The big Other

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (1593)

1. #01

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.32

   The (Moral-) Pathology of Everyday Life > Notes

   Theoretical move: This is a notes/references section, providing bibliographic citations and one substantive footnote distinguishing 'symbolic suicide' from actual suicide in relation to the subject and the Other.

   by killing himself, the subject attempts to send a message to the Other, i.e., it is an act that functions as an acknowledgement of guilt, a sobering warning, a pathetic appeal

2. #02

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.41

   The Subject of Freedom > What subject?

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Kantian freedom is not located beyond causal determination but emerges precisely within it, at the point where the causal chain fails to close on itself—a "crack in the Other"—and that this structure mirrors Lacan's move of introducing the subject as correlative to the lack in the Other, making guilt (not moral conscience) the paradoxical mode of the subject's participation in freedom.

   where the subject becomes aware of her dependence on the Other (such and such laws, inclinations, hidden motives...) and is ready to give up...Kant indicates a 'crack' in the Other, a crack in which he situates the autonomy and freedom of the subject.

3. #03

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.51

   The Subject of Freedom > What subject?

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

   there is no guarantee that the Other, as the site of heteronomy, does not itself 'contain' some heteronomous element which prevents it from closing upon itself as a complete system.

4. #04

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.69

   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.

   The final limit of the subject's pathology, however, is to be found not in him, but in the Other. When the subject has, so to speak, already bracketed his interests, another obstacle to carrying out his duty still remains: the good of his fellow-man.

5. #05

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

   The Lie > The Sadeian trap

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

   'I am sorry if my actions hurt you, but I only did what the Other wanted me to do, so go and talk to It if you have any objections.'

6. #06

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.85

   From the Logic of Illusion to the Postulates > 'Person also means mask'

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Kant's paralogism of personality and its resolution through the transcendental idea structurally anticipates Lacan's optical schema and the concept of the Ego-Ideal as 'the way I see the Other seeing me', showing that the unity of the subject-as-person is an inevitable dialectical illusion produced by identification with a virtual point of view that already marks the subject's division by the Other.

   The function of the transcendental idea is to give a frame to this configuration. In the case of the idea of personality, it embodies the virtual point from which the subject would see himself as he is seen by the other.

7. #07

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.89

   From the Logic of Illusion to the Postulates > The passage to the postulates

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Kant's postulates (freedom, immortality of the soul, God) differ structurally from the transcendental ideas by being axiomatic rather than fictional, and that the postulates of immortality and God 'personify' or materialize the two standpoints (understanding and reason) that regulative ideas only formally articulate—making the subject embody the perspective of understanding and God the perspective of reason in relation to the highest good.

   God, on the other hand, embodies the point of view of reason, which sees this series as a totality: The Infinite Being, to whom the temporal condition is nothing, sees in this series, which is for us without end, a whole conformable to moral law.

8. #08

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.96

   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.

   sacrificing my life is just 'another step' forward ... it is an empirical, not a transcendental necessity. It is this logic that governs Kant's postulate of the immortality of the soul, and serves to preserve the consistency of the big Other.

9. #09

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.114

   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.

   The 'I am lying' is a signifier which forms a part, in the Other, of the treasury of vocabulary.

10. #10

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.115

    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'.

    the subject is always pathological (in the Kantian sense of the word), determined by the Other, by the signifiers which precede him.

11. #11

    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.

    In regard to the Other, I am not the author of my acts (i.e. the Other 'speaks/acts through me'); thus I may not be held responsible for them.

12. #12

    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'.

    the 'suicidal' act that always goes 'too far', leaving a hole in the Other, and thus becomes the paradigm for 'diabolical evil'.

13. #13

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

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

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

    The pervert wants the Other to become a 'complete ' subject, with the help of the jouissance that he makes appear on the part of the Other. This intention to subjectivize the Other is, as we have seen, quite apparent in the novel.

14. #14

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.136

    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).

    He thus goes far beyond the truism that for him, as for any other 'atheist', the judicious thing to do would be to repent before he dies... Don Juan knows all too well what is ahead of him; the point is that despite this knowledge, he refuses to repent

15. #15

    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.

    Valmont makes enjoyment an object of his will; he tries to abolish the gap between the enjoyment and the will - which is why he himself becomes an instrument of the enjoyment of the Other.

16. #16

    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.

    one can only enjoy a part of the Other's body, for the simple reason that one has never seen a body completely wrap itself around the Other's body

17. #17

    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 absolute Other (in the form of the superego) is there in order to guarantee that there will always be a lack on the other side (the side of the subject)

18. #18

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.171

    Between the Moral Law and the Superego > The sublime and the logic of the superego > The second passage is from the Critique of Judgement.

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

    a man constrained by his reasons sees himself constrained to carry it on as at the bidding of another person.

19. #19

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.176

    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.

    the law is not always-already there, waiting for the subject to submit herself to it: it is this very submission, the (ethical) act, which constitutes the Law as atemporal and trans-subjective.

20. #20

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.186

    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.

    in Hamlet the Other (the Father) knows (that he is dead) and, what is more, lets the subject (Hamlet) know that he knows.

21. #21

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

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

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

    guilt, in the sense of symbolic debt, arises when the subject knows that the Other knows.

22. #22

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

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

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

    we see only the effect which he (or, rather, his disappearance) produces in the space of the Other, in the 'mirror' of the king of Athens

23. #23

    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.

    Knowledge as the 'knowledge that knows itself' is the knowledge behind a statement supported by an anticipated guarantee (at the level of the enunciation), in the sense that the Other is always-already there, ready to offer a guarantee for the subject's statement.

24. #24

    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.

    With one and the same act, he undermines the Other and plays the role of 'vanishing mediator'... which installs the Other. 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'.

25. #25

    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.

    Sygne's sacrifice serves to fill in the lack in the Other. Her 'weakness'... is that of wanting to save the image of the Father.

26. #26

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

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

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

    she does not wait for the Other to express its (and, consequently, her) desire: she does it herself.

27. #27

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

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

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

    the subject that fails to grasp the necessity of loss looks for the secret key to the object in the Other. The Other appears to know something that the subject itself does not.

28. #28

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.55

    THE E ND OF THE OTHE R

    Theoretical move: Psychoanalysis after Freud's 1920 theoretical revolution moves subjects not from dissatisfaction to satisfaction but from one form of satisfaction to another, and this intervention turns on the subject's relation to a non-existent Other whose desire is both the necessary stimulus for desire itself and the source of its constitutive alienation — a structure capitalism uniquely exploits by insisting the Other's desire actually exists and is interpretable.

    beyond these others the subject sees the Other, a figure of social authority that represents the social order as a whole and makes demands on the subject… the Other does not exist.

29. #29

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.57

    FAN TA SIZ IN G THE E ND

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

    the desire of the Other can provide no concrete guidance for the subject in its search for what to desire… the fantasy gives coherence to the Other's desire by creating an imaginary scenario surrounding the Other.

30. #30

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.61

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

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

    True freedom is freedom in the face of the Other's desire—or, more properly, freedom from the Other's desire.

31. #31

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.65

    Th e Psychic Constitution of Private Space

    Theoretical move: Capitalism systematically inverts the actual ontological priority of the public over the private: the subject is constituted through its encounter with the desire of the Other (a public process), yet capitalism produces the ideological fantasy that the subject is primordially private—thereby structuring an obstacle to the very satisfaction it promises.

    its subjectivity forms through its interaction with the desire of the Other. Without this interaction, there would be no subject at all.

32. #32

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.74

    RETRE ATIN G BEHIND THE GATE

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that capitalism's shift from production-oriented to consumption-oriented economy erodes the public sphere not simply because consumption is private, but because capitalism increasingly promises subjects the recovery of the lost object, fostering investment in unlimited private satisfaction and thus hostility toward the public world—the necessary site of loss and otherness.

    consumption retains a public dimension insofar as one consumes in order to make an impression on the Other.

33. #33

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.76

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

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

    the subject discovers its desire through the encounter with this desire of the Other

34. #34

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.82

    RETRE ATIN G BEHIND THE GATE > IN VA SION OF PR I VAC Y

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that surveillance capitalism does not threaten subjects by eliminating privacy but rather functions ideologically to deepen their investment in privacy, thereby privatizing subjectivity and severing subjects from the public world on which genuine satisfaction depends; the real counter to capitalist privatization is not defending privacy but recognizing that desire requires the obstacle of the public.

    When I'm in public, I alter my actions according to the expectations of the Other, but when I'm in private, no such barrier exists.

35. #35

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.88

    LIFE DUR IN G WARTIME

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

    Without stable capitalist social relations, neither Henry Reardon's new metal nor Dagny Taggart's trains would be conceivable.

36. #36

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.130

    N OT G OD BU T AN OTHE R

    Theoretical move: Capitalist modernity creates the structural conditions for genuine freedom by displacing God as a substantial Other, but simultaneously forecloses that freedom by substituting the market as a new tyrannical authority; Kant's moral philosophy—grounding the law in the subject's own self-division rather than any external Other—is identified as the authentic philosophical articulation of modern freedom that capitalism cannot stomach.

    Freedom involves an absence of reliance on the Other as a substantial figure of authority. For the free subject, the Other does not have a substantial existence.

37. #37

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

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

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

    They give the market the status of the Other for subjects within the capitalist economy.

38. #38

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.139

    N OT G OD BU T AN ADV E RTI SE ME N T

    Theoretical move: Advertising functions as the modern form of the big Other, saving subjects from the trauma of freedom by providing an image of a gaze that authorizes consumer choices; McGowan argues this structure is more insidious when it presents itself as liberation from conformity, and reads Fitzgerald's Dr. T. J. Eckleberg as the paradigmatic figure of the absent-yet-operative capitalist Other.

    Advertisements provide an image of the Other that enables us to believe that we are not simply on our own when it comes to how we should consume.

39. #39

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.145

    DAS ADAM SMITH PROBLEM

    Theoretical move: The "invisible hand" in Adam Smith's two major works functions as the modern, capitalist reformulation of God—an absent Other that coordinates and directs subjects' desires, thereby resolving both Das Adam Smith Problem (the apparent contradiction between Smith's moral philosophy and his economics) and the deeper problem of unbearable Kantian freedom that capitalism poses to its subjects.

    Th e Other as an absent fi eld that directs the desire of subjects arises with capitalism just as modernity destroys the fi gure of God as the guide for our desire.

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.

    The basis of neurosis is not just the repression of sexual desire and its replacement with a symptom but the belief in the substantial existence of the Other, the belief that a self-identical social authority can issue clear demands that solve the problems of subjectivity and freedom.

41. #41

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.197

    OBTAININ G WH AT YOU D ON' T WAN T

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

    To subdue fully the otherness of the other and master it would effectively eliminate the other as a lovable entity.

42. #42

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.203

    THE TR IP BE YOND NARC I SSI SM

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

    love demands that the little other take over the function of the big Other.

43. #43

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.209

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

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

    The subject in love abandons the recognition of the Other or social authority for the recognition of the love object. Romance dilutes this act by replacing the love object with a socially authorized object.

44. #44

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

    THE DIFFIC ULTIE S OF SUSTAININ G SC ARC IT Y

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

    The economic crisis spirals out of control because of the subject's investment in the desire of the Other. Individual capitalist subjects do not simply mind their own business. Instead, they constantly examine what others do in order to know what they should do.

45. #45

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.264

    . THE SUBJEC T OF DE SIR E AND THE SUBJEC T OF C APITALISM

    Theoretical move: This endnotes passage performs several interlocking theoretical moves: it grounds capitalism's logic in the structure of desire and the signifier (gap, mediation, lack), distinguishes psychoanalytic castration from mere frustration, aligns Hegel's ontology of nothing with the foundational role of absence in signification, and positions psychoanalysis against object-relations, deconstruction, and Heideggerian authenticity in their respective treatments of loss and the Other.

    the escape from the Other leads only to the confrontation with the necessity of failure... The idea that the Other does not exist is precisely what Hegel is aiming at when he says... 'not only as Substance, but equally as Subject.'

46. #46

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.268

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

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

    Early on, he believed that the analyst should identify with the public itself or the Other, but in the late 1950s this idea underwent a shift.

47. #47

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

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

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

    it is an indication of the nonrepresentable, subliminal, and unconscious character of the containment of the subject within the social Other.

48. #48

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.288

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

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

    The trend commences not with an individual decision but with the embrace of a particular style by the anonymous social authority that has no concrete existence.

49. #49

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.291

    . E XC H AN GIN G LOV E FOR ROM AN C E

    Theoretical move: Romantic love functions as the sine qua non of capitalist ideology because it provides the idealized template through which all commodity evaluation is learned; the chapter's endnotes collectively argue that authentic love (Lacanian or otherwise) is structurally traumatic and resists complementarity, whereas capitalism systematically replaces love with romance—a commodified, montage-compressed, ideologically safe substitute.

    Since everything depends on the Other, the solution is to have an Other all to oneself. This is what one calls love.

50. #50

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.13

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of ego psychology and object-relations theory in "The Freudian Thing" turns on the distinction between ego and subject (with proper subjectivity as unconscious), the insistence that truth/unconscious always returns despite repression or theoretical falsification, and the defense of a symbolically-mediated body against pseudo-Freudian reductivism to pre-Oedipal objects.

    the socio-historical matrices of big Others as symbolic orders (i.e., phylogenetic structures such as trans-individual, trans-generational languages, institutions, practices, etc.)

51. #51

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.25

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's "thing's order" names the symbolic order as a self-relating system of signifiers—structurally homologous to Hegelian dialectics—that constitutes human subjectivity, the mirror stage, and the symptom, while ego psychology's failure to grasp the unconscious is recast as foreclosure (psychotic repudiation) rather than repression.

    This trans-individual, transsubjective big Other, surrounding and shaping each and every socialized speaking subject, is made possible by and fundamentally consists in signifying structures and dynamics.

52. #52

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.42

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's mirror stage grounds the ego in a constitutive double alienation—imaginary and symbolic—such that the ego is structurally paranoid, narcissistic, and rivalrous, making ego-to-ego analysis (as in ego psychology) a therapeutic dead end that merely amplifies imaginary passions rather than dissolving the transference.

    the *corps* of the human being comes to be overwritten by signifiers coming from intersubjective others who themselves instantiate the transsubjective big Other.

53. #53

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.49

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian analytic practice turns on distinguishing the Imaginary (ego-centred empty speech) from the Symbolic (unconscious full speech), and that the compulsive repetition of neurotic symptoms is explained through a Hegelian–Kojèvian logic of unrecognised desire, whereby the analyst's appropriate recognition of transferential demands can finally dissolve symptomatic repetition.

    depends upon the background presence of a semantic and syntactic order, namely, a socio-symbolic big Other (358, 5)

54. #54

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.59

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan reads the Rat Man case as paradigmatic for a structural, transgenerational theory of neurotic etiology: symptoms are encrypted testimonies to symbolically transmitted family debts (signifiers), not to brute biological instincts, and the proper telos of analysis is not happiness/success but the analysand's confrontation with the contingent, factical nonsense—the Freudian Thing—that underpins apparent meaning, achieved by weakening the Imaginary ego to let the Symbolic unconscious speak.

    the avatar, within the domestic sphere, of the wider public world of the socio-symbolic big Other

55. #55

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

    [Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > Abstract

    Theoretical move: Against the imaginary reduction of psychoanalysis to ego-psychology, this passage argues that the unconscious must be understood as the locus of the Other's speech, structured by signifiers via metaphor and metonymy, with the death drive as the key to repetitive speech—and that analytic training requires restoring the symbolic chain rather than reducing analysis to an imaginary dyad.

    'The Other, beyond the ego, is implied by the act of speech.'

56. #56

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

    [Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > The talk given was couched in the following terms

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's abstract simultaneously enacts and reflects on his mode of teaching psychoanalysis, sketching key theses (split subject, linguistic unconscious, the analyst as Other) while critically noting the social cost of psychoanalysis's fashionable acceptance—which distorts the analyst into a figure of omniscient authority rather than a rigorous clinical and theoretical position.

    the psychoanalyst's role as incarnation of the Other

57. #57

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

    [Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > The imaginary in neurosis and object relations

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that neurotic impasses (hysterical and obsessional) are constituted entirely within the imaginary register—between little others and ego-images—and therefore cannot be resolved from within that register; the hysteric perpetuates an alienated desire mediated through the other's image while the obsessive deploys his ego as a puppet to stave off death, both strategies ultimately annulling desire and blocking genuine subjective engagement.

    The Other, the locus of speech, in turn, is 'reduced to death' since it threatens the position of the imaginary other, the ego.

58. #58

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.92

    [Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > Approaching neurosis in the imaginary vs. the symbolic

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the IPA's ego-strengthening approach to neurosis deepens alienation by keeping the subject in the imaginary register, and that only orienting analysis through the symbolic Other—rather than the imaginary other of identification—can treat neurosis as a genuine question rather than a lure; this critique extends to all empiricist, biologistic, and behaviorist appropriations of psychoanalysis that destroy its symbolic foundation.

    Lacan, his disdain for the former solution clear, steers us to the 'Other with a capital O,' which is 'a place that is essential to the structure of the symbolic.'

59. #59

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.110

    [The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-005) > The foundation of our research: free association

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "golden age" of psychoanalysis was undone by the cultural absorption of its interpretive vocabulary, and that analysts' recourse to non-mediated access (the "third ear," affect, lived experience) represents a regression into the Imaginary; the remedy lies in privileging the Symbolic/signifier, whose irreducible triangularity (the Other as third) keeps psychoanalysis from collapsing into a dyadic imaginary relation.

    Lacan's reference to the Other in this context emphasizes the irreducible three-dimensionality of the analytic situation (388, 5). Speech implies a third. While there may be only two people present in the analytic room, speaking implies being spoken as well.

60. #60

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.148

    [The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-006) > The letter in the unconscious

    Theoretical move: Lacan's deployment of rhetorical trope (via Quintilian) over mere figure reframes metaphor and metonymy as active, structural operations of the unconscious that work independently of conscious intention—thereby establishing the primacy of the signifier and positioning psychoanalysis as necessarily interdisciplinary, in explicit opposition to ego psychology's "autonomous ego."

    the final section of his essay develops the concept of the Other, further developing the implications of Freud's project and rhetoric in relation to science

61. #61

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

    [The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-006) > The letter, being, and the other

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the ego is a symptomatic compromise-formation that covers over the radical heteronomy of the subject, while the unconscious, understood as the Other's discourse, is the true object of psychoanalysis; the letter's insistence through metaphor and metonymy links being to desire and repetition, grounding Lacan's claim that subjects are spoken by signifiers rather than speaking them.

    The unconscious is the Other's discourse, as Lacan says, and the lie of the subject's unity represented by the ego is directed towards that other.

62. #62

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.155

    [The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-006) > The letter, being, and the other

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's account of the letter (metaphor/metonymy) constitutes an implicit but sustained response to Heidegger: where Heidegger sees language as the "house of being," Lacan insists that language captures, mutilates, and tortures the subject, making the unconscious the condition of any question of being and symptom/desire the structural correlates of metaphor/metonymy respectively.

    'big Other,' as the torture-house of the subject

63. #63

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.166

    [On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-007) > Context

    Theoretical move: This passage provides a contextual and structural overview of Lacan's 'On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis,' arguing that the text marks a pivotal shift in Lacan's theorization of psychosis as a unitary clinical structure grounded in the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, situated within a four-period developmental arc in Lacan's broader work on psychosis.

    Crucial to this theory is the relation between the subject and 'big Other,' and the position of the subject at the level of the unconscious.

64. #64

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.171

    [On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-007) > I. Toward Freud

    Theoretical move: Lacan reframes hallucination from a perceptual/cognitive phenomenon (scholastic-empiricist framework) to a fundamentally linguistic one: verbal hallucinations are events in the signifying chain that divide the subject, parallel to unconscious formations in neurosis, and must be approached via the symbolic structure rather than imaginary interpretation.

    conversations should start from the analyst positioning him-/herself as a castrated Other: as someone who is marked by a lack, or a not-all.

65. #65

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.178

    [On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-007) > II. After Freud

    Theoretical move: Lacan critiques post-Freudian (especially Katan's and Macalpine's) reductions of psychosis to ego-level defence mechanisms and affective projection, arguing that the decisive theoretical failure is the neglect of symbolic structure—specifically the logic of the signifier, the Oedipus complex, and the concept of the big Other—in favour of imaginary, ego-centred frameworks.

    A crucial problem is that many psychoanalysts have no proper theory of the concept of the 'other' (inclusive of the Lacanian idea of the 'big Other').

66. #66

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.179

    [On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-007) > III. With Freud

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's 'return to Freud' culminates in a formal, symbolic account of the unconscious as the Other's discourse, articulated through the L-schema and R-schema, which positions subjectivity as constituted by signifiers at the level of the Other rather than by imaginary ego-dynamics—thereby decisively separating psychoanalysis from both Cartesian consciousness-philosophy and Jungian imaginary interpretation.

    Lacan immediately introduces his concept of the Other, written with capital O... the unconscious is always experienced as something else; 'something-Other'

67. #67

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.185

    [On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-007) > III. With Freud

    Theoretical move: The passage demonstrates how Lacan's formula of metaphor, applied to the Oedipus complex as the paternal metaphor, structures subjective identity through the substitution of the Name-of-the-Father for the Mother's Desire, while the R-schema (reconceived as a Möbius strip) situates the objet petit a as the virtual support of reality in neurosis versus its chaotic real manifestation in psychosis.

    the subject's way of dealing with the Other, symbolized by A in the formula, will be completely subjected to phallic logic, symbolized by the term 'Phallus' as the denominator of the fraction 'A / Phallus.'

68. #68

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.191

    [On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-007) > IV. Schreber’s way

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Schreber's psychosis is structurally determined by the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, which produces a cascade of effects—absence of phallic signification, invasion of the Real by hallucinatory voices and gazes (object a), and compensatory metonymic 'forced thought'—all of which Lacan formalizes through the R-schema and the I-schema as an alternative symbolic architecture to neurotic repression.

    the law is not installed at the heart of the Other... Schreber's God, by contrast, does not incarnate a law. He is an absolutely untrustworthy figure, which points to foreclosure.

69. #69

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.198

    [On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-007) > IV. Schreber’s way

    Theoretical move: The I-schema formalizes Schreber's psychotic structure as the product of foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father (P₀→Φ₀), while demonstrating that his delusion constitutes an efficient stabilizing solution rather than mere deterioration; madness is re-theorized as the extreme limit-case of human freedom in the face of constitutive lack.

    God is 'awfully impertinent' and does not provide any stable guarantee for his existence as a subject (P₀)... Lacan stresses that the experience of ordinary friendship is not incompatible with the experience of psychosis. In psychosis the relation with the big Other is disturbed.

70. #70

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

    [On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-007) > V. Postscript

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's central thesis in "On a Question" is that psychosis is constituted by the Foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, which prevents metaphorization of the lack-of-being and produces a fundamental disorder in the subject's relation to the Other, the Symbolic, and the Real—a structural claim that post-Freudian authors systematically miss by failing to distinguish the symbolic father function from its imaginary and real counterparts.

    In psychosis the Other is mad (Vanheule, 2011)... Foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father implies that the element of order is lacking from the symbolic.

71. #71

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.209

    [The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > Context

    Theoretical move: The passage contextualizes Lacan's 'The Direction of the Treatment' as a theoretical turning point that pivots from an intersubjective/symbolic model of analysis toward a structural account of desire as the metonymy of lack-of-being, in direct opposition to ego psychology and object relations approaches that centre adaptation and the analyst's ego as goals of treatment.

    there is no Other of the Other (Lacan, 1958–1959/2013).

72. #72

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.213

    [The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > I. Who analyzes today?

    Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of post-Freudian (especially ego-psychological) psychoanalysis is mobilized to argue that authentic analytic practice requires orienting from the symbolic axis (Other, lack, desire) rather than from imaginary ego-to-ego relations, with the L-schema formalizing why the analytic situation must be understood as four-positional rather than dyadic.

    It is in 'the relation to the Other' that 'being finds its status' (512, 5) and in this relation to the Other, the symbolic is grounded in a lack.

73. #73

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.216

    [The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > II. What is the place of interpretation?

    Theoretical move: Lacan's account of interpretation displaces ego-psychological and Gestaltian frameworks by grounding interpretation exclusively in the function of the signifier and the place of the Other, arguing that subjective transmutation occurs through the signifier rather than through ego-adaptive understanding, and that analytic direction must begin from subjective rectification rather than adaptation to reality.

    interpretation is only made possible by the function of the Other: 'This is precisely what is allowed by the function of the Other in the possession of the code, it being in relation to that Other that the missing element appears'

74. #74

    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) > II. What is the place of interpretation?

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Rat Man and Ernst Kris cases to demonstrate that correct analytic interpretation operates through the Symbolic frame (the signifier, the Other, the paternal function) rather than through ego-level defense analysis; the ego-analysts' surface-to-depth model systematically misses desire by subordinating it to drives and defenses, requiring instead a topology that locates desire at the level of speech and the signifier.

    the function of the Other in obsessional neurosis. The position of the Other in obsessional neurosis is occupied by a dead man, which in the Rat Man's case was occupied by his father, who, by being dead, took the position of the absolute Father

75. #75

    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 phobic object stands in for a lack, a lack in the Other, and in that respect protects the subject from the anxiety that lack provokes

76. #76

    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) > IV. How to act with one’s being?

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst's proper mode of being cannot be derived from technical rules, happiness, or comprehension, but must be grounded in the ethics of desire — specifically the desire of the analyst — and that the analyst's stance toward the analysand's demand (intransitive, without object) is the pivot around which the direction of treatment turns.

    they implicitly distinguish the interpersonal relation with its warmth and lures from the relation of the subject to the Other (with capital O) in which 'being' finds its statue

77. #77

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.239

    [The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > V. Desire must be taken literally

    Theoretical move: Through close reading of the 'witty hysteric' dream, Lacan articulates that desire is structurally constituted as the interval between need and demand, that man's desire is the Other's desire, and that the phallus is the privileged signifier of the metonymical lack that sustains this structure — a conclusion illustrated both by hysterical identification and an obsessional clinical case.

    man's desire is the Other's desire… the subject needs to find the constitutive structure of his desire in the same gap in the signifiers that come to represent the Other

78. #78

    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) > V. Desire must be taken literally

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the direction of treatment must preserve a place for desire by refusing to respond at the level of demand; the phallus as signifier of lack structures the subject's desire metonymically, and analysis must lead the subject to confront the lack in the Other rather than offering new identifications that only deepen alienation.

    the subject receives his message back from that place... the ever vanishing desire being the metonymy of this lack of being, while the ego consisting of continuously added layers of identification in an ever recoiling attempt to provide an answer to the Other's desire.

79. #79

    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) > V. Desire must be taken literally

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst's desire operates by refusing to answer at the level of demand, thereby opening a space for the subject to encounter their own truth as construction — grounded in the irremediable lack in the Other — which Lacan identifies as the aim of analysis at this stage of his teaching.

    the irremediable lack in the Other, where desire finds its ultimate ground

80. #80

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.260

    [Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: “Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure”](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-009) > I. Structure and the subject

    Theoretical move: Lacan's commentary on Lagache's paper argues that structure must be understood in strictly formal, linguistic-mathematical terms (not naturalistic or organismic ones), such that signifying structure is not an abstract beyond but actively functions in the real—shaping organisms, producing the barred subject, and establishing the priority of the Other's discourse over any putative being-in-itself of the child.

    But is Lagache not basically agreeing with Lacan that the unconscious is 'the Other's discourse' (547, 3)?

81. #81

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.263

    [Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: “Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure”](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-009) > I. Structure and the subject

    Theoretical move: Against Lagache's personalist-intersubjective framework, which centres the imaginary and overlooks lack, Lacan argues that the subject emerges not from a progressive introjection of being-for-others but from the intervention of linguistic/symbolic structure on the organism, with Demand marking the transition from need to drive and with the fading of the subject occurring through over-identification with the signifiers of demand rather than through any phenomenological elusiveness of the cogito.

    signifiers that have a place that is external to or beyond the child – 'in' the Other functioning as a 'transcendental locus'

82. #82

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.265

    [Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: “Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure”](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-009) > II. Where is id?

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Lagache's account of the id's structure reaches an impasse because it ignores the function of the signifier; by re-reading the Freudian paradoxes of the id (unorganized, without negation, silent) through linguistic structure (synchrony/diachrony, the signifier's foundational duplicity, and Bejahung), Lacan shows that lack and negation are constitutive of the id and are the very conditions for the emergence of the subject.

    not as an organ of the body that produces and secretes the libido, but as a void that is crammed with content that is external to it. Such content (signifiers from the Other) accumulates and gets jumbled up in it

83. #83

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

    [Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: “Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure”](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-009) > III. On the ideals of the person

    Theoretical move: The passage uses the inverted vase schema to articulate the layered structure of imaginary and symbolic identification — distinguishing i(a)/ideal ego from i′(a)/ego-ideal, situating the Other (mirror A) as the structural third that disrupts dyadic imaginary relations, and arguing that the subject of desire emerges in the gap between statement and enunciation opened by signifying substitution — against object-relations developmentalism and ego-psychology.

    the structural position of speaking, of language, is designated by Lacan as the Other. In the illusion of the inverted vase, the Other would be situated in the 'real space' between the two virtual images (568, 1). In other words, it would be situated where the flat mirror itself is (A).

84. #84

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

    [Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: “Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure”](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-009) > III. On the ideals of the person

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychoanalytic cure works by progressively exposing object *a* as the cause of the subject's desire and fading, thereby enabling the analysand to traverse their fundamental fantasy, reduce ego-ideal identifications, and face the irreducible aporia of castration as the proper terminus of analysis.

    because of the analyst's position as an incarnation of the Other, and thus as 'the locus' of the analysand's speech

85. #85

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.287

    [Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: “Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure”](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-009) > IV. Toward an ethics

    Theoretical move: By situating Lacan's commentary on Lagache alongside Kant's dual wonder (starry heavens / moral law within), this passage argues that psychoanalysis enacts a double disenchantment — of nature through science and of morality through the discovery of the Other's voice as the ground of the superego — and that the proper analytic ethics requires confrontation with objet petit a rather than ego-strengthening or the surrender of desire.

    is seen to be rooted in a voice in our past, in the internalized voice of the Other

86. #86

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

    <span id="ch18.xhtml_page_289"></span>[Index](#ch05.xhtml_tocindex-001)

    Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section (letters O–R) from a scholarly volume on Lacan's Écrits, listing terms and page references without advancing any theoretical argument.

    Other: big Other [13], [25], [42]–[43], [48]–[49], [51], [59], [156], [166], [198]–[199]

87. #87

    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.

    'A Other' (i.e., the analysand's subjectivity-beyond-the-ego as the Symbolic unconscious)… The analyst both holds open a spatio-temporal clearing for the analysand's voiced associations in a long-existing tongue

88. #88

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

    [Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > Truly the most, the most truly

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that what is "truly proper" to psychoanalysis—the Freudian unconscious—has been systematically domesticated by Neo-Freudian adaptations, institutional identification, and mimetic transmission, and that reclaiming psychoanalysis requires a "militant" return to what is singular in Freud's concept of the unconscious rather than an imaginary identification with an acceptable image of Freud.

    Lacan is then acting as an analyst here, by taking responsibility for the unconscious, the lost discourse of the Other.

89. #89

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.9

    E M B R A C I N G THE VOID

    Theoretical move: Boothby argues that the Lacanian shift from thematic to structural analysis—reframing the Oedipus complex in terms of language and symbolic castration rather than literal familial drama—provides the conceptual foundation for a distinctly Lacanian theory of religion, in which the sacred is grounded not in divine presence but in the subject's primordial relation to a constitutive Void (the unconscious).

    Part 1. Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?)

90. #90

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.17

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?)

    Theoretical move: The passage sets up a programmatic theoretical agenda: to ground a Lacanian account of religion by first rigorously mapping the relationship between the big Other, the little other, and Lacan's triadic categories (imaginary, symbolic, real) — a relationship the author claims commentators typically take for granted.

    the 'big Other' of the symbolic code— a problematic that is all too often merely taken for granted by commentators on Lacan's thought

91. #91

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.31

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

    Theoretical move: Boothby argues that Lacan, despite offering no explicit theory of religion, provides uniquely suited resources for interpreting worship; the passage surveys two dominant approaches—identifying God with the Real or with the Symbolic—before proposing that the key to a Lacanian theory of religion lies in the relationship between the big Other and the little other.

    The 'big Other' is the nameless and faceless regulator who oversees the written and unwritten rules that direct our lives... part of what is at stake are the properly linguistic rules governing grammar, syntax, and semantics.

92. #92

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.33

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The Abyss of the Other

    Theoretical move: The passage sets up the theoretical problem of the intersection between the big Other (symbolic structures enabling exchange) and the little other (the fellow human being), arguing against the commonsense dismissal of the little other as trivial, and anchoring the distinction in Lacan's reading of *Das Ding* as an exterior, primordial alterity.

    the precise intersection between what Lacan called the 'big Other' and the 'little other.' The terms are intended to name, on the one side, the regularized structures that enable symbolic exchange

93. #93

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.34

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The Abyss of the Other > In the Shadow of the Thing

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that *das Ding* — the Thing — is not primarily a Kantian noumenal kernel of objects but the inaccessible, anxiety-generating core of the mother's desire encountered in the primordial relation with the fellow human being, making the (m)Other's unknown desire the constitutive ground of subjectivity and the original template for all subsequent object-relations.

    To mark the distinctive importance of this conception of the Other, I spell it here with a capital 'O.'

94. #94

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.38

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The Abyss of the Other > In the Shadow of the Thing > My Mother, the Monster

    Theoretical move: Boothby argues that Lacan's displacement of the Oedipus complex by the enigma of the mother's desire reveals the Thing-dimension within the Other as the primal source of anxiety, and marshals Sartre's phenomenology of the Other and the robotics "uncanny valley" as indirect empirical support for this counterintuitive but theoretically central claim.

    What if the 'uncanny valley' opens up when the robot begins to elicit a sense of the Thing in the Other, the dimension of the Other's intentions that remains unknown to us?

95. #95

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.39

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The Abyss of the Other > In the Shadow of the Thing > Alone Together

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that das Ding—located in the Other rather than in consciousness itself (contra Sartre)—is the primal source of both anxiety and desire in intersubjective life, and that contemporary digital behaviour (social-media addiction, 'alone together' gadget use) is best understood as a defensive yet ambivalent negotiation with this void in the Other, simultaneously evading and chasing it.

    For Lacan, by contrast, the original upsurge of the unthinkable void is discovered in the Other and only in a second movement folds back upon the subject itself.

96. #96

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.44

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > Ambivalence and the Falsely False

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian "falsely false" (a structure unique to the signifying subject) reveals ambivalence toward das Ding as the primal form of social intercourse: polite conventions simultaneously defend against the anxiety of the Other while preserving a limited opening toward the hidden excess of the Other-Thing, thereby retracing the structure of the symptom.

    the emphasis shifts from the subject to the Other. No doubt, as he says, 'in anxiety, the subject is . . . held, concerned, involved in the innermost part of himself.' But the indispensable key is to see how this self-concern is circuited by way of what is questionable in the Other.

97. #97

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.47

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > ". . . It's Not My Mother"

    Theoretical move: By reading stranger anxiety as a displacement that inverts and conceals the maternal origin of primal anxiety, Boothby deploys Lacan's concept of extimacy to argue that *das Ding* is the paradoxical locus where the most intimate and the most alien coincide, linking the death drive, desire, and jouissance to the irreducible unknown at the core of the Other.

    Encountering the dimension of the unknown and uncognizable in the Other, we begin to pose the question of what is unknown and uncognized in ourselves. Inside or out, we are positively haunted by the Other-Thing.

98. #98

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.50

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > Finding Oneself in the Void

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the subject's coming-to-be is constituted through its excentric relation to the Other via *das Ding*, and that the *objet petit a*—materialized through the cession of part objects (culminating in the infant's cry as first ceded object)—is the structural trace of the Thing that inaugurates both separation from the Other and the subject's positioning in the space of desire.

    Lacan thus claims that 'man finds his home at a point located in the Other that lies beyond the image from which we are fashioned. This place represents the absence where we stand.'

99. #99

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.55

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > Parting Is Sweet Sorrow

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the primordial function of language is not connection but separation: the entry into the signifier achieves a margin of detachment from the neighbor-Thing in the Other, making disjunction — not communication — the archaic ground of human language acquisition.

    the primal entry into language forestalls anxiety by establishing a margin of detachment that puts the threatening unknown of the neighbor- Thing at a distance.

100. #100

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby

     Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The *Ex Nihilo* of the Signifier

     Theoretical move: By centering the primal challenge on the mother's desire rather than the Oedipus complex, Lacan's concept of das Ding radicalizes Freud's triangular structure of subjectivity, reframing the relation between the little other and the big Other as the organizing problem of subject-constitution.

     This third point of the triangle Lacan calls 'the big Other.' It remains to specify more precisely what he meant by it.

101. #101

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.58

     Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The Disappearing Thing

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that *das Ding* does not disappear from Lacan's thought after Seminar VII but is progressively replaced by *objet petit a*, which functions as the trace of the Thing; this substitution is theoretically motivated by the need to avoid reifying the Thing, which is ultimately a locus of pure lack—not a substance but something purely supposed by the subject.

     As such, it represented the traumatizing unknown of the Other-Thing.

102. #102

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.61

     Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The Disappearing Thing > The Thing about a Psychoanalyst

     Theoretical move: The analyst embodies both the little Other (das Ding) and the big Other (subject supposed to know) at different levels of the analytic encounter; the progress of analysis moves from the patient's identification of the analyst with the symbolic big Other toward the dissolution of that Other, ultimately returning the subject to the pre-symbolic abyss of das Ding as the core of the unconscious.

     the analyst incarnates the big Other, the guarantor of the symbolic code.

103. #103

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.62

     Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The Disappearing Thing > Behind the Wall of the Law

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the signifier operates a double function with respect to das Ding: it defensively separates the subject from the Thing (through the big Other, law, grammar, the paternal metaphor) while simultaneously, through its constitutive excess over the signified and its horizon of semantic indeterminacy, reopening pathways toward the Thing — making the signifier both the wall against and the route back to the abyssal Real.

     The big Other names the regularization of the symbolic function that defends against the unknown Thing.

104. #104

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.68

     Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The Disappearing Thing > Behind the Wall of the Law

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the original function of language is not merely indicative but also interrogative: every signifier, at its most elementary level, implicitly poses a question about the unknowable beyond of the Other-Thing, and this double function is confirmed by the phonemic structure of parental names and cross-linguistic evidence from Chinese.

     the original function of language is not merely indicative but *also interrogative*. At the most elementary level, every utterance implicitly poses a *question*.

105. #105

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.69

     Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The Disappearing Thing > The Signifying Matrix

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the signifier performs a primordial Aufhebung — simultaneously canceling and preserving das Ding — and that this double function (distancing/disclosive, defensive/expressive) makes human subjectivity symptomatic through and through, collapsing the distinction between pathological symptom-formation and the ordinary operation of language.

     locates or marks the very otherness of the Other, thereby opening the space of a question about what remains unknown

106. #106

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.77

     Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?)

     Theoretical move: The passage proposes a Lacanian psychoanalytic theory of religion grounded in *das Ding* as the abyssally unknowable dimension of the Other, arguing that religious experience—paradigmatically prayer—is always an address to this void, and that different religious formations represent varying structural relationships to that abyss.

     the awe in the face of the divine arises from the locus of the Other-Thing

107. #107

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.81

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

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues that archaic Greek religion—its temple architecture, ritual sacrifice, and pantheon—can be read through Lacan's framework as a structural apparatus for staging the Real: the temple encloses the void of the Thing, sacrifice reenacts the birth of the signifier (the "murder of the thing"), and the gods themselves are modes by which the Real is revealed, not simply screened.

     'sacrifice is not at all intended to be an offering, nor a gift... but the capture of the Other in the web of desire.'

108. #108

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.80

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

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues that archaic Greek religion—its temple architecture, ritual sacrifice, and pantheon—can be read through Lacan's framework as a structural apparatus for staging the Real: the temple encloses the void of the Thing, sacrifice reenacts the birth of the signifier (the "murder of the thing"), and the gods themselves are modes by which the Real is revealed, not simply screened.

     the unknown of the gods' intentions for human beings and the unknown prospects for their future dispensations... a global reverberation of the Lacanian Other-Thing.

109. #109

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.87

     Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Agon of Forces

     Theoretical move: By reconstructing the archaic Greek ontology as one of "no things, only forces," Boothby argues that the Greek gods represent more-than-human natural forces arranged in a hierarchical agon, and uses this to ground a Lacanian conception of the big Other as the order of cosmic precincts of power, with fate (moira) as its ultimate, unknowable face.

     How, one might now ask, can such an implicit ontology of contending forces support the Lacanian notion of a big Other? It is by no means obvious. Perhaps the closest approximation would be the deep pagan sense of 'everything in its place,' the sense of a pyramid of greater and lesser forces, to each its own.

110. #110

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.90

     Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > What Appears Is Real, What Is Real Appears

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the archaic Greek ontology combines a "primacy of appearances" (truth is readable from surfaces) with an irreducibly unknowable force behind those appearances—identified with Lacan's Real—such that the gods, myth, and ritual function not to solve mystery but to preserve and screen it, anticipating Freud's unconscious.

     Struggling mortals were surrounded by multiple embodiments of what Lacan called the unknowable Other-Thing.

111. #111

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.112

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that feminine knowledge constitutes a structural threat to both archaic and philosophical Greek culture, and that Jocasta — as the figure who *knows* yet remains silent — is the ultimate embodiment of *das Ding*, the unrepresented abyss of the Real, making her the traumatic locus of the Other's desire that Greek culture could not confront.

     the traumatic confrontation with the uncognized void of the Other's desire

112. #112

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.115

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

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

     What makes Abraham infinitely answerable to the desire of an unknown Other. What is new in this encounter with divinity is that the god definitely wants something from him.

113. #113

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.119

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

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

     The speaking of Yahweh is disarmingly direct. In this way, the covenant with Yahweh properly inaugurates what Lacan calls the big Other.

114. #114

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.120

     Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Gimme Shelter > The Terms of the Deal

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that from a Lacanian perspective, the Abrahamic covenant's demand for circumcision instantiates the "mark of the cut" — a voluntary symbolic submission to the law of desire passing through the Other — thereby inaugurating a religion of inward subjectivity over pagan externalism, and marking a decisive shift in the history of sacrifice from quantitative object-value to pure intentional devotion.

     Abraham takes upon his organ of generation the 'mark of the cut,' thereby symbolically submitting himself to the law of desire, which passes by necessity through the locus of the Other.

115. #115

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.122

     Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Gimme Shelter > . . . and Offer Him There as a Sacrifice

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that monotheism's (specifically Judaism's) structural break with paganism lies not merely in the rejection of quid-pro-quo sacrifice but in the concentration of the unknown onto a *single* Other — thereby making religious experience the first explicit encounter with the enigmatic desire of the big Other, with das Ding as its constitutive ground.

     Here we encounter the consequences of having inaugurated a more decisive relation to the Lacanian big Other. Abraham's relation to Yahweh, and by extension that of every Jew who follows in the Abrahamic tradition, is bookended by unknowing.

116. #116

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.126

     Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Gimme Shelter > The Voice from the Burning Bush

     Theoretical move: Lacan's reading of "Eyeh asher eyeh" and the shofar together argue that the Jewish sacred is constituted by the divided subject and the pure voice as objet a: the burning bush declares the non-coincidence of the subject of enunciation with the subject of the enounced, while the shofar embodies das Ding as lost object, making Judaism the religion of the law of language.

     isn't the one whose memory is to be awakened, the one who is to be made to remember, God himself?

117. #117

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.133

     Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Laws of the Neighbor

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Decalogue's two tablets both address the subject's constitutive bondage to das Ding—first through the logic of the unnameable Other (Yahweh/signifier) and then through the neighbor-as-Thing—such that the final two commandments (against lying and coveting) crystallize an unavoidable double bind: every enunciation of truth about the Thing is already a lie, and every prohibition of desire is what constitutes and inflames that desire.

     the Decalogue addresses the subject's bondage to the Thing in language, first in relation to the words spoken by the (big) Other and second in relation to the respect that must be shown to the (little) Other.

118. #118

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.137

     Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Living with the Law— the God Symptom

     Theoretical move: Judaic monotheism's unprecedented proximity to *das Ding* is argued to generate anxiety that is structurally managed through a symptomatic displacement into obsessive legal observance (halacha), which simultaneously creates distance from and intimacy with the terrifying Other; this symptom formation is socially stabilized not by verified conformity but by a collective suppositional regime—what Pfaller calls "interpassivity"—in which the big Other's authority rests on the fiction that everyone else obeys.

     submission to the big Other of the law functions as a bulwark against a more direct and even more anxiety-producing confrontation with das Ding.

119. #119

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.145

     Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Worship of Love > To Love Thy Neighbor

     Theoretical move: The passage argues, from a Lacanian vantage, that Jesus's commandment to love the neighbor constitutes a radical injunction to abandon defensive barriers toward the threatening, jouissance-laden dimension of the Other—and, by extension, of oneself—thereby locating the divine wholly in the immanent encounter with the neighbor-as-Thing, a move that goes further than Freud's imaginary-bound critique of neighbourly love by opening onto the unconscious.

     a radical opening, an unhesitating and fully vulnerable acceptance of the Other... the Christian subject must suspend all defensive barriers toward the Other

120. #120

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.147

     Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Worship of Love > . . . and Love Thine Enemy

     Theoretical move: By deploying Lacan's concept of the jouissance of the Other alongside das Ding, the passage argues that loving one's neighbor and loving one's enemy are structurally identical challenges: the neighbor's undomesticated jouissance makes the neighbor an enemy, so that Christian love of the enemy constitutes an acceptance of the Other's radical alterity and, reflexively, of one's own.

     actively embracing the Other, extending oneself toward the Other in love

121. #121

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.150

     Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Worship of Love > From Circumcision to Crucifixion

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues that bodily mutilation rituals in Judaism (circumcision) and Christianity (crucifixion) operate as structurally distinct symbolic operations: circumcision establishes the signifier of the phallus and holds open the regime of signification, while crucifixion installs a phantasmatic identification with the objet a that risks collapsing into a narcissistic-masochistic perversion rather than genuine opening toward the Other.

     the crux of masochism, which is an attempt to provoke the Other's anxiety, here become God's anxiety, has become second nature in the Christian

122. #122

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.151

     Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Embracing the Cross

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that crucifixion, read through the intersection of Lacanian and Hegelian frameworks, figures not as sacrificial atonement but as the subject's embrace of the Other's foreignness as an opening to what is unknown in itself — a "dying away" of the ego that parallels Lacan's rereading of Freud's *Wo Es war, soll Ich werden* and Hegel's dialectical conception of love as constitutive self-division, which in turn grounds a psychoanalytic ethics of non-judgement toward the analysand.

     The crucial thing is to recognize in the image of crucifixion an emblem of the subject's embracing precisely what is foreign and threatening in the Other

123. #123

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.155

     Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Embracing the Cross > The True Religion Is Atheism

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Christianity constitutes the "one true religion" precisely because its teaching of love — as direct embrace of the neighbor-Thing — collapses the defensive triangulation effected by paganism and Judaism, thereby generating atheism from within its own theology: God's kenotic self-emptying in the crucifixion is the Hegelian-Lacanian move by which the transcendent big Other is abolished and divinity is identified with human love itself.

     pacifying relations between subjects by reassuringly referring them to a third position, the divine big Other.

124. #124

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.161

     Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Abyss of Freedom

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the radical Christian ethic of love—grounded in freedom, unknowing, and relation to das Ding beyond the law—is systematically betrayed by orthodox Christian dogma, which functions as a defensive, compensatory reinvestment in the symbolic big Other against the anxiety produced by that original abyssal encounter; the psychoanalytic transference is offered as a structural parallel to this dynamic of supposed knowledge arising from a void of unknowing.

     the Christian demand to embrace the enigma in the little Other led to a new and far-reaching compensatory reinvestment in the symbolic big Other.

125. #125

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.166

     Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Credo: How Christianity Invented Ideology

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues that Christianity's distinctive innovation is the elevation of *belief itself* (the act of believing, for-itself) over religious action or content, and that this structure of belief is fundamentally a social/ideological defense against the unknown Other — making it the very mechanism by which the church betrays Jesus's teaching of love.

     Belief introduces an implicit line of division into the social body. It segregates the believing subject from some group of Others who are supposed to lack it.

126. #126

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.172

     Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Credo: How Christianity Invented Ideology > The Manichaean Temptation

     Theoretical move: The Lacanian architecture of belief—which requires a supposed non-believer as its structural support—explains why mainstream Christianity persistently "substantializes" evil into a gnostic dualism despite both orthodox Augustinian theology and Jesus's own teaching; the psychic requirement of belief generates the division between good and evil as its ideological shadow.

     Evil is nothing but the hesitation, born of fear, to open ourselves in love for the Other.

127. #127

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.173

     Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Other Paths, Other Gods

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues that the three Abrahamic/Western religious traditions represent a progressive trajectory of increasing directness in approaching *das Ding* — from Greek paganism's indirect relation to unknowing, through Jewish monotheism's concentration of the unknown in an inscrutable deity, to Christianity's most radical move: fully restoring the abyssal Thing to its primordial site in the relation with the human Other, reframed as the imperative to love what is unknown and threatening.

     Jesus brought the enigmatic call of divinity fully down to earth, alarmingly pinpointing it in our relations with the actually existing human Other.

128. #128

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.175

     Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Religious Symptom

     Theoretical move: The passage deploys Lacan's tripartite RSI (Real/Symbolic/Imaginary) framework to argue that the three Abrahamic-plus-Greek traditions are each symptomatic formations organized around a defensive response to das Ding: Greek polytheism as imaginary, Judaism as symbolic, and Christianity as the religion of the Real—and therefore the most extravagantly symptomatic, generating both the greatest defenses and the greatest historical violence. Religion itself is thus theorized as the most elemental and ubiquitous human symptom, substitutable only by other forms of sublimation.

     the Christian religion transformed the authority of the symbolic big Other, extending its surveillance beyond outward obedience toward an unparalleled, inwardly directed self-consciousness.

129. #129

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.178

     Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > A Broader View?

     Theoretical move: The passage extends Boothby's Lacanian framework for the sacred to non-Western religions, arguing that Hinduism's moksha, Buddhism's sunyata, and Nishitani's Zen phenomenology all instantiate the same fundamental structure: an encounter with the unknowable neighbor-Thing, achieved through the sublimation or dissolution of the ego, confirming religion as the master symptom organized around the irreducible opacity of das Ding.

     this Buddhist twist of the Hindu sensibility might be interpreted as a matter of stripping away from the subject's orientation toward the Other-Thing all vestiges of its imaginary husk.

130. #130

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.183

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

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

     seeking the Kaaba that is interior to our neighbor… Be a pilgrim to the Ka'ba inside a human being

131. #131

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.192

     Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Cash Is the Thing!

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues that money in capitalist culture functions as a phantasmatic incarnation of *das Ding*, structuring social relations by both intensifying and defending against the anxiety produced by the unknown Thing in the Other — capitalism thereby operates as a religion, with the market economy displacing the "human economy" of gift-exchange that kept subjects entangled with the Other's desire.

     Human economies were webs of indebtedness, everywhere inflected by subtle concerns of relationship to Others, sensitively attuned to what could be supposed about their social position and expectations.

132. #132

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.194

     Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Cash Is the Thing! > Producing the Subjects of Ideology

     Theoretical move: The passage extends Althusser's theory of interpellation — which enlists individuals as ideological subjects via an imaginary mirror-structure anchored in an Absolute Other Subject — by arguing that money functions as the contemporary interpellating agency (the "God" of capitalist ideology), filling a gap Althusser left by only illustrating his theory through Christian/feudal religious ideology.

     the interpellation of individuals as subjects presupposes the 'existence' of a Unique and central Other Subject, in whose Name the religious ideology interpellates all individuals as subjects.

133. #133

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.196

     Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Money God

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that money functions as the true interpellating agency of modern capitalist society—replacing Althusser's divine Big Other with an anonymous, faceless force—by occupying the structural position of das Ding: it colonizes the void of desire so completely that subjects are always-already constituted as 'free' agents before any explicit ideological address, atomizing the social body and foreclosing collective solidarity.

     Althusser's own example, appealing as it does to the classical big Other of the Christian God, seems more or less irrelevant in the contemporary context. The whole tenor of postmodern life tends to obviate that sort of big Other. In the present age, we live in the twilight of master signifiers.

134. #134

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.201

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

     Theoretical move: Against a purely defensive/repressive reading of religion (Freud), Lacan's position is reframed as a positive 're-linking' (re-ligare) to the enigmatic Real encountered in the human Other, such that the sacred is constituted around an irreducible locus of unknowing — Das Ding / the 'No-thing' — that human desire perpetually orbits.

     religion is indeed a relinking— a relinking above all to the unknown Other- Thing.

135. #135

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.202

     Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Conclusions > Rethinking the Foundations of Psychoanalytic Theory

     Theoretical move: By reading the Freud-Rolland debate through the Lacanian Thing and the paternal metaphor, Boothby argues that religion is constitutively split between a maternal pole (oceanic fusion destabilized by das Ding) and a paternal pole (the signifying architecture of separation), a bipolarity the Nag Hammadi "Thunder, Perfect Mind" text is then used to confirm.

     the infant's increasingly anxious awareness of something unknown in the maternal Other

136. #136

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.207

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

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

     the big Other is no longer identifiable with a subject supposed to know, but is, on the contrary, found to be inhabited by an irradicable vacuity or gap.

137. #137

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.208

     Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Conclusions > The Heart of the Matter

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that a Lacanian account of religion grounds the sacred not in wish-fulfilling illusion but in the subject's primordial, ambivalent orientation toward das Ding as the void at the heart of the Other—and further proposes that both religion and science are ultimately forms of devotion to (and defense against) this unknown Thing, thereby dissolving Freud's simple religion/science opposition while aligning Lacan with an "art of unknowing."

     coming to realize that the big Other— for which the law-giving, all-seeing God is a ready stand-in— does not exist

138. #138

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.214

     Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Notes > Chapter 1

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section for Chapter 1 of Boothby's book, listing scholarly references on Lacanian theory and religion, Freud, Nietzsche, and related works. It is non-substantive in theoretical terms but signals key intertextual engagements.

     For a clear, free-wheeling, and highly suggestive introduction to the Lacanian concept of the big Other, see Slavoj Žižek, How to Read Lacan

139. #139

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.215

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

     Theoretical move: This notes section maps the theoretical genealogy of *das Ding* and *objet petit a* across Lacan's seminars, documenting the Thing's partial eclipse by the object a while tracing its persistent appearances and its structural relationships to the Other, the subject, fantasy, sublimation, and the paternal metaphor.

     'You are my wife'— after all, what do you know about it? 'You are my master'— in point of fact, are you so sure? Precisely what constitutes the foundational value of this speech is that what is aimed at in the message... is that the other is there as absolute Other.

140. #140

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.220

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

     Theoretical move: This notes passage traces a conceptual evolution in Lacan's use of "the big Other" across two phases of his teaching—from a term pointing toward genuine alterity and unconscious desire to one designating the defensive, meaning-policing function of the symbolic—while linking this shift to the broader move from imaginary to symbolic alienation.

     Lacan tends increasingly to use 'big Other' to designate the more defensive function that seeks to close down ambiguity and indeterminacy, the big Other that is the policeman of meaning.

141. #141

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.226

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

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section (endnotes for Part 2) providing citations and brief clarifications supporting the main argument; it is largely non-substantive apparatus, though it contains scattered theoretical anchors linking Lacan, Žižek, Hegel, and Freud to the book's argument about religion, the sacred, and the neighbor.

     the traumatic encounter with the abyss of the desiring Other— the Jewish people's encounter with their God whose impenetrable Call derails the routine of daily existence

142. #142

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.233

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

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

     The Other, the Other as the locus of truth, is the only place, albeit an irreducible place, that we can give to the term 'divine being,' God, to call him by his name.

143. #143

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.245

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

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

     God, concept of: as big Other, 21–22, 198–99 … big Other in, 77–78

144. #144

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.250

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

     Theoretical move: This is an index page (pp. 250) from Boothby's book; it is non-substantive in itself but maps the key Lacanian and psychoanalytic concepts deployed throughout the work, including das Ding, objet a, sexuation, the subject supposed to know, the symbolic, symptom, and the void in relation to religion and the sacred.

     big Other as representing, 7, 22, 23, 51–52

145. #145

     Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.248

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

     Theoretical move: This is a back-matter index passage (pages 248–249) listing key terms, persons, and concepts with page references; it is non-substantive as a theoretical argument but surfaces the book's central conceptual architecture through its entry clusters.

     naming: and big Other, 21, 51, 52; of father and mother, 45–46, 58–59; of God/gods, 20–21, 114, 117–20, 122, 126, 163, 172, 214n3

146. #146

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.28

     Acknowledgments > Introduction > Death at the Bott om of Everything

     Theoretical move: McGowan redefines the death drive not as aggression or a return to inorganic stasis but as a structural impetus to repeat an originary constitutive loss, arguing that masochism—not sadism—is the paradigmatic form of subjectivity, and that this primacy of the death drive makes any notion of progress inherently self-undermining.

     the sadist discharges the pain of existence into the Other, but without seeing that he himself thereby turns into an 'eternal object.' Though the other suffers pain, the other also becomes the sole figure of enjoyment.

147. #147

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.59

     I > 1 > Enemies Within and Without

     Theoretical move: Paranoia is theorized as a political-libidinal structure that closes the gap in social authority by positing a hidden "Other of the Other," thereby rendering constitutive loss merely contingent and depriving subjects of the agency that emerges precisely from social inconsistency; this makes paranoia—left or right—a fundamentally self-undermining political strategy.

     the subject cannot readily decipher what the social authority wants from it... the subject begins to desire in response to this unknown desire of the social Other

148. #148

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

     I > 3 > Th e Cost of Recognition

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

     the fundamental Lacanian thesis that the big Other itself, far from being an anonymous machine, needs a constant influx of jouissance.

149. #149

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

     I > Sustaining Anxiety > Beyond the Demand

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

     the absence of an explicit prohibition leaves the contemporary subject in the proximity of a real other. The social field of prohibition is a terrain stripped of all enjoyment where everyone is reduced to the form of symbolic identity.

150. #150

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.120

     I > Sustaining Anxiety > Taking a Short Cut

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that anxiety in contemporary subjects—and the violence it generates—derives from the encounter with the "enjoying other," and that this logic applies equally to fundamentalist terrorism and the War on Terror: both are misguided attempts to eradicate an enjoyment that is actually a projection of the subject's own fantasmatic construction, not a property of the other itself.

     The family is not what Christopher Lasch calls a 'haven in a heartless world' but rather a redoubling of that heartless external world.

151. #151

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.125

     I > Sustaining Anxiety > Taking a Short Cut

     Theoretical move: Violence directed at the enjoying other is structurally self-defeating and self-sustaining: it does not aim to eliminate the other's enjoyment but to perpetuate it, revealing that anxiety about jouissance can be managed through flight, violence, or—as a third ethical option—embracing anxiety itself.

     we flee this experience through an attempt to reestablish the distance from enjoyment that social authority no longer provides

152. #152

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.127

     I > Sustaining Anxiety > Anxiety as Ethics

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

     Social authority appears nonlacking and ubiquitous, never allowing the subject the space to desire.

153. #153

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

     I > Sustaining Anxiety > Whose Enjoyment?

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

     the experience of the nonexistent symbolic identity, which closes down the space in which the real other might appear

154. #154

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

     I > Changing the World > Psychoanalytic Success

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

     its less apparent aim is to bring the law into being: to make the Other as law (or law-giving Other) exist.

155. #155

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

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

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

     We always impute to the 'other' an excessive enjoyment: he wants to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our way of life) and/or he has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment.

156. #156

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.179

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

     Theoretical move: By accepting the logic of female sexuation — that enjoyment is constitutively tied to loss rather than impeded by it — subjects can dissolve the envy that drives social antagonism, because a 'nothing' that can only be lost admits no hierarchy of possession and thus enables an authentic social bond.

     there is no barrier to the establishment of an authentic social bond, one where envy does not play a key role

157. #157

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.259

     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.

     the believer finds an other that authorizes and justifies it. Where the power of social authority breaks down, religion allows the subject to find an authority authorizing and thereby obscuring this breakdown.

158. #158

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.266

     I > 10 > No Club to Join

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that religious belief is not a contingent psychological or ideological phenomenon but a structural necessity arising from the absence of a binary signifier in the signifying chain; the psychoanalytic-atheist move is not to deny God but to assert that 'God is unconscious' — i.e., that the gap in the signifying order holds no knowledge — thereby founding emancipatory politics on the recognition that nothing grounds human existence.

     It is impossible to say anything without immediately making Him subsist in the form of the Other.

159. #159

     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.

     Faith is a faith in the fidelity of others, not in God.

160. #160

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.273

     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.

     it implies that no other has the ultimate responsibility for this field. In the absence of a binary signifier (a conscious God, a being behind the scenes pulling the strings), ultimate responsibility rests with the subject itself.

161. #161

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.304

     I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > Introduction

     Theoretical move: This endnotes passage grounds the book's theoretical argument about enjoyment, repetition, and political emancipation by positioning Lacan's death drive (as repetitive encircling rather than aggression) against Frankfurt School and Reichian attempts to subsume it under Eros/surplus repression, while also contesting Derridean justice-to-come and the ideology of progress as ontological illusions that capitalism exploits.

     Everything that [a child] poses as a question, finally, is done to satisfy what he/she supposes that the Other wants him/her to ask

162. #162

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.310

     I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 1. The Formation of Subjectivity

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section containing footnotes and citations; it is non-substantive in terms of original theoretical argument, though several footnotes briefly gloss key Lacanian and Hegelian concepts in passing.

     Jacques Lacan's name for social authority is the 'big Other,' an anonymous force that sets the implicit and necessarily inconsistent rules for social interaction. When he proclaims that the big Other does not exist, Lacan is simply insisting on its inconsistency and on its inability to authorize definitively any statement.

163. #163

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

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

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

     The demands that the Other makes are more overt and extreme during the teen years because this is the time when the subject has yet to fully invest itself in those demands

164. #164

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.319

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

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

     Psychoanalysis intervenes in order to free the subject from this dependence by bringing the subject to the recognition that the other does not exist.

165. #165

     Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.325

     I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 5. Changing the World

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/endnotes section (notes 1–36 for chapter "Changing the World") providing bibliographic references and parenthetical theoretical glosses on ideology, normality, fantasy, jouissance, obsession, hysteria, and the political stakes of psychoanalysis; it is substantive insofar as it deploys several load-bearing concepts in the glosses, but its primary function is citational scaffolding.

     The phantasy stages the manner in which the subject relates itself to the incompleteness of the Other, the cause of desire

166. #166

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

     I > Sustaining Anxiety > Th e Paradox of Recognition

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

     what gives value to this recognition is its authorization by social authority, which is itself wholly unauthorized. The search for recognition cannot have any ethical status whatsoever because it involves submission to an entity that exists only through the act of submitting to it.

167. #167

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_ncx_104"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_page_0122"></span>***L*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_ncx_106"></span>**language**

     Theoretical move: The passage traces four developmental phases of Lacan's theory of language, arguing that language (langage) functions as the single paradigm of all structure, that the unconscious is structured like a language of signifiers, and that language has both symbolic and imaginary dimensions—against any reduction of it to the symbolic order alone or to a mere code.

     The axis A–S is language in its symbolic dimension, the discourse of the Other, the unconscious.

168. #168

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_113"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_page_0132"></span>***M*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_119"></span>***méconnaissance***

     Theoretical move: Méconnaissance is theorized not as mere ignorance but as an imaginary misrecognition of a symbolic knowledge the subject already possesses, structurally homologous between neurotic ego-formation and paranoiac delusion, making all connaissance 'paranoiac knowledge'.

     the ego is basically a misrecognition of the symbolic determinants of subjectivity (the discourse of the Other, the unconscious).

169. #169

     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_194"></span>**Structure**

     Theoretical move: The passage systematically traces Lacan's evolving concept of 'structure' from early social/affective relations through Saussurean linguistics and structuralism to topology, while establishing Clinical Structures (neurosis, psychosis, perversion) as the definitive nosographic framework grounded in discrete subject-positions relative to the Other rather than collections of symptoms.

     The three major clinical structures together constitute all the three possible positions of the subject in relation to the Other; every subject encountered in psychoanalytic treatment can therefore be diagnosed as either neurotic, or psychotic, or perverse.

170. #170

     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_148"></span>**perversion**

     Theoretical move: Lacan redefines perversion not as deviant sexual behaviour but as a distinct clinical structure, characterized by the operations of disavowal (in relation to the phallus) and a specific positioning of the subject as object/instrument of the Other's jouissance—inverting the structure of fantasy—and argues this structure is equally complex to neurosis, differing not in richness but in the inverse direction of its structuration.

     The pervert assumes the position of the object-instrument of the 'will-to-enjoy' (volonté-de-jouissance), which is not his own will but that of the big Other.

171. #171

     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_181"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0205"></span>**sexual difference**

     Theoretical move: Sexual difference cannot be grounded in anatomy or biology but is constituted by a fundamental dissymmetry in the signifier: the phallus is the only sexual signifier with no feminine equivalent, so sexual positions (masculine/feminine) are symbolic constructions determined by one's relation to the phallus and formalised through the formulae of sexuation, with the result that no fully 'finished' sexual identity is achievable and the sexual relationship is structurally impossible.

     the question of what one is to do as a man or a woman is a drama which is situated entirely in the field of the Other (S11, 204)

172. #172

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_ncx_87"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_page_0105"></span>***I*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_ncx_97"></span>**introjection**

     Theoretical move: Lacan redefines introjection against Kleinian and Ferenczian usage by locating it exclusively in the Symbolic register (as introjection of the signifier/speech of the Other, constitutive of the Ego Ideal), while relocating projection to the Imaginary register, thereby dissolving the classical introjection/projection symmetry and exposing it as a confusion between fantasy and structure.

     'introjection is always the introjection of the speech of the other'

173. #173

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_ncx_104"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_page_0122"></span>***L*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_ncx_105"></span>**lack**

     Theoretical move: Lacan's concept of 'lack' undergoes three successive theoretical articulations across his teaching: from lack of being (tied to desire and paralleling Sartre), to lack of object (distinguished into three forms, with castration as central), to lack of a signifier in the Other (constitutive of the subject), showing how the concept evolves while remaining fundamentally anchored to desire.

     when Lacan introduces the algebraic symbol for the barred Other… lack comes to designate the lack of a signifier in the Other.

174. #174

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

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

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

     Unlike the big Other, which represents a radical and irreducible alterity, the little other is 'the other which isn't another at all, since it is essentially coupled with the ego'.

175. #175

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part18.xhtml_ncx_83"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part18.xhtml_page_0102"></span>***H***

     Theoretical move: This passage (from Evans's introductory dictionary) articulates three interconnected Lacanian theoretical moves: (1) hallucination as the return of the foreclosed Name-of-the-Father in the Real; (2) helplessness (Hilflosigkeit) as grounding both the subject's constitutive dependence on language and the end of analysis as subjective destitution; and (3) hysteria redefined as a clinical structure organised around the question of sexual position and the desire of the Other, distinct from mere symptomatology.

     the hysteric only sustains the desire of the Other on condition that she is not the object of that desire (Ec, 222)

176. #176

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_113"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_page_0132"></span>***M*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_124"></span>**mirror Stage**

     Theoretical move: The mirror stage is theorised not merely as a developmental moment but as a permanent structure of subjectivity that founds the ego through identification with the specular image, generates imaginary alienation and aggressive tension, and already contains a symbolic dimension in the figure of the big Other who ratifies the image.

     he turns his head round towards this adult, who represents the big Other, as if to call on him to ratify this image

177. #177

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_ncx_30"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_page_0045"></span>***C*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_ncx_33"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_page_0046"></span>**castration complex**

     Theoretical move: The passage reconstructs Lacan's transformation of Freud's castration complex: by redefining castration as a symbolic lack of an imaginary object (the phallus), articulated across three "times" of the Oedipus complex, Lacan universalises castration beyond anatomical difference and makes the assumption or refusal of castration the structural hinge for both clinical structures (neurosis/perversion/psychosis) and sexuation.

     the subject realises at a very early stage that the mother is not complete and self-sufficient in herself… This is the subject's first perception that the Other is not complete but lacking.

178. #178

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_ncx_134"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_page_0151"></span>***O*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_ncx_137"></span>**obsessional neurosis**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes obsessional neurosis not as a cluster of symptoms but as an underlying clinical structure organized around an existential question about death and being, distinguishing it from hysteria while preserving Freud's diagnostic inheritance.

     he thinks that this will enable him to escape the lack in the Other, the castration of the Other, which is often represented in fantasy as some terrible disaster

179. #179

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_43"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0056"></span>***D*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_48"></span>**demand**

     Theoretical move: Demand is theorised as structurally double: it articulates a biological need while simultaneously becoming a demand for love from the Other, and this gap between the two functions is precisely what generates desire as an insatiable leftover — a move that situates demand as the mediating term in the Need-Demand-Desire triad.

     the object which satisfies the child's need is provided by another, it takes on the added significance of being a proof of the Other's love

180. #180

     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_189"></span>***sinthome***

     Theoretical move: The passage traces the theoretical evolution from Lacan's linguistic conception of the symptom (as signifier/ciphered message) to the topological concept of the *sinthome* as an unanalysable kernel of jouissance that serves as a fourth Borromean ring binding RSI, with Joyce's writing as the exemplary case of *sinthome*-as-suppléance in the absence of the paternal function.

     it is not a call to the Other but a pure jouissance addressed to no one

181. #181

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part31.xhtml_ncx_212"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part31.xhtml_page_0243"></span>***U***

     Theoretical move: The passage systematically maps Lacan's concept of the unconscious, arguing that against biologistic reductions by Freud's followers, the unconscious is irreducibly linguistic, symbolic, and transindividual — structured like a language, constituted as the discourse of the Other, and identical with the determination of the subject by the symbolic order.

     'The unconscious is the discourse of the Other' (Ec, 16)… 'one should see in the unconscious the effects of speech on the subject'

182. #182

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_ncx_30"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_page_0045"></span>***C*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_ncx_36"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_page_0050"></span>**code**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes 'code' (a system of fixed, bi-univocal indices used in animal communication) from 'language' (a system of signifiers characterised by irreducible ambiguity and equivocation), while acknowledging his own inconsistency in applying this distinction in the Graph of Desire seminar.

     he designates one point as the code, which he also designates as the place of the Other and the battery of signifiers.

183. #183

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_43"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0056"></span>***D*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_50"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0064"></span>**desire of the analyst**

     Theoretical move: The passage articulates a constitutive ambiguity in Lacan's concept of the desire of the analyst: on one side, it functions as an enigmatic attributed desire that engines the analytic process by sustaining the Che vuoi? question; on the other, it names a properly analytic desire oriented not toward identification or cure but toward 'absolute difference', situating it at the heart of the ethics of psychoanalysis and requiring a training analysis to constitute it.

     the analyst occupies the position of the Other, of whom the subject asks Che vuoi? ('What do you want from me?')

184. #184

     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_64"></span>**existence**

     Theoretical move: The passage draws a systematic distinction between two opposed senses of 'existence' in Lacan: existence-in-the-symbolic (what is positively integrated into the signifying chain) versus existence-in-the-real (the impossible, unsymbolisable kernel of the subject), and introduces the neologism 'ex-sistence' to capture the decentred, ex-centric nature of subjectivity as radically Other to itself.

     the heart of our being (Kern unseres Wesen) is also radically Other, strange, outside (Ec, 11)

185. #185

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_43"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0056"></span>***D*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_47"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0059"></span>**delusion**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes delusion not as the illness of paranoia itself but as the psychotic subject's attempt at self-cure — a substitute symbolic formation compensating for the absence of the Name-of-the-Father — and situates it within the structural analysis of speech and signification.

     revolves around the Other of the Other, a hidden subject who pulls the strings of the big Other (the symbolic order), and who controls our thoughts, conspires against us, watches us

186. #186

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_113"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_page_0132"></span>***M*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_121"></span>**metalanguage**

     Theoretical move: Lacan's 'no metalanguage' thesis argues that language cannot step outside itself to anchor meaning, since any attempt to fix meaning must itself be done in language; this entails that the Real is a beyond of language that nonetheless cannot serve as a transcendental signified, and that there is no Other of the Other to guarantee the subject's discourse—with direct clinical consequences for the transference.

     there is no Other of the Other (E, 311); if the Other is the guarantee of the coherence of the subject's discourse, then the falsity of this guarantee is revealed by the fact that the guarantor himself lacks such a guarantee.

187. #187

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part32.xhtml_ncx_214"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part32.xhtml_page_0245"></span>***W***

     Theoretical move: The passage traces the theoretical development of the concept of "woman" across Freud and Lacan, arguing that Lacan's key move is to displace the question of femininity from a biological or universal essence to a structural position in the symbolic order defined by the logic of the not-all, feminine jouissance beyond the phallus, and woman as symptom of man.

     woman is the Other for both men and women; 'Man here acts as the relay whereby the woman becomes this Other for herself as she is this Other for him'

188. #188

     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).

     Acting out is a symbolic message addressed to the big Other, whereas a passage to the act is a flight from the Other into the dimension of the real.

189. #189

     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_14"></span>**affect**

     Theoretical move: Lacan dissolves the classical affect/intellect opposition by grounding affect in the symbolic order rather than treating it as a primary, pre-discursive realm; the implication is that psychoanalytic treatment targets the truth of desire through speech, not abreaction, and that affects function as signals tied to the subject's relation with the Other—with anxiety uniquely singled out as the non-deceptive affect.

     affect means that the subject is affected by his relation with the Other.

190. #190

     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_16"></span>**algebra**

     Theoretical move: Lacan's algebraic formalisation of psychoanalysis is theoretically motivated by three interlinked aims: scientific legitimacy, integral transmission of psychoanalytic knowledge, and the prevention of imaginary (intuitive) understanding in favour of symbolic manipulation — the mathemes and associated symbols thus function as epistemic and pedagogical devices, not mere notation.

     A = the big Other

191. #191

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_ncx_164"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_page_0186"></span>***R*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_ncx_172"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_page_0193"></span>**resistance**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes resistance as a structural feature of the analytic process rooted in the imaginary register of the ego, not the ill will of the analysand, and distinguishes it from defence by locating resistance on the side of the object (transitory, imaginary) and defence on the side of the subject (stable, symbolic), while also implicating the analyst's own resistance as the true source of any obstruction to treatment.

     resistance is the imaginary axis a–a' which impedes the insistant speech of the Other (which is the axis A–S)

192. #192

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_ncx_66"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_page_0084"></span>***F*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_ncx_68"></span>**fantasy**

     Theoretical move: Fantasy is not opposed to reality but is a discursively constituted, structurally fixed defence against castration and the lack in the Other; its mathemic formalisation ($ ◇ a) places it within a signifying structure that the analysand must ultimately traverse in the course of treatment.

     the neurotic fantasy… appears in the graph of desire as the subject's response to the enigmatic desire of the Other, a way of answering the question about what the Other wants from me (Che vuoi?)

193. #193

     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_195"></span>**Subject**

     Theoretical move: The passage traces the theoretical genealogy of Lacan's concept of the 'subject', arguing that it is irreducibly distinct from the ego, constituted through language and the symbolic order, essentially split, and identified with the Cartesian cogito reread as the subject of the unconscious rather than self-conscious agency.

     'the subject is a subject only by virtue of his subjection to the field of the Other' (S2, 188)

194. #194

     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_65"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part15.xhtml_page_0083"></span>**extimacy**

     Theoretical move: Extimacy (extimité) is introduced as a Lacanian neologism that deconstructs the inside/outside opposition, showing that the Real, the unconscious, and the Other are structurally both interior and exterior to the subject, with this topology expressed paradigmatically in the Torus and Möbius Strip.

     the Other is 'something strange to me, although it is at the heart of me'

195. #195

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_43"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0056"></span>***D*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_53"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0068"></span>**disavowal**

     Theoretical move: Lacan systematically tightens Freud's concept of disavowal by restricting it exclusively to perversion and contrasting it rigorously with repression (neurosis) and foreclosure (psychosis), while reframing its object from the perceived absence of the penis to the structural lack of the phallus in the Other — making disavowal the denial that lack causes desire.

     Lacan relates it to the realisation of the absence of the PHALLUS in the Other.

196. #196

     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_149"></span>**phallus**

     Theoretical move: The passage traces the phallus across Lacan's three registers (real, imaginary, symbolic), arguing that Lacan's terminological innovation—distinguishing phallus from penis—clarifies a logic implicit in Freud while elevating the phallus to the status of a privileged signifier that organises both the Oedipus complex and sexual difference, a move that invites both feminist defence and Derridean critique of phallogocentrism.

     Lacan goes on in 1961 to state that the symbolic phallus is that which appears in the place of the lack of the signifier in the Other

197. #197

     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_62"></span>**enunciation**

     Theoretical move: The enunciation/statement distinction is deployed to locate the subject of the unconscious: the enunciation, as the unconscious dimension of speech, reveals that the source of language is the Other rather than the ego, and that the subject is split between the level of the statement (the 'I' as signifier) and the level of enunciation (the 'I' as index of the speaking subject).

     language comes from the Other, and the idea that 'I' am master of my discourse is only an illusion

198. #198

     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 sadist rejects this pain and forces the Other to bear it (Ec, 778). [...] the 'other scene' is, in Lacanian terms, the Other.

199. #199

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

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

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

     'the unconscious is the discourse of the other' (which first appears in 1953, and later becomes 'the unconscious is the discourse of the Other')

200. #200

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_ncx_30"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_page_0045"></span>***C*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_ncx_42"></span>**countertransference**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes countertransference not as the analyst's affective reactions per se, but as the analyst's failure to make adequate use of those affects; ultimately, he dissolves the countertransference/transference binary by insisting on the non-symmetrical, unified structure of transference in which both analyst and analysand are implicated.

     Freud interpreted the dream as something directed at him personally, rather than as something directed at the Other

201. #201

     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).

     Anxiety arises when the subject is confronted by the desire of the Other and does not know what object he is for that desire.

202. #202

     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).

     acting out results when recollection is made impossible by the refusal of the Other to listen... It is the Other who is entrusted with deciphering the message; yet it is impossible for him to do so.

203. #203

     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_182"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0208"></span>**sexual relationship**

     Theoretical move: The passage systematically unpacks Lacan's formula 'there is no sexual relationship' as condensing six distinct theoretical points about sexual difference: the mediating role of language, the asymmetry of the symbolic order (one signifier, the phallus), the impossibility of harmony between the sexes, the partiality of the drive's object, the woman's reduction to the mother function, and the opposition of sex to meaning/relation in the real.

     the Other of language stands between them as a third party

204. #204

     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_200"></span>**Symbolic**

     Theoretical move: The passage defines the Symbolic as the central order in Lacan's tripartite schema, arguing that it constitutes the essentially linguistic, law-governed, and totalising dimension of human subjectivity—irreducible to biology, structuring the Imaginary, and encompassing the Unconscious, the Other, the Death Drive, and Lack—while distinguishing it sharply from Freud's 'symbolism' as fixed bi-univocal meaning.

     The symbolic is also the realm of radical alterity which Lacan refers to as the OTHER.

205. #205

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_43"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0056"></span>***D*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_56"></span>**dual relation**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the imaginary order is constituted by dyadic relations while the symbolic order is essentially triadic, and that the failure to theorise this distinction reduces psychoanalytic treatment to an imaginary power struggle; Lacan's broader theoretical preference for triadic over binary schemes follows from this structural principle.

     the third term is the big Other, which mediates all imaginary dual relations... the analyst must realise that both he and the patient are equally subjected to the power of a third term: language itself.

206. #206

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_ncx_164"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_page_0186"></span>***R*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_ncx_169"></span>**religion**

     Theoretical move: The passage maps Freud's and Lacan's shared atheist alignment of psychoanalysis with science against religion, while showing how Lacan reframes religion's theoretical content—redefining God as unconscious, as a metaphor for the big Other, and grounding the Name-of-the-Father and feminine jouissance in theological metaphors even as he argues for religion's structural opposition to psychoanalytic truth.

     he uses the term 'God' as a metaphor for the big Other

207. #207

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_ncx_134"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_page_0151"></span>***O*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_ncx_141"></span>**other/Other**

     Theoretical move: The passage establishes the fundamental Lacanian distinction between the little other (imaginary counterpart/ego-reflection) and the big Other (symbolic order, radical alterity, locus of speech), arguing that the big Other as symbolic order is primary over the big Other as subject, and that the unconscious is the discourse of the Other.

     The big Other designates radical alterity, an other-ness which transcends the illusory otherness of the imaginary because it cannot be assimilated through identification. Lacan equates this radical alterity with language and the law, and hence the big Other is inscribed in the order of the symbolic.

208. #208

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_ncx_87"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_page_0105"></span>***I*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_ncx_98"></span>**inversion**

     Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's concept of 'inversion' from Freud's designation of homosexuality through to its properly Lacanian sense as a structural property of the specular image and imaginary phenomena, culminating in the claim that analytic communication is defined by the sender receiving his own message in inverted form — and that both senses are unified in Lacan's reading of Leonardo da Vinci via Schema L.

     the imaginary is represented as a barrier blocking the discourse of the Other, causing this discourse to arrive at the subject in an inverted form

209. #209

     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_199"></span>**superego**

     Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's progressive retheorization of the Freudian superego: from a symbolic agency tied to the Law and the Oedipus complex, to a paradoxical structure that is simultaneously the Law and its destruction, culminating in its identification with the Kantian categorical imperative and the jouissance-commanding voice of the Other.

     the superego is the Other insofar as the Other commands the subject to enjoy… the will of the Other, who assumes the form of Sade's 'Supreme Being-in-Evil'

210. #210

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_113"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_page_0132"></span>***M*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_126"></span>**mother**

     Theoretical move: The passage maps Lacan's theory of the mother across three registers (real, symbolic, imaginary) and traces how the child's relation to the mother's desire—structured around the phallus—generates anxiety, drives the entry into the symbolic order, and ultimately requires the paternal function to resolve the imaginary deadlock of the Oedipus complex.

     The infant is incapable of satisfying its own needs and so depends absolutely on an Other to care for him… It is she who introduces the child into language by interpreting the child's screams and thereby retroactively determining their meaning

211. #211

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_ncx_30"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_page_0045"></span>***C*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_ncx_41"></span>**Counterpart**

     Theoretical move: The counterpart (semblable) is theorized as the 'little other' of the Imaginary register—the other who is not radically Other but merely similar to the ego—thus grounding the formation of the ego in identificatory mirroring and distinguishing imaginary alterity from symbolic alterity.

     it is not the radical alterity represented by the Other, but the other insofar as he is similar to the ego (hence the interchangeability of a and a' in schema L).

212. #212

     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_176"></span>**Schema L**

     Theoretical move: Schema L is Lacan's first and most sustained diagrammatic formalization of psychoanalytic structure, demonstrating that the symbolic relation between the Other and the subject is always partially blocked by the imaginary axis, while also representing the decentered subject stretched across four structural loci; it is positioned as the originary quaternary from which all subsequent schemata derive, and as the precursor to Lacan's mature topological work.

     If one wants to position the analyst within this schema of the subject's speech, one can say that he is somewhere in A.

213. #213

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans · p.67

     <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_43"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0056"></span>***D*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_52"></span>**dialectic**

     Theoretical move: Lacan appropriates the Hegelian dialectic—particularly through Kojève's reading—to frame psychoanalytic treatment as a dialectical experience, while decisively breaking with Hegel by denying any final synthesis (Absolute Knowing), replacing the telos of progress with 'the avatars of a lack' anchored in the irreducibility of the unconscious.

     DESIRE is constituted dialectically by a relationship with the desire of the Other

214. #214

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_ncx_202"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_page_0231"></span>***T*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_ncx_208"></span> **transference**

     Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's evolving theorisation of transference from a Hegelian-dialectical and anthropological-symbolic account, through identification with the compulsion to repeat and the Agalma, to its mature formulation as the attribution of knowledge to the Other (Subject Supposed to Know), while also deploying Lacan's critique of ego-psychology's "adaptation to reality" model and its implicit collapse into suggestion and méconnaissance.

     transference is the attribution of knowledge to the Other, the supposition that the Other is a subject who knows

215. #215

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part21.xhtml_ncx_101"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part21.xhtml_page_0119"></span>***K***

     Theoretical move: This passage makes two theoretical moves: first, it positions Kleinian psychoanalysis as a key foil for Lacan's reading of Freud, cataloguing his criticisms (fantasy in the imaginary, neglect of the symbolic, linguistic unconscious) while acknowledging partial affinities; second, it articulates Lacan's fundamental distinction between two modes of knowledge—imaginary connaissance (ego-based misrecognition) and symbolic savoir (unconscious desire, jouissance of the Other)—establishing their opposed roles in psychoanalytic treatment.

     Symbolic knowledge does not reside in any particular subject, nor in the Other (which is not a subject but a locus), but is intersubjective.

216. #216

     An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

     <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_43"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0056"></span>***D*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_49"></span>**desire**

     Theoretical move: This passage establishes Desire as the central concept of Lacanian theory by distinguishing it rigorously from Need and Demand, grounding it in the Hegelian-Kojèvian framework of mutual recognition, and defining it structurally as a relation to Lack caused by Objet petit a rather than a relation to any satisfiable object.

     'man's desire is the desire of the Other' (S11, 235).

217. #217

     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_187"></span>**Signifier**

     Theoretical move: The passage establishes Lacan's transformation of the Saussurean signifier: by asserting the primacy and autonomy of the signifier over the signified, grounding it in differential structure, and defining it as "that which represents a subject for another signifier," Lacan reconstitutes language as the field of the Other and the unconscious as an effect of the signifier's operation on the subject.

     The field of the signifier is the field of the Other, which Lacan calls 'the battery of signifiers'.

218. #218

     Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

     5

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that civilization's restriction of the aggressive drive generates discontent by redirecting aggression outward toward outsiders, and that the trade-off between instinctual freedom and social security is structurally unavoidable, culminating in the diagnosis of a "psychological misery of the mass" produced by identification-based social bonding without strong individual leadership.

     After St Paul had made universal brotherly love the foundation of his Christian community, the extreme intolerance of Christianity towards those left outside it was an inevitable consequence.

219. #219

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

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

     Theoretical move: Fisher deploys psychoanalytic concepts—particularly the split between Law and jouissance embodied in the figure of Gene Hunt, and the mechanism of fetishistic disavowal that enables reactionary enjoyment—to argue that *Life On Mars* is ideologically reactionary, before pivoting to contrast this with David Peace's hauntological fiction, which refuses nostalgic vindication and instead approaches history as unexorcised, theologically charged suffering.

     the great light eclipsed by the world's unending tears…calling forth an absent God, a God who is experienced as absence

220. #220

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

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

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

     It is as if we are seeing the urgencies of our lives through the eyes of an Alien–God.

221. #221

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

     <span id="Chapter2.htm_page42"></span>Ghosts Of My Life: Goldie, Japan, Tricky

     Theoretical move: Fisher uses Tricky's artistic practice as a case study for theorising the split subject and the voice as an object: Tricky's gender-sliding, spectral vocal production, and class consciousness collectively demonstrate how the voice, far from guaranteeing presence and identity, indexes a fundamental splitting of the subject that is also its creative precondition.

     a writer/producer who coaxes singing from an Other

222. #222

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

     <span id="Chapter3.htm_page62"></span>No Longer the Pleasures: Joy Division

     Theoretical move: Fisher uses Joy Division as a cultural symptom—their music indexes the threshold moment (1979–80) when social-democratic, Fordist modernity collapsed into neoliberal control society, arguing that the band's depressive, catatonic expressionism is not merely aesthetic but diagnostic of a historically specific breakdown of subjectivity, community, and futurity.

