The Other of the Other

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (87)

1. #01

   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.

   it is possible to detect an echo of Lacan's famous claim that 'There is no Other of the Other'. In other words, the Other itself is inconsistent, marked by a certain lack.

2. #02

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

   The Subject of Freedom > What subject?

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

   There is no cause of the cause of your action; the cause of the cause can only be the subject itself. In Lacanian terms, the Other of the Other is 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.

   We said above that we could understand the subject as the Other of the Other. We can now refine this formula by saying that the Other of the Other is what Lacan calls the objet petit a.

4. #04

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.139

   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).

   Only when it is confronted with Don Juan's steadfast refusal to bend under the weight of this question, to give up on his enigmatic desire, does Heaven become powerless and fall from its position as Master.

5. #05

   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.

   If there is 'an Other of the Other', the very possibility of the act is excluded by definition. And such an exclusion, in spite of the humiliation and torment that the subject must endure at the hands of this Other, is, in fact, pacifying.

6. #06

   Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.136

   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.

   In an ontological sense, my freedom has its basis in the nonexistence of the Other, in the fact that there is no Other to tell me how to desire.

7. #07

   Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.279

   . 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.

   The idea of an unknowing Other becomes thinkable for the first time in the capitalist epoch, but this provides the possibility for rethinking the concept of God itself in these terms.

8. #08

   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.

   In Seminar VI this, the great secret of psychoanalysis, is crystallized in Lacan's famous remark that there is no Other of the Other.

9. #09

   Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.245

   [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 is confronted with the lack in the Other, that there is 'no Other of the Other' (1960/2006) for which the fundamental fantasy serves as a veil.

10. #10

    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 of the Other" [209], [245]

11. #11

    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.

    analysis aims at the realization that the big Other does not exist.

12. #12

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.60

    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.

    Paranoia is at its most elementary a belief into an 'Other of the Other,' into an Other who, hidden behind the Other of the explicit social texture, programs what appears to us as the unforeseen effects of social life and thus guarantees its consistency

13. #13

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.102

    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 social authority that would provide the recognition is not a substantial entity fully consistent with itself... Social authority, in other words, is always unauthorized or groundless.

14. #14

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.267

    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.

    To know that the other in the gap doesn't know or that God is unconscious is to understand that nothing grounds human existence.

15. #15

    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.

    Atheism is incompatible with a freedom that violates the laws of nature or that interrupts the claims of utility. In order to arrive at this type of freedom, one must have a place for God.

16. #16

    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.

    One common form, the 'delusion of persecution', revolves around the Other of the Other, a hidden subject who pulls the strings of the big Other

17. #17

    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)

18. #18

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.316

    **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.

    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

19. #19

    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.

    We posit that there is no locus where the truth constituted by the word can be guaranteed.

20. #20

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.83

    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.

    S signifier of capital O barred as constituting one of the nodal points of this network … To define the Other as the locus of the word, is to say that it is nothing other than the locus where an assertion is posited as veracious. It means, at the same time, that it has no other kind of existence.

21. #21

    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.

    we posit that there is no locus where the truth constituted by the word can be guaranteed.

22. #22

    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.

    In order to disentangle this, a structure of the Other must be stated which does not permit it to be overridden. Hence this formula: that there is no Other of the Other, or our affirmation that there is no metalanguage.

23. #23

    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... There is no... true about the true. In the same way there is no reason to consider the dimension of the transference of transference.

24. #24

    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... There is no, to respond to an old murmuring at my seminar at Sainte-Anne, alas, I am very sorry to have to tell you, true about the true.

25. #25

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.200

    **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.

    In order to disentangle this, a structure of the Other must be stated which does not permit it to be overridden. Hence this formula: that there is no Other of the Other, or our affirmation that there is no metalanguage.

26. #26

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.373

    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.

    there is no empty set that contains an empty set. There are not two empty sets.

27. #27

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.338

    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.

    does it know that it is known? ... the aporia in any case only being the introduction to a structure of the Other.

28. #28

    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.

29. #29

    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.

    I can only assume here that you will recall my statement that there is no Other of the Other. The Other, that is, the locus in which everything that can be articulated on the basis of the signifier comes to be inscribed, is, in its foundation, the Other in the most radical sense.

30. #30

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.159

    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.

    there is no Other of the Other, and that that is the reason why this signifier, opened up by this parenthesis, marks this Other as barred: S(0)

31. #31

    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.

    Does the Other know? There was someone named Empedocles... for Empedocles, that God was the most ignorant of all beings; and this very precisely because of knowing no hatred.

32. #32

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.208

    **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.

    there is created in a way the imaginary model of an Other of the Other and, in this kind of intermediary phase, the woman is for man the signifier of the Other

33. #33

    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.

    I made the remark that there is no Other of the Other, namely, that what in my little schema depicting the Borromean knot (IV-2) is characterised by a special accentuation of the hole

34. #34

    Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.117

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallic Real constitutes man's fundamental affliction — "aphligé" by a phallus that bars him from genuine access to the body of the Other — such that all discourse, especially the Discourse of the Master, is grounded on a semblance that phallus-as-signifier-index-1 installs; the Name-of-the-Father is reread as a merely tribal supplement to the Borromean knot, and unconscious signifier-copulation (savoir) is what gives rise to the subject as pathème divided by the One.

    He would need an Other of the Other for the body of the Other should not be for his a semblance

35. #35

    Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.130

    **Introduction** > **Seminar 8: Tuesday 18 March 1975**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Borromean Knot—understood through the topology of the torus—displaces the insoluble question of objectivity and grounds the three consistencies (Imaginary, Symbolic, Real) as irreducible, such that their triple points generate meaning, phallic jouissance, and the Name-of-the-Father respectively; identification is then reformulated as three distinct operations corresponding to the three registers of the knot's real Other.

    it is very specifically that there is no Other of the Other which gives it its consistency

36. #36

    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.

37. #37

    Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.165

    Seminar 10: Wednesday 13 April 1976

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that his invention of the Borromean knot as a writing of the Real constitutes a 'forcing'—a traumatic inscription of a new symbolic form—that both responds symptomatically to Freud's energetics and exposes the absence of any Other of the Other, while also identifying the Real as his own sinthome rather than a spontaneous idea.

    there is no Other of the Other. And that this here would be the place... but that there is nothing of the kind. At the place of the Other of the Other, there is no, no order of existence.

38. #38

    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

39. #39

    Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.53

    **Seminar 4: Wednesday 13 January 1976**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Borromean knot is the proper topological support for "first truths" about the Real, which is founded precisely by excluding meaning; and that the speaking being's (parlêtre's) only consistency is bodily/imaginary, while the knot — not the cord — is what properly ex-sists, grounding both truth and the analyst's responsibility in know-how (savoir-faire) rather than in any Other of the Other.

    there is no Other of the Other to carry out the Last Judgement... The real Other of the Other, namely impossible, is the idea that we have of artifice, in so far as it is a doing, faire, a doing that escapes us.

40. #40

    Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.167

    Seminar 10: Wednesday 13 April 1976 > QUESTIONS

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the sinthome from psychoanalysis proper, arguing that it is the *psychoanalyst* (not psychoanalysis) who functions as a sinthome — a "help against" in the biblical sense — and that the Real, as lawless and devoid of meaning, may itself be illuminated as sinthome; simultaneously, the Borromean knot is defended as a topology that can hold Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real together as separable rings without a common point.

    the Other of the Other, is what I have just defined now as the little hole there. That the little hole might be able to provide a help all by itself, it is precisely in this that the hypothesis of the Unconscious has its support.

41. #41

    Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.51

    **Seminar 3: Wednesday! 6 December 1975**

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the argument that the Borromean knot of three (Imaginary, Symbolic, Real) constitutes the minimal support of the subject — and is itself the structure of paranoid psychosis — while the Sinthome emerges as a necessary fourth term that knots the three rings when they would otherwise come apart, with phallic jouissance located at the conjunction of the Symbolic and the Real, and meaning at the conjunction of the Symbolic and the Imaginary.

    there is no Other of the Other that there is nothing Opposite the Symbolic, locus of the Other as such. That there is no enjoyment of the Other because there is no Other of the Other

42. #42

    Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.75

    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.

    S(Ø)… the signifier of the lack in the Other… when he discovers that the Other can recognise the existence of this key while not knowing it

43. #43

    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.

    what is meant by S(Ø), that is what that means, which is that it does not answer

44. #44

    Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.301

    **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.

    Whatever announces itself as I am the one who am is totally problematic, not sustained, and almost unsustainable, or only sustainable by an idiot.