     Curtis' sepulchral, anhedonic vocals sent back to him – as if they were the voice of an Other, or Others – in long, leering expressionistic echoes

223. #223

     Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.90

     **vn**

     Theoretical move: Using Melanie Klein's case of Dick, Lacan argues that the subject's entry into the human world is not a matter of ego development but of symbolic integration: the unconscious is the discourse of the Other, and it is the analyst's grafting of the Oedipal symbolisation onto the child's imaginary inertia that constitutes the therapeutic act—demonstrating that genuine speech, not language as such, is what coordinates the symbolic, imaginary, and real registers.

     the spectacular demonstration of the formula that I am always giving you - the unconscious is the discourse of the other.

224. #224

     Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.177

     **Xffl**

     Theoretical move: The Fort/Da game is read as the originary moment where desire becomes human through its entry into language: the symbol's power to negate the thing (the "original murder of the thing") opens the world of negativity, grounds both human discourse and reality, and locates primal masochism at this inaugural negativation; desire thereafter is only ever reintegrated through symbolic nomination, and analytic technique must be understood in terms of freeing speech from its moorings within language.

     it is already In his solitude that the desire of the little man has become the desire of an other, of an alter ego, who dominates him

225. #225

     Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.144

     **XI**

     Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the optical schema to articulate the structural difference between the Ideal Ego (Idealich) and the Ego-Ideal (Ichideal): the imaginary is regulated by the symbolic (governed by the voice/speech of the Other), and love/transference are theorised as perturbations of that symbolic regulation—love confusing the two registers, transference exploiting the same imaginary mechanism but within the analytic symbolic frame.

     Now let us postulate that the inclination of the plane mirror is governed by the voice of the other.

226. #226

     Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.215

     **XVII**

     Theoretical move: Lacan critically exposes the theoretical dead end of Balint's object-relation theory, which defines the object purely as satisfier of need and models all libidinal life on a closed, harmonious mother-infant complementarity—arguing this framework cannot account for the subject's encounter with the Other as a genuine subject, and thus deviates from the fundamental analytic conception of the libido.

     What makes genital love different from primary love is acceding to the reality of the other as a subject. The subject takes into account the existence of the other subject as such.

227. #227

     Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.256

     **XX**

     Theoretical move: By reading Augustine's *De Magistro* alongside Freud, Lacan argues that the sign cannot be anchored to the thing term-by-term, that signification always refers back to signification (the self-demonstrating character of speech), and that *nomen* as symbol-pact encodes a function of recognition (*reconnaissance*) that Augustine anticipates but cannot fully articulate because he lacks Hegel's dialectic of recognition.

     The nomen is the totality signifier-signified, especially in as much as it makes for recognition, since the pact and the agreement rest upon it. It is the symbol in the sense of pact.

228. #228

     Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.227

     xvra > **The symbolic order**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that perverse desire, structured around the imaginary dyadic relation, necessarily dissolves into an impasse (annihilation of either subject or object), and that escaping this impasse requires the symbolic order — demonstrated by showing that the Master/Slave dialectic, though mythically imaginary in origin, is always already bounded by symbolic/numerical structuration, which underpins the intersubjective field and language itself.

     the intersubjective field cannot but open on to a numerical structuration, on to the three, the four, which are our bench-marks in the analytic experience.

229. #229

     Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.54

     **IV** > **M. HYPPOLITE:** *Rejection [rejet]?*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that speech has two fundamental dimensions—mediation (hooking onto the other) and revelation (of the subject's truth)—and that resistance arises precisely when revelatory speech fails to arrive, causing speech to collapse entirely into its mediatory/relational function; this dialectic between full and empty speech structures the entire analytic experience, including the ego's constitutive dependence on the other.

     it is in so far as the confession of being doesn't come to term that speech runs entirely along the slope by which it hooks on to the other.

230. #230

     Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.284

     xxn > The concept of analysis > **0. MANNONI: ft** *is the navel of speech.*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that transference must be understood through the dialectic of the imaginary and symbolic registers rather than reduced to the real (Ezriel) or to ego-normalization (ego psychology); the imaginary relation, rooted in the mirror stage and the ideal ego, crystallizes transference while the symbolic—via speech and the analyst as mediating Other—enables the subject's integration of repressed history.

     What is on the side of 0 passes over to the side of 0'. Everything which is proffered from A, from the side of the subject, makes itself heard in B, on the side of the analyst

231. #231

     Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.241

     **XIX**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that signification never refers to an extra-linguistic reality but only ever refers back to another signification, and that speech — defined as the demand for recognition — constitutes a new order of being irreducible to emotion, organic index, or mechanical communication; transference is then reframed within this symbolic order rather than as a merely imaginary (delusional) phenomenon.

     The pig's grunt only becomes speech when someone raises the question as to what it is that they want to make you believe. Speech is precisely only speech in as much as someone believes in it.

232. #232

     Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.157

     **xn**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the mirror-apparatus schema to articulate how the imaginary specular dialectic introduces the death drive as a structural (not merely biological) dimension of human libido, and then extends this via Freud's 'Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams' to show how topographical and temporal regression correspond to shifts in the plane of reflection, with narcissism functioning as the libidinal complement of the egoism of the dream.

     it is with this character as go-between, embodied by his colleague from the laboratory... it is in relation to and through the intermediary of this colleague... that Freud projects, brings to life in this dream what is its latent desire

233. #233

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.348

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan concludes Seminar X by distinguishing mourning, melancholia, and mania through the functional difference between objet a and i(a), and then pivots to announce the Names-of-the-Father as the next seminar's project, arguing that the father is not a causa sui but a subject who has integrated his desire back into the irreducible a — the only passage through which desire can be authentically realised in the field of the Other.

     only opens up by situating the a as such in the field of the Other. And not only is it to be situated there, but it gets situated there by every single one of us.

234. #234

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.249

     **x** > **THE MOUTH AND THE EYE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan develops a topological inversion between the anxiety-point and the point of desire across the oral and phallic/scopic levels: at the oral level anxiety is located at the Other (the mother's body) while desire is secured in the fantasy-relation to the partial object; at the phallic level this is strictly reversed, with orgasm itself functioning as the anxiety-point's homologue. The eye is then introduced as the new partial object (objet a) whose structure of mirage and exclusion from transcendental aesthetics anchors this topology.

     The anxiety-point lies at the level of the Other, at the level of the mother's body.

235. #235

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.104

     BookX Anxiety > *NOT WITHOUT HAVING IT*

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances a catalogue of partial objects (objet petit a) as pre-symbolic, non-shareable objects whose entry into the field of exchange signals anxiety, while simultaneously arguing that the partial object's synchronic function in transference has been systematically neglected — a neglect that explains Freud's limit at castration and the post-analytic failures in sexual function. Topological surfaces (cross-cap, Möbius strip) are then deployed to distinguish the specular (imaginary) object from objet petit a.

     the field of the interpretation to be given of the phallic function at the level of the big Other, with the fantasy of fellatio, concerning the analyst's penis in particular.

236. #236

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.37

     BookX Anxiety > **ANXIETY, SIGN OF DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: The passage articulates a structural logic whereby declaring desire to the other identifies that other with the unknown object of desire, thereby fulfilling the other's own lack — making the declaration of desire a trap that ensnares the other precisely by addressing their want.

     the other as such, here object observe - of my love, will necessarily fall into my toils.

237. #237

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.191

     **x** > **XIII APHORISMS ON LOVE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances a series of aphorisms on the love-desire-jouissance relation, arguing that anxiety mediates between desire and jouissance, that sadism and masochism are not reversible but constitute a fourfold structure each concealing the other's true aim, and that "only love allows jouissance to condescend to desire" — with castration functioning as the structural impasse that governs the encounter between the sexes.

     When S re-emerges from this access to the Other, it is the unconscious, that is, the barred Other.

238. #238

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.66

     BookX Anxiety > **v** > **THAT WHICH DECEIVES**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the dimension of the Other is structurally irreducible across all approaches to anxiety—experimental (Pavlov, Goldstein), philosophical, and analytic—and that the illusion of self-transparent consciousness (Selbstbewusstsein / Subject Supposed to Know) is precisely what blocks recognition of this, while the uncanny marks the point where specular identification fails and anxiety's structural void becomes legible.

     three points in which the dimension of the Other remains dominant. These are, to wit, the Other's demand, the Other's jouissance, and in a modalized form... the desire of the Other

239. #239

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.32

     BookX Anxiety > **ANXIETY, SIGN OF DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan marks a decisive 'leap' beyond Hegel on the function of desire: whereas Hegel's desire is desire of/for another *consciousness* (leading necessarily to the struggle to the death), Lacanian desire is desire of the Other qua *unconscious lack*, mediated by the fantasy as image-support — a distinction formalised through four formulae and the division-remainder algebra that produces the barred subject and objet a as co-residues on the side of the Other.

     I put this Other here, capital A… the Other is there as an un-consciousness that is constituted as such. The Other concerns my desire to the extent of what he lacks and to the extent that he doesn't know.

240. #240

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.117

     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.

     the object is bound to its necessary lack right where the subject is constituted in the locus of the Other

241. #241

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.49

     BookX Anxiety > **FROM THE COSMOS TO THE** *UNHEIMLICHE*

     Theoretical move: By tracing Hamlet's two modes of identification—with the specular image i(a) and with the lost object a—Lacan distinguishes the imaginary register from a remainder that escapes specularization, using the cross-cap topology to show that minus-phi (the phallus as lack) and objet petit a share a status irreducible to the specular image, thereby framing anxiety as the privileged passageway between cosmism and the object of desire.

     this i(a) is given in the specular experience, but, as I told you, it is authenticated by the Other

242. #242

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.246

     **x** > **THE MOUTH AND THE EYE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the oral drive must be re-examined to show that the anxiety-point (located at the level of the mother/Other) and the point of desire (located at the mamma as partial object) are structurally distinct and non-coincident, with the mamma functioning as an 'amboceptive' object internal to the child's own sphere — thereby reframing the castration complex not as a dead end but as misread through an oral reduction that only metaphorically displaces it.

     the anxiety-point lies at the level of the mother. In the child, the anxiety of the mother's lack is the anxiety of the breast drying up... He is in some sense carried off into the Other.

243. #243

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.323

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

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that anxiety is "not without object" — its object being the objet petit a in its primordial form as a "yieldable object" (cession) — and uses this to ground the specific structure of obsessional desire: the a precedes and substitutes for the subject, inaugurating a dialectic in which all forms of the a (breast, gaze, voice, faeces) share the structural characteristic of potential cession.

     the field of the Other, as it were, splits open and exposes its rock bottom

244. #244

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.162

     **x** > **PUNCTUATIONS ON DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that anxiety arises not from Hegelian mutual recognition (where the Other acknowledges or misrecognizes me) but from a temporal dimension in which the Other's desire puts my very Being in question by targeting me as the cause of desire (as *objet a*) rather than as its object — a structure that also defines the operative dimension of analytic transference.

     The Other puts me in question, it interrogates me at the very root of my desire as a, as cause of this desire and not as object.

245. #245

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.144

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that anxiety points to a radical, irreducible lack that cannot be symbolized or compensated by the signifier; using topological figures (torus, cross-cap, Möbius strip) he demonstrates that this structural fault—prior to and constitutive of the signifier itself—cannot be filled by negation, cancellation, or symbolization, distinguishing it categorically from privation and absence.

     the relation to the Other, wherein any possibility of symbolization and of the locus of discourse are situated, meets up again with a structural fault.

246. #246

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.112

     BookX Anxiety > **VIII**

     Theoretical move: The passage reframes Objet petit a not as the intentional object *of* desire (in the phenomenological/Husserlian sense) but as the *cause* of desire that lies *behind* it, prior to any internalization; this reconfiguration is then used to distinguish the structural positions of sadism and masochism as different modes of identification with the object.

     before the subject, in the locus of the Other, grasps himself in specular form, in x, which will introduce for him the distinction between ego and non-ego.

247. #247

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.266

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that visual desire masks anxiety by substituting the non-specular Objet petit a with mere appearances, and pivots to establishing the voice as the most originary partial object — more fundamental than the scopic or anal object — whose relation to anxiety and desire must be grasped through the myth of the father's murder rather than through the primacy of maternal desire.

     The eye of the voyeur himself appears to the Other for what it is impotent.

248. #248

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.174

     **x** > **ANXIETY, SIGNAL OF THE REAL**

     Theoretical move: Lacan maps the perverse positions of sadism and masochism through the differential concealment of anxiety and the object (objet a), arguing that anxiety is the subject's real leftover and that castration is best understood not as threat but through the structural "falling-away" of the phallus as object—a detumescent object whose loss is more constitutive of desire than its presence.

     the Other is absolutely essential and this is precisely what I wanted to spell out when I gave my Seminar on ethics by bringing Sade and Kant together and showing you that Sade's essential act of putting the Other to the question goes so far as to simulate... the exigencies of moral law

249. #249

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.303

     **xx** > **XXI PIAGET'S TAP** > what the reproducer has understood what the explainer had understood

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Piaget's tap experiment to critique psychology's blindness to the causal dimension of the object as structured by desire and the phallic relation, then articulates five levels of the constitution of objet petit a in the S/A relation—oral, anal, phallic, scopic, and the desire of the Other—deploying this schema to reframe obsessional neurosis as structured around demand's cover over the desire of the Other, with anxiety as the irreducible kernel.

     need in the Other, at the level of the Other... demand in the Other... jouissance in the Other... might in the Other... desire of the Other

250. #250

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.262

     **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.

     isn't the one whose memory is to be awakened, the one who is to be made to remember, God himself?

251. #251

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.231

     **x** > **XVI BUDDHA'S EYELIDS**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the body's engagement in the signifying chain produces an irreducible remainder — the "pound of flesh" — that cannot be dissolved by phenomenological non-dualism, and uses this structure to contrast the Christian (masochistic identification with the waste-object) against the Buddhist relationship to desire-as-illusion, ultimately grounding the mirror/eye dialectic in the logic of objet petit a as what is cut from the subject rather than projected outward.

     what survives the ordeal of the division of the field of the Other through the presence of the subject

252. #252

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.309

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues for a "circular constitution" of objet petit a across all libidinal stages—against Abraham's linear-developmental model—grounding the cause-function of desire structurally in the gap between cause and effect, with excrement as the paradigm case that reveals how biological objects only acquire their subjective destiny through the dominance of the signifier.

     For them like us, this is a manifestation of a locus of the Other. An Other thing is evinced as such.

253. #253

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.201

     **x** > **WOMAN, TRUER AND MORE REAL**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses clinical material and the figure of Don Juan to argue that feminine jouissance is structurally distinct from masculine desire: whereas man's anxiety is tied to the (–φ) and the lost object, woman's relation to jouissance is mediated by the desire of the Other rather than by lack, making her "truer and more real." Women's masochism is consequently reframed as a male fantasy, and the male "imposture" is contrasted with the female "masquerade."

     She tempts herself by tempting the Other… For women, the desire of the Other is the means by which her jouissance will have an object that is, as it were, suitable.

254. #254

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.210

     **x** > **xv**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that "men's business" designates a structural asymmetry in desire: what lacks for the man is (-φ), primary castration as something he must actively mourn and detach from narcissism, whereas for the woman lack is pre-castratively constituted through demand and the object a in its relation to the mother — this asymmetry reframes the debate on female phallicism and reorganizes the clinical vignette of Lucia Tower's countertransference around the distinction between the Other and the object a.

     Her relationship with the Other, the patient-Other, the male Other — whom she misses so entirely, as you'll see — demonstrates this quite well enough.

255. #255

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.317

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

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

     the locus of the Other, is where the link lies

256. #256

     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.

     Conversely, the Other's entire existence hangs upon a guarantee that is missing, hence the barred Other.

257. #257

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan

     BookX Anxiety > *PASSAGE* **A** *L'ACTE* **AND ACTING-OUT**

     Theoretical move: The passage establishes that objet petit a is doubly relational: it is isolated by the big Other and constituted as a remainder in the subject's relation to the Other, grounding the mathemic table of division that structures subject, Other, and a together.

     what we have to accentuate today, however, is the relation it bears to the big Other.

258. #258

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.342

     **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.

     the object defined as a remainder that is irreducible to the symbolization that occurs at the locus of the Other… In the end, the Other, whoever it is, appears in the fantasy as the castrator.

259. #259

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.170

     **x** > **ANXIETY, SIGNAL OF THE REAL**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that anxiety is not without object (*nicht objektlos*) but signals the Real's irreducibility, distinguishing anxiety from fear by locating it at the logical moment prior to desire where the remainder of subjective division — *objet petit a* — first appears as cause; the structure is formalised through an arithmetic analogy of division in which the barred subject emerges as the quotient of *a* over the signifier.

     the subject has to be constituted in the locus of the Other … The treasure of the signifier in which he has to situate himself already awaits the subject.

260. #260

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.255

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Reik's analysis of the shofar—a ritual horn sounding at the voice-level of the object—to illustrate both the promise and the structural limit of analogical symbol-use in early psychoanalysis, positioning the voice (as objet petit a) as the final, fifth object relation that ties desire to anxiety in its ultimate form, while distinguishing rigorous theoretical grounding from mere intuitive analogy.

     a drama that would remain opaque for us were anxiety not there to enable us to reveal its meaning... the subject's grounding in the Other along the path of the signifier

261. #261

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.284

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

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

     our praxis presupposes our field, the field of desire, to be generated by the relation of S to A… the subject receives his own message from the Other.

262. #262

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.133

     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.

     Betwixt the subject $, here Othered, so to speak, in his structure of fiction, and the Other, A, which cannot be authenticated, never fully authenticated, what emerges is the remainder, a, the pound of flesh.

263. #263

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.337

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan concludes his seminar on anxiety by arguing that anxiety is a signal prior to the cession of object *a*, that the scopic level most fully masks *a* and thus most assures the subject against anxiety, and that birth trauma (understood as intrusion of a radically Other environment rather than separation from the mother) and the oral/anal stages of object constitution reveal how desire is fundamentally structured around the yielding of *a* in relation to the demand of the Other — a structure irreducible to Hegelian dialectics.

     I don't know which object a I am for the desire of the Other... what remains of the anguishing I don't know what object I am, is, fundamentally, misrecognition.

264. #264

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.185

     **x** > **XIII APHORISMS ON LOVE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that anxiety functions not as a mediator but as a *median* term between jouissance and desire: the subject of jouissance is mythical and can only appear through the remainder *a*, which resists signifierization and therefore cannot serve as a metaphor for that subject; it is precisely this irreducible waste-remainder that founds the desiring (barred) subject, with anxiety marking the gap between jouissance and desire that must be traversed in the constitution of fantasy.

     the figure of a division of the subject S in relation to the A of the Other, since the subject has to realize himself on the path to the Other.

265. #265

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.291

     **xx** > **XXI PIAGET'S TAP**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the objet petit a functions not as the object of desire but as its *cause*, and that this causal function — first legible in the structure of obsessional neurosis — is the primordial "shadow" or metaphor from which the philosophical category of cause derives; grasping the a as cause of desire is what orients the analysis of transference beyond the circle of transference neurosis.

     anxiety marks the dependency of any constitution of the subject with regard to A

266. #266

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.216

     **x** > **xv**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of vessels (the pot of castration as minus-phi, the Klein bottle as the structure of objet a) to argue that anxiety arises not from castration itself but from the way the object a comes to half-fill the hollow of primordial castration via the desire of the Other; circumcision is then read as a ritual embodiment of this topological structure, instituting a normative relation between subject, objet a, and the big Other.

     We still need to add that this a comes from elsewhere and that it's only constituted by the intermediary of the desire of the Other.

267. #267

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.55

     BookX Anxiety > **BEYOND CASTRATION ANXIETY**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that castration anxiety is not the neurotic's ultimate impasse; rather, what the neurotic shrinks from is making his castration into the positive guarantee of the Other's lack — a dialectical move that reframes castration's function and opens analysis beyond Freud's terminus. This is grounded by linking the Unheimliche structurally to the minus-phi position in the diagram, identifying the Heim as the site in the Other beyond the specular image where the subject's desire encounters itself as object.

     Dedicating his castration to guaranteeing the Other is that before which the neurotic comes to a standstill.

268. #268

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.313

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the anal object (excrement as objet petit a) achieves its subjective function not through the mother's demand alone, but through its structural articulation with castration (- φ): excrement symbolizes phallic loss, grounds obsessional ambivalence, and prefigures the function of the object a as territorial/representative trace — yet this still falls short of explaining how the concealment of the object founds desire as such.

     He believes that a is the Other and that in dealing with the a he is dealing with the Other, the big Other, the mother.

269. #269

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.59

     BookX Anxiety > **BEYOND CASTRATION ANXIETY**

     Theoretical move: Lacan pivots the classical Freudian account of castration anxiety from anxiety-as-signal-of-lack to anxiety-as-presence-of-the-object, demonstrating through the neurotic/pervert contrast and the exhaustion of demand that it is not the absence but the imminence of the object that generates anxiety, and that castration only appears at the far limit of demand's regressive cycle.

     the formula of the fantasy... can be translated into the following perspective that the Other faints, swoons, faced with this object that I am

270. #270

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.296

     **xx** > **XXI PIAGET'S TAP**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a critique of Piaget's developmental psychology to advance the thesis that the primordial effect of the cause (*a*) is desire-as-lack-of-effect, and that the signifier's function is not communication but the calling-forth of the signified dimension in the subject—a gap that Piaget's cognitivist framework systematically occludes.

     the process of the constitution of the subject in so far as he has to build himself in the locus of the Other

271. #271

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.275

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus's evanescence—its structural failure to conjoin man's and woman's jouissance—is the very mechanism through which castration anxiety is constituted, and that this failure, rather than any ideal of genital fulfilment, is what organizes the subject's relation to the Other, desire, and the death drive.

     Castration anxiety refers back to the beyond of this defended I, to this foretoken of a jouissance that exceeds our limits, in so far as the Other here is strictly speaking called forth in the register of the real whereby a certain form of life is transmitted and sustained.

272. #272

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.73

     BookX Anxiety > **v** > **THAT WHICH DECEIVES**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that anxiety is constituted by the emergence of lack under the pressure of a question (from the Other), and traces the origin of the signifier itself to a primordial act of deception — laying a falsely false trace — which simultaneously constitutes the subject, the Other, and the structure of cause, showing that the signifier reveals the subject only by effacing his trace.

     the aim that the Other, the real Other, should not know. The he didn't know takes root in a he mustn't know.

273. #273

     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 enigma of the function given to the Other, the woman on this occasion, who is the exalted object

274. #274

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.240

     **x** > **XVI BUDDHA'S EYELIDS**

     Theoretical move: Through a sustained engagement with Buddhist iconography (the Kanzeon/Avalokitesvara/Guanyin statues), Lacan argues that the object of desire (objet petit a) emerges precisely at the limit of the three stages (oral, anal, phallic-castration) as something radically separated off, and that castration's function in the object is illuminated by a culturally specific figure that appears as desire's object while remaining indeterminate with respect to sex—thus the mirror, as field of the Other, is the site where the place of the a first appears.

     the mirror inasmuch as it is the field of the Other in which there must appear for the first time, if not the a itself, then at least its place

275. #275

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.64

     BookX Anxiety > **BEYOND CASTRATION ANXIETY**

     Theoretical move: Lacan triangulates anxiety by situating it within three intersecting themes—the Other's jouissance, the Other's demand, and the analyst's desire as it operates in interpretation—thereby framing the analyst's desire as the privileged and enigmatic terminus of an inquiry into the economy of desire that will orient the subsequent sessions.

     One is the Other's jouissance. The second is the Other's demand.

276. #276

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.41

     BookX Anxiety > **FROM THE COSMOS TO THE** *UNHEIMLICHE*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the hiatus between the mirror stage (specular/imaginary) and the signifier (symbolic) is not a temporal discontinuity in his teaching but a structural articulation, where the specular image is always-already dependent on ratification by the big Other; he further stages this through a three-phase cosmology (world → stage → world-laden-by-stage) to distinguish Lévi-Straussian analytic reason from psychoanalytic reason grounded in the primacy of the signifier over any homogeneous materialism.

     he seems to be asking the one supporting him, and who here represents the big Other, to ratify the value of this image

277. #277

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.287

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the voice, as object a, is not assimilated but incorporated (Einverleibung), functioning not as sonorous resonance in physical space but as what resonates ex nihilo in the void of the Other — thereby linking the voice-object to anxiety, the desire of the Other, and ultimately to sacrifice as the capture of the Other in the web of desire.

     resonates in a void that is the void of the Other as such, properly speaking ex-nihilo. The voice responds to what is said, but it cannot answer for it.

278. #278

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.15

     BookX Anxiety > **ANXIETY IN THE NET OF SIGNIFIERS**

     Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar X by positioning anxiety as the nodal concept that will retroactively knot together the key terms of his previous disquisitions (fantasy, the Graph of Desire, the desire of the Other, the subject's relation to the signifier), insisting anxiety is not locatable at the centre of seriousness/care/expectation but rather escapes that encirclement — and distinguishing the Lacanian approach from existentialist (Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre) treatments of anxiety.

     the essential relationship between anxiety and the desire of the Other

279. #279

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.194

     **x** > **WOMAN, TRUER AND MORE REAL**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that woman's relation to jouissance is structurally superior to man's because her bond with desire is looser — she is not knotted to the phallic negative (-φ) in the same essential way — and uses mythological (Tiresias), philosophical (Sartre/Hegel), and topological (the pot/void) resources to articulate how the real is not lack but fullness, while the hole/void that structures desire is specifically man's burden.

     the desire of the Other as such is precisely what she has to contend with, and all the more so given that, in this confrontation, the phallic object only comes in second place for her

280. #280

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.161

     **x** > **PUNCTUATIONS ON DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: The passage makes the theoretical move of grounding the problem of the analyst's desire in a precise articulation of desire as law and as will-to-jouissance, then pivots to redefine anxiety—against Freud's ego-signal model—as the specific manifestation of the desire of the Other, thereby linking countertransference, the ethics of psychoanalysis, and anxiety under a single structural logic.

     the 'I' system, as Aufbau, as structure, as that which is interposed between perception and consciousness, is located in another dimension, as Other qua locus of the signifier.

281. #281

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.137

     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.

282. #282

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.243

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: Lacan delimits the scope of Pavlovian conditioning by arguing that conditioned reflexes involve the signifier and the Other (the experimenter), but produce no genuine subjective effect in the animal, since neurosis requires speech and there is no subject of the signifier on the animal's side — thereby clarifying the precise conditions under which desire (not mere need) must be invoked to make sense of psycho-somatic phenomena.

     this point is articulable with something that functions as a signifier, since it is made by the experimenter. In other words, the Other is there.

283. #283

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.242

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

     Theoretical move: Lacan locates the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz at the precise point where the vel between signifier and subject is enacted, distinguishing this from the mirror-relation, and uses this to delimit the psychosomatic as a signifying induction that does not trigger aphanisis of the subject—thereby limiting the scope of psychoanalytic interpretation.

     at the level of the transference, the terms that I was forced to introduce today concerning the function of the Other

284. #284

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.145

     PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that transference is fundamentally resistant (Übertragungswiderstand) — it is the closing up of the unconscious rather than its opening — and that the big Other is always already present in every fleeting opening of the unconscious, making the analyst's interpretation a secondary reflection of the unconscious's own prior interpretive work. This grounds a sharp critique of ego-alliance conceptions of transference.

     The Other, the capital Other, is already there in every opening, however fleeting it may be, of the unconscious.

285. #285

     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.

     her own desire of being unable to realize herself qua desire of the Other

286. #286

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.256

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

     Theoretical move: By reading Freud's Lust-Ich / Unlust distinction through the lens of the pleasure principle and its limits, Lacan shows that the structure of pleasure already anticipates the logic of alienation: Unlust, as the irreducible remainder that bites into the original ego, is the primitive form of the split between subject and Other, and hedonism's reduction of this to a good/evil dyad fails to account for desire.

     that breaking-off, that splitting-off, which I indicated in the dialectic of the subject with the Other, but here in the opposite direction.

287. #287

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.211

     FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the drive, in its turning inside-out through the erogenous zone, always seeks something that responds in the Other; and he prepares to introduce the lamella-myth (via Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium) to articulate the drive's 'false organ' as the only graspable pole in the domain of sexuality.

     is given the task of seeking something that, each time, responds in the Other

288. #288

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.139

     PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques the folk-semantic uses of "transference" (positive/negative, ambivalence, full transference) as inadequate, and then pivots to the properly conceptual question: transference must be determined by its function in praxis, and even if it is a product of the analytic situation, that situation cannot create the phenomenon entirely—something must pre-exist it.

     it structures all the particular relations with that other who is the analyst, and that the value of all the thoughts that gravitate around this relation must be connoted by a sign of particular reserve.

289. #289

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.51

     OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

     Theoretical move: Lacan marks the dissymmetry between Freud and Descartes: whereas Descartes grounds certainty in a cogito that then requires an Other (God) to guarantee truth, Freud grounds certainty in the unconscious itself, making the subject "at home" in that field—a move that displaces the guarantee of truth from a transcendent Other onto the structure of the unconscious.

     Descartes then has to re-assure himself—of what, if not of an Other that is not deceptive, and which shall, into the bargain, guarantee by its very existence the bases of truth.

290. #290

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.214

     FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

     Theoretical move: The subject is constituted through its division upon entry into the signifying field of the Other, and this very splitting is what underlies the drive's essential affinity with death and the impossibility of a fully recovered sexual relation at the level of the unconscious.

     it is this that is at issue with the relation between the subject and the field of the Other.

291. #291

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.267

     FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: The primary signifier, functioning like a zero in the denominator of a fraction, does not open the subject to all meanings but rather abolishes them all, grounding the subject's freedom through a radical non-sense that infinitizes subjective value—and this infinity of the subject must be mediated with the finiteness of desire through the Kantian concept of negative quantities.

     dialectized significations in the relation of the desire of the Other

292. #292

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.6

     CONTENTS

     Theoretical move: This is the table of contents for Seminar XI (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis); it is non-substantive structural/navigational material listing chapter titles and page numbers.

     THE FIELD OF THE OTHER AND BACK TO THE TRANSFERENCE

293. #293

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.286

     IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > IN YOU MORE THAN YOU

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topological figure of a surface crossing itself (cross-cap/Möbius-type surface) to argue that the line of self-intersection symbolizes identification, and then critiques any conception of analysis that terminates in identification with the analyst as eliding the true motive force of analysis — insisting there is a "beyond" to identification.

     the rim comes back on to the plane constituted by the locus of the Other

294. #294

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.148

     PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that transference is not reducible to a dual-subject objectivity (as in logical positivism or Szasz's analysis), but must be grasped through the dimension of truth and deception constitutive of love: in the transference, the subject persuades the Other of a complementarity that covers over its own lack, making love the structural model of deception in discourse.

     I pointed out the role of essential balancer played in Descartes by the Other which, it is said, must on no account be deceptive. In analysis, the danger is that this Other will be deceived.

295. #295

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.195

     THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that there is no natural developmental or dialectical metamorphosis between partial drives; the passage from one drive to another is produced not by organic maturation but by the intervention of the demand of the Other, with the lost object (objet petit a) serving as the structural cause of drive-circuit incompleteness rather than an originary satisfaction.

     by the intervention, the overthrow, of the demand of the Other.

296. #296

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.193

     THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Freud's three-stage account of the drive circuit (active, reflexive, passive) to argue that the appearance of a new subject — the other — is constitutively produced by the drive's circular course, making the subject not a presupposition but an outcome of the drive's reversal.

     This subject, which is properly the other, appears in so far as the drive has been able to show its circular course.

297. #297

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.128

     WHAT IS A PICTURE? > WHAT IS A PICTURE?

     Theoretical move: Lacan extends his analysis of the gaze beyond the scopic drive to argue that the icon's social and religious function is structured around a third gaze — neither the viewer's nor the painter's, but the divine or communal gaze behind the image — revealing that the objet petit a (as gaze) always operates within a triangulated social/sacrificial economy rather than a simple dyadic relation of viewer and image.

     if Javeh forbids the Jews to make idols, it is because they give pleasure to the other gods.

298. #298

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.119

     THE LINE AND LIGHT > OF THE GAZE

     Theoretical move: The passage maps the partial drives (oral, anal, scopic, invocatory) onto a hierarchy of structural positions—demand, metaphor/gift, desire, unconscious—culminating in the argument that the gaze functions as objet petit a precisely because it operates through a constitutive lure, placing the subject at the level of lack.

     At the scopic level, we are no longer at the level of demand, but of desire, of the desire of the Other.

299. #299

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.233

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: The passage identifies the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz with the binary signifier and locates it as the pivot of primal repression (Urverdrangung), while showing that the subject's division between meaning and fading (aphanisis) is constituted by the signifying coupling; separation is then introduced as the operation by which the subject finds the weak point of this alienating dyad and recovers desire from the interval between signifiers.

     the desire offered to the mapping of the subject in the experience of the discourse of the Other, of the first Other he has to deal with, let us say, by way of illustration, the mother.

300. #300

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.228

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > ALIENATION

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the "lethal factor" within the alienating vel (freedom or death) as a Hegelian moment of Terror, then pivots to introduce the second operation—separation—grounded in set-theoretic intersection, which completes the subject's circular relation to the Other and opens the field of transference.

     The intersection of two sets is constituted by the elements that belong to the two sets. It is here that the second operation in which the subject is led by this dialectic takes place.

301. #301

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.281

     IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > TO CONCLUDE

     Theoretical move: Lacan delimits psychoanalysis's proper terrain by contrasting what it does NOT do (provide erotological technique or new sexual knowledge) with what it does: articulate sexuality exclusively through the drive's passage in the defile of the signifier, constituted within the double movement of alienation and separation—with the objet a as the key isolating concept missing from confused analytic literature.

     a medial, chance status, in the gap opened up at the centre of the dialectic of the subject and the Other

302. #302

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.241

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the apparent neutrality of number and mathematical science conceals the constitutive presence of the subject and the Other: the zero in the number series is the subject who totalizes, meaning desire and the subject/Other dialectic are irreducible even within modern scientific formalism inaugurated by Descartes.

     To show you that the presence of the Other is already implied in number, I need only point out to you that the series of numbers can only be figured by introducing the zero

303. #303

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.245

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that analytic training turns on the problem of trust — specifically, that transference emerges wherever there is a subject supposed to know, and that the analyst must grasp through lived experience what this trust (and the movement it sets in motion) is actually oriented around, rather than substituting ceremony for genuine criteria of qualification.

     he does not present himself as a god, he is not God for his patient. So what does this trust signify?

304. #304

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

     THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: The partial drive is theorised as the mechanism by which the pleasure principle is forced open, revealing a jouissance beyond homeostasis and introducing an "other reality" that retroactively structures the Real-Ich itself.

     as the other intervenes, he will realize that there is a jouissance beyond the pleasure principle

305. #305

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.154

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan resolves the paradox of "I am lying" by splitting the subject of enunciation from the subject of the statement, demonstrating that the liar's paradox is not a logical antinomy but rather the very structure of the speaking subject — a division that produces "I am deceiving you" as the analytic truth that emerges from this gap.

     forming part, in the Other, of the treasury of vocabulary in which the I, determined retroactively, becomes a signification

306. #306

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.175

     SEXUALITY IN THE DEFILES OF THE SIGNIFIER > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that modern science establishes a deliberate "relation of non-relation" with the unconscious combinatory, and that the question of this disconnection must be pursued at the level of desire — specifically, the desire that subtends scientific discourse itself — as a condition for reflecting on the scientificity of psychoanalysis.

     the specific relation between these two discourses, the scientific discourse and the discourse of the Other, that is, the unconscious

307. #307

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.252

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Pavlovian experiment is not about sign-thing association but about the signifier cut from an interrupted need-cycle, which models the psychosomatic effect; crucially, when S1 and S2 are "holophrased" (no interval between them), the solidified dyad serves as the structural model for cases such as mental deficiency, where the subject is reduced to the support of the Other's desire.

     with regard to this something to which the mother reduces him, in being no more than the support of her desire

308. #308

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.284

     IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > IN YOU MORE THAN YOU

     Theoretical move: Through the fable of the Chinese restaurant menu, Lacan illustrates how the analytic situation transforms the subject's demand into a question about desire, with the analyst occupying the place of the Subject Supposed to Know while the objet a operates as the hidden motor of transference.

     when you abdicate your choice to some divination of the patronne, whose importance you have exaggerated out of all proportion

309. #309

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.221

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the drive's essential structure — its circular return to the subject rather than simple object-directedness — is irreducible to love or well-being, and that the subject's realization in the signifier depends on a constitutive gap in its relation to the Other, theorized topologically as the function of the rim.

     The tattoo certainly has the function of being for the Other, of situating the subject in it, marking his place in the field of the group's relations

310. #310

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.269

     FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: Lacan redefines the transference not as a shadow or repetition of past love, but as the living enactment of deception in the present, grounded in the meeting of the analyst's desire and the patient's desire — thereby linking the ethics of analysis to the question of the master/slave dialectic and the desire of the Other.

     the recognition of the absolute authority of the desire of the Other, that Thy will be done! that is taken up again in the Christian register

311. #311

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.271

     FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst's desire is best mapped by analogy with the slave (not the master), and pivots to ground the ego ideal in the "single stroke" (einziger Zug) as the first signifier in the field of the Other/desire, distinguishing it from narcissistic identification and showing how Freud's identification topology opens onto the Lacanian subject.

     It is the field of the Other that determines the function of the single stroke, in so far as it is from it that a major stage of identification is established

312. #312

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.282

     IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > IN YOU MORE THAN YOU

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the 'liquidation of the transference' cannot mean dissolving the unconscious or eliminating knowledge; rather, it must mean the permanent liquidation of the deceptive movement by which transference closes the unconscious—culminating not in identification with the analyst but in the dissolution of the Subject Supposed to Know as a structural position.

     he tries to induce the Other into a mirage relation in which he convinces him of being worthy of love.

313. #313

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.159

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan reverses the traditional topology of the unconscious — from a closed interior reservoir (double sack) to an open structure (hoop net) — to argue that the subject is constituted in the space of the Other, such that the locus from which the subject sees, speaks, and desires is not interior but external, with the unconscious closing through an obturating effect rather than being an innate enclosure.

     it is in the space of the Other that he sees himself and the point from which he looks at himself is also in that space. Now, this is also the point from which he speaks.

314. #314

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.229

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces Separation as a second operation distinct from Alienation, grounding it etymologically in the Latin 'separare/se parere' (to engender oneself) and showing how the subject responds to the lack perceived in the Other's discourse by offering its own disappearance as the first object — thereby locating desire in the interval between signifiers and founding the dialectic of the subject's self-engendering through the Other's lack.

     A lack is encountered by the subject in the Other, in the very intimation that the Other makes to him by his discourse.

315. #315

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.240

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > APHANISIS

     Theoretical move: Lacan leverages Descartes's voluntarist solution to the problem of the guaranteeing subject (God as the subject supposed to know) to introduce the analytic transference as a structural replacement for that theological guarantee, and simultaneously grounds his concept of alienation in the non-trivial logic of cardinal addition, showing that the vel of alienation cannot be collapsed into simple arithmetic totality.

     two and two make four is not something that can be taken for granted without his presence.

316. #316

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.144

     PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that transference cannot be reduced to repetition alone, and that its proper conceptual weight lies in the transfer of powers from the subject to the big Other — the locus of speech and truth — with the opacity of trauma marking the limit of remembering and the threshold of this transfer.

     the transfer of powers from the subject to the Other, what I call the capital Other (le grand Autre), the locus of speech and, potentially, the locus of truth

317. #317

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.250

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire and "not wanting to desire" are structurally identical (like a Möbius strip), and that this paradox is precisely the site where the analyst's desire functions as the essential pivot through which the subject's desire—constituted as desire of the Other—is both approached and indefinitely deferred in its recognition, rendering aphanisis an irreducible obstacle rather than a resolvable impasse.

     Man's desire is the desire of the Other.

318. #318

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.218

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION

     Theoretical move: Lacan defends the structural (linguistic) account of the unconscious against charges of neglecting sexual dynamics, by re-articulating those dynamics through the topology of the subject/Other division and the partiality of the drive, thereby integrating libidinal force into a structuralist framework rather than opposing it.

     The Other is the locus in which is situated the chain of the signifier that governs whatever may be made present of the subject.

319. #319

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.130

     WHAT IS A PICTURE? > WHAT IS A PICTURE?

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the gaze is not a neutral organ of vision but operates as a form of desire—the desire of the Other—whose terminal function is a "showing" that feeds the "appetite of the eye," ultimately linking the hypnotic power of painting to the archaic, destructive force of the evil eye (invidia), which carries a separating power irreducible to mere distinct vision.

     The formula I have of desire as unconscious—man's desire is the desire of the Other—I would say that it is a question of a sort of desire on the part of the Other

320. #320

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.198

     THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT

     Theoretical move: The circuit of the partial drive—illustrated through exhibitionism and sado-masochism—is only completed in its reversed, active form when the other is brought into play; this circuit constitutes the sole permitted transgression of the pleasure principle, revealing that desire is a detour aimed at catching the jouissance of the other.

     it is the victim as referred to some other who is looking at him

321. #321

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

     IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > TO CONCLUDE

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

     It supports the perspective chosen by the subject in the field of the Other, from which specular identification may be seen in a satisfactory light.

322. #322

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.293

     IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > TO CONCLUDE

     Theoretical move: This concluding passage makes two theoretical moves: (1) it positions the analyst's desire as a desire for absolute difference — the condition under which limitless love outside the law becomes possible — and (2) it provides a translator's glossary that operationally defines key Lacanian concepts (desire/need/demand, jouissance, the three orders, objet petit a, Name-of-the-Father, knowledge) as relational and context-dependent rather than static definitions.

     All speech is demand; it presupposes the Other to whom it is addressed, whose very signifiers it takes over in its formulation.

323. #323

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.219

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that sexuality is not represented as such in the psyche—only its equivalents (activity/passivity) appear there—and therefore the subject must learn from the Other (via the Oedipus complex) what it means to be man or woman; sexuality is established in the psyche through lack, not through any direct biological function.

     the ways of what one must do as man or as woman are entirely abandoned to the drama, to the scenario, which is placed in the field of the Other—which, strictly speaking, is the Oedipus complex

324. #324

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.226

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > ALIENATION

     Theoretical move: The vel of alienation is constitutively asymmetric: both choices—being or meaning—result in loss, because the joining operation contains an element whose disappearance is inevitable regardless of which side is chosen, thereby grounding the subject's constitutive split in the logic of the signifier.

     the meaning, as it emerges in the field of the Other, to be in a large part of its field, eclipsed by the disappearance of being

325. #325

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.197

     THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: In perversion, and specifically voyeurism, the subject is not absent but rather precisely placed within the drive's circuit: the object of the scopic drive (the gaze) is the lost object refound through the introduction of the Other, and what is sought is not the phallus but its absence — making absence itself the constitutive object of the scopic drive's aim.

     It is that the other surprises him, the subject, as entirely hidden gaze.

326. #326

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.52

     OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY > OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY

     Theoretical move: Lacan pivots from Descartes' subject of certainty to the Freudian subject of the unconscious, arguing that the unconscious thinks before certainty is attained, and that analysis introduces a new structure: not the deceiving Other (as in Descartes) but the deceived Other — a shift that reframes the evidential logic of analytic listening.

     the correlative of the subject is henceforth no longer the deceiving Other, but the deceived Other

327. #327

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.60

     OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS > OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS

     Theoretical move: Lacan maps the subject of the unconscious onto Freud's optical/topographical schema (from the letter to Fliess and the seventh chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams), arguing that the network of signifiers—not chance—is what constitutes the subject, and that the place of the Other is situated in the interval between perception and consciousness.

     the interval that separates them, in which the place of the Other is situated, in which the subject is constituted.

328. #328

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.208

     FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

     Theoretical move: The passage pivots from the narcissistic field of love (where the Other is structurally absent) to the partial drive's circular movement as the proper mechanism through which the subject attains the dimension of the big Other — distinguishing narcissistic self-love from the drive's heterogeneous, gap-bearing circularity, and using the scopic drive as the exemplary case.

     nothing represents in it the Other, the radical Other, the Other as such. This representation of the Other is lacking, specifically, between the two opposed worlds that sexuality designates for us in the masculine and the feminine.

329. #329

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.220

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > ALIENATION

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the lack at the heart of the subject's advent by grounding it in a real, biological lack introduced by sexed reproduction and individual death, and replaces Aristophanes' myth of complementary sexual halves with the myth of the lamella — repositioning the libido not as a field of forces but as an unreal organ that embodies the partial drive's essentially death-driven character.

     the subject depends on the signifier and that the signifier is first of all in the field of the Other.

330. #330

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.134

     WHAT IS A PICTURE? > WHAT IS A PICTURE?

     Theoretical move: This passage is largely a transitional exchange (dialogue between Miller and Lacan) touching on methodological differences between Lacan and Merleau-Ponty regarding subjectivity and Cartesian space; it contains minimal substantive theoretical development and concludes with a blank page marker.

     is it in order to open up the transcendental space of the relation to the Other?

331. #331

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.99

     THE SPLIT BETWEEN THE EYE AND THE GAZE > ANAMORPHOSIS > OF THE GAZE

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Sartre's phenomenological account of the gaze by showing that the gaze is not a real seen organ of the other but an imagined presence in the field of the Other, thereby shifting the gaze from an intersubjective encounter to a structure of the Symbolic/Imaginary field.

     The gaze I encounter—you can find this in Sartre's own writing—is, not a seen gaze, but a gaze imagined by me in the field of the Other.

332. #332

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.268

     FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that transference is grounded in the Subject Supposed to Know (who knows signification as such), and that the transference effect—love—is simultaneously its enabling condition and its resistance: love as narcissistic deception closes the subject off from the analytic interpretation it also makes possible, manifesting the alienation effect in the subject-Other relation.

     The alienation effect, in which is articulated, in the relation of the subject to the Other, the effect that we are, is here absolutely manifest.

333. #333

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

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > ALIENATION

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a dialectical logic of desire in which lack is not symmetrically exchanged but non-reciprocally superimposed: the lack engendered at one moment replies to the lack raised by the next, and the desire of the subject and the desire of the Other are structurally identical—a move that grounds the formal argument for alienation in Seminar XI.

     the desire of the subject and the desire of the Other—I have been telling you for a long time now that it is one and the same

334. #334

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.251

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that alienation is structurally tied to the dyadic function of signifiers: only with exactly two signifiers can the subject be "cornered" in alienation and aphanisis produced, whereas with three or more signifiers the sliding becomes circular and alienation dissolves — making the two-signifier dyad the minimal formal condition for subjectivity's fading.

     what appears first as lack in what is signified by the dyad of signifiers, in the interval that links them, namely, the desire of the Other.

335. #335

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.266

     FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > FROM INTERPRETATION TO TRE TRANSFERENCE

     Theoretical move: The Wolf Man case is used to demonstrate how the subject is constituted around a primal repressed signifier (Urverdrängung) — a traumatic non-meaning that cannot be substituted, and which structures the dialectic of desire through the Other, while the subject's gaze-fascination in the dream materialises the representative function of loss.

     signification constituted in the relation to the desire of the Other, in the numerator

336. #336

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.146

     PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that transference is a moment of closure against the unconscious, and that the analyst's interpretive intervention must be directed at the split subject itself (the "beauty behind the shutters") rather than a presumed healthy ego-part; this reframes transference as a topological knot requiring topology to adequately conceptualize it.

     the unconscious is the discourse of the Other… it is this discourse, which, through the mouth of the analyst, calls for the reopening of the shutter

337. #337

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.225

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces alienation as a structural operation grounded in a specific logical vel (neither exclusive nor indifferent), whereby the subject is condemned to appear divided: as meaning on one side, and as aphanisis (fading) on the other — not simply as emergence in the field of the Other.

     Does it mean, as I seem to be saying, that the subject is condemned to seeing himself emerge, in initio, only in the field of the Other? Could it be that? Well, it isn't. Not at all.

338. #338

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.261

     FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes two fields operative in analysis—the field of the Imaginary (Ith) and the field of the Other—and argues that the subject is constituted by the Other's circulating structures prior to any subjective emergence; alienation and separation are the two essential articulations of this Other field, and the passage announces a forthcoming elaboration of "subjective positions" grounded in desire.

     we depend on the field of the Other, which was there long before we came into the world, and whose circulating structures determine us as subjects.

339. #339

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.202

     FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

     Theoretical move: Lacan redefines the libido not as a fluid or divisible energy but as an organ — both in the sense of a bodily part and an instrument — thereby displacing hydraulic/economic models and preparing a structural-topological account of the drive and its relation to the subject and the Other.

     The subject and the Other.

340. #340

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.138

     PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST

     Theoretical move: Lacan opens his treatment of transference by challenging the reductive affect-based model (positive/negative transference as love/hate), invoking Freud's own more radical interrogation of "true love" (eine echte Liebe) as a way to elevate the concept beyond approximation toward a rigorous theoretical account.

     Obscurantism in Ablata The Other, already there• The unconscious is outside

341. #341

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.213

     FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan equates the libido with immortal, irrepressible life subtracted from the sexed being, positioning it as the ground of all partial objects (objets a), and locates the emergence of the subject in the locus of the Other through the logic of the signifier representing a subject for another signifier.

     The relation between the subject and the field of the Other becomes clearer... the subject, in initio, begins in the locus of the Other, in so far as it is there that the first signifier emerges.

342. #342

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.203

     FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject is constituted through division in the field of the Other, such that only partial drives (never a unified sexual drive) are apprehensible, while love and genitality belong to the Other's field and are structured by the Oedipus complex — meaning the ganze Sexualstrebung is nowhere present in the subject but diffused across culture.

     the subject always realizes himself more in the Other, but he is already pursuing there more than half of himself... the subject proceeds from his synchronic subjection in the field of the Other

343. #343

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.222

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > ALIENATION

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the subject as an effect of the signifier, establishing that the circular (but disymmetrical, non-reciprocal) relation between subject and Other is the structural basis for the unconscious, and redefines Jones's concept of aphanisis not as fear of vanishing desire but as the radical disappearance of the subject itself in the very moment the signifier calls it to function.

     the processes are to be articulated, of course, as circular between the subject and the Other—from the subject called to the Other, to the subject of that which he has himself seen appear in the field of the Other, from the Other coming back.

344. #344

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.236

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > APHANISIS

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that aphanisis is the structural condition of every subject — there is no subject without the subject's fading — and uses this to distance his own dialectic from Hegel's: where Hegel promises mediation and successive syntheses toward Absolute Knowing, Lacan's vel of alienation institutes a permanent division that forecloses any such closure, tracing this inaugural moment to Descartes rather than Hegel.

     there is an emergence of the subject at the level of meaning only from its aphanisis in the Other locus, which is that of the unconscious

345. #345

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.224

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > ALIENATION

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the losange (◇) as a topological algorithm that supports the two operations of alienation and separation, showing it functions as a "rim" that articulates the subject's relation to the Other in both the fantasy matheme ($◇a) and the demand/drive node ($◇D), grounding subjectivity in the dependence on the signifier.

     I now come to the two operations that I intend to articulate today in the relation between the subject and the Other.

346. #346

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.290

     IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > IN YOU MORE THAN YOU

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Hegelian-Marxist historiography cannot account for Nazism's sacrificial logic, because sacrifice reveals an irreducible drive to find the desire of the "dark God" in the object of sacrifice; Spinoza's reduction of God to the universality of the signifier offers a rare escape, but Kant's moral law is ultimately truer—and closer to pure desire—for psychoanalytic experience.

     we try to find evidence for the presence of the desire of this Other that I call here the dark God.

347. #347

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.223

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a critique of Piaget's concept of "egocentric discourse" to demonstrate that what appears as the child speaking to no one is in fact the constitution of the subject in the field of the Other — thereby grounding aphanisis (the fading of the subject) in a concrete, observable phenomenon.

     What we find once again here is the constitution of the subject in the field of the Other, as I have designated it for you in this little arrow on the blackboard.

348. #348

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.173

     SEXUALITY IN THE DEFILES OF THE SIGNIFIER > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan reinterprets the Breuer/Anna O. episode to demonstrate that "man's desire is the desire of the Other," arguing that Freud treated Breuer as a hysteric by locating Bertha's transference in the unconscious of the Other rather than Breuer's own desire—and then pivots this to claim that what truly determines the direction of psychoanalytic theory of transference is the desire of the analyst.

     it's the desire of the Other. I think Freud treats Breuer as a hysteric here, since he says to him: your desire is the desire of the Other.

349. #349

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.162

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

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the claim that topological thinking—specifically the notion of surfaces that are simultaneously inside and outside—is uniquely necessary for conceptualizing the unconscious, and introduces the object as an 'obturator' (a partial, not merely passive, blocking function) as the key to understanding transference at the correct level.

     in that locus of the Other in which alone it may assume its status

350. #350

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.6

     CONTENTS

     Theoretical move: This is the table of contents for Seminar XI (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis); it is non-substantive organisational material listing chapter titles and page numbers.

     THE FIELD OF THE OTHER AND BACK TO THE TRANSFERENCE

351. #351

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.51

     OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

     Theoretical move: Lacan establishes a structural dissymmetry between Freud and Descartes: whereas Descartes's cogito grounds certainty in the subject only to hand truth over to a non-deceptive Other (God), Freud grounds certainty directly in the unconscious as a field where the subject is 'at home,' bypassing the need to guarantee truth through an external Other — a move whose algebraic and set-theoretic consequences reshape the coordinates of truth itself.

     Descartes then has to re-assure himself—of what, if not of an Other that is not deceptive, and which shall, into the bargain, guarantee by its very existence the bases of truth

352. #352

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.52

     OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY > OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Cartesian subject of certainty must be replaced by Freud's subject of the unconscious, which thinks before attaining certainty; and further, that the analytic Other is not the deceiving Other (as in Descartes) but the deceived Other, since the unconscious can itself operate in the direction of deception without this undermining its status as truth.

     the correlative of the subject is henceforth no longer the deceiving Other, but the deceived Other.

353. #353

     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.

     her own desire of being unable to realize herself qua desire of the Other

354. #354

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.60

     OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS > OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS

     Theoretical move: The passage uses Freud's optical model (from Letter 52 to Fliess and The Interpretation of Dreams) to argue that the subject of the unconscious is constituted in the interval between perception and consciousness—the locus of the Other—and that mapping the signifying network (rather than spatial anatomy) is the only method of knowing the subject's existence.

     the interval that separates them, in which the place of the Other is situated, in which the subject is constituted.

355. #355

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.99

     THE SPLIT BETWEEN THE EYE AND THE GAZE > ANAMORPHOSIS > OF THE GAZE

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Sartre's phenomenological account of the gaze by arguing that the gaze is not a seen organ but an imagined presence located in the field of the Other, and that Sartre's own examples (rustling leaves, footsteps) betray that the gaze is not grounded in an intersubjective visual relation but in something more radically Other.

     The gaze I encounter—you can find this in Sartre's own writing —is, not a seen gaze, but a gaze imagined by me in the field of the Other.

356. #356

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.119

     THE LINE AND LIGHT > OF THE GAZE

     Theoretical move: The passage maps the partial drives (oral, anal, scopic, invocatory) onto distinct registers of lack and desire, arguing that at the scopic level the gaze functions as objet petit a through a constitutive lure whereby the subject is presented as other than he is and what is shown is not what he wishes to see.

     At the scopic level, we are no longer at the level of demand, but of desire, of the desire of the Other.

357. #357

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.128

     WHAT IS A PICTURE? > WHAT IS A PICTURE?

     Theoretical move: Lacan elaborates the Gaze as a triadic structure operating across religious, social/political, and modern aesthetic registers, arguing that the icon's value lies not in the viewer's experience but in its orientation toward a divine Gaze—'it is intended to please God'—and that behind every image there is always already a gaze, whether divine, political, or the painter's own.

     if Javeh forbids the Jews to make idols, it is because they give pleasure to the other gods.

358. #358

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.130

     WHAT IS A PICTURE? > WHAT IS A PICTURE?

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the gaze is structured by desire — specifically the desire of the Other — and that painting's hypnotic power derives not from elevated aesthetics but from the eye's voracity, exemplified by the evil eye (invidia), which operates as a separating, destructive force rather than a benevolent one.

     man's desire is the desire of the Other—I would say that it is a sort of desire on the part of the Other, at the end of which is the showing (le donner-à-voir).

359. #359

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.134

     WHAT IS A PICTURE? > WHAT IS A PICTURE?

     Theoretical move: This passage is a transitional seminar exchange, largely non-substantive in theoretical content — it records a brief dialogue between Miller and Lacan about Merleau-Ponty's relation to Lacanian theory and Cartesian space, followed by a blank page.

     is it in order to open up the transcendental space of the relation to the Other?

360. #360

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.138

     PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST

     Theoretical move: The passage opens Lacan's treatment of transference by challenging its conventional reduction to a positive/negative affect distinction, foregrounding Freud's own radicalization of the question of 'true love' (eine echte Liebe) as the theoretical pivot that will guide the seminar's re-conceptualization of transference.

     The Other, already there

361. #361

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.139

     PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques received notions of positive/negative transference and the ambivalence concept as theoretically insufficient, then pivots to the properly conceptual question: transference must be understood through the function it performs in analytic praxis, and even if it is a product of that situation, the situation alone cannot generate it ex nihilo — something outside must be presupposed.

     it structures all the particular relations with that other who is the analyst, and that the value of all the thoughts that gravitate around this relation must be connoted by a sign of particular reserve

362. #362

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.144

     PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that transference cannot be simply reduced to repetition, and that Lacan's own theorization re-reads Freud's concept of transference as a pivotal "transfer of powers" from the subject to the big Other—the locus of speech and truth—thereby distinguishing the structural function of transference from the mere acting-out of what cannot be remembered.

     I should see this as a highly significant moment in the transfer of powers from the subject to the Other, what I call the capital Other (le grand Autre), the locus of speech and, potentially, the locus of truth.

363. #363

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.145

     PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan inverts the standard clinical view of transference: rather than being a vehicle for unconscious communication, transference is fundamentally resistant—it is the mechanism by which the unconscious closes up again—and the big Other is already present in every opening of the unconscious prior to any analytic intervention.

     The Other, the capital Other, is already there in every opening, however fleeting it may be, of the unconscious.

364. #364

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.146

     PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the transference is not a moment of ego-alliance but a moment of closure against the unconscious, and that interpretation must address the split subject directly through this closure — reconceiving transference as a topological knot rather than a therapeutic lever on a "healthy part" of the subject.

     the unconscious is the discourse of the Other. Now, the discourse of the Other that is to be realized… is not beyond the closure, it is outside.

365. #365

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.148

     PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that transference is not reducible to a logical-positivist opposition of reality vs. illusion, but is structured by the dimension of truth and deception intrinsic to speech and love; the transference's closure is grounded in the subject's self-deception through love, not in any dual-subject objectivity.

     I pointed out the role of essential balancer played in Descartes by the Other which, it is said, must on no account be deceptive. In analysis, the danger is that this Other will be deceived.

366. #366

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.154

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan resolves the liar's paradox by distinguishing the I of the enunciation from the I of the statement, showing that the split between these two levels of the subject is not an antinomy but a structural condition that produces the move from "I am lying" to "I am deceiving you" — the very position from which the analyst operates.

     the am lying is a signifier, forming part, in the Other, of the treasury of vocabulary in which the I, determined retroactively, becomes a signification

367. #367

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.159

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

     Theoretical move: By replacing the traditional imagery of the unconscious as a closed inner reservoir (the double sack) with a topological figure of the hoop net, Lacan reframes the unconscious as constituted through its opening/orifice and its relation to the Other, arguing that the subject constitutes itself—sees itself, speaks, and forms desire—from the locus of the Other rather than from an interior self-image.

     it is in the space of the Other that he sees himself and the point from which he looks at himself is also in that space. Now, this is also the point from which he speaks

368. #368

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.162

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the topology of the unconscious by arguing that it is structurally inside the subject yet can only be realized outside, in the locus of the Other, and introduces the object as an "obturator" to figure this inside/outside structure—pointing toward the eye as a coming illustration of this topological object.

     in that locus of the Other in which alone it may assume its status

369. #369

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.173

     SEXUALITY IN THE DEFILES OF THE SIGNIFIER > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan pivots the standard account of transference away from the analysand's unconscious spontaneity and toward the desire of the analyst, arguing that every analyst's theory of transference is itself a readable symptom of the analyst's own desire — a move that simultaneously re-reads the Breuer/Anna O. episode through the formula "man's desire is the desire of the Other."

     It's not yours, not your desire, it's the desire of the Other.

370. #370

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.175

     SEXUALITY IN THE DEFILES OF THE SIGNIFIER > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that modern science establishes a 'relation of non-relation' with the unconscious — a structural disconnection — and that this disconnection can only be understood at the level of desire, opening the question of the desire that subtends scientific discourse itself.

     the specific relation between these two discourses, the scientific discourse and the discourse of the Other, that is, the unconscious

371. #371

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.193

     THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Freud's account of the drive's reversibility (active/passive poles) as demonstrating that the drive's circuit is fundamentally circular and that this circularity is what occasions the appearance of a new subject — the Other — not as a pre-existing subject but as an effect produced by the drive completing its round.

     This subject, which is properly the other, appears in so far as the drive has been able to show its circular course.

372. #372

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.195

     THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that there is no natural developmental or dialectical progression between partial drives; rather, transitions between drives are produced by the intervention of the demand of the Other, not by organic maturation or logical deduction. The objet petit a is not the origin of the oral drive but the structural marker of its constitutive lack.

     by the intervention, the overthrow, of the demand of the Other

373. #373

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.197

     THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: In perversion, and specifically voyeurism, the scopic drive's circuit completes itself not by seeing the phallus but by encountering its absence; the gaze functions as the lost object that is refound through shame when the Other intervenes, making the object-cause of desire constitutively the absence of the phallus rather than its presence.

     the gaze is this object lost and suddenly refound in the conflagration of shame, by the introduction of the other.

374. #374

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.198

     THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT

     Theoretical move: The circuit of the partial drive — illustrated through exhibitionism and sadomasochism — is only completed in its reversed form (return to the subject via the Other), and the drive's course is posited as the sole form of transgression available to the subject with respect to the pleasure principle, with jouissance of the Other as the drive's ultimate, always-missed aim.

     The true aim of desire is the other, as constrained, beyond his involvement in the scene. It is not only the victim who is concerned in exhibitionism, it is the victim as referred to some other who is looking at him.

375. #375

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.202

     FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

     Theoretical move: Lacan redefines the libido not as a fluid or diffuse energy but as an organ—both a bodily part and an instrument—thereby shifting the conceptual ground from energetics to topology, and uses an analogy (the bladder rather than Plato's cave) to reframe the unconscious away from depth-metaphors.

     The subject and the Other.

376. #376

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.203

     FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the totality of the sexual drive (ganze Sexualstrebung) is nowhere apprehensible in the subject — only partial drives appear through the pulsation of the unconscious — while genital sexuality finds its form not in the drive itself but in the field of the Other (Oedipus complex, kinship structures), thereby structurally separating drive from love and from any unified sexuality.

     the subject is subject only from being subjected to the field of the Other, the subject proceeds from his synchronic subjection in the field of the Other

377. #377

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.208

     FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the narcissistic field of love (where the Other cannot be represented) from the circularity of the partial drive, arguing that it is precisely through the drive's circular movement around the objet a that the subject attains the dimension of the big Other — a move that also introduces the concept of 'masquerade' as operating at the symbolic rather than imaginary level.

     nothing represents in it the Other, the radical Other, the Other as such.

378. #378

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.211

     FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the drive's turning-inside-out movement through the erogenous zone is structured as an appeal that seeks a response in the Other, and that the drive's proper "organ" is not the biological organ but an ungraspable, circumventable false organ — the objet petit a — whose nature he will illuminate via a myth drawn from Plato's Symposium.

     is given the task of seeking something that, each time, responds in the Other?

379. #379

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.213

     FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan identifies the libido as immortal, organ-less life subtracted from the living being through sexed reproduction, and argues that all forms of objet a are merely its figures/representatives; he then grounds the subject's emergence in the locus of the Other through the signifier, defining the signifier as that which represents a subject for another signifier—not for another subject.

     the subject, in initio, begins in the locus of the Other, in so far as it is there that the first signifier emerges.

380. #380

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.214

     FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

     Theoretical move: The subject is constituted through the emergence of the signifier in the field of the Other, whereby it immediately 'solidifies' into a signifier and is thereby born divided; this splitting is the structural ground for the drive's essential affinity with death and for the libido's relation to the sexual cycle as loss.

     it is this that is at issue with the relation between the subject and the field of the Other.

381. #381

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.218

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION

     Theoretical move: Lacan defends his structural approach against charges of neglecting sexual dynamics by arguing that the topology of subject/Other division already accounts for drive dynamics, with the partial drive situated on the side of the living being called to subjectivity — thereby integrating sexuality into a structuralist framework rather than opposing the two.

     The Other is the locus in which is situated the chain of the signifier that governs whatever may be made present of the subject

382. #382

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.219

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that sexuality is not represented as such in the psyche (neither as biological reproduction nor as sexual difference), but only through the partial drive as a representative of lack; consequently, what one must do as man or woman is entirely delegated to the scenario of the Other—the Oedipus complex—and sexuality enters the subject only through the structure of lack.

     the ways of what one must do as man or as woman are entirely abandoned to the drama, to the scenario, which is placed in the field of the Other

383. #383

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.220

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > ALIENATION

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject's lack is grounded in a real, prior lack introduced by sexed reproduction and individual death, and substitutes Aristophanes' myth of the complementary sexual other with the myth of the lamella—redefining the libido not as a field of forces but as an unreal organ that embodies the partial drive's fundamentally death-driven character.

     the subject depends on the signifier and that the signifier is first of all in the field of the Other.

384. #384

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.221

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the drive's logic — its circular return upon the subject — is irreducible to ambivalence or well-being, and that the subject's realization is produced through a structural gap in its signifying dependence on the Other, grounded topologically in the function of the rim/cut.

     the operation of the realization of the subject in his signifying dependence in the locus of the Other.

385. #385

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.222

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > ALIENATION

     Theoretical move: Lacan redefines aphanisis (Jones's term for the disappearance of desire) as the structural fading of the subject produced by the very movement of the signifier: the signifier calls the subject into function while simultaneously reducing it to a mere signifier, establishing the pulsating closure that characterises the unconscious.

     Here the processes are to be articulated, of course, as circular between the subject and the Other—from the subject called to the Other, to the subject of that which he has himself seen appear in the field of the Other, from the Other coming back.

386. #386

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.223

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: By critiquing Piaget's concept of "egocentric discourse" as a misreading, Lacan argues that the child's apparent self-directed speech actually exemplifies the constitution of the subject in the field of the Other — the subject's emergence is always already structured by an indeterminate placement beneath the signifier, confirming the concept of aphanisis (fading of the subject).

     the constitution of the subject in the field of the Other, as I have designated it for you in this little arrow on the blackboard.

387. #387

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.224

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > ALIENATION

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the lozange (losange) as a topological algorithm unifying the two fundamental operations of subject/Other relation—alienation and separation—showing how it functions as the formal support for both the fantasy formula ($<>a) and the demand/drive node ($<>D), with the vel of the lower half marking the first operation (alienation).

     I now come to the two operations that I intend to articulate today in the relation between the subject and the Other.

388. #388

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.225

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: Lacan defines alienation not as the subject's simple emergence in the field of the Other, but as a structural operation governed by a third form of the logical 'vel' (or), whereby the subject is condemned to appear either as meaning (produced by the signifier) or as aphanisis—a division that constitutes the very root of alienation.

     Does it mean, as I seem to be saying, that the subject is condemned to seeing himself emerge, in initio, only in the field of the Other? Could it be that? Well, it isn't.

389. #389

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.226

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > ALIENATION

     Theoretical move: The vel of alienation is articulated as a logical operation of joining (union) rather than addition: whichever term the subject chooses—being or meaning—one element necessarily disappears, such that the subject is constitutively split between non-meaning (being eclipsed by the signifier) and meaning deprived of the unconscious.

     it is of the nature of this meaning, as it emerges in the field of the Other, to be in a large part of its field, eclipsed by the disappearance of being

390. #390

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.228

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > ALIENATION

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the 'lethal factor' within the alienating vel (freedom or death) to demonstrate that alienation necessarily involves a death-structured choice, and then pivots to announce the second dialectical operation—separation—grounded in set-theoretic intersection rather than union, which will generate the field of transference.

     It completes the circularity of the relation of the subject to the Other, but an essential twist is revealed in it.

391. #391

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.229

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: Lacan theorises Separation as the subject's response to the lack encountered in the Other's discourse: by superimposing its own lack (disappearance/loss) onto the gap perceived in the Other's desire, the subject both procures itself and grounds fantasy, with metonymy naming the structural interval in which desire slips.

     A lack is encountered by the subject in the Other, in the very intimation that the Other makes to him by his discourse.

392. #392

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

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > ALIENATION

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the dialectic of desire as a non-reciprocal, twisted structure in which one lack is superimposed on another across temporal moments, such that the desire of the subject and the desire of the Other are revealed as one and the same through this asymmetric relay of lacks.

     the desire of the subject and the desire of the Other—I have been telling you for a long time now that it is one and the same

393. #393

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.233

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: Lacan identifies the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz with the binary signifier, situating it as the mechanism of primary repression (Urverdrangung) and the hinge of aphanisis, and then pivots to separation as the operation by which the subject finds the return path out of alienation by exploiting the interval between the two signifiers where desire resides.

     the desire offered to the mapping of the subject in the experience of the discourse of the Other, of the first Other he has to deal with, let us say, by way of illustration, the mother.

394. #394

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.235

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: The passage makes two linked theoretical moves: it radicalises the Master/Slave dialectic by showing that the master's freedom collapses into pure death (illustrated through Claudel's Sygne de Coûfontaine), and then distinguishes the Freudian Vorstellungsrepräsentanz from Vorstellung by aligning the former with the pure function of the signifier — stripped of intersubjective signification — against the latter's representational content.

     What do diplomats do when they address one another? They simply exercise, in relation to one another, that function of being pure representatives and, above all, their own signification must not intervene.

395. #395

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.236

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > APHANISIS

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that aphanisis is the necessary condition of subjectivity itself—there is no subject without its fading in the Other—and uses this to distinguish his dialectic from Hegel's: the subject emerges at the level of meaning only through its aphanisis in the locus of the unconscious, with no Hegelian mediation or synthetic progression.

     there is an emergence of the subject at the level of meaning only from its aphanisis in the Other locus, which is that of the unconscious

396. #396

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.241

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the apparent neutrality of mathematical/scientific discourse conceals the presence of the subject and the Other: the zero, as the condition of the number series, figures the subject who totalizes, meaning that the dialectic of subject and Other is already implicated in the very foundations of modern science inaugurated by Descartes.

     To show you that the presence of the Other is already implied in number, I need only point out to you that the series of numbers can only be figured by introducing the zero, in a more or less masked way.

397. #397

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.242

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

     Theoretical move: Lacan locates the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz at the precise point where the vel between signifier and subject is enacted, distinguishing it from the mirror-relation and the Subject Supposed to Know, and uses this to demarcate the psychosomatic as a signifying induction that bypasses aphanisis—thus limiting but not eliminating analytic interpretation.

     the terms that I was forced to introduce today concerning the function of the Other. They seem to be things very far removed from our domain. I am referring to the psycho-somatic.

398. #398

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.243

     THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: Lacan demarcates the properly psychoanalytic domain of desire and aphanisis from the Pavlovian/behaviourist register by arguing that conditioned reflexes operate entirely at the level of the signifier-for-the-experimenter, never constituting a speaking subject; the animal's 'neurosis' cannot be analysed, leaving desire and the subject's fading as irreducibly distinct from any psycho-somatic or reflex account.

     this point is articulable with something that functions as a signifier, since it is made by the experimenter. In other words, the Other is there.

399. #399

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.249

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that even when the analyst is put in question or suspected of being a lure, something stops at the limit—an irreducible credit of infallibility is granted to the analyst—and this paradox of trust is used to contest the Socratic/Platonist thesis that recognition of the good is irresistible for man, precisely because jouissance as such provokes a constitutive recoil.

     Even the psycho-analyst put in question is credited at some point with a certain infallibility

400. #400

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.250

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire's defensive structure ("not wanting to desire" = "wanting not to desire") is structurally identical to desire itself, forming a Möbius-like loop; and that the analyst's desire functions as the pivotal axis that transforms the patient's demand into transference, while "man's desire is the desire of the Other" entails an irreducible alienation that constitutively prevents the subject's desire from ever being fully recognized.

     Man's desire is the desire of the Other.

401. #401

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.251

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan re-articulates the structural logic of alienation as strictly dependent on the dyadic (two-term) relation of signifiers: with two signifiers the subject is cornered in alienation and fades (aphanisis), whereas with three or more the sliding becomes circular and the effect dissolves. The dyad is thus the minimal and necessary condition for the subject's capture in the signifying chain.

     what appears first as lack in what is signified by the dyad of signifiers, in the interval that links them, namely, the desire of the Other.

402. #402

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.256

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

     Theoretical move: The passage traces the genesis of alienation and the splitting of the subject from Freud's pleasure-economy (Lust/Unlust, Lust-Ich), arguing that the irreducibility of Unlust to the pleasure principle inaugurates a primitive dialectical structure that anticipates—but cannot be reduced to—the alienating articulation of the subject with the Other in the register of the signifier.

     that breaking-off, that splitting-off, which I indicated in the dialectic of the subject with the Other, but here in the opposite direction.

403. #403

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.261

     FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes between two fields of analytic experience — the field of the ego (Ith) and the field of the Other — and argues that the subject is constituted by the circulating structures of the Other that precede it; alienation and separation are the two essential articulations of this Other field, preparing the ground for an account of "subjective positions."

     we depend on the field of the Other, which was there long before we came into the world, and whose circulating structures determine us as subjects.

404. #404

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.266

     FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > FROM INTERPRETATION TO TRE TRANSFERENCE

     Theoretical move: Through the Wolf Man case, Lacan demonstrates that the subject is constituted around an originary repressed signifier (Urverdrängung) — a non-sensical, traumatic kernel that cannot be replaced by another signifier — and that the dialectic of the subject's desire is structured by successive reshapings of this founding index in relation to the desire of the Other.

     the dialectic of the subject's desire as constituting itself from the desire of the Other is correctly grasped

405. #405

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.267

     FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: The primary signifier functions not as openness to all meanings but as their abolition, grounding the subject's freedom through infinite value (denominator = zero); the mediation between this infinity of the subject and the finiteness of desire requires a formalization via Kant's concept of negative quantities.

     in the numerator, in the place of the zero, the things that are inscribed are significations, dialectized significations in the relation of the desire of the Other

406. #406

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.268

     FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that transference is grounded in the Subject Supposed to Know—the analysand's attribution of knowledge about signification to the analyst—and that the transference effect manifests as love, which simultaneously enables and resists interpretation by closing the subject off through an alienation effect.

     in the relation of the subject to the Other, the effect that we are, is here absolutely manifest.

407. #407

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.269

     FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: Lacan redefines transference not as a shadow of past love but as an active, present-tense deception whose structure reveals the constitutive link between the analyst's desire and the analysand's desire — a link that Hegel's master/slave dialectic claims to resolve but does not.

     the recognition of the absolute authority of the desire of the Other, that Thy will be done! that is taken up again in the Christian register

408. #408

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.271

     FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst's desire should be mapped in relation to the slave (not the master) in the Hegelian dialectic, and then pivots to ground the ego ideal in the "single stroke" (einziger Zug) as a signifier in the field of the Other—distinguishing it from narcissistic identification and situating it as the kernel of the ego ideal within the field of desire.

     The single stroke, in so far as the subject clings to it, is in the field of desire, which cannot in any sense be constituted other than in the reign of the signifier, other than at the level in which there is a relation of the subject to the Other. It is the field of the Other that determines the function of the single stroke.

409. #409

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.281

     IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > TO CONCLUDE

     Theoretical move: Lacan delimits psychoanalysis's proper terrain by arguing that it does not operate on sexuality as such but only on sexuality insofar as it manifests in the drive's passage through the signifier, constituting the subject through the double movement of alienation and separation; the objet a is foregrounded as the key conceptual instrument that analytic literature has lacked and that distinguishes genuine analytic work from its confusions.

     in the gap opened up at the centre of the dialectic of the subject and the Other

410. #410

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.282

     IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > IN YOU MORE THAN YOU

     Theoretical move: Lacan redefines the "liquidation of the transference" not as dissolving the unconscious but as permanently liquidating the deception by which transference closes the unconscious — the deception being the narcissistic mirage in which the subject attempts to constitute itself as an object worthy of love for the Subject Supposed to Know, whose natural culmination Freud identifies as identification.

     he tries to induce the Other into a mirage relation in which he convinces him of being worthy of love.

411. #411

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.283

     IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > TO CONCLUDE

     Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the distinction between specular identification (grounded in the Ego Ideal as the point in the Other from which the subject sees itself) and the objet petit a as the paradoxical object that disrupts the deceptive mirroring of love in the transference, introducing mutilation and the gift-of-shit as the truth of analytic alienation.

     the perspective chosen by the subject in the field of the Other, from which specular identification may be seen in a satisfactory light

412. #412

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.284

     IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > IN YOU MORE THAN YOU

     Theoretical move: Through the fable of the Chinese restaurant menu, Lacan illustrates how the analysand's Demand addressed to the analyst (as Subject Supposed to Know) inevitably fails to reach its object, because the objet petit a — rediscovered always and everywhere in the transference — cannot be reduced to any signifiable need or satisfied demand; the translation of the menu (signifiers) only defers the question of what the subject truly desires.

     if it is the first time that you have come to a Chinese restaurant, that the translation does not tell you much more than the original, and in the end you say to the patronne—Recommend something.

413. #413

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.286

     IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > IN YOU MORE THAN YOU

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of a surface folding back on itself (the cross-cap/Möbius-type structure) to argue that the line of self-intersection symbolises identification, and then moves to critique analyses that define their termination as identification with the analyst, insisting there is a "beyond" to identification that constitutes the true motive force of analysis.

     the rim comes back on to the plane constituted by the locus of the Other

414. #414

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.290

     IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > IN YOU MORE THAN YOU

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Hegelian-Marxist historical frameworks cannot account for Nazism's sacrificial logic, which reveals that human desire is fundamentally oriented toward finding evidence of the dark Other's desire in the sacrificial object; only Spinoza's reduction of God to the universality of the signifier offers an escape, but Kant's practical reason is ultimately 'more true' because it shows moral law as pure desire culminating in sacrifice.

     we try to find evidence for the presence of the desire of this Other that I call here the dark God

415. #415

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.296

     IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > TO CONCLUDE

     Theoretical move: This concluding passage of Seminar XI makes two theoretical moves: first, it articulates the analyst's desire as a desire for "absolute difference" that enables a love beyond the law; second, the appended glossary (translator's note) provides operational definitions of Lacan's key concepts—desire/need/demand, the three orders (Imaginary/Symbolic/Real), jouissance, objet petit a, and Name-of-the-Father—framing them as evolving and best understood contextually rather than statically.

     The 'petit a' (small 'a') differentiates the object from (while relating it to) the 'Autre' or 'grand Autre' (the capitalized 'Other').

416. #416

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.287

     **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 signifier for the other, the one who seeing the proportion is capable of correcting them. It is therefore here its distortion, the signifier for the other, this signifier of a subject.

417. #417

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.70

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 January 1965** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 20 January 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the problem of identification by critiquing the topological naïveté of Euler circles and replacing them with a more rigorous topology (Klein bottle, Möbius surface, torus) in which the subject's structure is homologous to the mathematical derivation of number from zero — the signifier represents the subject for another signifier just as the zero grounds the series of whole numbers, making identification inseparable from the subject's constitutive lack.

     the despairing attempt to resolve the question that we are trying to raise here; that of desire as desire of the big Other

418. #418

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.160

     **Seminar 12: Wednesday 17 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Using Munch's *The Scream* as a theoretical figure, Lacan argues that silence is not the ground of the scream but is caused by it—paralleling the structure of the big Other as a holed, divided surface—and uses this to articulate how the o-object emerges as a remainder/residue in the operation of demand, structuring fantasy, desire, and transference around an irreducible cut.

     is manifested as the structure of the Other, and all the more decisively because the painter chose it as divided in the form of a reflection

419. #419

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.314

     **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 23: Wednesday 16 June 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the clinical structures of neurosis (hysteria and obsession) through the differential relation each takes to the demand of the Other, showing how the o-object (objet petit a) anchors subjective positions differently in each structure, and concludes that the end of analysis is the signifier of the barred Other — the Other's acknowledgment that it is nothing.

     with respect to the Other, to the big O there are posed the problems of desire

420. #420

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.97

     **Seminar 8: Wednesday 3 February 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the optical model of the inverted bouquet to distinguish the non-specularisable status of objet petit a from the body-image and ideal ego, arguing that the impasses of identification at the end of analysis can only be resolved by orienting the work around the o-object rather than settling for identification to the analyst as a rectification of the ego ideal.

     prior to this experience there is the locus of the Other, the field of the Other, the support of the Other, the other, in a word, who holds the child in her arms in front of the mirror.

421. #421

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.150

     **Seminar 11: Wednesday 10 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that language is not a code transmitting information between emitter and receiver, but rather a structure that constitutes — rather than merely designates — the traversal of opposites (good/bad, beautiful/ugly), and that even the most reduced linguistic unit (the interjection) is always situated in the cut between Subject and the big Other, making Demand irreducible to Need or to expressive sincerity.

     it is now a question of passing from this first articulation of the effects of the lexis isolated, in a way, in an artificial fashion, into the field of the Other and to know what this Other is

422. #422

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.137

     **Seminar 10: Wednesday 3 March 1965**

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

     it is not true that everything is exhausted for the subject in the dimension of the Other, that with respect to the Other, everything is a demand to have, into which there is transferred, there is established a semblance of being.

423. #423

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.133

     **Seminar 10: Wednesday 3 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan rereads Freud's three forms of identification (incorporation, being/having alternation, hysteric's desire-to-desire) as demanding a tripartite structural framework—privation, frustration, castration—in which the status of the subject (oscillating between zero and one) must be posited prior to any account of demand, transference, or castration, thereby exposing the conceptual limitations of post-Freudian analytic practice.

     Do we not grasp here something that is derived from having played one's game with the Other too well?

424. #424

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.257

     **Seminar 19: Wednesday 19 May 1965** > (18) In other words let us deceive ourselves together.

     Theoretical move: The analyst's desire is theorized not as a counterforce to the patient's defensiveness but as a ruse that inhabits the patient's own defensive structure—occupying the pole of sexual reality's impossibility—so that what constitutes the analysand's original fantasy can be separated out and the objet petit a revealed as the substitute for the missing sexual relationship; this operation is articulated through the Möbius strip topology of the unexpected.

     from which there is going to arise the shadow of this omnipotent signifier, of this supreme name, of the omniscient which has always been the trap

425. #425

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.148

     **Seminar 11: Wednesday 10 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the Möbius strip, Klein bottle, and cross-cap to argue that the subject's structure is constituted by the cut rather than by any intrinsic disposition of parts, and that the field of unpleasure (the objet a, death drive) necessarily traverses the interior of the pleasure-principle field — thereby providing a topological rather than purely dialectical solution to the impasse of 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle'.

     Is O, the locus of the Other, the locus where there is inscribed the sequence of signifiers, is O this support which is situated, with respect to the one that we give to the subject, as his inverted image.

426. #426

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.121

     **Seminar 9: Wednesday 24 February 1965** > **Presentation by Jacques-Alain Miller**

     Theoretical move: Miller's presentation of Frege's logic of number demonstrates that the subject's relation to the field of the Other is structurally isomorphic to the relation of zero to the field of truth: the subject, like zero, is an excess that cannot be subsumed under any concept, yet must be counted as one (represented by a unary trait) in a movement that simultaneously excludes it from the field it grounds — this is the operation of suture, which ties logical discourse to the logic of the signifier and founds the definition of the signifier as that which represents the subject for another signifier.

     The relationship of the subject to the field of the Other, for now we will put our cards on the table, the relationship of the subject to the field of the Other, is nothing other than the matrix relationship of zero to the field of truth.

427. #427

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.322

     **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 23 June 1965**

     Theoretical move: Through a psychoanalytic reading of Marguerite Duras's *Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein*, the seminar argues that the subject is constituted in a "perpetual division" between the desire of the Other and the objet petit a (the Gaze), and that the subject can only be grasped "at the zero point of her desire" through the discourse of the other's desire — that is, Lol's subjectivity is structured entirely around a fundamental lack that is both sustained and circulated by the o-object as Gaze.

     It is in so far as I am the o-object that my desire is the desire of the other... the subject Lol... would have been impossible to grasp Lol at the zero point of her desire if it were not in the discourse of the desire of the other.

428. #428

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.225

     **Seminar 15: Wednesday 7 April 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the signifier from the sign by locating its function on the side of the emitter rather than the receiver, arguing that the signifier's representation of a subject for another signifier necessarily bars and divides that subject — and uses this structure to differentiate the clinical positions of psychosis, neurosis, and perversion with respect to a message's gap and the desire of the Other.

     the desire of the Other gives its sanction to the functioning of this appeal. The desire phantasied by the subject who announces herself to be alone, in order to be the only one, this desire is the desire of the Other

429. #429

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.269

     **Seminar 20: Wednesday 26 May 1965**

     Theoretical move: By reading Plato's *Sophist* through the lens of non-being, falsity, and the simulacrum (*fantasma*), Lacan argues that the subject is constituted as a gap (*écart*) rather than as a knowing reference—and that this gap-structure makes the analyst homologous to the Sophist, just as the Subject Supposed to Know is revealed to be a phantasy.

     non-being of this being, except by participating in being that it is not yet. There is thus constituted the category of koinonia, of participation, of community.

430. #430

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.159

     **Seminar 12: Wednesday 17 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that analytic experience centred on demand cannot be grounded in a biologistic or anaclitic conception of the mother-child relation; instead, the o-object (objet petit a) must be understood as what arises in the gap created by demand at the junction of subject and Other, with the demand always referring to the big Other as a third term irreducible to any concrete or fusional origin.

     what the simplest-looking interjection imposes on the interlocutor is this common reference to a third who is the big Other

431. #431

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.58

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 January 1965** > (10) [Various noises] You see that we are in a police state!

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the topological surface (specifically the Klein bottle) provides the most adequate schema for the divided subject constituted under language, and maps the three dimensions of Logical Time (instant of seeing, time to comprehend, moment to conclude) onto the subject's experience at the locus of the Other, showing how Demand circulates on this surface and requires an additional dimension—time as three-dimensional space—to escape indefinite self-enclosure.

     if it is the locus of the Other, the field of the Other, which is going to determine the structure, the field of the Other, for its part, I am announcing it here... this field of the Other is inscribed in what I will call Cartesian coordinates, a sort of space that for its part is three dimensional, except that it is not space, it is time.

432. #432

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

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

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

     he discharges it on the other, on the big Other, on God in a word. There is no necessity internal to the truth; even the truth of two and two make four is the truth because it has pleased God that it should be so.

433. #433

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.193

     **Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: The passage stages a theoretical dispute within Lacan's seminar over the structural role of the incest barrier, the Name-of-the-Father, and castration in grounding desire, with Safouan arguing that psychoanalysis leads not toward transgression but toward recognition of the limit as such, while Leclaire contests the appeal to Lacanian orthodoxy as a guarantor of correct interpretation.

     Law here designates the censorship or more precisely the law of the Other, the law of the authority of the Other, this authority is, as Mr Lacan says, this obscure authority which confers on the Other this first word

434. #434

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.76

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 January 1965** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 20 January 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the figure of Socrates to triangulate the voice as objet petit a, the structure of desire (including its link to the impossible), and the syllogism's topological deception, thereby re-framing the death drive not as a wish for death but as the structural condition that articulates desire, identification, demand, and transference around an irreducible gap.

     Socrates interrogates the master about what he calls his soul... by making testify who? The Other par excellence, the Other that can easily be, in his society, represented by the radical Other, the one who does not form part of it, namely the slave

435. #435

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.167

     **Seminar 12: Wednesday 17 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: By reading Plato's Symposium—specifically Alcibiades's pursuit of the hidden agalma in Socrates—Lacan establishes the dialectical structure of transference as desire for a concealed object that the Other does not possess, and concludes that the analyst's own identificatory position must be suspended within transference, collapsing the distinction between transference and counter-transference.

     of S and of O and of o have some meaning, it is not because they can be joined to some cultural baggage

436. #436

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.170

     **Seminar 13: Wednesday 24 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan frames the year's teaching as a "subjective ontology" — an ontology of the subject conditioned by the existence of the unconscious — and uses Leonov's spacewalk as a vivid image of the fantasy structure ($◇a), where the subject is simultaneously ejected and tethered, desire located at the level of the big Other.

     here is our major and here is the o-object; the capsule would be the S and then where is desire if not at the level of the big Other, the USSR.

437. #437

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.208

     **Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Through the clinical case of Philip (Leclaire's analysand), Lacan articulates the drive's circuit as a loop around a gap in the body, where "pure difference" (exquisite/acid fringe of sweetness) functions as the irreducible kernel of desire; the ejaculatory formula Poord'jeli is analysed as a vocal signifier that mimes and masters this circuit, connecting the drive's reversal to the sacred incantatory dimension of the Voice.

     There is no mother who is not taken up again from the voice of the other and, because of that, the voice constitutes a sort of privileged model of this first relationship to the other.

438. #438

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.319

     **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 23 June 1965**

     Theoretical move: Through Madame Montrelay's commentary on Marguerite Duras's *The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein*, the passage demonstrates that the novel structurally instantiates Lacanian concepts—particularly alienation, the objet petit a, desire, and the 'hole-word' as the absent signifier—without any analytic pretension, proving that literary form and analytic structure can be congruent.

     What can convince us of the impossible, who can say the truth about reality, beginning with that of sex, Jacques Lacan asked a little while ago, if not God. But God is absent.

439. #439

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.80

     **Seminar 7: Wednesday 27 January 1965**

     Theoretical move: The passage enacts a dual theoretical move: first, Lacan anchors the o-object (objet petit a) as the hidden regulator of intersubjective mirage and the cause of desire in ethics; second, via Conrad Stein's intervention, it deploys condensation and displacement—the primary process as Freud articulates it in the Traumdeutung—to analyse the fantasy-formation "Poord'jeli," raising the problem of whether images can be "translated" into language or stand in a fundamentally different relation to it.

     In the relationship of the subject to the Other, in the relationship of one with others, we have learned to distinguish in its subtlety, in its mobility, an essential function of mirage

440. #440

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.2

     http://www.lacaninireland.com

     Theoretical move: Through a sustained engagement with Chomsky's "colorless green ideas sleep furiously," Lacan argues that grammaticality and signification must be rigorously distinguished: any grammatical chain generates meaning when placed in a context/dialogue, which means meaning is not intrinsic to the chain itself but depends on a referent and the function of sense — and crucially, the unconscious cannot be located through metaphorical meaning-hunting in grammatical structures.

     the subject who is being questioned, who here is called on as judge, at the place, at the locus of the Other, to reintroduce the term inscribed in my presentation last year as a reference

441. #441

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.174

     **Presentation by Monsieur Oury**

     Theoretical move: Oury argues that the phonematic gestalt "Poord'jeli" is not a fantasy but rather a pre-subjective phonological structure marking the emergence of the speaking subject, located at the articulation between the Imaginary and the Symbolic, while Leclaire's response opens the question of whether fantasy must be organized around the scopic drive or whether it may equally be constituted by the voice as objet petit a.

     a fundamental phantasy which is very conjuratory and with an opening marking the bringing into play of the big Other... the search for a guarantee which ought to be a beyond of anxiety towards the mythical locus of the jouissance of the Other, the big Other

442. #442

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.49

     **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 January 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses topology (Klein bottle, Möbius strip) to argue that the structural properties of surfaces are independent of their immersion in three-dimensional intersubjective space, and then extends this logic to the proper name: the proper name functions not as a classificatory endpoint (contra Lévi-Strauss) but as a movable signifier that marks irreplaceability and lack, designed to "fill holes" in the signifying structure — a function illustrated through Freud's forgetting of the name Signorelli.

     it is not only the godfather, there are also all sorts of rules, there are phases, there is a whole configuration which is a configuration of exchange and of social structure

443. #443

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.124

     **Seminar 9: Wednesday 24 February 1965** > **Presentation by Jacques-Alain Miller**

     Theoretical move: Miller's presentation argues that the subject's emergence as representation in the signifying chain is necessarily correlative to its vanishing—a circular temporal structure in which the subject is simultaneously the origin of the signifier and excluded by it—and uses this logic to critique Aulagnier's notion of 'insertion' as neglecting the dimension of aphanisis, while grounding desire's pseudo-infinity and alienation in the metonymic function of the objet petit a.

     the subject who was summoned to appear in the field of the Other, and who never appears there in person

444. #444

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.312

     **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 23: Wednesday 16 June 1965**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the topological structure of the Möbius strip, Klein bottle, cross-cap, and projective plane is not mere formal play but indexes the subjective positions of being: specifically, the o-object (objet petit a) is identified as the topological element that closes the cross-cap/projective plane, and its function is to cover over the Entzweiung (division) of the subject, making fantasy the fallacious conjuncture of that division with the o-object, while castration names the fundamental relation of the subject to sex/truth.

     it is in so far as I am **o** that my desire is the desire of the Other and it is for that reason that it is through this that there passes the whole dialectic of my relationship to the Other, the big O

445. #445

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.243

     **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965** > **Seminar 18: Wednesday 12 May 1965**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian subject is constituted by its relation to a refused, foreclosed signifier (a "not-knowing"), and that the sexual dyad—whose nature remains fundamentally unknowable—is the radical foundation of all signifying opposition; this grounds Lacan's claim that the subject of the unconscious is precisely the subject who avoids knowledge of sex, linking the structure of the signifier to the biological fact that sex is not reducible to reproduction but is bound to death.

     Everything that I will say about this other in what is going to follow, emerges, is already perfectly articulated at the end of this Sophist... precisely under the rubric of the Other.

446. #446

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.102

     **Seminar 8: Wednesday 3 February 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire, understood topologically through the Klein bottle as a cut that reveals an a-cosmic surface, exposes the fundamental inadequacy of ego-psychological and developmental object-relations approaches to transference: the analyst risks being "deceived" (not merely deceiving) by reducing the structure of the subject to a normative developmental history of needs and traumatic incidence, thereby foreclosing the properly Freudian dimension of desire and the unconscious.

     the subject, within the range of his means, establishes his position at the locus of the Other... the analyst, in so far as he is the Other, the Other of the Cartesian subject

447. #447

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.105

     **Seminar 8: Wednesday 3 February 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the o-object (objet petit a) is the hiding place of the Other's desire, not merely a register of demand or transference identification, and that failing to distinguish desire from demand leads to a clinical impasse — illustrated through a case where the analyst remains captive to a decade-long identificatory grip because she reduces the symptom to oral demand rather than grasping the dimension of desire.

     the desire of man was the desire of the Other (with a capital O), and if this is essentially what is at stake in analysis, where is this desire of the Other presented.

448. #448

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.57

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 January 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan justifies his topological models (Klein bottle, Möbius strip, cross-cap, torus) as the necessary formal apparatus for grasping the subject as a surface, aligning this with Hegel's Phenomenology and its loop of Absolute Knowing, and connecting both to the analytic concept of the Subject Supposed to Know as the structural foundation of transference.

     he does not know that there are two acceptations of the other, who puts this 'subject supposed to know'

449. #449

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.160

     **Seminar 12: Wednesday 17 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Using Munch's *The Scream* as a topological illustration, Lacan argues that silence is not mere absence of speech but the structural correlate of the voice-as-object (objet petit a), such that the scream *causes* silence rather than silence grounding the scream; this models the Möbius/Klein bottle topology of demand, from whose cut the objet petit a falls as remainder—the origin of desire, fantasy, and transference.

     what is the status, what are the limits of this field of the big Other... is manifested as the structure of the Other, and all the more decisively because the painter chose it as divided in the form of a reflection

450. #450

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.57

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 January 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan justifies his use of topological models (Klein bottle, Möbius strip, torus, cross-cap) as theoretically necessary — not merely illustrative — by arguing that the subject must be conceived as a surface, and that this topological thinking finds its philosophical parallel in Hegel's Phenomenology, whose loop of absolute knowledge illuminates the analytic concept of the subject supposed to know and transference.

     he does not know that there are two acceptations of the other, who puts this 'subject supposed to know'

451. #451

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.314

     **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 23: Wednesday 16 June 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the differential structure of neurosis by showing how desire is constituted with respect to the demand of the Other, distinguishing hysteria (desire maintained as unsatisfied, castration instrumentalised) from obsessional neurosis (desire rendered impossible, phallus safeguarded via oblativity), while warning that interpreting the o-object under its faecal species as the truth of the obsessional is a clinical trap that merely satisfies the neurotic's demand — and concluding that the end of analysis is the signifier of a barred Other whose knowledge is nothing.

     with respect to the Other, to the big O there are posed the problems of desire.

452. #452

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.316

     **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 23: Wednesday 16 June 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the differential structure of neurosis by showing how desire is constituted with respect to the demand of the Other, distinguishing hysteria (desire maintained as unsatisfied, castration instrumentalised) from obsessional neurosis (desire rendered impossible, phallus safeguarded via oblativity), while warning that interpreting the o-object under its faecal species as the truth of the obsessional is a clinical trap that merely satisfies the neurotic's demand — and concluding that the end of analysis is the signifier of a barred Other whose knowledge is nothing.

     The end of analysis if it is what I inscribed in the symbol S, signifier of Ø, are these terms: the Other knows that he is nothing.

453. #453

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.319

     **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 23 June 1965**

     Theoretical move: Through Michèle Montrelay's close reading of Marguerite Duras's *The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein*, the seminar demonstrates that literary narrative can independently arrive at the same structural truths Lacan has been elaborating—particularly regarding the alienating dialectic of desire, the subject as remainder/waste produced by the other's desire, and the Objet petit a as a "hole-word" or body-remainder constituted by what is fundamentally missing in the signifier's relation to sex.

     'What can convince us of the impossible, who can say the truth about reality, beginning with that of sex', Jacques Lacan asked a little while ago, 'if not God. But God is absent.'

454. #454

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.95

     **Seminar 8: Wednesday 3 February 1965**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the end of analysis cannot be reduced to identification with the analyst (rectification of the ego ideal) but must reckon with the non-specularizable objet petit a, which centres specularization without itself being visible in the mirror — thereby positing two irreducible poles (ego ideal and objet a) that govern identificatory processes and determine the impasses of analytic experience.

     the space in which it functions being precisely the space of the Other qua locus of the word.

455. #455

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.70

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 January 1965** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 20 January 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Euler's circles, while pedagogically seductive, conceal the essential topological complexity of identification; by drawing on mathematical logic's discovery that zero (lack) grounds the whole number series, he establishes a structural homology between the genesis of number and the movement of the subject from signifier to signifier, grounding identification in topology (the Klein bottle / Möbius surface) rather than in classical set-theoretic extension/comprehension.

     the despairing attempt to resolve the question that we are trying to raise here; that of desire as desire of the big Other

456. #456

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.243

     **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965** > **Seminar 18: Wednesday 12 May 1965**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian subject is constituted by its relation to a *rejected* signifier (a not-knowing), and that this structure — the signifier representing the subject for another signifier — recapitulates the whole dialectic from Plato's Sophist to the present; further, it grounds the dyadic signifying opposition (Other/One, being/non-being) in the sexual dyad, while insisting that sex itself is radically unknowable and is not primarily a reproductive mechanism but a relationship with death.

     Everything is in the status of this other... the sum of the major texts concerning the elaboration of a thinking about knowledge... the definition that the linguistic reference today allows us to give of a subject as that which corresponds to the position of the signifier

457. #457

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.193

     **Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: The passage stages a clinical-theoretical dispute about the relationship between the incest barrier, the Name of the Father, castration, and desire: Safouan argues against conflating the conscious/unconscious barrier with the incest barrier, insisting that the Name of the Father (not transgression) is what orients the subject toward the unconscious and grounds desire through castration, while Leclaire counters that orthodoxy itself is the danger in such argumentation.

     the law of the Other, the law of the authority of the Other, this authority is, as Mr Lacan says, this obscure authority which confers on the Other this first word and which gives to his words their value as oracle.

458. #458

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.300

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

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

     he discharges it on the other, on the big Other, on God in a word. There is no necessity internal to the truth; even the truth of two and two make four is the truth because it has pleased God that it should be so.

459. #459

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.137

     **Seminar 10: Wednesday 3 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that subjective constitution is not exhausted by the demand-Other dyad: the primordial "genesis of one from zero" (filling of a void/lack) always leaves an irreducible residue — the objet petit a — which escapes both demand and transference, and whose topology is best captured by the cut on the Klein bottle yielding a Möbius strip, thereby grounding the legitimacy of analytic operation in confronting this remainder rather than identifying with the analyst.

     it is not true that everything is exhausted for the subject in the dimension of the Other, that with respect to the Other, everything is a demand to have

460. #460

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.58

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 January 1965** > (10) [Various noises] You see that we are in a police state!

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that subjective structure is best apprehended topologically—via surfaces (Klein bottle, torus) rather than volume—and maps the three moments of Logical Time (instant of seeing, time to comprehend, moment to conclude) onto a three-dimensional temporal field structured by the Other, through which demand, transference, and identification are articulated as inscriptions on that surface.

     it is the locus of the Other, the field of the Other, which is going to determine the structure...this field of the Other is inscribed in what I will call Cartesian coordinates, a sort of space that for its part is three dimensional, except that it is not space, it is time.

461. #461

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.102

     **Seminar 8: Wednesday 3 February 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the Klein bottle to theorise desire as a "good cut" that reveals the a-cosmic, non-orientable surface of the subject, and then pivots to critique the object-relational/developmental reduction of transference, arguing that the analyst risks being deceived when transference is interpreted merely as a reproduction of parental experience rather than as a structural positioning of the subject at the locus of the Other.

     the subject, within the range of his means, establishes his position at the locus of the Other

462. #462

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.152

     **Seminar 11: Wednesday 10 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Language is not a code transmitting information between emitter and receiver; rather, the subject is always already present in every enunciation, even the most reduced form (the interjection), which is situated precisely in the cut between subject and the locus of the Other — a structural argument that grounds the density of analytic speech against communication-theory reductionism and sets up the function of the Subject Supposed to Know in the analyst's position.

     it is between S and O, between S and the locus of the Other, the locus of the Other where the Other is present.

463. #463

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.124

     **Seminar 9: Wednesday 24 February 1965** > **Presentation by Jacques-Alain Miller**

     Theoretical move: Miller's presentation argues that the subject's insertion into the signifying chain is necessarily correlative to its vanishing — a circular, non-linear temporal logic — and that alienation is properly grounded in the division of the subject (not in consciousness), while the o-object, functioning as metonymy and as the logic of number (zero/one), structures the pseudo-infinity of desire.

     the subject who was summoned to appear in the field of the Other, and who never appears there in person.

464. #464

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.145

     **Seminar 11: Wednesday 10 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analytic technique, grounded in language and the signifier, must take mathematics as its guiding reference precisely because mathematics demonstrates that there is no metalanguage—every formal construction must be accompanied by common discourse—and that the subject is best located in the interval between zero and one, as a "shadow of the number," a figure of privation that precedes its constitution in demand.

     that we only grasp the most insubstantial shadow for the shock of what happens when the subject, does not use language, but arises from it

465. #465

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.2

     http://www.lacaninireland.com

     Theoretical move: By working through Chomsky's "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" example, Lacan argues that grammaticality and meaning (signification) are structurally distinct: any grammatical signifying chain will always generate meaning, which means that meaning is not intrinsic to the chain itself but depends on an external referent/context, pointing toward the real function of sense beyond semantics.

     the subject who is being questioned, who here is called on as judge, at the place, at the locus of the Other, to reintroduce the term inscribed in my presentation last year as a reference

466. #466

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.148

     **Seminar 11: Wednesday 10 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topological properties of the Möbius strip, Klein bottle, and cross-cap to argue that the subject's structure—its non-orientability, the function of the cut, and the relation between the subject, the big Other, and objet petit a—cannot be captured by classical set-theoretic (Eulerian) distinctions, and that the field of unpleasure (objet a, death drive) necessarily traverses the interior of the field of pleasure rather than standing opposed to it from outside.

     We suppose that O is the inverted image of what serves us as a support for conceptualising the function of the subject... Is O, the locus of the Other, the locus where there is inscribed the sequence of signifiers, is O this support which is situated, with respect to the one that we give to the subject, as his inverted image.

467. #467

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.313

     **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 23: Wednesday 16 June 1965**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the topological structure of the Möbius strip, cross-cap, and Klein bottle formally captures the subjective position of being, and that the objet petit a—conceived as a topological "rag" completing the cross-cap—is the operative term that closes the Entzweiung of the subject, enabling the passage from alienation to separation and grounding the structure of fantasy as a fallacious suturing of the subject's division over the real.

     it is in so far as I am o that my desire is the desire of the Other and it is for that reason that it is through this that there passes the whole dialectic of my relationship to the Other, the big O.

468. #468

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.174

     **Presentation by Monsieur Oury**

     Theoretical move: Oury argues that the "phonematic gestalt" (Poord'jeli) is not a fantasy but rather the pre-symbolic point of emergence of the speaking subject — the locus from which fantasy and its privileged image arise — while Leclaire's response pivots on distinguishing fantasy-forms by the nature of the Lacanian object (scopic vs. vocal) implied within them.

     marking the bringing into play of the big Other... the mythical locus of the jouissance of the Other, the big Other

469. #469

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.105

     **Seminar 8: Wednesday 3 February 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a clinical vignette of a borderline patient treated for ten years to argue that the analyst's error was reducing the patient's symptomatology to demand (and its oral regression) rather than locating the properly structural dimension of desire—specifically, that desire is constituted by its torsion toward the Other's desire, and that the objet petit a is the site where the desire of the Other dwells, not a relation between two egos.

     The desire of the Other, in this radical field where the desire of the subject is irreducibly, not tied into him, but precisely constituted by this torsion that my bottle here tries to represent for you.

470. #470

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.322

     **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 23 June 1965**

     Theoretical move: The seminar presentation reads Marguerite Duras's novel *Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein* as a clinical-literary staging of the subject's constitution through the desire of the Other and the objet petit a (the gaze), arguing that the subject (Lol) can only be grasped at the zero-point of desire in the discourse of the other, where she is structured by a perpetual division between the desire of the Other and the o-object that drives the fantasy.

     It is in so far as I am the o-object that my desire is the desire of the other

471. #471

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.207

     **Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the clinical case of Philip (Leclaire's analysand) to theorise how the circuit of sense—anchored by pure difference, the gap of the body, and the dehiscence of the other body—produces desire, the drive, and the object voice, culminating in the Shemah prayer as a limit-case where the signifier, jouissance, and the sacred converge around an invocatory formula.

     There is no mother who is not taken up again from the voice of the other and, because of that, the voice constitutes a sort of privileged model of this first relationship to the other.

472. #472

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.170

     **Seminar 13: Wednesday 24 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan frames the year's research as a "subjective ontology" — an ontology of the subject conditioned by the existence of the unconscious — and then uses the Leonov spacewalk as a vivid image of the fantasy structure ($◇a), mapping cosmonaut-as-ejected-yet-tethered onto the o-object, desire, and the big Other, thereby literalizing the matheme of fantasy in a desexualized, public form.

     here is our major and here is the o-object; the capsule would be the S and then where is desire if not at the level of the big Other, the USSR.

473. #473

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.122

     **Seminar 9: Wednesday 24 February 1965** > **Presentation by Jacques-Alain Miller**

     Theoretical move: Miller's presentation argues that Frege's logical generation of zero and the natural numbers provides the formal matrix for Lacan's theory of the subject: the subject is structurally homologous to zero—excluded from the field of the Other yet represented within it as one (the unary trait)—and this 'suture' of logical discourse is also the suture of the subject in the signifying chain, replacing any reference to consciousness with the logic of the signifier.

     the relationship of the subject to the field of the Other, is nothing other than the matrix relationship of zero to the field of truth.

474. #474

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.225

     **Seminar 15: Wednesday 7 April 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the example of the "alone at five o'clock" love-sign to demonstrate that the signifier (unlike the sign) represents a subject for another signifier — not from the side of the receiver but from the side of the emitter — and deploys this to differentiate the clinical structures (psychosis, neurosis, perversion) by how each relates to the gap structured in a signifying message.

     Only the desire of the Other gives its sanction to the functioning of this appeal. The desire phantasied by the subject who announces herself to be alone, in order to be the only one, this desire is the desire of the Other.

475. #475

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.256

     **Seminar 19: Wednesday 19 May 1965** > (18) In other words let us deceive ourselves together.

     Theoretical move: The analyst's desire operates not as the imposition of knowledge onto the analysand but as a structural ruse that separates the analysand's defensiveness—directed not against the analyst but against the reality of sexual difference—into an ever-purer form of fantasy, with the objet petit a standing in for the impossible real of the sexual relation; the unexpected (figured topologically via the Möbius strip) is proposed as the operative mode of analytic desire against the field of anxious expectation.

     it is the desire of the other, not because the desire of the analyst is dictated to the patient, but because the analyst makes of himself the desire of the patient

476. #476

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.257

     **Seminar 19: Wednesday 19 May 1965** > (18) In other words let us deceive ourselves together.

     Theoretical move: The analyst's desire operates not as the imposition of knowledge onto the analysand but as a structural ruse that separates the analysand's defensiveness—directed not against the analyst but against the reality of sexual difference—into an ever-purer form of fantasy, with the objet petit a standing in for the impossible real of the sexual relation; the unexpected (figured topologically via the Möbius strip) is proposed as the operative mode of analytic desire against the field of anxious expectation.

     from which there is going to arise the shadow of this omnipotent signifier, of this supreme name, of the omniscient which has always been the trap

477. #477

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.136

     **Seminar 10: Wednesday 3 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's three forms of identification (incorporation, being/having alternation, hysterical desire-to-desire) as a scaffold to argue that analytic experience cannot be exhausted by demand and transference alone, and that a tripartite structure of privation, frustration, and castration—grounded in a radical materialism of the body as libido—is required to make castration thinkable and to properly situate the subject in relation to the Other.

     It is not in any way philosophy, or belief, that I am preaching here...that we find ourselves here before something completely opaque...the question of the mustard pots poses this question, the question precisely of the distinction between what is indiscernible

478. #478

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.76

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 January 1965** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 20 January 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the figure of Socrates to articulate the structural relationship between Voice as objet petit a, Desire, Demand, Transference, and the Death Drive, arguing that the syllogism "Socrates is mortal / all men are mortal" is a topological lure whose deceptive diameter maps onto the function of transference as the link between identification, demand, and the indeterminate subject of the unconscious.

     making testify who? The Other par excellence, the Other that can easily be, in his society, represented by the radical Other, the one who does not form part of it, namely the slave

479. #479

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.159

     **Seminar 12: Wednesday 17 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analytic experience of demand cannot be grounded in a "living" or anaclitic dependency on the mother, but must be rethought through the articulation of the o-object (objet petit a) as what arises in the gap created by demand at the junction of subject and the big Other — thus correcting post-Freudian reductions of demand to developmental/biological origins.

     what the simplest-looking interjection imposes on the interlocutor is this common reference to a third who is the big Other

480. #480

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.256

     **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analytic dialectic cannot be confined to demand and the maternal Other (as in object-relations approaches), but must pass through desire and ultimately jouissance; castration is reinterpreted not merely as the Oedipal prohibition but as the barrier of desire that bars the subject from jouissance — and the Hegelian master/slave dialectic is criticised for falsely attributing jouissance to the master, revealing it as a mirage.

     The field of the Other is what it is a matter of involving in desire; desire comes to involve the Other. And this is the different essence of the two other o-objects.

481. #481

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.238

     **Seminar 19: Wednesday 25 May 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Velázquez's Las Meninas as a structural demonstration of the Gaze and the Objet petit a: the Infanta figures the central 'slit' (phallus-as-object) around which the picture's whole economy of vision is organised, and the Cross-cap topology is invoked to show how the fall of the object (the painter's look) simultaneously produces the barred subject and installs the empty Other as the support of truth.

     In this gap there lies, properly speaking, a certain function of the Other, which is precisely that in which the soul of a monarchical vision at the moment that it empties itself

482. #482

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.236

     **Seminar 19: Wednesday 25 May 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Velázquez's Las Meninas as a structural diagram that maps the mirror stage's optical model—with its interplay of ideal ego, ego ideal, the gaze, and the Objet petit a—onto the monarchical scene, showing that the painting is not a representation but a "trap for the look" that captures the subject within fantasy, thereby demonstrating that the o-object is not specular and cannot be recovered in the mirror's field.

     This royal vision is exactly what corresponds to the function, when I tried to articulate it explicitly, of the big Other in the narcissistic relationship.

483. #483

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.49

     IV - IDENTITY AND NON-IDENTITYTO ONESELF: THE DEATH DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan critically engages with Conrad Stein's theory of narcissistic regression in the analytic situation, using it as a foil to sharpen the distinction between imaginary dual relations and the properly Lacanian categories of the big Other, the small other, and objet petit a — arguing that the analytic situation cannot be reduced to fusional narcissism but involves an articulated structure of desire and the object.

     it seemed to me nevertheless difficult to differentiate in his text between the big Other and the other of the imaginary relationship.

484. #484

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.95

     Dr Lacan

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Dante's *Divine Comedy* as a topological witness that anticipates the psychoanalytic function of the objet petit a (as the gaze/look), arguing that the medieval opposition of knowledge and truth (doctrine of the double truth) prefigures the split that modern science inherits, and that the poet—through his projection of cosmological knowledge into the field of "final ends"—inadvertently maps the edge-topology that links the word-in-the-Other to the emergence of the o-object, concretely illustrated by the conjunction of the liar and the counterfeiter in Hell.

     the word qua situated in the field of the Other as support of the truth and the necessary, co-ordinated emergence of the o-object

485. #485

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.172

     Mademoiselle Grazien

     Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the relationship between Jones's concept of aphanisis and Lacan's theory of the subject's fading, using this parallel to introduce jouissance as a bodily dimension that cannot be reduced to the pleasure principle and that stands in a constitutive tension with the subject's "I am" — arguing that the subject is always already implicated in the duplicity between being and non-being that jouissance makes visible.

     the demand of the Other, is the o-object faeces, the demand to the Other, is the o-object breast... the desire of the Other, which you will already immediately sense is supported by the voice

486. #486

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.254

     **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that topology is not an optional supplement to psychoanalytic formation but its very substance — the 'stuff into which the analyst cuts' — and uses the mathematician's disclosure that mathematical discourse conceals its own referent to illuminate the structural parallel with the psychoanalyst's position, where the unconscious (Urverdrangung) prevents any direct saying of what is spoken about; jouissance, caught in the net of language/the signifier, is identified as the hidden dimension that grounds desire and that only topology can begin to approach.

     it is from this field that there is withdrawn by the subject, as a belonging, the oobject. That something is at stake more on this hither side, concerning another function of the Other, since this Other here, behind the subject, completely hidden from him

487. #487

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.85

     Madame le Docteur Parisot

     Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Dragonetti's analysis of Dante's *Divine Comedy*, Lacan deploys the Narcissus myth and the figure of counterfeit money to theorize how the fraudulent (mis)recognition of the image-as-truth constitutes a fundamental structure of conscience and desire: the subject, captivated by its own reflection, mistakes the image of nothing for the real, such that malice (latent falsification) becomes the originary condition of every conscience.

     It strikes God in what is closest to his essence, namely reason ... the relationship to the source which founds the natural order of values ... the Other of the absolute.

488. #488

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.29

     [Foot note

     Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of object relations theory is grounded in its suppression of the Symbolic by reducing psychic life to a Real-Imaginary opposition, while the ideal ego / ego ideal distinction is repositioned as a platform for theorising the subject's relation to the Other.

     theoretical developments of Lacan which are inserted in the perspective of the relationship to the Other.

489. #489

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.267

     **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the o-object (objet petit a) must be understood not merely at the level of demand (breast, faeces) but through desire and jouissance, where castration is the barrier that projects jouissance onto the murdered father as an Oedipal mirage — a move that corrects what Lacan identifies as the Hegelian error of attributing jouissance to the master rather than understanding its structural unavailability to any subject.

     The field of the Other is what it is a matter of involving in desire; desire comes to involve the Other. And this is the different essence of the two other o-objects.

490. #490

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.28

     I - JACQUES LACAN"S OBJECT: A RAPID REMINDER

     Theoretical move: The passage traces the theoretical development of the o-object (objet petit a) through Lacan's earliest graphs, arguing that (o) functions as the indispensable mediation between Subject and Other (via the Mirror Stage) and between Subject and Ego Ideal (via Schema R), while the Symbolic field alone provides the third term—the Name of the Father—that structures the whole process, inaccessible by any direct route.

     (o) can be understood then in its relationship to o' ... as an element of the indispensable mediation which unites the subject to the Other.

491. #491

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.39

     B - The problem of the differential distribution of the mode of representation

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Objet petit a cannot be reduced to perception but must be understood as a structural "representative of representation" — a trajectory of the subject through registers — that grounds desire through aphanisis, negative hallucination, and the mourning of the primordial object, while also proposing a systematic mapping of the object across synchronic and diachronic axes of Freudian theory.

     this process is the same as the one which grounds desire as the desire of the Other, since mourning is interposed in the relationship of the subject to the Other and of the subject to the object.

492. #492

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.33

     II -THE SUTURING OF THE SIGNIFIER, ITS REPRESENTATION AND THE o-OBJECT

     Theoretical move: By reading Frege through Miller's logic of the signifier, Lacan argues that the structure of numerical concatenation (zero as both excluded object and naming integer) mirrors the subject's constitutive exclusion from the signifying chain, and that the objet petit a is precisely what "subsists" from this nullifying operation, linking suture and cut to the subject–signifier relation.

     I leave here the question of the relationship of the subject to the big Other by the effect of the zero

493. #493

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.129

     **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.

     the wager is Pascal's wager on the existence of the other... the field of the Other *qua* divided with respect to being itself, it is what is in my graph as S, signifier of Ø.

494. #494

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.227

     **Seminar 18: Wednesday 18 May 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan develops a projective-geometry account of the subject's inscription in the visual field, arguing that perspective's two "subject poles" (the vanishing point and the point at infinity) articulate the split subject's double presence/absence within the picture-plane, and that the painting (exemplified by Las Meninas) functions as a "trap for the look" precisely because the picture-within-the-picture saturates reality while the objet petit a—the falling, ungraspable element—is what the painter is really aiming to capture.

     the relationships of the subject to the Other are not reciprocal, for me not to fall into this trap today

495. #495

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

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

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

     the revelation of the lack of the Other and also of the lack as it appears in the process of meaning. What is lacking to the Other is what cannot be conceived of.

496. #496

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.272

     **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan inverts the Hegelian master/slave dialectic by arguing that jouissance remains with the slave, not the master, and uses this to reframe castration as the operation that introduces a negative sign onto the phallus—making possible the (always asymmetric) encounter between masculine and feminine jouissance. He then previews the tripartite RSI framework and the 'logic of fantasy' as the conceptual architecture needed to account for the subject's relation to desire, jouissance, and the real.

     how there is cut out, in a stuff which is common, this relationship of the subject to the Other, this advent of the subject in the signifier, thanks to which there is sustained this phantasy in its relationship to the real

497. #497

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

     C - The o, object of desire

     Theoretical move: The passage theorises the objet petit a as the structural precipitate of a series of castrations (weaning, sphincter training, castration proper) that separates the subject from the maternal object, so that the object falls from the field of the Other to become the object of desire — a mediation that constitutes the subject precisely by exiling it from its own subjectivity, with fantasy as the structure that formalises this hollow inscription.

     If O only reaches its full meaning by being sustained by the Name of the Father... it passes as we have seen through the maternal defile and is only reached when the cut between the subject and maternal object irremedially separates him from the aforesaid object.

498. #498

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.53

     IV - IDENTITY AND NON-IDENTITYTO ONESELF: THE DEATH DRIVE

     Theoretical move: The passage stages a theoretical confrontation between a framework centred on frustration, narcissism, and the pleasure/reality principle duality (Stein's position) and Lacan's alternative, which reorders the analytic situation around lack, the subject supposed to know, and the signifier/signified distinction—arguing that frustration is not the terminal category of analysis and that the symbolic dimension is being systematically underweighted in current analytic theory.

     a mythical word, a foundational word which establishes him both as… objects of the desire of the Other and qua subject of an original fault

499. #499

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.124

     **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.

     at the level of what is affirmed of it as I am in the field of the other, of what, in the subject, comes from self-miscognition

500. #500

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.115

     Another question.

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that predication is not a logical act but an expression of desire's particular forcing, and that the analytic relationship cannot be grounded in a specular grammar of pronoun-equivalence; the remainder that escapes specularisation is what distinguishes the big Other from the barred Other, and it is precisely this remainder that structures both transference (the subject supposed to know) and the analyst's relationship to truth.

     the only way to get out of the circularity…is in effect to conceive that there exists a difference between the you and the I, this difference being that of the big Other and that of the big Other barred in so far as precisely what liberates the bar is a remainder.

501. #501

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.112

     Another question.

     Theoretical move: The passage records a seminar discussion in which Lacan and interlocutors (Conté, Melman, Audouard) interrogate Stein's theoretical articles on psychoanalytic treatment, centering on whether the analyst's word can function as objet petit a, and identifying the absence of the big Other as the critical gap in Stein's articulation of narcissism, desire, transference, and truth.

     the lack of the references that you make here to the big Other is the point where precisely things start to agglutinate in the text, it gets clogged up and one finishes by asking oneself how they can be disentangled.

502. #502

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.36

     B - The problem of representation

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Frege's logic of representation—where zero figures as the object under which no representation falls—to articulate how the subject is constituted by a cut at the expense of the object, such that desire survives the loss of the object through suture; the Hamlet passage then dramatizes this structure of cause, defect, and remainder as the very logic of desire and demand.

     the object is dead, long live the desire (of the Other).

503. #503

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.247

     **Seminar 20: Wednesday 1 June 1966**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet petit a is not the object of need's satisfaction but the structural cause of desire, arising from the relationship between the subject's demand and the Other's desire — and that the scopic field (the gaze) occupies a privileged position in this structure precisely because Freud founded the analytic position by excluding the look, making it a paradigmatic object that reveals the subject's foundational relationship to the Other.

     the function occupied by the scopic field in a structure which is, properly speaking, the one which involves the relationship of the subject to the Other.

504. #504

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.77

     **Seminar 6: Wednesday 12 January 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic concept of the objet petit a—hidden in the 'suture of the subject' within modern logic—is what classical and modern logic fails to articulate when it reduces truth to bivalent truth-value; the Möbius strip and projective plane topology are introduced as the structural alternative to the spherical cosmology underpinning both idealism and naïve realism in theories of knowledge.

     It is impossible then to eliminate this dimension which I describe as the locus of the Other where everything that is articulated as word, is posed as true, even and including the lie

505. #505

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.261

     **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan inverts the Hegelian master/slave dialectic by locating jouissance on the side of the slave, then uses this inversion to ground a critique of Freudian obscurantism around feminine jouissance, the phallic function as negativity, and the three registers (imaginary/symbolic/real) as orientating instruments for a forthcoming 'logic of phantasy'.

     this relationship of the subject to the Other, this advent of the subject in

506. #506

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.65

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 5 January 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Cartesian-Aristotelian reduction of body to homogeneous three-dimensional extension is a fundamental epistemological deception, and proposes that the topological structure of two-dimensional surfaces (sphere, cylinder, torus) with holes—rather than metric spherical space—can provide a non-punctual, non-specular account of the divided subject and its relation to the real.

     The subject of the 'I' speaks, speaks somewhere that I called the locus of the Other and here is what always obliges us to take into account a figure, a structure, which is other than punctual and which organises the articulation of the subject.

507. #507

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.30

     D - The (o) as fetish

     Theoretical move: Lacan's theorisation is distinguished from post-Freudian authors by its privileging of a negative/reflexive approach to the object: rather than marking the positive qualities of the object (e.g. the phallus as terrifying instrument), Lacan follows Freud's logic of the Medusa to argue that the fetish object functions as a veil over castration — a witness to the lack in the field of the Other.

     the veil of the castrated sexual organ - of the lack in the field of the Other.

508. #508

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.276

     there are normal perverts,

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Möbius strip's double-circuit topology to argue that the Oedipus Complex has two equivalent articulations — the generative drama of the law and the drama of the desire to know — and proposes that only through the objet petit a can the castration complex be rigorously formalized, a task he defers to the following year's seminar.

     in this position in respect to the field of the Other, that everything that concerns his relationship to jouissance, has to come to him through the mediation of what is linked to the Other

509. #509

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.265

     **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that topology is not an optional supplement to psychoanalytic training but its very operative 'stuff' — the medium in which the analyst cuts the subject — and uses the mathematician's structural concealment of his object as a foil to show that the analyst's non-saying differs because an irreducible unconscious (Urverdrängung) prevents knowledge, while jouissance, caught in the net of language as sexual jouissance, is the hidden ground that desire defends against, pointing toward the death drive as the only genuine philosophical question.

     it is from this field that there is withdrawn by the subject, as a belonging, the **o** object. That something is at stake more on this hither side, concerning another function of the Other

510. #510

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.209

     **Seminar 17: Wednesday 11 May 1966**

     Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Velázquez's Las Meninas, Lacan dismantles standard interpretations (mirror-of-painter, king-and-queen as sitters) to argue that the painting's structural logic turns on the opposition window/mirror: the window as the painter's empty place of return versus the mirror as the royal couple's omniscient gaze—a gaze that functions like Descartes' God, guaranteeing the subject's world, and whose obverse is the television screen as the modern correlate of the relation between subject and objet petit a.

     This presence of the royal couple, playing exactly the same role as the God of Descartes, namely, that in everything that we see, nothing deceives on the single condition that the omnipresent God, for his part, is deceived by it.

511. #511

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.287

     Monsieur Safouan

     Theoretical move: Safouan's case presentation of an obsessional's 'duplication of the feminine object' is used to argue that the split between a narcissistic/desired beloved and an anaclitic/demanding 'perverse' partner is structurally grounded in the imaginary phallus (-phi): the beloved is not identified to the phallus but to minus-phi, the guarantee of the Other's castration, while the subject himself is subtilised into (-phi), such that symbolic castration (as the regularisation of the phallic position) must be distinguished from imaginary castration via yet-unformulated distinctions around negation.

     in the whole measure that the erotic life of the subject is thus placed under the sign of his dependence on the all-powerfulness of the other

512. #512

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.96

     Dr Lacan

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Dante's poetic structure—particularly the Narcissus/mirror motif and the figure of Beatrice in courtly love—to argue that the objet petit a (o-object) is non-specular: it appears as an image of nothing, and this structure of sublimation (where jouissance is withdrawn) establishes a privileged equilibrium between truth and knowledge that poetic construction can illuminate more directly than psychoanalytic theory alone.

     the one which is employed to refer to the function of the other and of the beloved other, that the chosen woman is the one... the good neighbour... is here as close as possible to what in the most modern mathematical theory is called the function of neighbourhood.

513. #513

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.135

     **Seminar 10: Wednesday 9 February 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Pascal's Wager as a topological model of the fantasy structure: the infinite field of the big Other, barred and reduced to pure alternation of existence/non-existence, is what causes the Objet petit a to 'fall' as the real cause of desire—and this structural logic defines the analyst's position as the partner who 'knows he is nothing', enabling the object to fall from the opaque field of belief/dream.

     to say, about the indeterminate that God becomes in 'I wager that God exists', is to say something completely different for this implies beneath the bar that God does not exist. In other words, to say: 'I wager that God exists or' … is to introduce this referent in which there is constituted the Other, the big Other, as marked by the bar

514. #514

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.90

     Madame le Docteur Parisot

     Theoretical move: By close reading of Dante's *Purgatorio* and *Paradiso* (via Dragonetti), Lacan stages the structural opposition between narcissistic reflection—reason folding back on itself and converting transparency into shadow—and the analytic position, figured through Virgil/Beatrice, which redirects desire toward a truth that speaks through shame rather than through self-excusing expression; the passage culminates in the paradox of God's own narcissism as the limit-point of any fantasmatic transparency of desire.

     All is light and the light comes from God. Light is God's look. And between God and Dante there is Beatrice

515. #515

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.243

     **Seminar 20: Wednesday 1 June 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the objet petit a as a topological structure (hole) that is "represented" precisely by not being representable, and reframes his entire method as a second circuit around Freud's teaching—not a mere return to sources but a non-orientable, Möbius-strip-like redoubling that transforms meaning through structure rather than reduplication.

     the o-object is what is operating between the S and the O in so far as neither of them can co-exist with the other except by being marked with the sign of the bar

516. #516

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.148

     **Seminar 12: Wednesday 23 March 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reconstructs, for an American audience, the foundational articulation between demand and desire, the splitting of the subject, and the topology of the torus as the structural support (*upokeimenon*) of desire — arguing that desire is not desire for jouissance but the barrier that keeps the subject at a calculated distance from it, and that this duplicity of desire with respect to demand grounds everything called ambivalence in analysis.

     from the locus of the Other, the positioning point of the truth, as a locus where there is put in question the truth of the demand, as a locus also where there appears and emerges at the same time the dimension of desire

517. #517

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.279

     there are normal perverts,

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Oedipus complex is insufficient to ground sexuality unless it is re-articulated as the foundation of desire through the phallic function, and that feminine jouissance is structurally located at the place of the big Other (O), while the minus-phi (−φ) serves as the mediating organ-as-object between male and female jouissance — against any naïve notion of genital maturation or "oblativity" as explanatory.

     how does it happen that it is at this place of O, at the place of the Other, in so far as it is there that signifying articulation is constructed, that there is posed for us the aim of a mapping-out which tends towards jouissance and, properly speaking, sexual jouissance.

518. #518

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.42

     IV - IDENTITY AND NON-IDENTITYTO ONESELF: THE DEATH DRIVE

     Theoretical move: The passage, presented by André Green as a commentary on Lacan's o-object, argues that the psychoanalytic subject is constituted through the effacing of the trace—a logic linking the Death Drive, the Name of the Father, castration, and metonymy—and that this logic of effacement (cutting/suturing) is what structuralism (Lévi-Strauss) fails to capture, reducing symbolic difference to mere homology rather than recognizing the barred lack as the cause of desire.

     the subject rejoins its dependency on the Other, to identify itself to its own effacing.

519. #519

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.288

     Doctor Lacan

     Theoretical move: Lacan closes Safouan's contribution with an impromptu reflection that uses the Napoleon/Talleyrand anecdote as a codicil to his earlier account of the o-object (objet petit a), posing the question of what identifies the object of the Other's desire with the anal object (shit), and warning of the dangers of that identification.

     the object of the desire of the Other: what is it that leads us to think that it is shit?

520. #520

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.249

     **Seminar 20: Wednesday 1 June 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the topology of the Objet petit a by demonstrating that the scopic and invocatory objects occupy a dimension beyond demand/frustration theories of neurosis, and introduces the hyperboloid of revolution as a topological figure that models the structural relationship between subject (S) and o-object, pointing toward a group-structure combinatorial of partial objects culminating in castration.

     this singular dimension that is already offered to us by the evocation of the window which, moreover, is willingly itself called a look, in this dimension of the desire of the Other, of openness, of aspiration by the Other

521. #521

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.25

     **Seminar 3: Wednesday 15 December 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Möbius strip provides the topological model for the divided subject: its essential property is that the cut IS the strip itself, meaning that subjectivity is constituted through division rather than unity. By showing how the cross-cap (projective plane) decomposes into a Möbius strip plus a spherical flap, and by introducing the torus and Klein bottle as further structural supports, Lacan grounds the relationships between subject, Objet petit a, demand, desire, and the Other in rigorous topological terms.

     The non-symmetrical conjunction of the subject and of the locus of the Other is what we can illustrate, thanks to the Klein bottle.

522. #522

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.279

     there are normal perverts,

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Oedipus complex is insufficient to ground sexuality unless articulated through the phallic function and the (-phi), and that sexual jouissance must be mapped through the structure of the Other — locating feminine jouissance at the place of the Other (O) while exposing "Hegel's error" of placing jouissance on the side of the master.

     how does it happen that it is at this place of O, at the place of the Other, in so far as it is there that signifying articulation is constructed, that there is posed for us the aim of a mapping-out which tends towards jouissance and, properly speaking, sexual jouissance.

523. #523

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan

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

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

     the revelation of the lack of the Other and also of the lack as it appears in the process of meaning. What is lacking to the Other is what cannot be conceived of.

524. #524

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.249

     **Seminar 20: Wednesday 1 June 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the hyperboloid of revolution to illustrate the structural relationship between the subject (S) and the objet petit a, arguing that the o-object can only function within a group structure that permits negative values, which ultimately grounds the Freudian dimension of desire and castration.

     The voice is not alone the causal object but the instrument in which there is manifested the desire of the Other.

525. #525

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.77

     **Seminar 6: Wednesday 12 January 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that truth cannot be sutured by mere logical truth-value (alethes) or empirical reference, and that the o-object (objet petit a) — hidden in the suture of the subject within modern logic — is precisely what reveals the true secret of the connection between truth and knowledge; the projective plane and Möbius strip are then introduced as topological figures adequate to this subject-object structure, against the inadequate spherical cosmology that underlies both idealism and false realism.

     It is impossible then to eliminate this dimension which I describe as the locus of the Other where everything that is articulated as word, is posed as true, even and including the lie

526. #526

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.86

     Madame le Docteur Parisot

     Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Dragonetti's commentary on Dante's *Divine Comedy*, Lacan (or his seminar presenter) elaborates how the myth of Narcissus structures a theory of fraudulent conscience: the mirror of Narcissus figures the capture of the subject by its own image, such that the falsification of the sign (counterfeit money) allegorizes the primal separation of consciousness from truth — a movement from the Real to a self-enclosed fiction that becomes "truth itself" for the pervert.

     what Adam pursues, the principle of evil, which is preferable to the spring which quenches his thirst, slips away and that it is nothing other than the refusal to be, hence the radical slipping away… Master Adam himself with respect to whom there forever escapes the principle of evil as the Other of the absolute.

527. #527

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.276

     there are normal perverts,

     Theoretical move: Lacan pivots from the normality of perversion (illustrated by the Abbé de Choisy) to a recapitulation of the year's key theoretical advances: the gaze as the privileged objet petit a whose function as (-phi) articulates the castration complex, and the Oedipus Complex re-read via the Möbius strip as requiring two full circuits to complete its meaning.

     the subject, in this position in respect to the field of the Other, that everything that concerns his relationship to jouissance, has to come to him through the mediation of what is linked to the Other

528. #528

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.129

     **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.

     Pascal's wager on the existence of the other... the structure that Pascal's wager puts forward is the possibility... that the field with respect to which there is established the claim of (o), the object of desire, is the field of the Other *qua* divided with respect to being itself

529. #529

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.39

     B - The problem of the differential distribution of the mode of representation

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet petit a is not a perceived object but a structure of transformation — the trajectory/circuit of the subject across registers — grounded in the differential distribution of representations, where aphanisis, negative hallucination, and the mourning of the primordial object together constitute the inaugural narcissistic identification and the condition for desire as desire of the Other.

     It becomes clear that this process is the same as the one which grounds desire as the desire of the Other, since mourning is interposed in the relationship of the subject to the Other and of the subject to the object.

530. #530

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.25

     **Seminar 3: Wednesday 15 December 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Möbius strip, Cross-cap (projective plane), torus, and Klein bottle are not mere illustrations but structural supports for the constitution of the divided subject: the cut that divides the Möbius strip IS the Möbius strip, making division constitutive of subjectivity rather than secondary to it, and thereby grounding the relationship between demand, desire, and the Other in rigorous topological terms.

     The non-symmetrical conjunction of the subject and of the locus of the Other is what we can illustrate, thanks to the Klein bottle.

531. #531

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.236

     **Seminar 19: Wednesday 25 May 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Velázquez's *Las Meninas* as a visual matheme for the structural relationship between the gaze, the mirror, the Objet petit a, the Ideal Ego, and the field of the big Other: the painting is not a representation but a "trap for the look," and the royal couple's invisible gaze from the mirror-position enacts the function of the big Other in the narcissistic/specular relationship, while the o-object (objet petit a) remains irreducibly non-specular and therefore haunts the schema from outside it.

     This royal vision is exactly what corresponds to the function, when I tried to articulate it explicitly, of the big Other in the narcissistic relationship.

532. #532

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.254

     **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that topology is not an optional supplement for the psychoanalyst but the very material into which the psychoanalytic operation cuts, and that jouissance—placed on the hither side of the big Other and caught in the net of subjective topology as sexual jouissance—is the irreducible, unsayable dimension that language/desire both defends against and compels us to question, linking the emergence of the signifier to the individual's relation to jouissance via Freud's death drive.

     the fundamental arrangement which goes from S to the field of the big Other which designates for you what I am going to remind you of later: namely, that it is from this field that there is withdrawn by the subject, as a belonging, the oobject.

533. #533

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.148

     **Seminar 12: Wednesday 23 March 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan recounts his American seminars as an occasion to condense his core theoretical moves—distinguishing demand from desire, grounding the splitting of the subject in the unconscious, locating sexuality as desire-to-know, and announcing that topology (torus, cross-cap, Klein bottle) will provide the structural substance for showing how one demand generates a duplicity of desire.

     from the locus of the Other, the positioning point of the truth, as a locus where there is put in question the truth of the demand, as a locus also where there appears and emerges at the same time the dimension of desire

534. #534

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.29

     [Foot note

     Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of object relations theory is grounded in its failure to account for symbolic mediation, reducing psychic life to a Real-Imaginary dyad; meanwhile, the Nunberg-Lagache distinction between ideal ego and ego ideal serves as a platform for Lacan's theorisation of the Other.

     serves as a platform for the theoretical developments of Lacan which are inserted in the perspective of the relationship to the Other.

535. #535

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.227

     **Seminar 18: Wednesday 18 May 1966**

     Theoretical move: By reading Velázquez's *Las Meninas* through Desargues' projective geometry, Lacan identifies the painter's "subject point" as structurally split between the vanishing point (the horizon) and a point at infinity outside the picture, such that the picture-within-the-picture functions as objet petit a — the representative of representation that can never be seized in the mirror, only in the gaze-trap the picture sets for the viewer.

     the relationships of the subject to the Other are not reciprocal, for me not to fall into this trap today

536. #536

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.243

     **Seminar 20: Wednesday 1 June 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the objet petit a is a topological structure identifiable with the "hole" in surfaces like the torus, cross-cap, and Klein bottle—not a represented object but the very condition of representation—and frames his entire method as a second circuit of Freud's own Möbius-like path, where repetition transforms rather than reduplicates, culminating in the division of the subject.

     the o-object is what is operating between the S and the O in so far as neither of them can co-exist with the other except by being marked with the sign of the bar.

537. #537

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.28

     I - JACQUES LACAN"S OBJECT: A RAPID REMINDER

     Theoretical move: The passage traces the theoretical evolution of the o-object (objet petit a) through Lacan's earliest graphs—from the Mirror Stage to the L Schema and Schema R—arguing that (o) functions as the indispensable mediation between the subject and the Other, and between the subject and the ego ideal, while the symbolic field alone provides the third term (Name of the Father) that structures the whole process.

     The (o) - I am not saying yet the o-object - is present in Lacan's oldest graph when he starts from the theorisation proposed in The mirror stage (1936-1949). (o) can be understood then in its relationship to o'... as an element of the indispensable mediation which unites the subject to the Other.

538. #538

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.30

     D - The (o) as fetish

     Theoretical move: Lacan's theoretical distinctiveness lies in his privileging of a negative or reflective approach to the object, exemplified by his reading of fetishism: the fetish is not defined by the positive qualities of the object but as the veil/witness of the lack (castration) in the field of the Other.

     the veil of the castrated sexual organ - of the lack in the field of the Other.

539. #539

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.112

     Another question.

     Theoretical move: The passage stages a seminar discussion in which participants (Conté, Melman, Lacan) critically interrogate Stein's theoretical framework, converging on the argument that his account of the analyst's word, narcissism, desire, and predication remains incomplete precisely because it lacks a structural reference to the big Other as the third locus from which the subject receives his own word — a lacuna that collapses the treatment into a dual imaginary game between analyst and patient.

     the lack of the references that you make here to the big Other is the point where precisely things start to agglutinate in the text, it gets clogged up and one finishes by asking oneself how they can be disentangled.

540. #540

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.282

     there are normal perverts,

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques object-relations theory's reduction of analytic theory to frustration and demand, arguing that the analyst's position is precisely to demand nothing, and that the privileged o-object in the field of the Other's demand is anal—linking oblativity, the phallic fantasy in obsessional neurosis, and the anal phase's logic of the bar (gift/retention) to show that 'giving what one has' is always giving shit, whereas genuine love is to give what one does not have.

     The object of the demand of the Other, we know it by the structure and the history, after the demand to the Other

541. #541

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.53

     IV - IDENTITY AND NON-IDENTITYTO ONESELF: THE DEATH DRIVE

     Theoretical move: The passage stages a debate between a frustration-based model of analytic treatment (Stein's) and Lacan's structural alternative, pivoting on the claim that 'lack' is more fundamental than 'frustration', and that transference is grounded in the Subject Supposed to Know rather than in the analyst's representative function of reality — while Melman's intervention presses toward the primacy of the signifier/signified distinction over mere content of speech.

     a mythical word, a foundational word which establishes him both as… objects of the desire of the Other and qua subject of an original fault

542. #542

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.256

     **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the o-object of demand (breast, faeces) must be distinguished from the objects of desire (gaze, voice) and jouissance (linked to castration), and that castration is not reducible to the Oedipus myth's prohibition but marks the bar between the subject and jouissance — a bar that IS desire itself; further, the Hegelian master/slave dialectic fundamentally misreads jouissance by assuming that renunciation entails its loss.

     The field of the Other is what it is a matter of involving in desire; desire comes to involve the Other. And this is the different essence of the two other o-objects.

543. #543

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.272

     **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan inverts the Hegelian master/slave dialectic by locating jouissance on the side of the slave, then reframes castration not as a prohibitive structure but as the operation of negativing the phallus so that desire and jouissance can be articulated across sexual difference — a move he introduces as preliminary to the 'logic of phantasy' and organises around three registers (imaginary, symbolic, real/torsion).

     there is cut out, in a stuff which is common, this relationship of the subject to the Other, this advent of the subject in the signifier

544. #544

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.135

     **Seminar 10: Wednesday 9 February 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Pascal's Wager through the topology of the cross-cap and the barred Other to argue that the wager's stake is precisely the Objet petit a as cause of desire: wagering on God's existence installs the big Other under the bar (marking its non-existence as condition), and this structural move—not religious faith—is what psychoanalysis must reckon with to define the analyst's position relative to the subject's fantasy.

     to say, about the indeterminate that God becomes in 'I wager that God exists or' … is to introduce this referent in which there is constituted the Other, the big Other, as marked by the bar, which reduces him to the alternative of existence or not, and to nothing else.

545. #545

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.238

     **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.

     In this gap there lies, properly speaking, a certain function of the Other, which is precisely that in which the soul of a monarchical vision at the moment that it empties itself

546. #546

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.49

     IV - IDENTITY AND NON-IDENTITYTO ONESELF: THE DEATH DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan critically engages Stein's account of narcissistic regression in the analytic situation, using it as a foil to distinguish the imaginary dual relation from the big Other and to locate the o-object (objet petit a) within the structure of desire rather than as a supplement to fusional narcissism—thereby insisting that the analytic situation has an articulated symbolic structure, not merely a fusional lack of distinction.

     it seemed to me nevertheless difficult to differentiate in his text between the big Other and the other of the imaginary relationship

547. #547

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.95

     Dr Lacan

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Dante's *Divine Comedy* as a privileged site to show how the o-object (the gaze) emerges at the intersection of knowledge and truth within the pre-scientific philosophical tradition, arguing that the medieval doctrine of the double truth anticipates the topological distinction between open and closed sets, and that Dante, qua poet, unconsciously articulates the structure of the o-object—particularly through the mirror of Narcissus—at the very limit between knowledge and truth.

     constellations that I would qualify as typical, which are properly speaking those of the relationship which links the word qua situated in the field of the Other as support of the truth

548. #548

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.33

     II -THE SUTURING OF THE SIGNIFIER, ITS REPRESENTATION AND THE o-OBJECT

     Theoretical move: By reading Frege through Miller's logic of the signifier, Lacan articulates the structure of suture: the subject is constituted by the same operation of evocation-and-exclusion that generates the number zero, such that the subject is repeatedly expelled from the signifying chain it produces, with the objet petit a as the trace-remainder (the 'having') that subsists under the chain.

     I leave here the question of the relationship of the subject to the big Other by the effect of the zero

549. #549

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.97

     Dr Lacan

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet petit a is non-specular — it appears as an image of nothing — and that courtly love (as in Dante's poetic construction) uniquely structures the relationship between the subject, the ego ideal, the o-object, and jouissance, thereby grounding psychoanalytic theory of sublimation in a topological framework.

     In the development that I shall have to pursue on the subject of structure... the Klein bottle, will allow there to be structured in a decisive fashion what I mean here about the relationship of the subject to the other.

550. #550

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.265

     **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that topology is not an optional supplement to psychoanalytic training but its very operative material, and uses the structural parallel between mathematical discourse (which speaks what it cannot name) and psychoanalytic discourse (which cannot name what it speaks about due to the irreducible unconscious) to re-ground the function of language, desire, and jouissance as the hidden field from which the subject withdraws its object.

     the fundamental arrangement which goes from S to the field of the big Other which designates for you what I am going to remind you of later: namely, that it is from this field that there is withdrawn by the subject, as a belonging, the o object.

551. #551

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.115

     Another question.

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that predication is not a logical act but an act of desire's forcing, and that the analytic relation cannot be grounded in a specular grammar of pronouns (I/you equivalence); the remainder that escapes specularisation is what opens the dialectic between the barred Other and truth, and the transference's misunderstanding consists in the analysand supposing the analyst knows everything except the truth.

     the only way to get out of the circularity... is in effect to conceive that there exists a difference between the you and the I, this difference being that of the big Other and that of the big Other barred in so far as precisely what liberates the bar is a remainder.

552. #552

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.36

     B - The problem of representation

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the cut of representation (drawn from Frege's zero) constitutes the subject at the cost of the object, and that desire survives this sacrifice of the object through the mediation of demand — a logic illustrated via Hamlet's madness as the structural effect of a causeless demand whose remainder is the objet petit a.

     the object is dead, long live the desire (of the Other).

553. #553

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.248

     **Seminar 20: Wednesday 1 June 1966**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the structure of the subject necessarily bears the mark of a gap or wound that "full objectification" forecloses, and that the objet petit a—specifically as it appears in the scopic field and in oral/anal dialectics—is not the object of need-satisfaction but the cause of desire, which emerges only when the subject's demand is articulated in relation to the desire of the Other.

     The o-object is the stake (*l'enjeu*) of what is foundational for the subject in his relationship to the Other. Our question is suspended on the subject of its belonging.

554. #554

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.209

     **Seminar 17: Wednesday 11 May 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan's reading of Velázquez's Las Meninas turns on the irreducible structural difference between a mirror and a window, arguing that the royal couple functions not as reflections but as an omnipresent guarantee of the visible world—analogous to Descartes' God—while the painter's position enacts an "I paint therefore I am" that installs an empty place at the heart of the subject, culminating in the identification of the mirror-at-the-back with a precursor to the television screen as an object-relation.

     This presence of the royal couple, playing exactly the same role as the God of Descartes, namely, that in everything that we see, nothing deceives on the single condition that the omnipresent God, for his part, is deceived by it.

555. #555

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.203

     **Seminar 17: Wednesday 11 May 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Velázquez's *Las Meninas* as a structural demonstration of the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz: the picture-within-the-picture does not represent but rather *presentifies* the window-space of the gaze, showing that what constitutes the picture in its essence is not representation but the capture of the looking subject (sujet regardant) — a topology that introduces the dialectic of the subject via the scopic drive.

     what we desire and desire to know is very properly something which is something of the order of what one can call the desire of the other

556. #556

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.65

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 5 January 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the classical philosophical reduction of the body and the real to three-dimensional homogeneous (spherical) extension is a fundamental deception about the subject and knowledge; by drawing on topology (the sphere, the cut, the hole, the cylinder, the torus), he proposes that a two-dimensional, edge-based topological structure—rather than metric space—is the proper framework for articulating the divided subject and its inscription in the real.

     The subject of the 'I' speaks, speaks somewhere that I called the locus of the Other and here is what always obliges us to take into account a figure, a structure, which is other than punctual and which organises the articulation of the subject.

557. #557

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.90

     Madame le Docteur Parisot

     Theoretical move: Reading Dante's Purgatorio and Paradiso through a Lacanian lens, Lacan argues that shame, reflection, and the gaze stage the fundamental impotence of reason to recover truth by itself—and that the structure of Paradise (mirror as pure transparency, Beatrice as the mark of God) reframes Narcissus's error not as individual pathology but as the structural position of the subject before the gaze of the Other, culminating in the provocative reversal: it is not Dante's narcissism but God's narcissism that is at stake.

     To remit to God the cause of one's desire is the only possible path... there is God. All is light and the light comes from God. Light is God's look.

558. #558

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.261

     **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Hegelian master/slave dialectic fails to explain social cohesion, whereas Freud's account grounds it in the homosexual bond and the prohibition of feminine jouissance; this leads to a recasting of castration not as prohibition but as the operation by which the phallus receives a negative sign, enabling the (non-)relationship between masculine and feminine jouissance — a problem Lacan frames as requiring a logic of fantasy and introduces through three registers (imaginary/symbolic/real) oriented around negativity and torsion.

     to map out how there is cut out, in a stuff which is common, this relationship of the subject to the Other, this advent of the subject

559. #559

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.267

     **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the object of demand (the o-object as bodily appurtenance recovered from the field of the Other) must be distinguished from the object of jouissance, and that castration is properly understood not through the Oedipus myth of incest prohibition alone, but as the barrier that bars the subject from jouissance—a barrier that is desire itself—thereby exposing the Hegelian error of attributing jouissance to the master in the Master/Slave dialectic.

     The field of the Other is what it is a matter of involving in desire; desire comes to involve the Other. And this is the different essence of the two other o-objects.

560. #560

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.288

     Doctor Lacan

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a Napoleonic anecdote about Talleyrand as a codicil to theorize the object of the Other's desire: the objet petit a (figured here as the anal object, "shit") and the question of what drives the subject toward it, with desire finding "its way" through the all-powerful Other, suggesting the Other's desire is not transparent but potentially a trap.

     he also had some relationships with the all-powerful. And that his desire found its way rather well there

561. #561

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan

     C - The o, object of desire

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet petit a acquires its status as object of desire through a series of castrations that separate the subject from the primordial (m)Other, and that fantasy—as the constitutive structure of the subject—mediates the relation between objet a, the Ideal Ego, and the big Other by marking the subject only in absentia (imprinted in the hollow).

     The relationship between (o) and O is thereforee clearly shown. If O only reaches its full meaning by being sustained by the Name of the Father which is not, is it necessary to specify, either a name or a God

562. #562

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.38

     III - THE RELATION o TO i(o) AND THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATION AND SPECULARISATION.

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that affect must be granted the status of a signifier — on a par with the drive-representative (Vorstellungsrepräsentanz) — by tracing Freud's progressive distinction between Verleugnung (denial, bearing on perception) and Verdrängung (repression, bearing on affect), and then proposes that the signifier itself be redefined to include both registers, thereby grounding a reduplicated Entzweiung (splitting) at the heart of the subject.

     memory in the locus of the Other but which preserves the trace before it not without losing its quality of memory if it comes to be lived out in actuality

563. #563

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.287

     Monsieur Safouan

     Theoretical move: Safouan uses the case of the obsessional's duplicated love-object to argue that the splitting between the narcissistic (desired) and anaclitic (demanded) object is structured by the function of (-phi): the more the virtual body-image i(o") tends to coincide with the imaginary phallus, the more the subject is "subtilised" into (-phi), so that the beloved's identification with the phallus is not an act the subject performs but an operation in which he is already caught — resolving into the question of how symbolic castration (via Oedipal negation) regularises the phallic position.

     in the whole measure that the erotic life of the subject is placed under the sign of dependency on the all powerfulness of the other

564. #564

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.92

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 9: Wednesday 25 January 1967**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the barred Other — S(Ø) — must be understood not as the simple non-existence of the Other but as the Other being *marked* (by castration), and that this marking is the logically prior condition for the subject's alienation, the constitution of desire via the objet petit a, and the very possibility of a logic of the phantasy; it further insists that the scopic drive's proper object (the gaze) is to be sought in what the voyeur wants to see, not in the look of an arriving Other, correcting a philosophical deviation that would locate hell in the Other rather than in the subject.

     Sexuality, as it is lived, as it operates, is, in this respect, something fundamentally … something which represents a prohibiting oneself from following the consequences of this truth: that there is no Other.

565. #565

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.52

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the Klein group as a four-term topological structure to ground Metaphor and the logic of the Unconscious, arguing that the formula of metaphor (signifying substitution) shares the same structural cell as the Klein group, and that this structure supports the claim that there is no Universe of discourse — a formal condition for the subject of the unconscious that is co-extensive with, yet irreducible to, the Cartesian cogito.

     this capital S with, in brackets, this O barred, (Ø), if not, at the level that we are at, the designation by a signifier of what is involved in the One too many

566. #566

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.132

     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.

     capital O. What is capital O? If the sexual act is what we are taught, as signifier, it is the mother.

567. #567

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.84

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 8: Wednesday 18 January 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Cartesian cogito's grounding in the Other collapses into alienation once the Other's existence becomes untenable, leaving only grammatical structure as the residue of the fallen Other; this is then mapped onto Freud's dream-work to demonstrate that the unconscious is structured like a language, where the ego is dispersed across dream-thoughts as condensation and displacement, and the logic of the phantasy requires the Other's locus to articulate its constitutive "therefore, I am not."

     it is to it, it is to the reference to this locus, as locus of the word, that Descartes remits himself... No one, as one of my friends has written recently, believes in this Other.

568. #568

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.11

     **Seminar 1: Wednesday 16 November 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that because no signifier can signify itself, language cannot constitute a closed set—there is no Universe of discourse—which defeats any 'reduced language' account of the unconscious and grounds the necessity of distinguishing the One (which repeats to establish itself) from totality, thereby locating the foundational lack constitutive of the subject.

     there is nothing that contains everything… in the Universe of discourse there is nothing that contains everything

569. #569

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.14

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the axiom that "no signifier can signify itself" as the founding structural principle of the Universe of discourse, and demonstrates—through a self-referential paradox of writing—that this axiom introduces a constitutive gap or exclusion within that very Universe, raising the question of whether what the axiom specifies can itself be said.

     This small o [sic] that in a sense one can identify to the locus of the Other, which in fact is the locus where there is produced everything that can be described as a statement in the broadest sense of the term, namely, what constitutes what I, incidentally, called the treasury of the signifier.

570. #570

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.73

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 7: Wednesday 11 January 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads the Cartesian cogito as a structural foreclosure of being—a "rejection" (Verwerfung) that installs the Other in the place of Being—and uses this to ground the psychoanalytic Id not as a "bad ego" or first-person subject but as the grammatical remainder of discourse once "I" is subtracted, thereby articulating alienation as the rejection of the Other rather than capture by it.

     it is essentially grounded, on the contrary, on the rejection of the Other, in so far as this Other - the one that I signal with the capital O - is what has come in place of this questioning of Being

571. #571

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.193

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan formalizes the objet petit a through the golden number equation (1 + o = 1/o), arguing that this mathematical structure captures the objet a's incommensurability with sex, and deploys the unary stroke as the necessary precondition for measurement of the objet a within the locus of the Other, linking metaphor's substitutive logic to the emergence of the sexual subject.

     the locus of the Other, first of all, in so far as, as such, it introduces the duplication of the field of the One

572. #572

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.242

     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.

     What corresponds here to our questioning… is a for the Other, with a capital O. Namely, - which we had to evoke first – namely, the locus from which the message returns to him in an inverted form.

573. #573

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.227

     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.

     the locus of the Other - everything that I articulated as such up to now (I mean since the beginning of my teaching) - designated the locus of the Other in the body.

574. #574

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.244

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the sexual act installs the subject precisely at the disjunction between body and jouissance: the body of the woman becomes the metaphor for masculine jouissance, while the phallus (distinguished from the penis) functions as the symbol of a withdrawn jouissance that underlies social exchange — yet this structural arrangement leaves feminine jouissance unresolved and adrift, mirroring the slave's displaced jouissance in the Hegelian master/slave dialectic.

     A little plaque can serve as a body for us. With a certain number of things, in effect, written on it. This is the function of the body, since we have recalled that it is the locus of the Other.

575. #575

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

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

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

     this jouissance is closely linked to a manoeuvre of the Other which, I would say, is most commonly expressed in the form of contract ... the Other, the locus in which there is deployed on this occasion a word which is a contract word.

576. #576

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.126

     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.

     something of the field of the eliminated Other, that I have just recalled, is manifested in the form of a truthful manifestation. Such is, fundamentally, the sense of acting-out.

577. #577

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.57

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan mobilises Boolean/set-theoretic negation (De Morgan's laws) to construct four logical transformations of the Cartesian cogito, arguing that the negated inverse — "either I am not thinking or I am not" — is the proper logical frame for grasping the subject of the unconscious, thereby announcing the programme of the logic of fantasy.

     The Other, that with the sacrifice, one catches in the trap. It is not the same thing to catch the Other in the trap in one's own name or if it is simply for the client.

578. #578

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.105

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 1 February 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the formula *cogito ergo Es* to reframe the Freudian *Es* (Id) not as a variant ego but as a function grounded in the barred Other, arguing that the real Freudian discovery is an *object* (not a thought-system) whose status is identical with structure insofar as structure is real — illustrated topologically by the Möbius strip transforming into a torus.

     starting from the barred Other, that is involved, that we are going to have not to rethink it, but quite simply to think it.

579. #579

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.187

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

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

     the Other in the sense that I ordinarily understand it, the locus of the Other, capital O - the locus where there is articulated the signifying chain and the truth that it supports.

580. #580

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.206

     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.

     the key to the neurotic position depends on this close relation to the demand of the Other, in so far as he tries to make it emerge

581. #581

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.223

     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 relation of the Other, of the big Other, to the partner which remains to him, namely, what we started from - and it is not for nothing that I called it small o

582. #582

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.101

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 9: Wednesday 25 January 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's meta-commentary on dream-function (the preconscious desire to sleep, "it is only a dream") and the Zhuangzi butterfly-dream to argue that the I is structurally constituted as a *stain* in the visual field—inseparable from the gaze/objet petit a—and that topology is the only rigorous framework for articulating the o-object's relationship to the subject's loss and repetition.

     the suspense in which the status of desire is left if the Other, precisely, can be said not to exist?

583. #583

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

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

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

     the relation of the subject to the big O begin, in so far as - in the mode in which a division is produced - the O barred is given. That in relation to this big O, it is an S barred which comes to be established, and that the remainder is given there by a small o

584. #584

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.124

     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.

     Elimination then from the Other. From the Other. What does that mean, the Other, with a capital O, in so far as here it is eliminated? It is eliminated qua closed and unified field.

585. #585

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.258

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that perversion is structurally intelligible as the attempt to reconnect jouissance and the body that have been disjuncted by the signifying intervention constitutive of the subject, with the objet petit a (small o) serving as the topological and structural key to this reconnection, while the sadistic act paradigmatically illustrates how the perverse subject, in Verleugnung, becomes the instrument of a jouissance located in the Other rather than knowing itself as the subject of that jouissance.

     It is at the level of the Other, with a capital O of course, that he brings about this subversion, in regulating… the relations of the body to the soul

586. #586

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.236

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that jouissance as a third function is topologically located at the locus of objet petit a, and that perversion—unlike neurosis or the master/slave dialectic—constitutes an experimental, subject-driven inquiry into jouissance by seeking the partial objects that escape signifying alienation; sadism and masochism are reframed as researches along the path of the sexual act rather than natural gender attributes.

     The jouissance that he aims at is that of the Other, in so far as he is perhaps the only remainder of it.

587. #587

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.89

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 8: Wednesday 18 January 1967**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that castration is not a biological or imaginary fact but the logical result of language's constitutive inadequation to sexual reality: at the level of Bedeutung, language reduces sex to the binary of having/not-having the phallus, and it is precisely this structural lack that grounds the o-object (objet petit a) and distinguishes the alienating operation of logical subjectivity from the alienating operation of unconscious sexual meaning.

     where there intervenes - as such - the function of the Other in so far as we ought to mark it as barred

588. #588

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.80

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 8: Wednesday 18 January 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that alienation is the pivotal operation through which the Freudian unconscious must be understood: by situating the Other as the locus of the word (and hence as barred, S(O)), he reframes the cogito's subject as inherently split and repressing, displacing both Cartesian self-transparency and object-relational nostalgia for primitive unity in favour of a logical articulation of the subject's constitutive dependence on the symbolic order.

     the function of the Other (as I write it with this big O placed in the top left corner of our board today) is its the determining function.

589. #589

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.115

     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.

     the Other as such - I am saying: this locus of the Other, in so far as the need for the guarantee of a truth evokes it - the other as such is, as I might say, if you will permit this word that I have improvised: fractured.

590. #590

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.137

     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.

     does this third element not have some relation with what we have designated as the division of the Other itself, the S (Ø)?

591. #591

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.271

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire structurally emerges from the gap between demand and need within language, that unconscious desire is constituted as "desire-not" (désirpas) through a broken link in the discourse of the Other, and that fantasy functions not as content within the unconscious discourse but as an axiom — a "truth-meaning" — that anchors the transformation-rules of neurotic desire.

     desire is the desire of the Other. Its break is produced at the locus of the Other, in so far as it is to the locus of the Other that the demand is addressed.

592. #592

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.213

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the sexual act constitutes the founding impossibility (the "holed One") from which all truth, symptom, and signification emerge, while identifying the big Other not with spirit but with the body as the primary site of inscription — thereby grounding the Symbolic in a Real that cannot be formally proved.

     The Other, when all is said and done, and if you have not already guessed it, the Other here, as it is written, is the **body**!

593. #593

     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.

     this field of the Other of alienation - this field of the Other which introduces us to the Other of the O barred, which is also the field of the Other in which the truth is presented for us

594. #594

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

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > S *W* S

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces signifier B as the signifier of sterility—that which marks the failure of the signifier's self-relation to generate meaning—and situates it within the Universe of discourse via the 'little diamond' (lozenge), anticipating the full elaboration of the subject's relation to the Other throughout Seminar XIV.

     my little diamond in order to say that B forms part of A, that it has relations with it whose richness I will certainly have to bring into play, for you, throughout this year

595. #595

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.249

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that jouissance is constitutively separated from the body, and that it is precisely this disjunction—marked by the barred Other—that grounds the question of jouissance in the sexual act; perversion responds directly to this question (via objects a), while neurosis merely sustains desire, making the perverse act and the neurotic act structurally distinct.

     the disjunction between jouissance and the body. It is in as much... as the masochist... comes to subtract, as I might say, from the field of the Other, what remains available for him in terms of a certain operation of jouissance.

596. #596

     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.

     Why is there this Other (with a capital O)? What is the position of this strange double that – you should note - the single takes on?

597. #597

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.7

     **Seminar 1: Wednesday 16 November 1966**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the subject originates through the cut — topologically modeled on the cross-cap/projective plane — whereby the o-object is separated and Urverdrängung (primal repression) is defined as what a signifier represents for another signifier; the barred subject emerges only in alienated form, and desire is re-formulated not as the essence of man but as the essence of reality, displacing Spinoza's anthropology into a strictly structural, a-theological account.

     the subject can only be established in a relation of lack to this o which is from the Other, except by wanting to be situated in the Other, also not to have it except amputated from this o-object.

598. #598

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.261

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that masochism exemplifies the fundamental economy of perversion: the masochist's identification with the rejected o-object and his demonstrative capture of jouissance reveals that sadism is not the reversal of masochism but its naive counterpart—the sadist, believing himself master, unknowingly occupies the masochistic position of the o-object, enslaved to jouissance from the outside.

     the masochist, after all, knows well that it matters little to him what is happening in the field of the Other. Of course it is necessary that the other should play the game, but he knows the jouissance that he has to draw from it.

599. #599

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.194

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

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

     to recognise here in this essential function which requires in opposition, as if in a mirror, the field of the Other to this field of the enigmatic One

600. #600

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

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

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

     The Other is the set of bodies, from the moment that the operation of social struggle simply introduces the fact that the relations of bodies are henceforth dominated by this something which, moreover, is called the law.

601. #601

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

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

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

     it is necessary that it should be in this place in order to question. I mean at the locus of the Other. For one does not question from any other place.

602. #602

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.101

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 9: Wednesday 25 January 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's theory of the preconscious as the agency that 'knows' one is asleep—and Zhuangzi's butterfly dream—to argue that the 'I am only dreaming' move masks the reality of the gaze, establishing the Objet petit a (as gaze/stain) as constitutively correlated with the I, and positioning topology as the rigorous framework for articulating the o-object's structure via cutting operations on surfaces.

     desire is the desire of the Other, and to show the suspense in which the status of desire is left if the Other, precisely, can be said not to exist?

603. #603

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.50

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Klein group's four-term structure provides the formal skeleton for both the metaphor/repression formula and the unconscious-as-language thesis, and that S(Ø)—the signifier of the barred Other—marks the constitutive 'One too many' that replaces the absent Universe of discourse, linking the logical structure of the subject to the Cartesian cogito.

     the mark or the index S(Ø)… the presence of what I called the One too many (Un-en-trop), which is also what is lacking, what is lacking in the signifying chain, in so far… as there is no Universe of discourse.

604. #604

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.89

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 8: Wednesday 18 January 1967**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that castration is not an empirical but a logical-structural fact: at the level of Bedeutung (meaning), language constitutively fails to articulate sexual reality, reducing sexual polarity to having/not-having the phallus, and this failure—the "minus phi" of phallic signification—is precisely what the analytic operation of alienation reveals, pointing toward the logical status of the objet petit a as the core-object around which the subject turns.

     the function of the Other in so far as we ought to mark it as barred … if something of the Other, which is related to sexuality, is manifested starting from unconscious thoughts

605. #605

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.80

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 8: Wednesday 18 January 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan re-articulates alienation as the pivotal operation that redefines the unconscious subject in relation to the Other-as-locus-of-the-word, arguing that the Freudian step is only graspable by tracing the consequences of the Cartesian cogito and by replacing the mythological "primitive unity" reading of psychoanalysis with the rigorous formula S(Ⓞ): the Other has no existence except as the site where assertions are posited as veracious, making the barred Other the nodal point of the dialectic of desire.

     the function of the Other (as I write it with this big O placed in the top left corner of our board today) is its the determining function.

606. #606

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

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

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

     this additional unit, uncountable as such, which is essential for a whole series of structures, which are precisely the ones on which I founded, since the year 1960, my whole operation (opératoire) of identification.

607. #607

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.271

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire is structurally constituted by its displacement from demand through language, making it inherently the desire of the Other and necessarily unsatisfied; fantasy is reframed not as a content to be interpreted but as a truth-meaning axiom within the neurotic's unconscious discourse, supplying for the lack of desire.

     desire is the desire of the Other. Its break is produced at the locus of the Other, in so far as it is to the locus of the Other that the demand is addressed.

608. #608

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.223

     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 relation of the Other, of the big Other, to the partner which remains to him, namely, what we started from — and it is not for nothing that I called it small o

609. #609

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.199

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

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

     it is necessary that it should be in this place in order to question. I mean at the locus of the Other. For one does not question from any other place.

610. #610

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.3

     **Seminar 1: Wednesday 16 November 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar XIV by introducing "the logic of phantasy" as a formal project: the matheme $◇a is posed as a logical relation between the barred subject and the objet petit a, with the diamond (poinçon) encoding biconditional implication (if and only if), and fantasy's structural surface—identified as desire and reality in seamless continuity—is topologically modeled via the cross-cap and Möbius strip, displacing the imaginary register in favor of a properly logical determination.

     Separated by a vertical stroke, it represents a double relation which can be read in the first place as greater (>) or lesser (<): $ smaller or indeed greater than big O. $ included or in fact excluded from big O.

611. #611

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.14

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board

     Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the paradox of self-reference (the smallest whole number not written on the board) to establish a foundational axiom for his theory of the signifier: that no signifier can signify itself. This axiom, when introduced into the Universe of discourse, generates a structural gap — a specification that simultaneously belongs to and threatens to exceed the totality of what can be said — linking the logic of writing, the Graph of Desire, and the structure of the unconscious as language.

     this small o [sic] that in a sense one can identify to the locus of the Other, which in fact is the locus where there is produced everything that can be described as a statement in the broadest sense of the term, namely, what constitutes what I, incidentally, called the treasury of the signifier

612. #612

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.137

     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.

     does this third element not have some relation with what we have designated as the division of the Other itself, the S (Ø)?

613. #613

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.242

     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.

     This is where the introduction of the function of the big Other ought to be of service to us... a *for the Other,* with a capital O. Namely, - which we had to evoke first – namely, the locus from which the message returns to him in an inverted form.

614. #614

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.249

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that jouissance is constitutively separated from the body, and that this separation is the structural ground on which both the perverse act (which directly questions jouissance via the objet petit a) and the neurotic act (which merely sustains desire) must be rigorously distinguished; masochism is proposed as the exemplary perverse structure that lets us make this distinction.

     it is through this that he comes to subtract, as I might say, from the field of the Other, what remains available for him in terms of a certain operation of jouissance.

615. #615

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.205

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Bergler's concept of "oral neurosis" and its triad of masochistic mechanism as a critical foil to develop his own theory of the oral drive, distinguishing raw aggression, narcissistic aggression, and pseudo-aggression, and then redefines masochism not as assumption of pain but as the subject taking the position of the object (objet petit a as waste/remainder) in a contractual scenario involving the big Other and jouissance.

     this jouissance is closely linked to a manoeuvre of the Other which, I would say, is most commonly expressed in the form of contract … the Other with a capital O – plays in it. The Other, the locus in which there is deployed on this occasion a word which is a contract word.

616. #616

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.84

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 8: Wednesday 18 January 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Cartesian cogito, read through the lens of alienation, reveals that the "I am" is grounded not in a thinking subject but in the grammatical structure of language itself—the fallen Other—such that unconscious thinking (the Es/dream-work) follows a logic structured like a language, not a sovereign ego, and this is confirmed by Freud's analysis of dream-work as the grammatical articulation of the drive.

     No one, as one of my friends has written recently, believes in this Other. In our time, from the most devout people to the most libertine - if this term still has a sense everyone is an atheist.

617. #617

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.124

     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.

     Elimination then from the Other. From the Other. What does that mean, the Other, with a capital O, in so far as here it is eliminated? It is eliminated qua closed and unified field.

618. #618

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

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

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

     in the mode in which a division is produced – the O barred is given. That in relation to this big O, it is an S barred which comes to be established, and that the remainder is given there by a small o which is an irreducible element of it

619. #619

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.19

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > B ◊ A

     Theoretical move: Lacan deploys Russell's paradox not to endorse set-theoretic logic but to mark its limit: by grounding his own inquiry in the Universe of discourse and the axiom that the signifier cannot signify itself, he argues that the contradiction Russell identifies is a product of *saying* rather than *writing*, and that the logic of fantasy is more fundamental than any formalised logic derived from set theory.

     B which I do not know, but which I have begun to suppose forms part of the Universe of discourse

620. #620

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.11

     **Seminar 1: Wednesday 16 November 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the unconscious cannot be reduced to a "language of reduced language" (analogy-based metaphor) because no signifier can signify itself, which entails—via Russell's paradox / set-theoretic axiom of specification—that there is no closed universe of discourse, and that the One of the subject must be distinguished from countable totality, grounding the constitutive lack of the subject.

     in the Universe of discourse there is nothing that contains everything

621. #621

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.244

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the sexual act is constitutively structured by the disjunction between body and jouissance, with the subject emerging precisely at that gap; the woman's body functions as a metaphor for masculine jouissance, while the phallus (distinct from the penis) marks the withdrawal of jouissance into exchange value — yet feminine jouissance remains radically unresolved and adrift, beyond any structural accounting.

     A little plaque can serve as a body for us. With a certain number of things, in effect, written on it. This is the function of the body, since we have recalled that it is the locus of the Other.

622. #622

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.193

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the golden ratio formula (1 + o = 1/o) as a matheme for the Objet petit a's incommensurability to sex, arguing that the iterative algebraic unfolding of this relation enacts both metonymy (the sliding chain) and metaphor (the substitution of the One for the enigma of sex), while grounding the operation of measurement in the unary stroke as the condition for the Other's locus.

     the locus of the Other, first of all, in so far as, as such, it introduces the duplication of the field of the *One*

623. #623

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.122

     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.

     the status of the Other, where it is evoked for us in the most urgent fashion, so as not to lead to precipitation and error, namely, the analytic situation

624. #624

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.57

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan constructs a Klein-group logic of four propositions derived from transformations of the Cartesian cogito — affirmative, two negations, and the full negation — arguing that the fourth term ("either I am not thinking or I am not") captures the subject of the unconscious, linking logical negation (De Morgan/Boolean) to the vel that structures the split subject.

     there is the Other. The Other, that with the sacrifice, one catches in the trap.

625. #625

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.194

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "sexual relation" does not exist as a consistent dyadic unity — it is structurally a hole or gap between the small o and the big Other — and uses the cauldron metaphor (from Freud's Witz) to indict analytic theory for triply refusing to acknowledge this void; the Oedipus myth is recruited to demonstrate that accessing full jouissance covers over a foundational rottenness that truth cannot tolerate.

     the field of the Other to this field of the enigmatic One ... the connotation, signifier of capital O barred, S(Ø)

626. #626

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.206

     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.

     the key to the neurotic position depends on this close relation to the demand of the Other, in so far as he tries to make it emerge

627. #627

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.187

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

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that jouissance-value originates from the lack instituted by the castration complex, which produces an irreversible reversal: jouissance becomes objectal (not narcissistic), the phallus functions as the unit marking the distance between Objet petit a and sex, and the o-object itself is revealed as the product of the operation of language — the "metaphorical child" of the One and the Other, born as refuse from inaugural repetition, and the foundational starting-point for rethinking logic and the analytic act.

     the locus of the Other, capital O - the locus where there is articulated the signifying chain and the truth that it supports.

628. #628

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.6

     **Seminar 1: Wednesday 16 November 1966**

     Theoretical move: Through topological figures (cross-cap, projective plane) and set-theoretic logic (Euler circles), Lacan argues that the subject originates not as a pre-given entity but is *engendered* by the signifier through a primary cut; the objet petit a is the first "Bedeutung" — the residue of the subject's alienation from the Other — and desire is redefined as the essence of *reality* rather than of man, displacing Spinoza's formula into a properly psychoanalytic, a-theological one.

     It is, in effect, this third dimension, in them, of the Other, that is involved, as such… What is the front or the back primarily at the locus of the Other, in the discourse of the Other, is played out there as heads or tails. This in no way concerns the subject, for the reason that as yet there is not one.

629. #629

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.73

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 7: Wednesday 11 January 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Cartesian cogito founds the subject as an empty set through the evasion of Being, and that this Verwerfung (foreclosure) of Being—reappearing in the Real—is the structural basis of alienation; the resultant "I am not" opens onto Freud's Id (Es), which Lacan re-articulates not as a person but as everything in the logical-grammatical structure of discourse that is not-I, grounding the drive's fantasy in that impersonal remainder.

     the rejection of the Other, in so far as this Other - the one that I signal with the capital O - is what has come in place of this questioning of Being

630. #630

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.262

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that masochism—not sadism—reveals the naked economy of perversion: the masochist's frantic identification with the rejected object (objet petit a) as the locus of jouissance is itself a demonstration that constitutes his jouissance, while the sadist, thinking himself master, unknowingly occupies the masochistic position as slave of the drive. Both perversions share the same logic as fantasy, linking perversion to neurosis.

     the masochist, after all, knows well that it matters little to him what is happening in the field of the Other.