45. #45

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.455

    **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.

    This beyond that is articulated in the upper line of our schema is the Other of the Other... The Other of the Other is the locus in which the Other's speech takes shape as such.

46. #46

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.442

    **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.

    beyond the Other placed primordially in the position of omnipotence by its power... the Other of this Other, as it were, that is, what makes it possible for the subject to become aware of this Other, the locus of speech, as itself symbolized.

47. #47

    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).

    the Other also has, beyond itself, this Other capable of giving the law its foundation.

48. #48

    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.

    the Other of the Other 176, 437-8, 450-1, 457, 472

49. #49

    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.

    what is produced at the upper level, that of the command and guilt, which is linked to the Other of the Other.

50. #50

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.463

    **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 privileged signifier of the relationship to the Other of the Other, and this makes it a central signifier of the unconscious.

51. #51

    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.

    will always encounter in the Other, in some ways, the Other of the Other, that is, its own law.

52. #52

    Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.306

    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.

    There is no other of the Other [section heading]

53. #53

    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.

    There is no Other of the Other, as I explained before by giving you what I called the final answer, in the form of the signifier of the barred Other [S(A)].

54. #54

    Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.391

    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).

    he encounters in the Other the hollow or empty space that I formulated by telling you that 'there is no Other of the Other'; that no possible signifier can guarantee the authenticity of the series of signifiers

55. #55

    Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.313

    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.

    The big secret is that there is no Other of the Other.

56. #56

    Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.386

    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.

    This is what is at issue when I tell you that 'there is no Other of the Other.' What does this mean if it is not that no signifier exists that can guarantee any concrete, serial manifestation of signifiers.

57. #57

    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 Other of the Other only exists as a place. It finds its place even if we cannot find it anywhere in the real, even if all we can find to occupy this place in the real is simply valid insofar as it occupies this place.

58. #58

    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, and no other source of tragedy than this very fate.

59. #59

    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.

    there is no Other of the Other, nothing which guarantees the truth of the law, the only real Other being what one can enjoy without the law

60. #60

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.66

    chapter 2 > Shofar

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the object voice — paradigmatically embodied in the shofar — is not simply opposed to logos but is its hidden support: the paternal voice that founds the Law is structurally identical to the "other" voice it ostensibly persecutes, and both are organized around an ineradicable lack (S(A/)) that links voice, jouissance, femininity, and the impossible foundation of the Other. The voice is further theorized as the missing link between bodies and languages, connecting Lacanian object-theory to Badiou's ontology.

    the point of the always-missing ultimate signifier which would totalize the Other, the point of the absent foundation of the Law

61. #61

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.110

    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 of the superego obfuscates this locus, fills it with its vocality, thus seemingly presenting the awesome figure of 'the Other of the Other,' the Other without a lack, the horrendous Other

62. #62

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.161

    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.

    This other difference will emerge only once our appeals to the Other have been abandoned, once we accept the fact that there is 'no Other of the Other.'

63. #63

    Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.35

    Predestination as Emancipation > <span id="unp-ruda-0013.xhtml_p34" class="page"></span>Affirm and Declare: Predestination!

    Theoretical move: By reading Luther's anti-Erasmus argument through a Lacanian-Hegelian lens, Ruda shows that the doctrine of predestination functions as a 'forced choice' that abolishes free will precisely to open the space for genuine faith: the very structure of 'no Other of the Other' (no cause behind God's cause) and the gap between revealed God and hidden God enact a logic homologous to Lacanian alienation and the Real, reframing predestination as an emancipatory, anti-perverse position.

    there cannot be a cause to the cause, no Other of the Other, to use a Lacanian vocabulary.

64. #64

    Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.70

    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.

    it is this heteronomous Other that is the unthinkable ground from which truths emerge, they emerge from a necessarily contingent act of creation. In this sense truths and laws are not compatible (not even the laws of logic)

65. #65

    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.

66. #66

    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.

    This is why Lacan maintains that there is no Other of the Other, no ultimate guarantee of the Other's reliability

67. #67

    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.

    Lacan maintains that there is no Other of the Other—no ultimate guarantee of the Other's meaning.