631. #631

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.62

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 6: 21 December 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces a new logical operation (omega) that is irreducible to standard logical connectives—one where the conjunction of two truths yields the false—and identifies this operation with alienation, deploying it to articulate the distinctive logical structure of the unconscious as the relation between 'I do not think' and 'I am not', which allows a rigorous distinction between resistance and defence.

     what is prohibited for us in it, is exactly this sort of movement of thought which is properly that of the cogito, which just as much as analysis requires the Other (with a capital O)

632. #632

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.256

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the golden-ratio schema of objet petit a to articulate how perversion attempts to reconnect the body and jouissance that the signifying intervention (the subject-function) necessarily disjoins — with the sadist as the exemplary figure who, in Verleugnung, becomes the instrument of jouissance rather than its master, ultimately revealing that jouissance can only be located in the 'outside-the-body' part that is the o-object.

     The small o is this something ambiguous, which, however little it may belong to the body, to the individual object itself, it is in the field of the Other, and with good reason, because this is the field in which the subject is outlined

633. #633

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.227

     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.

     The body itself is, from the origin, this locus of the Other, in so far as it is there that, from the origin, there is inscribed the mark qua signifier.

634. #634

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.126

     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 sense of acting-out. I am asking you…something of the field of the eliminated Other, that I have just recalled, is manifested in the form of a truthful manifestation.

635. #635

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.233

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

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

     The Other is the set of bodies, from the moment that the operation of social struggle simply introduces the fact that the relations of bodies are henceforth dominated by this something which, moreover, is called the law.

636. #636

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.236

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that jouissance as a third function is topologically located at the locus of objet petit a — the partial objects that escape signifying domination — and uses the master/slave dialectic to demonstrate that jouissance subsists on the side of the slave, not the master; perversion is then recast as a systematic, subject-driven inquiry into this residual jouissance of the Other, while sadism and masochism are reframed as researches along the path of the sexual relation rather than natural gendered dispositions.

     The jouissance that he aims at is that of the Other, in so far as he is perhaps the only remainder of it.

637. #637

     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.

     there is within it a question of an Other qua field of the sexual act. And then, that this Other, here… is this field of the Other of alienation - this field of the Other which introduces us to the Other of the O barred

638. #638

     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.

     why is there this Other (with a capital O)? What is the position of this strange double that – you should note - the single takes on? Because the Other (with a capital O), for its part, is not two.

639. #639

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.115

     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.

     the Other as such — I am saying: this locus of the Other, in so far as the need for the guarantee of a truth evokes it — the other as such is, as I might say... fractured.

640. #640

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.213

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the sexual act is constitutively impossible (there is no sexual act), yet it remains the sole ground of truth; the symptom is the knot at the hole of the 'One', the Other is identified with the body as the primordial locus of inscription, and all truth—including ideology and perception—is structured by this foundational gap.

     The Other, when all is said and done, and if you have not already guessed it, the Other here, as it is written, is the **body**!

641. #641

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.92

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 9: Wednesday 25 January 1967**

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the logic of the phantasy by linking alienation (the forced choice between "I do not think" and "I am not") to castration as the primordial marking of the Other: the barred Other (S(Ⓞ)) does not mean the Other is absent but that it is marked—by lack, by castration—which grounds desire through the objet petit a as cause, and against which all sexuality and philosophy defensively operate.

     Sexuality, as it is lived, as it operates, is, in this respect, something fundamentally… something which represents a prohibiting oneself from following the consequences of this truth: that there is no Other.

642. #642

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.132

     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.

     capital O. What is capital O? If the sexual act is what we are taught, as signifier, it is the mother … we are going to give her the value One.

643. #643

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.105

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 1 February 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses an interrupted seminar session (deferred by a strike and Jakobson's presence) to sketch the theoretical stakes of the year's work on the *Logic of the Fantasy*: the Es/Unconscious cannot be substantified as an "outlaw ego"; its proper status must be derived from the barred Other as locus of speech, while topology (Möbius strip → torus) is introduced as a demonstration that structure is real, not metaphorical—culminating in the question of what authorises a teaching addressed to analysts who do not yet exist.

     it is starting from the barred Other, that is involved, that we are going to have not to rethink it, but quite simply to think it. And that this barred Other, in so far as we start from it as the locus in which there is situated the affirmation of the word

644. #644

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.200

     **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.

     presupposes, simply by being stated in this way, an Other, that for its part knows it before it has been perceived. We know that even Descartes makes use of this Other to guarantee at least the truth of his scientific starting point.

645. #645

     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.

     it is from its field, from the field of the Other that this signifier has been torn, namely, the o-object

646. #646

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.29

     **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.

     the simple fact that I, I am reporting it to you, that I am raising it to the field of the Other, effectively makes of it a witticism.

647. #647

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.154

     **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.

     a predicate that can be established in the field of the Other. So then, that what is involved, through this effect, of the 'all' in so far as it is stated, involves something completely different to that towards which... identification does not go. Namely, towards the recognition come from the Other

648. #648

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.192

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the "events" of May '68 as occasion to articulate the structural relation between the Other as locus of knowledge, truth as what is refused from the symbolic and returns in the real as symptom, and the subject's secondary determination by knowledge — positioning psychoanalysis as a radical modification of the subject-Other relation that goes beyond mere discovery.

     I defined it strictly as a locus, the locus where the word has taken its place... it is a quite indispensable topological function to bring out the radical and logical structure that is at stake in what I called earlier this knot or this bubble

649. #649

     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.

     there is someone who already knows all of that, everything that is going to happen. Naturally not the analyst. But there is someone.

650. #650

     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.

     Thus it is confirmed that the truth makes itself known through the Other… it is in relation to the Other which no longer has anything mystical or transcendental about it that this is produced.

651. #651

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.140

     **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.

     fixing the subject somewhere in the field of the Other, whose formula is the following: $ (S V S°)

652. #652

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.103

     **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.

     in as much as, as subject there is none other than this Other to whom the whole discourse is left

653. #653

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.188

     **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.

     these terms: knowledge, truth, subject and the relation to the Other, there you are, there is no word to put all four of them together.

654. #654

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.33

     **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.

     there is not in my language an Other of the Other. The Other in this case being written with a capital O. There is no... true about the true.

655. #655

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.53

     **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.

     the truth is at the locus of the Other, the inscription of the signifier.

656. #656

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · 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 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 reference to the Other taken as such is the one, also very farcical, which was given at least by a classical form of religious direction

657. #657

     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 dimension of the Other, in so far as the act bears witness to something, cannot be eliminated either.

658. #658

     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.

     there is a - call it what you wish the omniscient, the Other - there is someone who already knows all of that

659. #659

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.188

     **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.

     these terms: knowledge, truth, subject and the relation to the Other, there you are, there is no word to put all four of them together

660. #660

     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.

     Thus it is confirmed that the truth makes itself known through the Other. This justifies that it has always emerged in this way. What we know more, is that it is in relation to the Other which no longer has anything mystical or transcendental about it that this is produced.

661. #661

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.69

     **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.

     since moreover it is from its field, from the field of the Other that this signifier has been torn, namely, the o-object

662. #662

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.169

     **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 argues that language cannot be reduced to an act of the subject, and pivots to the logic of quantification to show how the universal proposition always secretly harbours an irreducible "stating subject" that cannot be elided — which is precisely what makes quantificational logic (and psychoanalysis) interesting beyond formal demonstration.

     in the measure that language is not an act of the subject, I think that it ought to be defined as being the locus of the act of the other.

663. #663

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.53

     **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.

     the truth is at the locus of the Other, the inscription of the signifier.

664. #664

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.33

     **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.

     there is not in my language an Other of the Other. The Other in this case being written with a capital O. There is no... true about the true.

665. #665

     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.

     the reference to the Other taken as such is the one, also very farcical, which was given at least by a classical form of religious direction

666. #666

     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.

     an Other, that for its part knows it before it has been perceived. We know that even Descartes makes use of this Other to guarantee at least the truth of his scientific starting point.

667. #667

     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 dimension of the Other, in so far as the act bears witness to something, cannot be eliminated either.

668. #668

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.105

     **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).

     only sees in it relations which are properly those that I designate when I handle this algebra: the $, the o, indeed the O and the i(o).

669. #669

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.29

     **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.

     I am raising it to the field of the Other, effectively makes of it a witticism

670. #670

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.154

     **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.

     a predicate that can be established in the field of the Other... in nothing of what we can inscribe of ourselves in the field of the Other, can we recognise ourselves.

671. #671

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.140

     **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.

     fixing the subject somewhere in the field of the Other, whose formula is the following: $ (S V S°).

672. #672

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.192

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the unconscious is structured like a language such that truth is produced at the precise point where the subject refuses to know—what is rejected from the Symbolic reappears in the Real as symptom—and that psychoanalysis contributes a radical new dimension to the subject-Other relation by showing that knowledge is only constituted through recognition by the Other, while scientific knowledge, purified of this relation, functions as a complement to (rather than identity with) the Real.

     I defined it strictly as a locus, the locus where the word has taken its place… All knowledge comes to us from the Other

673. #673

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.79

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 11 December 1968**

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

     It is therefore first of all in so far as the Other is not consistent that stating turns into demand and this is what gives its bearing to what in the big completed graph

674. #674

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.220

     Seminar 12: Wednesday 26 February 1969 > Seminar 13: Wednesday 5 March 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the sexual relationship cannot be grasped through biological, logical, or identificatory schemas (active/passive, male/female, +/−), and that Freudian logic ultimately reduces sex to the formal mark of castration as constitutive lack; this requires distinguishing the Other (as terrain cleared of enjoyment, site of the unconscious structured like a language) from Das Ding (the intolerable imminence of jouissance/the neighbour), and poses the central question: is the Woman the locus of desire (the Other) or the locus of enjoyment (the Thing)?

     The Other is only its cleared out terreplein... It is at the level of the Other that those who take the trouble will be able to situate... the existence of language. It is there, in the Other, that there is the unconscious structured like a language.

675. #675

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.350

     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.

     this structure which is the one that I am aiming at to start again from today, the original structure, the one that I called that of an Other, to show where, through the incidence of psychoanalysis, it is going, to reveal a quite different other, namely the o.

676. #676

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.329

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the phallus functions as the "missing signifier" because sexual enjoyment (jouissance) is radically foreclosed from symbolization and can only reappear in the real; the castration complex, illustrated through the case of Little Hans, marks the precise joint between the imaginary and symbolic where this structural lack is registered, with the phobia functioning as a symptomatic "paper tiger" that mediates the subject's intolerable anxiety before the phallic mother.

     a point of his determination as a field limited by a relationship to what is structured as Other... the significance of the Other qua structured and holed is something different to what we can metaphorically call the signifier that holes it, namely, the phallus.

677. #677

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

     Seminar 24: Wednesday 18 June 1969

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

     I am writing again the 1, this circle that we first used to write the Other. And in this circle, taken here to function as a set, two members, the 1, and then something that, if it is still the Other, is to be taken here under the heading of set.

678. #678

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.303

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

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

     I therefore first defined the o-object as essentially founded on the effects of what happens in the field of the Other, in the symbolic field, in the field of arranging, in the field of order

679. #679

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.343

     Seminar 21: Wednesday 21 May 1969

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

     Any enjoyment is only thinkable for him as a treaty with the Other as whole always imagined by him as fundamental, with whom he deals.

680. #680

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.191

     Seminar 12: Wednesday 26 February 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's dream of the burning child as a pivot to argue that the proper analytic question is not "what does the dream mean?" but "where is the flaw (desire) in what is said?"—and then formalizes the relationship between Knowledge and Truth via the golden-ratio proportion (o/1-o = 1/o), establishing the objet petit a as the structural hinge that articulates desire, knowledge, and truth in the unconscious.

     it is a desire that burns this child, but in the field of the Other, in the field of the one to whom he addresses himself, to the father on this occasion

681. #681

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.112

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan reinterprets Pascal's wager by displacing its stakes from God's existence to the existence of the subject ("I"), and identifies the wager's true structure as hinging on the objet petit a as cause of the subject — thereby reframing the decision-theoretic form of the wager as a psychoanalytic problem about the subject's relation to the o-cause.

     we are entirely given over to the tradition of the book. What is at stake in Pascal's wager is the following.

682. #682

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.334

     Seminar 21: Wednesday 21 May 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that enjoyment (jouissance) is structurally excluded from the symbolic system of knowledge, yet is thereby realised as the Real; this exclusion—figured through the phallic signifier—organises all clinical structures (neurosis/psychosis), and the triad of enjoyment, the Other as locus of knowledge, and the objet petit a provides the proper framework for understanding both infantile biography and the analytic encounter.

     the Other as locus where that is known... There is somewhere where everything that has happened is known.

683. #683

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.3

     **Seminar 1: Wednesday 13 November 1968**

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

     I chose the title From an Other to the other (D'un Autre à l'autre) to indicate the major reference points around which my discourse ought, properly speaking, to turn.

684. #684

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.356

     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.

     this Other, this unique locus where knowledge is supposed to connect up, does not exist. Nothing indicates that the Other is One.

685. #685

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.268

     Seminar 15: Wednesday 19 March 1969 > **Seminar 17: Wednesday 23 April 1969**

     Theoretical move: Lacan stages a confrontation between Hegel's Selbstbewusstsein and the Freudian unconscious to argue that thinking is constitutively a censorship of an originary "I do not know," and that desire (to know) is born from this nodal failure of knowledge — a topology illustrated via the Klein bottle and Möbius strip, and clinically anchored in free association and the objet petit a.

     It is in so far as in the traumatic phantasy this desire of the Other cannot be formulated, that desire takes seed in what can be called... the desire (to know).

686. #686

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.38

     Am I making myself understood?

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

     a first reading of this relation to an O taken as Other, the locus of the code, namely, of what must already be supposed as a treasury of language

687. #687

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.72

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 11 December 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the logical structure of the field of the Other — its constitutive incompleteness and the necessary exteriority of the subject-signifier (S2) — to reground the "I" not in being but in the truth-function of speech, showing that the subject can only be represented outside the totality of signifiers, a structure that anticipates his formalization of sexuation via universal/particular quantifiers placed "outside the field."

     it is before the Other as allowing a logical failing to be circumscribed, as locus of an original flaw brought to bear on the word in so far as it might respond - that the 'I' appears as, firstly subjected

688. #688

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.393

     Seminar 25: Wednesday 25 June 1969

     Theoretical move: In this final session of Seminar XVI at the École Normale Supérieure, Lacan argues that a genuine student revolt would require attacking the relationship between the subject and knowledge at its root—distinguishing s(O) (neurotic) from the intact signifier of O (pervert)—while contextualizing this within a critique of the University discourse and announcing his expulsion from the ENS.

     what should be done, is to reconnect what is on the top left, the S, signifier of O.

689. #689

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.258

     Seminar 15: Wednesday 19 March 1969 > **Seminar 17: Wednesday 23 April 1969**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the imaginary (body image, ideal norms, Utopia) provides the historical ground for pre-scientific "knowledge," but genuine science — including the Freudian rationalist doctrine — breaks with the imaginary by grounding itself in the symbolic/mathematical function (x = f(y)), where meaning is retroactively determined by the point of arrival in a signifying chain.

     does the subject, in perversion, himself take care to supply for this flaw in the Other

690. #690

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.249

     Seminar 15: Wednesday 19 March 1969 > Seminar 16: Wednesday 26 March 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the perverse drives (scoptophilic, sadomasochistic) are fundamentally asymmetrical and structured around the topology of the Objet petit a: each drive operates not as a return of its counterpart but as a supplement to the Other, aimed at producing or evacuating the jouissance of the Other rather than of the subject—a logic that makes the pervert a "defender of the faith" of the Other's jouissance.

     It is in this field, the field of the Other qua deserted by enjoyment that the exhibitionistic act is posited to give rise there to the look.

691. #691

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.123

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

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

     the measure of this field of the Other as 1, namely, something different to its pure and simple inscription as unary trait.

692. #692

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.95

     **Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 January 1969**

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

     It is around the desire of the Other that the demand of the discourse...converges towards the desire of the Other.

693. #693

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.66

     **Seminar 4: Wednesday 4 December 1968**

     Theoretical move: By applying a Russell's-paradox-style logical operation to the big Other, Lacan demonstrates that the subject—defined as the subset of all signifiers that are not elements of themselves—cannot be universalised: the point where the subject is signified falls necessarily *outside* the Other, establishing the structural impossibility of a universe of discourse.

     what I ended on the last time is the other end of the questioning that we have to pose to big O, to big 0 in so far as we impose on it the condition of not containing itself.

694. #694

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.52

     **Seminar 4: Wednesday 4 December 1968**

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

     our last remarks about the Other, in short, about what I called the big Other. I ended by putting forward certain schémas… the Other, this big Other, O, in its function as I already approached it, the Other enclosed no knowledge that one can presume… will one day be absolute.

695. #695

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.304

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the anaclitic relation is structurally grounded in the operation of objet petit a as a masking of the Other, that perversion consists in returning o to the big Other, and that phobia reveals the true function of anxiety-objects: the substitution of a frightening signifier for the object of anxiety, marking the passage from the imaginary (narcissism) to the Symbolic field.

     to bring back these effects of the o in the imaginary to the Other, the field that they start from...the big Other

696. #696

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.127

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the golden ratio (φ, written 'o') and the Fibonacci series to demonstrate the structural reciprocity between the divided subject and objet petit a, arguing that the 'I' of enjoyment is necessarily excluded from any totalised field of knowledge, and that the question of subjective existence must be posed impersonally — 'does it exist?' rather than 'I exist'.

     is what conditions the distinction of the 'I' as sustaining this field of the Other and being able to totalise itself as a field of knowledge

697. #697

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.116

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

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

     this Thy is addressed to a faceless Other. There is no need for him to have one at all for it to be addressed to him, if we know how to distinguish this field of the Other from the relationship to one's fellow.

698. #698

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.64

     **Seminar 4: Wednesday 4 December 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the truth "speaks I" (rather than being spoken by a subject), and formalises this through the ordered pair of signifiers to show that the subject is constituted as infinite repetition within—and thus excluded from—absolute knowledge; this logical structure grounds both the analytic rule of free association and the link between the subject supposed to know, transference, and objet petit a.

     whether a knowledge is conceivable that reunites this conjunction of two subsets in a single one, in such a way that they can be under the name of O, of the big O

699. #699

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.41

     Am I making myself understood?

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

     it is precisely appended to this function of the big O which is the one that we have to question today… What does it want? What does the Other want?

700. #700

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.139

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

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

     how can we, for even an instant, when it is a matter of a game imaged by Pascal's pen, neglect the function of grace, namely, that of the desire of the Other.

701. #701

     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.

     he needs nothing less than the big Other. When the Eternal Father is no longer there to fulfill this role, there is no longer anyone.

702. #702

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.147

     Seminar 12: Wednesday 26 February 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan retroactively illuminates the trajectory of Seminar VII (Ethics of Psychoanalysis) from his 1969 vantage point, arguing that the Freud event grounds ethics in the Real—approached through the conjoint Symbolic/Imaginary—and that "truth has the structure of fiction" (via Bentham's theory of fictions) is the essential starting point for any psychoanalytic ethics, correlating the pleasure principle with the function of the unconscious.

     my title, for example, From an Other to the other, under which my discourse for this year is presented.

703. #703

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.374

     Seminar 24: Wednesday 18 June 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the differential structures of hysteria and obsessional neurosis by mapping each onto a foundational "model" (woman/master) and showing how each neurotic subject installs a Subject Supposed to Know in place of that model's constitutive ignorance, while grounding the whole analysis in the set-theoretic logic of the Other and the o-object.

     This same indefinitely repeated structure of the 1, circle 1, circle 1 and so on, this is what defines the Other. Namely, this is the very thing that constitutes the agency of the o-object as such.

704. #704

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.147

     Seminar 10: Wednesday 5 February 1969

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

     the enigmatic Other, the one involved in short as to whether he holds the wager or not, ought to find himself in that place, God exists or does not exist.

705. #705

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.161

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

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

     it is on this that the choice is brought to bear, and in this case it is plausible... to wager, and to wager in the sense that Pascal proposes... one cannot even be sure of the existence of the Other.

706. #706

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.246

     Seminar 15: Wednesday 19 March 1969 > Seminar 16: Wednesday 26 March 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that the o-object is fundamentally an extimate topological structure that functions as the locus of captured enjoyment within the field of the Other, and that the pervert's clinical function is precisely to fill the hole that this structure opens in the Other—making him, paradoxically, a "defender of the faith" rather than a contemner of the partner.

     The locus of the Other as evacuated of enjoyment is not simply a clear place, a burned circle… it is very precisely what introduces into it this lack, this bar, this gap, this hole that can be distinguished by the title of the o-object.

707. #707

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.176

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

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

     it is by a purely arbitrary, schematic and signifying act that we define it as One, namely, faith in what? Faith in our thinking.

708. #708

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.15

     **Seminar 1: Wednesday 13 November 1968**

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

     a reference to the field where the discourse of the subject would take on its consistency, namely, to the field of the Other that I defined as this locus where every discourse at least posits itself in order to be able to offer itself to what is or not its refutation.

709. #709

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.47

     Am I making myself understood?

     Theoretical move: By mapping Russell's paradox onto the relation of the subject (S) to the big Other (O), Lacan demonstrates that the Other cannot be totalized as a closed code or complete set of discourse, and that this structural impossibility — topologically figured by the cross-cap and Klein bottle — is precisely what produces the split subject and positions the objet petit a as the hole in the Other.

     The big O, as such, has in itself this flaw that one cannot know what it contains if it is not its own signifier, is the decisive question in which there is highlighted what is involved in the flaw of knowledge.

710. #710

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.98

     **Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 January 1969**

     Theoretical move: Lacan recasts Pascal's wager not as a question about God's existence but as a question about the existence of the "I" (subject), thereby relocating the wager's stake from theology to the uncertainty of subjectivity itself.

     God is, there is absolutely no kind of doubt about that, that absolutely does not prove that he exists. The question does not arise.

711. #711

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.385

     Seminar 25: Wednesday 25 June 1969

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

     the logical definition that I gave at our second last meeting of the Other as empty set and of its indispensable absorption of a unary trait

712. #712

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.291

     Seminar 18: Wednesday 30 April 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the stain/gaze as the structuring lack in the field of vision that inserts vision into desire via the o-object, then leverages this to distinguish perversion (where objet a fills/masks the phallic lack, restoring o to the Other) from neurosis (where the signified of the barred Other reveals the conflictual articulation at the level of logic itself), with the neologism 'hommelle/famil' marking the transition between these clinical structures.

     presents the big Other, the sign as giving the term of what is posited at the level of enunciating, of desiring enunciating. The fact is that the response that it gives is very exactly the flaw that this desire represents.

713. #713

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.323

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

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

     It is in so far as it is inscribed in the field of the Other that it subsists

714. #714

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.314

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan grounds the subject's structure in the logic of the signifier as self-othering: the signifier can only represent the subject for another signifier, and this irreducible alterity of the signifier to itself constitutes the big Other as necessarily incomplete (holed by objet petit a), while the subject is redefined as "what effaces its tracks," making the trace-effacement the originary operation from which the signifier and language emerge.

     to inscribe at the locus of O, this locus which is the big Other... the O is not complete, is not identifiable in any case to a 1, to a whole.

715. #715

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.209

     Seminar 11: Wednesday 15 April 1970 > (16) That's fine.

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a scholarly exchange on Sellin's biblical exegesis and Freud's reliance on it to probe the structural problem of textual latency and unconscious inscription, while the discussion of Hosea's conjugal metaphor (Yahweh as spouse/Baal) is positioned as an archaic precursor to the logic of the Other's desire and the formation of a community through symbolic substitution.

     there revolves something of what I had begun to announce earlier

716. #716

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.44

     *[A porter appears]*

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

     The belly of the Other, of the capital O, is full of them. This belly, like a monstrous Trojan horse, is what gives rise to the phantasy of total knowledge.

717. #717

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.212

     Seminar 11: Wednesday 15 April 1970 > Seminar 12: Wednesday 13 May 1970

     Theoretical move: In this informal Q&A transcription, Lacan defends the centrality of affect in his work by distinguishing his translation of Freud's Vorstellungsrepräsentanz from the 'ideational representative' reading, argues that repression displaces rather than suppresses affect, and retrospectively links the Discourse of the Master to his 1962 Seminar on Anxiety while positioning Kierkegaard as a historical moment in the conceptualization of anxiety within an economy of jouissance.

     You have spoken about the Other as the treasury of signifiers, and you have said that there was no confronting it, because given that free association is not coherent it is not the Other.

718. #718

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

     Seminar 10: Wednesday 8 April 1970

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

     it is the someone from somewhere, from nowhere, who must be manipulating everything. Let that help us to put the 'no smoke without fire' at the same level as 'no prayer without God'

719. #719

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

     *[A porter appears]*

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

     What has a body and does not exist? Answer - the big Other.

720. #720

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.64

     *[A porter appears]*

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

     a subject identifying himself as being object of enjoyment. In the erotic practice that I am evoking... Whose enjoyment? That of the one who carries what I called the glory of the mark? Is it sure that this means the enjoyment of the Other? Certainly it is one of the ways the Other enters his world.

721. #721

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

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

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

     by allowing the Other to speak, and precisely in so far as it is the locus of repressed knowledge... Under the Other, it is the one where loss is produced

722. #722

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

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

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

     He can only be at the place at which he has to be, on the top right, at the place of the big Other, is that not so? Very precisely there knowledge no longer carries any weight.

723. #723

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.277

     Seminar 15: Wednesday 17 June 1970

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that truth operates not as an open revelation but as a hidden debt that conditions discourse, and that the master signifier emerges not from a heroic struggle for prestige but from something as contingent and shameful as shame itself—a move that reframes the Four Discourses as radical structural functions rather than a deterministic model of historical progression.

     the locus of the Other is designed, as I have always said, for truth to be inscribed there, that is to say, everything that is of that order, the false, even the lie

724. #724

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.6

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

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

     I constructed a circle marked with the sign O, that is to say the field of the big Other... the intervention of the signifier makes it emerge as a field.

725. #725

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.240

     **ANALYTICON**

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

     what psychoanalysis reveals is that our desire, our desire... for it we are dependent on what I call the locus of the Other, in so far as it is there that there is inscribed through destination, because it is only here that there can be inscribed everything that is articulated.

726. #726

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.168

     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.

     Before any date, 'minus-one' (moins-un) designates the locus described by Lacan as the Other (with the abbreviation O).

727. #727

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.77

     *[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.

     All blackguardism comes from wanting to be the Other - I mean the big Other - for someone, in which there is outlined the shapes in which his desire is captured.

728. #728

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.169

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan drives a wedge between the Oedipus myth (dictated by the hysteric's dissatisfaction, privileging law over enjoyment) and *Totem and Taboo* (an obsessional-neurotic construction that places enjoyment at the origin, then law), arguing that the psychoanalytic discourse must move beyond mythic interpretation toward a more rigorous combinatorial of desire's causation.

     It is time to attack that aspect of theatre that it has appeared necessary to maintain in order to sustain the Other scene, the one that I speak about, that I was the first to speak about.

729. #729

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.32

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that woman occupies the structural position of truth for man precisely because she holds knowledge of the disjunction between jouissance and semblance; this truth — usually domesticated under the label "castration complex" — is what the whole formation of masculine subjectivity is organised to evade, and Lacan links this structure to a broader critique of capitalist discourse via the discourse of the master.

     no one other than the woman, because it is in this that she is Other

730. #730

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.138

     **Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 May 1971**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that writing is equivalent to jouissance within the discourse of the analyst, and that the non-inscribability of the sexual relationship is the fundamental failure at the heart of language—a failure that the letter (as in Poe's purloined letter) stages by feminising those under its shadow and by making truth structurally dependent on fiction.

     it is not measurable - as long as it is not explicitly, and it can only be so in an artefact, in the artefact of the relation to the Other with a capital O

731. #731

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.64

     **Seminar 4: Wednesday 17 February 1971**

     Theoretical move: Writing is theorized as the necessary condition for logic and for questioning the symbolic order, while the Phallus is recast not as a missing signifier but as an obstacle to the sexual relationship—what establishes jouissance as the condition of truth in analytic discourse.

     the locus of the Other of truth

732. #732

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.8

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

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

     there is no meta-language to judge it, there is no Other of the Other, there is no true of the true.

733. #733

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

     **Seminar 4: Wednesday 17 February 1971**

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

     the desire then of the Other, and the woman, on this occasion, one sees that it is she who is the Other.

734. #734

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.19

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

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

     This 'what I am getting at' is in any case a very good example of what I put forward about the desire of the Other: che vuoi? What does he want?

735. #735

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.81

     *Lacan writes on the board: "L 'achose"*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that 'l'achose' (the thing-as-absent) can only be approached through writing (l'écrit), not speech, because the thing's place is always marked by the absence of the o-object (castration), and topology—exemplified by the Graph of Desire—is irreducibly a written form that the spoken word cannot substitute for.

     the S of the signifier, the signifier bearer of the function of O barred, O̸...Everything depends, of course, on the sense that you are going to give to capital O.

736. #736

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.160

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

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

     you should understand that it is the achievement of the barred O of my graph, S(0).

737. #737

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.112

     **Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 March 1971**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that sexual jouissance cannot be written (inscribed in the symbolic), and that this unwriteability is the structural condition from which both the Oedipus complex and the formulas of sexuation derive — specifically: "the woman" does not exist because the universal affirmative ("all women") is impossible, while the prohibition on jouissance (pleasure principle as "not too much enjoyment") and the maternal body supply the only available symbolic scaffolding for the sexual relationship.

     The letter, in so far as she is the signifier that there is no Other: S(O) (sic).

738. #738

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.173

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

     Theoretical move: In this closing session of Seminar XIX, Lacan condenses the year's argument: the *Yadl'un* (the One makes Being) is not ontology but the structural ground of analytic discourse, and Freud's essential contribution—overdetermination—is precisely the irreducible relation of the signifying chain to the body as the site of jouissance, a jouissance that is always "hand to hand" and never attributable to a single body.

     to place it in this....in this big Other that I very specifically show as having to be barred and pinpointed very precisely with the signifier of this barring itself, it is curious!

739. #739

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.78

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that enjoyment is always "from the Other" but never sexual (there is no sexual relation), and that the Other must be barred — emptied out — to become the locus where the sexuation formulae and knowledge are inscribed; this move connects the barred Other S(Ø) to lalangue, fantasy, repetition (Nachträglichkeit), and the necessity of writing for psychoanalysis to be possible at all.

     The Other that is at stake, the Other is that of the sexual couple, that very thing. And it is indeed for that reason that it is going to be necessary for us to produce a signifier that can only be written by the fact that it bars this capital O.

740. #740

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.157

     accommodate yourselves.

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

     if I address myself to those who have not listened, I can only inscribe the nothing of their non-listening and permit by this an elaboration which obviously will be of use subsequently

741. #741

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

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

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

     The cancellation of the Other is only produced at this level... It notes really the Other not as abolished, but precisely as impossibility of correlative and it is by making present this impossibility that it colours the discourse of Hegel.

742. #742

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.169

     J Lacan - Pierce as astronomer > Someone in the audience - That's bullshit!

     Theoretical move: The passage develops a Peircean semiotic framework by articulating the four terms (sign, object, ground, interpretant) and the three relational branches (speculative grammar, pure logic, pure rhetoric), with Lacan and Recanati using this structure to locate the conditions under which a sign produces meaning—particularly foregrounding the third relation (representamen-interpretant) as the site where one sign generates another sign, a concern directly relevant to Lacanian signification.

     the relation between the *representamen* and the interpreter that Pierce calls with genius pure rhetoric, which recognises the laws. It functions at the level of laws, according to which a sign gives birth to another sign which develops it according to the *cursus* of the interpreter

743. #743

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.91

     Seminar **6:** Wednesday **8** March 1972 > Seminar 7: Wednesday IS March 1972

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the neologism "Yad'lun" (there is One / il y a de l'Un) as a foundational ontological proposition, distinguishing the One as a structural feature of analytic discourse from both the Platonic dyadic Eros and the Freudian death-drive pairing, while showing that analytic experience turns on the analysand's encounter with division within the One rather than a fusion of two.

     The last time I told you something that was centred around the Other, which is more manageable than what I am going to talk about today

744. #744

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.10

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's appeal to Copernican and Darwinian "revolutions" to explain resistance to psychoanalysis actually masks the true subversion psychoanalysis introduces: not a revolution in cosmological or biological knowledge, but a transformation in the very structure and function of knowledge itself — specifically, the discovery that the unconscious is a knowledge unknown to itself, structured like a language, and inextricably bound to jouissance and the body's descent toward death.

     That at least that, you cannot say that it is not in every case a knowledge, for those who follow me, that it is something that must be taken into account to guide oneself... This is what I tried to mark with my S, brackets of O, S(0) precisely and barred.

745. #745

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.87

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge > I ASK YOU TO REFUSE WHAT I AM OFFERING YOU.

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the absence of the Other (as heteros) from the sexual relationship is not gendered but structural, grounded in the logic of Zero and One; the sexuation formulas are then developed through a critique of Aristotelian universals and quantification, establishing that the Universal (phallic function) requires the exception ('at-least-one') as its foundation, and that Eros as fusion toward the One is a dangerous mythological delusion with no analytic warrant.

     the Other, from wherever one takes it, the Other is absent, from the moment that what is at stake is the sexual relationship.

746. #746

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.63

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus is the singular meaning (Bedeutung) through which language signifies, that this phallic function structurally prevents any harmonious sexual relation, and that the objet petit a — as metonymical cause of desire — is what determines the speaking being as a divided subject within discourse, with the semblance-pole (analyst's position) and enjoyment-pole standing as the two irreducible terms of the quadripode.

     There is first of all his relation with the supreme Other... the big Other did not have an impact. There where the o takes shape he even had a quite specific notion about it, which was that the pleasure of the big Other, was to upset that of all the little ones!

747. #747

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.143

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan formalises the sexuation formulas by mapping the masculine side (universal castration grounded by the exceptional father who says-no) against the feminine side (not-all, grounded not by an exception but by the absence/void of any denial of the phallic function), and identifies the four logical relations between the quadrant terms as existence, contradiction, undecidable, and lack/desire/objet a, while equating the mathematical notion of the set with the barred subject and the non-numerable with feminine not-all.

     The woman is not the locus of the Other and, what is more, she is inscribed very precisely as not being the Other in the function that I give to the O, namely, as being the locus of the truth.

748. #748

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.116

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan disputes the standard set-theoretic introduction of non-numerability via induction by substituting the notion of "partition" for "parts," showing this yields 2^n − 1 rather than 2^n, and uses this to argue that the One emerging from the empty set is the ground of repetition — directly linking set-theoretic structure to the analytic concept of the One as reiteration of lack.

     it is ruled out then, in the belonging of an element to a set, that any element whatsoever should be repeated as such. It is then as distinct that every element whatsoever of a set subsists

749. #749

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.131

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan deploys set theory and the logic of the 'yad'l'un' (there is One) to ground the four formulas of sexuation, arguing that existence is constituted through a "saying not" (the exception that founds the universal), and that psychoanalysis is the only discourse in which blackguardism (corruption of desire) necessarily produces stupidity—making the mathème the privileged vehicle for approaching knowledge about truth.

     it is a matter of desire, the desire of the Other from whom the person involved has emerged.

750. #750

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.80

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge > I ASK YOU TO REFUSE WHAT I AM OFFERING YOU.

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the formulas of sexuation cannot be read through standard propositional logic (negation, conjunction, disjunction) because the phallic function governs both sexes asymmetrically: the masculine side is structured by a universal ('All x') grounded in an exception ('there exists an x that negates φx'), while the feminine side is 'not-all' within the phallic function, which opens onto a dual, properly feminine jouissance irreducible to phallic jouissance—and it is precisely this asymmetry that marks the non-existence of the sexual relationship.

     this relationship, to be specific, makes the Other absolutely foreign to what might here be purely and simply secondant. It is what perhaps this evening, will force me to emphasise the O by which I mark this Other as empty

751. #751

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.93

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge > I ASK YOU TO REFUSE WHAT I AM OFFERING YOU.

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that feminine universality (the "not-all") is structured by the *absence* of exception rather than by a grounding exception, and that this absence of exception does not consolidate but rather further undermines any universal — making the feminine position irreducibly non-universal and essentially dual, in contrast to the masculine universal which rests on a (gratuitous) founding exception.

     the uni laterality of the existential function for what is involved in the Other, of the other partner in so far as it is 'without exception'.

752. #752

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.75

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge > I ASK YOU TO REFUSE WHAT I AM OFFERING YOU.

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the entry of language into the speaking being structurally voids the "second sex" (the Other as *heteros*), making sexual difference not a natural binary but a topological-linguistic problem: there is no sexual relationship because "the Other" is the very locus that language empties of being, and universals like "Man" and "Woman" are linguistic constructs required by language itself, not grounded in animal copulation.

     it is very precisely this void that it offers to the word that I call the locus of the Other, namely, that in which there are inscribed the effects of the aforesaid word.

753. #753

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.190

     B EYOND THE IMA GINARY , THE SYMBOLIC , OR FROM TH E LITTLE TO TH E BIG OTH ER > Odd or even? Beyond intersubjectivity

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the game of even and odd—first analysed through imaginary intersubjectivity (ego-mirroring, temporal oscillation between first, second, third positions) and then through the confrontation with the machine—to demonstrate that the symbolic order, not imaginary identification, is the proper ground for logical reasoning; the machine forces a passage from imaginary intersubjectivity to the combinatory of language, and the detour through Freud's random number shows that the unconscious is itself a symbolic machine where chance does not exist.

     We will take the other path, the one which can be made logical... Obviously it imposes itself as soon as your partner is the machine.

754. #754

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.133

     THE FR EUDIAN SCHEMATA OF TH E P S YCHIC APP ARATUS > From the Entwurf to the Traumdeutung

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's *Beyond the Pleasure Principle* and the analogy of the electronic triode to argue that the ego functions as an imaginary resistor that makes unconscious communication perceptible precisely by obstructing it, while the Freud-Fliess dialogue is invoked to show that the unconscious as "full significance of meaning" infinitely surpasses the signs consciously manipulated by any individual subject.

     Freud's conversation with Fliess, the fundamental speech, which is at this time unconscious, is the essential dynamic element. Why is it unconscious at this time? Because it infinitely surpasses what both of them, as individuals, can at this time consciously apprehend of it.

755. #755

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.252

     XVIII > Introduction of the big Other

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the schema of the "wall of language" separating the subject (S) from the true big Other (A), distinguishing the imaginary plane of ego/specular other (a/a') from the symbolic plane, and arguing that the Other's capacity to lie—not merely to answer—constitutes the decisive proof of authentic intersubjectivity; this schema also serves as a critique of ego-psychology's imaginary reduction of analytic aims.

     we in fact address Al , A2, those we do not know, true Others, true subjects. They are on the other side of the wall of language, there where in principle I never reach them.

756. #756

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.328

     XXIII > A, m, a, S > FATHER BEIRNAERT: Why?

     Theoretical move: Lacan maps Freud's three-stage account of the cure (signification → imaginary reminiscence → repetition) onto the four-pole schema A.m.a.S, arguing that the ego's imaginary resistance interrupts the fundamental symbolic discourse running between the radical Other (A) and the subject (S), and that analytic transference works precisely by substituting the radical Other for the imaginary little other.

     I begin with A, which is the radical Other, that of the eighth or ninth hypothesis of Parmenides, which is equally the real pole of the subjective relation and is what Freud ties the relation to the death instinct to.

757. #757

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.213

     B EYOND THE IMA GINARY , THE SYMBOLIC , OR FROM TH E LITTLE TO TH E BIG OTH ER > The Purloined Letter > M. GUENINCHAULT: The letter.

     Theoretical move: The Purloined Letter demonstrates that a letter (signifier) exists only in the dimension of truth, not reality — it cannot be found by those who believe only in the real/force (the police), while those who think symbolically can locate it; furthermore, possession of the letter structurally feminizes its holder and ultimately, a letter always reaches its destination, defining subjects by their position in the symbolic chain rather than any real qualities.

     Anyone who has this letter enters into the zone of shadow caused by the fact that it is addressed to whom? if not to whom it may concern — the King.

758. #758

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.284

     XVIII > Where is speech? Where is language?

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a seminar discussion and the apologue of the Martian to sharpen the distinction between language (as an impersonal, geometrical, polysemantic system) and speech (as a perspectival, founding, revelatory act), culminating in the thesis that the subject is not merely an agent of language but is always-already inscribed in it as a "message" — determined by a universal concrete discourse prior to birth.

     Within language, there is no ego... the point of perspective is always an other.

759. #759

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.204

     B EYOND THE IMA GINARY , THE SYMBOLIC , OR FROM TH E LITTLE TO TH E BIG OTH ER > The Purloined Letter

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the symbolic chain constitutes the subject rather than being constituted by it, using the mathematical analysis of plus/minus sequences and Poe's "The Purloined Letter" to demonstrate that the subject is an element within the symbolic order whose intersubjective relations are determined by the structural position of the signifier (the letter), not by psychological intentionality.

     The characters in question can be defined beginning with the subject, more precisely beginning with the relation determined by the aspiration of the real subject through the necessity of the symbolic linking process.

760. #760

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.185

     B EYOND THE IMA GINARY , THE SYMBOLIC , OR FROM TH E LITTLE TO TH E BIG OTH ER > Odd or even? Beyond intersubjectivity

     Theoretical move: Lacan locates an "ultimate quod" — a confrontation of the subject with the real beyond both imaginary and symbolic mediation — in privileged dream experiences (Irma, Wolfman), then uses Poe's "even and odd" game to introduce the cybernetic/intersubjective problem of identification with the Other's reasoning, staging the question of what kind of subject operates beyond the ego.

     one could say that such privileged experiences... are characterised by the relation which is established with an absolute other, I mean an other beyond all intersubjectivity

761. #761

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.209

     B EYOND THE IMA GINARY , THE SYMBOLIC , OR FROM TH E LITTLE TO TH E BIG OTH ER > The Purloined Letter > M. GUENINCHAULT: The letter.

     Theoretical move: The letter in "The Purloined Letter" functions as the radical symbolic subject itself — it is not a content but a pure signifier whose displacement determines the positions and identities of all characters who come into contact with it, demonstrating that the symbolic circuit governs existence rather than individual subjectivity governing the symbol.

     he gives it no symbolic meaning, all he plays on is the fact that this mirage, this reciprocal fascination is established between himself and the Queen

762. #762

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.278

     XVIII > Introduction of the big Other > Sosiel

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the myth of Amphitryon (Sosie/double) and a critique of Fairbairn's clinical case to argue that analysis progresses not through ego-splitting observation but through speech addressed to the absolute Other, and that misrecognition of the imaginary register—treating imaginary drives as real—produces iatrogenic paranoia rather than cure.

     Analysis progresses through the speech of the subject in so far as it passes beyond the dual relation, and thus no longer encounters anything except the absolute Other, whom the subject doesn't know how to recognise.

763. #763

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.100

     VI > VII

     Theoretical move: Lacan grounds Freudian repetition compulsion not in biology but in the symbolic register: repetition is the form taken by the human subject's integration into a circular chain of discourse (the unconscious as the discourse of the Other), illustrated through the cybernetic model of a message looping through a circuit, which supersedes the dyadic/imaginary model of reminiscence Lacan associates with Platonic thought.

     the unconscious is the discourse of the other. This discourse of the other is not the discourse of the abstract other, of the other in the dyad, of my correspondent, nor even of my slave, it is the discourse of the circuit in which I am integrated.

764. #764

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.255

     XVIII > Introduction of the big Other

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques ego-psychology-style analytic technique—which aims at imaginary reconstitution of the ego through identification with the analyst's ego—and counter-proposes an analysis oriented toward the big Other, where the analyst functions as an empty mirror so that true speech can traverse the wall of language and the subject can assume its relations of transference with its real Others; "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" is re-read as the subject (S) being called to speak and enter into relation with the real Other.

     The analysis must aim at the passage of true speech, joining the subject to an other subject, on the other side of the wall of language. That is the final relation of the subject to a genuine Other, to the Other who gives the answer one doesn't expect.

765. #765

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.264

     XVIII > Introduction of the big Other > Objectified analysis

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Object Relations theory (Fairbairn) for collapsing the imaginary and the real, and for reducing analytic action to an ego-normative dual relation; he argues instead that the imaginary only becomes analytically operative when transcribed into the symbolic order, where the subject's account of itself in speech constitutes the true lever of analysis.

     the subject gives an account of himself. The fact that he gives an account of himself is the dynamic mainspring of the analysis.

766. #766

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.244

     XVIII > Introduction of the big Other

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the fundamental distinction between the big Other (the radical alterity of speech and the symbolic) and the small other (the ego as imaginary counterpart), arguing that the subject's relation to satisfaction is always mediated by the Other — and uses the contrast between planets (pure reality, silenced by language) and speaking beings (constituted by the gap of desire) to demonstrate that language does not emerge from the real but retroactively forecloses it.

     We must distinguish two others, at least two - an other with a capital O, and an other with a small o, which is the ego. In the function of speech, we are concerned with the Other.

767. #767

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.349

     XXIII > A, m, a, S > INDEX

     Theoretical move: This is a back-matter index from Seminar II, listing key terms (speech, subject, symbolic order, unconscious, transference, temporality, symptom, etc.) with their page references; it is non-substantive as a theoretical argument but maps the conceptual architecture of the seminar.

     as discourse of other 89, 120, 122, 137, 160, 255, 324 ... and lack of other in analysis 324

768. #768

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.267

     XVIII > Introduction of the big Other > Objectified analysis

     Theoretical move: This transitional passage pivots from a mechanical schema to a dramatic model (Molière's Amphitryon) as a vehicle for theorising psychoanalysis in the symbolic register, framing the literary figure of Sosie as an illustration of the "misadventures" of analysis.

     Introduction of the big Other > Objectified analysis

769. #769

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.276

     XVIII > Introduction of the big Other > Sosiel

     Theoretical move: Using the Amphitryon/Sosie myth as a clinical allegory, Lacan argues that the ego is constitutively alienated—always encountering its own reflected image rather than attaining desire or the Other—and that this imaginary capture is at its most binding in obsessional neurosis, where ego-reinforcement (as prescribed by ego psychology) only deepens the subject's dispossession.

     to become aware of the essentially imaginary character of what is said in that place when the absolute transcendent Other is invoked, this Other to be found in language each time speech endeavours to be uttered.

770. #770

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.17

     THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN > Psychology and metapsychology

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that ego psychology represents a regression to pre-analytical, substantialist notions of the ego, betraying Freud's Copernican decentring of the subject; the Freudian discovery's radical move — that "I is an other," that the subject cannot be equated with the ego — is grounded in the gap between consciousness, the I, and the unconscious.

     What do you mean by the other? - his fellow man, his neighbour, his ideal I, a washbowl? These are all others. The unconscious completely eludes that circle of certainties by which man recognises himself as ego.

771. #771

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.194

     B EYOND THE IMA GINARY , THE SYMBOLIC , OR FROM TH E LITTLE TO TH E BIG OTH ER > Odd or even? Beyond intersubjectivity

     Theoretical move: By contrasting biological memory with symbolic remembering (Nachträglichkeit), and by reading Poe's "Purloined Letter" as a demonstration that signification is never where one expects it to be, Lacan argues that the subject's truth is structured by the symbolic order rather than by intersubjective psychology or empirical reality—the symbolic quod, not the living subject, is primary.

     Do we even have to concern ourselves with what this subject is and with respect to which other it is to be located? That is totally useless. The most important thing is the symbolic quod.

772. #772

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.78

     **II** > God and Woman's jouissance

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the argument that the non-existence of the sexual relationship is the ground from which its supplements (love, phallic jouissance, courtly love) must be theorised, and uses the distinction between reading and understanding—illustrated by commentary on *Le titre de la lettre*—to reframe the Subject Supposed to Know as the very structure of love/transference.

     the Other - put forward at the time of 'The Instance of the Letter' as the locus of speech - was a way, I can't say of laicizing, but of exorcising the good old God.

773. #773

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.99

     **VII** > A love letter *(une lettre d'amour)* > **Does the Other know?**

     Theoretical move: Through a detour via Empedocles (as cited by Aristotle and used by Freud), Lacan argues that love and hate are inseparable: a God who knows no hatred equally knows no love, and a man who believes a woman confuses him with God (i.e., with what she enjoys) thereby loves less—because there is no love without hate. This establishes a structural co-dependency of love and hate against any idealization of pure love.

     the more a man can believe a woman confuses him with God, in other words, what she enjoys

774. #774

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.72

     **II** > Love and the signifier > Aristotle and Freud: the other satisfaction

     Theoretical move: Lacan establishes that jouissance is structurally 'inappropriate' to the sexual relationship, making repression a secondary effect that generates metaphor; he then aligns Aristotle's energeia-pleasure (exemplified by seeing/smell/hearing) with the analytic function of objet petit a as that which, from the male pole, substitutes for the missing partner and thereby constitutes fantasy, while announcing that the female pole requires a different supplement to the non-existent sexual relationship.

     the object that puts itself in the place of what cannot be glimpsed of the Other.

775. #775

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.48

     **II** > Love and the signifier

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the signifier is characterized by contingency rather than eternity, and that this contingency (figured through creationism, the *ex nihilo*, and the Copernican/Newtonian revolution) grounds his central claim that love compensates for the absence of the sexual relationship — a relation only accessible through the function of the phallus as that which is articulated on the basis of absence. The "revolution" Lacan values is not a change of center but the shift from "it turns" to "it falls," marking the real subversion of the signified's routine.

     The Other, in my terminology, can thus only be the Other sex.

776. #776

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

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

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

     Do we realize that it is the Other? - such as I posited it at the outset, as a locus in which the signifier is posited, and without which nothing indicates to us that there is a dimension of truth anywhere.

777. #777

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.123

     **IX**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that jouissance is the substance of thought and that its irreducible gap from language—marked by the cry "that's not it"—demonstrates that structure and jouissance are co-constitutive, grounding the non-existence of the sexual relationship; Christianity and Aristotle serve as foils to show how philosophical and theological traditions have covered over this gap with the fantasy of knowledge and soul.

     There is a hole there and that hole is called the Other. At least that is what I felt I could name it, the Other qua locus in which speech, being deposited - founds truth and, with it, the pact that makes up for the non-existence of the sexual relationship

778. #778

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.20

     On Feminine Sexuality The Limits of Love and Knowledge > On jouissance

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that feminine sexuality is constituted by a logical "one by one" (une par une) structure that derives from the Other rather than from bodily substance, making sexual jouissance "compact" and the feminine sexed being "not-whole"—a claim illustrated through the Don Juan myth and grounded in a topology that refuses any reference to being or substance.

     the Other who is incarnated, so to speak, as sexed being - requires this one by one (une par une).

779. #779

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

     **¹⁰⁷x** > Rings of string

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

     the Other - the Other insofar as the articulation of language, that is, the truth, is inscribed therein - the Other must be barred, barred on the basis of what I earlier qualified as the One-missing.

780. #780

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.38

     **II** > **The function of the written¹**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the written (l'écrit) is not of the same register as the signifier, and uses this distinction to ground the specific function of analytic discourse: letters (a, A, $) name loci and functions rather than merely signify, while the unconscious is what is *read* beyond speech — a move that simultaneously critiques ontology (the master's discourse) for its illegitimate hypostatization of the copula "to be."

     Then A, that I make function in that aspect of the proposition that takes only the form of a written formula… I designate thereby that which is first of all a locus, a place. I called it 'the locus of the Other'.

781. #781

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.19

     On Feminine Sexuality The Limits of Love and Knowledge > On jouissance

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that sexual jouissance is structurally defined by an impasse—the impossibility of the sexual relationship—and uses topological concepts (compactness, open sets, finity) to articulate how phallic jouissance constitutes an obstacle to jouissance of the Other, while the Not-all marks the female pole's irreducible remainder. Love is revealed as narcissistic, and its object-like substance is in fact the objet petit a as remainder in desire.

     Jouissance, qua sexual, is phallic - in other words, it is not related to the Other as such.

782. #782

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.125

     **IX**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that every wisdom tradition—Taoism, Buddhism, mythology, Christianity—fails to satisfy the "thought of being" except at the price of castration, positioning psychoanalytic discourse as a contingent, non-mathematical pathway toward an economy of jouissance that science and religion alike cannot reach.

     They were gods all the same, that is, rather consistent representations of the Other.

783. #783

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.130

     **¹⁰⁷x** > Rings of string

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the impossibility of metalanguage to pivot toward topology: because the symbolic ex-sists rather than being, and because language can only be transmitted through further language, the matheme/formalization points beyond itself to the Borromean knot as the structural figure that can 'operate' on the first knot—linking writing, jouissance, and the non-rapport of sexuation under a single topological framework.

     the partner of the opposite sex remains the Other. It is thus by missing its jouissance that it manages to be reproduced yet again without knowing anything about what reproduces it.

784. #784

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.86

     **II** > God and Woman's jouissance

     Theoretical move: Lacan theorizes a feminine jouissance that is "beyond the phallus" — experienced but unknowable even to women themselves — and uses mystical testimony (St. Teresa, Hadewijch) as its privileged witness, then links this Other jouissance to the God-face of the big Other and the paternal/castration function, arguing these do not resolve into either one God or two.

     why not interpret one face of the Other, the God face, as based on feminine jouissance? As all of that is produced thanks to the being of signifierness, and as that being has no other locus than the locus of the Other (Autre) that I designate with capital A

785. #785

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.32

     **II** > To Jakobson > **What is the signifier?**

     Theoretical move: Lacan defines the signifier as both the cause of jouissance (its material and efficient cause, enabling access to a part of the Other's body) and simultaneously what brings jouissance to a halt (its final cause), thereby grounding the signifier not in Aristotelian physics or Cartesian extended substance but in a new ontological category: 'enjoying substance' (la substance jouissante).

     a body that symbolizes the Other… it is one person's body that enjoys a part of the Other's body. But that part also enjoys - the Other likes it more or less

786. #786

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.138

     **¹⁰⁷x** > Rings of string

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of Borromean knots and rings of string to ground a theory of desire, the subject, and the Other: object a is the void presupposed by demand, the subject's division is structurally equivalent to the 'bending' of a ring, and the Other is not additive to the One but is the 'One-missing' — a difference internal to the One rather than supplementary to it.

     the Other cannot be added to the One. The Other can only be differentiated from it… the Other - as I already said… is the One-missing (l'un-en-moins)

787. #787

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.98

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes analytic discourse from both Aristotelian cosmology and scientific discourse by locating the speaking being's reality at the level of fantasy and the unconscious, then pivots to the question of feminine jouissance and its relation to the Other, arguing that woman—like man—is subjected to an Other that may or may not "know" the jouissance she experiences beyond the phallic game.

     the term I call the Other, signifying it with an A - whether this term knows anything. For it is in this respect that she herself is subjugated (sujette) to the Other, just as much as man.

788. #788

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.14

     On Feminine Sexuality The Limits of Love and Knowledge > On jouissance

     Theoretical move: Lacan grounds Seminar XX's inquiry by defining jouissance as "what serves no purpose," distinguishing it from love (which is always mutual and demands more), positioning the superego as the imperative of jouissance ("Enjoy!"), and asserting that jouissance of the Other's body is not the sign of love — thereby opening the problem of what, beyond necessity or sufficiency, can answer with jouissance.

     "Encore" is the proper name of the gap (faille) in the Other from which the demand for love stems.

789. #789

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.93

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances that analytic discourse emerges from scientific discourse precisely to reveal that speaking of love is itself a jouissance, and that the soul—far from being a psychological presupposition—is an effect of love ('hommosexual' elaboration), while feminine jouissance points toward the question of the Other's knowledge, which scientific discourse forces us to think without recourse to any Supreme Being's supposed knowledge of the Good.

     A is barred by us, of course. That doesn't mean that it suffices to bar it for nothing to exist thereof. If by S(Ⓐ) I designate nothing other than woman's jouissance, it is assuredly because it is with that that I am indicating that God has not yet made his exit.

790. #790

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.91

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the formulas of sexuation by showing how masculine and feminine sides of speaking beings relate differently to phallic jouissance, fantasy, and the barred Other — culminating in the claim that the dissociation of *a* (imaginary) from S(Ⱥ) (symbolic) is the task of psychoanalysis, distinguishing it from psychology, and that woman's radical Other jouissance places her in closer proximity to God than any ancient speculation on the Good could reach.

     The Other is not simply the locus in which truth stammers. It deserves to represent that to which woman is fundamentally related.

791. #791

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.55

     **II** > Love and the signifier

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that analytic discourse breaks with the cosmological presupposition of a unified world-substance by privileging the letter and writing over lived meaning-effects; love is posited as what "makes up for" the non-existent sexual relationship, and the unconscious is clarified as structured *like* (not *by*) a language—specifically like the assemblages of set theory, which are constituted (not merely designated) by letters.

     The Other, the Other as the locus of truth, is the only place, albeit an irreducible place, that we can give to the term 'divine being,' God, to call him by his name.

792. #792

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.176

     **Seminar 9: Wednesday 20 March 1973**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the true from the real by arguing that truth can only be "half-said" (because jouissance constitutes its limit), while the real is accessible only through the impasse of formalisation; the mathemes (objet a, S(Ø), $) are introduced as written supports that, unlike speech, can designate the limits where the symbolic encounters the real—culminating in the claim that the phallic function is a contingency (ceases not to be written) rather than a necessity or impossibility.

     if it is indeed true that the Other can only be reached by being bracketed, as I said the last time, with small o, the cause of desire, it is moreover to the semblance of being that it is addressed

793. #793

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.95

     Semina r **5:** Wednesday **16 January 1973**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the "Copernican revolution" as a foil to argue that genuine subversion lies not in changing a centre but in substituting a new formal principle ('things fall', expressed as Newton's law of gravity written down) — an argument that privileges the function of the written over imaginary, sphere-centred thinking, while reframing the phallus, the Other, love, and the sign as the year's key compass-points.

     This Other is more than ever put in question here. It must be hammered out, recast anew... The Other, in my language, can thus only be the other sex.

794. #794

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.216

     J.Lacan-... of this?

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the 'not-all' logic governing Woman cannot be read through finite Aristotelian particularity (which would imply an exceptional existence), but only through the infinite—where no determinate exception can be constructed—grounding Lacan's claim that Woman is properly half-said, and that her enjoyment is of the order of the infinite rather than the phallic universal.

     no relation of the man to the Other without the not-all of the woman, but on the other hand a supplementary, feminine enjoyment, a privileged relationship to the Other

795. #795

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.12

     **Seminar 1: Wednesday 21 November 1972**

     Theoretical move: Lacan deploys topological concepts of compactness and open sets to demonstrate that the impossibility of the sexual relationship is what structures all discourse, and that feminine sexuality is characterized by the 'not-all'—women taken 'une par une'—rather than by phallic jouissance or universal fusion, grounding sexuation in a logical rather than anatomical requirement.

     there is a locus of the Other, of this locus of the Other, of one sex as Other, as absolute Other

796. #796

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.260

     (3) Naturally since I made a small mistake

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Borromean knot topology to ground the asymmetry between the One and the Other (woman as "less One"), arguing that mathematisation alone accesses the Real—defined as the mystery of the speaking body and the unconscious—while distinguishing the Real from both fantasy and traditional reality.

     And this indeed is why this Other, inasmuch as the articulation of language, namely, of truth can be inscribed in it, the Other may be barred.

797. #797

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.244

     Seminar 12: Wednesday 15 Ma y 1973

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that there is no metalanguage by distinguishing the Symbolic from being, grounding formalisation in the act of saying rather than in ontological subsistence, and then demonstrates how topology—specifically the Borromean knot and the torus—provides the only adequate 'writing' of what cannot be said about the sexual non-relation and the structure of the subject.

     the partner of the other sex remains the Other... About the being of the Other it wants to know nothing.

798. #798

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.105

     Semina r **5:** Wednesday **16 January 1973**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the claim that analytic discourse, grounded in the letter rather than in lived experience or phenomenal appearance, compels an abandonment of the ontological "world" in favour of *par-être* (being-to-one-side), and that mathematics—specifically set theory's use of the letter—provides the orientation point for reading the effects of language precisely where the sexual relationship is absent.

     it is impossible to say anything whatsoever without immediately making Him subsist even if only in the form of the Other, of the Other also described as the truth.

799. #799

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.252

     (3) Naturally since I made a small mistake

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Borromean knot as a topological demonstration that the One (ring of string enclosing nothing but a hole) grounds both the structure of desire—where the objet petit a is not a being but a void supposed by demand, sustained only by metonymy—and the logic of mathematical language, where removing a single element disperses all the rest simultaneously.

     the Other is only presented to the subject in an asexed form... everything that was made of this order, is a-sexed.

800. #800

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.209

     J.Lacan-... of this?

     Theoretical move: Recanati's intervention uses Berkeley's semiotics and Kierkegaard's relation to Régine to interrogate whether 'supplementary feminine jouissance' can be anything other than the signifier of masculine quest/fatum, deploying the not-all and the barred Other to show that the Woman's relationship to the big Other resists masculine perspectival capture, while the Kierkegaard example maps the masculine dilemma (exclusion vs. mediated relation to God) onto the Splitting of the Subject, from which the woman is structurally exempt.

     her relationship to the big Other appears privileged only from the point of view of man who considers her as the representative

801. #801

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.235

     J.Lacan-... of this? > **Seminar 11 : Wednesday 8 May 1973**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that jouissance (enjoyment) constitutes the substance of thinking and is irreducibly linked to the inertia of language, such that the sexual relationship remains inexistent and unthinkable — a gap named the Other — and all cultural, religious, and philosophical formations (including Christianity's baroque obscenity and Aristotle's active intellect) are so many failed attempts to make enjoyment adequate to the sexual relationship, with castration as the only price of any apparent satisfaction.

     There is here a hole, and this hole is called the Other. At least that is how I thought I could name it. The Other as the locus in which the word, by being deposed... founds the truth

802. #802

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.158

     Semina r **5:** Wednesday **16 January 1973** > **Seminar 7: Wednesday 20 February 1973**

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the structural connection between the barred Woman (not-all), the barred Other S(Ø), and Other jouissance, arguing that what ancient metaphysics designated as the Supreme Good (Aristotle's unmoved mover) is in fact a mythical placeholder for the enjoyment of the Other—and that psychoanalysis must dissociate the imaginary small o from the symbolic barred O to accomplish what psychology has failed to do: the splitting that reveals the sexual non-relationship at the foundation of all knowledge.

     this locus of the Other itself, where there has been inscribed everything that can be articulated in terms of signifier is, in its foundation, of its nature, so radically Other, that it is this Other that must be examined

803. #803

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.237

     J.Lacan-... of this? > **Seminar 11 : Wednesday 8 May 1973**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that analytic discourse diverges from scientific discourse precisely because the 'economy of enjoyment' cannot be rendered as a mathematical device, yet mythology, the Counter-Reformation, and Baroque art all attest to historically contingent attempts to regulate jouissance — attempts that are 'founded in the gap proper to the sexuality of the speaking being' and that analytic discourse may partially continue.

     They were all the same gods, namely, fairly consistent representations of the Other.

804. #804

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.112

     Semina r **5:** Wednesday **16 January 1973**

     Theoretical move: Lacan revisits Logical Time to show that intersubjective inference is structured around the objet petit a (the third term that reduces the dyad to One + o), then pivots to distinguish sign from signifier, grounding the subject as an effect of the signifier chain; the second seminar session opens by establishing that the speaking being's needs are contaminated by an "other satisfaction" rooted in the unconscious structured like a language, which Lacan links retrospectively to the Ethics of Psychoanalysis and ultimately to the universals of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

     between two whatever they may be, there is always the One and the Other, the One and the little o, and that the Other cannot in any case be taken for a One.

805. #805

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.203

     **Seminar 10: Wednesday 10 April 1973 ..**

     Theoretical move: The passage articulates the structural asymmetry between the masculine (phallic) universal—grounded in the paternal exception (∃x.¬Φx)—and the feminine not-all (∄x.¬Φx), arguing that both the father function and the "virgin function" constitute existence in an eccentric, decoupled position with respect to the phallic function Φ, such that their radical incommensurability is what grounds the inexistence of the sexual relationship.

     the S(Ø) constituting what one could call the universality or rather the inexhaustibility... she is situated with respect to something other than the limit of the masculine universal... pinpointed by its relationship to the other as barred — Ø

806. #806

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.188

     **Seminar 9: Wednesday 20 March 1973**

     Theoretical move: Lacan links the objet petit a as a semblance of being to a primordial scene of jealous enjoyment (jalouissance) drawn from Augustine, positioning it as the first substitutive enjoyment that founds desire through metonymy and demand addressed to the Other, and closes on the question of whether having the object a is the same as being it — a question he refers to "The Meaning of the Phallus."

     a demand that is presumed to be addressed to the Other

807. #807

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.80

     **Seminar 4: Wednesday 9 January 1973**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that writing (the letter) belongs to a fundamentally different register than the signifier, and uses this distinction to theorize the specific function of writing within analytic discourse—particularly how mathemes (S(O), objet a, Φ) operate as letters that mark lack and loss within the locus of the Other, rather than as signifiers in the linguistic sense.

     by it I designate what is first of all a locus, a place. I said the locus of the Other, designated as such by a letter.

808. #808

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.171

     Semina r **5:** Wednesday **16 January 1973** > **Seminar 7: Wednesday 20 February 1973**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the sexual non-relationship is irreducible: love operates in a 'hommosexual' (soul-to-soul) register that bypasses sex, courtly love was a historically singular meteor rather than a dialectical synthesis, and the question of woman's enjoyment opens onto whether the barred Other itself knows — with the conclusion that attributing omniscience to the Other (or to God/woman) actually diminishes rather than enriches love.

     whether this term that I am calling the Other, signifying it with the barred O - 0 - whether this term, for its part, knows something. Because it is in this that she is herself subjected to the Other, just as much as man. Does the Other know?

809. #809

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

     **Seminar 9: Wednesday 20 March 1973**

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

     Do we realise that it is the Other? The Other with a capital O as I posited it at the start, as nothing other, nothing other than the locus in which the signifier is posited and without which nothing indicates to us that there is somewhere a dimension of truth

810. #810

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.207

     **Seminar 10: Wednesday 10 April 1973 ..**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the structural asymmetry between masculine and feminine sides of sexuation means that woman is neither One nor Other but occupies an undecidable relation to the barred Other, grounding man's imaginary construction of woman as the signifier of the barred Other through the procession of objet petit a objects—making the sexual relation structurally impossible.

     The woman does not approach the One, she is not the One, which does not imply that she is the Other.

811. #811

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.153

     Semina r **5:** Wednesday **16 January 1973** > **Seminar 7: Wednesday 20 February 1973**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the claim that feminine (Other) jouissance is an enjoyment that is experienced but known nothing about, linking mystical experience to the structural position of the not-all and to the impossibility of the sexual relationship; he then introduces the sexuation formulas and explains how the barred subject's only access to the Other is via the fantasy ($ ◇ a), which also constitutes the reality principle.

     why not interpret one face of the Other, the face of God since it was from that, through that that I tackled the business earlier, a face of God as supported by feminine enjoyment?

812. #812

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.7

     **Seminar 1: Wednesday 21 November 1972**

     Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar XX by grounding the impossibility of the sexual relation in the structural gap between jouissance (phallic enjoyissance) and love: love aims at making One but can only produce narcissistic identification, while enjoyment of the Other's body is neither necessary nor sufficient as a response to love, with the Not-all (pas-toute) marking woman's asymmetrical position relative to phallic jouissance.

     Encore is the proper name for this gap from which in the Other the demand for love starts.

813. #813

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.141

     Semina r **5:** Wednesday **16 January 1973** > **Seminar 7: Wednesday 20 February 1973**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the argument that what supplements the absent sexual relationship is not a dyadic fusion but a singular "there is something of the One" — irreducibly solitary — and that love (including transference as love) is the operative name for this supplement; the big Other, far from being abolished, must be reckoned with precisely as the site that mediates between the sexes in the absence of a sexual relationship, a point that also grounds his endorsement of courtly love as a "feint" for the missing relation.

     I was putting between the man and the woman a certain Other, with a capital O, in which there was according to those who were the voluntary conveyors of this echo, a certain Other who indeed seemed to be the same good old God.

814. #814

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.8

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 1: Tuesday 10 December 1974**

     Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar XXII by arguing that the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary only acquire a "common measure" — i.e., can be said to be genuinely three — through the Borromean knot, which provides the minimal topological structure (requiring three as its minimum) that holds them together; this displaces Freud's spatial-geometrical (sack) topology in favour of a knot-based topology, and identifies the Imaginary as grounded in the body, the Symbolic in equivocation/writing, and the Real as strictly unthinkable.

     Only there is another Other, the one that I marked with a capital O, which for its part is defined as not having the slightest relationship, however small you may imagine it…

815. #815

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.68

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 5: Tuesday 11 February 1975**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses an anecdotal tour through Nice, Strasbourg, London, and his reading of Strachey's *Queen Victoria* to advance the theoretical claim that the sexual non-relationship is confirmed by historical-biographical evidence, while elaborating the resistance of different *lalangues* to the unconscious and reiterating that "The woman does not exist" but that women (as not-all) have a privileged, unmeasured relation to liberty and to the unconscious.

     if what is involved in the unconscious is localised at the locus of the Other and if I made the remark that there is no Other of the Other

816. #816

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.57

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 4: Tuesday 21 January 1975**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Borromean knot's topological properties to argue that the three consistencies—Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real—are irreducibly linked and that this triadic structure grounds both representation and the subject's condition, while the objet petit a (small o), as cause of desire rather than its object, marks an irrational, non-conjunctive gap between the One of the signifier and the One of meaning.

     the Other is thus a matrix with a double entrance, of which the small **o** constitutes one of these entrances, and of which the other…what are we going to say about it? Is it the One of the signifier?

817. #817

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.31

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 2: Tuesday 17 December 1974**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Borromean knot structures the three registers (R.S.I.) such that phallic enjoyment, ek-sistence, and the hole are each topologically grounded: phallic enjoyment is produced through the knotting of the Symbolic ring; the Real is made by jouissance that ek-sists; and the sexual non-relationship is inscribed in language rather than filled by it, with anxiety marking the limit of enjoyment of the other body.

     What Freud brings us concerning what is involved in the Other, is precisely this, that there is only an Other by saying it. But that this Total-Other (Tout-autre) is quite impossible to say completely

818. #818

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.155

     Seminar 9: Wednesday 16 March 1976

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Joyce's *Finnegans Wake* and the sinthome to distinguish the unanalysable from what analysis can address, then pivots to the Phallus as a "phunction of phonation" substitutive for man, contrasting it with S(Ⓞ) — the signifier of the non-existence of the Other of the Other — which Lacan identifies with "The woman" as the only candidate for an Other of the Other, thereby articulating the impossibility of the sexual relation through the bar that no Other can cross.

     The absolute necessity for the human species being that there should be Another of the Other. This is the one generally called God, but which analysis unveils as being quite simply The woman.

819. #819

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.150

     Seminar 9: Wednesday 16 March 1976

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

     I cannot trace out all the algorithms that I have stated of the type: S(Ø).

820. #820

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.67

     **Seminar 4: Wednesday 13 January 1976** > W w e W.

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Joyce's riddle (the fox burying his grandmother) as an exemplar of the analytic response — necessarily "stupid" relative to the poem-like symptom — and argues that meaning is produced by suturing/splicing the Imaginary to the Symbolic, while simultaneously splicing the sinthome to the parasitic Real of enjoyment; the Borromean knot is the structural model for this therapeutic operation.

     if we think that there is no Other of the Other, at least no enjoyment of this Other of the Other, we must make a suture somewhere

821. #821

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.134

     Seminar 7: Wednesday 17 February 1976 > **Seminar 8: Wednesday 9 March 1976**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Borromean chain's topological manipulability (turning inside-out, colouring, orientation) to argue that the Real is not a single ring but is constituted by the knot-relation itself, and that the circle's hole—not its closure—is what founds both set theory's not-all and the chain's supple geometry as opposed to rigid, formal demonstration.

     Specifying that the woman is not-all, implies an asymmetry, an asymmetry between an object that one might call capital A - and it is a matter of knowing what it is - and a set with one element.

822. #822

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.63

     So then what is this lack? > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 February 1977**

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces topological figures (flattening of the Borromean knot) to generate the Real/Imaginary distinction, then cedes the floor to Alain Didier Weill, who constructs a multi-stage circuit using the Graph of Desire and the Purloined Letter schema to theorise the *Passe* as a process by which successive inversions of knowledge between subject (Bozef) and Other (the King) propel the subject through positions of innocence, duplicity, and finally radical exposure before the Other.

     the Other does not know, the king does not know, does not know what? Well then, quite simply, the content of the letter does not matter, quite simply does not know that the subject knows something about him.

823. #823

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.88

     So then what is this lack? > **Seminar 7: Wednesday 15 February 1977**

     Theoretical move: Lacan re-reads "The Purloined Letter" through the figure of Bozef (introduced by Alain Didier Weill) as an incarnation of Absolute Knowledge — knowledge that is in the Real but does not speak — to argue that the Borromean topology of RSI, the structure of the Passe, and the objectification of the unconscious all hinge on the same redoubling of knowledge ("I know that he knows that I know that he knows"), while distinguishing the silent, real truth from the lying Symbolic and the false-but-consistent Imaginary (consciousness).

     He or she, is the third person, is the Other, as I define it, it is the unconscious. It knows, in the absolute, and only in the absolute.

824. #824

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.3

     **Seminar 1: Wednesday 16 November 1976**

     Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar XXIV by proposing 'une-bévue' as a superior translation of the Unbewusst, then pivots to argue that the end of analysis is not identification with the analyst or the unconscious but rather 'knowing how to deal with one's symptom' — and grounds this clinical proposition in a topological account of the torus (and its inside-out inversion) as the proper model for the relationship between inside and outside, Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real.

     the unconscious remains – I say 'remains', I am not saying 'remains eternally' – remains the Other. It is the Other with a capital O that is at stake in the unconscious.

825. #825

     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.

     this split of which I am speaking… implies that his Other also is split… between an Other that would never lie and an Other which always lies, if you wish the Devil

826. #826

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.98

     **Seminar 8: Wednesday 8 March 1977**

     Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the relation between the Real, the universal, and sense: Lacan argues that the Real is defined by the exclusion of all sense and by impossibility (what does not cease not to be written), yet psychoanalysis as a practice depends on words having import — a tension he navigates by revisiting the Four Discourses, specifically the Discourse of the Analyst, to show how the barred subject holds the place of Truth through Knowledge, while the gap between S1 and S2 marks an irreducible incompletion.

     the signifier of the fact that the Other does not exist, which I wrote like that: (Ø). But the Other, the Other in question, must indeed be called by its name Other, it is the sense, it is Other than the real.

827. #827

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.33

     What is the way of distinguishing these two cases?

     Theoretical move: The passage pivots on two interlocking theoretical moves: Lacan argues for the primacy of topological structure over phenomenal shape (using the torus and Klein bottle), and Alain Didier extends this by mapping the circuit of the invocatory drive onto the logic of separation, proposing that musical jouissance operates as a sublimation that "evaporates" the lost object and thus transmutes lack into nostalgia.

     qua Other, a desire, an unconscious lack, I have the testimony that the subject which receives this lack is not paralysed by it

828. #828

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.58

     So then what is this lack? > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 18 January 1977**

     Theoretical move: Lacan refuses the framing of art (painting, music) as "preverbal" and instead insists it is "hyper-verbal" — saturated by the symbol and the signifier — while simultaneously distinguishing art as a form of know-how (savoir-faire) that goes beyond symbolism and carries more truth than discursive elaboration. The theoretical pivot is that the Real/Imaginary continuity invoked by the interlocutor does not bypass the Symbolic but is, in Lacan's formulation, "verbal to the power of two."

     there is no cut between the subject and the locus of the Other, there is not this alienation that was described for us in music

829. #829

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.49

     So then what is this lack? > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 11 January 1977**

     Theoretical move: Lacan voices ambivalence about having made the unconscious teachable, lamenting the degenerate offspring of his teachings (e.g. Derrida's preface to *Le verbier*), while also articulating that the Real—figured as *l'âme à tiers*—is precisely that to which we have no relation, and that S(Ø) names its non-response, leaving the subject talking alone until a potentially delirious Ego emerges.

     even though it is quite obvious that the Id dialogues, and this is even what I designated by the name of capital O

830. #830

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.37

     So then what is this lack?

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

     the subject effectively solicits the love of the Other for him, but the love of the Other qua radically impossible... the subject has, through this second point of view, has a perspective on the lack that inhabits the Other

831. #831

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.78

     So then what is this lack? > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 February 1977**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Passe cannot be transmitted by a speaking subject alone (the *passant*) because the locus of enunciating from which S(Ø) is emitted cannot itself be said; only a topological writing—a graphical arrangement that articulates the subject of the enunciated and the subject of enunciating in a transmissible way—can function as the true Passer, which is why Lacan's seminars and graphs perpetually recreate the conditions of division.

     the proper of this response is that it is a metaphor in a pure state. If you wish, if the subject had responded: 'It's you' to the Other who would have asked him

832. #832

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.66

     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.

     Bozef is in the position in which he find himself and what I am going to show you… of the eclipsing of the subject, of fading before the signifier of demand… for the first time Bozef is confronted to the Other

833. #833

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.119

     **Seminar 9: Wednesday 15 March 1977** > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 10 May 1977**

     Theoretical move: Lacan triangulates the Real, the Sinthome, and the Unconscious through a meditation on undecidability, negation, and the sign: the Real is defined by what does not cease not to be written (impossibility), the Unconscious is recast as 'bévue' (the structural stumbling of language), and the sinthome is identified with the mental as such — the upshot being that psychoanalysis produces only a 'semblance' of truth, not truth itself, because S1 never fully represents the subject for S2.

     The notion of the Other, I marked in a certain graph with a bar which breaks it, Ø. Does that mean that when broken it is denied? Analysis, properly speaking, enunciates, that the Other is nothing but this duplicity.

834. #834

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

     **Two lines of numbers**

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

     The otherwise in question, is indeed what I write, for my part also in the following way: S(Ø). Otherwise, what does that mean? Here it is a matter of the O, namely, the big Other. Does otherwise mean: otherwise than this spluttering called psychology? No, otherwise designates a lack.

835. #835

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.286

     **XXII**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Other must be understood as a *locus* — the site in which speech and the speaking subject are constituted — rather than as a symmetrical alter-ego or existentialist "thou," and uses grammatical evidence (personization across relative clauses) alongside the Schreber case to demonstrate that the asymmetry between I and you, and the structural priority of the big Other, precede and condition any imaginary intersubjectivity.

     the Other is, therefore, the locus in which is constituted the I who is speaking with him who hears.

836. #836

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.316

     **XXIII** > **XXIV** > **1**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychosis is structurally precipitated when a primordial signifier—the Name-of-the-Father—is foreclosed (verworfen) and thus cannot be received from the field of the Other, reducing the subject to a purely imaginary, dual relation of mutual destruction; this is contrasted with the authentic symbolic invocation that addresses "all the signifiers" constituting the subject, including symptoms.

     The Other, with a big O, has to be recognized beyond this relationship, even reciprocal relationship, of exclusion. It has to be recognized in this disappearing relation as being just as elusive as I.

837. #837

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.253

     **XVIII** > **An address: Freud in the century** > **1**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's fundamental discovery is the primacy of the signifier — the structure of language — as the organizing principle of the unconscious, dreams, symptoms, and the ego, and that the compulsion to repeat is grounded in the insistence of speech; this is what post-Freudian ego psychology has systematically obscured.

     There is also the other who speaks from my place, apparently, this other who is within me. This is an other of a totally different nature from the other, my counterpart.

838. #838

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.54

     **II** > **Ill** > **1**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reworks Freud's grammatical analysis of paranoia by mapping each mode of negation of "I love him" onto a distinct structure of alienation (inverted, diverted, converted), while grounding the whole in the distinction between the big Other (symbolic, unknown) and the little other (imaginary, rival ego), arguing that psychosis must be understood through the structure of the subject's relation to an Other that speaks to him.

     This distinction between the Other with a big O, that is, the Other in so far as it's not known, and the other with a small o, that is, the other who is me, the source of all knowledge, is fundamental.

839. #839

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.265

     **XX**

     Theoretical move: By distinguishing the little other (imaginary) from the absolute Other (symbolic/linguistic), and drawing an analogy between medieval ecstatic love theory and psychotic structure, Lacan argues that psychosis is constituted by an inability to respond to the interpellation of the Other, producing a love relation that abolishes the subject and reduces the Other to a pure signifier emptied of meaning.

     The latter, the absolute Other, is the one we address ourselves to beyond this counterpart, the one we are forced to admit beyond the relation of mirage... the one to whom we always address ourselves.

840. #840

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.312

     **XXIII** > **XXIV** > **1**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the second-person pronoun 'you/thou' is not a univocal marker of the other but a punctuating signifier that 'hooks' the other into discourse; the theoretical question is what mechanism elevates this indeterminate signifier to subjectivity—answered through the copulatory ('to be') and ostensive functions, which bear directly on the structural problem of why 'it speaks' in psychosis.

     this you presupposes an other who, in short, is beyond him.

841. #841

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.296

     **XXII** > **4**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that when the organizing signifier (specifically the Name-of-the-Father in Schreber's case) is evoked but fails to appear, the signifying chain cannot be anchored, producing a decomposition of the subject's relation to language and to the Other — the structural explanation for Schreber's interrupted sentences and his radical experience of absolute otherness.

     if the Other abandons him for one instant, drops him, a veritable decomposition occurs.

842. #842

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.242

     **XVIII** > **1**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that metonymy (contiguous, signifier-to-signifier coordination) is the foundational operation of language acquisition and psychic organization, upon which metaphor (transference of the signified) can only subsequently operate—and that psychotic phenomena like Schreber's delusional assonances expose this hidden signifying substructure by promoting the signifier as such.

     disturbances in the relationship to the other... it's as a function of his natural propensity to decompose in the presence of the other.

843. #843

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.234

     **XVII** > **1**

     Theoretical move: Lacan grounds the Freudian mechanisms of condensation and displacement in the rhetorical distinction between metaphor and metonymy, arguing that the signifier's structural priority over the signified is the very starting-point of the Freudian discovery, and that psychosis results from a specific pathological relationship between the subject and the signifier/Other rather than from a merely aphasic mechanism.

     It's by proceeding from the subject's relation to the signifier and to the other, with the different levels of otherness, imaginary other and symbolic Other, that we can articulate this psychical intrusion

844. #844

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.126

     **VIII**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian unconscious is nothing other than the continuous circulation of the symbolic sentence (the "discourse of the Other"), from which the ego functions precisely to shield consciousness; psychosis makes this structure visible by exposing the internal monologue as an articulated, interrupted, and grammatically structured discourse — as Schreber's voices demonstrate — thereby grounding both the theory of the unconscious and the theory of psychosis in the same structural account of language.

     the unconscious is also the discourse of the Other

845. #845

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.51

     **II** > **Ill** > **1**

     Theoretical move: By shifting the analysis of psychosis from organogenetic/psychogenetic frameworks (both of which covertly presuppose a unifying subject-point) to the register of speech, Lacan establishes the structural distinction between the big Other (the absolute, unknown addressee of speech) and the little other (the object of discourse), and grounds the ego's constitutive alienation in the primacy of the other's desire as the origin of human objects.

     For my part, within the generalized notion of communication, I state what speech as speaking to the other is. It's making the other speak as such. We shall, if you like, write that other with a big O.

846. #846

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.221

     **XVI**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychotic subject's testimony about their relationship to language must be taken literally rather than filtered through academic clinical categories, because the psychotic's "turning" in relation to language reveals a dimension constitutive of all human subjectivity — namely, the half-external position every subject occupies with respect to the signifier. The Schreberian case is thus elevated from pathological curiosity to methodological key for understanding the signifier/signified relation and the ego's grounding in the Other.

     the image that is raised, elevated, in relation to the first, that of the big Other, the paternal imago, insofar as it founds the double perspective within the subject of the ego and the ego ideal.

847. #847

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.103

     **VII** > **The imaginary dissolution**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's analysis of Schreber's paranoia to argue that narcissism, as conventionally understood (self-as-object), is insufficient to explain psychosis; the real question is the structural modification of the other — its emptying of subjectivity — which points toward a distinctly Lacanian register of alienation in madness.

     the description of this unique partner called God nevertheless leaves us perplexed as to his nature

848. #848

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.205

     **XIV** > **1**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the distinctiveness of the signifier — that it signifies nothing in itself — is the key to understanding both the structure of human subjectivity and the differential mechanism of neurosis versus psychosis: in neurosis the signifier remains enigmatic but operative, while in psychosis what has been foreclosed from the symbolic (Verwerfung) reappears in the real, with delusion marking the moment the initiative is attributed to the big Other as such.

     the delusion began the moment the initiative came from the Other, with a capital O, when the initiative was founded on a subjective activity. The Other wants this, and above all he wants this to be known, he wants to signify it.

849. #849

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.92

     **VI**

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces Verwerfung (foreclosure) as a logical-prior failure of primitive symbolization—distinct from repression—whereby what is not symbolized reappears in the Real, establishing the foundational distinction between psychosis and neurosis and grounding a critique of the "defense" concept and premature interpretation in analytic technique.

     everything he brings into being in these meanings is in a certain sense void of him... God, his imaginary interlocutor, understands nothing about what goes on within, nothing at all about living beings

850. #850

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.292

     **XXII** > **2**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a linguistic analysis of the second person pronoun ('you') to demonstrate that the superego operates as a foreign-body signifier rather than a dialectical law, and that the foundational function of speech—mission or mandate—is what generates the subject's latent question about its own being, with the 'you' as quilting point between address and subjectivity.

     The third party at issue here... is nothing resembling an object. It's always the discourse itself to which the subject is referring.

851. #851

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.159

     **X** > **XI** > **1**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychosis cannot be adequately explained at the level of the imaginary (projection, narcissism, ideal ego) because alienation is constitutive of the imaginary as such; what distinguishes psychosis is a breakdown at the level of the symbolic order, specifically through Verwerfung (foreclosure), which operates in the field of symbolic articulation that subtends the reality principle — a field Lacan grounds in the primordial symbolic nihilation of reality itself.

     we have to admit the existence of another Other. It's not only because we give it a capital letter that we are satisfied with it, but because we locate it as the necessary correlate of speech.

852. #852

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.27

     **I** > **1**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the distinction between neurotic repression and psychotic repression is a matter of their different positions within the symbolic order, and that misrecognizing the autonomy of the symbolic—substituting imaginary recognition for symbolic exchange—is the structural cause of analytic-triggered psychosis; verbal hallucination is theorized as the moment the subject collapses into identification with the ego, speaking to itself in the real.

     the interruption of full speech between the subject and the Other and its detour through the two egos

853. #853

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.69

     **IV** > **"I've just been to the butcher's"**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes synchronic from diachronic dimensions of the signifier, using Schreber's psychosis to show how isolated signifiers become "erotized" (charged with unassimilable meaning), and frames the structural analysis of delusion around the differentiation of the big Other (symbolic), the imaginary ego, and the real person—arguing that this tripartite structure is what the unconscious means.

     There is the otherness of the Other that corresponds to the S, that is, the big Other, the subject who is unknown to us, the Other who is symbolic by nature, the Other one addresses oneself to beyond what one sees.

854. #854

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.218

     **XV** > **1**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychosis is constituted not by conflict or defense in the neurotic sense, but by a foundational hole at the level of the signifier — specifically the foreclosure of the paternal signifier — which collapses the entire signifying chain and forces the subject into imaginary compensation, with decompensation occurring when imaginary crutches can no longer substitute for the absent symbolic function.

     the masked Other that is always in us appears lit up all of a sudden, revealing itself in its own function, for this function is the only one that henceforth maintains the subject at the level of discourse which threatens to fail him entirely.

855. #855

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.206

     **XIV** > **1**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychosis is structured around a failure at the level of the signifier — the exclusion of the big Other — which forces the subject into an imaginary compensation through the "between-I" (inmixing of subjects), explaining the characteristic delusion, mental automatism, and enigmatic assertion of the other's initiative as restitutive responses to the signifier's absence.

     The Other with a big O, qua bearer of the signifier, is excluded. The Other is thereby all the more powerfully affirmed between it and the subject, at the level of the little other, of the imaginary.

856. #856

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.348

     **XXV** > **INDE X**

     Theoretical move: This is the index section of Seminar III, a non-substantive reference apparatus listing key concepts, proper names, and page references for the seminar's theoretical content on psychosis, language, and related Lacanian concepts.

     Other and being, 288 image of, 209 as nondeceptive, 64 and onset of psychosis, 193 in psychosis, 43, 52-53, 162 and recognition, 50-51, 168, 303 and Schema L, 14, 52-53, 56 and signifier, 290-94

857. #857

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.353

     **XXV** > **INDE X**

     Theoretical move: This is an index from Seminar III, non-substantive in itself, but it maps the conceptual architecture of the seminar by clustering key Lacanian terms (Verwerfung/foreclosure, signifier, unconscious, symbolic, subject, Verneinung, etc.) with their page references, making visible the theoretical relations Lacan constructs across the seminar.

     unconscious … as discourse of the Other, 56, 112 … subject and Other, 52, 74, 239-40

858. #858

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.149

     **X** > **On the signifier in the real and the bellowing-miracle**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Schreber's psychosis to develop a theory of the signifier in the real: the verbal hallucination is not a false perception but the limit-phenomenon where discourse opens onto a signifier that precedes and exceeds the subject's intentional grasp, reframing the ego and the Other in terms of this foreign discourse at the heart of subjectivity.

     this Other considered as radically foreign, as errant, who intervenes so as to cause a convergence to the second degree upon the subject, an intentionalization of the external world, which the subject himself, insofar as he asserts himself as I, vigorously repels.

859. #859

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.114

     **VII** > **1**

     Theoretical move: By analysing Schreber's psychotic language, Lacan argues that the foreclosure of the third-person 'he' (the big Other as irreducible other subject) is the structural catastrophe of psychosis: without this guaranteeing 'he', the subject's being collapses, leaving only a hallucinatory, enigmatic speech produced by an imaginary-degraded God who absorbs all otherness.

     the other who is irreducible to anything other than the notion of another subject, that is, to the other qua he.

860. #860

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.283

     **XXI** > **1** > **4**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the quilting point (point de capiton) between signifier and signified is the minimal structural condition for normality, and that psychosis is characterised precisely by its absence or failure — a thesis developed through the Oedipus complex as the paradigmatic quilting point and through Schreber's case as exemplary psychotic disintegration of signifier/signified unity.

     You imagine perhaps that the you is here, at the level of the big Other, do you? No, not at all. This is where we shall begin - the you in its verbalized form does not at all coincide with this pole that we have been calling big O.

861. #861

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.230

     **XVII** > **1**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that in psychosis (particularly Schreber's hallucinations), the signifier's dimension of contiguity dominates over the dimension of similarity/metaphor, and that misrecognising the primordial mediating role of the signifier — reducing analysis to the signified — renders psychosis unintelligible; the hallucinatory phenomenon is precisely the grammatical-syntactic part of language imposed as an external reality, marking a failure of the metaphoric function.

     It's precisely around the existence of the other that the meaning of the preeminence of the signifying game revolves, increasingly emptied of meaning.

862. #862

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.78

     **V**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the condition of possibility for modern science is a historically specific "act of faith" — inherited from the Judaeo-Christian tradition — that posits an absolutely non-deceiving guarantor of the real; this epistemological foundation distinguishes modern science from other cultural formations (including Aristotle's) and is used to frame the entry into Schreber's psychotic system, where the celestial sphere functions as an alternative guarantee of reality.

     What assured him, in nature, of the truthfulness of the Other as real were those things that always return to the same place, namely the celestial spheres.

863. #863

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.175

     **XII** > **The hysteric's question**

     Theoretical move: By analyzing Schreber's delusion through the schema of analytic communication, Lacan argues that in psychosis the big Other—where being is realized through speech—is foreclosed, reducing discourse to an internal echo (automatism) that cannot resolve the subject's constitution; this structural difference from neurosis must be clarified before any technique for working with psychotics can be formulated.

     in psychosis the Other, where being is realized through the avowal of speech, is excluded.

864. #864

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.299

     **XXIII** > **The highway and the signifier "being a father"**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a grammatical analysis of the French construction "Tu es celui qui..." to demonstrate that the subject of enunciation (the I/ego) is essentially fleeting and can never fully sustain the address to the Other (thou), and then extends this insight to argue that the Judaeo-Christian tradition's founding figure of "I am the one who am" installs an always-elusive, unsustainable Other at the heart of Western subjectivity and science, distinguishing it from the Aristotelian relation to a graded world of entities.

     this thou to whom I address myself from the place I myself am in as Other with a big О is in no way my pure and simple correlate.

865. #865

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.183

     **XII** > **The hysteric's question** > **2**

     Theoretical move: Through a case of traumatic hysteria (Eisler's 1921 analysis), Lacan argues that hysterical symptoms are not reducible to imaginary or libidinal contents (anal, homosexual) but are formulations of a fundamentally symbolic question—"Am I a man or a woman? Am I capable of procreating?"—thereby grounding neurosis in the subject's failed symbolic identification with a sexed position, and linking this to Dora's question to establish a structural dissymmetry in the Oedipus complex between the sexes.

     This question is obviously located at the level of the Other, insofar as integration into sexuality is tied to symbolic recognition.

866. #866

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.113

     **VII** > **1**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the purely imaginary relation — illustrated via Schreber's psychosis — is structurally doomed to collapse (collision/fragmentation) unless stabilized by the symbolic order, specifically the Name of the Father; Schreber's delusion is then read as a clinical demonstration of what happens when that symbolic anchoring fails, leaving the subject exposed to an unchecked imaginary invasion legible through the disintegration of identity, voice phenomena, and the decomposition of language itself.

     the one and only being that henceforth exists for him... he divides them into two categories. There is on the one hand what is echt... on the other hand what is learned by rote.

867. #867

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.88

     **VI**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the psychotic's relation to reality from that of the normal subject by showing that what is at stake in psychosis is not belief in the reality of hallucinations but an unshakeable *certainty* that phenomena concern the subject — a certainty that is structurally prior to and independent of reality-testing, and which must be understood through the symbolic frame (L Schema) rather than reduced to normal mechanisms like projection.

     towards the big Other of intersubjectivity, the Other that you do not apprehend as long as it is a subject, that is, as long as it can lie, the Other that on the contrary one always finds in its place

868. #868

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.303

     **XXIII** > **The highway and the signifier "being a father"**

     Theoretical move: The highway-as-signifier analogy is deployed to show that the signifier does not merely connect points but *creates* and polarizes a field of meanings; this is then applied to Schreber's psychosis by arguing that the foreclosed signifier 'being a father' leaves only a network of minor paths (imaginary/partial routes), generating hallucinatory substitute signifiers in place of the absent structuring highway.

     the gravity, the inertia specific to the signifier in the field of relations with the Other.

869. #869

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.77

     **V**

     Theoretical move: By contrasting the neurotic's symptomatic language (where repression and the return of the repressed are two sides of one linguistic process) with the psychotic's open discourse, Lacan argues that psychosis cannot be reduced to the same mechanisms as neurosis; the analysis of Schreber's discourse must proceed through the three registers (symbolic/signifier, imaginary/meaning, real/discourse) toward an account of a specifically psychotic mechanism distinct from repression.

     Vertically, there is the register of the subject, speech, and the order of otherness as such, the Other. The hub of the function of speech is the subjectivity of the Other, that is to say, the fact that the Other is essentially he who is capable, like the subject, of convincing and lying.

870. #870

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.136

     **VIII** > **IX**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Schreber's delusion to elaborate the structure of psychotic discourse: the *Unsinn* (nonsense) of the voices is not simple privation of sense but a positively organized, contradiction-laden discourse from which the subject is alienated, while the threat of being 'forsaken' (*liegen lassen*) functions as the persistent thread tying together the entire delusional structure — with the implication that what is at stake is the subject's relation to language as a whole, not a providential/superego mechanism.

     the Other is lacking in delusion - but on this side, in a sort of internal beyond.

871. #871

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.83

     **V** > *The reading continues.*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Schreber's psychotic experience to argue that the fundamental structure of psychosis involves a lived contradiction between two incompatible figures of God (the cosmic guarantor of the Real and the erotic living partner), played out entirely within the imaginary dimension rather than through formal logic or intersubjective speech—a 'transversal' axis of deception that subverts the subject-to-subject axis of authentic symbolic exchange.

     The subject can speak to the Other insofar as with him it's a question of faith or feint, but here this permanent exercise of deception, which tends to subvert any order whatever, whether mythical or not, in thought itself, unfolds as a passive phenomenon

872. #872

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.141

     **VIII** > **IX**

     Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Schreber's delusion, Lacan argues that psychotic experience is structured around a fundamental disturbance in the symbolic order: God's radical incomprehension of the human, the 'writing-down system', and the self-contradictory nature of the delusional universe all index a breakdown in the total functioning of language, with the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary as the analytic framework for understanding delusional interlocution.

     This character with whom Schreber is involved in a twofold relation, a dialogue and an erotic relationship which are distinct and yet never disjoined, is also characterized by the fact that he has absolutely no understanding of anything that is specifically human.

873. #873

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.223

     **XVI** > *Reading from the* Memoirs, *300-01*

     Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Schreber's Memoirs, Lacan demonstrates that in psychosis the structure of reality itself is reorganized around verbal/signifying presences — the "fundamental language" — such that the Real is replaced by a linguistically constituted divine Other, which functions as the sole guarantor of the subject's existence.

     the sum of these verbal presences is for him identical with the divine presence, this sole and unique presence that is his correlative and his guarantor.

874. #874

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.65

     **IV** > **"I've just been to the butcher's"**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the hallucinatory utterance "Sow!" to demonstrate that in paranoia the big Other is structurally excluded, so the subject's own message circulates between two small others (ego and mirror-counterpart) without ever reaching the dimension of true speech; this is contrasted with the diachronic/synchronic structure of language (Saussure) mapped onto the tripartite symbolic/imaginary/real.

     The reason that the woman is strictly a paranoiac is that for her the cycle contains an exclusion of the big Other.

875. #875

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.180

     **XII** > **The hysteric's question** > **2**

     Theoretical move: Lacan draws a sharp distinction between the preconscious/imaginary domain and the unconscious proper, arguing that the analytic field is defined not by preverbal or imaginary communication but by the structural fact that unconscious phenomena are "structured like a language" — meaning they exhibit the signifier/signified duality where the signifier refers to another signifier, not to any object.

     I spoke to you of the Other of speech as being where the subject recognizes himself and gets himself recognized. This, and not the disturbance of some oral, anal or even genital relation, is the determining factor in a neurosis.

876. #876

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.189

     THE FETISH OBJECT > THE PHALLUS AND THE UNFULFILLED MOTHER

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that perversion in general, and fetishism in particular, is structurally grounded in the child's pre-Oedipal attempt to trick the unfulfillable desire of the mother by turning himself into a deceptive object—thereby constituting the intersubjective relation and the ego's stability—while also marking the danger of regression to an oral-devouring figure (Medusa) that underlies both phobia and perversion.

     The subject supposes desire in the other. What has to be satisfied is a desire at one remove, and since it's a desire that cannot be satisfied, one can only trick it.

877. #877

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.164

     THE FETISH OBJECT > IDENTIFICATION WITH THE PHALLUS

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses transvestism as the symmetrical complement to fetishism to argue that garments and the scopic relation both function around the *lack* of the object rather than its presence, and extends this to the "girl = phallus" symbolic equation, showing that in each case the subject's position vis-à-vis the phallic object (bringing, giving, desiring, replacing) is structurally distinct—while the imaginary "almightiness" of the Other is ultimately grounded in, and sustained by, an irreducible lack.

     The Other is the one who is almighty. However, behind this almightiness there is indeed an ultimate lack on which the might of the Other hinges.

878. #878

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.9

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan inaugurates Seminar IV by arguing that the Object Relations school's reduction of analytic experience to a dual subject-object relation (line a-a') is theoretically inadequate: against this, he retrieves Freud's own notion of the object as a *lost* and re-found object, constitutively marked by repetition and irreducible tension, which requires the full complexity of the L-Schema (subject/Other/imaginary axis) rather than a simple dyadic rectification.

     the big Other is another subject and insomuch as he is capable, par excellence, of deceiving.

879. #879

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.290

     HOW MYTH IS ANALYSED > THE SIGNIFIER AND DER WITZ

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the structure of Witz (naivety, the third-person ternarity, and the combinatorial logic of signifiers) to argue that Little Hans's symptom is best understood as a mythical-signifying system whose diachronic development is circular: the impasse at the origin is found again—inverted but structurally identical—at the point of arrival, and this movement is governed by the symbolic register, not by instinctual meaning.

     the third person who is always implied in the spirited remark. The first person makes a remark about a second to a third... there is always this ternarity which is essential for the remark to trigger laughter

880. #880

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.115

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE PERVERSE WAYS OF DESIRE > A CHILD IS BEING BEATEN AND THE YOUNG HOMOSEXUAL WOMAN

     Theoretical move: Lacan analyses the three stages of the beating fantasy to argue that perverse fantasy represents a radical desubjectivation in which signifiers are preserved in "pure state" - stripped of intersubjective signification - and that this structure (like the fetish as screen-memory) reveals the valorisation of the imaginary image as a frozen residue of unconscious speech articulated at the level of the big Other; perversion is therefore not a pre-Oedipal relic but is fully constituted through and by the Oedipus complex.

     The big Other is the locus at which unconscious speech is articulated, the Es insomuch as it is speech, history, memory and articulated structure.

881. #881

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.387

     XVIII CIRCUITS > 'ME DONNERA SANS FEMME UNE PROGÉNITURE'

     Theoretical move: Lacan recapitulates his trajectory from intersubjective schema (subject/Other/little other) toward discourse and object-as-signifier, then formalises the Oedipus complex and castration complex as interlocking symbolic structures, arguing that the Name-of-the-Father introduces a radical symbolic dimension into the child-mother relation, and that the phobic object functions as a metaphor standing in for this symbolic gap.

     the fundamental subjective schema of the symbolic relation between the subject and this Other that is the unconscious personage who steers him and guides him

882. #882

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.364

     XVIII CIRCUITS > AN ESSAY IN RUBBER¬ SHEET LOGIC

     Theoretical move: By using the anecdote of a woman artificially inseminated by her dead husband's preserved semen, Lacan sharpens the distinction between the real father and the symbolic father, arguing that paternity is fundamentally a function of speech and the Symbolic Order rather than of biological fecundity — a theoretical move that both grounds the Oedipus complex in the paternal metaphor and exposes the irreducible gap in sexual relations.

     all inter-human relations are founded on this investiture that comes in effect from the Other. This Other is already within us in the form of the unconscious, but nothing can be accomplished in our development if not through this constellation that implies the absolute Other as the seat of speech.

883. #883

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.202

     ON THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Oedipus complex cannot be resolved on the imaginary plane alone (where it produces only anxiety and symptom), but requires the introduction of a real element into the symbolic order — the paternal figure who "truly has" the phallus — such that castration becomes the necessary condition for the male subject's accession to the virile position and the inscription of the Law; yet the symbolic father as such can never be fully incarnated by any real individual.

     at the level of the big Other there is someone who can respond come what may, and who in every case answers that he is the one who's got the true phallus, the real penis.

884. #884

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.221

     ON THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX > ON THE CASTRATION COMPLEX

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the castration complex emerges as the necessary structural resolution to an impasse created when the child's real drive (the stirring of the real penis) disrupts the imaginary phallic luring game with the mother; the symbolic father's intervention re-orders what was an unresolvable imaginary deadlock, while the phobia (Little Hans) functions as a substitute signifier for the absent paternal term.

     he comes face-to-face with the opening where he is the captive, the victim, the pacified element in a game in which he now becomes prey to the significations of the Other.

885. #885

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.422

     FAREWELL > FROM HANS-THE-FETISH TO LEONARDO-IN-THE-MIRROR

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's Leonardo essay to develop a structural account of sublimation as the displacement of the radical alterity of the absolute Other into an imaginary relation—a "relation of mirage"—distinguishing this from the ego-psychological account of de-instinctualisation, and situating it through Leonardo's peculiar relationship to Nature as a non-subjective other accessible via imaginary identification.

     this other transforms the radicalness of the alterity of the absolute Other into something that is accessible through a certain imaginary identification.

886. #886

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.77

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE SIGNIFIER AND THE HOLY SPIRIT > ON ANALYSIS AS BUNDLING AND THE CONSEQUENCES THEREOF

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques the object-relations school (Marty, Fain, Bouvet) for reducing the analytic situation to a real dyadic relationship aimed at collapsing imaginary distance, thereby foreclosing the symbolic dimension of speech and the Other — and shows that this technical orientation produces paradoxical perverse reactions, particularly in obsessional cases. Against this, he reaffirms that the symbolic (S-A) and imaginary (a-a') axes must be held in their mutual, crossing functioning, with the paternal function and Oedipus complex as the fourth term that re-situates the preoedipal imaginary triad.

     This Other is not merely the other party who is there, but is literally the locus of speech… this big Other stands beyond the other that you apprehend imaginarily

887. #887

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.65

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE SIGNIFIER AND THE HOLY SPIRIT > THE DIALECTIC OF FRUSTRATION

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that frustration must be re-theorized through a structural distinction between the real object and the symbolic agent (the mother), showing how the presence-absence opposition introduced by the fort-da game grounds the virtual origin of the symbolic order, and how the mother's failure to respond converts her from symbolic agent into a real power, causing a reversal whereby the object becomes symbolic (a gift-token) rather than merely real.

     whereas the symbolic structuration makes her the present-absent object in keeping with the child's appeal, from the moment she is in decline she becomes real.

888. #888

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.25

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THEORISING THE LACK OF OBJECT > <span id="page-22-0"></span>THE THREE FORMS OF THE LACK OF OBJECT

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the object relation cannot be theorized without the phallus as a third-party element disrupting any dual (imaginary) subject-object relation, and that the dominant object-relations practice errs by reducing the analytic situation to an imaginary dyad (identification with the analyst's ego), as exemplified by its mishandling of obsessional neurosis.

     He exhibits how far this little other, which is his alter ego, his own double, can go, and does so before an Other who witnesses the spectacle in which he himself is a spectator.

889. #889

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.126

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE PERVERSE WAYS OF DESIRE > A CHILD IS BEING BEATEN AND THE YOUNG HOMOSEXUAL WOMAN

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the case of the young homosexual woman to demonstrate how perversion arises from a structural permutation within the Imaginary-Symbolic-Real triad: when the symbolic father intrudes into the imaginary plane as a real event (giving a child to the mother), the subject identifies with the paternal function and reorganises her desire around what the love-object lacks (the symbolic phallus), revealing that love is essentially a gift of what one does not have.

     what was articulated in a latent fashion at the level of the big Other is starting to link up in an imaginary fashion, in the fashion of a perversion.

890. #890

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.177

     THE FETISH OBJECT > THE PHALLUS AND THE UNFULFILLED MOTHER

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that frustration is not the refusal of an object of satisfaction but the withholding of a gift-as-symbol-of-love, grounded in the child's always-already symbolic order; need-satisfaction becomes erotically charged (libido in the strict sense) only because it substitutes for symbolic/love-demand, making the oral drive a product of this dialectic rather than a biological given.

     the structure of speech implies in the Other that the subject receives his own message in an inverted form.

891. #891

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.425

     FAREWELL > FROM HANS-THE-FETISH TO LEONARDO-IN-THE-MIRROR

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that sublimation is structurally correlated with an inversion of the ego/other relation in the imaginary register, such that the very process of de-subjectification (sublimation) entails a fundamental self-forgetting—illustrated through Leonardo's mirror writing as the symptom of a radical alienation in which the subject addresses himself from the position of his own imaginary other.

     This is inscribed, along with the necessity of the big Other, here on the diagram to which I have been urging you to refer as a means of charting these problems.

892. #892

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.128

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > DORA AND THE YOUNG HOMOSEXUAL WOMAN

     Theoretical move: By distinguishing symbolic insistence (Wiederholungszwang) from imaginary deception in the transference, Lacan argues that the young homosexual woman's "ruse dreams" are in fact the return of an unconscious symbolic message ("You will bear my child") from the Oedipus complex—and that Freud's error was failing to locate transference at the level of symbolic articulation rather than preconscious intentionality; this is then set against the Dora case as its structural mirror (perversion as negative of neurosis).

     it is necessary to introduce three terms… the dimension of law, of a regularity that is being established, is conceived of as something possible yet is being shielded from the bidder.

893. #893

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.386

     XVIII CIRCUITS > 'ME DONNERA SANS FEMME UNE PROGÉNITURE'

     Theoretical move: Lacan formalises the Little Hans case by arguing that neurosis is a closed question articulated at the level of the subject's existence through the symbolic dimension, and that transference is the structural mechanism by which the analyst—as the locus of the big Other—progressively decrypts the organised discourse of neurosis through dialogue, with the paternal function necessarily doubled into a real father and a higher symbolic/witnessing father (Freud).

     simply by virtue of being a discourse, it entails somewhere, initially in a virtual form, the Other that is in sum the place, the witness, the guarantor and the ideal locus of its good faith.

894. #894

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.19

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

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

     what is at issue is the constitution of the other as such, insomuch as he speaks, insomuch as he is a subject.

895. #895

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.43

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE SIGNIFIER AND THE HOLY SPIRIT

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Id (Es) is not a brute physical or energic reality but is organized and articulated like a signifier, thereby reframing the analytic notion of libido as a purely abstract measure (akin to energy) that operates at the level of the imaginary, and situating the body image and clinical objects (phobia, fetish) within the signifier/signified relation rather than within developmental-stage object theory.

     The Es is what, through the intermediary of the Other's message, is liable to become I.

896. #896

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.104

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE PERVERSE WAYS OF DESIRE > THE PRIMACY OF THE PHALLUS AND THE YOUNG HOMOSEXUAL WOMAN

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Freud's case of the young homosexual woman to argue that the structure of desire is organized around lack: what is loved in the beloved is precisely what she lacks (the phallus/child as imaginary substitute), and that Freud's countertransference error lay in making a mere desire real by premature interpretation, collapsing the symbolic plane onto the imaginary.

     This relation implies as its basis the possibility of being brought about at this level of the lie. We are in the realm of lies and truth.

897. #897

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.124

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the comic (as distinct from the witticism) is constituted at the level of the Imaginary—specifically through the ego's narcissistic dependency on the image of the semblable—while naïve jokes achieve their effect entirely "at the level of the Other" without requiring the standard dialectical work, and that Desire's fundamental disappointment is what the subject masks through ready-made metonymic satisfactions in language.

     a joke by an ignorant or naive person... is complete on this occasion, as it were, at the level of the Other... to elevate this blunder to the level of a joke, I simply have to present it and have it ratified by a third party, the big Other, to whom I communicate it.

898. #898

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.400

     **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.

     The interest of concepts such as the big Other and the little other is to structure the lived relationships in many more than one direction.

899. #899

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.139

     **FORECLOSURE OF THE NAME-OF -THE-FATHER**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Bateson's double bind as a foil to argue that the genesis of psychosis cannot be reduced to double-meaning communication but requires identifying the missing signifier — the Name-of-the-Father — as the grounding element of the law in the Other; its Verwerfung (foreclosure) is what distinguishes psychotic from neurotic structure, while the accompanying schema of the witticism illustrates how desire is essentially transformed (betrayed) by its passage through the signifying chain.

     in the Other as the seat of the law, represents the Other. This is the signifier that gives the law its support, that promulgates the law. It is the Other in the Other.

900. #900

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.15

     THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE F AMILLIONAIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan recapitulates the theoretical trajectory of Seminars I–IV to frame the new topic of "formations of the unconscious," establishing that the signifier's primacy grounds both the symbolic determination of meaning and the structural distinction between metonymy (desire's object) and metaphor (emergence of meaning), while introducing the quilting-point schema and the retroactive (*nachträglich*) action of the signifier as the key apparatus for the year's investigation.

     the Other, the big Other, the Other as the seat of speech, is reduced to the imaginary other. It involves the suppletion of the symbolic by the imaginary.

901. #901

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.464

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT > **EXITING VIA THE SYMPTOM**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the resolution of obsessional and hysterical neurosis hinges on the subject's correct relationship to the phallus as a signifier—not identifying with it but assuming one's place relative to it—and that failures of analytic technique (reducing this to imaginary phallic identification) produce symptomatic persistence rather than cure, with the Freudian formula 'Wo Es war soll Ich werden' pointing toward the properly symbolic realization of desire.

     the Other only exists as such at the level of signifying articulation... He is constantly occupied in maintaining the Other and making him subsist through imaginary formulations

902. #902

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.454

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT > **EXITING VIA THE SYMPTOM**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that neurosis is a fully structured linguistic phenomenon—"speech pronounced by the barred subject"—and that the opacity of the unconscious derives specifically from the Other's desire, which sits between the Other as locus of speech and the Other as embodied being; regression is thereby recast not as a temporal return but as the reappearance in discourse of earlier signifying forms linked to demand.

     We have defined the Other as the locus of speech. This Other is instituted and takes shape through the sole fact that the subject speaks. By virtue of this sole fact, the big Other is born as the locus of speech.

903. #903

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.26

     THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE F AMILLIONAIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's analysis of the 'famillionaire' witticism to argue that wit operates through a formal technique of the signifier (condensation of two signifying chains), that it requires the Other as a third party to codify the incongruous message, and that the essence of wit lies not in truth but in truth's alibi — a dimension always glimpsed only by looking obliquely, as with the unconscious itself.

     This difference is confirmed as a witticism by the Other. This is indispensable and it's in Freud... Confirmation by the Other as third party, whether supported or not by an individual person, is essential here.

904. #904

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.129

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

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that love is the fundamental human solution to the structural unsatisfiability of demand—having "an Other of one's own"—and uses this thesis to trace comedy's history from Aristophanic id-irruption through New Comedy's metonymic love-object, culminating in Molière's *The School for Wives* as the paradigm case in which full speech, metonymy, and the comedic treatment of desire are displayed with Euclidean clarity.

     Since everything depends on the Other, the solution is to have an Other of one's own. This is what we call love.

905. #905

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.87

     **A BIT-OF-SENSE AND THE STEP-OF-SENSE**

     Theoretical move: By tracing Freud's analysis of wit, Lacan argues that the pleasure of witticisms is not reducible to infantile verbal play but is grounded in the structural homology between the laws of the signifier (metaphor/metonymy) and the unconscious, and that this structural primacy of the signifier fundamentally perverts the relationship between need, demand, and desire.

     demand is in itself so relative to the Other that the Other is immediately in the position of accusing and rejecting the subject, whereas by invoking need he authenticates, assumes and ratifies it

906. #906

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.350

     **THE DREAM BY THE BUTCHER'S BEAUTIFUL WIFE** > Then Freud makes this parenthesis: > A further parenthetical remark by Freud:

     Theoretical move: By working through the Dora case, Lacan demonstrates how hysteria is structurally defined by the subject's inability to advance beyond demand to desire: the hysteric's identification with the little other (Herr K.) functions as a substitute for the beyond-of-demand constituted by the paternal metaphor, and the collapse of this identification reveals the fundamental interchangeability—and fragility—of the two lines connecting desire and demand in the Graph of Desire.

     the signifier of barred A. It's precisely the question of what I have just now defined as being the function of the signifier phallus - namely, the function of marking what the Other, as marked by the signifier, that is, as barred, desires.

907. #907

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.45

     THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE** *FAT-MILLIONAIRE*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the witticism 'famillionaire' operates on two irreducible axes—metaphorical signifying creation and metonymic proliferation of meaning—but that the true centre of the phenomenon is the conjunction of signifiers confirmed by the Other, which is precisely what distinguishes a witticism from a symptom and grounds its status as a formation of the unconscious.

     It's the Other who gives the signifying creation its value as a signifier in its own right... It's the Other's confirmation that distinguishes a witticism from the pure and simple phenomenon of a symptom

908. #908

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.441

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT > **THE CIRCUITS OF DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychoanalytic interpretation must be grounded in a two-circuit schema (symbolic and imaginary) in which the subject's articulation of need passes through the Other, and that this structure requires a "Other of the Other" — a meta-symbolic function — to account for how the subject can symbolize the locus of speech itself; this reframes debates about castration, penis envy, and aggressiveness within a broader topology of desire.

     It's here, in A, that he encounters the mother as a speaking subject, and it's here, in s(A), that the message ends, at the point at which the mother satisfies him.

909. #909

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.389

     **THE OBSESSIONAL AND HIS DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that obsessional desire is structured by dependence on the Other, and that fantasy must be redefined not as a blind imaginary image but as the imaginary captured in a particular use of signifiers—a scenario ($◇a) in which the subject is implicated—thereby distinguishing the obsessional's relation to desire from the hysteric's identificatory structure.

     the Other becomes the relay for the subject's access to his desire. The Other as locus of speech, insofar as demand is addressed to it, will also be the locus in which desire, or the possible formulation of desire, has to be discovered.

910. #910

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.431

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the resolution of the castration complex does not hinge on having or not having the phallus as an organ, but on the subject's recognition that she/he *is not* the phallus; the Phallus functions as the signifier of desire itself, and the case of the obsessional woman illustrates how misrecognizing this—treating the phallus as an object to be possessed rather than a signifier of desire—leads to analytic impasse.

     We find here, once again, the identification of Christ with the Other as locus of speech.

911. #911

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.318

     **SYMPTOMS AND THEIR MASKS**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that demand, constituted through the symbolic parenthesis of presence, generates two distinct formations along separate signifying lines: the ego-ideal (produced via the transformation of rejected demand through the mask) and the superego (produced along the line of signifying prohibition from the Other); the mask itself is constructed through dissatisfaction, and a privileged signifier—the phallus—will be required to unify the subject across the plurality of masks.

     the principle of what is called prohibition and superego, articulated as coming from the Other, emerges

912. #912

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.259

     **THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the phallus functions as the master signifier of desire for both sexes — not as a biological organ but as the structural marker of the gap between need and desire introduced by the signifying order — and that the Kleinian error lies in reducing the primordial dialectic to a specular, dyadic mother-child relation, thereby foreclosing the constitutive third term (the father) and the Other's desire.

     The second term, the term 'signified'... is the important point... The term implies the structuring action in the subject of signifiers that have been constituted, in relation to need, in an essential modification due to the entry of desire into demand.

913. #913

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.377

     **THE 'STILL WATERS RUN DEEP' DREAMS** > **THE OTHER'S DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus functions as the privileged signifier that designates the overall effects of the signifier on the signified, and that desire—structured as the desire of the Other—is the key axis around which both hysterical and obsessional clinical structures are organized, with the Splitting of the Subject (Spaltung) as the structural condition making the unconscious possible.

     Beyond this Other, if something called the beyond of desire is constituted by signifiers, we then have the possibility of the relationship [g 0 D].

914. #914

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.386

     **THE 'STILL WATERS RUN DEEP' DREAMS** > **THE OTHER'S DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan differentiates the hysteric's and obsessional's structural relations to desire: the hysteric locates desire in the Other's desire, while the obsessional's desire is constituted as an absolute condition that necessarily destroys the Other—making the obsessional's search for the object of desire self-defeating, since desire requires the Other's support as its very place.

     There is no big Other here. I am not saying that the big Other doesn't exist for the obsessional, I am saying that there isn't one, where his desire is involved

915. #915

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.118

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

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

     The Other is indispensable for closing the loop that is discourse insofar as it arrives at the message in a position to satisfy, at least symbolically, the fundamentally insoluble character of demand as such.

916. #916

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.411

     **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.

     by virtue of the simple fact that we are there to listen as Other, that is difficult - and all the more so if, in the way we enter into it, we accentuate the feature of analysis described as permissive.

917. #917

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.177

     **FORECLOSURE OF THE NAME-OF -THE-FATHER** > **THE PATERNAL METAPHOR**

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the thesis that the father's function in the Oedipus complex is not grounded in any real, imaginary, or simply symbolic agency but is precisely a metaphor — a signifier substituted for the maternal signifier — and that this paternal metaphor is the unique mainspring through which the phallus emerges as the signified of desire, resolving the impasses of the Oedipus complex for both sexes.

     the desire for something Other as such... the various manifestations of the presence of something Other insofar as they are institutionalized.

918. #918

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.376

     **THE 'STILL WATERS RUN DEEP' DREAMS** > **THE OTHER'S DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Bouvet's object-relations account of obsessional neurosis—centred on imaginary phallic incorporation—by insisting the phallus must be understood as a signifier (part object properly so called), and he uses this critique as a springboard to re-articulate the Graph of Desire, showing that desire is constitutively located in a field *beyond* demand, irreducible to the passage of need through the defiles of demand.

     We've already placed here the big A, the big Other, which is where the code is located and receives demands.

919. #919

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.395

     **THE OBSESSIONAL AND HIS DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that obsessional desire is structurally maintained through prohibition rather than satisfaction: the obsessional turns the evanescence of desire into a forbidden desire supported by the Other's refusal, while clinically demonstrating that drive-stage 'fixations' are not imaginary regressions but signifying articulations of demand at the level of the unconscious—thereby critiquing developmental object-relations theory in favour of a structural account of desire beyond demand.

     the obsessional is always in the process of asking permission... to apply oneself to restoring this Other and to place oneself in the most extreme dependence on him.

920. #920

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.98

     **A BIT-OF-SENSE AND THE STEP-OF-SENSE**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the witticism (Witz) operates by traversing the tension between two structural poles: the 'bit-of-sense' (peu-de-sens), the levelling effect of metonymic displacement, and the 'step-of-sense' (pas-de-sens), the surplus introduced by metaphoric substitution. The joke's completion requires the big Other to authenticate the step-of-sense, revealing that desire is structurally conditioned by the signifier's ambiguity and that subjectivity is only constituted through this triangular social process.

     A joke is only complete once it gets beyond this point - that is, only after the Other has taken the joke on board, responded to it and authenticated it as a joke.

921. #921

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.63

     THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE** *MIGLIONAIRE*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's Signorelli forgetting to articulate the structural distinction between metaphor and metonymy as the two axes of signifying creation, arguing that the forgotten name marks not mere absence but a positively constituted lack (an X) where new metaphorical meaning should have been produced, and extends this to a distinction between the 'speaking present' (the enunciating subject) and the 'present speaking' (discourse itself), grounding wit in the play of signifiers at both metaphoric and metonymic levels.

     The meaning to be created remains suspended somewhere between the ego and the Other.

922. #922

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.417

     **TRANSFERENCE AND SUGGESTION**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that obsessional neurosis requires interpretation at the level of castration-as-symbolic-law rather than suggestive identification with a part-object; mistaking the plane of demand for the plane of fantasy-identification constitutes a fundamental technical error whose visible symptom is the analyst's projecting passive homosexuality onto material (the bidet dream) that actually poses the question of the castration of the Other.

     The horizon of the Other, the big Other as such, distinct from the little other, is tangible in this observation at every turn.

923. #923

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.369

     **THE 'STILL WATERS RUN DEEP' DREAMS** > Freud comments in these terms:

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the difficulty of accessing sexual desire is located in the gap between the Other's absolute subjectivity (as giver/withholder of love) and its necessary objectification as an object of desire; this gap produces dizziness/nausea, theorized via the Phallus as signifier rather than as image or fantasy, which Lacan proposes as the key rectification over existing (Ego Psychology) technique.

     discordance between what there is that is absolute in the subjectivity of the Other who gives or doesn't give love and the fact that, to gain access to the Other as object of desire, it is necessary for it totally to become an object.

924. #924

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.195

     **THE THREE MOMENTS OF THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX (II)**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the structural failure of the Name-of-the-Father (foreclosure in psychosis, or its effective overruling by the mother in homosexuality) determines the subject's inability to complete the Oedipus complex's third moment; the key theoretical move is to show that homosexuality is not simply an "inverted Oedipus" but results from a precise structural inversion of authority within the parental couple, where the mother lays down the law to the father instead of the reverse.

     the first series of hallucinations consists of messages on a neo-code which presents itself as coming from the Other.

925. #925

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.179

     **THE THREE MOMENTS OF THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX (I)**

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the "nodal point" of the Oedipus complex as the moment when the subject must decide whether to accept the father's castration/privation of the mother, distinguishing two structural alternatives—"being or not being the phallus" (imaginary) versus "having or not having the phallus" (symbolic)—and shows how the father must intervene not merely as the bearer of the law de jure but as a real, graduated symbolic agent whose effective presence or deficit determines clinical structure.

     the law of the desire of the Other... the first test that he undergoes in his relationship with the Other, he undergoes with this first Other that is his mother

926. #926

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.482

     **YOU ARE THE ONE** YOU HATE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the obsessional's demand for death must be understood as a signifier mediated by the Oedipal horizon rather than reducible to Penisneid or castration, and that the Christian commandment 'love your neighbour as yourself' discloses—when formulated from the locus of the Other—the unconscious circuit in which the subject is the one who hates (demands the death of) itself, converging with Freud's 'Wo Es war, soll Ich werden'.

     The phallus has to be situated here at the level of the signifier of the Other as barred, S(Ⱥ), as identical to the profoundest signification that the Other has attained for the subject.

927. #927

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.491

     **EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > 2 This year's schema

     Theoretical move: The passage explicates the Graph of Desire schema by showing how the retroactive action of the signifying chain on the signified produces meaning, and how desire serves as the middle term that inserts discourse into the speaking subject, distinguishing the human level (with desire and the Other) from the animal level (specular imaginary confrontation).

     The encounter with the Other is projected onto that. The message is the result. For the message to be formed, it is sufficient that there be a receiver and a sender.

928. #928

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.421

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a close reading of his schema—distinguishing the line of articulated demand from the upper horizon of the demand for love—to argue that desire is structurally located in the intermediary zone between need and that horizon, always structured by the Other; he then critiques a clinical case where reduction to a dyadic, two-person (homosexual transference) framework systematically misses the symbolic/phallic elements visible in the dream material.

     the subject's relationship to the Other as the locus of speech and message... the barred A - S(A)... the return from demand's passage through the Other, which is called the message

929. #929

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.105

     **A BIT-OF-SENSE AND THE STEP-OF-SENSE** > **WHOAH, NEDDY!**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's analysis of jokes (Witz) — via a specific joke about battles and a rearing horse — to argue that the witticism's punchline operates through a retroactive "step-of-sense" that discloses how the signifier both enables and forecloses access to reality, and that the joke's satisfaction requires a tripartite structure involving the Other, distinguishing wit structurally from the merely comic.

     The Other that's at issue, which Freud also calls 'reference of the psychical scene' concerning jokes, is the one that today we have to question. It is the one that Freud constantly brings us back to concerning the pathways and the very process of jokes.

930. #930

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.170

     **FORECLOSURE OF THE NAME-OF -THE-FATHER** > **THE PATERNAL METAPHOR**

     Theoretical move: The passage uses the analytic technique of boredom as a transitional framing device, positioning it as constitutive of professional analytic practice, before pivoting to announce that the dialectic of the signifier is located at the level of the big Other — from which the function of the Name-of-the-Father must be approached.

     it's at the level of this Other, as such, that the dialectic of the signifier is located and that it's from there that it's best to explore the function, the impact, the precise pressure and the inductor effect of the Name-of-the-Father

931. #931

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.473

     **YOU ARE THE ONE** YOU HATE

     Theoretical move: Lacan concludes Seminar V by arguing that the phallus signifier is pluripresent across all neurotic structures, that obsessional neurosis is characterised by a 'demand for death' that structurally destroys the very possibility of demand, and that guilt in neurosis is independent of any reference to the law — reversing the Pauline formula so that 'if God is dead, nothing is permitted.'

     the demand for death concerns the Other in an internal manner. The fact that this Other is the locus of demand effectively entails the death of demand.

932. #932

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.68

     THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE GOLDEN CALF**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that metonymy is irreducible to metaphor by using Heine's "Golden Calf" witticism to show that the wit resides not in metaphorical substitution but in a metonymic displacement that subverts the metaphor; this is grounded in a structural distinction between desire and need, where need is always refracted through the laws of the signifier before it can appear as demand.

     what is produced may tend towards... or rather, on the contrary, it may be taken up and ratified as having been heard by the Other at the level of a specific signifying value

933. #933

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.150

     **FORECLOSURE OF THE NAME-OF -THE-FATHER** > 157 And we also have this schema:

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the subject (S) is a structurally "dummy" fourth term outside the Oedipal triangle, dependent on the signifiers at the locus of the Other, and that the imaginary triangle—anchored by the ego/specular image, the mother-father-child triad, and the phallus as third point—maps how the paternal metaphor transforms the first (symbolic) triad into a second (imaginary) one; the phallus is thus the central object with which the subject imaginarily identifies, irreducible to a mere part-object.

     If A truly is the locus of signifiers, it must itself carry some reflection of the essential signifier

934. #934

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.426

     **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.

     Ratifying the subject's fantasmatic production at the level of the signified of the Other, s(A), reduces the complex formations of desire in the subject to the demand articulated in the subject's immediate relationship to the analyst.

935. #935

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.57

     THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE** *MIGLIONAIRE*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's examples of 'famillionaire' and the forgetting of 'Signorelli' to argue that metaphorical creation necessarily produces a repressed residue (a 'signifying scrap') — the word that is displaced but not forgotten — demonstrating that the unconscious is structured as a combination of signifiers, not as a repository of meanings or objects.

     the subject poses the question to the Other, and to the Other itself qua Other - 'Who painted the Orvieto frescoes?' And nothing comes to him.

936. #936

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.334

     **SIGNIFIER, BAR** AND PHALLUS

     Theoretical move: The phallus is constitutively barred from the signifying order — it is the signifier of the Other's desire — and this structural bar is what introduces castration for both sexes, producing asymmetrical dilemmas: the woman must *be* the phallus (identifying with it as desired object) while the man must *have* it, yet both are divided from their being by this impossible relation to the phallic signifier.

     If the phallus is encountered in the barred form where it has the place of indicating the Other's desire, what about the subject?

937. #937

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.148

     **FORECLOSURE OF THE NAME-OF -THE-FATHER**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychosis (specifically Schreber's) results from the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father: because the Other lacks the signifier that would ground its own authority, messages cannot be authenticated through the 'you' circuit and arrive as broken, enigmatic utterances—a failure that is structural (the paternal metaphor) rather than empirical (whether the real father is present or adequate).

     in order for the dimension of the Other to be fully able to exercise its function as Other, as the locus of the depot or treasure trove of signifiers, it must include the following, which is that it also contain the signifier of the Other as Other.

938. #938

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.100

     **A BIT-OF-SENSE AND THE STEP-OF-SENSE** > **WHOAH, NEDDY!**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Other is not merely an intersubjective correlate but the structural locus where the "bit-of-sense" is transformed into the "step-of-sense" through a signifying chain that introduces an irreducible remainder (heterogeneity), thereby displacing the Cartesian cogito and grounding the unconscious as the signifier-in-action that thinks in the subject according to its own laws.

     As the locus of the code, it is the locus that a message in the form of a joke reaches by following the path on our schema that goes from the message to the Other where the simple succession of signifiers in a chain… gets registered.

939. #939

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.524

     **EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > **Chapter xxvm You Are the One You Hate**

     Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index chunk from Seminar V, listing page references for key Lacanian and psychoanalytic concepts without advancing a theoretical argument.

     barred Other 294, 299, 329, 346, 373, 416, 440, 478 ... as locus of speech 294, 298-9, 335-6, 363-4, 384-5, 415-18

940. #940

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.408

     **TRANSFERENCE AND SUGGESTION**

     Theoretical move: Lacan maps Freud's three types of identification onto his schema of need/demand/desire, distinguishing the line of suggestion (identification with the Other's insignia along the demand axis) from the line of transference (a second, properly analytic articulation beyond demand), thereby reframing the transference/suggestion opposition as a topological split within the structure of demand itself.

     the Other, it is itself symbolized - which means that it appears present against the background of absence and can be made present as absence.

941. #941

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.212

     FROM IMAGE TO **SIGNIFIER - IN PLEASURE AND IN REALITY**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that hallucinatory satisfaction is not a primitive imaginary phenomenon but is constituted at the level of signifiers and presupposes the locus of the Other; consequently, both the pleasure principle and the reality principle must be rethought as effects of the signifying chain rather than of need-satisfaction or experiential adaptation.

     what characterizes the hallucinatory satisfaction of desire is that it's formed in the domain of signifiers and that, as such, it implies a locus of the Other... It's a locus of the Other, insofar as it's necessary for the position of the instance of signifiers.

942. #942

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.113

     **A BIT-OF-SENSE AND THE STEP-OF-SENSE** > **WHOAH, NEDDY!**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the joke's mechanism reveals the Other as a dual structure: both a real, living subject (whose needs give meaning direction) and a purely symbolic locus — an anonymous, abstract "treasure trove" of signifiers — and that it is precisely this function of the Other, as the empty Grail or form, that the joke invokes and must awaken, thereby showing that the unconscious is the plane on which the joke's surprise arrives.

     It's the Other that possesses this treasure trove. It is assumed that the Other knows the multiplicity of signifying combinations... It's a matter of everything that language bears within itself... I only ever address the Other by assuming that what I bring into play in my joke is already contained in it.

943. #943

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.307

     **SYMPTOMS AND THEIR MASKS**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the original Freudian discovery of unconscious desire must be recovered against the distorting backdrop of contemporary psychoanalytic normativization: early Freudian interpretations derived their efficacy precisely from the absence of a pre-formed cultural framework, whereas today the analyst's intervention is weighted by an implicit normative horizon that obscures desire's essential link to its mask (symptom), making desire structurally unarticulable even when articulated.

     human desire is not directly implicated in a pure and simple relationship with the object that satisfies it ... there have always been glimpses of human desire in its internal relations with the Other's desire.

944. #944

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.116

     **A BIT-OF-SENSE AND THE STEP-OF-SENSE** > **WHOAH, NEDDY!**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that jokes operate through a shared symbolic field (the "parish"/paroisse) constituted by metonymic stock common to speaker and Other, and that the joke's mechanism works by using the Other-as-censor as a "reflecting concavity" to make the unconscious resonate — the obstacle to meaning becomes the very vehicle for transmitting what cannot ordinarily be heard.

     The Other is constituted as a filter that puts order into, and places an obstacle before, what can be accepted or simply even heard.

945. #945

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.493

     **EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > 3 **Concerning the Oedipus complex**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Oedipus complex is a structural prerequisite for theorizing pre-Oedipal configurations (perversion, neurosis, homosexuality), and uses the superimposition of two schemas—one imaginary, one intersubjective—to give 'identification' a precise topological meaning: the mutual substitution of subjects in speech.

     introduces intersubjectivity and the relationship to the Other, not as present, but as produced by speech itself

946. #946

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.340

     **THE DREAM BY THE BUTCHER'S BEAUTIFUL WIFE**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire must be distinguished from demand by showing how the subject's desire is fundamentally constituted through its encounter with the Other's desire, illustrated by Freud's analysis of the butcher's beautiful wife's dream, which serves as a paradigm case for the structure of unsatisfied/barred desire and the alienation of desire in the Other's speech.

     nothing intersubjective can be established unless the Other with a big '0' speaks. Or, again, because the nature of speech is to be the speech of the Other.

947. #947

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.347

     **THE DREAM BY THE BUTCHER'S BEAUTIFUL WIFE** > Then Freud makes this parenthesis: > A further parenthetical remark by Freud:

     Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Freud's dream of the butcher's wife, Lacan argues that hysterical identification enacts the structural split between demand and desire: the hysteric's unsatisfied desire is not a deficiency but a necessary condition for constituting a real Other, and it is only through the Other's barred desire that the subject can recognize and encounter its own barred, castrated desire.

     if a subject has to create an unsatisfied desire for himself, it's because this is the condition for a real Other to be constituted for him, that is, one that is not entirely imminent to the reciprocal satisfaction of demand or to the entire capture of the subject's desire by the Other's speech.

948. #948

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.489

     **EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > **1 The signifying chain**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the signifying chain is the irreducible structural condition of human subjectivity, the unconscious, and intersubjectivity alike — and that failing to grasp this leads to technical deviations (e.g. Bouvet's imaginary-centric technique), which Schema L is designed to correct by showing how the vector from the Other to the subject must traverse, not reduce to, the imaginary relation.

     subjects are captured in the Other, that is, the unconscious, and no subject has access to the unconscious without the Other's intervention

949. #949

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.190

     **THE THREE MOMENTS OF THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX (II)**

     Theoretical move: Lacan elaborates the three logical moments of the Oedipus complex as a structural sequence centred on the metonymic circulation of the phallus as the object of the mother's desire, showing how the paternal prohibition interrupts the child's identification as the mother's metonymic object and thereby opens the path to the third, identificatory moment — grounding castration in the paternal metaphor rather than in any social teleology.

     The child is particularly isolated and bereft of everything but the desire for this Other whom he has already constituted as the Other capable of being present or absent.

950. #950

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.238

     **FANTASY, BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reinterprets Freud's 'beyond the pleasure principle' by grounding it in the subject's fundamental relation to the signifying chain: the death drive, negative therapeutic reaction, and masochism are not biological inertia but expressions of the subject's refusal to constitute itself in signifiers, a refusal that paradoxically binds it ever more tightly to the chain.

     the fantasy... becomes the relation with the Other by whom it's a question of being loved, insofar as he himself is not recognized as such.

951. #951

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.327

     **SIGNIFIER, BAR** AND PHALLUS

     Theoretical move: The passage theorises the bar as the essential property of the signifier — its capacity to be cancelled/effaced — and uses this to ground the relationship between the signifying chain, the subject, desire, and the phallus; the Aufhebung of a non-signifying element (real or imaginary) is precisely what raises it to the dignity of a signifier, making the bar the hinge between signification, subjectivity, and the castration complex.

     Desire is there beyond it. This line passes through the signified of A [s(A)], which is placed here, on the schema at this first stage.

952. #952

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.477

     **YOU ARE THE ONE** YOU HATE

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates guilt as structurally located between desire and demand on the Graph of Desire, not merely as a response to prohibition: the prohibited demand kills desire, and this mechanism—visible only from outside the subject's lived position—defines neurotic (especially obsessional) guilt. The demand for death is shown to be an articulated symbolic demand whose reflexive structure makes it equivalent to the death of demand itself, while the polypresence of the phallus-as-signifier (rather than imaginary organ) explains the unity of obsessional phenomenology across sexes.

     the demand for death is equivalent to the death of demand... linked to the Other of the Other... the Other as symbolic object which gives or refuses presence or absence

953. #953

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.302

     **THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS** > **THE FORMULAS OF DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: The phallus is theorized as the privileged signifier that introduces the relationship to the little other (a) into the big Other (A) as the locus of speech, thereby barring the Other and implicating it in the dialectic of desire — a structural move that critiques Jones's reductive biologism (aphanisis as disappearance of desire) in favour of a properly symbolic account of the castration complex.

     the subject's relationship to the Other remains to be structured, insofar as it's in the Other, in the gaze of the Other, that he apprehends his own position.

954. #954

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.80

     THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE GOLDEN CALF**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that metonymy, through the perpetual sliding of meaning along the signifying chain, constitutes the primordial dimension of human language not as meaning but as value — a claim grounded in readings of Maupassant, Feneon's micro-fictions, and Marx's theory of general equivalence, all of which demonstrate that discourse can only grasp reality by introducing a decentring, disorganizing movement irreducible to reference.

     at the beginning of any witticism there's always an appeal to the Other as the locus of verification.

955. #955

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.19

     THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE F AMILLIONAIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the Graph of Desire's two-line schema to distinguish the signifying chain (permeable to metaphor/metonymy) from the line of rational discourse, showing how their two intersections (code and message) generate meaning; he then opens the inquiry into Witz as the privileged Freudian site where the interplay between code and message—and thereby the structural relation between wit and the unconscious—becomes legible.

     This code is very obviously located in the big Other, that is, in the Other insofar as it's the companion of language.

956. #956

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.314

     **SYMPTOMS AND THEIR MASKS**

     Theoretical move: The symptom functions as a "mask" that presents desire in an ambiguous, closed form—addressed to nobody, articulated but not articulable—and this structure of masked desire, rooted in the hysterical identification with a situation of desire rather than a determinate object, necessitates that analytic interpretation always does more than mere recognition: it assigns an object to a desire that is fundamentally desire-for-lack-in-the-Other.

     desire is desire for this lack which, in the Other, designates another desire.

957. #957

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.451

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT > **THE CIRCUITS OF DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the obsessional's circuit of desire from the hysteric's by showing that the obsessional uses the signifying articulation of demand to annul the Other's desire through verbal destruction, yet paradoxically this same destructive signifying act sustains the Other's dimension — a structure illustrated by the French formula 'Tu es celui qui me tues', and contrasted with the illusory analytic 'solution' of imaginary identification.

     'Thou art the one who will ...'. That's what the subject formulates to the Other. For the obsessional that is where it stops.

958. #958

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.36

     THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE** *FAT-MILLIONAIRE*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that metaphor and condensation operate not through injection of meaning but through signifier-to-signifier relations (homonymy, equivocation), and that this same mechanism — whereby the original signifier gets "repressed" once meaning is established — underlies all formations of the unconscious, unifying wit, slips, and forgetting under a single economy of the signifier.

     you wouldn't know about it if on this occasion I hadn't been the Other with a big O, that is the listener, and not only the attentive listener, but the listener who hears [entendant], in the true sense of the term.

959. #959

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.443

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT > **THE CIRCUITS OF DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Oedipal structure is grounded in the castration complex as the effect of the signifier on the Other, which introduces a constitutive lack-in-being into the subject; this foundational lack then distributes into distinct clinical structures—symptom, hysteria, and obsession—each defined by a specific relationship to desire and its object.

     The Other isn't purely and simply the locus of this perfectly organized and fixed system. It is itself a symbolized Other... The Other, potentially the Father, the locus in which the law is articulated, is itself subject to the signifying articulation

960. #960

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.242

     THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PHALLUS > **DESIRE AND JOUISSANCE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes desire from jouissance by showing that desire is fundamentally structured by signifiers (not reducible to imaginary relations or need), and uses Joan Riviere's case of 'womanliness as masquerade' to demonstrate that the subject's relation to the phallus — whether as theft, mask, or sign of being — reveals the constitutive splitting of the subject between existence and signifying representation, grounding the unconscious.

     the maternal object, initially produces operates on signs, on what we might call, to give an image of what I mean, the currency of the Other's desire.

961. #961

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.459

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT > **EXITING VIA THE SYMPTOM**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus achieves its privileged status as master signifier of the unconscious not through anatomical primacy but through its metaphorical passage into the signifying chain via the paternal metaphor; in psychosis, the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father prevents this metaphorical effect, leaving the Other's desire unsymbolized and causing the 'it speaks' of the unconscious to erupt in the Real as hallucination, while in obsessional neurosis the Other's desire is actively disavowed (Verneinung) rather than left unsymbolized.

     the Other as the locus of speech speaks to him incessantly... everything is in voices, and why the 'it speaks' that is in the unconscious for the neurotic subject is on the outside for the psychotic subject.

962. #962

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.292

     **THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS** > **THE FORMULAS OF DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques the "psychologizing" regression in post-Freudian theory (culminating in Klein's "early Oedipus complex") that reduces castration to a partial, aggressive drive, and counter-proposes that castration must be understood in its irreducibly signifying character: as the structural relation between desire and the mark, prior to any psychological or genetic narrative.

     You will discover the subject S, the big A and the little a. Where is the big A, where is the little a? It doesn't matter - what's important is that there be the two of them.

963. #963

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.135

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

     Theoretical move: Through a reading of Molière's *L'École des femmes*, Lacan argues that desire is structurally metonymic and always exceeds any attempt to capture it in language or in the Other: the subject's desire lies "beyond" whatever object or discourse is imposed, and the Other functions not as the unique object of desire but as the necessary correspondent/medium through which desire must pass while always slipping past it.

     The relationship to the Other is essential inasmuch as the path of desire necessarily passes through it, but not insofar as the Other is the unique object, but rather insofar as the Other is the correspondent of language and subjects it to its entire dialectic.

964. #964

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.299

     **THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS** > **THE FORMULAS OF DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces three formulas of desire (articulating desire's relations to narcissistic identification, demand/the Other, and the phallus as signifier) while arguing that Freud's *Totem and Taboo* discloses the constitutive link between desire and the signifier — specifically that the murder of the father marks the emergence of signifiers from death, and that human desire is irreducible to adaptation because the subject enjoys desiring itself.

     The big A that comes next is the big Other, the locus, seat or witness that the subject makes reference to as the locus of speech, in his relationship with any kind of little a.

965. #965

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.183

     **THE THREE MOMENTS OF THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX (I)**

     Theoretical move: Lacan schemas the Oedipus complex as three dialectical moments governed by the paternal metaphor: (1) the child identifies with the phallic object of the mother's desire, (2) the father intervenes imaginarily as depriver/castrator of the mother, and (3) the father reveals himself as *having* (not *being*) the phallus, enabling the boy's identification as ego-ideal and the decline of the complex—the entire movement being structurally a metaphor in which one signifier (the Name-of-the-Father) is pinned to another to produce a new signification.

     What the subject effectively questions the Other about, provided he traverses it completely, will always encounter in the Other, in some ways, the Other of the Other, that is, its own law.

966. #966

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.89

     **A BIT-OF-SENSE AND THE STEP-OF-SENSE**

     Theoretical move: By tracing demand through a three-moment schema, Lacan argues that the introduction of signifiers necessarily transforms raw need into desire, and that this minimal metaphorical transformation—instating the Other and the message simultaneously—is the mythical-structural foundation for all subsequent operations of the unconscious, including wit, surprise, and the metonymic circuit of the subject's desire in the Other.

     Instituting the Other thus coexists with the completion of the message. They are determined at one and the same time, one as message and the other as Other.

967. #967

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.366

     **THE 'STILL WATERS RUN DEEP' DREAMS** > Freud comments in these terms:

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a Freudian dream analysis (the hysterical gesture of the hand on the jacket) to articulate the structural position of the woman in desire: she makes a mask of herself to *be* the phallus, and this leads to a rigorous reformulation of desire as the residue produced by the subtraction of need from the demand for love — an absolute condition that abolishes the dimension of the Other's response.

     Every desire in its pure state is something that ... assumes the form of an absolute condition in relation to the Other ... it abolishes the dimension of the Other, that it's a requirement where the Other doesn't have to respond yes or no.

968. #968

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.171

     **THE THREE MOMENTS OF THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX (I)**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Oedipus complex must be articulated through the structure of the paternal metaphor: the Name-of-the-Father substitutes for the mother in the signifying chain, and this symbolic operation is what installs the phallus as the privileged imaginary object mediating the child's relation to the mother's desire — establishing a metaphorical (not merely sociological or empirical) connection between the symbolic father and the imaginary phallus.

     there is always a third party, the big Other, who is constitutive of the subject's position, insofar as he speaks, which is also to say, insofar as you analyse him.

969. #969

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.362

     **THE 'STILL WATERS RUN DEEP' DREAMS**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's analysis of the butcher's wife's dream to demonstrate that the phallus functions as a *signifier* of desire—not as an object—and that the subject's dilemma is whether to *have* or *be* this signifier, a distinction that lies at the heart of the castration complex and the hysteric's relation to desire.

     With the phallus it is effectively a matter of something that is articulated on the plane of language, and which therefore is located as such on the plane of the Other.

970. #970

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.142

     **FORECLOSURE OF THE NAME-OF -THE-FATHER**

     Theoretical move: Lacan demonstrates that Foreclosure (Verwerfung) of the Name-of-the-Father destroys the message/code circuit at point A (the locus of the Other), thereby collapsing the signifying conditions for desire's satisfaction and precipitating psychosis—illustrated through Schreber's voice hallucinations as substitutes for the absent paternal signifier.

     there is an Other, another Other in him, as subject of the code … The possibility of satisfying any human desire happens to depend on how it fits into the signifying system … at the level of the Other as locus and seat of the code.

971. #971

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.325

     **SIGNIFIER, BAR** AND PHALLUS

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes desire from demand by insisting on desire's eccentricity to satisfaction and its irreducibility to any graspable meaning produced by signification, while simultaneously grounding the signifier's distinctive status in its capacity for self-substitution within the topological space of the big Other — a structure animals lack, since they possess no law organizing signifiers into a concatenated discourse.

     what the discourse of animals lacks is concatenation... I would say that it's due to what I call the relationship to the big Other, insofar as it is the locus of a unitary system of signifiers.

972. #972

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.513

     **EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > **Chapter xxvm You Are the One You Hate**

     Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section listing technical terms, proper names, and page references from Lacan's Seminar V, providing no original theoretical argument but mapping the conceptual terrain of the seminar.

     the Other's desire 36~82, 442,443,458-60 the Other as object of 7,363-4 castration of the Other 328-30

973. #973

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.493

     TOWARD SUBLIMATION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the object of desire (objet a) is constituted as the signifier of desire-for-desire—not as a complement to instinct—and that the phallus functions not as a biological referent but as the privileged signifier of the Other's desire; desire is located in the gap between two signifying chains (repressed and manifest), while the Real is defined by inexorable return to the same place, and analytic interventions that reduce transference to current reality miss the essential dimension of desire.

     the child first deals with the mother's desire - in other words, with what the demanding subject truly is apart from demand.

974. #974

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.149

     THE LITTLE COUGH AS A MESSAGE

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Graph of Desire to articulate the structural distinction between statement (énoncé) and enunciation (énonciation) in dream-reporting, arguing that the subject's asides, doubts, and stresses are not incidental but are inscribed at the level of enunciation and connect directly to the latent dream-thoughts — thereby giving the formula E(e) as the general structure of the enigma.

     all of that, which accompanies the dream and which, in some sense, comments on it from a position for which the subject assumes more or less responsibility, is inscribed at the level of discourse for the Other.

975. #975

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.229

     THE LAUGHTER OF THE IMMORTAL GODS

     Theoretical move: Lacan formalizes the quadripartite structure of subject-formation by showing that the specular couple [a-a'] is always already regulated by the more primitive dyad of the unconstituted subject and the mother-as-One, and that the birth of metaphor (substitution) is the moment at which the object is symbolized and desire properly emerges — yielding the formula of fantasy ($◇a) inscribed within a four-term schema.

     the mother's body, this universal container which presents itself as a One at the level of the Other

976. #976

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.27

     CONSTRUCTING THE GRAPH

     Theoretical move: Lacan constructs the Graph of Desire by differentiating desire from need and will through psychoanalytic categories (drive, fantasy), then grounds subjectivity in the signifying chain, demonstrating that the graph's two levels articulate the subject's progressive capture in language and the emergence of the Other as such.

     There is a relationship here with the Other, strictly speaking, inasmuch as there is an appeal to the Other as presence, presence against a background of absence.

977. #977

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.238

     THE LAUGHTER OF THE IMMORTAL GODS

     Theoretical move: Through close reading of Sharpe's case, Lacan demonstrates that the patient's symptomatic objects (straps, car) are instances of objet petit a, while the real analytic impasse lies in the patient's structural impossibility of accepting the castrated Other—a deadlock Lacan locates in the analyst's own resistance to naming what the phallus as signifier does in the Other.

     It is not the patient who is omnipotent. It is the Other who is omnipotent and this is why the situation is especially frightening to him.

978. #978

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.241

     THE LAUGHTER OF THE IMMORTAL GODS

     Theoretical move: The fundamental mainspring of neurosis is not castration anxiety (fear of losing the phallus) but rather the refusal to allow the Other to be castrated; this is articulated through a rereading of the analysand's fantasy in terms of aphanisis as the active hiding/escamotage of the phallus rather than its disappearance.

     If the subject cannot accede to the Other's world, it is inasmuch as the phallus is not included in the game, being preserved, instead, on the sidelines.

979. #979

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.308

     THERE IS NO OTHER OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: The passage uses Hamlet's structural position—his delay, his encounter with death, and the father's revelation of truth—to articulate the Lacanian subject as constituted by the signifier and the Graph of Desire, distinguishing the obsessional's relation to desire (Erwartung) from the Oedipal structure, and positioning the father who "knew the truth" as the key differential coordinate between Hamlet and Oedipus.

     the intersection of demand's intention and the signifying chain occurs for the first time at point A, which we have defined as the Other with a capital O, qua locus of truth.

980. #980

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.330

     OPHELIA, THE OBJECT

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the structure of fantasy ($◇a) by distinguishing how the object of desire (objet petit a) takes the place of the symbolically deprived phallus, and then uses this framework to differentiate perversion (emphasis on the imaginary pole, a) from neurosis (emphasis on the barred subject, $), with Hamlet serving as the privileged illustration of neurotic fantasy through his constitutive subjection to the Other's time.

     his dependence on the Other's desire - that is, on his mother's desire... Hamlet is always tributary to the other's time [suspendu a l'heure de l'autre]

981. #981

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.253

     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.

     This 'not knowing' in the Other is correlated with the very constitution of the subject's unconscious, and it is indispensable that we take this into account.

982. #982

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.139

     DESIRE'S PHALLIC MEDIATION > But Freud adds the following:

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's three-phase schema of "A Child Is Being Beaten" and the optics of the inverted bouquet to argue that the subject constitutes itself as barred subject ($) only by passing through a fantasmatic phase of near-abolition (primary masochism), and that the phallus functions as the mediating signifier through which desire is structured in the imaginary-symbolic interplay.

     The spherical mirror, which helps him return to his place in the symbolic, represents capital A here - it is a symbolic mirror.

983. #983

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.363

     PHALLOPHANIES

     Theoretical move: The Oedipus complex's dissolution (Untergang) is structured as a mourning of the phallus, which Lacan re-articulates through the triad of castration/frustration/deprivation: symbolic castration marks the barred subject as speaking subject, and the imaginary subtraction of the phallus (−φ) is what generates Objet petit a as the object that sustains the subject precisely in his position as "not being the phallus."

     the locus of the demand for love, she is at first symbolized in the twofold register of presence and absence, and that she thereby finds herself to be in the position of setting the generative dialectic in motion

984. #984

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.332

     OPHELIA, THE OBJECT

     Theoretical move: Lacan maps three successive stages of Hamlet's relation to the object (Ophelia) — estrangement, rejection/externalization, and mourning/reconquest — arguing that Ophelia functions structurally as the phallus that the subject externalizes and rejects, and that the fantasy formula ($◇a) tilts toward ($◇φ) in a movement that illuminates das Unheimliche and the modern hero's constitutive displacement onto the other's time.

     it is always by the other's watch [heure] that the plot of the tragedy proceeds and is brought to an end

985. #985

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.46

     FURTHER EXPLANATION

     Theoretical move: At the second level of the Graph of Desire, the subject-as-speaker is constituted through the "Che vuoi?" of the Other, which reveals that the subject does not know the message returning to him from his demand; the only true answer to that question is the Phallus as the signifier of the subject's relation to the signifier, but to articulate this answer the subject disappears — generating the threat of castration — and desire is situated precisely in the gap between code and message on this second level.

     Every discourse is the Other's discourse, even when it is the subject who speaks it... what we find at the second level is fundamentally a call for being, which is made with more or less force.

986. #986

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.217

     SACRIFICING THE TABOO QUEEN

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the chess metaphor — specifically the patient's refusal to sacrifice his queen — to argue that the phallus is a hidden signifier displaced onto the female partner (wife/analyst), and that the subject's desire is structured around preserving this phallic substitute at the cost of remaining bound in a fantasy of omnipotence; the analytic task is to bring this secret relation between subject and partner into the open.

     the female partner qua Other is precisely what represents to this subject, as to many subjects, what is in some sense most taboo in his power

987. #987

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.42

     FURTHER EXPLANATION

     Theoretical move: Lacan reconstructs the Graph of Desire step by step to show how its two levels articulate the speaking subject's relation to the signifier, demonstrating that continuity and fragmentation on each trajectory encode the retroactive effect of the signifier's synchronic structure on need, demand, and intentionality, thereby distinguishing the repressed, desire, and the unconscious as three non-identical registers.

     Capital A is, as you know, the locus of the code, the locus in which the treasure trove of language in its synchrony resides

988. #988

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.523

     375. The process of logical generation

     Theoretical move: This passage is editorial/annotation material: it situates two Freudian quotations (Wo Es war, soll Ich werden; the Fliess letter) and notes a schematic diagram from Seminar VI relating to the process of logical generation via the level of demand rather than the Other, without advancing an independent theoretical argument.

     it is not by examining the Other, but rather by considering what occurs at the level of demand

989. #989

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.35

     CONSTRUCTING THE GRAPH

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that metaphor produces a new signified by substituting an unexpected signifier, and that this metaphorical operation always veils/unveils death — the constitutive absence at the heart of language — through the structural function of the phallus as the missing signifier subtracted from the chain of speech, making desire the metonymy of being and castration the inevitable consequence of the subject's capture in speech.

     at the level at which the subject is himself caught up in speech, and thereby in a relationship with the Other as the locus of speech

990. #990

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.471

     THE FUNCTION OF SPLITTING\* IN PERVERSION

     Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the distinction between neurotic and perverse desire by deploying the fantasy matheme ($◇a) to show that fantasy constitutes the subject at the point where unconscious discourse escapes him; masochistic jouissance is reread as the subject's relation to the Other's discourse rather than the death drive, schizophrenic foreclosure is located at the identification with the cut, and neurotic desire is defined as structurally dependent on the paternal metaphor that masks a metonymy of castration.

     an essential dimension of masochistic jouissance lies in the specific sort of passivity experienced by the subject: he enjoys thinking that his fate is being decided in some upper echelon, by a certain number of people who are around him and who debate his fate in his presence as if he were not there.

991. #991

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.165

     THE FANTASY ABOUT THE BARKING DOG

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Ella Sharpe's clinical case to argue that interpreting a patient's symptoms (cough, dream, enuresis) at the level of imaginary rivalry and omnipotence misses the properly symbolic dimension: what is at stake is the omnipotence of discourse via the Other, not the subject's own omnipotence — and the cough must be read as a signifier (message) addressed to the Other, not a spontaneous affective release.

     If what he is dealing with is the omnipotence of discourse, it is via the Other that he proffers it.

992. #992

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.95

     THE DREAM ABOUT THE DEAD FATHER: "AS HE WISHED"

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the subject is constituted through the structural split between the I of enunciation and the I of the statement, and that negation (Verneinung) — especially the "discordant" ne — is the earliest linguistic trace of this split, linking the signifier's capacity for self-effacement to the inaugural moment of the unconscious subject.

     In order to show you by what route the subject enters into a dialectic involving the Other [la dialectique de l'Autre], insofar as this dialectic is imposed on him by the very structure of the difference between enunciation and statement.

993. #993

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.163

     THE LITTLE COUGH AS A MESSAGE

     Theoretical move: The passage deploys the fantasy of self-annihilation (becoming an animal, barking) as the subject's way of articulating that in the presence of the Other he is "no one" — linking the structure of fantasy to the subject's fundamental identification and its necessary failure, using the Odysseus/Cyclops myth as the anchoring figure.

     Inasmuch as I am in the presence of the Other, I am no one.

994. #994

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.205

     SACRIFICING THE TABOO QUEEN

     Theoretical move: Lacan reappropriates Jones's term "aphanisis" — redirecting it from a fear of desire's disappearance rooted in developmental psychology toward a structurally prior effect of castration, arguing that it is precisely because the signifier is operative in castration that the subject can become alarmed at the potential disappearance of his desire; this allows Lacan to reframe the clinical material of Ella Sharpe's patient in terms of intersubjective topology rather than imaginary equivalences.

     the places of the subject, the little other, and the Other with a capital O must always be indicated for each phenomenon if we wish to avoid getting bogged down in a sort of tangle

995. #995

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.338

     MOURNING AND DESIRE

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Hamlet's oscillation between procrastination and precipitation is not a character flaw but a structural feature of neurosis, specifically indexed by the formula S(Ⱥ): Hamlet always acts on the Other's time because he misrecognises a non-existent Other-of-the-Other as guarantor of truth, and his tragedy is his inexorable progress toward the hour of his own downfall.

     Hamlet is always operating on the Other's time [a l'heure de l'Autre].

996. #996

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.355

     PHALLOPHANIES

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a structural comparison of Hamlet and Oedipus to argue that mourning's disrupted rituals expose the same fundamental gap as the phallic signifier/castration, and that Hamlet stages a 'barred Other' [S(Ⱥ)] at its very outset rather than discovering it through the hero's deed—making Hamlet's Oedipal drama a specifically modern, 'distorted' form of the Untergang of the Oedipus complex in which the subject is paralysed by an unatonable debt rather than enacting the lustral rebirth of the law.

     the locus in which the law is inscribed. Connecting these things should give us the opportunity to return to the way in which relations between the subject and what one might call the original crime have been articulated.

997. #997

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.182

     THE FANTASY ABOUT THE BARKING DOG > Crossing and exchange

     Theoretical move: Lacan demonstrates how the fantasy formula ($◇a) operates clinically by tracking a patient's chain of associations through the Graph of Desire, showing that the subject's fantasy structure requires the absence of the big Other as witness, and that the oscillation between the imaginary other (little a) and the symbolic Other is the pivotal hinge around which the subject's desire and shame are organized.

     'I watch the other that I am, this dog, on the condition that the Other not come in, otherwise I would die of shame.'

998. #998

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.381

     THE FUNDAMENTAL FANTASY

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the fundamental fantasy ($ ◇ a) provides desire's minimal supporting structure by articulating, synchronically rather than diachronically, how the subject must pay the price of castration—giving up a real element (objet a) to serve as a signifier—precisely because the subject cannot designate itself within the Other's discourse (the unconscious). This move directly opposes ego-psychology's conflation of object-maturation with drive-maturation, exposing it as a confusion between the object of knowledge and the object of desire.

     What is at stake here is based entirely on what happens in the Other, inasmuch as the Other is the locus of the subject's desire. Now, in the Other, in the Other's discourse which the unconscious is, the subject is missing something.

999. #999

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.322

     OPHELIA, THE OBJECT

     Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the Graph of Desire to distinguish fantasy's imaginary object (a) from the signifiers of demand, arguing that Object Relations theory errs by collapsing this distinction—Ophelia serves as the dramatic instantiation of objet petit a, and Hamlet's vacillating desire is theorized as the subject's fading (aphanisis) at the intersection of demand and fantasy.

     The first step we took along this pathway was thus to articulate to what degree the play is the drama of desire insofar as desire is related to the Other's desire.

1000. #1000

      Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.96

      THE DREAM ABOUT THE DEAD FATHER: "AS HE WISHED"

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the object of desire is not the correlate of need but what props the subject up at the moment of his disappearance behind the signifier; deploying the Graph of Desire, Lacan situates 'desire' between the alienating appeal to the Other and the dimension of the unsaid, using Freud's 'dead father' dream to show how statement and enunciation articulate desire's structural role in the subject's existence.

      The subject puts it to the test against the backdrop of the idea that the Other knows all about his thoughts, since at the outset his thoughts are, by their very nature and structure, this Other's discourse.

1001. #1001

      Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.499

      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 subject's desire, qua desire for desire, opens out onto the cut or pure being, manifested in A in the form of lack.

1002. #1002

      Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.89

      LITTLE ANNA'S DREAM

      Theoretical move: Lacan articulates repression (Verdrängung) as an operation *on the signifier* — specifically, the subject's self-effacement through the elision of signifying clausulae — and distinguishes it from foreclosure (Verwerfung) and negation (Verneinung) as three distinct modes by which the subject "hides itself qua subject," grounding the unconscious in the structure of the Other as locus of speech.

      the Other, who is the locus of my speech, becomes the dwelling place of my thoughts; and by means of which the subject's Unbewusste [unconscious] can be established

1003. #1003

      Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.341

      MOURNING AND DESIRE > What is Hamlet missing?

      Theoretical move: Lacan uses Hamlet's final duel to demonstrate that desire is structured by the formula ($◇a) — fantasy — where the object in desire functions as a substitute for the phallus the subject sacrifices to the signifier; Hamlet's inability to act from desire proper (he engages only at the level of imaginary, specular rivalry) reveals the structural gap between the object of need and the object in desire, and exposes the mirror stage as the imaginary short-circuit that occludes the real stakes of his action.

      this formula is inscribed at the end of the question that the subject raises in the Other, when seeking a final answer, by asking the Other: 'What do you want?' 'Che vuoi?'

1004. #1004

      Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.389

      IN THE FORM OF A CUT

      Theoretical move: The passage traces the logical genesis of the subject through successive stages of demand and the Other, arriving at the formula for fantasy ($◇a) as the structural prop that arrests the subject's fading at the point where no signifier in the Other can authenticate the subject's being — fantasy is thus the "perpetual confrontation between barred S and little a" that sustains desire where unconscious desire was (Wo Es war).

      the position of the real Other, rA, insofar as it is all-powerful in responding to this demand. This stage is essential if we are to understand the foundation of the first relationship to the Other, who is the mother here

1005. #1005

      Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.278

      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.

      The body is with the king, but the king is not with the body. The king is a thing [ ... ] of nothing.

1006. #1006

      Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.259

      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.

      What does Hamlet find himself faced with when the question 'To be, or not to be' arises? He must confront the place occupied by what his father told him... the Other's sin, a sin that was not redeemed [paye] by the Other.

1007. #1007

      Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.185

      THE IMAGE OF THE INSIDE-OUT GLOVE

      Theoretical move: The passage uses the Graph of Desire to theorize the structural asymmetry between fantasy and dream: in fantasy the subject (barred, announcing itself as other) is foregrounded while the object remains enigmatic, whereas in the dream the object is foregrounded and the subject remains unknown — thereby elaborating the formula ($◇a) as a mobile, two-sided structure where desire arises in the gap between need and demand.

      The simple fact that I speak of myself as me [de moi comme moi] is based on the capturing of the ego in the Other's discourse.

1008. #1008

      Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.425

      THE FUNCTION OF THE SUBJECTIVE SLIT IN PER VERSE FANTASIES

      Theoretical move: Lacan establishes that being is co-extensive with the cut/gap in the signifying chain, and that the subject, constituted as "not one" (barred, split), appears precisely at those gaps in desire — a structural account that displaces both ego-psychological notions of genital maturity and religious/moral frameworks for desire's satisfaction, while insisting on desire as the irreducible proof of the subject's presence.

      they rely in the final analysis not on our own dispositions, but on the other's, on his affection [tendresse]

1009. #1009

      Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.312

      THERE IS NO OTHER OF THE OTHER

      Theoretical move: The passage delivers the core formulation S(Ⱥ) — the signifier of the barred Other — as the "big secret of psychoanalysis": there is no Other of the Other, no metalanguage or guarantor that can give the subject back what it has sacrificed to the signifying order, and the phallus names precisely that missing, symbolically-sacrificed signifier; Hamlet is read as the dramatic figure who receives this radical revelation and whose desire is consequently structured around this absence.

      At A - which is not a being, but rather the locus of speech, the locus where the whole system of signifiers, that is, a whole language, resides in a developed or enveloped form - something is missing.

1010. #1010

      Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.439

      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).

      the subject found himself confronted with his mother's actual desire, and he had no recourse in the presence of this desire.

1011. #1011

      Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.131

      DESIRE'S PHALLIC MEDIATION

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus functions as the privileged signifier mediating between demand and desire, such that neurosis consists precisely in the inscription of desire within the register of demand; the Graph of Desire is used to map this structural tension, and the beating fantasy ('A child is being beaten') is introduced as the exemplary case through which fantasy props up desire at the imaginary level.

      there is a place for a response, which is schematized by the abbreviation S(A), which is the signifier of barred A. This is a reminder that the Other too is marked by the signifier, that he too is in a certain way abolished in discourse.

1012. #1012

      Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.197

      THE IMAGE OF THE INSIDE-OUT GLOVE

      Theoretical move: Lacan critiques the analyst (Sharpe)'s interpretive framework by arguing she conflates the omnipotence of speech—which properly belongs to the Other—with a fantasized personal omnipotence attributed to the patient, thereby missing the structural division between the Other as speaking and the Other as imaginary, and rushing past the subject's actual shrinking position relative to the signifying object.

      Omnipotence is always connected with the Other, with the world of speech as such.

1013. #1013

      Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.221

      SACRIFICING THE TABOO QUEEN

      Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Sharpe's analytic intervention by distinguishing the activation of the penis as a real (biological) organ from its function as a signifier, arguing that the patient's violent acting-out demonstrates a failure to engage the Other as the locus of speech and law — marking a missed encounter with the symbolic rather than a genuine therapeutic advance.

      when relations with the Other occur, the Other as the locus of speech, the locus of the law, the locus of the rules of the game. This is precisely what is missed by this slight drop in the level of Sharpe's analytic intervention.

1014. #1014

      Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.288

      THE MOTHER'S DESIRE

      Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Hamlet's dramatic power derives not from Shakespeare's personal biography but from the play's structural composition as a space where desire finds its place; he then critiques the standard psychoanalytic (Jonesian/Oedipal) reading of Hamlet's paralysis, exposing its non-dialectical character and pointing toward the need for a more rigorous structural account of why two positive impulses cancel each other out.

      the unconscious is defined as the Other's discourse [le discours de l'Autre]. Nothing can better illustrate this than the perspective given to us by an experience like that of the audience's relationship to Hamlet.

1015. #1015

      Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.432

      THE FUNCTION OF THE SUBJECTIVE SLIT IN PER VERSE FANTASIES

      Theoretical move: Lacan argues that in fantasy, the subject is not where he desires but is represented at the very moment of his disappearance (aphanisis), and that this structure—the correlation between $ and a—is what defines fantasy as the prop of desire; he then uses the exhibitionist's fantasy to demonstrate that perverse desire requires the symbolic frame (the Other's complicity) rather than proximity to the object, thus distinguishing perverse from neurotic desire structure.

      in the exhibitionist's relationship to the Other… it is necessary that this Other be, as far as desire is concerned, complicit… The satisfaction of their desire depends on the condition that there be maximal danger.

1016. #1016

      Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.464

      THE EITHER/OR CONCERNING THE OBJECT

      Theoretical move: The passage articulates the structural logic of the phallus as signifier through the "either/or" formulation — one either *is* the phallus or *has* it — and deploys this to distinguish feminine desire from neurotic desire, where the neurotic regresses to a metonymic substitution in which "not having" disguises an unconscious identification with being the phallus, while the ego usurps the place of the barred subject in the dialectic of desire.

      the subject questions his relationship to the Other and then strikes the Other with signifying death, as it were, as IA., only to himself appear as fallen, $, in the presence of this little a

1017. #1017

      Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.443

      THE DIALECTIC OF DESIRE IN NEUROSIS

      Theoretical move: The passage advances a differential dialectic of desire in neurosis: hysteria and obsession are contrasted as two distinct structural positions relative to desire and the phallus, with the phallus theorized as the signifier that ties desire to the law of exchange and fertility, such that the neurotic subject's fundamental impasse is the "to be or not to have" disjunction—being the phallus for the Other exposes one to the threat of castration, while the neurotic ego-defense is what organizes the subject's distance from the Other's desire.

      In sustaining his desire he must always call on something that presents itself in a tertiary position for help in dealing with the Other's desire.

1018. #1018

      Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.351

      MOURNING AND DESIRE > What is Hamlet missing?

      Theoretical move: Lacan argues that mourning creates a hole in the real (not the symbolic) analogous to the Verwerfung of psychosis, and that funeral rites function as the total mobilization of the symbolic order to fill this hole — thereby linking the structural logic of mourning to fantasy ($ ◇ a) and the economy of the real, imaginary, and symbolic as dramatized in Hamlet.

      the signifier that is essential to the structure of the Other, the signifier whose absence renders the Other unable to give you your answer.

1019. #1019

      Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.87

      LITTLE ANNA'S DREAM

      Theoretical move: The passage develops the distinction between the subject of enunciation and the subject of the statement as the structural foundation of the Graph of Desire's two lines, arguing that repression is essentially the effacement of the subject at the level of the enunciation process, and that all speech is primordially the Other's discourse — with Foreclosure (Verwerfung) marking the pathological limit of this structure.

      All speech [or every word, toute parole], insofar as the subject is implicated in it, is the Other's discourse [discours de l'Autre].

1020. #1020

      Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.480

      THE FUNCTION OF SPLITTING\* IN PERVERSION

      Theoretical move: Lacan argues that perversion inverts the neurotic's proof-structure: where the neurotic must ceaselessly prove desire's existence, the pervert takes it as given, and organises his entire construction around identifying with the phallus-as-object inside the mother, using the fetish or idol to symbolise the split between symbolic identification (I) and imaginary identification (i(a)) — a structure illustrated paradigmatically through male and female homosexuality and confirmed clinically via the anecdote of Gide's marble.

      the Other's desire finds its symbol, having emerged from the mother, in the phallus, which is the essential signifying element here, the center around which the whole of the pervert's construction gets organized.

1021. #1021

      Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.28

      CONSTRUCTING THE GRAPH

      Theoretical move: Lacan constructs the second and third stages of the Graph of Desire by showing how the encounter with the Other's desire (Che vuoi?) introduces the principles of substitution (metaphor) and similarity (metonymy), situating desire in the gap between demand and being, and how fantasy ($ ◇ a) emerges as the subject's imaginary defense against Hilflosigkeit — the structural response to the opacity of the Other's desire.

      The Other involved is the one who can respond to the subject, answer his call... the subject first encounters desire, desire being initially the Other's desire.

1022. #1022

      Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.385

      THE FUNDAMENTAL FANTASY

      Theoretical move: Lacan presents a synchronic schema of the dialectic of desire that articulates how the subject is constituted through the structural failure of the Other as guarantor, establishing objet petit a as the remainder produced by the division of the Other by Demand—a mortified lost object that desire aims at only as hidden, always beyond the nothing to which the subject must consent through castration.

      The Other, who is someone real here, a real subject, rS, finds himself in a position - owing to the fact that he is called upon by demand - to transform demand, whatever it may be for, into something else, which is a demand for love.

1023. #1023

      Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.490

      TOWARD SUBLIMATION

      Theoretical move: Lacan argues that contemporary psychoanalysis has deviated from Freud by subordinating desire to object-relations and moralizing normalization; against this, he insists that desire must be theorized as irreducible subjectivity constituted through the signifying chain, whereby drives are decomposed and separated from their sources — making desire a mapping of the subject with respect to the Other's desire, not a vital impulse.

      Desire is not this sequence. It is a mapping of the subject with respect to this sequence, whereby he is reflected in the dimension of the Other's desire.

1024. #1024

      Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.434

      THE FUNCTION OF THE SUBJECTIVE SLIT IN PER VERSE FANTASIES

      Theoretical move: The passage advances the structural argument that in perverse fantasy (exhibitionism/voyeurism), the subject is not identified with the visible object but with the 'slit' itself — the cut or gap that mediates between the glimpsed and the not-glimpsed — and that the barred subject ($) in fantasy is therefore structurally constituted by this cut, while the objet petit a in fantasy turns out to be the Other's desire rather than a simple part-object.

      The Other does not see her Je me voyais; her jouissance is unconscious; she is in some sense decapitated by the third party.

1025. #1025

      Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.402

      IN THE FORM OF A CUT > A few tangential remarks are in order here.

      Theoretical move: Lacan develops the voice as the third form of objet petit a — specifically as a pure cut or gap — by contrasting it with ordinary vocal function and analysing the hallucinatory voice in psychotic delusion, where the interrupted sentence (Schreber's Sie sollen werden…) produces a call to signification that swallows the subject; he then frames this alongside the mirror-stage, narcissism, and the phallus to insist that fantasy's "dimension of being" cannot be collapsed into any reality-adaptation model of analytic technique.

      it represents the agency of an Other manifesting himself as real.