68. #68

    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).

    the fact that the Other now openly admits that God was always already dead, and that there is therefore no Other of the Other, means that we are deprived even of this debt, along with its power to motivate us.

69. #69

    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.

    there are no guarantees. Democracy, Lefort argues, is 'the dissolution of the ultimate markers of certainty.' The discourse of power—the law—that gives birth to the modern subject can guarantee neither its own nor the subject's legitimacy.

70. #70

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.151

    **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.

    This other difference will emerge only once our appeals to the Other have been abandoned, once we accept the fact that there is 'no Other of the Other.' Nothing guarantees the Other's certainty, consistency, or completeness.

71. #71

    The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.37

    <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.

    why is it wrong to want to be like God, knowing the difference between good and evil?... it is difficult to see how the punishment is in any way commensurate to the crime.

72. #72

    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.

    he refuses to repent, for to do this would imply that there is a view of God that is not distorted

73. #73

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.397

    **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.

    the fate of god himself is decided in our revolutionary activity.

74. #74

    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.

    does the a priori possibility of viruses disintegrating the virtual universe not point towards the fact that, in the virtual universe also, there is no 'Other of the Other,' that this universe is a priori inconsistent

75. #75

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.22

    **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.

    only the link to Christianity (to its central motif of the lack in the Other itself) makes Marxism truly materialist.

76. #76

    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.

    S(A) stands for the impossibility of the signifier of the big Other, for the fact that there is no 'Other of Other,' that the field of the Other is inherently inconsistent.

77. #77

    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 (beyond or outside of the Other) might in fact ex-sist

78. #78

    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.

    although Lacan is already clear here about the inconsistency of the big Other, about its barred character, about the fact that 'there is no Other of the Other'

79. #79

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.22

    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.

    while 'seduction' cannot be reduced simply to the subject's fantasy, while it does refer to a traumatic encounter with the Other's 'enigmatic message,' bearing witness to the Other's unconscious

80. #80

    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 fantasize about another kind of Other, an Other of the Other, who does have direct access. The belief in the Other of the Other allows us to avoid recognizing our own role in constituting the historical object as such.

81. #81

    The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.87

    **Desire and Not Showing Enough**

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that filmic narration produces desire not through the manipulation of an empirically withheld fabula but through the constitutive absence of the gaze as objet petit a—an impossible object that resists meaning and cannot be revealed, only attested to as an irreducible emptiness that triggers spectatorial desire.

    he assumes that there is an Other of the Other, a force responsible for the filmic narration that *really* knows.

82. #82

    The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.257

    29 > **27. Alain Resnais between the Present and the Past**

    Theoretical move: This footnote apparatus advances two theoretical moves: (1) it deploys the concepts of fantasy, desire, and the Subject Supposed to Know to analyze Resnais's treatment of historical memory and trauma; and (2) it introduces shame as structurally tied to the concealment-gesture of fantasizing, extending the ethics of fantasy into Wenders's filmmaking.

    These theories testify to the guests' collective belief in the special knowledge of M—their belief in the Other of the Other.

83. #83

    The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.142

    18

    Theoretical move: The cinema of integration ideologically stabilizes the subject by transforming the gaze from an ontological absence (impossible object-cause of desire) into an empirically fulfillable presence, thereby conjuring the image of a non-lacking Other that conceals the constitutive incompleteness grounding subjective freedom and generates the fantasy of a hidden agency responsible for the subject's failure to enjoy.

    the actual Other of the Other in the film is God himself, as testified to by the living power of the Ark.

84. #84

    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.

    We could also translate this as the 'guarantor of the truthfulness of the truth,' or 'guarantor of truth of that which, in language, is produced as truth.' ... Lacan's thesis that 'there is no Other (of the) Other' ... means that the criterion in question is inherent to language.

85. #85

    The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.142

    <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."

    The Other (of the Other) is included in the Other—and this is precisely what makes the Other Other, not just a duplication or repetition of the One. On account of this inclusion, the Other is, by definition, not-all or not-whole.

86. #86

    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. This subject, who holds and operates the threads of the deception proper to the symbolic order, is what Lacan calls 'the Other of the Other.'

87. #87

    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.

    'there is no Other of the Other.' If woman is the Other of man, man is not the Other of woman. There is no Other of the Other—the Other is included in the Other (as the Other sex).