1026. #1026

      Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.125

      DESIRE'S PHALLIC MEDIATION

      Theoretical move: Desire cannot be reduced to demand or frustration but must be grasped through the tight knot of Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic; the dream of the dead father exemplifies how the imaginary interposition of the father's image props up desire as a shield against the anxiety of subjective elision, with the fantasy formula (S◇a) expressing the structural absence of the subject that is constitutive of desire itself.

      behind every precise demand, every demand for satisfaction, there is, owing to language, the symbolization of the Other, the Other as presence and absence, the Other who may be a subject who provides the gift of love

1027. #1027

      Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.409

      CUT AND FANTASY

      Theoretical move: This passage systematically works through the upper level of the Graph of Desire to show how fantasy functions as an imaginary prop that substitutes for the unattainable articulation of the subject as subject of the unconscious—bridging the gap between the barred subject's encounter with demand and the insufficiency of the Other's guarantee of truth.

      there is nothing in the Other or signifierness that can suffice at this level of signifying articulation; there is nothing in signifierness that can guarantee truth; there is no other guarantee of truth than the Other's good faith

1028. #1028

      Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.171

      THE FANTASY ABOUT THE BARKING DOG

      Theoretical move: Lacan uses Ella Sharpe's case to demonstrate that the patient's question about the purpose of his cough operates at the level of the signifier of the Other (the unconscious question "what does the Other want?"), and that the barking-dog fantasy exemplifies how the subject constitutes itself through a signifier as other-than-what-it-is — establishing the structural function of the signifier in fantasy as distinct from the order of affect and comprehension.

      the subject has entered into analytic discourse and that he literally raises a question concerning the Other that is in him - namely, his unconscious. This level of articulation is insistently present in every subject inasmuch as he asks himself, 'But what does this Other want?'

1029. #1029

      Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.193

      THE IMAGE OF THE INSIDE-OUT GLOVE

      Theoretical move: Lacan argues that fantasy must not be dissolved into pre-formed imaginary significations (mouth/vagina, womb/envelopment) but must be respected as a precise object with signifying value; using the Graph of Desire, he locates fantasy midway between the signifier of the barred Other S(Ⱥ) and the signified of the Other s(A), insisting that the object in fantasy is simultaneously a visual representation and a signifier.

      something closed and enigmatic that is not at all a fantasy, or a need, pressure, or 'feeling,' but that is always something akin to a signifier as such, S(A.)

1030. #1030

      Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.225

      THE LAUGHTER OF THE IMMORTAL GODS

      Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the phallus functions as a signifier—not a privileged object (contra Klein)—and that the subject's relation to it is structured by the dialectic of being versus having: men "are not without having it" (castration enables possession of objects), while women "are without having it," making the sexual positions asymmetrical and irreducible to each other.

      it is certainly not a relationship that places the former beyond the latter, in the sense in which the phallus would be the being of the Other with a capital O - assuming someone raised the question in these terms.

1031. #1031

      Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.297

      THE MOTHER'S DESIRE

      Theoretical move: Lacan uses the closet scene of Hamlet to demonstrate that desire is constitutively the Other's desire, mapping Hamlet's oscillating plea/collapse onto the Graph of Desire to show how Fantasy regulates desire's fixation and how, when the subject drops back without meeting his own desire, he is left with nothing but the Other's message — the mother's impenetrable jouissance.

      the elementary discourse of demand, the one that subjects the subject's need to the consent, caprice, and arbitrary will of the Other as such… The Other's discourse thus has the power to structure human tension and intention in the fragmentation brought on by the signifier.

1032. #1032

      Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.228

      **XIV** > The function of the good

      Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analytic conception of the good cannot be reduced to the hedonist tradition because Freud's pleasure principle—read through the Entwurf up to Beyond the Pleasure Principle—introduces a dimension of memory/facilitation/repetition that rivals and exceeds satisfaction, thereby grounding ethics in the subject's relation to desire rather than in utility or the natural good.

      All kinds of tempting goods offer themselves to the subject; and you know how imprudent it would be for us to put ourselves in a position of promising the subject access to them all, to follow 'the American way.'

1033. #1033

      Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.23

      **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Outline of the seminar**

      Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian ethical position constitutes a radical reorientation relative to Aristotle and utilitarianism by locating the human subject's relation to the real—not the ideal—as the proper ground of ethics, and by identifying the pleasure principle with the symbolic-fictitious rather than with nature, thereby reframing the economy of desire, fantasy, and masochism as the central problems for a psychoanalytic ethics.

      the notion of desire as desire of the Other assumes its full weight.

1034. #1034

      Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.183

      **XI** > **XIII**

      Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's Moses and Monotheism and Totem and Taboo to argue that the primordial murder of the father does not open the path to jouissance but paradoxically strengthens its prohibition — a structural asymmetry in which the transfer of jouissance to prohibition always increases the superego's cruelty, while the reverse passage (toward uninhibited jouissance) generates its own obstacles, revealing the fundamental fault at the origin of moral law.

      the Ark of union, that is the pure symbol of the pact, of the tie that bound him who said 'I am what I am,' and gave the commandments, to the people who received them

1035. #1035

      Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.317

      **XXIII**

      Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the Oedipus complex's decline and superego formation by distinguishing three registers of the father (real/castrating, imaginary/privating, symbolic/dead) and the corresponding mourning work, arguing that the superego ultimately expresses hatred toward the imaginary father-God who "handled things badly," while the paternal function is always and only the Name-of-the-Father — the dead father as myth — and desire is constituted through a necessary crossing of limits.

      When I tell you that the desire of man is the desire of the Other

1036. #1036

      Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.201

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

      Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the barrier to jouissance and the resistance to the commandment "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" are one and the same thing, not opposites — thereby locating the paradox of jouissance at the intersection of the Law, the death of God, the superego's aggression, and the imaginary identification with the other that grounds altruism.

      It is there the sign appears that I presented to you in my graph in the form of S (O). Situated as you know in the upper left section, it signifies the final response to the guarantee asked of the Other concerning the meaning of that Law articulated in the depths of the unconscious.

1037. #1037

      Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.74

      **V**

      Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes das Ding from Vorstellungen/Sachvorstellungen by positioning it as the primordial, absent, and unsymbolizable Thing that governs the gravitational field of unconscious representations, while using Freud's Verneinung/Verdrängung/Verwerfung triad to map different levels of negation onto the structure of discourse, ultimately grounding the Reality Principle and superego in the relation to das Ding and the Other of the Other.

      The function of this place is to contain words... through which synchrony is introduced, and it is on the foundation of synchrony that the essential dialect is then erected, that in which the Other may discover itself as the Other of the Other.

1038. #1038

      Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.245

      **XIV** > **XVIII**

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the field "beyond the good principle" is delimited on one side by the beautiful (which suspends desire rather than fulfilling it) and on the other by pain/masochism, and that neither side exhausts that field; it pivots toward Antigone as the exemplary case of an absolute, non-good-motivated choice, while grounding the whole inquiry in the relationship between the human being, the signifier, and the death drive.

      this reference of the dialectic of the good to a beyond that, by way of illustration, I will call 'the good that musn't be touched'... jouissance as that which is only accessible to the other.

1039. #1039

      Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.211

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

      Theoretical move: Lacan uses Sade's work to argue that the literary experiment of transgression reveals the structure of jouissance as approach to an unbearable centre, and introduces two theoretical terms: the part object (as the logic of Sade's social law) and the indestructibility of the Other in fantasy — ultimately connecting the Sadistic relation to the structure of obsessional neurosis.

      that which appears in the fantasm as the indestructible character of the Other, and emerges in the figure of his victim.

1040. #1040

      Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.48

      **Ill**

      Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's foundational texts—especially the *Entwurf*—are grounded not in psychology but in ethics, and that the opposition between the pleasure principle and the reality principle must be understood as an ethical (not merely psychological) problem, with the *Nebenmensch* (the Other as speaking subject) as the hinge through which satisfaction and reality are constituted for the subject.

      the subject's experience of satisfaction is entirely dependent on the other, on the one whom Freud designates in a beautiful expression that you didn't emphasize, I am sorry to say, the Nebenmensch.

1041. #1041

      Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.291

      **XIV** > **XXI** > **Antigone between two deaths**

      Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Antigone's beauty functions as a blinding screen that prevents direct apprehension of the death drive she incarnates; situated between two deaths, her complaint (κομμός) and her identification with Niobe reveal her as the pure embodiment of the desire of death, rooted in the criminal desire of the mother, which she perpetuates by guarding the being of the criminal (Atè) against all social mediation.

      What happens to her desire? Shouldn't it be the desire of the Other and be linked to the desire of the mother?

1042. #1042

      Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.171

      **XI** > **XII** > **A critique of Bernfeld** > **A CURIOUS CASE OF SUBLIMATION**

      Theoretical move: By reading Arnaud Daniel's scatological poem within courtly love, Lacan demonstrates that sublimation does not require the disappearance of the sexual object but instead involves the construction of a refined symbolic apparatus around a cruel, empty Thing — the Lady's very crudity is what unveils Das Ding at the heart of sublimation.

      The idealized woman, the Lady, who is in the position of the Other and of the object, finds herself suddenly and brutally positing, in a place knowingly constructed out of the most refined of signifiers, the emptiness of a thing in all its crudity.

1043. #1043

      Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.286

      **XIV** > **XXI** > **Antigone between two deaths**

      Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Antigone's position is not grounded in divine law or ethical content but in the pure ontological affirmation that language freezes being into an ineffaceable singularity—her brother *is* what he is, independent of any predicates—and that this linguistic 'being' constitutes the radical limit (*Atè*) she embodies, distinguishing her from Creon's mere *hamartia*.

      Atè concerns the Other, the field of the Other, and it doesn't belong to Creon. It is, on the other hand, the place where Antigone is situated.

1044. #1044

      Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.138

      **IX** > **X**

      Theoretical move: Lacan organizes sublimation around Das Ding (the Thing) as a constitutive emptiness, then maps the three Freudian mechanisms—Verdrängung, Verschiebung, and Verwerfung—onto art, religion, and science respectively, arguing that science's foreclosure of the Thing causes it to reappear in the Real, while courtly love is positioned as the paradigmatic case of sublimation in art.

      When I give you a formula such as 'The desire of man is the desire of the Other,' it is a gnomic formula

1045. #1045

      Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.61

      **IV**

      Theoretical move: By reading das Ding as the 'beyond-of-the-signified' — the absolute, prehistoric Other that can only be missed, never reached — Lacan grounds the clinical structures of hysteria, obsessional neurosis, and paranoia in differential relations to this primordial lost object, and then opens the path toward a Kantian ethics where das Ding is replaced by the pure signifying system of the moral law.

      everything is calculated, regulated, and, as it were, focused on den Anderen, on the Other, the prehistoric, unforgettable Other, that later no one will ever reach.

1046. #1046

      Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.13

      **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Outline of the seminar**

      Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar VII by framing the ethics of psychoanalysis as irreducible to moralism or the naturalist liberation of desire: the 'attraction of transgression' — running from Freud's murder-of-the-father myth through the death drive — constitutes the properly psychoanalytic entry-point into ethics, one that cannot be dissolved by taming perverse jouissance or reducing guilt.

      He who submits himself to the ordeal finds at the end its premises, namely, the Other to whom this ordeal is addressed, in the last analysis its Judge.

1047. #1047

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.320

      **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **PENSÉE'S DESIRE** > And a bit further on she continues:

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

      Those who in fact hear themselves being heard, are madmen who are hallucinating… They can only hear themselves being heard in the place of the Other, where we hear the Other send our own message back to us in an inverted form.

1048. #1048

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan

      **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > ⁴⁶⁷ **Editor's Notes** > **Notes to the Second Edition**

      Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index excerpt from the editor's notes to a second edition of Seminar VIII, listing page references for key Lacanian and philosophical concepts without advancing any theoretical argument.

      the Other access to unconscious 181-5 anal stage and 203-4 anxiety and 367 castration complex 244-7

1049. #1049

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.53

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

      Theoretical move: Lacan establishes love as a Metaphor (signifier substitution) by articulating the structural non-coincidence between what the lover (erastès) lacks and what the beloved (erômenos) unknowingly has, grounding transference in this same gap and positioning the trajectory of analysis as the revelation of the unconscious Other through an analogous structure.

      The course of an analysis involves, strictly speaking, the thorough revelation of something that is called the unconscious Other.

1050. #1050

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.259

      **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** > **THE SYMBOL Φ**

      Theoretical move: The passage theorises the structural difference between hysterical and obsessional fantasy through their respective relations to the phallic signifier Φ: the hysteric sacrifices her own desire to keep the Other in possession of the key to her mystery, while the obsessive attacks the imaginary phallus in the Other (what Lacan calls "phallophany") to manage the unbearable real presence of desire — revealing that handling the symbolic function of Φ, not working through imaginary castration, is the genuine analytic task.

      she prefers to let her own desire go unsatisfied and have the Other hold the key to her mystery.

1051. #1051

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.196

      **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OBJECT OF DESIRE A N D THE DIALECTIC OF CASTRATION** > <span id="page-192-0"></span>**A CRITIQUE OF CO UNTERTRANSFERENCE**

      Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the unconscious is first encountered as the Other's unconscious, which reframes the countertransference debate: analytic apathy is not grounded in the analyst's thorough self-analysis (reduction of unconscious blind spots) but in the analyst being possessed by a desire stronger than other desires—a transformed economy of desire specific to the analytic position.

      the detour via the Other, and this makes analysis necessary and infrangibly eliminates the possibility of self-analysis.

1052. #1052

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.251

      **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** > **THE SYMBOL Φ**

      Theoretical move: Lacan introduces capital Φ as the unique symbol that occupies the place of the missing signifier — not because any signifier is literally absent from the battery, but because the dimension of questioning opens a subjective gap where the signifier's own foundation becomes ungraspable, making Φ indispensable for understanding how the castration complex operates on the mainspring of transference.

      everything that is signifying to us always occurs in the locus of the Other... In order for something to signify, it must be translatable in the locus of the Other.

1053. #1053

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.254

      **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** > **THE SYMBOL Φ**

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus (Φ) functions as a privileged signifier that uniquely arrests the infinite deferral of the signifying chain, and that the subject's unnameable relation to this signifier of desire is what organizes both fantasy and the symptomatic effects of the castration complex — exemplified through a reading of Dora's hysteria as a game of substituting imaginary φ where the veiled Φ is sought.

      The answer to 'What am I?' is nothing other that is articulable... there is no other answer to 'What am I?' at the level of the Other than 'Let yourself be.'

1054. #1054

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.366

      **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **CAPITAL I A N D LITTLE** *a* > **IDENTIFICATION VIA** *"E IN E IN Z IG E R Z U G* **"**

      Theoretical move: Lacan uses his optical schema to argue that the emergence of the ego-ideal and ideal ego requires the intervention of the big Other (capital O) as a third term that exceeds the dyadic, radically imaginary and destructive conflict of the mirror stage, thereby grounding narcissistic development in a symbolic register that neither Hegel's dialectic nor the Jekels-Bergler introjection/projection model can adequately account for.

      in order that something be founded that is open to dialectical development, the register of the Other with a capital O must come into play beyond this.

1055. #1055

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.369

      **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **CAPITAL I A N D LITTLE** *a* > **IDENTIFICATION VIA** *"E IN E IN Z IG E R Z U G* **"**

      Theoretical move: The passage performs two linked theoretical moves: (1) it distinguishes the *einziger Zug* (single trait) as a sign rather than a signifier, using it to differentiate Ego Ideal (symbolic introjection) from Ideal Ego (imaginary projection); and (2) it articulates love as structured by the unconditional dimension of demand, where love is "giving what you don't have," connecting poverty/lack structurally to desire, and wealth/jouissance structurally to the saint's position — thereby positioning the analyst's own ideal against the horizon of sainthood and jouissance.

      how can the subject internalize the gaze of an Other who can at any moment change its preference for one or the other of the enemy twin brothers constituted by the ego and the image of the little specular other?

1056. #1056

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.381

      **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE RELATIONSHIP BETW EEN ANXIETY A N D DESIRE**

      Theoretical move: Lacan argues that anxiety is not purely internal to the subject but circulates between subjects as a kind of shared energy, and that desire functions as a remedy for anxiety—yet the analyst's proper position requires not using desire merely as an expedient but sustaining a relationship to "pure desirousness" that refuses to fill the place of the anxious Other for the patient.

      the subject sees himself as castrated, confronted with the Other with a capital O... the further along he is in his analysis, in other words, the more he seeks out the path of his desire at the level of the Other with a capital O that you are for him.

1057. #1057

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.388

      **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE RELATIONSHIP BETW EEN ANXIETY A N D DESIRE** > **"A D R EA M OF A SHADOW IS M A N "**

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the subject's exit from narcissistic captivity depends on the structuring function of the signifier in the field of the Other: the distinction between Ideal Ego and Ego Ideal, mapped through the optical schema, shows that it is only by traversing the dream-field of wandering signifiers that the subject can glimpse the "reality of desire" beyond the shadow of narcissistic cathexis.

      the position of S in the field of the Other - that is, in the virtual field that the Other develops, owing to its presence, as a field of reflection - can only be located here at the point designated by capital I

1058. #1058

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.95

      **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ARISTOPHANES*

      Theoretical move: Lacan uses the figure of Socrates — his *atopia*, his daemon, his relation to truth and death — to theorize a pre-subjective, discourse-grounded dimension of truth and the Real, drawing a genealogy from pre-Socratic philosophy through Plato's *Symposium* in order to illuminate what is demanded of the analyst: a situatedness-nowhere analogous to Socrates' own unsituable position.

      There is no other guarantor of the Other's words than those very words.

1059. #1059

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.161

      **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ÂGALMA*

      Theoretical move: Lacan defines the psychoanalytic object as *àgalma* — the partial object of desire that is incommensurable with ordinary objects of equivalence — and argues that this object, not identificatory or metaphysical constructs, is the true pivot of love, desire, and analytic practice, requiring a strict topology of subject, little other, and big Other to be properly situated.

      I will try next time to situate this object in the threefold topology of the subject, the other with a lowercase o, and the Other with a capital O

1060. #1060

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.230

      **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.

      The Other with a capital O - that is, the Other in which signs are situated - is already instated in that spot [place]. And signs suffice to institute the question 'Che vuoi?' to which the subject has at first no response.

1061. #1061

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.218

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

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

      It is in the anal relationship that the other as such becomes truly dominant... the subject does not know what he desires most, the other or the intervening third party [i.e., the Other].

1062. #1062

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.193

      **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OBJECT OF DESIRE A N D THE DIALECTIC OF CASTRATION** > <span id="page-179-0"></span>**TRANSFERENCE IN THE PRESENT**

      Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire is constitutively the Other's desire, and uses this to reread Socrates' role in the Symposium as an unwitting analyst who redirects Alcibiades' transference love toward his true desire — thereby grounding the analytic situation in the structural relation between two desires rather than in object-relations theory.

      To the extent to which Socrates does not know what he himself desires - it being the Other's desire

1063. #1063

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.301

      **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OEDIPAL MYTH TODAY** > **TU R E L U R E 'S ABJECTION**

      Theoretical move: Lacan reads Claudel's play as a dramatization of the Oedipus complex that goes beyond its classical form: the 'imaginary dimension' of the father is shown to be sufficient for efficacy (the father dies of fright, not from a real bullet), while two women engineer the parricide by exploiting the father's desire, revealing the father as a passive, 'duped' element in a four-player game that mirrors the structure of the analytic situation.

      the killing of the father on 'the other stage' [anderer Schauplatz, 'the other scene']

1064. #1064

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.429

      **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > <span id="page-411-0"></span>**Translator's Endnotes** > **Chapter XV - Oral, Anal, and Genital**

      Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of translator's endnotes for Seminar VIII, clarifying terminological, textual, and referential details; it is non-substantive in theoretical terms but does briefly gloss key Lacanian concepts such as aphanisis, the barred Other, and sublimation as they appear in the surrounding lecture text.

      Lacan seems to be saying here that phi is at the root of barred A - that is, 'the Other as designated by the lack of a signifier.'

1065. #1065

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.183

      **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OBJECT OF DESIRE A N D THE DIALECTIC OF CASTRATION** > <span id="page-179-0"></span>**TRANSFERENCE IN THE PRESENT**

      Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Symposium's final scene between Alcibiades and Socrates reveals the fundamental structure of desire: the subject, through the metonymic sliding of the signifier, finds an object (objet petit a / agalma) that arrests that sliding and paradoxically restores subjective dignity, while the subject simultaneously undergoes a "deposing" before the Other—establishing that transference is not reducible to repetition but must be approached via this dialectic of love and desire.

      A is defined for us as the locus of speech, the locus that is always evoked as soon as there is speech... This Other... is a perpetually vanishing Other which, due to this very fact, places us in a perpetually vanishing position.

1066. #1066

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.158

      **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ÂGALMA*

      Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Greek term *âgalma* — traced through its etymological ambiguities (sparkle, admiration, envy) and its literary uses in Homer and Euripides — to recover the original psychoanalytic discovery of the partial object as the pivotal point of desire, against Ego Psychology's domestication of that discovery into a "totalising" genital-oblative love that falsely resolves the subject/object opposition.

      a subject, strictly speaking, is an other [en est un autre]

1067. #1067

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.151

      **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ÂGALMA*

      Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Alcibiades' speech in Plato's *Symposium* and a verse from Euripides' *Hecuba*, Lacan argues that *âgalma* names the hidden precious object inside the other that captures desire — a specifically psychoanalytic notion whose fetishistic function displaces the dyadic dialectic of beauty with a triadic topology of the subject's relation to the symbolic.

      Alcibiades tells us... open this silenus up; άνοιχθέντος, partly open, I don't know if anyone has ever seen the άγάλματα that are inside.

1068. #1068

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.323

      **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **PENSÉE'S DESIRE** > And a bit further on she continues:

      Theoretical move: Lacan reads Claudel's figure of Pensée as a topology of desire in which the woman, by becoming frozen into the object of love, incarnates the structure of desire itself — revealing that desire necessarily involves the four terms (two imaginary doubles a/a, the barred subject, and the big Other), and that the analyst's task is to locate those extreme points rather than succumb to therapeutic normalization.

      the figure of the Other incarnated in this woman. These four elements allow for the possibility of all sorts of varieties of inflicted death

1069. #1069

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.265

      **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** > **REAL PRESENCE**

      Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes Φ (the phallus as symbolic/unconscious function operative for all speaking subjects) from φ (the imaginary phallic unit of measurement that organises the obsessive's erotic object-equivalences), arguing that in obsessive neurosis the phallic function is not repressed but emerges consciously and avowedly at the level of symptom, which is precisely what must be explained against both Bouvet's theory of imaginary introjection and a naïve psychologism.

      the fundamental substitutional, and perpetually eluded, in a sort of sleight of hand that characterizes the way in which the obsessive proceeds in his way of situating himself in relation to the Other

1070. #1070

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.200

      **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OBJECT OF DESIRE A N D THE DIALECTIC OF CASTRATION** > <span id="page-192-0"></span>**A CRITIQUE OF CO UNTERTRANSFERENCE**

      Theoretical move: Lacan critiques the Kleinian theory of countertransference by showing that what analysts call "countertransference" — the analyst's feelings determined by the analysand — is not an incidental imperfection but a structural feature that must be theorized through the Graph of Desire (especially the relation between demand, the Other, and the superego), not simply attributed to projection of the "bad object."

      It is then have here the image, or rather the position, of the Other with a capital O insofar as it is the analyst who occupies it.

1071. #1071

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.272

      **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** > **REAL PRESENCE** > Further along, we read.

      Theoretical move: The phallus (Φ) is theorized not merely as a sign of desire but as the signifier structurally excluded from the signifying system, whose function is to mark real presence—that which exceeds all signification—while the obsessive's compulsion to fill every gap in the signifying interval is understood as defense against encountering this real presence.

      the degrading of the Other with a capital O into the other with a lowercase o, in the field in which their desire develops

1072. #1072

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.244

      **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-232-0"></span>**PSYCHE A N D THE CASTRATION COMPLEX**

      Theoretical move: Lacan uses the myth of Psyche and Zucchi's painting as an image for the castration complex, arguing that the phallus becomes a signifier precisely by being cut off from the organ, making it the signifier of the point where the signifying chain is lacking — S(Ⱥ) — and thereby rendering the subject unconscious and barred, rather than the castration complex being reducible to a fear of aphanisis.

      the phallus as a signifier, has a place, it is precisely that of supplementing the Other at the point at which signifierness disappears - at the point at which the Other is constituted by the fact that a signifier is lacking somewhere.

1073. #1073

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.407

      **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE RELATIONSHIP BETW EEN ANXIETY A N D DESIRE** > **M O U R N IN G THE LOSS OF THE ANALYST**

      Theoretical move: The passage advances a structural account of desire's object by showing that the phallus functions as a summit organizing the scale of objects, that the subject of desire is nothing but an apostrophe inscribed in the Other's desire, and that the ego-ideal (as Einziger Zug) is what rivets the subject to the ideal ego — a structure that also explains the distinction between mourning and melancholia as processes of exhausting narcissistic trait-identifications one by one.

      A prop must necessarily be constructed in the Other, the Other who determines whether the flower is enclosed or not [by the opening of the vase].

1074. #1074

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.118

      **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *AGATH ON*

      Theoretical move: Lacan reads Socrates' desire as an atopia — an unclassifiable, unsituable place of pure desire for discourse — which he locates topologically in the space between-two-deaths, and uses this to frame the question of the analyst's desire as something that must be articulated beyond the vague notion of training catharsis.

      the place he must offer up as vacant to the patient's desire in order for the latter to be realized as the Other's desire.

1075. #1075

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.268

      **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** > **REAL PRESENCE**

      Theoretical move: Lacan uses the obsessive's structure to articulate aphanisis as the specific failure of the Φ (phallic) function when it encounters the real dead end of fantasy, distinguishing this from Jones's naturalistic reading and tying the subject's vanishing to the barred Other—while introducing "real presence" as a homonym for Eucharistic dogma that illuminates this phallic function at the surface of obsessive phenomenology.

      To be a subject is to have one's place in the Other [A], in the locus of speech. Now, a vicissitude can arise here that is designated by the bar that strikes through the A - namely, that the Other's speech is lacking.

1076. #1076

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.169

      **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ÂGALMA* > <span id="page-161-0"></span>**BETWEEN SOCRATES A N D ALCIBIADES**

      Theoretical move: Lacan reads Socrates' refusal of Alcibiades through the structure of the metaphor of love: Socrates' 'kénosis' (constitutive emptiness/non-knowledge) prevents the substitution of erastés for erômenos, and his interpretation of Alcibiades' speech reveals that what Alcibiades truly seeks — in Socrates and then in Agathon — is the agalma (partial object), the supreme point at which the subject is abolished in fantasy, which Socrates both knows and is doomed to misrecognize by substituting a lure in its place.

      the divine locus of the Other, insofar as the fate of Ruth's desire is inscribed in it

1077. #1077

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.60

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

      Theoretical move: Lacan uses a close reading of Phaedrus' speech in the Symposium to argue that the succession of eulogies traces a fundamental topology of love's impossibility, and introduces a theological framework (the gods belong to the Real) to situate Eros within the tripartite RSI schema, while the myth of Orpheus anchors the distinction between the fantasmatic object and the Other's being.

      the difference between the object of our love insofar as our fantasies cover it over, and the other's being, insofar as love wonders whether or not it can reach it.

1078. #1078

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.223

      **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 uses the figure of the praying mantis to sharply distinguish animal (instinctual/synchronic) jouissance from human desire, arguing that human desire is not grounded in natural instinct but is structurally constituted in the margins of demand—a beyond and a shy-of—and is always already articulated around a partial object whose erotic value is retroactively (Nachträglich) installed by demand and its beyond of love.

      The Other, depository of desire.

1079. #1079

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.311

      **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **PENSÉE'S DESIRE**

      Theoretical move: Lacan reads Claudel's trilogy to show how desire is articulated through the figure of the Other incarnated in a woman, and how the void opened by betrayal and parricide generates a jouissance-inflected death-drive structure in which desire, death, and eternity collapse into a single instant — demonstrating that desire is constituted by lack and the impossibility of any lasting object.

      The Other incarnated in this woman.

1080. #1080

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.214

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

      Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the gap between demand and desire is irreducible: every demand structurally evokes a counter-demand from the Other, and it is precisely the meeting of these two demands—not a meeting of tendencies—that produces the discordance in which desire exceeds and survives (or is extinguished by) satisfaction, illustrated paradigmatically through oral demand and the nursing relationship.

      It is addressed to the Other who hears [entend], and who, at this primal level of the enunciation of demand, can truly be designated as what I call the 'locus of the Other' - the Other-on [l'Autre-on] or 'Otron'

1081. #1081

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.245

      **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-232-0"></span>**PSYCHE A N D THE CASTRATION COMPLEX**

      Theoretical move: The analyst's desire must take the form of "nescience qua nescience" — not ignorance but the structural position of holding lack without filling it — such that the only sign the analyst can give is the sign of the lack of a signifier, which alone opens the analysand to the unconscious; this is grounded in the phallus as signifier structuring the entire economy of desire through the tension between being and having.

      the Other-which is the locus of speech, the legitimate subject, and the one with whom we have relations of good and bad faith - can and must become something precisely analogous to... a, the object of desire

1082. #1082

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.188

      **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OBJECT OF DESIRE A N D THE DIALECTIC OF CASTRATION** > <span id="page-179-0"></span>**TRANSFERENCE IN THE PRESENT**

      Theoretical move: Lacan argues that transference is irreducible to mere repetition compulsion because it contains a constitutively creative and fictional element addressed to the big Other; drawing on the Symposium's Alcibiades scene, he shows that the true object of transference is the agalma (objet petit a) hidden in the analyst, and that Socratic interpretation reveals a further displacement of desire onto a third party — structurally distinguishing transference from repetition while grounding it in the subject's address to the Other.

      Everything that we know of the unconscious right from the outset, on the basis of dreams, leads us to the conclusion that there are psychical phenomena which occur, develop, and are constructed in order to be heard - which occur, develop, and are constructed for the Other who is there even if one does not know it.

1083. #1083

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.282

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

      Theoretical move: The analyst's desire must be understood not as natural harmony or ethical perfection but as occupying the empty place of the missing signifier (Φ), being the barred subject in the very locus where the patient expects knowledge — so that fantasy, as the final register of transference, can be entered and the object *a* discerned.

      desire of the Other with a capital O... Desire in the place where the Other is [i.e., to desire as if one were the Other] in order to be in the Other's place - desire for some alterity.

1084. #1084

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan

      **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > <span id="page-411-0"></span>**Translator's Endnotes** > **Chapter XVII - The Symbol Φ**

      Theoretical move: This is a translator's endnotes section providing textual variants, clarifications of French idioms, and cross-references to the Graph of Desire in the Écrits and other seminars; it contains no independent theoretical argumentation.

      she prefers having her own desire go unsatisfied to having the Other hold the key to her mystery.

1085. #1085

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.359

      **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **CAPITAL I A N D LITTLE** *a* > **IDENTIFICATION VIA** *"E IN E IN Z IG E R Z U G* **"**

      Theoretical move: Lacan critiques the Jekels-Bergler theory of narcissism and the ego-ideal by showing that their reliance on a "neutral energy" oscillating between Eros and Thanatos, and their attribution of object-creation to the death drive, result from a failure to distinguish the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real registers — a failure that his optical schema (mirror A, real image *i(a)*, and flowers *a*) is designed to correct and generalize.

      placing at a certain location a flat mirror - that I will call uppercase A owing to the metaphorical use that I will make of it later

1086. #1086

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.316

      **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **PENSÉE'S DESIRE** > And a bit further on she continues:

      Theoretical move: Lacan reads Claudel's trilogy as a dramatization of how, after the death of the God of fate, the subject becomes a hostage of the Word itself, such that Sygne's Versagung (radical refusal/perdition under the signifier) and Pensée's absolute desire for justice together trace the dialectic through which desire can be reborn from a radical stance of negation.

      Man becomes a hostage of the Word because he tells himself - or, too, in order that he tell himself - that God is dead. At this moment a gap opens up in which nothing can be articulated except what is merely the very beginning of the expression 'were I not.'

1087. #1087

      Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.425

      **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > <span id="page-411-0"></span>**Translator's Endnotes** > **Chapter ΧΠ - Transference in the Present**

      Theoretical move: This passage is a set of translator's endnotes providing bibliographic and conceptual glosses on Seminar VIII's discussion of transference, desire, and the Graph of Desire; it is largely non-substantive but contains two theoretically pointed glosses: one clarifying the aim of *Aidos* as the fall of the Other (A) into *objet a*, and one identifying the analysand's desire as the question "What does the analyst want?"

      its aim is to get the partner to fall from the position of Other to that of a, to fall off a certain kind of pedestal.

1088. #1088

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.282

      *Seminar 24*: *Wednesday 13 June 1962*

      Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the cross-cap/projective plane—specifically the hole structure of the Möbius strip and the double cut that yields a central piece plus a Möbius surface—to formalise the structure of fantasy ($ ◇ a), showing how the Objet petit a is situated at the point of lack in the Other and how narcissistic/specular identification serves as a lure that covers the true relationship to the object of desire.

      the fundamental deficiency of the Other as locus of the word, with respect to what is the only definitive response at the level of enunciating, the signifier of the universal witness in so far as it is lacking

1089. #1089

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.25

      *Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 3*: *Wednesday 29 November 1961*

      Theoretical move: Lacan uses phonetics (the silent P between implosion and explosion), animal communication, baby-talk, pidgin, and cross-species identification to clear the ground for a theory of the signifier and the function of the One — arguing that what specifies a tongue is not simply speech but a differential structure of presence/absence, and that identification (not pre-logical participation) is the fundamental phenomenon underlying the human subject's relation to language and the Other.

      the concrete distinction here between the other and the Other, all we can do is go through this experience

1090. #1090

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.210

      *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 19*: *Wednesday 9 May 1962*

      Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire is not beyond language but structured through it, and that the subject's constitution as desire requires grasping both the topological dimension of the objet petit a and its role in fantasy—where the Graph of Desire's two-level structure reveals that fantasy anticipates the ideal ego in a temporal logic of the future perfect, pointing toward a 'temporal dynamics' that exceeds mere spatial topology.

      the desire of man is the desire of the Other. It is so not with reference to a supposedly renascent third, the more central subject, the subject identical to itself, the Hegelian self-consciousness

1091. #1091

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.292

      *Seminar 24*: *Wednesday 13 June 1962*

      Theoretical move: At the close of Seminar 9, Lacan positions the logic of desire—articulated through the fantasy matheme ($◇a) and the topology of the subject's relation to the object—as the necessary supplement to Lévi-Straussian structuralism, while simultaneously arguing that the three clinical structures (neurosis, perversion, psychosis) are each 'normal' expressions of the three constitutive terms of desire, and that misreading drive as biological agency is the foundational error of ego-psychology/American psychoanalysis.

      the neurotic because he has to deal with the Other, the big Other as such

1092. #1092

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.132

      *Seminar 13*: *Wednesday 14 March 1962*

      Theoretical move: Lacan advances the structural derivation of desire through three ordered moments—real privation, imaginary frustration, and their articulation in the symbolic via the Other—arguing that the torus topology formalises how the subject's uncounted circuit (−1) grounds universal affirmation, and that the neurotic impasse is constitutively the collapse of desire into demand.

      it comes from an experience constituted for the subject with whom we have to deal, by the existence, before he was born, of the universe of discourse, by the necessity that this experience supposes the locus of the Other with a big 0

1093. #1093

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.10

      *Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1961*

      Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the entire philosophical tradition stemming from Descartes's cogito rests on a single structural prejudice — the Subject Supposed to Know — and that psychoanalysis radically subverts this prejudice by demonstrating that the Other (as locus, not subject) is merely the depository of the supposition of knowledge, which returns to the subject as the unconscious.

      the Other is not a subject, it is a locus to which one strives, says Arisle, to transfer the knowledge of the subject.

1094. #1094

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.247

      *Seminar 21*: *Wednesday 23 May 1962* > *Seminar 22*: *Wednesday 30 May 1962*

      Theoretical move: By mapping the torus topologically, Lacan formalises the structural inversion between the subject's demand/object and the Other's demand/object, deriving from this the differential structure of obsessional and hysterical neurosis, and showing that the neurotic's impasse consists in pursuing objet a through the specular image i(o) rather than acceding to it directly.

      this relationship on the surface of the other torus, which you sense is going to allow us to symbolise the relationship of the subject to the big Other

1095. #1095

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.168

      *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 16*: *Wednesday 4 April 1962*

      Theoretical move: The passage advances a structural account of anxiety as the desire of the Other (not a defence against which one defends, but the source of defences), articulates the phallus as the mediating object between demand and desire, and then pivots to a topological grounding of these arguments through the introduction of the torus and a critique of Eulerian circles as an inadequate logical model—establishing topology as the rigorous foundation for Lacanian logical claims about identification and negation.

      anxiety is the desire of the Other - with a big 0.

1096. #1096

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.22

      *Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 3*: *Wednesday 29 November 1961*

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the single trait (*einziger Zug*) is the minimal signifying mark through which the subject's identification is suspended, and uses the contrast between animal speech (access only to the little other) and human speech (access to the big Other) to demonstrate that the constitutive feature of human language is not mere phonatory emission but the structural locus of the Other as the place of the signifying chain.

      the locus of this Other where the signifying chain is situated is developed for her as for us... It is precisely this which is lacking to my dog: for her there is only the small other.

1097. #1097

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.312

      *Seminar 26: Wednesday 27 June 1962*

      Theoretical move: In this closing session of the seminar, Lacan consolidates the year's teaching by articulating the structural difference between i(o) and o (the specular image and the object), grounding desire in the phantasy formula $◊a, identifying the desirer as always already implicated in the object of desire via the "Che vuoi?", and situating castration's object as the very object of analytic science—while using Blanchot's prose and the hysteric's relation to the Other's desire as literary and clinical anchors.

      it is the desire of the Other with regard to which she orientates herself and which started her hunting.

1098. #1098

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.162

      *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 16*: *Wednesday 4 April 1962*

      Theoretical move: Lacan pivots from a critique of psychoanalytic congress discourse to articulate the structural relationship between anxiety, desire, jouissance, and the Other: the prohibition of jouissance (its Aufhebung) is the supporting plane on which desire is constituted, the Other is the metaphor of this prohibition, and anxiety must be understood through the desire of the Other rather than as the jouissance of a mythical self—a move that corrects both Jones's aphanisis and a Jungian-inflected misreading of the drive.

      the Other is presented here as a metaphor of this prohibition. To say that the Other is the law or that it is jouissance qua prohibited, is the same thing.

1099. #1099

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.164

      *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 16*: *Wednesday 4 April 1962*

      Theoretical move: Lacan defines anxiety as the sensation of the desire of the Other — not an affect without an object in reality but one where the lack of object is on the subject's side — and positions the phallus as the mediating term between demand and desire, showing how hysteria and obsessional neurosis are each specific strategies for managing the desire of the Other.

      the pure apprehension of the desire of the Other as such that is involved if precisely I fail to recognise what? My insignia: namely that I am decked out in the skin of the male.

1100. #1100

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.72

      *Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 8*: *Wednesday 17 January 1962*

      Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Cartesian encounter with extension and the linguistic analysis of French negation (Damourette & Pichon) to articulate the split between the subject of enunciation and the enunciating subject, showing that the "expletive ne" is a trace of the unconscious subject and that negation is not a simple logical operation but indexes a gap in the subject's position within language.

      they encountered, not the empty extension of Descartes' approach... but the void of the Other, a much more terrifying place because someone is necessary there.

1101. #1101

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.139

      *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962*

      Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the torus topology — not the sphere — is the fundamental structure of the desiring subject, because desire is constitutively knotted to the law of the Oedipus complex (the prohibition on the Other's desire), which installs an irreducible void/hole that demand and desire can never simply substitute for one another; this topological duplicity also accounts for the subject's split position as simultaneously inside and excluded from the field of the Other, grounding the impossibility of reducing desire to need.

      the demand made on the Other... which is the Other with a big 0, its 'essentialness', as I might say, in the establishment of the subject

1102. #1102

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.220

      *Seminar 20*: *Wednesday 16 May 1962*

      Theoretical move: Lacan argues that topology—specifically the properties of surfaces such as the torus and cross-cap—provides the structural ground for understanding the signifier, whose essence as difference and discontinuity (the cut) can only be fully theorized once the inside/outside distinction is destabilized by non-orientable surfaces; this move displaces spatial intuition in favour of a topological account of the signifying cut.

      The locus of the Other already has its place in our seminar.

1103. #1103

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.255

      *Seminar 21*: *Wednesday 23 May 1962* > *Seminar 23*: *Wednesday 6 June 1962*

      Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the torus (and its paired-torus construction) to formalise the formula "the desire of the subject is the desire of the Other," and then pivots to the cross-cap/projective plane as the privileged topological support for the structure of fantasy, before offering contextual remarks on Heidegger and Lévi-Strauss.

      by supposing it enchained, concatenated with another torus in so far as it would symbolise the Other, we see that undoubtedly… the desire of the subject is the desire of the Other

1104. #1104

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.136

      *Seminar 13*: *Wednesday 14 March 1962*

      Theoretical move: By mapping desire and demand onto two interlocking tori, Lacan demonstrates that the subject's inside and outside spaces are topologically identical, and that the object of desire emerges precisely from the Other's structural inability to respond to demand — the Other is "not without" power, and this negation grounds the absolute conditionality of desire.

      the Other as regards the satisfaction of the desire of the subject must be defined as without power (sans pouvoir).

1105. #1105

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.38

      *Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 4*: *Wednesday 6 December 1961* > What then is a signifier?

      Theoretical move: The passage pivots on distinguishing the signifier from the sign: whereas a sign represents something for someone, a signifier represents the subject for another signifier. This distinction is grounded in the concept of the unary trait (pure difference, the "1" of set theory), which Lacan then links to repetition, metonymy, and the emergence of the subject through the signifying chain.

      it is what represents precisely the subject for another signifier; my dog is on the lookout for signs… who cannot give her any signifier.

1106. #1106

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.28

      *Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 3*: *Wednesday 29 November 1961*

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that identification must be grounded not in folklore or empirical phenomena but in the logic of the signifier, where the unit constitutes itself as pure difference ('the one as such is the Other'), so that identification is structurally distinct from unification and can only be understood through the differential structure of language as analysed via Saussure and elaborated in terms of the big Other.

      it is in the Other (1'Autre) that the A of 'A is A', the big 0, as one says the great word, is released.

1107. #1107

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.193

      *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 18*: *Wednesday 2 May 1962*

      Theoretical move: Piera Aulagnier, invited by Lacan, argues that anxiety is not typed by content (oral, castration, death) but is structurally defined as the collapse of all identificatory reference points—the ego's dissolution before the un-symbolisable—and that its resolution or temporary suspension is bound to the coincidence of demand and desire in jouissance, with castration functioning as the transitional passage that converts the penis into the phallic signifier.

      a major source of anxiety in analysis is caused by what is in fact the essence of the analytic situation: the fact that the Other in this case is the one whose most fundamental desire is to not desire

1108. #1108

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.150

      *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 15*: *Wednesday 28 March 1962*

      Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the torus (and introduces the cross-cap) to formalise the dialectical relationship between Demand and desire in the subject, showing how the torus's privileged circle—encompassing both the generating circle (Demand) and the inner circle (metonymical desire)—allows him to locate objet petit a and the phallus as structural measures of the subject's relation to desire, while insisting that identification is strictly a dimension of the subject and not of drive or image.

      it is inside this same torus that I symbolise by another analogous circle the demand of the Other with what that will involve for us of 'either..., or....'

1109. #1109

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.306

      *Seminar 26: Wednesday 27 June 1962*

      Theoretical move: At the close of Seminar 9, Lacan articulates the objet petit a as a topological-ontological operator: it is the object of castration that, by its enucleation from the cross-cap, transforms the imaginary sphere into a Möbius surface, thereby constituting the subject's world while marking the irreducible hole at the centre of desire and the Other's desire—a 'acosmic point' that underlies every metaphor, every symptom, and the anxiety of confronting what the Other desires of the subject.

      the locus of the Other, big 0, which is the locus where there is ordered the reality of the signifier

1110. #1110

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.3

      *Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1961*

      Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar IX by arguing that identification must be approached not through the imaginary relation to the other but through the logical problem of identity (A = A), and that the subject is constituted not by any self-present cogito but solely through the existence of the signifier and its effects — a thesis which frames the entire year's inquiry.

      this difference between the other and the Other, between the small other and the big Other, which is a theme with which I may indeed say that you are already familiar.

1111. #1111

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.158

      *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 15*: *Wednesday 28 March 1962*

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Jones's concept of 'aphanisis' misidentifies the source of anxiety in the castration complex by conflating the disappearance of desire with repression; true anxiety is always about the object that desire dissimulates (the void at the heart of demand), not about desire's disappearance—and this misrecognition occludes the decisive function of the phallus as the instrument mediating desire's relation to the big Other.

      We do not grasp the true mainspring of it which always implies this reference to the big Other where all of this takes on its meaning.

1112. #1112

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.145

      *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962*

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "reality of desire" is constituted through the dimension of the hidden and the structural weakness of the Other as guarantor of truth; this dialectic is traced through hysteric and obsessional modes of evading capture, and culminates in the claim that ethical behaviour—and the irreducibility of the castration complex at analysis's end—can only be understood by mapping desire's function in relation to the Other.

      this structure, this fundamental dialectic which entirely reposes on the ultimate weakness of the Other as a guarantee of what is sure.

1113. #1113

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.67

      *Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 7*: *Wednesday 10 January 1962* > What is the proper name?

      Theoretical move: Lacan rewrites the Cartesian cogito as a structural problem of the subject's relation to the Other and to signification: the "I think" is not a logical consequence but a preconscious signified that points to an ontological x—the subject—while the infinite regress of "I think that I think" is short-circuited by the mirror-like reduplication of cogito and sum, anticipating the split between the subject of the statement and the subject of the enunciation.

      to know whether one can trust the Other, whether as such what the subject receives from outside is a reliable sign

1114. #1114

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.297

      *Seminar 24*: *Wednesday 13 June 1962*

      Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the proper aim of analysis is not therapeutic adaptation but the subject's entry into desire, and grounds this claim structurally by showing that the object of desire (objet petit a) is constituted not by privation or frustration but by castration, and that this castrated object uniquely "carries number with it" — a point illustrated through re-reading the Wolf Man's primal-scene fantasy.

      this non-specular object which is the object of desire… in the mirror which the big Other constitutes, let us say the space developed by the big Other

1115. #1115

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.289

      *Seminar 24*: *Wednesday 13 June 1962*

      Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Symposium's agalma — what Alcibiades seeks at the heart of Socrates — to argue that the object of desire is ultimately the Other's desire itself (the pure eron), and that the phallus functions as the punctual, organising point that connects the barred subject ($) to the object (o) in the fundamental fantasy, while also introducing the third Freudian mode of identification as constituted through desire at the locus of the big Other.

      the field of desire is only conceivable for man starting from the function of the big Other: the desire of man is situated at the locus of the Other

1116. #1116

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.207

      *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 18*: *Wednesday 2 May 1962* > Lacan

      Theoretical move: Lacan uses a critical commentary on Mme Aulagnier's presentation to advance his own theoretical positions: that the subject must be defined purely through its exclusion from the signifier (not as a person), that affect cannot be understood outside its relation to the signifier, that perversion must be rethought as the subject making himself object for the jouissance of a phallic god, and that anxiety is properly situated as a sensation of the desire of the Other at the level of the ideal ego rather than as a word/affect antinomy.

      anxiety which I qualified for you as a sensation of the desire of the Other

1117. #1117

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.141

      *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962*

      Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the torus and the Graph of Desire's four nodal points to articulate the structural difference between message and question, grounding desire as precisely that part of demand hidden from the Other—and showing how the neurotic (especially the obsessional) constitutes himself as a real/impossible in face of the Other's impotence to respond.

      the relationship to the Other, in so far as I described it as founded on some lure which it is now a question of articulating...the position of the question to the Other, of the question about his desire and its satisfaction

1118. #1118

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.123

      *Seminar 12*: *Wednesday 7 March 1962*

      Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the topology of the torus to argue that the subject's structure is characterised by irreducible loops—unlike the sphere or plane where any loop can be collapsed to a point—and that the interplay between 'full circles' (demand) and 'empty circles' (desire/the object) on the torus structurally accounts for the constitutive 'minus one' of the unconscious, the detour through the Other, and the impossibility of a purely tautological (fully analytic) subjectivity.

      the circuit which is missing in the count is precisely what the subject includes in the necessities of his own surface to be infinitely flat that subjectivity can only grasp by a detour: the detour of the Other

1119. #1119

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.187

      *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 16*: *Wednesday 4 April 1962*

      Theoretical move: Through sustained topological demonstration using the torus, spread-out torus, inverted eight, and cross-cap, Lacan argues that the asymmetry between the two fundamental circles (of desire and demand) cannot be grounded in the torus's own surface structure, and that this irreducible asymmetry—always escaping formalization—is precisely what makes the toric topology productive for psychoanalytic modeling of the subject's relation to the Other.

      of finding a way out of it in the demands required of the Other.

1120. #1120

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.200

      *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 18*: *Wednesday 2 May 1962*

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that anxiety arises at the precise moment when the desire of the Other becomes unnameable, dissolving both ego and Other as supports of identification; this structural logic is then differentiated across neurosis, perversion, and psychosis, where for the psychotic the foreclosure of symbolisation means that the emergence of desire itself—rather than its loss—is the privileged source of anxiety, since it forces a confrontation with the constitutive lack (castration) that was never symbolised.

      if it is true that it is the Other who constitutes us by recognising us as object of desire, if the response of the Other makes us realise the gap which exists between demand and desire

1121. #1121

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.216

      *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 19*: *Wednesday 9 May 1962*

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus functions as the pivot of desire's constitution by operating as a signifier that cannot signify itself — the transmutation from need to desire passes through the phallic function — and that this structure can only be adequately rendered through topology (torus, cross-cap), which provides the 'transcendental aesthetic model' for the subject's exclusion from the signifying field and the analyst's place as incarnated desire.

      The fact is that the phallus of the Other is very precisely what incarnates… the postman through whom any object whatsoever may be introduced to the function of object of desire

1122. #1122

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.196

      *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 18*: *Wednesday 2 May 1962*

      Theoretical move: The passage advances a structural typology of clinical positions (normality, neurosis, perversion, psychosis) organized around the axis of identificatory conflict with the partial object, castration, and the differential articulation of demand, desire, and jouissance — arguing that what distinguishes each structure is not the content of the drive but the subject's identificatory relation to the phallic object and the Other's desire.

      the mediation between the subject and the Other between demand and desire takes place around this very ambiguously defined object which is called the partial object.

1123. #1123

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan

      *Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 7*: *Wednesday 10 January 1962*

      Theoretical move: The passage repositions the proper name as a pivot in the theory of identification, specifically linking it to the second (regressive) type of identification — identification with the unary trait of the Other — and situates this within an interdisciplinary horizon (linguistics and mathematics).

      identification to the unary trait of the Other

1124. #1124

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.92

      *Seminar 9*: *Wednesday 24 January 1962*

      Theoretical move: Lacan demonstrates that the breast as signifier is not a mammary object but a stand-in for the phallus, and uses the Fort-Da alternation (o / -o) to show that subjectivity and identification are constituted not by presence or absence alone but by their conjunction—the cut—which requires the imaginary unit √-1 as the formal root of desire's structure.

      he the 1 qua assuming the signification of the Other as such, has the closest relationship to the realisation of alternation.

1125. #1125

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.239

      *Seminar 21*: *Wednesday 23 May 1962*

      Theoretical move: The passage articulates a reversal in the structure of fantasy: rather than the subject projecting toward the object, it is the object (objet petit a) that imposes the cut of separation on the subject from the beyond of the imaginary, dissolving the classical idealist subject-object impasse and reconstituting the object as object of desire.

      to fill the lack, the hole of the Other

1126. #1126

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.153

      *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 15*: *Wednesday 28 March 1962*

      Theoretical move: The passage traces how the subject constitutes itself through the unary trait and the non-response of the Other, rewriting Freud's "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" as a formula of the One's advent, and then uses Sade to demonstrate that the object of desire is structurally dependent on the Other's silence—culminating in the Sadian drive toward annihilating signifying power as the logical extreme of this dialectic.

      his law, more exactly his fatum is this path that he can only describe by passing through the Other in so far as the Other is marked by the signifier, and it is on this side (en deça) of this necessary passage through the signifier that desire and its object are constituted as such.

1127. #1127

      Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.31

      *Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 4*: *Wednesday 6 December 1961*

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the formula "A is A" is not a logical truth but a historically contingent belief whose apparent self-evidence conceals the real condition of subject-formation: the subject emerges only from the non-self-identity of the signifier, demonstrated through the Fort-Da game and the distinction between sign and signifier, between indexical and nominal uses of language.

      a certain accession to the identical, as the transcendent A [l'Autre?]

1128. #1128

      The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.30

      I. Regarding Ethics, Freud Has What it Takes

      Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's ethics cannot be reduced to utilitarianism or humanism because its core is the structuring function of the Name-of-the-Father as prohibition of jouissance, a mechanism legible in St. Paul's account of the law and sin, and whose truth Freud traces through the Oedipus complex, Totem and Taboo, and Moses and Monotheism to a Judeo-Christian ontological tradition that grounds the subject in discourse rather than in biology.

      prohibition drives the statement of desire away from the subject in order to transfer it to an Other, to the unconscious that knows nothing of what is propped up by its own enunciation.

1129. #1129

      The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.70

      III. The Triumph of Religion

      Theoretical move: Lacan sharply distinguishes psychoanalytic speech from religious confession, arguing that the analytic setting is not confessional but oriented toward free speech about anything; religion's potential triumph over psychoanalysis is explained not by any structural resemblance between the two but by religion's constitutive invincibility.

      Religion does not triumph by means of confession. If psychoanalysis won't triumph over religion it is because religion is invincible.

1130. #1130

      The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.52

      II. Can Psychoanalysis Constitute the Kind of Ethics Necessitated by our Times?

      Theoretical move: Lacan critiques the ego-psychological reduction of desire to libidinal object-relations (oral/anal/genital stages), arguing instead that desire has no proper object but only the Thing as its impossible horizon, and that the commandment to love one's neighbour exposes the irreducible ambivalence (love/hatred) that makes any ethics of psychoanalysis inseparable from sublimation, the death drive, and the laws of speech that encircle das Ding.

      In fantasy, the subject experiences himself as what he wants at the level of the Other, this time with an uppercase O - in other words, in the place where he is truth without consciousness and without recourse.

1131. #1131

      Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.58

      <span id="page-53-0"></span>Destructive Plasticity, War, and Anarchism: A Conversation Between Catherine Malabou and Julie Reshe

      Theoretical move: Malabou argues that Freud accurately sensed destructive plasticity through the concept of the death drive but failed to give it autonomous form independent of Eros; the passage uses this gap to introduce destructive plasticity as a concept that radically destabilises identity, reframes trauma as a new form-creating force, and proposes anarchism as the political translation of plasticity.

      Death always necessarily comes from outside, from a blow coming from the other… The unconscious cannot assimilate the idea that I will die, of my own death.

1132. #1132

      Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.104

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

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

      If you see that the other is lacking as well. And if you see that, then you're not prone to that outburst of anxiety.

1133. #1133

      Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

      THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > SECTION II. Of the Transcendental Ideal (Prototypon Trancendentale).

      Theoretical move: Kant argues that the Transcendental Ideal (ens realissimum) arises from a dialectical illusion in which the distributive unity of empirical reality is illegitimately converted into a collective whole, which is then hypostatized and personified — a move Lacan will later theorize as the production of the big Other or the Subject Supposed to Know as a guarantee of completeness.

      we are induced to hold the empirical principle of our conceptions of the possibility of things, as phenomena, by leaving out this limitative condition, to be a transcendental principle of the possibility of things in general

1134. #1134

      Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

      THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > SECTION II. Of the Ideal of the Summum Bonum as a Determining Ground of the Ultimate End of Pure Reason. > 1. WHAT CAN I KNOW? 2. WHAT OUGHT I TO DO? 3. WHAT MAY I HOPE?

      Theoretical move: Kant argues that the three questions of pure reason—what can I know, what ought I to do, what may I hope—converge on a moral theology in which the necessary connection between moral worthiness and happiness can only be grounded in the postulate of a supreme rational cause (God) and a future life, making the 'ideal of the summum bonum' a practically necessary idea of reason rather than a speculative one.

      all actions of reasonable beings be such as they would be if they sprung from a Supreme Will, comprehending in, or under, itself all particular wills

1135. #1135

      A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.89

      The voice and the drive > His Master's Voice, His Master's Ear

      Theoretical move: Dolar uses the HMV logo as a theoretical parable: the voice-as-object (acousmatic voice) operates as a Lacanian drive-montage that simultaneously structures authority/obedience, deceives via a trompe-l'oreille analogous to trompe-l'œil, and exposes the speaking subject to the power of the Other's ear — thereby showing the voice's irreducible asymmetry with vision and its constitutive role in psychosis and subjective interiority.

      By so doing it produces an effect which has both an obscene side (disclosing something hidden, intimate, revealing too much, structurally too much)...one is ashamed of using one's voice because it exposes some hidden intimacy to the Other.

1136. #1136

      A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.176

      Silence

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the voice occupies a structurally privileged position at the point of exception within the law: it epitomizes "validity beyond meaning" (Geltung ohne Bedeutung), functioning as the non-universal partial object that captures desire and holds the subject in thrall, thereby linking Lacan's topological account of subject/Other desire (via the torus) to Kafka's literary figures of bare life and sovereignty, and to Agamben's inclusive exclusion.

      establishing a communication, a passage between two tori, that of the subject and that of the Other

1137. #1137

      A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.65

      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.

      discloses the presence and gives ground to its imaginary recognition—recognizing oneself as the addressee of the voice of the Other

1138. #1138

      A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar

      The voice and the drive > The antipolitics of the voice

      Theoretical move: The passage advances a structural contrast between fascism and Stalinism in terms of their differential relation to the voice: fascism places the Führer's voice *in place of* the law/big Other, while Stalinism paradoxically derives its power from the self-effacement of the voice behind the letter, making the minimal, hidden voice the very mechanism of its terror.

      If in Stalinism everything happens in the name of the big Other of history, then in fascism the Führer himself assumes the role of the Other.

1139. #1139

      A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.181

      Silence > Ulysses

      Theoretical move: Dolar reads Kafka's "Silence of the Sirens" to articulate how the law operates not through command but through silence—its zero-point of voice—which is irresistible precisely because there is nothing to resist, and shows that Ulysses' "escape" relies on a self-cancelling pretense whose structure mirrors the logic of the Jewish joke, leaving the law's mechanism intact.

      Silence here is the very form of the validity of the law beyond its meaning, the zero-point of voice, its pure embodiment.

1140. #1140

      A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.77

      chapter 2 > The acousmatics of the voice

      Theoretical move: The acousmatic voice structurally resists 'disacousmatization': its source is constitutively concealed, meaning ventriloquism is not an exception but the very condition of voice as object—the voice emerges precisely in the void from which it supposedly stems, operating as both surplus-of-body and no-more-body (plus-de-corps), and thus as the operator of the impossible division between interior and exterior.

      the disciples' main concern was to maintain the illusion, so that the disillusionment which they must have experienced did not affect the big Other. Another screen had to be raised to prevent the big Other from seeing what they saw

1141. #1141

      A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.97

      The voice and the drive > The voice of the daemon

      Theoretical move: By tracing the "voice of conscience" from Socrates' daemon through Rousseau's Savoy vicar, Dolar argues that the supposedly pure inner voice — positioned as the ground of morality beyond logos — is structurally tied to the big Other: the apotreptic, negative function of the divine inner voice always requires an external authority (Teacher, daemon, God) to authenticate it, so the ideal of autonomous self-authorization secretly reproduces heteronomy.

      The pure inner voice thus becomes inherently tied up with the overpowering presence of the Other.

1142. #1142

      A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.207

      Notes > Chapter 3 The "Physics" of the Voice

      Theoretical move: This endnote apparatus advances several interlocking theoretical arguments: the drive's aim/goal distinction (via Lacan) explains why the oral drive circles an eternally lacking object rather than reaching satisfaction; the acousmatic voice is shown to be structurally tied to phantomology when seen/heard fail to coincide; and the trompe-l'œil/lure distinction illuminates how deception operates at the level of the sign rather than verisimilitude.

      Orpheus... yields authority to the Other and tries to elicit the Other's mercy through his voice, while the Sirens, the depositories of the voice as authority, are merciless.

1143. #1143

      A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.210

      Notes > Chapter 4 The Ethics of the Voice

      Theoretical move: These notes to "The Ethics of the Voice" develop the structural homology between the superego's categorical imperative and the Kantian moral law, trace the voice's ethical function across Rousseau, Kant, Freud, and Lacan, and culminate in the claim that the foreclosed Name-of-the-Father returns in the Real precisely as the voice in psychosis.

      if the voice supplants the Other and immediately 'makes the law,' then it entails the dramatic consequences we can witness in psychosis

1144. #1144

      A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.17

      A Voice and Nothing More

      Theoretical move: The passage introduces the voice as a third object irreducible to either its function as a vehicle of meaning or as an aesthetic fetish, arguing that psychoanalysis alone can sustain fidelity to this "object voice" — a surplus effect that escapes both interpellation and aesthetic sublimation.

      the first use of subjectivity would be to throw itself at the mercy of the Other, something one can best do with the voice, or can do only in one's own voice.

1145. #1145

      A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.37

      A Voice and Nothing More > The linguistics of the non-voice

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that ostensibly "presymbolic" or "presignifying" vocal phenomena—coughing, hiccups, babbling, and the scream—are not external to the symbolic structure but are always already captured by it; their very non-signifying character makes them the zero-point of signification and the minimal condition of possibility for the signifier as such. Simultaneously, the scream's transformation into appeal enacts the passage from need to desire via the structure of address to the Other.

      the moment the other is provoked and interpellated by it, the moment it responds to it, scream retroactively turns into appeal... it is caught in a drama of appeal, eliciting an answer, provocation, demand, love.

1146. #1146

      A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.112

      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 voice comes from the Other without being part of it; rather, it indicates and evokes a void in the Other, circumscribing it, but not giving it a positive consistence.

1147. #1147

      A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.143

      The voice and the drive > The click

      Theoretical move: Dolar argues that the voice functions as a traumatic kernel at the origin of fantasy, specifically the primal scene fantasy: a contingent, inexplicable sound (the 'click') short-circuits inner and outer, revealing an excess of jouissance in the Other that simultaneously constitutes the subject's own enigma, so that subjectivation is grounded not in language structure but in a pre-linguistic sonorous object.

      The enigma in the Other is that excess which actually makes the Other the Other at all, it is what bestows otherness on it, it is the sound which betrays the excess of an unfathomable enjoyment.

1148. #1148

      A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.125

      The voice and the drive > The antipolitics of the voice

      Theoretical move: The passage theorizes two opposed political uses of the voice against the letter: (1) a ritual/complementary division-of-labor in which the voice enacts and seals the letter's authority, and (2) an authoritarian-totalitarian use in which the voice supplants the letter — with fascism and Stalinism representing structurally inverse forms of this second mode, the former centred on the charismatic, law-suspending voice and the latter on the self-effacing subordination of voice to the letter-as-Big-Other.

      he has to act as a mediator for the Other, which is different from the audience of insiders... the performance is meant for the ears of the big Other of history

1149. #1149

      A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.81

      The voice and the drive

      Theoretical move: Dolar argues that the voice, as objet petit a, occupies the paradoxical topological intersection of language and the body that belongs to neither, and that this position is what makes the voice the object of the drive rather than of desire — the drive's "aim" (the voice as by-product) is satisfied on the way to the "goal" (meaning), precisely because the voice is a non-dialectical, aphonic remainder that resists signification.

      desire itself, being the driving force, can never itself be exhausted by any meaning... it is another name for the dialectic between the subject and the other.

1150. #1150

      A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.90

      The voice and the drive > His Master's Voice, His Master's Ear

      Theoretical move: The voice, as object of the drive, operates through a constitutive asymmetry of incorporation and expulsion that makes it extimate—belonging to neither interior nor exterior—and this same structural topology grounds the intimate connection between voice and conscience that has animated the ethical tradition.

      Incorporating the voice of the Other is essential if one is to learn to speak; for the acquisition of language depends not simply on emulating the signifiers, but crucially consists in incorporating the voice.

1151. #1151

      A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.169

      Silence

      Theoretical move: The analyst's silence does not simply oppose lalangue but is its structural flip side: by creating a void in which the analysand's speech resonates through the loop of the Other, silence dispossesses the voice, returning the message of desire as the voice of the drive, and this trajectory—from subject-supposed-to-know through fantasy to the object voice—is the path of analysis itself, culminating in la passe.

      The voice responds to what is said, but it cannot be responsible for it… in order for it to respond we have to incorporate the voice as the alterity of what is said.

1152. #1152

      A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.217

      Chapter 6 Freud's Voices

      Theoretical move: This passage is a footnotes/endnotes section for Chapters 6 and 7, but it contains substantive theoretical moves: linking Dream-Work to Wish-Fulfillment, articulating the Drive's mythological status, connecting the fundamental fantasy to the drive, and theorizing the Voice and Objet petit a as the eternally lacking object that circumvents oral satisfaction, while also noting the structural role of the Matheme against phonological structuralism.

      the badger is the antisocial animal, the solitary digger, the animal of an utter exclusion from society, but from that outside he has to deal all the more with the oppressive and unfathomable big Other.

1153. #1153

      A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.191

      Silence > The dog

      Theoretical move: By reading Kafka's "Investigations of a Dog," Dolar traces how the acousmatic voice-from-nowhere (objet petit a as pure resonance) converges with the enigma of food to identify objet petit a as the common-source intersection of voice and nourishment—both passing through the mouth in mutual exclusion—while also theorising psychoanalysis as the abandonment of childhood rather than its retrieval.

      It is as if the pure void of the Other started to reverberate in itself in the presence of those great musicians, whose art consisted merely in letting the Other resonate for itself.

1154. #1154

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.8

      Aclmowledgments

      Theoretical move: This is the acknowledgements section of Joan Copjec's *Read My Desire*; it is non-substantive, containing personal and professional thanks with no theoretical argument developed.

      The big Other aside (I don't, after all, know his or her name)

1155. #1155

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.47

      Orthopsycbism > The Mirror as Screen

      Theoretical move: Copjec argues that film theory's appropriation of the Lacanian gaze fundamentally misreads it: where film theory locates the gaze as a positive, signified presence that centers and confirms the subject (aligning it with Foucauldian panopticism), Lacan's gaze is the Objet petit a in the visual field—a blind, jouissance-absorbed point of impossibility that annihilates rather than confirms the subject, constituting desire as constitutionally contentless pursuit of an impossibility.

      the horrible truth, revealed to Lacan by Petit-Jean, is that the gaze does not see you. So, if you are looking for confirmation of the truth of your being or the clarity of your vision, you are on your own; the gaze of the Other is not confirming.

1156. #1156

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.156

      The Unvennogender Other: Hysteria and DeDlocracy in ADlerica > The Tefton Totem

      Theoretical move: By reading the "Teflon President" phenomenon through Lacan's "realist imbecility" and the objet petit a, Copjec argues that television's failure to damage Reagan exposed the structural distinction between the enunciated (referential content, subject's statements) and the enunciating instance (the surplus object that retroactively constitutes the subject's consistency), and further identifies this Lacanian structure with the Cartesian cogito and the democratic subject — thereby positing a homology between psychoanalytic and political-philosophical logics of universality.

      his God is merely the principle that the Other is just like you and that this is the very same principle-that of the possibility of total consensus-upon which modern science is founded.

1157. #1157

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.65

      Orthopsycbism > The Mirror as Screen > Cause: Lac:an and Aristotle

      Theoretical move: Copjec argues that the opacity of the signifier — which bars language from transparently reflecting reality or intention — necessarily generates doubt, desire, and a subject constituted ex nihilo rather than as the fulfillment of a social/historical demand; the Lacanian formula 'desire is the desire of the Other' means not mimetic identification with the Other's image but a causation by the Other's indeterminate, unsatisfied lack, with objet petit a as the historically specific but content-less cause of the subject.

      The Lacanian aphorism 'desire is the desire of the Other'—is often taken to mean that the subject fashions itself in the image of the Other's desire... Lacan's answer to this mistaken interpretation of his formula is simply that we have no image of the Other's desire (it remains indeterminate), and it is this very lack that causes our desire.

1158. #1158

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.159

      The Unvennogender Other: Hysteria and DeDlocracy in ADlerica > The Tefton Totem

      Theoretical move: Copjec argues that the psychoanalytic subject is objectively indeterminate (not merely vaguely described), and uses the need/demand/desire triad to theorize how democracy itself hystericizes the subject by structuring its relation to an impotent (unvermögender) Other—a relation that sustains demand precisely through the Other's failure to deliver, while American pluralism forecloses the radical difference psychoanalysis defends by clinging to belief in a consistent Other of the Other.

      love is giving what one does not have... the indeterminate part of its being (in Lacanian terms the object a), which the Other (or subject) is but does not have, and therefore cannot give.

1159. #1159

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.247

      LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale > Sexual Diference and the Superego

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

      the jouissance of the Other, the body of the Other, is only promised in infinity.

1160. #1160

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.107

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

      Theoretical move: Psychoanalysis corrects both Kantian ethics and utilitarianism by reinstating the superego as the hidden enunciator of the moral law, thereby restoring the division of the subject that Kant's erasure of the enunciating instance threatens to abolish—and exposing how the disavowal of this division underwrites the violence latent in utilitarian happiness-maximization.

      someone-the Other always benefits from the sacrifice of enjoyment and always at the subject's expense

1161. #1161

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.120

      Orthopsycbism > Guilty versus Useful Pleasures > Fantasy and Fetish

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that perversion (specifically fetishism) inverts the structure of fantasy: where the neurotic subject constitutes itself in relation to the object a as an externalized image of loss, the pervert positions himself as the object a in its real form, becoming the instrument of the Other's enjoyment rather than a desiring subject—and Clerambault's fetishistic photographs thereby expose, rather than obscure, the utilitarian fantasy's dependence on the supposition of an obscene Other jouissance.

      The pervert places himself in the position of 'never being deprived with regard to knowledge, and most particularly knowledge concerning love and eroticism.' ... he is certain about love, about what the Other wants.

1162. #1162

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.211

      LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale

      Theoretical move: The passage argues, first, that film noir's visual techniques and the femme fatale figure both function as failed symbolic defenses against the drive/jouissance; and second, pivoting to Butler's Gender Trouble, that the sex-as-substance vs. sex-as-signification binary is inadequate because it smuggles in an imaginary (complementary) conception of sexual difference, which Lacanian sexuation can displace.

      in postmodernism the modern aporia between commensurability and incommensurability is dissolved through an unbarring of the Other, that is, through an annihilation of the public sphere

1163. #1163

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.237

      LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale > The Female Side: Mathematical Failure

      Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Lacan's "not-all" formula for woman functions as an indefinite judgment in the Kantian sense — affirming a negative predicate rather than negating a copula — which means woman's ex-sistence is neither denied nor confirmed, her non-collectibility into a whole stems from an internal limit (the failure of castration's "no"), and she is ultimately the product of lalangue, a symbolic without the guarantee of the Other.

      The Other is, however, by definition that which guarantees our consistency, and, as we have seen, there is no such guarantee where the woman is concerned.

1164. #1164

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.200

      Detour through the Drive > The Voice and the Voice-Over

      Theoretical move: Against the standard reading that the film noir voice-over signals the hero's limited knowledge, Copjec argues that the voice-over's excess over commentary indexes a surplus jouissance — a private enjoyment adhering in the act of speech itself — and that the "grain of the voice" (following Barthes rather than Bonitzer) functions as a transferential X that eroticizes the voice, preserving particularity and desire rather than marking mere epistemic failure.

      we fictively add to the field of the Other, to the voice, an X, the mark of our nonknowledge

1165. #1165

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.201

      Locked RoomILonely Room

      Theoretical move: Copjec argues that film noir's characteristic "lonely room" architecture — depopulated, emptied of desire and interpretability — is the spatial correlative of the drive's displacement of the big Other: where classical detection produces an infinite interpretable space (the locked room), noir produces a space of pure being, where the intrusion of objet petit a (the grain of the voice, private jouissance) into the phenomenal public field depletes rather than enriches social reality, and the hero's choice of jouissance over the signifying network yields a satisfying "nothing."

      For Neff, and his like, the benevolent impotent Other no longer exists, and Neff can, then, no longer seek from it what it is able to provide: protection from jouissance.

1166. #1166

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.171

      The Unvennogender Other: Hysteria and DeDlocracy in ADlerica > The Modern Forms of Power

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the modern democratic subject is constituted not by power's self-guaranteeing omniscience (Foucault) but by a structural lack of knowledge in the Other: because power cannot certify the subject, a surplus of meaning escapes social recognition, and it is precisely this conflict—including the irruption of jouissance—that both constitutes democratic subjectivity and prevents its totalisation.

      The modern subject encounters a certain blind spot in the Other, a certain lack of knowledge-an ignorance-in the powerful Other.

1167. #1167

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.134

      Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety

      Theoretical move: Anxiety, understood as a signal of the overproximity of object a rather than of lack, is structurally equivalent to the Gothic vampire figure; the symbolic order defends against the Real through negation, doubt, and repetition rather than interpretation, and psychoanalysis founds itself precisely on the rigorous registration of its own inability to know the Real - a 'belief without belief' that is not skepticism.

      psycho analysis commits itself to what Lacan refers to as a 'belief without belief, ' to a belief in an Other whose very existence is dependent on our lack of knowledge.

1168. #1168

      How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

      HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *God rid me of God* > *The Bible and conceptual idolatry*

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Bible itself enacts a structural resistance to conceptual idolatry through the irreducible plurality and contradiction of its divine descriptions, combined with a theological insistence on God's unrepresentability — such that revelation always occurs through concealment, and no single ideological or systematic reading can legitimately colonize the text or the divine.

      We can only speak of God's otherness and distance even at the very site of revelation

1169. #1169

      How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

      HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *God rid me of God* > *Beyond ‘God’*

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that idolatry consists not in a false claim of connection with God but in a false claim of adequate understanding of God, and uses Eckhart's prayer as a pivot to articulate the irreducible gap between any conceptual definition of God and the divine reality it attempts to name — a gap that implicates the subject's self-image in every theological claim.

      the God we are in relationship with is bigger, better and different than our understanding of that God

1170. #1170

      How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

      HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > TOWARDS ORTHOPRAXIS: BRINGING THEORY TO CHURCH > *Sins of the Father*

      Theoretical move: The passage deploys a liturgical service as a site for theorizing the structure of faith as irreducible to comfort or submission, using Žižek's Tamagotchi figure to argue that the God one thinks one understands is a projected idol of one's own creation — thereby situating genuine faith as persisting *despite* (and against) the God one has constructed.

      the God we think we understand is like a Tamagotchi toy – our own creation which subsequently makes demands upon us.

1171. #1171

      How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

      HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > TOWARDS ORTHOPRAXIS: BRINGING THEORY TO CHURCH > *Corpus Christi*

      Theoretical move: The passage performs a theological move that displaces propositional truth (orthodoxy) in favour of transformative, relational truth (orthopraxis), arguing that the encounter with God occurs in and through the body of the neighbour—a claim enacted liturgically through parable, Sufi poetry, and Holocaust testimony, all of which converge on the Lacanian-resonant dissolution of a self-enclosed 'I' as the condition of genuine encounter.

      Jesus introduced the idea that one could know God by finding God in the other... in loving others we come face to face with God in the face of the other.

1172. #1172

      How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

      HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *The aftermath of theology* > *God as subject, not object*

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that God cannot be reduced to an object of knowledge but must be understood as the absolute Subject before whom the human being becomes the object — a reversal grounded in the distinction between objective data and transformative, intimate encounter.

      God is not the object of our thought but rather the absolute subject before whom we are the object. This is confirmed in baptism when we say that we are 'baptized into the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost'. Here we do not name God but God's name names us.

1173. #1173

      How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

      HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *A/theology as icon* > *The saying of nothing*

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that authentic theological discourse operates as a "powerless" or apophatic speech-act that does not colonize the divine with logos but instead creates a sacred clearing in which the divine can address the subject — inverting the evangelistic model from answer-provision to question-opening, and theorizing language as the medium through which its own limits are enacted.

      God stands outside our language regimes and cannot be colonized via any power discourse.

1174. #1174

      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."

      the idea of God as hypernonymous

1175. #1175

      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.

      religion offers us certainty and security in a world full of ambiguity, offering us answers where there are so many questions, meaning when everything can seem so meaningless

1176. #1176

      How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

      HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *Inhabiting the God-shaped hole* > *Being evangelized*

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that genuine theological dialogue requires a posture of receptive powerlessness rather than monological self-assertion, reframing Christian mission as a mutual transformation in which the missionary is evangelized by the Other rather than simply transmitting God to the unreached.

      a dialogue in which we treat everyone we meet as individuals who we can learn from and perhaps teach, rather than reducing people to the same massive and clumsy categories such as 'Christian', 'Islamic' and so on

1177. #1177

      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.

      It is in the midst of this double reading between our interpretation of the text and our interaction with the other that the Christian community operates.

1178. #1178

      How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

      HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > TOWARDS ORTHOPRAXIS: BRINGING THEORY TO CHURCH > *Judas*

      Theoretical move: The passage deploys a liturgical/performative critique of self-legitimating religion, arguing that genuine faith requires radical self-critique — a "self-lacerating" identification with the betrayer (Judas) rather than the righteous — and that this prophetic, self-subverting structure is internal to authentic Christian discourse itself.

      the Word of God arrives at our threshold as adversarius noster (our adversary)

1179. #1179

      How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

      HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *The aftermath of theology* > *Theology and the voice of God*

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that theology should be understood not as human discourse that defines God, but as the site where God speaks into human discourse — a shift from idolatrous representationalism to a responsive, a/theological posture that acknowledges the irreducible excess of the divine over any tradition's understanding of it.

      the relationship we have with God cannot be reduced to our understanding of that relationship.

1180. #1180

      How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

      HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > TOWARDS ORTHOPRAXIS: BRINGING THEORY TO CHURCH > *‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’* > *Service description*

      Theoretical move: The passage performs a theological-liturgical argument that genuine faith requires dwelling in radical uncertainty (Holy Saturday) rather than instrumentalizing God for existential security — faith forged in the void of divine absence transcends reward/punishment logic, enacting a form of desire that is unconditional and non-transactional.

      'My name is Lucifer… I have cast your God from his throne and banished Christ to the realm of eternal death.'

1181. #1181

      How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

      HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > TOWARDS ORTHOPRAXIS: BRINGING THEORY TO CHURCH > *Advent*

      Theoretical move: The passage stages a liturgical enactment of the shift from orthodoxy as propositional belief to orthodoxy as transformative practice, using the Advent/Incarnation narrative to theorize how the subject must empty itself (undergo a kind of ego-death) to become a dwelling-place for truth, structuring this through the homology between Mary's womb and the subject's receptive void.

      Only God can give God. In order to prepare for this advent of God in our being, we must let go of those things in our lives that would extinguish the fragile flame of the Spirit.

1182. #1182

      How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

      HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *The third mile* > *Letting go*

      Theoretical move: The passage advances a theological argument that authentic Christian practice requires ego-dissolution rather than correct belief or moral effort, drawing on Eckhart's mystical kenosis to argue that the subject must empty itself so that divine love can flow through it — positioning self-surrender as the condition of possibility for ethical transformation.

      the love that emanates from our beloved... the transformative power of God

1183. #1183

      How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

      HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *Inhabiting the God-shaped hole* > *Religion and the absence of God*

      Theoretical move: Rollins deploys a Derridean law/justice analogy to argue that Christianity is structurally self-deconstructing: just as the law testifies to but can never embody justice, religious tradition testifies to but can never make present a God who is Wholly Other, thereby affirming religion's necessity while simultaneously announcing its redundancy.

      God as transcendent – not in the modern rendering that would use this term as a means of saying that God is bigger than we are, but in the more ancient meaning of God as Wholly Other.

1184. #1184

      Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda

      Abolishing (Aristotelian) Freedom > God the Extimate

      Theoretical move: By following Descartes's logic of thinking the unthinkable (God as lack of lack, infinite will), the passage argues that freedom can only be encountered when one is forced to do what one cannot do — making freedom structurally analogous to the Real: it vanishes the moment it is predicated on the subject, and can only be thought as that which cannot be thought.

      one's 'likeness of God.' Freedom therefore can be thought only as that which one cannot think.

1185. #1185

      Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda

      Abolishing (Aristotelian) Freedom > The Freedom of a Fatalist

      Theoretical move: Ruda argues that Cartesian freedom is not a capacity but a result—something that happens to the subject through a contingent, unthinkable determination (figured as God). This yields a paradox: one is truly free only when forced to be, so the fatalist imperative "Act as if you were not free!" becomes the condition of genuine freedom, opposing all Aristotelian naturalizations of essence.

      Thereby I do not simply become the instrument of the big Other, of God's will. Rather I become even more responsible for my deeds because everything is determined, but it is entirely unclear how.

1186. #1186

      Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.69

      Abolishing (Aristotelian) Freedom > God the Extimate

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Descartes's concept of God operates as an *extimate* cause — an external determination that inhabits the innermost kernel of thought — and that this structure collapses the inside/outside dualism: God is not a natural capacity within us nor a mere external fortune, but an undecidable necessity/contingency that is the condition of all eternal truths, making fatalism the precondition of genuine thought about freedom.

      Within me I find an Other that is so Other that I can never integrate it or include it in my inner realm of thought. In other words, as soon as I reach the innermost realm of thought, the cogito, I am thrown out of myself in a more radical manner than I can think or imagine.

1187. #1187

      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.

      I experience faith only when I encounter God, and I am thus forced to renew myself... Nothing guarantees salvation, not even incessant striving for good works.

1188. #1188

      The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.152

      6. *The Dignity of the Thing* > *Repetition as Creativity* > *The Allure of False Objects*

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the imaginary components of the objet a function as decoys that eclipse das Ding, and that sublimation—the uniquely human capacity to create meaning from lack—can be perverted into a destructive accumulation of false objects, generating an ethical obligation to distinguish between objects that carry the Thing's echo and mere lures.

      to the degree that the Other seeks to hide its lack by offering us a dizzying cornucopia of unnecessary objects, our life-worlds are filled with such decoys

1189. #1189

      The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.64

      2. *The Rewriting of Destiny* > *The Agency of the Signifi er*

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the subject's confrontation with its constitutive lack—rather than being a mere heroic sacrifice—is precisely what enables it to reclaim agency over the signifier from the Other, thereby transforming symbolic mortification into a resource for desire, resistance to trauma, and self-directed meaning-production. Psychoanalysis is distinguished from psychology by its orientation toward the signifier as the site where "destiny" can be rewritten.

      it allows it to better hold its own in the face of the Other's hegemonic desire

1190. #1190

      The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.51

      2. *The Rewriting of Destiny*

      Theoretical move: Fantasy is theorized as fate-defining precisely because it gives the repetition compulsion its content, sutures the subject's lack, fills the gaps of the big Other, and thereby embeds jouissance within normative ideological structures—dissolving fantasy is therefore recast as a rare existential act of rewriting psychic destiny and reclaiming singularity.

      fantasies also fill the gaps of the Other, making invisible the antagonisms of the social world and offering us an overly reassuring vision of a knowable reality

1191. #1191

      The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.135

      5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er* > *Singularity as a Social Phenomenon*

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that singularity is not an asocial eruption of the real but a social phenomenon produced by creatively linking the sinthome (the inexorable real in the subject) with the signifier, such that the rebellious energies of the real become the very engine of symbolic innovation—and this reconciles the apparent opposition between Lacanian, Foucauldian, and Derridean accounts of symbolic subversion.

      we can evade ideological interpellation not only by 'assuming' the nonexistence of the big Other through a mutinous act of subjective destitution (or divine violence), but also, quite simply, by playing with the inconsistency of the Other.

1192. #1192

      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.

      what undercuts the subject's faith in the seamless legitimacy of the big Other

1193. #1193

      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.

      Far from interpreting the signifier as a mere minion of the big Other, Lacan suggests that language can draw upon and intermingle with the chaotic energies of the real

1194. #1194

      The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.19

      *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 signifier robs me of agency, that there is no Other of the Other, or that my self-understanding is, by necessity, incomplete and misleading.

1195. #1195

      The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.73

      3. *The Ethics of the Act* > *The Sinthome as a Site of Singularity*

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's late shift from symptom to sinthome marks a theoretical transition from the subject of lack (structured by desire and the symbolic order) to a subject of singularity grounded in jouissance—where identification with the sinthome, as an irreducible kernel of real that resists symbolization, becomes the terminal aim of analysis.

      Beyond the erroneous belief that the big Other is a dependable field that contains the cure to the subject's affliction, the sinthome connects the subject to the real of its being outside of any recognizable sequence of discourse.

1196. #1196

      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.

      In Lacanian terms, because I am forced to speak the language of the Other, I can never account for myself independently of the hegemonic terms supplied by this Other.

1197. #1197

      The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.207

      8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *The Critique of Multiculturalism*

      Theoretical move: Post-Lacanian ethics, drawing on the Real dimension of the other, mounts a structural critique of multiculturalism: far from respecting genuine difference, multiculturalism tolerates only a domesticated version of the other, thereby serving the logic of global capitalism and repeating a colonial imperative to assimilate.

      multiculturalism celebrates the rhetoric of 'difference' while at the same time protecting us against the 'real' difference of others

1198. #1198

      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'.

      what Lacan calls the lack in the Other—the place of the absent from every signifying chain and hence of the very division around which the subject itself takes shape

1199. #1199

      The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.95

      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.

      Both undermine our faithfulness to the hegemonic desire of the Other, allowing us to access deposits of passion that are more representative of our singularity

1200. #1200

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

      8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *2. The Rewriting of Destiny*

      Theoretical move: This passage, constituted by scholarly endnotes, theorizes the constitutive incoherence of the big Other (barred, lacking any Other of the Other), the pre-symbolic law of the mother as foundational subjection, the distinction between classical and modern tragedy as forms of destined versus destituted subjectivity, and the analytic end-point as confrontation with helplessness and the absence of a Sovereign Good — all articulating how drive, fantasy, and the real internally limit symbolic consistency.

      the big Other, the symbolic order itself, is also barré, crossed-out, by a fundamental impossibility, structured around an impossible/traumatic kernel, around a central lack

1201. #1201

      The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.227

      8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *In Defense of Empathy* > *The* Ressentiment *of the Powerful*

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the anti-victim universalism of Badiou and Žižek conceals a ressentiment of the powerful—a reversal of Nietzschean ressentiment by which dominant subjects begrudge the jouissance of suffering attributed to marginalized others—and that their universalism is incomplete because it arbitrarily excludes racial, sexual, and postcolonial subjects while admitting the proletariat.

      a marginalized subject (or group) can come to be viewed as an explicit hindrance to the dominant group's access to jouissance—as what, for example, keeps the dominant group from attaining a sense of cultural cohesion

1202. #1202

      The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.68

      2. *The Rewriting of Destiny* > *The Agency of the Signifi er* > *The Analyst as Daimon*

      Theoretical move: Analysis functions as an "interpellation beyond ideological interpellation" by repositioning the analyst as the enigmatic cause of desire, replacing fantasmatic fixations with a transferential relation that reorganizes the analysand's existential orientation and opens new possibilities of singularity.

      the initial 'why' of the child (which is aimed at the frustrating desire of the parents) becomes, later in life, generalized into a 'why' (a Chè vuoi?) addressed to institutional forms of authority

1203. #1203

      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.

      capitulate to the desire of the Other

1204. #1204

      The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.167

      7. *The Ethics of Sublimation* > *The Banalization of the World*

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that both the "passion for the Real" (which strips symbolic formations of value) and poststructuralist nihilism (which denies any transcendent real) are mirror-image failures that produce the same "banalization of the world" under the dictatorship of the reality principle—and that the ethics of sublimation requires holding the sublime within signification rather than beyond it.

      Žižek's contention that the big Other is nothing but a set of ideological deceptions designed to cover over and pacify the monstrous real

1205. #1205

      The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.125

      5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er* > *The Inconsistency of the Signifi er*

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's binary opposition between a "dead" symbolic order and a vital real misses the implication of his own insight—that the real's disruption of the symbolic is precisely what makes the signifier creative and polyvalent, so that counterhegemonic resignification can occur from within the symbolic rather than requiring an exit from it.

      the conversion of the pre-symbolic Real into the symbolized reality—into the Real caught in the web of the signifier's network. In other words, through this 'empty gesture' the subject presupposes the existence of the big Other.

1206. #1206

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

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

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

      Her desire is obviously not the desire of the Other, and she insists on following this desire to its bitter end.

1207. #1207

      The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.253

      8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *Conclusion: The Other as Face*

      Theoretical move: These endnotes consolidate the theoretical apparatus of the chapter's argument about the neighbor/Other, drawing on Lacan, Žižek, Levinas, and Badiou to negotiate the tension between singularity, universality, and the traumatic jouissance of the Other as the ethical crux of love and politics.

      When do I effectively encounter the Other 'beyond the wall of language,' in the real of his or her being?

1208. #1208

      The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.151

      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.

      learning to read the 'truth' of our desire allows us to distance ourselves from the enigmatic desire of the Other

1209. #1209

      The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.69

      2. *The Rewriting of Destiny* > *The Agency of the Signifi er* > *The Possibility for New Possibilities*

      Theoretical move: Lacanian analysis is theorized as a process that dismantles fantasy-generated fixity—the unconscious reproduction of the Other's desire as one's own—and converts symptomatic repetition into a more fluid, singular capacity for desire, where the goal is not happiness but the tolerance of anxiety and the opening of new existential possibilities.

      a subject driven by unconscious fantasies tends to continuously recreate the same imaginary relationship . . . to what it presumes the Other's desire to be

1210. #1210

      The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.252

      8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *8. The Sublimity of Love*

      Theoretical move: This notes section develops a series of theoretical positions linking Das Ding, lost object, courtly love, and the enigma of the Other's desire to show how love operates as a vehicle for the subject's approach to the Thing—always fleetingly—and how love's interpellation can momentarily suspend ordinary socio-symbolic identification.

      we can certainly feel depleted by the intimate other no less than by the big Other—we do not usually experience the intimate other, the other with whom we enjoy, primarily as a bearer of hegemonic intent

1211. #1211

      The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.54

      2. *The Rewriting of Destiny* > *Validity in Excess of Meaning*

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Other's desire functions through a "validity in excess of meaning" — a surplus that exceeds rational comprehension — which binds subjects to institutions not through explicit juridical demands but through visceral, unconscious citation of authority, generating anxiety that curves the subject's everyday space and drives the desperate Che vuoi? toward an Other that is itself incapable of accounting for its own desire.

      The Other's enigmatic desire incites us to strive to make sense of the various ways we are addressed, and the more ambiguous this desire, the more thoroughly it penetrates our bodily constitution

1212. #1212

      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.

      the act of identifying with one's sinthome and the act of subjective destitution—of completely forsaking one's allegiance to the symbolic order

1213. #1213

      The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.206

      8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *The "Faceless" Face*

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that a genuinely post-Lacanian ethics must reckon with the non-symbolizable, nonrelational surplus (jouissance) of the other rather than retreating to the "dazzling epiphany" of the face as a fetishistic totality; the Muselmann is deployed as the limit case that exposes this ethical demand at its most traumatic.

      one cannot discern in his face the trace of the abyss of the Other in his/her vulnerability, addressing us with the infinite call of our responsibility

1214. #1214

      The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.133

      5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er* > *Joyce as a Singular Individual*

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that jouissance is not merely the repressed underside of the signifier but foundational to its innovative capacity, such that the signifier and the real mutually transform each other — a reciprocal dynamic that grounds the subject's active invention of meaning and enables singular individuality (exemplified by Joyce) through the sinthome's integration into the symbolic.

      Lacan thus proposes that each of us has some leeway in organizing the signifiers of the big Other.

1215. #1215

      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.

      the Other / desire of, 39–41 / lack, 229–30 / as irreplaceable, 180–82 / versus the signifi er, 158–60

1216. #1216

      The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.90

      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... represents a categorical rejection of the (enigmatic or obvious) signifiers of the Other's desire.

1217. #1217

      The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.103

      4. *The Possibility of the Impossible* > *Fidelity to the Event*

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that fidelity to a truth-event requires the subject to sustain a retroactive truth-process through the "unknown," tolerating disorientation and working through it toward "ethical consistency"; this fidelity is theorized as an uncoupling of the drive from its normatively determined destiny, opening genuinely new existential possibilities.

      the congealed surplus agitation or overanimation that haunts the subject as a result of its normative seduction by the enigmatic signifiers of the Other.

1218. #1218

      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.

      there is no subjectivity without the Other (or others)... it is this very Other/other that gives us access to the meaning making capacities of language—that, more broadly, gives us the gift of sublimation.

1219. #1219

      The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.58

      2. *The Rewriting of Destiny* > *The (Uneven) Tragedy of Human Life*

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacanian alienation must be stratified into two distinct registers—foundational/existential and contingent/historical—exposing how socially produced inequalities compound the universal trauma of symbolic inscription, so that "destiny" is not uniformly demoralizing but differentially so depending on one's positioning within networks of power.

      Our relationship to the symbolic Other is therefore exceedingly complex. On the one hand, we are indebted to the Other in that, without the Other's presence, we would have no subjectivity.

1220. #1220

      The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.164

      7. *The Ethics of Sublimation* > *Beyond the Reality Principle*

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that sublimation constitutes an ethics grounded in fidelity to das Ding rather than the reality principle: by admitting traces of the real into the symbolic, sublimation punctures the seamlessness of social reality and opens a space for the reinvention of values beyond the hegemonic 'common good', a move Badiou's truth-event is shown to parallel.

      there is an enormous difference between the symbolic Other as a site of hegemonic power and the signifier as a tool of sublimatory capacity

1221. #1221

      The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.214

      8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *The Third of Justice*

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that post-Lacanian ethics (via Žižek) corrects the Levinasian privileging of the face-to-face encounter by resurrecting the impersonal "Third" as the proper seat of justice, establishing a structural incompatibility between love (which singularizes a privileged One) and justice (which must remain blind to the particular face), grounding ethics in universality rather than in the affective pull of the other's face.

      Every preempting of the Other in the guise of his or her face relegates the Third to the faceless background.

1222. #1222

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

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

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

      The Other blocks our direct access to jouissance so that it can only be approached in the roundabout way I alluded to above, through (more or less) socially recognizable objects of desire.

1223. #1223

      The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.244

      8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > 8. Here is one example:

      Theoretical move: The passage, drawn from endnotes, argues that the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real are each structurally necessary components of bearable human coexistence: the Symbolic Third mediates between subjects and the monstrous Real Thing, the Imaginary enables identification with the other, and the Real supplies the dynamism of singular passion—while also elaborating the sinthome as a meaning-producing enigma that is opaque, poetic, and irreducible to ultimate signification.

      if the functioning of the big Other is suspended, the friendly neighbor coincides with the monstrous Thing (Antigone)

1224. #1224

      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.

      we learn to desire what (we think that) the Other desires (or wants us to desire) . . . we are often not the authors of our desires but serve as conduits for culturally hegemonic forms of desire

1225. #1225

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

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

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

      When it comes to Polyneces, the big Other (the law of Creon) is, for Antigone, entirely irrelevant.

1226. #1226

      The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.154

      6. *The Dignity of the Thing* > *Repetition as Creativity* > *Symbolic Ideals and Values*

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that symbolic quilting points, when chosen critically, serve a constructive function by anchoring desire in collective meaning without arresting its movement—thus enabling sublimation rather than narcissistic closure—and that the ego ideal (symbolic) is theoretically superior to the ideal ego (imaginary) precisely because it opens onto collective structures rather than foreclosing personal limitation.

      we remain capable of dissociating our desire from the desire of the Other.

1227. #1227

      The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.131

      5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er* > *Enjoyment-in-Meaning*

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's late concept of the sinthome, via *jouis-sens*, reframes the signifier not as a passive instrument of ideological interpellation but as a vehicle of jouissance-laden, polyvalent meaning-production — thereby challenging readings that treat the real only as a site of subjective destitution and showing that language and jouissance are not mutually exclusive.

      if we allow for the possibility that the signifi er does not invariably obey the dictates of the big Other

1228. #1228

      The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.230

      8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *1. The Singularity of Being*

      Theoretical move: This endnote cluster consolidates the theoretical architecture of the chapter by specifying the structural relations among das Ding, desire, repetition compulsion, jouissance, the death drive, sublimation, the sublime, and the symbolic order—while positioning Badiou, Žižek, Zupančič, and Santner as allied but differentiated interlocutors within a Lacanian frame.

      the central defect around which the dialectic of the advent of the subject to his own being in the relation to the Other turns—by the fact that the subject depends on the signifier and that the signifier is first of all in the field of the Other.

1229. #1229

      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.

      there is no 'big Other' that guarantees their ultimate consistency

1230. #1230

      The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.263

      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.

      the Other, 39–42

1231. #1231

      The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.223

      8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *In Defense of Empathy*

      Theoretical move: The passage argues against the post-Lacanian and Badiouian reduction of all interpersonal empathy to colonialist bad faith or structural impossibility, contending instead that the irreducible opacity of the Other as Thing does not preclude partial, meaningful human connection—and that the wholesale vilification of empathy may itself conceal intellectual lethargy rather than ethical rigor.

      The other who is unknowable is always also in many ways knowable.

1232. #1232

      The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.128

      5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er* > *Lacan's Reading of Joyce*

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the sinthome is not a site of pure destruction but of creative renewal: by identifying with his sinthome, Joyce links the symbolic and the real so as to generate innovative signification, making artistic creativity—rather than subjective destitution—a viable response to the death drive's impossibility.

      doing so made it possible for it to disconnect itself from the desire of the Other

1233. #1233

      The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.250

      8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *7. The Ethics of Sublimation*

      Theoretical move: Sublimation is theorized as an encounter with the Real that exceeds the reality principle, creating space for "impossible" objects; meanwhile, the contemporary sublimatory crisis is diagnosed as the collapse of even the symbolic debt that previously motivated subjects, since the Other now openly acknowledges its own lack of ultimate guarantee (the Other of the Other is absent).

      not only do we know that the Other (our symbolic universe) is devoid of any ultimate guarantee (such as God), but the Other knows this too.

1234. #1234

      The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.31

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

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

      the drive, like desire, is always organized in relation to the symbolic Other . . . it has been molded in response to the signifiers of the Other

1235. #1235

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

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

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

      'The subject much prefers to deal with the Other's demand that he or she do things, become this or that, than to deal with the Other's desirousness, pure and simple'

1236. #1236

      The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.216

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

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

      Given the notorious post-Lacanian scorn for the 'flat' and 'aseptic' universe of Habermasian communicative action

1237. #1237

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.124

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

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet petit a occupies a paradoxical double position—it is both the real itself and the symbolic's positivized failure to reach the real—and uses this logic to distinguish psychoanalysis (which registers its own limits as the condition of truth) from historicism/skepticism (which forecloses the real by filling every gap with causal-cultural chains), while reading Frankenstein's monster as the paradigmatic modern subject: structurally constituted by the failure/lack of knowledge rather than by any positive invention.

      psychoanalysis commits itself to what Lacan refers to as a 'belief without belief,' to a belief in an Other whose very existence is dependent on our lack of knowledge.

1238. #1238

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.227

      **Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason** > **The Female Side: Mathematical Failure**

      Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Lacan's "not-all" with respect to Woman must be read as an indefinite judgment (following Kant's mathematical antinomies), not as an external limitation: Woman's non-existence within the symbolic is not a denial of her ex-sistence but an internal limit constitutive of reason itself, and this structure—where no metalanguage can anchor a judgment of existence—culminates in Woman as the product of lalangue, a symbolic without an Other.

      Ordinarily we think of the symbolic as synonymous, in Lacanian terms, with the Other. The Other is, however, by definition that which guarantees our consistency, and, as we have seen, there is no such guarantee where the woman is concerned.

1239. #1239

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

      **The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan** > **The Mirror as Screen**

      Theoretical move: Copjec argues that the Lacanian gaze is not a confirming, panoptic presence but a blind, non-validating point of impossibility that constitutes the subject as a desiring, guilty, and anchored being—one structurally cut off from the Other rather than identified with it, and whose narcissism and fantasy merely circumnavigate a constitutive absence.

      When you encounter the gaze of the Other, you meet not a seeing eye but a blind one. The gaze is not clear or penetrating, not filled with knowledge or recognition; it is clouded over and turned back on itself, absorbed in its own enjoyment. The horrible truth, revealed to Lacan by Petit-Jean, is that the gaze does not see you.

1240. #1240

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.160

      **The** ***Unvermögender*** **Other: Hysteria and Democracy in America** > **The Modern Forms of Power**

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that democracy is constituted not by power belonging to an anonymous "anyone" (Foucault's self-guaranteeing law) but by a structural lack in the Other—no guarantees, no ultimate markers of certainty—and that this very lack produces the subject's singularity and surplus of meaning, while the enjoyment that emerges from erased certainty is precisely what sustains democratic conflict against totalitarian closure.

      The modern subject encounters a certain blind spot in the Other, a certain lack of knowledge—an ignorance—in the powerful Other.

1241. #1241

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

      **The Sartorial Superego** > **Beyond the Good Neighbor Principle**

      Theoretical move: By tracing French psychiatry's concept of mental automatism through the mind/machine boundary problem, Copjec argues that the structural gap in utilitarian self-definition reveals why the psychoanalytic ethics of the Superego and the Lost Object—premised on non-reciprocal, unconditional prohibition—must replace the utilitarian model of reciprocity, pleasure-reward, and intersubjective exchange as the foundation of moral law.

      Freud does not hesitate to agree with Bentham that we are basically altruistic, that we would be willing to sacrifice for the Other. But would the Other be willing to sacrifice for us?

1242. #1242

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

      <span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_page237"><span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_pg237" class="pagebreak" title="237"></span></span>**Notes** > **Chapter 2**

      Theoretical move: This endnotes section for Chapter 2 develops the theoretical argument that the gaze arises from linguistic rather than voyeuristic/fetishistic assumptions, that the cinema is better understood through the concept of the "nonspecularizable" than through the mirror/screen analogy, and that a properly Lacanian account of the subject requires distinguishing the unreturned gaze from imaginary identification and aggressivity.

      obsession as that which covers over the desire in the Other with the Other's demand

1243. #1243

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.55

      **Cutting Up** > **Cause: Lacan and Aristotle**

      Theoretical move: Against both Bergson's vitalist temporality and historicist constructions of the subject as language's determinate effect, Copjec argues—via Lacan—that the opacity of the signifier generates an irreducible surplus (objet petit a) that causes the subject ex nihilo: the subject is not the fulfillment of a social demand but the product of language's constitutive duplicity, which produces desire as a striving for an indeterminate, extradiscursive nothing.

      The Lacanian aphorism—desire is the desire of the Other—is often taken to mean that the subject fashions itself in the image of the Other's desire.

1244. #1244

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.150

      **The** ***Unvermögender*** **Other: Hysteria and Democracy in America** > **The Teflon Totem**

      Theoretical move: Copjec argues that American democracy structurally hystericizes the subject by generating a demand for an *unvermögender* (impotent/incapable) Other whose very failure to deliver accreditation preserves the subject's singularity; this diagnosis is grounded in the tripartite distinction of need/demand/desire and the logic of love (giving what one does not have), and culminates in a critique of the American suppression of the Real excess within the law itself.

      the pluralism that characterizes American democracy depends on our devotion to an unvermögender Other... If everything this Other says or does fails to deliver the accreditation we seek, if all the Other's responses prove inadequate, then our difference is saved.

1245. #1245

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.200

      **Locked Room/Lonely Room: Private Space in Film Noir** > **Lethal Jouissance and the Femme Fatale**

      Theoretical move: Copjec argues that film noir's visual techniques (deep-focus, chiaroscuro) and the figure of the femme fatale both function as symbolic defenses against the drive—ersatz substitutes for a genuinely operative symbolic order—and that the femme fatale specifically embodies a contract by which the noir hero surrenders jouissance to an external double, a delegation that proves lethal rather than stabilising because she hoards rather than screens enjoyment.

      through an unbarring of the Other, that is, through an annihilation of the public sphere that created this aporia

1246. #1246

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.96

      **The Sartorial Superego** > **Beyond the Good Neighbor Principle**

      Theoretical move: Psychoanalysis radicalizes Kant's ethical subject by insisting that the moral law is always enunciated by a superegoic Other whose sadistic enjoyment is concealed when the marks of enunciation are erased; restoring this division of the subject is itself an ethical necessity, and its disavowal generates the violent aggressions disguised as utilitarian benevolence.

      someone—the Other—always benefits from the sacrifice of enjoyment—and always at the subject's expense.

1247. #1247

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.157

      **The** ***Unvermögender*** **Other: Hysteria and Democracy in America** > **The Modern Forms of Power**

      Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Foucault's analysis of disciplinary power is structurally blind to totalitarianism because it fails to recognize that the "mild and provident" tutelary power is, in Freudian-Lacanian terms, the ideal father who constitutes himself precisely by interdicting jouissance (expelling objet petit a), and that this interdiction — not discursive multiplicity — is what generates the fantasy of transgression and the eventual return of the despotic primal father in the form of totalitarianism.

      You may have recognized here what we earlier called the unvermögender Other; the ideal father is 'a man without means.'

1248. #1248

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.189

      **Locked Room/Lonely Room: Private Space in Film Noir** > **The Voice and the Voice-Over**

      Theoretical move: Copjec argues that the "grain of the voice" operates as a structural limit that collapses universal sense and installs the listener in a relation of transference/desire toward an unknown X; when desire gives way to drive, this private beyond is no longer hidden but exposed as a void—jouissance surfacing within the phenomenal field without becoming phenomenal—a move that explains the film noir voice-over's materialization of the narrator's irreducible absence from diegetic reality.

      we fictively add to the field of the Other, to the voice, an X, the mark of our nonknowledge

1249. #1249

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.191

      **Locked Room/Lonely Room: Private Space in Film Noir** > **Locked Room/Lonely Room**

      Theoretical move: Copjec argues that film noir enacts a structural shift from the "locked room" of classical detection (governed by a benevolent-impotent Other that conceals and yields meaning) to the "lonely room" (governed by the drive), where the intrusion of the non-phenomenal private realm—the object a, the grain of the voice—into public space registers not as plenitude but as a depletion of phenomenal reality, so that noir's characteristic emptiness is the positive mark of jouissance overrunning the signifying network.

      For Neff, and his like, the benevolent-impotent Other no longer exists, and Neff can, then, no longer seek from it what it is able to provide: protection from jouissance.

1250. #1250

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

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

      Theoretical move: By distinguishing neurotic fantasy (barred subject in relation to objet a) from perversion (subject positioning himself *as* objet a, becoming agent of division in the Other), Copjec argues that Clérambault's fetishistic photographs do not simply reproduce the colonialist fantasy of cloth but pervert it—exposing the fantasy's structural dependence on the supposition of an obscene, useless enjoyment of the Other that the fantasy simultaneously requires and disavows.

      The pervert places himself in the real, the only place where nothing is lacking, where knowledge is certain… he is certain about love, about what the Other wants.

1251. #1251

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

      <span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_ack_r1.htm_pageix"><span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_ack_r1.htm_pgix" class="pagebreak" title="ix"></span></span>**Acknowledgments**

      Theoretical move: This is an acknowledgements section — non-substantive autobiographical and professional credits with no theoretical argumentation, aside from a passing mention of the big Other as a rhetorical device.

      The big Other aside (I don't, after all, know his or her name), it is to a number of others that I have addressed myself in writing this book

1252. #1252

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.169

      **Locked Room/Lonely Room: Private Space in Film Noir** > **The Actuarial Origins of Detective Fiction**

      Theoretical move: Copjec, via Miller's reading of the panoptic, argues that modern power constitutes the subject *as* private precisely in order to conceal its own operation — there is no secret self outside power's knowledge — which in turn poses the paradox of how crime (transgression of a private boundary) is possible at all.

      there can in fact be no secret that keeps itself from power, no self that is not always already known.

1253. #1253

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

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

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

      the jouissance of the Other, the body of the Other, is only promised in infinity.

1254. #1254

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.145

      **The** ***Unvermögender*** **Other: Hysteria and Democracy in America** > **The Teflon Totem**

      Theoretical move: By reading the "Teflon President" phenomenon through Lacan's concept of objet petit a (as the instance of enunciation that exceeds all statements), Copjec argues that "realist imbecility"—the sacrifice of the signified for the referent—structurally disables television's (and the police's) capacity to menace the subject, and that democratic ideology is founded on a Cartesian universal subject whose "innocent" enunciating instance mirrors the logic of objet petit a.

      his God is merely the principle that the Other is just like you and that this is the very same principle—that of the possibility of total consensus—upon which modern science is founded.

1255. #1255

      Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.31

      **The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan** > **The Mirror as Screen**

      Theoretical move: Copjec argues that film theory fundamentally misreads Lacan's concept of the gaze by collapsing it into a Foucauldian optics of total visibility and perspectival construction; the Lacanian gaze, properly understood from Seminar XI, is not a point of surveillance but the Objet petit a in the visual field—an unoccupiable, impossible-real absence that founds the subject as desiring precisely through what it cannot see.

      the proof and sole guarantee of that alterity of the Other which Hegel's sweeping tale, in overlooking, denies

1256. #1256

      Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.285

      <span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c20_r1.xhtml_page_273" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="273"></span>*20*

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the limits of knowledge in love and grief are not deficiencies but constitutive dimensions of intimate bonds, and that psychoanalysis teaches not perfect transparency but a tolerant, even productive relation to irreducible unknowing — in others and in oneself.

      doesn't the magic of a new relationship arise in no small part precisely from what we don't yet know, from the encounter with another person as an enticing mystery?

1257. #1257

      Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.287

      <span id="ch6.xhtml_p281" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 281. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Conclusion

      Theoretical move: Boothby argues that Lacan's concept of the Real is the decisive retrieval of Freudian metapsychology, translating the energetic remainder that escapes psychical representation into the register of the unrepresentable Other and das Ding, and that the objet a constitutes Lacan's unique theoretical contribution—the 'dispositional object'—which has no analogue in any contemporary philosophy of the unthought ground of thought.

      The real is the dimension of das Ding, of what is in the other more than the other... Such a reference to the unencompassable dimension of the Other is the key point of Lacan's outlook

1258. #1258

      Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.246

      <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 5 </span><span id="ch5.xhtml_p241" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 241. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Figurations of the *Objet a* > The Object-Cause of Desire

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the *objet petit a* is the "object-cause" of desire: a primordially lost, liminal object that is simultaneously imaginary, symbolic, and real yet belongs to none, and whose retroactive ceding—not subtraction from a pre-formed subject—constitutes the desiring subject itself, such that desire paradoxically originates only in and through the loss of its object.

      the mother assumes the proportions of das Ding, not the little other of the imaginary object, the mirror image of the other human being, but the unknowable, unmasterable, and monstrous big Other.

1259. #1259

      Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.14

      <span class="chnum ordinal">Introduction</span><span id="ch0.xhtml_p1" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 1. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span> Returning to Metapsychology > The Lacanian Return to Freud

      Theoretical move: Boothby positions Lacan's "return to Freud" as a theoretically ambitious refounding of psychoanalysis through three cardinal registers (Imaginary, Symbolic, Real), a radical critique of Ego Psychology's adaptation model, and an insistence that the signifier—not the ego—determines the subject, with the Other as the ultimate horizon of desire.

      For Lacan, the unconscious is 'the discourse of the Other.' Human desire is 'the desire of the Other.' It is difficult to overestimate the importance for Lacan of this reference to the Other.

1260. #1260

      Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.15

      <span class="chnum ordinal">Introduction</span><span id="ch0.xhtml_p1" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 1. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span> Returning to Metapsychology > The Lacanian Return to Freud

      Theoretical move: Boothby poses the central tension of his project: Lacan's "return to Freud" appears to replace Freudian energetics with the algebra of the signifier, yet he argues this apparent betrayal is possible precisely because Freud's own metapsychology contains a latent content that only Lacanian concepts can bring to light.

      Lacan's evocation of the Other appears less Freudian than Hegelian.

1261. #1261

      Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.185

      <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 3 </span><span id="ch3.xhtml_p133" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 133. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Dialectic > Toward a Lacanian Theory of Sacrifice

      Theoretical move: Boothby argues that sacrifice's general function is to establish the operation of the signifier: it pivots between the imaginary and the symbolic by enacting a violation of bodily wholeness (castration logic) that simultaneously founds a system of signifiers, the law of exchange, and the big Other — thereby integrating prior anthropological theories of sacrifice into a single Lacanian account.

      In Lacanian terms, the Other—the so-called 'big Other'—is the locus of the code, the treasury of signifiers that constitutes the symbolic system.

1262. #1262

      Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.249

      <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 5 </span><span id="ch5.xhtml_p241" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 241. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Figurations of the *Objet a* > "You don't love me . . . you just don't give a shit."

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet a—exemplified by the anal object—is not a natural object but is constituted through the demand of the Other, which "colonizes" the body's orifices and transforms biological functions into denaturalized libidinal strivings; drive development across stages is thus not natural maturation but a migration of the objet a driven by the Other's demand.

      the subject has some apprehension he is taking on, this part becoming at least valorised by the fact that it gives its satisfaction to the demand of the Other

1263. #1263

      Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.271

      <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 5 </span><span id="ch5.xhtml_p241" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 241. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Figurations of the *Objet a* > Why One and One Make Four

      Theoretical move: By mapping gestalt concepts (figure/ground) onto the Schema R and contrasting it with Schema L, Boothby argues that symbolic castration is the process of "demotivation" that opens the real between the imaginary axis (m-i) and the symbolically mediated axis (I-M), distinguishing the fuller picture of the Oedipus complex from the neurotic, analytic situation mapped by Schema L.

      by occupying the position of the big Other (O) of the symbolic code, to open it to the influence of the signifier

1264. #1264

      Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby

      <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 4 </span><span id="ch4.xhtml_p191" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 191. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Thing

      Theoretical move: The chapter pivots from a dualistic (imaginary/symbolic) framework to a triadic one (imaginary/symbolic/real integrated via the Borromean Knot), arguing that Freudian dualisms internally require development into triadic structures, and that the split, Other-bound subject disclosed by psychoanalysis—together with Nachträglichkeit—fundamentally challenges any philosophy premised on a unified representing subject.

      the human subject is found to be eccentric to itself... ineluctably bound up with an opaque and unencompassable Other.

1265. #1265

      Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.191

      <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 4 </span><span id="ch4.xhtml_p191" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 191. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Thing > <span id="ch4.xhtml_p193" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 193. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>A Love Triangle

      Theoretical move: By arguing that the phallus as signifier is retroactively inscribed into the very formation of the narcissistic ego—simultaneously its last discovery and its originary motive—Boothby establishes that the Symbolic (and specifically the Name-of-the-Father/phallus) has priority over the Imaginary even at the most primitive level of ego formation, grounding this in Lacan's retroactive temporality (Nachträglichkeit) and its Freudian precedent in trauma theory.

      there is no better place to begin than with the Oedipus complex and, more particularly, with the pivotal role played by the phallus. In the previous chapter, we treated the question of the phallus in terms of the imaginary dismemberment at stake in the phantasy of castration.

1266. #1266

      Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.260

      <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 5 </span><span id="ch5.xhtml_p241" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 241. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Figurations of the *Objet a* > Between the Look and the Gaze

      Theoretical move: By identifying the gaze with objet petit a and locating it in a triadic, topological structure that pre-exists and constitutes the field of the visible, Boothby argues that the Lacanian gaze is not a competing look but the dispositional horizon of consciousness itself—the desire of the Other that frames all positional awareness—with distinct political and clinical consequences in mass psychology versus analytic transference.

      the gaze is one of the prime figures in which the imaginary relation opens out upon a symbolic horizon... Its place will come to be occupied by the entirety of the symbolic order. In the place of the gaze, the subject will come to experience the call of the signifier.

1267. #1267

      Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby

      <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 3 </span><span id="ch3.xhtml_p133" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 133. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Dialectic > The Agency of Death in the Signifier

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the death drive is double-sided: operating as imaginary unbinding (violence, hallucination, fragmentation) and as symbolic unbinding (signification), where the symbolic constitutes a "second-order binding" whose very bound structure enables ongoing dissolution of imaginary unities — thereby translating Freud's instinct-fusion into a dialectic of binding/unbinding immanent to the speech chain itself.

      the subjective construction on the scale of the signifier in its relation to the Other

1268. #1268

      Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby

      <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 5 </span><span id="ch5.xhtml_p241" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 241. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Figurations of the *Objet a*

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's *objet a* emerges from the intersection of image and word opened by linguistic retroaction (*Nachträglichkeit*), functioning as the remainder of *das Ding* after symbolization—a locus of indeterminacy linked to bodily structures yet beyond all signifying, thereby generalizing Freud's theory of deferred action into a constitutive feature of subjectivity itself.

      Lacan locates in the negative space of das Ding the impenetrable nucleus of what is most unknowable in the Other, the enigma of the Other's desire.

1269. #1269

      Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.264

      <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 5 </span><span id="ch5.xhtml_p241" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 241. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Figurations of the *Objet a* > Why One and One Make Four

      Theoretical move: By mapping the *objet a* across Schema L, Schema R, the Gestalt figure/ground distinction, and the Greimasian semiotic square, Boothby argues that the *objet a* is not a positional object but an "objectality" function that emerges from the structural tension between das Ding (maternal) and the paternal Law (symbolic order), a tension whose topology is best captured by Schema R rather than Schema L.

      the locus of the Big Other, associated by Lacan with the father, coincides with that of the Thing, linked most closely with the mother.

1270. #1270

      Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.82

      <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 2 </span><span id="ch2.xhtml_p71" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 71. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Between the Image and the Word > The Unconscious Play of the Signifier

      Theoretical move: By mapping Freud's thing-presentation/word-presentation distinction onto Lacan's Imaginary/Symbolic axes via the Schema L, Boothby argues that repression is not a topographic displacement but a dynamic shift of valence between two psychical functions—a structural transformation in which a signifying process becomes captured in an imaginary formation, rendering the unconscious a process rather than a receptacle.

      the resources of the symbolic system, in which is circuited the unconscious desire of the subject... a discourse of the Other

1271. #1271

      Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.248

      <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 5 </span><span id="ch5.xhtml_p241" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 241. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Figurations of the *Objet a* > The Object-Cause of Desire

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that sacrifice functions to anchor the Other's desire in the symbolic by ceding the real object (objet a), and that this ceding is the very condition of subjective desire — the subject must give up the object in order not to give up on desire, with the two moments of ceding being exactly complementary rather than contradictory.

      sacrifice is destined, not at all to be an offering or a gift which spreads itself into a quite different dimension, but to be the capture of the Other as such in the network of desire

1272. #1272

      The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.30

      <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.

      both involve the sacrifice of another and both involve acting in response to a higher will.

1273. #1273

      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 serpent versus God

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that biblical narrative is constitutively structured around unresolvable moral ambiguity and contradiction — most visible in the Eden story — and proposes a third position beyond apologetic harmonization or secular rejection: fidelity to the text means embracing its conflicts as the very mark of its divine character rather than as defects to be explained away.

      the God we read about is one whom we must question, not out of our weakness and selfishness but rather from out of the very depths of our faith.

1274. #1274

      The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.52

      <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > From the void without to the void within

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the eschatological kingdom is not a future arrival but a spectral presence already "to come" within the present — an interior void that ruptures the text, the beloved, and the world from within rather than from without — and uses this structure to reframe theological transcendence as radical immanence.

      there is always something Other about the other, something 'to come' amidst the presence of those we love.

1275. #1275

      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 > Indirectly approaching the Word

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that fidelity to Scripture demands a "radical hermeneutics" that refuses to reduce the Word to propositional content or factual claims, positing instead that the Word is encountered as a life-transforming event that dwells within but exceeds the words — analogous to subjectivity exceeding the flesh — and that genuine faith requires wrestling with, and even betraying, the literal text to reach a deeper truth.

      the central Word of the text is never directly grasped as a source of knowledge, but rather is encountered as a life-transforming event.

1276. #1276

      The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.15

      <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > The betrayal of Judas, take 2

      Theoretical move: By inverting the conventional reading of the Judas/Jesus relationship, the passage argues that the figure traditionally cast as betrayer was in fact the betrayed—exposing an undecidability at the heart of the narrative that destabilises any single authoritative interpretation of divine will and fidelity.

      Judas was really called to fulfill the role of an expendable pawn in a cosmic game

1277. #1277

      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 contemporary church

      Theoretical move: The passage argues against a theology of God as a knowable being whose revealed side can be protected and deepened, pivoting instead toward a "radical cut" introduced by the Incarnation that ensures even the revealed side of God remains concealed — a move that reframes theological unknowing not as a limit of human cognition but as intrinsic to divine revelation itself.

      God's existence and nature are offered to the mind via revelation... the Bible is approached as a type of divine textbook that provides us with information concerning God.

1278. #1278

      The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.76

      <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > Moses and the burning bush: the scriptural naming of God

      Theoretical move: The passage uses the Exodus narrative of Moses and the burning bush to argue that the divine name ('ehyeh 'asher 'ehyeh / "I AM WHO I AM") resists both magical manipulation and simple descriptive capture, positioning God as fundamentally beyond human control or conceptual grasp — a theological move that sets up a critique of any name-based mastery over the divine.

      God responds with a promise: 'I will be with you.' Yet this is not enough for Moses. Still unconvinced about accepting this immense task and still skeptical that this promise of presence will be enough

1279. #1279

      The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.79

      <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 two theologically distinct modes of divine absence — transcendence-as-withdrawal and abandonment-as-forsaking — and then, through the parable of the returning Messiah who is not recognised as having arrived, performs a paradox in which presence and absence become indistinguishable, undermining any straightforward logic of messianic arrival.

      from the angry accusations of the psalmist to Christ's anguished cry from the cross, such prayers are not condemned by the text but celebrated.

1280. #1280

      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="chapter032.html_page_176"></span><span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the ethical act is self-justifying (its own reward), and that unconditional gift-giving retroactively creates the conditions for its own justification — a logic illustrated parabolically and then extended to a second tale where the heretic's final act exposes the universal guilt of his accusers by demanding an innocent executioner.

      the gift of God to the unworthy brother is precisely that which brings the brother to a place where he could finally become worthy of the gift.

1281. #1281

      The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.132

      <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 makes a double theoretical move: first, it articulates a mystical epistemology of "knowing unknowing" (docta ignorantia) where proximity to the source of faith produces greater opacity rather than clarity; second, through a parable it argues that unconditional acceptance—not demand or criticism—is the condition of possibility for genuine subjective transformation.

      a voice from heaven interrupted him, saying, 'Caleb is also my son, and I love him just the way he is.'

1282. #1282

      The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.121

      <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 makes two related theoretical moves: first, it articulates the paradox of authentic teaching as requiring a "faithful betrayal" — a loving transgression of the master's letter in fidelity to its spirit; second, the parable of Leon illustrates how ritual practice (the symbolic act) operates independently of subjective belief, enacting jouissance or the big Other's efficacy regardless of the subject's conscious disavowal.

      the priest informed me that this prayer works even if you don't believe in it

1283. #1283

      The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.24

      <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 makes a theological-ethical argument that Christ's teachings of non-retaliation and love of enemies are addressed to the oppressed, not the powerful, thereby implicating the affluent Western reader as oppressor rather than recipient; the accompanying parable then dramatises how unconditional hospitality—giving without reserve—paradoxically preserves the very interiority the adversary seeks to destroy.

      He had given everything to God and knew that these people needed such items more than the church did.

1284. #1284

      The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.63

      <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.

      Bonhoeffer rejected this and refused to give God a place in the world, because when God is given a place, God is confined to a specific location... Instead he advocated an existence fully immersed in the world.

1285. #1285

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

      <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

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

      there is a Biblical injunction to question authority, regardless of who or what that authority is, when we believe that authority is not defending the persecuted

1286. #1286

      The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.155

      <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 makes a theological-ethical argument that genuine reconciliation transcends the transactional logic of exchange (apology accepted/rejected), enacting a form of love that dissolves the demand for symmetrical accounting—paralleling the claim that true faith-wealth is love rather than accumulation, thereby critiquing both prosperity theology and moralistic debt-repayment models of forgiveness.

      Before God and all the heavenly hosts, I swear to you now that I will never accept your apology.

1287. #1287

      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.

      God would always let the weak and marginalized win, even if it meant that God would have to be defeated in the process.

1288. #1288

      The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.183

      <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: Rollins argues that all theological speech is irreducibly distorted, and that the honest admission of this distortion ("orthodox heresy") is epistemically and ethically superior to the dogmatic claim to accurate God-talk ("heresy of orthodoxy"); the distinction between orthodoxy and heresy is thereby redrawn as a distinction between two kinds of heresy.

      there is a view of God that is not distorted, namely the view of the religious authorities at the time

1289. #1289

      The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.91

      <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 thought experiments to probe whether faith is intrinsically rewarding or instrumentally oriented toward external rewards, then pivots to a narrative inversion in which humanity, on Judgment Day, pronounces judgment *on God* rather than receiving it — reversing the standard eschatological structure and raising the question of divine accountability.

      all living things fell silent... They had pronounced their judgment on God and now waited to hear God's defense.

1290. #1290

      The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.96

      <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.

      God descended from heaven, saying, 'The priest and elders speak the truth, my friend. In order to protect the town this man must be handed over to the authorities.'

1291. #1291

      The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.143

      <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

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

      God is not encountered as the highest being in the chain of beings but rather in the lowest and most humble of things.

1292. #1292

      The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.85

      <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 desire is not prior to and satisfied by the arrival of the beloved, but is retroactively born and sustained by the beloved's presence, because presence always entails a simultaneous withdrawal—a structure applied theologically to the Incarnation as a deepening rather than dissipation of divine mystery.

      People we have known all of our life will remain a mystery to us as much as they will remain a mystery to themselves.

1293. #1293

      The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.122

      <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 the Marxist concept of fetishism to argue that belief is primarily enacted through practice and context rather than conscious conviction, and that genuine change requires transforming the symbolic/material environment in which subjects are embedded, not merely altering intellectual assent.

      So who is this 'other' that believes on our behalf? It is, of course, not literally another person or group of people, but rather it can be described as the values expressed in the context we inhabit (the ads we watch, the books we read, etc.)

1294. #1294

      The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.67

      Fuzzy Math > **Mean Values**

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Kierkegaard's social critique of modernity's "leveling" identifies a shift from qualitative inwardness to a quantitative, arithmetic social logic—chatter is theorized as the communicative mechanism by which individuals are reduced to fractions, aggregated into the abstract "gallery-public," and subjected to statistical denomination, anticipating Heidegger's and Lacan's later restatements of this structure.

      nobodies to be abstracted and aggregated into gallery-publics, and gallery-publics to engage in self-indulgent gossip about anything and everything

1295. #1295

      The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.271

      The Writing on the Wall > First and Final Words > **Truth from Behind**

      Theoretical move: Empty speech and errant chatter are not obstacles to but rather the necessary pathway for analytic truth: through slips, stammers, and disfluencies, the discourse of the unconscious (the Other) irrupts into the analysand's empty speech, converting error into the condition of possibility for full speech and resubjectivization.

      the discourse of the unconscious, which is that it is the discourse of the other

1296. #1296

      The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.110

      Fuzzy Math > **Trembling Impatience** > **The Premise- Author**

      Theoretical move: The passage deploys Kierkegaard's distinction between 'essential authors' and 'premise-authors' to argue that chatter is structurally constituted by a lack of self-understanding: the premise-author, having no coherent life-view to communicate, uses public discourse as a substitute for the reflexive work of self-determination, thereby allowing language itself—rather than an intending subject—to speak.

      In exchange for premises strewn throughout their work, these authors hope to receive conclusions from the public—a literary transaction which proves that they are not as they appear.

1297. #1297

      The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.93

      Fuzzy Math > **P**⊋**{{***n*+**1},{Ø}}** > *Tælle Tale*

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "fuzzy math" of modern public life—formalized as P⊋{{n+1},{Ø}}—is structurally recursive rather than extensive, such that chatter (Snaksomhed) and common sense (Forstandighed) are not merely linked but are the paralogistic double of a self-referential counting operation that can never complete its own count; the matheme for this public is thus simultaneously a theory of modern loquacity.

      As 'the entity that is supposed to include everything,' the public has no choice but to tally the being-nothing of this empty set alongside the being-all of its expansive counterpart.

1298. #1298

      The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.27

      part i

      Theoretical move: Zupančič uses Hegel's account of comedy in the Phenomenology—specifically the "noumenological" movement whereby Absolute Spirit must come to know itself—to argue that what Hegel and Lacan share is a structural insight: genuine transformation requires not only a change in the subject's consciousness but a shift in the external Symbolic/Other in which the subject's unconscious is materialized, and this "short circuit" between the lack in the subject and the lack in the Other is the properly comic (and analytic) dimension of experience.

      the subject is ready to do quite a lot, change radically, if only she can remain unchanged in the Other (in the Symbolic as the external world in which, to put it in Hegel's terms, the subject's consciousness of herself is embodied)

1299. #1299

      The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.104

      Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite > And a little further on:

      Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that comic suspense differs from thriller suspense by beginning *after* the catastrophe (an "overrealization"), and that this structural feature is the mechanism by which comedy suspends the big Other, introducing a surplus-object that irreversibly alters the symbolic coordinates when the Other is reinstated — a thesis illustrated through Molière's *Amphitryon* and Shakespeare's *Comedy of Errors*, where the restored Other is not the same Master but one stripped of its authority.

      the Other (as the symbolic presupposition of sense) is no ideal or eternal and unchangeable in its form; via the surplus-object, it is always irreducibly attached to and involved in concrete reality

1300. #1300

      The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.178

      Conceptual Stakes of Repetition: Deleuze and Lacan

      Theoretical move: By contrasting Deleuze's "realization of ontology through repetition" with Lacan's account of the symbolic cut as primary, Zupančič (drawing on Dolar) argues that tyche is the gap internal to automaton—i.e., the Real is not opposed to the Symbolic but is its constitutive impasse—and further that repetition and primary repression are co-extensive rather than causally related, so that alienation, the signifying dyad, and the forced choice together explain why repetition cannot be dissolved by successful interpretation.

      when the subject comes to exist, she exists only in the Other, through the signifying chain

1301. #1301

      The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.111

      Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite > And a little further on:

      Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the comic object functions as the material subsistence of the symbolic Other's suspension, identifying it with objet petit a as a paradoxical "effect-cause" rather than a mere effect, and distinguishes genuine comedy (which produces the Thing as objectified surplus) from derision (which veils the Thing's comedy by prematurely exhibiting its obscene underside). She then extends this to Marivaux, where the comic mechanism operates through pure structural difference rather than surplus-object.

      if we relate the notion of the comic object (as material surplus of a given situation) to the Lacanian concept of the object a, there are several interesting consequences for the status of the latter, especially in the perspective of the relationship between object a and the Other.

1302. #1302

      The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.118

      Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite > And a little further on:

      Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that in Marivaux's comedy, access to the Real is achieved not by stripping away symbolic fiction but by *redoubling* it — a "dialectical" move whereby the doubling of the imaginary mirror-turn produces an inner, minimal difference constitutive of the Symbolic, opening a space for the Other as immanent to the situation rather than as its outer horizon.

      the Other is tested as to what sort of rearrangements of the 'small others' it still endures.

1303. #1303

      The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.96

      Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite > And a little further on:

      Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that comic trust (and transference) operates not through knowledge but through a credit extended precisely at the point of the Other's lack, and that the comic suspension of the big Other (as in comedies of mistaken identity) produces a surplus object — "error incorporated" — as a little other that takes the Other's place, revealing that comedy proper pivots not on the Other's failure itself but on the surplus effects that failure generates.

      trust is precisely what comes at the point of the lack in the Other, of the Other's inconsistency and inconstancy. The subject thus credits the Other precisely at the point where the latter escapes reciprocity and predictability.

1304. #1304

      Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.57

      *Unexpected Reunions* > **The Inhuman View**

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that subjectivity is structurally constituted through suture—the counting of a lack as a positive determination—and that this same logic governs the relation between hegemonic particularity and universality, with social antagonism arising from the gap between the element that hegemonizes universality and the element excluded by it; the shift from master signifier to barred signifier reveals this structure when objet a is subtracted from the signifying space.

      the auratic presence of the master signifier fills in what is lacking in the big Other; it obfuscates the inconsistency of the symbolic order

1305. #1305

      Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.28

      *Unexpected Reunions* > **Dialectical Materialism is Immaterialism**

      Theoretical move: Žižek argues that genuine dialectical materialism is paradoxically "immaterialist": it holds that every actual interaction must be sustained by a virtual background (vacuum fluctuations, the big Other, normative structures), and that purely relational virtual entities—though they have no substance of their own—are nonetheless real agents that resist reduction to "really existing" material practices, thereby redefining materialism against both naïve substance-ontology and pure flux/relationism.

      "Spiritual Substance" is Hegel's name for the "big Other," and insofar as the illusion of "big Other" is necessary for the functioning of the symbolic order, one should reject as pseudo-materialist the thought that wants to dismiss this dimension.

1306. #1306

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.167

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

      Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Lacanian formula "there is no big Other" must be taken in its strongest ontological sense—not merely that the symbolic order exists only as a virtual fiction, but that it cannot even cohere as a fiction due to immanent antagonisms—and that this non-existence of the big Other is the very condition for the subject, while simultaneously exposing guilt and jouissance as structurally co-constitutive in conditions of permissiveness.

      'il n'y a pas de grand Autre' has a much stronger meaning, it implies that the big Other cannot even persist as a coherent symbolic fiction since it is thwarted by immanent antagonisms and inconsistencies

1307. #1307

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.56

      **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 Adorno's "negative dialectics" misreads Hegel's reconciliation as false positivity, when Hegelian reconciliation is always already reconciliation *with* antagonisms; the two exits from Adorno's deadlock—Habermas's communicative a priori and the Lacanian path—are contrasted, with Žižek defending a third, properly Hegelian reading in which the subject's lack is grounded in the incompleteness of the objective order itself, thereby opening radical action through the "redoubling of the lack."

      the order is in itself incomplete, traversed by an impossibility

1308. #1308

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.425

      **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 an "empty ritual" — one whose traditional content is lost and whose artificiality is fully acknowledged — can be more authentically operative than an immersive, "authentic" one, and uses this case to construct a four-term Greimasian matrix of ethical gestures organized around the axes of negative/positive and ritual/non-ritualized act, while also distinguishing hegemonic false universality from the authentic universality embodied by those excluded from the hegemonic order.

      since the hold of the big Other (symbolic substance) is broken, this can only be an empty ritual

1309. #1309

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.455

      **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.

      The basic constellation of the play is thus the dialogue between the subject and the big Other, where this couple is reduced to its barest minimum: the Other is a silent impotent witness which fails in its effort to serve as the medium of the Truth of what is said

1310. #1310

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.279

      **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Retarded God <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-780"></span>of <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1619"></span><span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1834"></span>Quantum <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1168"></span>Ontology > [The Implications of Quantum Gravity](#contents.xhtml_ahd19)

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the collapse of the wave function in quantum physics is structurally homologous to the Lacanian concept of symbolic registration by the big Other, and further proposes a three-level ontology (quantum Real, abyssal Void, macroscopic reality) modeled on the Klein bottle, where the collapse of the wave function is not an anomaly but constitutive of quantum reality itself — with the 'snout' of the Klein bottle retroactively producing the 'mollusk' of the Real.

      he forgets to add the crucial level, that of the 'objectivized' knowledge, knowledge embodied in the virtual entity that Lacan calls the big Other.

1311. #1311

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.287

      **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Retarded God <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-780"></span>of <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1619"></span><span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1834"></span>Quantum <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1168"></span>Ontology > [The Implications of Quantum Gravity](#contents.xhtml_ahd19)

      Theoretical move: Žižek uses quantum physics (wave-function collapse, decoherence, virtual particles) to argue that ignorance is not merely epistemic but has a positive ontological status inscribed in reality itself, which in turn redefines the big Other/God as necessarily non-omniscient and "retarded" (always registering too late), and connects this to a Hegelian dialectic in which the indivisible One of a thing is identical with a void of Nothing at its core.

      insofar as god is one of the names of the big Other, we can see in what sense one cannot simply get rid of god (big Other) and develop an ontology without big Other: god is an illusion, but a necessary one.

1312. #1312

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.391

      **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.

      the danger of succumbing to the perverse position of perceiving oneself as the direct instrument of the big Other's will

1313. #1313

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.301

      **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Retarded God <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-780"></span>of <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1619"></span><span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1834"></span>Quantum <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1168"></span>Ontology > [The Two Vacuums: From Less than Nothing to Nothing](#contents.xhtml_ahd20)

      Theoretical move: Žižek maps a triadic ontological structure—Nothing/Void ($), the One (objet a), and the Two (sinthome)—onto unorientable topological surfaces (Möbius strip, cross-cap, Klein bottle), arguing that at every level there is a constitutive antagonism: nothing is never fully nothing, the One is never one, the Two never forms a relation, and the barred subject ($) is the operator that transforms pre-ontological void into ontological nothingness.

      if we brutally identify god as a figure of the big Other who registers events and thus 'creates' them, i.e., transposes them from a murky pre-ontological state into our common reality

1314. #1314

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.410

      **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.

      Johannes continues to rely on a big Other (when god failed [to appear in his crisis and help him], the devil helped him, he was there when Johannes needed it)

1315. #1315

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.395

      **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Ibi <span id="corollary_4_ibi_rhodus_ibi_saltus.xhtml_IDX-952"></span>Rhodus Ibi Saltus! > [Jumping Here and Jumping There](#contents.xhtml_ahd27)

      Theoretical move: Žižek reverses Hegel's "Hic Rhodus hic saltus" into "Ibi Rhodus ibi saltus" to argue that the big Other must be recognized as lacking/non-existent rather than serving as guarantor of action, and develops this through a reading of Luther versus Münzer on divine unknowability, the distinction between potentia Dei absoluta and ordinata, and Hegel's formula of reconciliation as recognizing the decentered Other as constitutive of the self.

      We are ready to jump here in any way, to engage ourselves, to fight … on condition that we can rely on some form of big Other which guarantees consistency of it all.

1316. #1316

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.120

      **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Sexual Parallax and Knowledge](#contents.xhtml_ahd8)

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the shift from Kant to Hegel is not a return to pre-critical ontology but a move that inscribes epistemological antinomies into the Real itself, making "subjective distortion" the very mode of contact with the Absolute—and that sexuality, as the impossible-real Absolute, is accessible only through the detours and gaps of the symbolic order, with Lacan's formulas of sexuation homologous to Kant's antinomies of pure reason.

      So one should resist this temptation even more: there is no Other, the Other is in itself 'barred,' it provides no ultimate ground.

1317. #1317

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.124

      **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Sexual Parallax and Knowledge](#contents.xhtml_ahd8)

      Theoretical move: The passage enacts the Hegelian move from epistemological deadlock to ontological impossibility, arguing that the subject's constitutive failure to symbolize itself, the Other's opacity to itself, and sexuality's irreducible excess all converge on the same structure: reality is non-all, and the obstacle to knowledge IS the thing-in-itself. The enigma OF the other must become the enigma IN the other, grounding universality not in shared content but in shared failure.

      the real other, the impenetrable abyss of the Other's desire, which can be elevated into the absolute Otherness of god.

1318. #1318

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.91

      **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 subject avoids its constitutive splitting by positing himself directly as the instrument of the Other's will.

1319. #1319

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.216

      **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Seven Deadly Sins

      Theoretical move: Žižek maps the seven deadly sins onto a structural grid (Self/Other axis, three triads) and identifies acedia/sloth as the paradigmatic unethical attitude in the Lacanian sense—a compromise on desire (céder sur son désir)—arguing that the only truly ethical act is one that does not sacrifice desire even at the cost of death.

      Pride (in one's Self) the opposite of Wrath (at the Other)

1320. #1320

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.306

      **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Retarded God <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-780"></span>of <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1619"></span><span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1834"></span>Quantum <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1168"></span>Ontology > [Is the Collapse of a Quantum Wave Like a Throw of Dice?](#contents.xhtml_ahd21)

      Theoretical move: Žižek uses Gabriel Catren's realist interpretation of quantum mechanics—which reads wave-function collapse through a Schelling-Hegelian "speculative physics"—to argue that while quantum mechanics does offer a complete description of reality, this completeness must be understood not as pre-critical naive realism but as a Kantian transposition of epistemological limitation into an ontological condition: the Real in-itself is virtual (a superposition of possibilities), and some minimally decentered registering agency (the big Other) is required for collapse into actuality.

      there has to be some kind of registering agency (of big Other) through the medium of which the wave function collapses into one reality, and this agency has to be minimally decentered (or in delay) with regard to the wave function.

1321. #1321

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.229

      **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Three <span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-862"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-1095"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-2455"></span>Unorientables > [Möbius Strip, or, the Convolutions of Concrete Universality](#contents.xhtml_ahd13)

      Theoretical move: The Möbius strip serves as the topological model for dialectical "coincidence of opposites," showing how a line brought to its extreme intersects with its opposite — a structure that governs politics (Fascism), sexuation (universality/exception), the psychoanalytic relation of contingency to symbolization, and the Signifier/Signified relation in language, with the quilting point as the element of contingent Real that concludes the symbolic process by throwing it back to its origin.

      the symbolic space, so it is no wonder that this space (what Lacan calls 'the big Other') is itself structured as a Möbius strip

1322. #1322

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.325

      **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: Žižek argues that Badiou's Being/Event duality must be supplemented by a third term—the Death Drive—which names the immanent distortion of Being that precedes and enables the subject's fidelity to an Event; against Badiou's residually Kantian finitude, a properly Hegelian-materialist move problematizes the very positivity of finite reality (the "human animal") rather than accepting it as given.

      the formal operations of incorporation into the place of the Other and of the splitting of the subject constitute under the name of the unconscious the substructure of the human animal

1323. #1323

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

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

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

      the interposed digital machinery which stands for the Lacanian 'big Other' as the anonymous symbolic order whose structure is that of a labyrinth

1324. #1324

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.11

      **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.

      act in such a way that your activity does not rely on any figure of the big Other as its ontological guarantee. Even the most 'materialist' orientation all too often relies on some big Other supposed to register and legitimize our acts

1325. #1325

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.51

      **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.

      what Sade doesn't see is that there is no big Other, no Nature as an ontologically consistent realm

1326. #1326

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

      **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Three <span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-862"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-1095"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-2455"></span>Unorientables > [Möbius Strip, or, the Convolutions of Concrete Universality](#contents.xhtml_ahd13)

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the name-as-quilting-point and objet a are structurally intertwined but distinct: the Master-Signifier sutures signifier and signified by "falling into" the signified, while objet a is what gives the Master-Signifier its auratic surplus, emerging not as what castration eliminates but as the positive form of the lack castration opens up — a rebuttal to any nominalist/Ockhamist reduction of this fictive-yet-necessary supplement.

      the auratic presence of the Master-Signifier fills in the lack in the big Other, it obfuscates the inconsistency of the symbolic order

1327. #1327

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.131

      **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Sexual Parallax and Knowledge](#contents.xhtml_ahd8)

      Theoretical move: Sexuality is constitutively grounded in a structural impossibility ('il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel') rather than in repressed instinct: fantasy fills the gap opened by this impossibility, infantile sexuality is not a pre-normative productive base but the very site where the impossibility first registers, and copulation itself has two sides—the Master-Signifier of orgasmic culmination and S(Ⱥ), the signifier of the barred Other as irreducible antagonism.

      its obverse is S(barredA), the signifier of the 'barred Other,' of the antagonism/blockade of the order of sexuality.

1328. #1328

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.110

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

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

      enables her to see Phi—the fascinating Master-Signifier—as a signifier of the inconsistency/lack of the big Other

1329. #1329

      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.

      Ian (the man) ignores the heptapod Other and in this way continues to rely on it

1330. #1330

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.393

      **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: Žižek argues that freedom and universal truth are accessible only through the irreducible position of enunciation (the subject's horizon), not by abstracting from subjectivity toward an objective view; and that the Protestant subject, as barred/empty subject ($), embodies this by being sacrifice itself rather than offering sacrifice in exchange—collapsing the logic of exchange into an identity of giving and getting.

      I am 'spoken' more than speaking, the Other speaks through me

1331. #1331

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.57

      **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1608"></span>Parallax <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1657"></span>of Ontology > [<span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_p57" class="pagebreak" title="57"></span>The Margin of Radical Uncertainty](#contents.xhtml_ahd4)

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that radical materialism requires rejecting both "objective reality" and consistent subjectivity, identifying the Real not with nature-in-itself but with the crack/gap in every ontological edifice—a deficiency shared by transcendental reason and reality itself—which Freud/Lacan name 'sexuality,' and whose trans-ontological elaboration requires a concept of 'less than nothing' formalized through the Klein bottle as the minimal definition of the Absolute.

      Such a notion of Justice is the ultimate refined version of the big Other, the agency where the ethical meaning of all our acts is registered.

1332. #1332

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.436

      **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Language, *Lalangue*

      Theoretical move: Žižek argues against Milner's symmetrical opposition between language and lalangue by reordering their relationship: language is primary (constituted by a traumatic "wound" or symbolic castration), while lalangue is secondary—a defense that attempts to fill or obfuscate the constitutive lack of language through homophonic enjoyment. The subject of the signifier belongs to the death drive, while lalangue aligns with life and pleasure.

      Is Lacan's thesis on the Unconscious as the 'discourse of the Other' to be replaced by (or at least specified as) the thesis on the Unconscious as the discourse of lalangue?

1333. #1333

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.414

      **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Ibi <span id="corollary_4_ibi_rhodus_ibi_saltus.xhtml_IDX-952"></span>Rhodus Ibi Saltus! > [Four Ethical Gestures](#contents.xhtml_ahd28)

      Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Wagner's *Parsifal* — framed against historicist contextualization — Žižek argues that the opera's central ethical and libidinal drama turns on the obscene superego-jouissance of the father (Titurel as père-version), hysterical feminine subjectivity (Kundry), and the paradox of a wound that is simultaneously the mark of corruption and the source of immortal life-energy; Parsifal's salvation-gesture is grounded not in simple purity but in hysterical identification with the very suffering he refuses.

      what, precisely, pushes us to this engagement when no figure of big Other vouches for it?

1334. #1334

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.401

      **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Ibi <span id="corollary_4_ibi_rhodus_ibi_saltus.xhtml_IDX-952"></span>Rhodus Ibi Saltus! > [Jumping Here and Jumping There](#contents.xhtml_ahd27)

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "objective riddle" structure—in which mystery belongs to the thing itself, not merely to the finite mind—reveals a God who is internally split (the "separation in the heart of god himself"), such that Christ's death on the cross is not the sublation of a real God into a symbolic one but the death of the big Other itself, leaving behind a community that accepts the non-existence of the big Other; this is deployed to distinguish a revolutionary theology of ontological opening from one of purification/instrumentalization.

      What dies on the cross is not the real god but the big Other, the ideal/virtual entity, or, as Lacan would have put it, as the symbolic big Other.

1335. #1335

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.21

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

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

      disparity means that the lack of the subject is simultaneously the lack in the Other: subjectivity emerges when substance cannot achieve full identity with itself

1336. #1336

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

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

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

      our ignorance is simultaneously the ignorance in the heart of the Other itself

1337. #1337

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.377

      **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Persistence of <span id="theorem_iv_the_persistence_of_abstraction.xhtml_IDX-17"></span>Abstraction > [The All-Too-Close In-Itself](#contents.xhtml_ahd25)

      Theoretical move: Žižek defends the transcendental subject against object-oriented ontology by arguing that the subject is not an object but an irreducible standpoint, and redeploys the Lacanian Real as virtual-impossible rather than materially present, showing how direct neuronal manipulation produces a "more real than real" experience that dissolves the reality/simulacrum divide — while paralleling this logic to the Unconscious (which must not be substantialized) and to neurotheology's hard-rock encounter with the Real.

      this is also one of the meanings of Lacan's claim that 'there is no big Other': the Unconscious is fully immanent to subjectivity

1338. #1338

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.286

      **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Retarded God <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-780"></span>of <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1619"></span><span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1834"></span>Quantum <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1168"></span>Ontology > [The Implications of Quantum Gravity](#contents.xhtml_ahd19)

      Theoretical move: Žižek argues for a three-level ontological triad (pre-ontological quantum proto-reality, ordinary physical reality, and the symbolic universe) in which Lack/absence must be primordial rather than emergent, and where the logic of retroactivity, the quilting-point, and the Not-all operate homologously across quantum physics, Hegel's Logic, and the Lacanian symbolic order—displacing both evolutionary materialism and standard idealism.

      What this presupposes is a minimal gap between things in their immediate brute proto-reality and the registration of this reality in some medium (of the big Other)

1339. #1339

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

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

      Theoretical move: This is a back-matter index passage from Žižek's *Sex and the Failed Absolute*, listing key terms and their page/section locations. It is non-substantive in itself but maps the conceptual architecture of the book, pointing to where core Lacanian and Hegelian concepts are developed.

      S(s)ubject … big Other and [here](#corollary_2_sinuosities_of_sexualized_time.xhtml_IDX-2192)

1340. #1340

      Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

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

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that digitalization does not threaten humanist subjectivity but rather the decentered Freudian subject: it risks collapsing the symbolic big Other into a really-existing machine, thereby abolishing the constitutive gap (alienation/separation, counterfactuality, primordial repression) that makes subjectivity possible—while the "paranoid" structure of digital control is nonetheless pathological because the digital Other is immanently stupid and cannot register the purely virtual dimension of the Freudian unconscious.

      it is through its own lack/inconsistency that structure (the big Other) is always-already subjectivized

1341. #1341

      The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

      INTRODUCTION

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian subject is constituted as a void—the failure point of symbolic representation—and distinguishes this from post-structuralist subjectivation; it then maps this structure onto the Hegelian 'negation of the negation,' showing that epistemological contradictions (inability to define Society, the Rabinovitch joke) are not obstacles to truth but its very index, so that the antagonistic kernel of a Thing-in-itself is inseparable from our failed access to it.

      antagonism is always a kind of opening, a hole in the field of the symbolic Other, a void of an unanswered, unresolved question

1342. #1342

      The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

      INTRODUCTION

      Theoretical move: Fantasy is not the scene of desire's satisfaction but its constitutive frame and simultaneously a defence against the raw desire of the Other; the completed Graph of Desire maps the structural impossibility between the Symbolic order and jouissance, where the lack in the Other enables Separation (de-alienation) and drives are tied to remnant erogenous zones that survive the signifier's evacuation of enjoyment.

      the big Other, the symbolic order itself, is also barred, crossed-out, by a fundamental impossibility, structured around an impossible/traumatic kernel, around a central lack.

1343. #1343

      The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

      INTRODUCTION

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that misrecognition has a positive ontological dimension—it is not merely an obstacle to truth but the condition of possibility for both the subject's consistency and the existence of certain entities (e.g., the unconscious letter, enjoyment); this logic culminates in the claim that the Symptom as Real is an irreducible kernel that resists symbolization and cannot be dissolved by making meaning.

      his external position vis-a-vis the Other (the fact that he experiences himself as excluded from the secret of the Other) is internal to the Other itself

1344. #1344

      The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

      INTRODUCTION

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

      In the third period we have the big Other, the symbolic order, with a traumatic element at its very heart; and in Lacanian theory the fantasy is conceived as a construction allowing the subject to come to terms with this traumatic kernel.

1345. #1345

      The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

      INTRODUCTION

      Theoretical move: Žižek argues that both descriptivism and antidescriptivism miss the radical contingency of naming: descriptivism misses the big Other (the tautological, self-referential dimension of the master signifier), while antidescriptivism misses the small other (objet petit a as the objectification of a void opened by the signifier), with the identity of an object across all counterfactual situations being a retroactive effect of naming itself rather than a feature found in positive reality.

      'Others', of course, cannot be reduced to empirical others; they rather point to the Lacanian 'big Other', to the symbolic order itself.

1346. #1346

      The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

      INTRODUCTION

      Theoretical move: Žižek argues that ideology cannot be fully grasped through discourse analysis (interpellation/symbolic identification) alone; its ultimate support is a pre-ideological kernel of enjoyment structured in fantasy, and therefore ideology critique must be supplemented by a logic of enjoyment that 'traverses' social fantasy and identifies with the symptom — demonstrated through the case of anti-Semitism, where 'the Jew' functions as a fetish embodying the structural impossibility of 'Society'.

      fantasy is precisely the way the antagonistic fissure is masked... the fact that 'Society doesn't exist', and thus to compensate us for the failed identification

1347. #1347

      The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

      INTRODUCTION

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Hegelian "speculative proposition" ('The Spirit is a bone', 'Wealth is the Self') structurally mirrors the Lacanian formula of fantasy ($◇a): in both, the subject's impossibility of signifying self-representation finds its positive form in an inert object that fills the void left by the failure of the signifier, and this logic is extended through the dialectic of language, flattery, and alienation in the Phenomenology, culminating in a critique of Kantian external reflection as unable to grasp this immanent reflexive movement.

      the fantasy-object fills out the lack in the Other (the signifier's order).

1348. #1348

      The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

      INTRODUCTION

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

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

1349. #1349

      The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

      INTRODUCTION

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

      the hole in the Other, and the object the inert content filling up this void... the big Other (the symbolic order) perforated, inconsistent

1350. #1350

      The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

      PREFACE

      Theoretical move: Žižek rereads Hegel against the standard 'postmodern' critique by proposing that Hegelian 'absolute liberation' is not the full internalization of otherness but rather a 'reconciliation' that operates through a shared division cutting across both the particular subject and the universal substantial order — a move that, far from contradicting Lacan's critique, may actually converge with it.

      I set the Other free only after I have completely internalized it . . . However, is this really the case?

1351. #1351

      The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

      INTRODUCTION

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the symbolic order is constituted around an impossible Real kernel, requiring a contingent element to embody its structural necessity; this logic generates a quartet of "subject presumed to…" figures (know, believe, enjoy, desire) that articulate the unconscious as the gap between form and content—illustrated through Hitchcock and Mozart.

      Because the big Other, the symbolic order, is always barre, failed, crossed out, mutilated, and the contingent material element embodies this internal blockage, limit, of the symbolic structure.

1352. #1352

      The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

      INTRODUCTION

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's proposition "there is no metalanguage" must be taken literally—not as post-structuralist infinite self-referentiality, but as the necessity of an irreducible object (objet petit a) excluded from yet internal to the symbolic order; the "Lenin in Warsaw" joke illustrates the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz logic of the master signifier, while the conscript joke illustrates how the object is produced by, yet cannot be reduced to, the signifying texture itself.

      This 'internal exclusion' of the object from the Other of the symbolic network also allows us to expose the confusion upon which the Derridean assumption of the 'title-address of the letter' rests

1353. #1353

      The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

      INTRODUCTION

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

      guilt in the eyes of the big Other of history

1354. #1354

      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.

      through this 'empty gesture' the subject presupposes the existence of the big Other.

1355. #1355

      The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

      INTRODUCTION

      Theoretical move: The subject is not a questioning force but an "answer of the Real" — the void produced when the Other's question exposes the ex-timate traumatic kernel (objet petit a / das Ding); this hystericization is constitutive of the subject, while interpellation/subjectivation functions as an attempt to evade this kernel through identification. Žižek further deploys Hitchcock's object-typology to distinguish the MacGuffin, the circulating real-object (objet petit a), and the phallic object, showing how the Real must irrupt to establish the symbolic structure.

      the subject is the void of the impossibility of answering the question of the Other.

1356. #1356

      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).

      we suppose in advance the presence in the Other of a certain knowledge — knowledge about the meaning of our symptoms ... this knowledge is an illusion, it does not really exist in the other, the other does not really possess it

1357. #1357

      The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

      INTRODUCTION

      Theoretical move: Fantasy is theorized as a double operation: it answers the unbearable gap of the Other's desire ('Che vuoi?') by filling the void with an imaginary scenario, while simultaneously constructing the very coordinates that make desire possible; this structure illuminates hysteria as failed interpellation, anti-Semitism as racist fantasy, Christianity vs. Judaism as contrasting strategies for 'gentrifying' the desire of the Other, and sainthood/Antigone as ethical positions of not giving way on one's desire.

      the subject is automatically confronted with a certain 'Che vuoi?', with a question of the Other. The Other is addressing him as if he himself possesses the answer to the question of why he has this mandate

1358. #1358

      The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

      INTRODUCTION

      Theoretical move: Žižek argues that ideology operates not at the level of false consciousness (knowledge) but as an unconscious fantasy structuring social reality itself — a "fetishistic inversion" that persists even under cynical distance — and supports this with a Lacanian account of belief as radically exterior and materialized in social practice rather than interior and psychological.

      the other - embodied in the television set - is relieving us even of our duty to laugh - is laughing instead of us.

1359. #1359

      The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

      INTRODUCTION

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Point de capiton functions as a 'rigid designator' — a pure, meaningless signifier that retroactively constitutes the identity of ideological objects — and that 'ideological anamorphosis' names the error by which this structural lack is misperceived as supreme plenitude of Meaning; the Objet petit a emerges as the real-impossible surplus correlative of this operation.

      this upper level is nothing but an articulation of the inner structure of a question emanating from the Other to which the subject is confronted beyond symbolic identification

1360. #1360

      The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

      INTRODUCTION

      Theoretical move: The passage advances a theory of the Graph of Desire's operation by showing that the point de capiton retroactively fixes meaning through the Master Signifier, and that this quilting operation grounds both ideology (as transferential illusion) and subjectivity (as the difference between imaginary identification with the ideal ego and symbolic identification with the ego-ideal/gaze of the Other).

      the point de capiton represents, holds the place of, the big Other, the synchronous code, in the diachronous signifier's chain

1361. #1361

      The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

      INTRODUCTION

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

      it is already a classic Lacanian thesis that 'the big Other [that is, the symbolic order as a consistent, closed totality] does not exist', and the subject is denoted by $, the crossed, blocked S, a void, an empty place in the signifier's structure.

1362. #1362

      Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.224

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

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

      'the Other is that from which time comes.'

1363. #1363

      Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.180

      Who Cares?

      Theoretical move: Psychoanalysis must be positioned against new materialism not to defend anthropocentrism but to supply what new materialism lacks: a theorization of the Real as the consequence of castration (not a pre-discursive thing-in-itself), and of sexuality as an "ontological lapse" that marks the specificity of human being without grounding a hierarchy—thereby enabling an ethics of the nonhuman other that new materialism's own "democracy of objects" forecloses.

      what Lacan called the Real is synonymous with the impossible... the latter situates the urge toward metaphysical totality... as a symptom of the lack in being

1364. #1364

      Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.185

      Who Cares? > The Human Object

      Theoretical move: Psychoanalysis is positioned not as an escape from correlationism but as its radical subversion: by replacing the Kantian unity of apperception with the imaginary misrecognition of the ego and grounding the subject in the unconscious rather than consciousness, Lacan exposes desire, fantasy, and jouissance as what secretly drive both Kantian rationality and moral law—demonstrating that castration (the traumatic encounter with the signifier) is the specifically human mark, irreducible to new materialism's ontologies of actual entities.

      desire is not the subject's desire but the desire of the Other—the lack in the Other to which corresponds the lack in being that is the cause of the subject's quest for the impossible.

1365. #1365

      Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.49

      Mladen Dolar > Freud's Materialism

      Theoretical move: Dolar argues that Freud's departure from scientific materialism is not a rejection but a radicalization of it: by pushing mechanism, determinism, monism, reductionism, and scientism to their outermost consequences, psychoanalysis discovers a crack or inner break within each—a 'less than nothing' that persists without ontological substance—thereby converging, by an entirely different route, with Hegel's 'substance is subject.'

      'the unconscious is the discourse of the Other,' 'desire is the desire of the Other,' the Other as the Other sex... the Other doesn't exist, it has no ontological consistence, but it is thereby not nothing.

1366. #1366

      Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.219

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

      Theoretical move: Against new materialist (Deleuzean) ontologies of Becoming that dissolve the subject into immanent flux and promise plenitude, the passage argues from a Lacanian-Hegelian standpoint that ontological incompleteness—the barred, split subject—is irreducible and is in fact the condition of possibility for freedom, joy, and genuine subjectivity; a close reading of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway is deployed to show that Deleuze's ventriloquism of Woolf suppresses the very void of subjectivity her text stages.

      the self does not preexist externalization but is constituted through its reflection in the Other. Because the self is constitutively split, this split assumes the form of incompleteness and loss.

1367. #1367

      Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.269

      Index > **INDEX**

      Theoretical move: This is an index section of an academic book on Hegel, Lacan, and materialism; it is non-substantive reference material listing topics and page numbers rather than advancing a theoretical argument.

      big Other, 135; ... Other, 42, 103, 134, 135, 178, 188n19, 211

1368. #1368

      Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.141

      Adrian Johnston > Žižek continues:

      Theoretical move: Johnston defends his "transcendental materialist" position against charges of both naturalistic reductionism and idealist anti-reductionism by confessing to a "weak reductionism" that preserves relative autonomy for philosophy/psychoanalysis with respect to the natural sciences, while arguing through Hegel, Marx, and Lacan that the natural Real is partially but not absolutely transformed by the non-natural Symbolic—a position distinct from both crude naturalism and absolute anti-naturalism.

      only one Nature-with-a-capital-N as an unbarred big Other, namely, a seamless totality of heteronomous causal chains in which everything dissipates into the monochromatic abyss of a Spinozist-style substantial One-All.

1369. #1369

      Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.110

      Intellectual Intuition and *Intellectus Archetypus*: Reflexivity from Kant to Hegel

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Hegelian answer to Schelling's mytho-feminine ontology is not the immediate unity of intellectual intuition (orgasmic One) but minimal reflexivity - the subject's self-distancing gaze that cuts into every immediate enjoyment - thereby framing the chapter's project of tracing reflexivity from Kant through Hegel as the core concept of subjectivity in German Idealism.

      we spectators clearly play the role of the big Other who has to register her enjoyment

1370. #1370

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.131

      ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > 4. Fantasizing the Father in *Blue Velvet* > *6. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with* Me and Identificatio n with the Object

      Theoretical move: This passage is a footnotes/endnotes section providing citations and theoretical elaborations for a chapter on *Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me*, with substantive theoretical content concentrated in notes 4, 6, 13, 17, and 25 on identity, fantasy, the phallus as signifier, and castration.

      Laura views Donna as a non-lacking Other when Laura... these two attitudes are not at all contradictory.

1371. #1371

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.92

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

      Theoretical move: McGowan argues that fantasy is not an escape from reality but a solution to the torment of desire—it stages a determinate answer to the enigma of the Other's desire, thereby producing the very "sense of reality" that we mistake for the real world, while the Real is revealed precisely at the traumatic transition-point between desire and fantasy.

      Though Alice's story upsets Peter, it also offers him a fantasized answer to the question, 'what does the Other want?'; it allows him to conceive of the Other enjoying.

1372. #1372

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.86

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

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that *Lost Highway*'s narrative "incoherence" is structurally necessary: by separating the worlds of desire and fantasy into visually distinct cinematic registers, Lynch makes legible the underlying logic of fantasy—that it does not escape the deadlock of desire but merely repeats it in a new form, always returning the subject to the same traumatic impasse.

      A world of pure desire would be completely mysterious in this way because it would offer us no possibilities for making sense of the desire of the Other (which is the function of fantasy).

1373. #1373

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.84

      ,'\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.

      All this chaos results from Laura's encounter with the lack in the Other. Seeing her father as BOB, she can no longer believe in the pristine Other that has a substantive identity.

1374. #1374

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.17

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

      Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Lynch's cinema achieves a theoretically impossible feat: by formally separating the realms of desire and fantasy—rather than blending them as most films and everyday experience do—Lynch's films expose the structural relationship between the two, revealing how fantasy retroactively constitutes desire rather than merely answering it, and thereby producing a "normality" more unsettling than any avant-garde subversion.

      fantasy saves us from having to endure the inherently traumatic desire of the Other unprepared.

1375. #1375

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.77

      ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > **The Contradidory Status of l auro Polmer** > The Hostility of Deer Meadow

      Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the first part of *Fire Walk with Me* constructs a "world of desire" structured around the absent object-cause (Teresa Banks), where subjects experience alienation in the signifier without the relief of fantasy, and where enjoyment takes the paradoxical form of senseless signification for its own sake—only resolvable when the film shifts to the fantasmatic world of Twin Peaks.

      Carl initially perceives and is perceived by the Other as a threat, an attitude that characterizes a world of desire.

1376. #1376

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.15

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

      Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Lynch's aesthetic operates not through deconstruction or alienation-effects but through hyper-normality: by pushing binary oppositions (fantasy/reality, desire/demand) to their logical extreme, Lynch reveals the bizarre as inherent to the mainstream, while simultaneously demonstrating that the psychoanalytic 'normal' subject — who maintains an absolute divide between fantasy and social reality — is itself an a priori impossibility.

      In Lacan's idiom, this figure who embodies the social order and its regulations is the Other. The subject enters the social order confronted with the Other's articulated demand, but this demand conceals unarticulated desire.

1377. #1377

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.83

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

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that phallic authority (figured as BOB) is structurally dependent on the feminine enjoyment it can never possess, and that Lynch's *Fire Walk with Me* exposes this dependency by centering Laura's perspective rather than the male fantasy—thereby revealing the constitutive failure of phallic power rather than its triumph.

      'That the specifically feminine part of jouissance is articulated at S(A), beyond the phallic contribution made by her partner'

1378. #1378

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.28

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

      Theoretical move: McGowan uses Lynch's *Eraserhead* to refine the Freudian account of fantasy: fantasy is not triggered by the simple absence of the desired object but by the subject's encounter with a visible *barrier* to enjoyment in the Other, which retroactively constitutes the subject's own lack and energises fantasy through the lost object.

      It emerges at the moment when the subject encounters a reminder in the Other of the subject's own lack.

1379. #1379

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.71

      ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > The Price of the Ho ppy Ending

      Theoretical move: The happy ending of *Wild at Heart* is theorized not as commercial compromise but as a demonstration that genuine enjoyment requires abandoning the ideal of non-castration and fully committing to the logic of fantasy—including its traumatic, real dimension—which transforms not only the subject but the external world itself.

      being wild at heart means embodying an ideal of non-castration, being a real man in the eyes of the Other; but Glinda points out that being 'truly wild at heart' involves fully committing oneself to the logic of one's fantasy.

1380. #1380

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.24

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

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian lamella—the life substance lost when the subject enters language and sexed reproduction—is the theoretical key to understanding *Eraserhead*'s opening sequence: Henry's loss of this substance inaugurates him as a desiring, lacking subject, and the film shows how fantasy, desire, and capitalist production all derive from this originary, pre-ontological sacrifice.

      The subject only turns toward the Other on the basis of its own experience of lacking this life substance.

1381. #1381

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.102

      ,'\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.

      Even as fantasy disguises our subjection to the Other and creates an illusion of independence, it facilitates an encounter with the traumatic real insofar as it manifests the innermost part of our subjectivity externally.

1382. #1382

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.133

      ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > 4. Fantasizing the Father in *Blue Velvet* > 7· Finding O urselves on a *Lost* Highway

      Theoretical move: These footnotes theorize how fantasy structures reality (making it perceptible to others), how the superego functions as an irrational, insatiable voice of enjoyment irreducible to meaning, and how symbolic authority has gone underground in *Lost Highway*, thereby exacerbating paranoia about the Other's excessive enjoyment.

      *Lost Highway* is the attempt to depict how this movement of symbolic authority underground exacerbates paranoia about the Other's excessive enjoyment.

1383. #1383

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.69

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

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

      When one fully commits to one's fantasy, one ignores the Other's look altogether, but this doesn't happen in the film.

1384. #1384

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.70

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

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the pursuit of complete enjoyment is structurally self-defeating: enjoyment requires loss/absence as its condition, so subjects compulsively self-sabotage to recreate the constitutive lack, a dynamic that drives the transition from the pleasure principle to the death drive and explains the perverse/masochistic turn as the unconscious path desire takes when blocked by the suffocating presence of the privileged object.

      Jingle Dell turns to a paranoid explanation: the Other has stolen this enjoyment—the spirit of Christmas—and thus represents an external barrier to complete enjoyment.

1385. #1385

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.108

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

      Theoretical move: By showing that what initially appears as desiring subjectivity (Rita's mystery) is actually a fantasmatic scenario (Diane's fantasy), the passage argues that fantasy doesn't merely resolve desire's constitutive impossibility but actively transforms impossibility into mystery—and even generates the questions desire appears to confront, making fantasy more primordial than desire.

      Rita's uncertainty about her own identity is at the same time uncertainty about the desire of the Other: not knowing who one is results from not knowing who one is for the Other.

1386. #1386

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.87

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

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire is constituted through the subject's encounter with the opacity of the Other's desire—Fred's bewilderment before Renee's inscrutable want is precisely what generates him as a desiring subject—and that because desire can never be articulated in a signifier without producing a further veil, fantasy serves as the necessary correlative that makes desire bearable.

      Desiring is, in a sense, being in the dark about the desire of the Other—or feeling oneself in the dark.

1387. #1387

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.121

      ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > NOTES > Infroduction: The Bizarre Nafure of Normality

      Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section for the introduction of a book on David Lynch, providing scholarly citations and brief elaborations on concepts including the gaze, fantasy, desire, normality, and the uncanny in relation to film theory and psychoanalysis. It is primarily apparatus rather than original theoretical argument.

      The Other is present to me everywhere as the one through whom I become an object.

1388. #1388

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.31

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

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the realization of fantasy is always violent—it necessarily destroys the barrier (the baby) that fantasy itself posits as the obstacle to enjoyment—and that this violence is figured in Lynch's *Eraserhead* as a political gesture against capitalist restriction of jouissance, though not without ambivalence.

      he now feels his own failure to enjoy- and the ubiquitous enjoyment of the Other- all the more tangibly.

1389. #1389

      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.

      Law and desire work hand-in-hand to keep the subject's attention focused on the Other and the question of the Other's desire.

1390. #1390

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.82

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

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that in *Fire Walk with Me*, the Man From Another Place figures the Lacanian libido as detached body part—the primordial lost object that institutes the death drive—while BOB figures the phallus as an attempt to short-circuit the drive by possessing the object without loss; the film shows that phallic authority is secretly subordinate to the death drive, and that fantasy makes visible the hidden dependency of the social order on this structure.

      the Phi, the signifier of phallic power, phallus in its fascinating presence, merely 'gives body' to the impotence/inconsistency of the big Other.

1391. #1391

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.105

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

      Theoretical move: Full commitment to one's own fantasmatic enjoyment transforms the perceived public world from threatening to welcoming, thereby serving as the condition for an ethics that overcomes paranoia; the passage argues that envy of the Other's enjoyment is itself a displaced mode of enjoyment that arises precisely when the subject has abandoned its own fantasy.

      Because he experiences the Other from the perspective of his fantasy, he simply cannot even a threat there.

1392. #1392

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.134

      ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > 4. Fantasizing the Father in *Blue Velvet* > R. The Ethics of Fantasizing in *The 5traight* 5tory

      Theoretical move: The passage argues, through footnotes to McGowan's analysis of Lynch's *The Straight Story*, that fantasy's ethical dimension lies in full commitment to it even unto trauma, and that desire in its pure form is the pain of existing; furthermore, fantasy typically produces paranoia by attributing loss to an external cause, but Alvin's fantasy escapes paranoia through the quantitative intensity of his commitment rather than any structural difference.

      One can not see the Other as the source of what one sees, but neither can one see the Other as looking.

1393. #1393

      The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.99

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

      Theoretical move: Lynch's *The Straight Story* is not an exception to his fantasmatic method but its purest instance: by presenting the American heartland as mythic fantasy rather than reality, Lynch demonstrates that "straight" reality is itself the product of fantasmatic distortion that fills the gaps of desire, and the film's structure mirrors this by moving the spectator from a world of desire (absence, non-knowledge, lack) into a world of fantasy (fullness, coherence, meaning).

      by professing his strength and independence, he highlights his near-total dependence on the Other for both physical aid and symbolic recognition.

1394. #1394

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.86

      <span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > **Alienation, Separation, and the Traversing of Fantasy in the Analytic Setting**

      Theoretical move: The analytic setting operationalizes alienation and separation as clinical techniques: the analyst's enigmatic desire disrupts the analysand's fantasy ($ ◇ a), while the Freudian injunction "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" frames the Lacanian subject as ethically tasked with subjectifying the otherness of primal repression — making the subject appear where the drive/Other once dominated.

      the analysand taken here by the analysand to be the locus of all meaning, the Other that knows the meaning of all utterances

1395. #1395

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.76

      <span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > *The Introduction of a Third Term*

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the paternal metaphor/function, by introducing a third term (Name-of-the-Father) that disrupts the mother-child dyad, is structurally equivalent to the operation of Separation, and that the failure of this function is what produces psychosis; language itself is thereby theorized as the protective mechanism that transforms dangerous dyadic jouissance into structured desire.

      The paternal function leads to the assimilation or instating of a name... that neutralizes the Other's desire, viewed by Lacan as potentially very dangerous to the child, threatening to engulf it or swallow it up.

1396. #1396

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.215

      <span id="page-191-0"></span>*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_ > There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship

      Theoretical move: This endnote cluster clarifies several technical concepts—S(A) as signifier of the barred/lacking Other, sublimation, subjectivity vs. subjectivization, sexuation structures as strict contradictories—while defending Lacan's theoretical innovations against feminist and structuralist misreadings.

      S(A) is, at that point in Lacan's thinking, the signifier of the divided or barred Other, that is, the Other as incomplete.

1397. #1397

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink

      <span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > <span id="page-60-0"></span>**The Freudian Subject**

      Theoretical move: The passage distinguishes the "Freudian subject" (the unconscious as a second agency or intentional intruder) from the properly Lacanian subject, arguing that attributing subjectivity to the unconscious as mere breach or interruption fails to capture the specificity of Lacan's account, in which the unconscious remains the Other's discourse rather than an agency.

      it remains a discourse divorced from consciousness and subjective involvement—the Other's discourse—even as it interrupts the ego's discourse

1398. #1398

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.139

      THE PHALLUS: ONE OF W~ S PARTNERS > *Masculine!F eminine-Signifier!Signifierness*

      Theoretical move: Fink argues that sexual difference is grounded in a structural asymmetry between masculine and feminine modes of alienation in language: men are defined by the signifier of desire (Φ) and take the object (a) as partner, while women are defined by "signifierness" (the being of the signifier beyond signification) and take the phallus and S(Ⱥ) as partners—a dissymmetry so radical it forecloses any writable sexual relationship.

      The little Lacan directly says about S(A) suggests that the Other jouissance it denotes has to do with the absolute radicality or otherness of the Other: there is no Other (i.e., no outside) of the Other.

1399. #1399

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.65

      <span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > **Lacan's Split Subject**

      Theoretical move: The Lacanian subject is nothing but the split itself — a radical separation between ego (false being) and unconscious (the Other's discourse) produced by alienation in language; this split, which exceeds purely linguistic/structural explanation, serves as the foundational diagnostic divide between neurosis and psychosis.

      Though the subject is nothing here but a split between two forms of otherness—the ego as other and the unconscious as the Other's discourse—the split itself stands in excess of the Other.

1400. #1400

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.12

      **THE LACANIAN SUBJECT** > Pour Heloise

      Theoretical move: Fink's preface argues that the Lacanian subject has two faces—fixated symptom and subjectivization—mirrored by two faces of the object (objet petit a as Other's desire and as letter/signifierness), and that this non-parallel, "Gödelian" structure grounds a theory of sexual difference and underwrites psychoanalysis as an autonomous discourse irreducible to science.

      otherness...runs the unlikely gamut from the unconscious (the Other as language) and the ego (the imaginary other [ideal ego] and the Other as desire [ego ideal]) to the Freudian superego (the Other as jouissance)

1401. #1401

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.105

      <span id="page-101-0"></span>Object (a): Cause of Desire > *Imaginary Objects, Imaginary Relations*

      Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's early theorisation of the ego as imaginary object (*a*), showing how imaginary relations (love/identification and hate/rivalry) operate through the logic of same/different, and contrasts this with the later emergence of the real object cause of desire (objet petit a), while situating countertransference as an inescapably imaginary phenomenon that the analyst must set aside.

      Those whom we consider like ourselves generally stand in a similar relation to the Other as we do. And since the Other generalizes-from our parents to the academic Other, the law, religion, God, tradition, and so on.

1402. #1402

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.79

      <span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > <span id="page-77-0"></span>*Object* a: *The Other's Desire*

      Theoretical move: Through the operation of separation, the Other's inscrutable desire constitutes object a as the remainder of a hypothetical mother-child unity, and it is only by cleaving to this remainder in fantasy that the split subject sustains an illusion of wholeness and procures a sense of being beyond mere symbolic existence.

      Separation results in the splitting of the subject into ego and unconscious, and in a corresponding splitting of the Other into lacking Other (A) and object a.

1403. #1403

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.77

      <span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > Signifier Mother's Desire

      Theoretical move: The paternal metaphor's substitution of S2 for the mOther's desire retroactively produces S1, constitutes the desiring subject through separation, and simultaneously precipitates all four algebraic elements (S1, S2, $, and objet petit a) as a single logical event in Lacan's metapsychology.

      the symbol Lacan provides us for it... is S(A), which is usually read 'the signifier of the lack in the Other' but, as lack and desire are coextensive, can also be read 'the signifier of the Other's desire.'

1404. #1404

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.71

      <span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > *The Vel of Alienation*

      Theoretical move: The passage develops Lacan's vel of alienation as a forced, asymmetric either/or in which the subject is structurally assigned the losing position, giving rise not to being but to a pure place-holder (empty set) within the symbolic order; it then introduces separation as the complementary operation—a neither/nor overlap of two lacks—through which the subject attempts to fill the Other's lack with its own manque-à-être, thereby generating desire as coextensive with lack.

      In Lacan's vel, the sides are by no means even: in his or her confrontation with the Other, the subject immediately drops out of the picture.

1405. #1405

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.56

      <span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > **The Lacanian Subject Is Not the "Individual" or Conscious Subject of Anglo-American Philosophy**

      Theoretical move: The passage distinguishes the Lacanian subject from both the ego (as theorized in ego psychology) and the conscious subject of analytic philosophy, arguing that the ego is a narcissistic construct of crystallized ideal images whose very nature is distortion and error — making it precisely what the Lacanian subject is NOT.

      Other ideal images are similarly assimilated by the child which stem from the image of him or herself reflected back from the parental Other: 'a good girl' or a 'bad girl,' 'a model son,' and so on.

1406. #1406

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.135

      THE PHALLUS: ONE OF W~ S PARTNERS

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that S(A)—the signifier of the lack in the Other—functions as Woman's second "partner" in the sexuation table, and that its meaning has shifted in Lacan's work from a symbolic designator of the Other's desire to a real-register signifier of a primordial loss; this asymmetry grounds two distinct paths beyond neurosis (desire/masculine vs. sublimation/feminine) and implies that feminine subjectivity is constituted through an encounter with jouissance rather than through subjection to a master signifier.

      The Western societal Other never views such attempts very favorably, and thus the satisfaction which could be derived therefrom is often spoiled.

1407. #1407

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.209

      <span id="page-191-0"></span>*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_ > Object (a): Cause of Desire

      Theoretical move: This endnotes passage does substantial theoretical work in clarifying the concept of surplus-jouissance (plus-de-jouir) as structural surplus analogous to Marxian surplus-value — not an end or excess of jouissance but an additional, supplemental jouissance — while also distinguishing imaginary, symbolic, and real registers of the object, and situating objet petit a as the real cause of desire rather than a symbolically constituted object of demand.

      L'Autre de la demande is both the Other to whom the subject addresses his or her demands and the Other who demands certain things of the subject.

1408. #1408

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink

      <span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > <span id="page-67-0"></span>The Subject and the Other's Desire

      Theoretical move: This introductory passage maps the chapter's theoretical itinerary: it positions alienation and separation as the two foundational operations constituting the subject, then adds a third, more advanced operation—the traversal of the fundamental fantasy—framing all three in relation to the Other's desire and the analytic setting.

      I begin with a brief general discussion of the two processes Lacan refers to as 'alienation' and 'separation' and then go on to describe them more fully in terms of the Other's desire.

1409. #1409

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.107

      <span id="page-101-0"></span>Object (a): Cause of Desire > <span id="page-105-0"></span>*The Other as Object, Symbolic Relations*

      Theoretical move: By tracing the analyst's proper position through a critique of both imaginary and symbolic identifications, Fink argues that situating the analyst as the omniscient Other of demand traps the analysand at the level of demand rather than desire, and that only by relinquishing the position of subject supposed to know—redirecting knowledge-authority to the analysand's own unconscious—can analysis constitute the subject as desiring rather than demanding.

      Symbolic relations are those with the Other as language, knowledge, law, career, academia, authority, morality, ideals, and so on.

1410. #1410

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.115

      <span id="page-101-0"></span>Object (a): Cause of Desire > <span id="page-113-0"></span>**The Freudian Thing**

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's object (a) is a direct theoretical translation of Freud's *das Ding*: by rendering Freudian neurons as signifiers and facilitations as signifying links, Lacan shows that the Thing is what remains isolated from the signifying chain yet is circled by it — the unsignifiable kernel within the Other that constitutes the subject as a defense against it, and whose differing primal affects (disgust vs. being-overwhelmed) provide structural diagnostic criteria distinguishing hysteria from obsession.

      das Ding appears as the unsignified and unsignifiable object within the Other (or 'Other-complex') — in the Other yet more than or beyond the Other

1411. #1411

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.225

      <span id="page-191-0"></span>*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_ > **Appendix 2 Stalking the** Cause

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the subject's being is entirely dependent on the marks (letters/quotes) that constitute it—the subject has no being other than as mark or as being-set-off—connecting the typographical device of quotation marks to Lacan's claim that the subject is never more than supposed, and that its being is bound to the registers of speech and writing.

      The subject is thus dependent on what some other has always already said about him.

1412. #1412

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.103

      <span id="page-101-0"></span>Object (a): Cause of Desire

      Theoretical move: Fink establishes Objet petit a as Lacan's most significant and polyvalent contribution to psychoanalysis, cataloguing its many avatars and situating it across the registers of the imaginary, symbolic, and real as a prerequisite for systematic exposition in the chapter ahead.

      object a as the Other's desire… the foreign, fateful cause of the subject's existence

1413. #1413

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.89

      <span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > <span id="page-87-0"></span>**Metaphor and the Precipitation of Subjectivity**

      Theoretical move: Fink argues that the three constitutive moments of subjectivity (alienation, separation, traversal of fantasy) are structurally identical to three substitutional metaphors, and that the subject itself has two faces—as precipitate (sedimented signification) and as breach/precipitation (the creative spark between signifiers)—such that metaphorization and subjectification are strictly co-extensive, with analysis requiring the forging of new metaphors to reconfigure the symptom.

      The end of analysis can be viewed as the effectuation of the substitution shown in the third metaphor above, ~Ia, whereby the subject assumes the place of the Other and of the Other's desire (object a)

1414. #1414

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.193

      <span id="page-191-0"></span>*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_

      Theoretical move: This passage is a glossary of Lacanian mathemes and symbols (barred S, object a, S1, S2, the Other, barred A, S(/A), phallus, phallic function, logical quantifiers, lozenge, fantasy formula, drive formula), followed by non-substantive acknowledgements pages.

      A- The Other. which can take on many forms: the treasure-house or repository of all signifiers; the mOther tongue; the Other as demand, desire, or jouissance; the unconscious; God.

1415. #1415

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.49

      <span id="page-42-0"></span>The Creative Function of the Word: The Symbolic and the Real > **Incompleteness of the Symbolic Order: The (W)hole in the Other**

      Theoretical move: The symbolic order (the Other as the set of all signifiers) is structurally incomplete and untotalizable: any attempt to name or close the set generates a new signifier that remains outside it, mirroring Gödel's incompleteness theorem, and these logical aporias mark the intrusion of the Real into the Symbolic.

      as soon as we attempt to designate such a set, we add a new signifier to the list: the 'Other' (with a capital 'O'). That signifier is not yet included within the set of all signifiers.

1416. #1416

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.30

      <span id="page-21-0"></span>Language and Otherness > **The Unconscious**

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the unconscious is constituted by the Other's discourse—a chain of signifiers obeying language-like rules—such that what appears as the subject's innermost desire is in fact the desire of the Other, rendering the very notion of a self-transparent, sovereign subject untenable.

      At this most basic level, then, the Other is that foreign language we must learn to speak which is euphemistically referred to as our 'native tongue'

1417. #1417

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.119

      <span id="page-116-0"></span>There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship > **Castration**

      Theoretical move: Lacan's concept of castration is re-theorised as a structural loss of jouissance — not an anatomical threat — that is transferred to and circulates in the Other (as language, knowledge, market, law), and this structure of lack/loss is shown to be homologous across the economic, linguistic, kinship, and political registers.

      it is only insofar as we alienate ourselves in the Other and enlist ourselves in support of the Other's discourse that we can share some of the jouissance circulating in the Other.

1418. #1418

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.85

      <span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > *Subjectifying the Cause: A Temporal Conundrum*

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that separation and the subjectification of the cause operate under a retroactive temporal logic (future anterior / Nachträglichkeit) that is irreducible to classical linear causality, and that this culminates in the traversal of fantasy as the moment when the Other's desire is fully "signifierized," liberating the subject from the fixity of the Name-of-the-Father and enabling genuine action.

      a legitimacy or authority that is not embodied in the king alone but subsists in the symbolic order beyond the king, above the king.

1419. #1419

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.95

      <span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > *The Subject as Signified*

      Theoretical move: Fink redefines Lacanian castration as the subject's alienation-in and separation-from the Other (not biological threat), and articulates how the barred subject is constituted as a sedimentation of meanings via the retroactive relation between S2 and the master signifier S1 (equated with the Name-of-the-Father), with the traversal of fantasy marking the path beyond neurosis.

      the subject seems to be a sort of sedimentation of meanings furnished by the Other (the subject's statements only taking on meaning in the Other or being granted meaning by the Other).

1420. #1420

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.191

      <span id="page-156-0"></span>Psychoanalysis and Science > Parenthetical Structures

      Theoretical move: By mapping the asymmetry of the L Chain onto the subject/Other split and identifying the parenthesis as the operator that introduces heterogeneity into the unary-trait repetition, Fink argues that the letter imposes a "parenthetical structure" on the subject — structurally enacting alienation and separation — and that object (a) is what gets bracketed in this process.

      Only with the intervention of a parenthesis does something split off from or separate out from the Other; only with its appearance is the Other momentarily held at bay

1421. #1421

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.70

      <span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > **Alienation and Separation**

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that alienation and separation are two complementary operations structuring subjectivity: alienation constitutes the subject through a forced submission to the Other-as-language, while separation arises from the alienated subject's confrontation with the Other-as-desire, specifically the irreducible gap between the child's desire to be the Other's sole object and the Other's always-elsewhere desire.

      the subject is caused by the Other's desire... separation consists in the attempt by the alienated subject to come to grips with that Other's desire as it manifests itself in the subject's world.

1422. #1422

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.110

      <span id="page-101-0"></span>Object (a): Cause of Desire > *Real Objects, Encounters with the Real*

      Theoretical move: Desire has no object in the conventional sense but only a cause — object (a) — which is real, unspecularizable, and resistant to symbolization; the passage argues that what elicits desire is the Other's desire as manifested in partial objects (gaze, voice), not the companion or the demand, and that the therapeutic challenge is to dialectize this real cause and disturb the fundamental fantasy organized around it.

      What arouses desire in a child is the Other's desire, not the Other's demand... It is the Other's desire as pure desirousness... that elicits desire in the child.

1423. #1423

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.23

      <span id="page-21-0"></span>Language and Otherness > A Slip of the Other's Tongue

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that alienation in language is constitutive of the subject: the Other (as the pre-given totality of language) is not merely an external resource but an intrusive force that molds need into desire, installs an unconscious Other-discourse alongside ego-discourse, and thereby fundamentally alienates every speaking being from themselves.

      Lacan's Other is, at its most basic level, related to that other kind of talk. For we can tentatively assume that there are not only two different kinds of talk, but that they come, roughly speaking, from two different psychological places: the ego (or self) and the Other.

1424. #1424

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.203

      <span id="page-191-0"></span>*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_ > **The Lacanian Subject**

      Theoretical move: This passage is a scholarly footnote/glossary section providing bibliographic references and clarificatory notes on Lacanian symbols and concepts; it is primarily apparatus rather than a substantive theoretical argument, though note 14 makes a genuine theoretical point about Lacan's notational distinctions between imaginary and symbolic registers of the subject.

      the Other might be said to have broken down into imaginary other—the ego as a crystallization of internalized images—and (decompleted) symbolic Other.

1425. #1425

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.188

      <span id="page-156-0"></span>Psychoanalysis and Science > <span id="page-183-0"></span>Stalking the Cause

      Theoretical move: By retranscribing Schema L as Chain L using a parenthetical/binary formalism, Fink shows how object a emerges as a structural remainder—the *caput mortuum* of the signifying chain—thereby demonstiting that object a's causal function with respect to desire is inscribed in the very topology of the symbolic chain rather than being a supplementary concept added from outside.

      everything outside of the two main sets of parentheses represents the field of the Other (capital A), clearly dominated here by repetition of the unary trait

1426. #1426

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.121

      <span id="page-116-0"></span>There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship > **The Phallus and the Phallic Function**

      Theoretical move: The phallus is theorized not as the cause but as the *signifier* of desire (and of lack), while objet petit a is posited as the real, unsignifiable cause of desire; the phallic function is then defined as the alienating function of language that institutes lack, which grounds the subsequent account of sexuation and jouissance's non-conservation.

      one signifier comes to signify that part of the parents' desire which goes beyond the child (and by extension, their desire in general)... 'signifier of the Other's desire.'

1427. #1427

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.118

      <span id="page-116-0"></span>There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship

      Theoretical move: Fink argues that Lacan's theory of sexuation turns on a dialectic of part and whole (not all and some), and that misreadings—especially in translations of Seminar XX—have distorted this; he proposes to reframe castration as alienation, the phallus as the signifier of desire, and the Name-of-the-Father as S(Ⱥ), thereby advancing a theory of sexuation that transcends Freud's culture-specific terms.

      the whole is never whole (the Other does not exist)

1428. #1428

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.33

      <span id="page-21-0"></span>Language and Otherness > **Foreign Bodies**

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the body is fundamentally "written by signifiers" — that language and the symbolic order override biological organization to produce psychosomatic symptoms, erogenous zones, and fantasies — and uses this to ground the claim that different relations to the Other (as language, demand, desire, jouissance) constitute the basis for the clinical structures.

      The body is overwritten/overridden by language... our bodily pleasures all come to imply/involve a relationship to the Other.

1429. #1429

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.34

      <span id="page-32-0"></span>The Nature of Unconscious Thought, or How the Other Half "Thinks"

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that language operates autonomously as an Other that subjects are "used by" rather than merely using, and that unconscious thought processes — structured by condensation/metaphor and displacement/metonymy — constitute a parallel chain of discourse whose autonomous functioning Lacan sought to model through artificial/formal languages and combinatories.

      Such expressions and metaphors are selected in some Other place than consciousness.

1430. #1430

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.205

      <span id="page-191-0"></span>*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_ > The Subject and the Other's Desire

      Theoretical move: This footnote apparatus elaborates key theoretical moves from the main text: the neurotic's fantasy structure as ($◇D) rather than ($◇a) - conflating the Other's demand with the Other's desire - and the topology of the subject/Other relation, while clarifying that separation involves replacing demand with objet a in the neurotic's fantasy.

      Analysis must involve 'this repositioning of the ego as subject in the a that I was for the Other's desire'

1431. #1431

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.236

      <span id="page-231-0"></span>**Index**

      Theoretical move: This is an index passage (pages 235-236) from Bruce Fink's "The Lacanian Subject," listing key concepts and page references. It is non-substantive as a theoretical argument but serves as a navigational guide to the book's conceptual architecture.

      Other, xi, 3-76, 169; binary representation of, 167; demand and, xi, 189n. II; desire and, xi, 54; discourse of, 4; as jouissance, xi; as lacking, 173

1432. #1432

      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).

      when he says 'Il n'y a pas d'Autre de l'Autre,' he does not leave us the option of speculating whether or not this Other of the Other… might in fact ex-sist: it neither exists nor ex-sists

1433. #1433

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.53

      <span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > Name-of-the-Father Mother's Desire

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Name-of-the-Father operates first as a "rigid designator" (primordial signifier) and only becomes a full-fledged signifier through a further separation that enables displacement within the dialectical chain — thus grounding the paternal function's multiple Lacanian designations (nom/non du père, phallus, S(Ⱥ)).

      the signifier of the Other's desire, S(A)

1434. #1434

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.81

      <span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > **A Further Separation: The Traversing of Fantasy**

      Theoretical move: The traversing of fantasy is theorized as a "further separation" in which the alienated subject paradoxically assumes its own traumatic cause—the Other's desire that produced it as split subject—thereby subjectifying jouissance and relocating from the position of effect to that of cause, in contrast to the Ego Psychology solution of identification with the analyst.

      the analyst must maneuver away from serving the analysand as an Other to imitate, to try to be like, to desire like... an Other with whom to identify

1435. #1435

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink

      **THE LACANIAN SUBJECT** > Pour Heloise

      Theoretical move: This passage is a table of contents for "The Lacanian Subject" by Bruce Fink; it is non-substantive and contains no theoretical argument, only chapter and section headings.

      The Other as Object, Symbolic Relations

1436. #1436

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.116

      <span id="page-101-0"></span>Object (a): Cause of Desire > **Surplus Value, Surplus Jouissance**

      Theoretical move: By equating object (a) with Marx's surplus value, Lacan shows that the work process simultaneously produces the alienated subject ($) and a loss (a), where surplus-jouissance circulates outside the subject in the Other — structurally positioning the neurotic subject as working for the Other's enjoyment rather than its own.

      The capitalist, as Other, enjoys that excess product, and thus the subject finds him or herself in the unenviable situation of working for the Other's enjoyment, sacrificing him or herself for the Other's jouissance.

1437. #1437

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.220

      <span id="page-191-0"></span>*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_ > <span id="page-216-0"></span>**Chapter 9**

      Theoretical move: This passage consists of scholarly endnotes for chapters on the Four Discourses, Psychoanalysis and Science, and an Afterword — it is largely bibliographic and referential, but contains several load-bearing theoretical asides: that the specific ordering of mathemes in the Four Discourses is constitutive (not merely combinatorial), that object (a) is the remainder left over after science's symbolization of the real, and that there is always a limit to formalization.

      to provide what that Other clearly required in the case of a previously unknown author like myself.

1438. #1438

      The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.197

      <span id="page-191-0"></span>*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_ > **Chapter 1 Language and Otherness**

      Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of endnotes for Chapter 1, providing bibliographic references, clarifications of key Lacanian terms, and cross-references to other chapters and seminars. It is non-substantive in terms of original theoretical argument.

      The fundamental incompleteness of the Other—that is, its ultimate nature as lacking—and the overall logic behind some of Lacan's crucial concepts will be discussed at length in chapters 3 and 8.

1439. #1439

      The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.28

      part i

      Theoretical move: Zupančič uses Hegel's treatment of comedy in the *Phenomenology* as a lens to argue that genuine subjective change requires not merely the subject's self-knowledge but a corresponding shift in the external Symbolic (the "Other"), and that this double movement—where lack in the subject must coincide with lack in the Other—is shared by both Hegel and Lacan, with transference as its analytic condition.

      the subject is ready to do quite a lot, change radically, if only she can remain unchanged in the Other (in the Symbolic as the external world in which, to put it in Hegel's terms, the subject's consciousness of herself is embodied)

1440. #1440

      The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.96

      Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite > And a little further on:

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that comic naivety (trust in the Other's metonymic object despite its inconsistency) is not mere ignorance but a structural wager on the lack-in-the-Other, and that comedies of mistaken identity function by suspending the symbolic Other, generating a surplus comic object ('error incorporated') that displaces the emphasis from the Other's failure to the productive accidents that failure enables.

      the point of the 'lack of the Other'—that is to say, the point that is not consistently covered, in advance, with the causal net structuring intersubjective relationships

1441. #1441

      The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.178

      Conceptual Stakes of Repetition: Deleuze and Lacan

      Theoretical move: By triangulating Deleuze and Lacan on repetition, Župančič argues that the three Lacanian registers (Symbolic, Imaginary, Real) correspond to three modes of repetition, and that tyche is the gap internal to automaton rather than its opposite—a structure grounded in primary repression and alienation as co-constitutive rather than causally sequential moments of subjectivity.

      when the subject comes to exist, she exists only in the Other, through the signifying chain

1442. #1442

      The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.118

      Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite > And a little further on:

      Theoretical move: Zupančič argues, through Marivaux's comic dramaturgy, that access to the Real is achieved not by stripping away symbolic fiction but by *redoubling* it: a second mask/fiction produces an internal difference that constitutes the Symbolic as immanent to the situation, distinguishing this comic logic from both romantic immediacy and carnivalesque transgression.

      the symbolic Other as immanent to the given situation (as opposed to the Other constituting its framework or outer horizon)... The suspended Other appears on the stage in the form of the inner difference of every identity.

1443. #1443

      The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.104

      Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite > And a little further on:

      Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that comic suspense is structurally distinct from thriller suspense because it begins *after* the catastrophe (an "overrealization"), and that this post-catastrophic surplus-object suspended in the comic action actually transforms the symbolic Other rather than simply restoring it—demonstrated through close readings of Molière's *Amphitryon* and Shakespeare's *Comedy of Errors*.

      the Other (as the symbolic presupposition of sense) is no ideal or eternal and unchangeable in its form; via the surplus-object, it is always irreducibly attached to and involved in concrete reality

1444. #1444

      The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.111

      Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite > And a little further on:

      Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the comic object (as surplus-object) is not merely a humorous treatment of the symbolic Other but the material condition for any retroactive effect of the phenomenal order on its own transcendental coordinates; she further distinguishes genuine comedy from derision by showing that derision protects the sacred mystery of the symbolic structure whereas comedy produces das Ding as an objectified surplus, and introduces Marivaux as the figure who replaces surplus-objects with pure difference as the mechanism of comic suspension.

      if the other side of the comic suspension of the symbolic Other were not the material presence on the scene of this Other in the form of a surplus-object, then this (retroactive) effect of the determined world on the very coordinates of this determination could not take place.

1445. #1445

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.313

      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.

      the fundamental Lacanian thesis that the big Other itself, far from being an anonymous machine, needs a constant influx of jouissance.

1446. #1446

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek

      Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Toward a New Science of Appearances

      Theoretical move: By reading Rashomon's four witness accounts as a Lévi-Straussian mythic matrix, Žižek argues that the film's real stakes are not epistemological (no ultimate reality behind narratives) but socio-ethical: the disintegration of the big Other's symbolic pact is traced to feminine desire as the traumatic kernel around which the other versions function as defense-formations.

      there was no 'big Other' on which people could rely, no basic symbolic pact guaranteeing trust and sustaining obligations.

1447. #1447

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.317

      Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Jouissance as a Political Category

      Theoretical move: Žižek uses a Christological reading of *The Matrix* trilogy to distinguish between a proto-Jewish and a properly Christian logic of sacrifice, arguing that the trilogy's ideological deadlock stems from Capital functioning as a double allegory (for Capital and for the Symbolic Order), and that the failure of any final resolution is itself a sober political message against pseudo-Deleuzian celebrations of multitudinal revolt.

      the Matrix functions as a double allegory: for Capital (machines sucking energy out of us) and for the Other, the symbolic order as such.

1448. #1448

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.111

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

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

      what this critique misses is the umbilical link that connects the big Other (the formal order, ultimately an empty place) to the small other (the ridiculous/excessive/excremental object, tic, that sticks out of the Other).

1449. #1449

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.364

      The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Over the Rainbow Coalition!

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the apparent antagonism between liberal multiculturalism and conservative-populist fundamentalism is ideological mystification: populist fundamentalists are the symptomatic truth of liberal hypocrisy, and the real enemy shared by both is capitalism's logic of expanding demand—which conservatives disavow by blaming "human nature" rather than capitalism itself. The radical Left must therefore traverse the culture-war frame and seek unlikely allies across the rainbow coalition.

      Recall Lacan's definition of successful communication: in it, I get back from the other my own message in its inverted—that is, true—form.

1450. #1450

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.42

      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 Master-Signifier operates as a reflexive "quilting point" that transforms disorder into order without adding positive content, and that objet petit a functions as the "transcendental scheme" of fantasy mediating between the formal symbolic structure and the positivity of objects in reality — thereby explaining how ideology schematizes desire and hegemonizes the void left by the primordially repressed binary signifier.

      In one of his short fragments, Kafka himself pointed out how the ultimate secret of the Law is that it does not exist—another case of what Lacan called the nonexistence of the big Other.

1451. #1451

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.410

      The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Interlude 1: Kate's Choice, or, The Materialism ofHenry James > 4The Loop of Freedom

      Theoretical move: This endnote apparatus performs multiple theoretical moves simultaneously: it glosses the Lacanian big Other's radical ambiguity (symbolic substance vs. pure appearance), identifies the Master-Signifier as the answer to infinite regress in argumentation, reads anxiety (and, contra Lacan, Badiouian enthusiasm) as the affect that grants access to the Real, and deploys the Hegelian 'positing of presuppositions' to illuminate the mutual entanglement of sexual and socio-symbolic failure in marriage.

      it simultaneously designates the symbolic 'substance' (the determining order which 'pulls the strings' in the mode of the 'cunning of Reason,' the subject supposed to know) and the pure appearance (the big Other, which 'should not know it,' for whom appearances should be maintained

1452. #1452

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.296

      Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The Biopolitical Parallax

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that late capitalism's shift from desire to demand (and from Oedipal to post-Oedipal subjectivity) converges with biopolitical control as two faces of the University Discourse; the correct psychoanalytic response is not conservative re-Oedipalization but a full assumption of the Other's nonexistence, enabling a demand no longer addressed to the Other — a mode that coincides with the drive.

      what one needs is a demand no longer addressed to the Other. Both desire and demand rely on the Other—either a full (omnipotent) Other of demand or a 'castrated' Other of the Law

1453. #1453

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.139

      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.

      In short, Densher wants to deceive the big Other, to accomplish a gesture that would not be noted as such by the big Other.

1454. #1454

      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.

      The Other of today's World History, poor Third World countries, is thus inscribed into the universe of the Wallander novels; this big Other of World History has to remain in the background, as the distant Absent Cause.

1455. #1455

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.368

      The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Welcome to the Desert of the American Subculture

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Abu Ghraib tortures were neither isolated criminal acts nor directly ordered, but rather the necessary obscene underside of official ideology — a "Code Red" transgression that is the constitutive supplement to public values of democracy and dignity, revealing how Power systematically generates and requires its own excess.

      they adopt the perverse position of a direct instrument of the big Other's will.

1456. #1456

      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.

      Thus the big Other is the order of the lie, of lying sincerely.

1457. #1457

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.312

      Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Jouissance as a Political Category

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that contemporary politics is fundamentally a biopolitical regulation of jouissance rather than emancipatory politics proper, tracing this through liberal ideology's fantasmatic disgust, the symmetry between fundamentalism and liberal hedonism, and the paradox of the superego imperative to enjoy—where permitted jouissance becomes obligatory jouissance—culminating in a reading of The Matrix as staging the co-dependence of the big Other (Symbolic) and the Real.

      What, then, is the Matrix? Simply what Lacan called the 'big Other,' the virtual symbolic order, the network that structures reality for us.

1458. #1458

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.376

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

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

      Argentinian ideological self-identity relied on an alienating identification with the Other's gaze

1459. #1459

      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.

      Ultimately, it is thus the 'big Other,' the order of social appearances, that should be kept in ignorance: if the big Other doesn't know, it is 'as good as if it were nothing.'

1460. #1460

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.278

      Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Ontic Errance, Ontological Truth

      Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Heidegger's ontology is structurally blind to Marx's critique of political economy—an ignorance it shares with fascism—and that Heidegger's move from individual to communal authenticity is not arbitrary but a necessary escape from decisionistic formalism, yet one that cannot be rehabilitated into a "progressive" alternative without repeating the same structural problem.

      the reign of anonymous market forces is experienced as the new version of the ancient Fate: as Marx and Hegel repeatedly claimed, in modernity, Fate looks more and more like the impenetrable and capricious socioeconomic process

1461. #1461

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.351

      The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > The Ignorance of the Chicken

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the true stake of both psychoanalytic treatment and ideological critique is not changing the subject's conscious knowledge but transforming what the subject presupposes the big Other to know — a split that is internal to the subject itself — thereby demonstrating that fetishistic disavowal, commodity fetishism, and ideological belief all operate through displacement of belief onto an Other who is presumed not to know.

      it is not enough to convince the patient of the unconscious truth of his symptoms; the Unconscious itself must be induced to accept this truth.

1462. #1462

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.115

      The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Odradek as a Political Category

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that both Levinas and Adorno fail to account for the truly "inhuman" dimension of subjectivity—exemplified by the Muselmann—which cannot be subsumed under any ethical or normative frame; Žižek uses Agamben's Muselmann, the L Schema, and Kafka's Odradek to articulate a "neighbor" as monstrous, impenetrable Thing that exceeds Levinasian face-ethics and demands a radically different conceptualization of the human/inhuman boundary.

      there is no ideal Recipient, so that, when we are aware that our testimony is safely deposited there, we get rid of our demons—there is no big Other.

1463. #1463

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.209

      Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > "Positing the Presuppositions"

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that autopoiesis (the self-producing loop of living cells) is the biological instantiation of Hegel's "positing the presuppositions"—the retroactive self-positing of an organism's own conditions—and that this same logical structure governs the paradox of freedom/fate: a truly free act is not one that escapes necessity but one that retroactively posits it, with the "causality of appearance" (the subject as surface-effect with no substantial kernel) as the key operator.

      insofar as the three 'precogs' are a direct medium of the 'big Other,' their discord is not simply subjective, an erroneous cognition of the future, but a direct expression of the inconsistency of, inherent cracks in, the 'big Other' itself

1464. #1464

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.9

      introduction

      Theoretical move: Žižek introduces the concept of the "parallax gap" as the theoretical core of dialectical materialism, arguing that the irreducible non-relation between two incommensurable perspectives (e.g., revolutionary politics and art, historical and dialectical materialism) is not an obstacle to dialectics but its very engine, and that this gap must be inscribed back into the particular itself rather than resolved by a higher synthesis.

      in order to be a private cynic, he has to presuppose the existence of naive other(s) who 'really believe.'

1465. #1465

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.186

      Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > When the God Comes Around

      Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the trauma of the Shoah forces theology through a dialectical succession of positions—from sovereign to finite to suffering God—and that only the theological frame can adequately register the scope of such catastrophe; this dialectic mirrors the Universal-Particular-Singular triad of Christian confessions (Orthodoxy-Catholicism-Protestantism), culminating in a Protestant God of arbitrary, Law-suspending cruelty whose dark underside is the necessary correlate of the excess of Christian love over Jewish Law.

      The standard metaphysical-religious notion of Evil is that of doubling, gaining a distance, abandoning the reference to the big Other, our Origin and Goal.

1466. #1466

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.47

      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 "truth" of ideology lies in its universal form rather than its fantasmatic support, and that genuine subjectivity is constituted by a structural gap or noncoincidence-with-itself — a void that is not filled by particular content but is itself a stand-in for a missing particular — thereby linking the Hegelian dialectic of Subject/Substance to Lacanian aphanisis and the three-level triad of Universal-Particular-Individual.

      there is an emergence of the subject at the level of meaning only from its aphanasis in the Other locus, which is that of the unconscious

1467. #1467

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.141

      The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > interlude 1

      Theoretical move: The passage reads two Henry James novels—*The Wings of the Dove* and *The Golden Bowl*—as ethical and libidinal allegories: in *Wings*, Densher's "moral masochism" (fake love for Milly's memory) constitutes the real betrayal, while in *Golden Bowl*, the cracked bowl functions as the signifier of the barred Other that structures intersubjective relations, and the incest motif encodes the link between capitalist brutality and familial protection/violation.

      they can pretend that nothing happened, but they 'shall never be again as [we] were' because the big Other knows it.

1468. #1468

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.86

      The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Kierkegaard as a Hegelian > Die Versagung

      Theoretical move: Žižek uses Lacan's reading of Claudel's *The Hostage* and James's *The Portrait of a Lady* to argue that the feminine "No" (Versagung) is not a signifying negation grounded in the paternal "No," but a bodily, excremental gesture of pure loss that enacts separation from the Symbolic—prefiguring the sinthome—and that this "No as such" (form without content) is the hidden materialist core linking Kierkegaard's infinite resignation to Hegelian speculative identity.

      What occurs in (3) and (4), on the contrary, enacts the separation from the Symbolic: we pass from the big Other to the small other

1469. #1469

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.358

      The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Fundamentalism?

      Theoretical move: Žižek proposes a fourth, materialist reading of the crucifixion (God repaying his own debt to humanity) to expose the theological truth concealed by the three standard versions, and argues that only a comprehensive materialism—not liberal tolerance or religious fundamentalism—can sustain a genuinely ascetic, militant ethics capable of judging fundamentalism on its own terms.

      what if Christ's death was a way for God-the-Father to repay his own debt to humanity, to excuse himself for having done such a botched-up job

1470. #1470

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.68

      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.

      This is the function of the Lacanian "big Other" at its purest: this impersonal, nonpsychological agency (or, rather, site) of registering, of "taking note of" what takes place.

1471. #1471

      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)

1472. #1472

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.402

      The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Interlude 1: Kate's Choice, or, The Materialism ofHenry James

      Theoretical move: This passage is a footnote apparatus for a chapter on Henry James, but it does substantive theoretical work by: (1) deploying the Lacanian triad of objects (objet petit a, S of barred A, big Phi) to map three types of Hitchcockian narrative objects found in James; and (2) critically noting James's failure to fully confront the ethical claim of revolutionary radicalism, contrasting this with Hegel's acknowledgment that the 'rabble' (Pöbel) is justified in its unconditional demands on society.

      the Lacanian triad of objects (a, S of the barred A, the big Phi [the overwhelming phallic presence]) is thus completed

1473. #1473

      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.

      they should commit mass suicide, and thus arouse the conscience of the world.... We can easily imagine the Nazi reaction to this: OK, we'll help you where do you want the poison delivered to?

1474. #1474

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.82

      The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Kierkegaard as a Hegelian

      Theoretical move: Žižek uses Kierkegaard's theology as the limit-point of idealism to stage a materialist inversion: whereas idealism projects closure onto a transcendent God correlative to an "open" ontology, materialism holds that the "All" is itself non-All and contingent; Kierkegaard's desubstantialized God and his structure of "infinite resignation" (Versagung) are then read as a secretly Lacanian operation in which the sacrificial loss of everything yields not a reward but the loss of the Cause-Thing itself.

      God himself is this: how one involves himself with Him... In respect to God, the how is the what.

1475. #1475

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.356

      The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Fundamentalism?

      Theoretical move: Žižek argues that fundamentalism is defined by the immediate identification with fantasy (becoming the "dupe of one's fantasy") which forecloses the enigma of the Other's desire; this structural analysis is then extended to show that liberal multiculturalism's tolerant repression of passion produces the same segregationist logic it claims to oppose, leaving aggressive secularism and fundamentalist passion as mirror-image dead ends.

      the secrets of the Egyptians were also secrets for the Egyptians themselves, that is to say, into how our alienation from the Other is already the alienation of the Other (from) itself

1476. #1476

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.20

      The Tickling Object

      Theoretical move: Žižek introduces the "parallax object" as the key to understanding the subject-object relation: the objet petit a is identified as the pure parallax object and cause of the parallax gap, a minimal difference that is itself an object, irreducible to any symbolic grasp — and this structure is shown to pervade narrative form (Fitzgerald), psychoanalytic experience, and the ontology of the subject's gaze.

      Rosemary's external point of view, fascinated by the ideal(ized) couple of Dick and Nicole, is not simply external. Rather, it embodies the gaze of the social 'big Other,' the Ego-Ideal, for which Dick enacts the life of a happy husband

1477. #1477

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.191

      Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The Desublimated Object of Post-Ideology

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the postideological "desublimated" call of jouissance short-circuits the symbolic mediation constitutive of the Other's jouissance, so that the apparent opposition between pure autistic jouissance (drugs, virtual sex) and the jouissance of the Other (language, narrative, remembrance) secretly converges in the Hegelian infinite judgment: the passion for the Real and the passion for semblance are two sides of the same phenomenon.

      the spoken word, the big Other, was too directly flooded by jouissance, so the two are embarrassed by one another's presence

1478. #1478

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.222

      Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The False Opacity

      Theoretical move: Žižek uses Metzinger's neurophenomenological account of selfhood (the "cave," "red arrow," and "total flight simulator" metaphors) to sharpen the Lacanian distinction between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the enunciated, arguing that Metzinger's two imprecisions—failing to distinguish those two subjects, and failing to distinguish generative opacity from the inherent symbolic opacity of phenomenal experience—are structurally linked: the second, properly symbolic opacity is the opacity of the subject of the enunciation itself.

      as Lacan emphasized, the Other is for me by definition an abyss, he is 'opaque,' that is to say, I am always aware that what I experience is a phenomenal surface which can deceive

1479. #1479

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.396

      The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Notes > 2Building Blocks for a Materialist Theology

      Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section of The Parallax View, containing scholarly footnotes with citations and brief argumentative asides; the theoretically substantive moments include Žižek's critique of Boostels on Kant avec Sade, a gloss on Lacan's tripartite (ISR) staging of anxiety, and a reading of Medea vs. Antigone as two versions of feminine subjectivity.

      anxiety is located in the (symbolic) subject, signalling the moment the overproximity of the Other's desire threatens to cover up the distance, the lack, which sustains the symbolic order

1480. #1480

      The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.420

      The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Interlude 2: objet petit a in Social Links, or, The Impasses of Anti-Anti-Semitism > 5From Surplus-Value to Surplus-Power

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

      the analyst not as the small other (a), but, on the contrary, as a kind of stand-in for the big Other (A, the anonymous symbolic order). At this level, the function of the analyst was to frustrate the subject's imaginary misrecognitions... Later, however, the analyst stands precisely for the ultimate inconsistency and failure of the big Other

1481. #1481

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.93

      11

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

      Our desire emerges through the act of positing a hidden desire in the figure of authority, in the Other representing the forces of society.

1482. #1482

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.113

      **Claire Denis and the Other's Failure to Enjoy**

      Theoretical move: Claire Denis's films perform a systematic demolition of fantasy by staging and then deflating the image of the enjoying Other—revealing the lack and partiality that underlie any apparent complete enjoyment—thereby redirecting subjects away from the paranoid lure of fantasmatic jouissance and back toward the partial enjoyment proper to the path of desire.

      Because fantasy necessarily attributes our own enjoyment to the other, there is always a paranoid dimension to fantasy: underlying the typical fantasy scenario is the idea that the other enjoys in our stead because of a secret knowledge that she/he has illicitly obtained.

1483. #1483

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.158

      20

      Theoretical move: Spielberg's films deploy a recurring fantasy structure in which the initially failed or absent father is redeemed as a capable paternal authority, thereby domesticating the traumatic gaze and shielding the subject from the real—a move that ultimately serves an ideological function by covering over the gaps in ideology with the illusion of protection.

      those in the camp have no idea what this unseen gaze wants from them... they turn to frenetic activity and work in hopes of finding the answer and appeasing the gaze

1484. #1484

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

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

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

      the death of the trucker in no way answers the question of the Other's desire

1485. #1485

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

      **Wim Wenders and the Ethics of Fantasizing**

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

      fantasy's retreat from the restraints of the big Other renders the subject vulnerable in a whole new way.

1486. #1486

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.100

      12

      Theoretical move: The nouvelle vague's formal emphasis on absence, contingency, and the impossibility of the gaze-as-object constitutes a cinema of desire that resists ideological fantasy by refusing to produce the objet petit a as attainable, thereby structurally positioning the spectator as a desiring subject rather than a fantasizing one.

      Reconciliation is impossible because the object gaze exists beyond the Other's look at the subject. This is what dooms the project of seeking the Other's recognition.

1487. #1487

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.207

      **Alain Resnais between the Present and the Past**

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Resnais's *L'Année dernière à Marienbad* does not simply thematize the unknowability of the historical object but instead reconfigures our relationship to it: the impossible historical object exists in the present in a fantasmatic form, and its intrusion into the present (via radical cuts) is an extimate disruption that implicates the subject in the constitution of history itself, thereby opening onto an ethical response.

      We know that the big Other, the domain of language, has no direct access to the historical object. As the site of mediation, it can only provide indirect knowledge.

1488. #1488

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.19

      **Introduction: From the Imaginary Look to the Real Gaze** > **The Gaze as Object**

      Theoretical move: McGowan argues that early Lacanian film theory mislocated the gaze in the subjective look of the spectator, whereas Lacan's own conception treats the gaze as objet petit a—an objective, real-order disturbance within the visual field that implicates rather than empowers the spectator, thereby fundamentally reorienting psychoanalytic film theory away from imaginary/symbolic models toward the real.

      Lacan invents the term 'objet petit a' (and insists that it not be translated) in order to suggest this object's irreducibility to the field of the big Other (l'Autre) or signification.

1489. #1489

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.107

      **The Banality of Orson Welles**

      Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Welles's cinema enacts a Hegelian correction of the Kantian logic of the nouvelle vague: rather than sustaining the gaze as an impossibly absent transcendent object (which risks feeding fantasy), Welles renders the object's absence fully present by embodying it in a banal, everyday object, thereby exposing the void at the core of desire and foreclosing fantasmatic resolution.

      The great secret of the Other—the Other's hidden enjoyment, the secret object-cause of desire that animates Kane—is that there is no secret. Which is to say, even the Other doesn't know what it wants.

1490. #1490

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.239

      29 > **11. The Politics of Cinematic Desire**

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire is constituted through irreducible failure and impossibility—the lost object can never be recovered—and distinguishes Lacanian desire from Hegelian desire-for-recognition, while showing how the Nouvelle Vague films (Truffaut, Godard, Varda) formally enact this logic by frustrating the spectator's fantasmatic expectations.

      Lacan is critical of Sartre, his critique lies in the direction of Sartre's failure to recognize the power of the big Other over the subject (which is of a piece with Sartre's rejection of an unconscious for the for-itself).

1491. #1491

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

      20

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

      These first films stress the abject failure of the father to domesticate the gaze: rather than obscuring the void within the Other, the fathers here expose this void through their inability to control it.

1492. #1492

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.51

      **The Politics of Cinematic Fantasy**

      Theoretical move: Fantasy operates as a necessary supplement to ideology, compensating for ideology's constitutive incompleteness at the level of the signifier; but cinema's publicization of fantasy can also expose the obscene surplus-enjoyment that ideology depends on yet cannot avow, giving fantasy a double political valence—both conservative and subversive.

      A fantasy is simultaneously pacifying, disarming (providing an imaginary scenario which enables us to endure the abyss of the Other's desire) and shattering, disturbing, unassimilable into our reality.

1493. #1493

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.165

      21

      Theoretical move: Griffith's parallel editing in films like *Intolerance* and *Way Down East* performs an ideological function by blurring desire and fantasy: by fantasmatically resolving the impossible status of the objet petit a, the suspense structure eliminates the traumatic dimension of desire, substituting a fantasmatic resolution that names and subjugates the threatening desire of the Other.

      the idea that the desire of the Other represents a specific threat that the suspense sequence must overcome.

1494. #1494

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.221

      29

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

      Here, unlike in Fred's world, there is no lack of knowledge concerning the desire of the Other.

1495. #1495

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.189

      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.

      Freedom depends on the recognition that the Other does not exist, that the Other cannot provide the subject a substantive identity.

1496. #1496

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.101

      12

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that freedom arises not from achieving the gaze or the Other's recognition, but from embracing the gaze's impossible status as objet petit a — the failure of the Other to see the subject properly is what sustains desire, and recognizing this impossibility liberates the subject from the Other's power.

      she realizes that it will never provide her with what she wants. This realization frees Cléo from her dependence on the Other.

1497. #1497

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.83

      **Desire and Not Showing Enough**

      Theoretical move: The passage establishes a theoretical distinction between the "cinema of desire" and the "cinema of fantasy" by arguing that film's structural proclivity toward presence (the overpresence of the image) works against desire, which depends on absence—yet narrative form necessarily deploys absence (via suyzhet/fabula gaps) to engine spectator desire, making the cinema of desire a subversion of film's inherent medium rather than its natural expression.

      the subject's desire can never line up perfectly with what the Other offers the subject... the subject desires to see precisely what is not visible in the Other

1498. #1498

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

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

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

      The hold that symbolic authority has over subjects depends on the avoidance of the traumatic real that exposes the imposture of all authority... The encounter reveals to the subject the nonexistence of the big Other.

1499. #1499

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.33

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

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

      the desire of the Other, embodied in the absent gaze, remains just out of sight (and thus out of reach)—and irreducible to the filmic image itself

1500. #1500

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.163

      21

      Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Griffith's parallel editing structure embeds a fantasmatic logic that domesticates the gaze by converting it from an impossible, traumatic absence into a knowable, manageable presence—thereby demonstrating that the formal racism of the "cinema of integration" is inseparable from its editorial technique of suspense-through-fantasy.

      the desire of the Other—the gaze—is located in the black men (especially the black Union soldiers) who desire white Southern women... racism fantasizes a traumatic enjoyment in the desire of the Other

1501. #1501

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.209

      **Wim Wenders and the Ethics of Fantasizing**

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

      Subjects do this by adopting the conventions of the big Other—obeying the law, acting politely, and even following the popular fashions.

1502. #1502

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.235

      29 > **6. Spike Lee's Fantasmatic Explosions**

      Theoretical move: This footnote-heavy passage advances the theoretical argument that racist ideology operates at the level of fantasy (jouissance attributed to the Other), that Lee's formal excess targets this fantasmatic racism whereas Haggis's realism misses it, and that Mann's male heroes instantiate a Kantian ethics of excess structurally tied to the phallic exception.

      fantasies that involve black enjoyment... White subjects put on blackface in order to approach the jouissance they posit in black subjectivity.

1503. #1503

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.23

      **Introduction: From the Imaginary Look to the Real Gaze** > **The Gaze as Object** > **Desiring Elsewhere**

      Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the early Lacanian film theory tradition misreads Lacan by conflating desire with a Nietzschean/Foucaultian will to mastery; the properly Lacanian gaze is not the vehicle of mastery but an objet petit a—a point of traumatic, unassimilable enjoyment in the Other that causes desire precisely by remaining out of reach, thereby reorienting film theory from the imaginary look to the real gaze.

      It is the Other's seeming enjoyment that acts as an engine for desire, not mastery.

1504. #1504

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.182

      23

      Theoretical move: The cinema of intersection, by juxtaposing desire and fantasy, stages the traumatic emergence and disappearance of the gaze as impossible object, thereby revealing to the subject that its own jouissance—not the Other's secret—fills the lack in the Other; this constitutes a cinematic analogue of the psychoanalytic cure that enables identification with the gaze rather than neurotic dependence on the Other.

      we can recognize our own role in filling in the lack in the Other... our fantasy—not some secret buried within the Other itself—provides the support for the Other at its point of lack.

1505. #1505

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.125

      15

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Italian neorealism models a politics grounded in sustaining desire rather than resolving it through fantasy, and that this path—though painful—resists the symbolic authority whose existence depends on subjects' abandonment of desire; it also identifies a counter-tendency (the "cinema of integration") in which films ideologically resolve desire's deadlock by presenting the gaze as an attainable object.

      it cedes this freedom to a big Other that exists only through the subject's positing of it.

1506. #1506

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.230

      29 > **Preface** > **Introduction**

      Theoretical move: This endnote passage clarifies key theoretical distinctions—between jouissance and enjoyment, desire and jouissance, gaze and look, cinema and dream—while situating the book's Lacanian framework against phenomenology, neoliberal ideology, and auteur theory.

      this conception of freedom from the constraints of the big Other has nothing to do with freedom in the neoliberal sense... The freedom that U.S. foreign policy attempts to safeguard is an economic freedom that one finds only through submission to the big Other

1507. #1507

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.244

      29 > **16. The Intermixing of Desire and Fantasy**

      Theoretical move: The passage demonstrates, through a close reading of *An Officer and a Gentleman*, how the fantasy of the successful sexual relationship domesticates the traumatic gaze into a reassuring object, and then situates this analysis within the broader debate about film theory's treatment of fantasy and suture as ideological mechanisms.

      he approaches Paula herself, we can see Zack transition from embodying the impossible gaze—the desire of the Other—to embodying a desire that fits securely within our fantasy structure.

1508. #1508

      The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.141

      18

      Theoretical move: The cinema of integration ideologically stabilizes the subject by transforming the gaze from an ontological absence (impossible object-cause of desire) into an empirically fulfillable presence, thereby conjuring the image of a non-lacking Other that conceals the constitutive incompleteness grounding subjective freedom and generates the fantasy of a hidden agency responsible for the subject's failure to enjoy.

      By repairing the lack in the Other, this cinema disguises the source of the subject's radical freedom. The subject is free because the Other is incomplete and cannot provide a foundation for the subject.

1509. #1509

      The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.99

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

      Theoretical move: Zupančič identifies two distinct Nietzschean conceptions of truth: one that identifies truth with the Real (as inaccessible, dangerous force requiring dynamical 'dilution'), and another grounded in perspectivity (a structural/topological disjunction where truth is internal to its situation) — arguing that conflating or choosing between them misreads both the passion for the Real at work in each and the specific way nuance functions in each configuration.

      The truth which loses (or renounces) its support and guaranty in the big Other becomes one with the Real, and is thereafter engaged in the 'passion for the Real.'

1510. #1510

      The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.39

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

      Theoretical move: Zupančič recasts Nietzsche as a metapsychologist whose diagnoses of the ascetic ideal and the extinction of true masters articulate, in Lacanian terms, a structural shift from the Discourse of the Master to the Discourse of the University, driven by the "death of God" understood as the symbolic death of God-as-S1 (the generative power of the Symbolic), a loss whose consequences are traced through the Catholic/Protestant opposition as differing configurations of the relationship between two scenes via the point de capiton.

      this difference, often defined in terms of the difference between God as 'big Other' and the personal God of faith

1511. #1511

      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.

      it is not recognizing oneself in the Other thing, but becoming it. A crucial, essential caveat here, however, is that what is at stake in this 'becoming the Other thing' is not a kind of (mystical) transformation of subjectivity: the Other thing is the subject itself.

1512. #1512

      The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.152

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

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

      Lacan says 'a two exists.' He axiomatically posits (an)other starting point from which (and only through which) it is even possible to think the Other as Other.

1513. #1513

      The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.149

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

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that truth is structurally "not-whole" not because of lack but because of an irreducible surplus—an auto-referential doubling where the level of enunciation always sticks to what is enunciated—and that this same structure (the Real as the gap between knowledge and jouissance, between the Symbolic and Imaginary) underlies the Nietzschean "double affirmation," the Lacanian not-all, and the ontological status of Woman/Truth as irreducible to objet petit a.

      The Other is included in the Other, and this is precisely what makes the Other not-whole.

1514. #1514

      The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.144

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

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Nietzsche's theory of double affirmation—where negation/lack is inscribed only as minimal difference or interval rather than as a direct object—parallels Lacan's logic of the not-all and the inclusion of the "Other of the Other," both of which resist the nihilistic move of transforming Nothing into a positive object; the Lacanian distinction between enunciation and statement, and the thesis that there is no meta-language, are shown to be structural instances of this same "inclusion of the third possibility."

      'There is no Other (of the) Other,' 'the big Other does not exist,' 'the Other is not-whole,' 'the Other is barred/inconsistent,' and so on.

1515. #1515

      The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.196

      <span id="page-186-0"></span>Notes > Part I: Nietzsche the Metapsychologist > Part II: Noon

      Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section (endnotes for Parts I and II of the book), providing citations to Nietzsche, Lacan, Badiou, Deleuze, and others. It is non-substantive as a theoretical argument in itself, though several quoted passages gesture at key conceptual nodes (truth, jouissance, the not-all, analytical discourse).

      Being the Other, in the most radical sense, in the sexual relationship, . . . , woman is that which has a relationship to that Other.

1516. #1516

      Theory Keywords · Various · p.60

      **Object Relations Psychoanalysis** > **The Other of the Other**

      Theoretical move: The passage assembles a keyword-style theoretical compendium covering four major Lacanian concepts — the Other of the Other, Orientalism, Phenomenology, and the Phallus — arguing above all that the Phallus is a paradoxical signifier of exception whose apparent mastery/phallic authority is illusory, dependent on a veil and collective obedience, and structurally tied to castration, lack, and the death drive.

      the deception of the big Other is located in an agent, another subject ('they') who is not deceived.

1517. #1517

      Theory Keywords · Various · p.53

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

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

      'states that are essentially by-products' are states that are essentially produced by the big Other – the 'big Other' designates precisely the agency that decides instead of us, in our place.

1518. #1518

      Theory Keywords · Various · p.7

      **Anxiety**

      Theoretical move: This passage is a keyword-glossary compilation that defines and elaborates several Lacanian and Hegelian concepts — Anxiety, Analysand, Appearance, Sublation (Aufhebung), the Barred subject, Beautiful Soul, Beyond (Jenseits), and Castration — drawing on Žižek, Fink, McGowan, and Kalkavage to show how each concept performs a specific theoretical function within the broader structure of desire, subjectivity, and dialectical mediation.

      The castrated subject is always presenting itself to the Other, looking to win attention and recognition from the Other. And the more it presents itself, the more inescapably castrated it becomes as it is represented by and in the Other.

1519. #1519

      Theory Keywords · Various · p.72

      **The Real** > **Signifier**

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the signifier's entry into the subject inaugurates a structural loss that transforms need into desire mediated by absence, constitutes the subject as split from any satisfying object, and — shifting registers — establishes that singularity emerges not from particular identity but through universality's violence on particularity, while speculative identity names the subject's recognition of itself in radical otherness.

      the subject, in initio, begins in the locus of the Other, in so far as it is there that the first signifier emerges.

1520. #1520

      Theory Keywords · Various · p.30

      **Fantasy**

      Theoretical move: Fantasy is theorised as the subject's orchestration of its relation to objet petit a and the Other's desire, with the purpose of producing jouissance — an excitement that exceeds the pleasure/pain binary and may manifest as disgust or horror, as Freud's Rat Man case illustrates.

      the subject casts the Other's desire in the role most exciting to the subject

1521. #1521

      Theory Keywords · Various · p.26

      **Fantasy**

      Theoretical move: Fantasy is theorized not as wish-fulfillment but as the structural support of desire itself: it constitutes the subject as desiring by providing the coordinates of desire, answers the enigma of the Other's desire, bridges the subject to the impossible lost object, and functions as the necessary supplement to ideology by rendering social dissatisfaction bearable through imaginary enjoyment.

      For Lacan, fantasy provides an answer to the enigma of the Other's desire...Fantasy gives the desire of the subject a concrete form that it otherwise lacks.

1522. #1522

      Theory Keywords · Various

      **Mirror Stage**

      Theoretical move: The passage works through two parallel conceptual pivots: first, how the Mirror Stage structures the subject as constitutively dependent on and rivalrous with the other through the mediating gaze; and second, how Hegel's dialectical concept of the Moment dissolves oppositional thinking by showing that determinations are self-bestowed and mutually constitutive rather than externally imposed.

      To exist, one has to be recognized by an-other. But this means that our image, which is equal to ourselves, is mediated by the gaze of the other.

1523. #1523

      Theory Keywords · Various · p.14

      **Contradiction** > **Desire**

      Theoretical move: Desire is constitutively tied to lack, structured as the desire of the Other, and operates as an endless metonymic movement through signifiers that can never arrive at a final object—making desire irreducibly different from need and rendering any fantasmatic 'solution' to desire a retreat from its fundamental logic.

      The subject's desire arises out of the encounter with the indecipherable desire of the Other, and in this sense, as Lacan often repeats, one's desire is the desire of the Other.

1524. #1524

      Theory Keywords · Various · p.71

      **The Real** > **Reality**

      Theoretical move: The passage surveys a cluster of interrelated psychoanalytic and Hegelian concepts — Real/reality, pleasure/reality principle, repetition, repression, self-consciousness, and separation — showing how each marks a site where symbolization both constitutes and fails to exhaust its object, leaving a remainder (the Real, the repressed, desire) that persistently disrupts any stable closure of meaning or satisfaction.

      separation, involves the alienated subject's confrontation with the Other, not as language this time, but as desire.

1525. #1525

      Theory Keywords · Various

      **Demand**

      Theoretical move: Demand is structurally dialectical: any explicit demand opens onto a hidden dimension of desire, and this gap between demand and desire is not a concealed content but an effect of language itself — the opacity of the signifier generates the illusion of a secret in the Other, and it is through this illusion that the subject's own desire is constituted.

      The subject's desire focuses on what it believes is the secret of the Other, but this secret has no positive content.

1526. #1526

      Theory Keywords · Various · p.31

      **Fantasy** > **Fetish**

      Theoretical move: The passage theorizes the fetish as a structural mechanism that enables subjects to simultaneously know and not-know about lack and castration, arguing that commodity fetishism and Freudian fetishistic disavowal are mutually reinforcing, and that the fetish's efficacy depends on its performative effect remaining opaque to the subject.

      Fetishistic disavowal functions through a fetish object, which enables the subject to believe in a non-lacking Other that could secure the subject's identity.

1527. #1527

      Theory Keywords · Various · p.22

      **Demand** > **Drive** > **Ego**

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian ego is not a seat of agency but a narcissistic construct built from the sedimentation of ideal images whose coherence is sustained by the Symbolic order, and that meaning is therefore Imaginary insofar as it is tied to this ego/self-image — a move that subordinates the ego to the priority of the Unconscious.

      Other ideal images are similarly assimilated by the child which stem from the image of him or herself reflected back from the parental Other.

1528. #1528

      Theory Keywords · Various

      **Fantasy** > **Fetishistic Disavowal**

      Theoretical move: Žižek's concept of fetishistic disavowal is deployed to argue that capitalist ideology is uniquely powerful because it displaces belief onto commodities themselves, so that the cynical postmodern subject who disavows belief is nevertheless structurally caught in ideological capture - a move that links Marxist commodity fetishism to Lacanian logic of the Other as the site of belief.

      While knowledge is on the side of the I, belief is a function of the other.

1529. #1529

      Theory Keywords · Various · p.56

      **Object Relations Psychoanalysis**

      Theoretical move: The passage makes two interlocking theoretical moves: (1) it critiques Object Relations Psychoanalysis for treating the lost object as empirically contingent rather than ontologically constitutive, contrasting Fairbairn's 'paradise lost' with Freud's priority of loss; (2) it elaborates the big Other as the symbolic order that mediates desire, whose constitutive non-existence is the very condition of both freedom and capitalist ideology's grip on the subject.

      The 'big Other' is the nameless and faceless regulator who oversees the written and unwritten rules that direct our lives.

1530. #1530

      Theory Keywords · Various · p.65

      **The Real**

      Theoretical move: The passage constructs a multi-dimensional account of the Lacanian Real as neither a pre-existing thing-in-itself nor a deeper truth behind appearances, but as the structural impossibility immanent to the symbolic order itself—the gap, antagonism, or point of failure that prevents any symbolic totalization, traumatizes both subject and big Other, and paradoxically grounds the subject's freedom from ideological subjection.

      the real traumatizes not just the subject that encounters it but also the big Other as well. The hold that symbolic authority has over subjects depends on the avoidance of the traumatic real

1531. #1531

      Theory Keywords · Various · p.89

      **Transference** > **Unconscious**

      Theoretical move: The passage advances a multi-pronged account of the Lacanian unconscious: it is structured like a language (via the metaphor/metonymy–condensation/displacement homology), it is spatial and relational (between subject and Other), it operates independently of meaning/signification, and its logic can be extended to critique ideological systems like capitalism where surface avowals conceal the real engine (loss/sacrifice) driving the system.

      the Unconscious is between the subject and the Other.

1532. #1532

      Theory Keywords · Various · p.86

      **Transference** > **Unconscious**

      Theoretical move: The passage constructs a multi-layered theoretical account of the Unconscious by moving from Freud's topographical and economic descriptions (timelessness, exemption from contradiction, primary process) through Lacan's reformulation of the unconscious as structured by and dependent on the Other/language, to contemporary arguments (McGowan, Zupančič) that the unconscious is the site of ontological negativity, genuine freedom, and desire that exceeds conscious will.

      the unconscious manifests itself in the symbolic order and emerges through the subject's encounter with a trans-individual symbolic order. There can be no unconscious without an-Other.

1533. #1533

      Theory Keywords · Various · p.37

      **Fantasy** > **Identity**

      Theoretical move: The passage develops a cluster of arguments around Identity, Ideology, and Identification: Identity is always externally determined and thus structurally unfree (Kant/McGowan); Ideology is not false consciousness but the social reality that conceals its own antagonistic kernel (Žižek/Lacan); and excess within narrative is internal to signification rather than external to it, making ideological subversion possible only from within the structure it exceeds.

      Ideology isn't about what you or I spontaneously believe, but about what we believe that the Other believes

1534. #1534

      Theory Keywords · Various · p.45

      **Interpellation** > **Little Other**

      Theoretical move: The passage works through four related concepts—the little other as site of quasi-traumatic subjectivity-formation, the lost object as the structural condition of desire and enjoyment, phallic jouissance as the masculine structure of constitutive dissatisfaction, masochism as sadistic reversal, and the master signifier as the empty signifier that initiates the symbolic order and organizes enjoyment through exclusion—demonstrating that lack, loss, and emptiness are not failures of the system but its generative engine.

      the encounter with the mother's desire, with its enigma (che vuoi?, what does she want?) Is the primordial encounter with the opacity of the Other.

1535. #1535

      Theory Keywords · Various · p.3

      **Absolute Knowing (Hegel)**

      Theoretical move: This passage functions as a keyword glossary, establishing the theoretical content of three interrelated Lacanian/Hegelian concepts—Absolute Knowing, Alienation, and Adaptation—by tracing how each turns on a constitutive negativity: the subject's limit is integral to its understanding, alienation is the very condition of subjectivity rather than something to be overcome, and the human disconnection from environment (jouissance/death drive) is what distinguishes us from animals.

      thought is always caught in the latter, and as such it can only emerge and expand in the big Other.

1536. #1536

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

      Žižek Responds! > [When Desire Is Not the Desire of the Other](#contents.xhtml_ch11) > Sublimation, Jouissance, and “Real” Satisfaction

      Theoretical move: The passage argues against collapsing desire into the drive (as Žižek does), contending instead that a second, non-alienated form of desire—one that approaches but does not merge with the drive—is the basis of Lacanian ethics and provides the subject with "real," partial satisfaction through sublimation acting as a shield that transmits tolerable doses of jouissance.

      Giving ground relative to one's desire—ceding on one's desire—is here plainly presented as a form of self-betrayal that ushers the subject back into the folds of the Other's desire

1537. #1537

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

      Žižek Responds! > [Response to Neroni](#contents.xhtml_ch6a)

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the state's existence depends on a subjective performative dimension (subjects "taking it seriously"), grounding this in the big Other's function, and then draws a strategic political consequence: progressive forces must seize and use state power precisely because the state's form is biased, turning enemy territory into a site of immanent struggle.

      they are pronounced from the big Other—there is an invisible gap which separates pronouncements and declarations of even very influential individuals from state declarations.

1538. #1538

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.13

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

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's communism is grounded not in a positive vision of emancipated production but in privileging the encounter with the Real and the commons over capitalist fantasy, and that this political project is underwritten by a Hegelian-Christian logic of divine self-division and a theory of belief-through-the-Other that exposes the disavowed religious investment in liberal ideology.

      the ultimate figure of authority, the ultimate Other, is nothing but a weak human being. This is the lesson of Christianity.

1539. #1539

      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.

      the move from S1 to S(A), from new harmony to new disharmony, which is an exemplary case of subtraction

1540. #1540

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.325

      Žižek Responds! > [Rethinking Lacan’s Unthinkable “Thing”](#contents.xhtml_ch14)^{<a href="#14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_en14-1" id="14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_nr14-1">1</a>}

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's das Ding, properly understood as a locus of pure lack encountered in the Other rather than in self-referential Dasein-anxiety, is distinguished from Heidegger precisely by extimacy; integrating objet a with das Ding produces not theoretical closure but a coherent account of the impossibility of ultimate theoretical coherence.

      the key point for Lacan is, at the outset anyway, what remains unknown in and about the Other.

1541. #1541

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

      Žižek Responds! > [Rethinking Lacan’s Unthinkable “Thing”](#contents.xhtml_ch14)^{<a href="#14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_en14-1" id="14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_nr14-1">1</a>} > Notes

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

      both the Other and the subject itself are inhabited, indeed constituted, by a void

1542. #1542

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.20

      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.

      the normative subject—whose desire is invariably a reflection of the hegemonic desire of the Other

1543. #1543

      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.

      the absolute contingency of her act, which coincides with a 'momentary suspension of the big Other'

1544. #1544

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.99

      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>} > III

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's Lacanian reading of Hegel correctly recovers neglected Hegelian themes (retroactivity, Spirit as self-producing, rejection of the narcissistic sublation model) but ultimately distorts Hegel by over-assimilating him to Lacan, failing to articulate the genuinely Hegelian alternative regarding Reason and sociality.

      especially with respect to the problem of reason (Hegel's 'big Other') and sociality

1545. #1545

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.277

      Žižek Responds! > [When Desire Is Not the Desire of the Other](#contents.xhtml_ch11) > Salvaging Our Dignity

      Theoretical move: Against Žižek, the passage argues that the objet petit a—by arresting the infinite sliding of the signifier and fixing the subject to its fundamental fantasy—is an ethical force that salvages the subject's dignity and individuality, positioning the ethics of psychoanalysis as an ethics of desire faithful to das Ding rather than to the master's morality or the Other's desire.

      desire moves from one object to the next in ways that feed the goals of capitalism and therefore reflect the Other's desire.

1546. #1546

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

      Žižek Responds! > [Žižek and the War in an Era of Generalized Foreclosure](#contents.xhtml_ch13)^{<a href="#13_iek_and_the_war_in_an_era_of_generalized_foreclosure.xhtml_en13-1" id="13_iek_and_the_war_in_an_era_of_generalized_foreclosure.xhtml_nr13-1">1</a>}

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that contemporary political crisis—exemplified by the war in Ukraine—is best understood not through Baudrillardian simulacra but through the psychoanalytic lens of "generalized foreclosure": a collapse of the big Other that produces an excess of certainty ("too much reality"), dissolves the social bond, and generates the very wars and communicative breakdowns that define our era.

      we have lost the Other, and we have assumed the position of the one who supposes knowledge. When we assume the position of the one who knows, the world itself collapses.

1547. #1547

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.229

      Žižek Responds! > [Response to Bou Ali](#contents.xhtml_ch9a)

      Theoretical move: Žižek defends the Lacanian notion of sexual difference against Butler's historicist critique by arguing that "primordial repression" (Ur-Verdrängung) is not a trans-historical a priori but a retroactively posited presupposition of any social space, and that the gap between form and content must be reflected back into content itself — a move that grounds his concept of "inherent transgression" as the structural supplement that constitutes rather than merely polices the public sphere.

      if we pretend that gays in the army do not exist, it is as if they effectively do not exist (for the big Other).

1548. #1548

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.321

      Žižek Responds! > [Rethinking Lacan’s Unthinkable “Thing”](#contents.xhtml_ch14)^{<a href="#14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_en14-1" id="14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_nr14-1">1</a>}

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that *objet a* and *das Ding* form a two-fold ontic-ontological dynamic: the *objet a* functions as the obstinate objective clue (the ontic "odd feature") that opens onto the abyssal void of *das Ding* (the ontological Real), thereby reversing Žižek's own formulation; and that *das Ding*, linked to the mother's inscrutable desire and mediated by the Name of the Father / signifier, is ultimately "extimate" — the Thing in the Other mirrors an unthinkable excess within the subject itself.

      What was called up by the dreadful smile, however, was the way in which it pointed disturbingly to something abyssal and threatening in the unknown desire of the Other.

1549. #1549

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

      Žižek Responds! > [Žižek and the Retroactivity of the Real](#contents.xhtml_ch3) > Žižek’s Retroactive Ontology

      Theoretical move: Žižek's Hegelian retroactivism grounds a political ethics of committed action over detached critique by showing that failure is constitutive of the dialectic itself, that truth exceeds the Symbolic Order / Big Other of Absolute Knowing, and that the Hegelian Whole is always already split by its own symptoms and unintended consequences.

      the truth that articulates itself is the truth about the failures, gaps, and inconsistencies of the big other

1550. #1550

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.158

      Žižek Responds! > [Response to Neroni](#contents.xhtml_ch6a)

      Theoretical move: Žižek uses self-critique to advance three corrective moves on his standard positions: (1) the disintegration of the big Other is a real social danger, not merely a theoretical non-existence; (2) jouissance is the irreducible motor of ideology that neither class-interest analysis nor discourse-hegemony models can capture; (3) the state must be theorized not only as an instrument of class oppression but as the material embodiment of a 'real illusion' of common protection, as revealed by the pandemic.

      The problem is that there is no all-encompassing big Other that would regulate the interaction between the two: although we can still talk about the big Other in the sense of a 'normal' Swedish society into which gangs are not integrated, the danger is that this big Other is disintegrating

1551. #1551

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.310

      Žižek Responds! > [Response to Rousselle](#contents.xhtml_ch13a)

      Theoretical move: Žižek argues against Rousselle's (and Miller's) thesis of "generalized foreclosure" characterizing the current political era, contending that the symbolic order remains operative—as evidenced by political censorship that still works through metaphoric substitution (absence standing in for prohibited content)—and that the Iraq WMD and Ukraine "bio-labs" narratives function as Hitchcockian MacGuffins rather than psychotic foreclosures.

      there is no psychotic foreclosure at work here, you just don't exist for the institutional big Other.

1552. #1552

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

      Žižek Responds! > [Response to Boothby](#contents.xhtml_ch14a)

      Theoretical move: Žižek argues against Boothby's reversal of the ontic/ontological assignments of *objet a* and *das Ding*: *objet a* is ontological (as object-cause of desire that structures reality through subtraction), while *das Ding* exceeds the entire ontic-ontological distinction as a "trans-ontological" trace of what the ontic was before disclosure — and this logic extends to the subject itself, which is ultimately also a supposition rather than a positive given.

      Das Ding has to be posited as exterior, as the prehistoric Other that is impossible to forget—the Other whose primacy of position Freud affirms in the form of something entfremdet, something strange to me.

1553. #1553

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.169

      Žižek Responds! > [The Subject Is Not Enough](#contents.xhtml_ch7) > Overidentification

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Laibach's strategy of "overidentification"—staging the obscene superego underside of ideology without ironic distance—is theoretically significant precisely because it exposes how ideology functions not through belief but through unconscious enjoyment, while also raising the limit-question of whether critical awareness of one's own disavowed authoritarian traits merely produces a more refined ironic stance rather than genuine ideological rupture.

      their public (especially intellectuals) is obsessed with the 'desire of the Other' […]—what is Laibach's actual position, are they truly totalitarians or not?

1554. #1554

      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.

      these 'principles' are obviously symbolic norms, part of the big Other. But what is non-negotiable for, say, a pervert can be a specific obscene act

1555. #1555

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.262

      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).

      what Sade does not see is that there is no big Other, no Nature as an ontologically consistent realm—nature is already in itself inconsistent, unbalanced, destabilized by antagonisms.

1556. #1556

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.165

      Žižek Responds! > [The Subject Is Not Enough](#contents.xhtml_ch7) > Caught in Their Butterfly Net

      Theoretical move: The passage uses Zhuang Zi's butterfly dream—as read through Lacan's Seminar XI—to argue that the subject (as doubt, deposition, and questioning) is structurally opposed to the ego/identity, and that ideology functions as the 'butterfly net' of identity-captivity, while critique of ideology works like dream-interpretation: accessing unconscious commitments from within, with no view from nowhere.

      the dream of one's identity is simultaneously a way of being 'caught in their butterfly net,' i.e., of living up to some particular image that is ultimately derived from the Other.

1557. #1557

      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>}

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's position on the refugee crisis is best understood not as Eurocentric conditional hospitality but as a resistance to the "double blackmail" of pure heterophilia vs. pure heterophobia, and that Žižek's critique of Levinasian ethics of alterity actually converges with Derrida's own deconstruction of pure alterity as ideological fantasy—though Žižek misses this convergence by lumping Derrida with Levinas.

      Racism confronts us with the enigma of the Other, which cannot be reduced to the partner in symbolic communication; it confronts us with the enigma of that which, in ourselves, resists the universal frame of symbolic communication.

1558. #1558

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.103

      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.

      there is no 'big Other,' and by disabusing ourselves of this delusion we would be in a position to open up that space for the emergence of a 'pure' drive beyond fantasy

1559. #1559

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

      Žižek Responds! > [Response to Zalloua](#contents.xhtml_ch8a)

      Theoretical move: Žižek argues that "dislocation" — the radical re-contextualization of an element into a new symbolic space that confers an entirely new meaning — is the key dialectical concept that corrects misreadings of Hegelian Sublation: in genuine dialectical passage, Universality itself is dislocated and a predicate becomes a new Subject, so that no single overarching Substance persists through history.

      Doesn't Žižek's intervention presuppose a kind of autoimmune Europe, a Europe whose being... and universality is precisely in question, a universality that ought to foreground its various communities?

1560. #1560

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.273

      Žižek Responds! > [When Desire Is Not the Desire of the Other](#contents.xhtml_ch11) > The Dignity of the Thing

      Theoretical move: Against Žižek's insistence on an unbridgeable chasm between the Thing and worldly objects, the passage argues that sublimation—raising a mundane object to the dignity of the Thing—is not mere idealization but a genuine "realization" of the real within reality, and that "not giving way on desire" means choosing the singularity of one's jouissance/sinthome rather than automatically switching to the register of the drive.

      the person, ideal, or principle that has taken possession of our being... the Other's desire becomes utterly irrelevant

1561. #1561

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.10

      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.

      we as subjects are answers to questions emitted directly or indirectly by what Lacan calls the big Other, the symbolic order.

1562. #1562

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.174

      Žižek Responds! > [The Subject Is Not Enough](#contents.xhtml_ch7) > Latching On

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that effective ideological critique requires not only a "negative" moment of critical destabilization but also a "positive" moment of "latching on"—an opening toward something new—and that this dialectical structure parallels both the Hegelian movement of self-consciousness and the Lacanian end of analysis, making critique genuinely transformative rather than merely cynical.

      the end of analysis to Lacan meant the 'fall of the big Other,' i.e., a liberation from certain constraints or a sense of necessity, but liberation comes not only in its negative form—it also implies a sense of capability

1563. #1563

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.132

      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 true courage of an act is always the courage to accept the inexistence of the big Other, that is, to attack the existing order at the point of its symptomal knot.

1564. #1564

      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.

      his 'apathy' is a fake, a lure concealing the all too passionate engagement on behalf of the Other's jouissance.

1565. #1565

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

      Žižek Responds! > [Response to Bjerre](#contents.xhtml_ch7a)

      Theoretical move: Žižek argues that every identity rests on an immanent exclusion, that over-identification (as practiced by Laibach) is more ideologically subversive than ironic distance, and that Laibach's genuine radicality lay not in riding the democratic wave but in prescient critique of democracy's own authoritarian underside—a dark message with no redemptive hope.

      the weight of the symbolic act, of the inscription of my chosen identity into the official big Other. What drew her to suicide was not any change in her bodily or interpersonal reality … but the mere final step of registering what she did.

1566. #1566

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.148

      Žižek Responds! > [Ideology Critique as an Existentialist Choice](#contents.xhtml_ch6) > Žižek’s Intervention

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's theory of ideology is constitutively different from Marx's and Althusser's because it grounds the social order in the Real (unconscious, split subject, antagonism) rather than material-economic conditions, and achieves this by fusing Lacan's non-existent Big Other with Hegel's foundationless dialectics — locating ideology as a cover for external social antagonism rather than as the effect of an economic base.

      Lacan expands the idea of the superego into the social order by theorizing our need to imagine a Big Other, an authority figure par excellence... He famously says, 'This Other doesn't exist.'

1567. #1567

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.22

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

      Theoretical move: Boothby argues that Žižek's failure to articulate a linkage between objet a and das Ding is not mere oversight but may signal a deeper conceptual commitment, and proposes that the two concepts form an essential couplet—each unintelligible without the other—anchored by Lacan's remark in Seminar XVI that objet a "tickles das Ding from the inside."

      das Ding, the unknown Thing in the Other

1568. #1568

      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')

1569. #1569

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

      Žižek Responds! > [<span class="grey">INDEX</span>](#contents.xhtml_end1)

      Theoretical move: This is a back-matter index passage listing proper names and Lacanian sub-concepts with their page/anchor references across the volume; it is non-substantive and performs no theoretical argument.

      Big Other [here](#introduction.xhtml_IDX-651), [here](#introduction.xhtml_IDX-652), [here](#introduction.xhtml_IDX-653)

1570. #1570

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.279

      Žižek Responds! > [When Desire Is Not the Desire of the Other](#contents.xhtml_ch11) > Conclusion

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's theory of desire—grounded in the lost Thing—explains the idiosyncratic, counterproductive, and socially defiant dimensions of desire that ideology critique (à la Žižek) cannot account for, because such desire exceeds the logic of the Other's desire and resists instrumentalization by capitalist-neoliberal imperatives.

      it does not always coincide with the Other's desire: it is surely not in the interest of neoliberal capitalist society to distract us to the point that we become incapable of participating in its performance principle.

1571. #1571

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.102

      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.

      David Lurie appears to have 'negated' the status quo, the 'big Other' of prudence, trust in the police, holding individuals responsible for their deeds, and seeking to redress wrongs done to individuals (justice).

1572. #1572

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.191

      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>} > Racializing the Palestinian Other

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that Levinas's ethics of the face substantializes the Other in a way that, when applied to the Israel-Palestine conflict, ideologically neutralizes concrete racialized suffering; Žižek's counter-move is to insist that true emancipatory ethics must pass through "objective violence" and structural analysis, suspending the dyadic face-to-face encounter in favor of attending to the other's others.

      What is at stake in Žižek's critique of Levinas is the latter's substantialization of the other; the fascination with the Levinasian other blinds us to the structural suffering of concrete others

1573. #1573

      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 Other seduces the subject into submission by appropriating its desire to the extent that, even on an unconscious level, it desires exactly what it is culturally conditioned to desire.

1574. #1574

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.122

      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.

      By striking at himself rather than at his attackers, Söze eliminates the possible psychic hold that his attackers might have on him. He takes away their advantage through the act of self-destruction that eliminates the site of his own psychic investment.

1575. #1575

      Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.151

      Žižek Responds! > [Ideology Critique as an Existentialist Choice](#contents.xhtml_ch6) > Žižek’s Intervention

      Theoretical move: Žižek's theory of ideology is grounded in a "parallax Real" — a non-existing antagonism reconstructed retroactively from multiple symbolic perspectives — which synthesizes Marx's political theory of class struggle with Lacan's theory of the subject while departing from both: against Marx, antagonism is unsolvable; against Lacan, the Real is politicized and mobile rather than returning to the same place.

      Žižek brings Hegel's gesture of retroactivity to bear on Lacan's theory of the subject and thus politicizes the Big Other while also giving us the tools to be able to see this process.

1576. #1576

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

      Žižek Responds! > [Rethinking Lacan’s Unthinkable “Thing”](#contents.xhtml_ch14)^{<a href="#14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_en14-1" id="14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_nr14-1">1</a>}

      Theoretical move: Boothby argues, against Žižek's ontological/ontic assignment, that das Ding is purely ontological (the originary opening of the human relation to being-as-such) while objet petit a is the ontic element that opens onto an ontological horizon—and that the two form an essential couplet rather than independent concepts, with objet a "tickling das Ding from the inside."

      The primal experience of something unknown in the maternal Other, he argued, later provides the template for all of the infant's explorations of objects.

1577. #1577

      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 'momentary suspension of the big Other,' see Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject

1578. #1578

      Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.153

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

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

      the act of identification involves recourse to an anonymous social authority or Other that recognizes it. There is no identity in isolation.

1579. #1579

      Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.160

      [THIS IS IDENTITY POLITICS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_5) > **WE DO THE CONCENTRATING**

      Theoretical move: By taking Nazism as the paradigm of identity politics rather than of universalism, McGowan argues that identitarian projects are structurally self-defeating: they require the very other they aim to eliminate in order to constitute their own identity, so that success is always simultaneously failure.

      Without the other in the position of the enemy, there is no identity. And yet the identity project aims at eliminating this other.

1580. #1580

      Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.84

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

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

      Universality provides us a politics without an enemy because it deprives us of our own illusion of belonging.

1581. #1581

      Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan

      [THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ABSENT](#contents.xhtml_toc1_2) > **WHAT IS NOT KNOWN**

      Theoretical move: McGowan argues that universality is grounded not in shared positive traits but in a shared constitutive lack—the unknown blank spot within every subject—and that this internal absence is both the basis of love and the source of genuine emancipatory connection, which is more terrifying than particularist identity because it demands avowing self-alienation.

      Hegel defines 'knowing in its universality' as 'pure self-knowing in absolute otherness.'

1582. #1582

      What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.62

      Contradictions that Matter > Sexual Division, a Problem in Ontology

      Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan's formulas of sexuation are not about anatomical or cultural difference but about two distinct logical configurations of the same constitutive minus (castration/phallic function) intrinsic to the signifying order, such that sexual difference is ontological rather than secondary—and that feminine jouissance marks precisely the place where the Other's lack is inscribed in the Other itself, functioning as the signifier of missing knowledge rather than as an obstacle to the sexual relation.

      The nonexistence of the Other is itself inscribed into the Other. And this is precisely what the concept of the unconscious is about: the point where the nonexistence of the Other is itself inscribed into the Other.

1583. #1583

      What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.39

      <span id="page-29-0"></span>… and Even Stranger out There > The Anti-Sexus

      Theoretical move: Zupančič uses Platonov's fictional Anti-Sexus device to demonstrate that enjoyment and the Other are irreducibly co-implicated (each is "in" the other), making the non-relation not an absence of relation but a constitutive bias or curvature of discursive space—and thereby refuting both the revolutionary fantasy of liberating humanity from sexuality and the liberal-democratic ideology of neutral pluralism.

      all enjoyment originates at the place of the Other (as the locus of the signifiers). Our innermost enjoyment can occur only at that 'extimate' place.

1584. #1584

      What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.27

      It's Getting Strange in Here … > Christianity and Polymorphous Perversity

      Theoretical move: Zupančič inverts the standard account of religion vs. drive sexuality: Christianity does not repress partial drives but rather represses the *link* between enjoyment and sexuality, because what is truly threatening is not perverse jouissance but the ontological negativity of the sexual relation (the missing signifier), which registers in reality as the unconscious. Humanity is thus not an exception to Nature but the site where Nature's own lack of sexual knowledge acquires its singular epistemic—unconscious—form.

      'knowing the other in the biblical sense' is to engage with the point in the Other where knowledge is lacking.

1585. #1585

      What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.51

      Contradictions that Matter > <span id="page-43-0"></span>Sex or Gender?

      Theoretical move: Župančič argues that Lacan's Real is irreducible to Butler's performative ontology because the emergence of the signifying order is coextensive with a constitutive gap (a "minus one"), and it is precisely at this place of the missing signifier that surplus-enjoyment arises — making sexuality not a being beyond the symbolic but the contradictory effect of the symbolic's own structural impossibility, which is what is lost when "sex" is translated into "gender."

      S(Ⱥ), referring to a constitutive lack in the Other…the signifying field, or the field of the Other, is never neutral…but conflictual, asymmetrical, 'not-all,' ridden with a fundamental antagonism.

1586. #1586

      What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.20

      It's Getting Strange in Here … > Where Do Adults Come From?

      Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that what makes enjoyment "sexual" is not its continuity with adult sexuality or its entanglement with partial drives per se, but its constitutive entanglement with the unconscious as a structural negativity arriving from the Other—such that sexuality is not first present and then repressed, but appears *only* as repressed, making the unconscious and sexuality ontologically co-extensive.

      what sexualizes the pleasure experienced by children is thus first and foremost the encounter with the unconscious of adults; not an encounter with an additional ('adult') surplus knowledge … but with a minus, with something that first comes to them only as missing from its place in the Other.

1587. #1587

      What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.41

      <span id="page-29-0"></span>… and Even Stranger out There > "The Invisible 'Handjob' of the Market"

      Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that modern forms of social power—paradigmatically capitalism—operate not by abolishing the constitutive non-relation of the symbolic order but by *appropriating* it (a "privatization of the negative"), building it into a narrative of a higher Relation (e.g., the invisible hand of the market), while Marx's concept of the proletariat names the precise structural point of this disavowed negativity within the capitalist mode of production.

      what we find at the very core of the most selfish individual enjoyment is actually the Other (looking after a general welfare). What is missing is the next step: and what we find, at the same time, at the core of this Other, is a most 'masturbatory' self-enjoyment.

1588. #1588

      What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.38

      <span id="page-29-0"></span>… and Even Stranger out There > The Anti-Sexus

      Theoretical move: The passage argues that the antagonism between signifier and enjoyment, and between the Other and jouissance, arises not from heterogeneous origins but from their co-origination in the same locus; the Other and enjoyment are 'extimately' related such that any attempt to purify one of the other rediscovers what was expelled at the very heart of the purified term, producing a structural twist rather than a symmetrical relation.

      The Other is both the locus of the signifier and the locus of enjoyment (mine, as well as the enjoyment of the Other).

1589. #1589

      What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.64

      Contradictions that Matter > Sexual Division, a Problem in Ontology

      Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that sexual division maps onto an ontological asymmetry between masculinity as belief (reliance on the phallus as signifying support to repress castration) and femininity as pretense (masquerade as constitutive deception), and further that this same ontological minus—the bar between signifier and signified transposed into the signifier itself—grounds Lacan's theory of the subject of the unconscious as a "with-without" inherent to the signifying order, moving beyond Saussurean structuralism.

      This S(Ⱥ), the other's jouissance as the signifier of the 'Other as barred'

1590. #1590

      What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.109

      Object-Disoriented Ontology > <span id="page-102-0"></span>Death Drive I: Freud

      Theoretical move: Zupančič reconstructs Freud's trajectory in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle"—from the monism of the death drive, through the Eros/Thanatos dualism, to a monism of sexual drives—in order to show that the Lacanian death drive is not a separate drive but the inherent negativity (the gap/void) around which every partial drive circulates, with objet petit a functioning as the "crust" that sticks to this void and makes repetition possible.

      Pleasure (in the Freudian sense), on the other hand, needs no Other; the Other (as Other) is rather disturbing to it.…Sexual drives do not so much go against the pleasure principle as they seem to suspend it.

1591. #1591

      Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

      ‘There’s no central exchange’

      Theoretical move: Fisher argues that the centerlessness of global capitalism produces a structural logic of deflection and fetishistic disavowal — blame circulates between impotent governments and immoral individuals, obscuring the impersonal, acephalous nature of Capital itself, which cannot be held responsible because it is not a subject.

      The supreme genius of Kafka was to have explored the negative atheology proper to Capital: the centre is missing, but we cannot stop searching for it or positing it.

1592. #1592

      Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

      All that is solid melts into PR: Market Stalinism and bureaucratic anti-production

      Theoretical move: Fisher argues that "Really Existing Capitalism," like Really Existing Socialism, depends on the big Other as a structural guarantor of symbolic fiction—not its dissolution—and that post-Fordist bureaucratic audit culture intensifies rather than dissolves this dependency, producing a permanent, Kafkaesque anxiety in which subjects become their own surveyors while the big Other's authority is simultaneously disavowed and re-entrenched.

      One way to understand the 'realism' of capitalist realism is in terms of the claim to have given up belief in the big Other.

1593. #1593

      Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

      All that is solid melts into PR: Market Stalinism and bureaucratic anti-production

      Theoretical move: Fisher argues that neoliberal 'market Stalinism' is not a deviation from capitalism but its essential logic: the proliferation of bureaucratic audit culture and PR-production instantiates a structural compulsion to substitute representations of performance for actual achievement, and this system is held together by the Lacanian big Other as the collective fiction that must be maintained in its constitutive ignorance for social reality to function.

      The big Other is the collective fiction, the symbolic structure, presupposed by any social field. The big Other can never be encountered in itself; instead, we only ever confront its stand-ins.