Traversal of Fantasy
ELI5
Traversing the fantasy means following your deepest story about what would make you whole all the way to the point where you see there was never any missing piece to find — and that moment of recognition actually frees you to act differently in the world.
Definition
Traversal of the fantasy (la traversée du fantasme) designates, in Lacan's mature teaching, the terminal operation of analysis: the movement by which the subject ceases to be structured by the fundamental fantasy and instead assumes the position of its own cause. In the fundamental fantasy ($ ◇ a), the subject relates to the objet petit a as if it were a lost object to be recovered—a structure that simultaneously organises desire and screens the Real. The traversal does not simply dissolve this frame by external critique or rational demystification; it is, as Zupančič insists, an immanent movement that can only be made "from inside" the fantasy's own logic, driven to its end-point. Lacan marks the outcome in Seminar XI as a conversion: "the experience of the fundamental phantasy becomes the drive," moving the subject from the economy of desire (oriented toward an always-deferred object) into a circular, aim-satisfying relation to the drive itself—a "beyond of analysis" that Lacan says has never been theorised. Fink formalises this as the subject "subjectifying trauma," taking upon itself the Other's desire that produced it as split subject, thereby crossing from the right-hand to the left-hand term of the fantasy schema and becoming the cause rather than the effect.
The concept carries significant political weight in post-Lacanian theory. For Žižek, traversal does not mean escaping jouissance but "unhooking" it from its fantasmatic frame—paradoxically, a full identification with the fantasy's real core that vacillates the consistency of reality rather than exchanging illusion for sobriety. For McGowan, traversal is the necessary precondition of any authentic political act: as long as a subject maintains fantasmatic investment in symbolic authority, it cannot perceive, let alone act on, the opening that political transformation requires. Žižek's formulation sharply distinguishes traversal from Enlightenment ideology-critique (which merely argues against fantasy while remaining libidinal captives of it) and from Stavrakakis's reading, which treats it as a therapeutic dissolution enabling democratic realism. Žižek instead theorises it as the radical move that suspends—rather than integrates—the structuring power of the fundamental fantasy, instituting new coordinates for experience rather than extending existing ones.
Evolution
In Seminar XI (1964, "object-a" period), Lacan first formally names traversal of the fundamental fantasy as the end-point of analysis, defining it structurally as the "crossing of the plane of identification" — the moment after which the experience of the fundamental phantasy is converted into the drive. He explicitly marks it as an uncharted "beyond of analysis" that has "never been approached." The concept is already tied to the analyst's function: by maintaining the distance between identification (I) and the objet a, the analyst enables this crossing; the analyst's desire "isolates the a." At this stage the concept is primarily clinical and its political or ethical extensions remain undeveloped.
By Seminars XIV and XV (mid-to-late 1960s), as Fink documents, the notion of "separation" gives way to la traversée du fantasme as the dominant name for the analytic end-point. The emphasis shifts toward subjectification of jouissance: the subject must assume the traumatic cause of its own advent, inhabiting the place previously occupied by the Other's desire. This reformulation makes the concept explicitly about a change in the subject's relation to the Real of the Other's desire — not merely a cognitive demystification but an assumption of that which made the subject possible.
Among the secondary commentators working in the corpus, the concept undergoes a bifurcation. Zupančič (alenka-zupancic-ethics-of-the-real) insists on the immanence of the movement — traversal proceeds from within the fantasy's own logic, through desire pursued to its ultimate horizon, rather than by giving up on one's Cause. Fink (the-lacanian-subject) emphasises the structural, schema-level operation: crossing the square, subjectifying trauma. McGowan (enjoying-what-we-don-t-have-th, the-real-gaze-film-theory-afte, todd-mcgowan-sheila-kunkle) extends the concept into film-political theory, arguing that the traversal is not merely the end of analysis but the condition of possibility for genuine political action, catalysed through encounters with cinematic form.
Žižek's treatment (slavoj-zizek-less-than-nothing, slavoj-zizek-sex-and-the-failed-absolute) is the most paradoxical: traversal means not the abandonment but the full identification with the fantasy's real core — "vacillating" reality by accepting its inconsistent Non-All, "unhooking" jouissance from the fantasmatic frame without purifying it. This distinguishes Žižek sharply from Stavrakakis (represented in McGowan's critique), who reads traversal as liberation from fantasy enabling pragmatic-democratic politics. McGowan himself contests the dominant reading shared by Stavrakakis — that traversal dissolves fantasy as obstacle — arguing instead for fantasy's irreducible positive political valence, a position that sits in tension with the strictly clinical-liberatory reading.
Key formulations
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) (p.288)
after the mapping of the subject in relation to the a, the experience of the fundamental phantasy becomes the drive. What, then, does he who has passed through the experience of this opaque relation to the origin, to the drive, become? This is the beyond of analysis
Lacan's own canonical formulation of traversal as the conversion from fantasy to drive, marking it simultaneously as the telos of analysis and as an unexplored theoretical frontier.
Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan (p.245)
We cannot 'get beyond' the fantasy by giving up on the Cause that animates us but, on the contrary, only by insisting on it until the end. Such a 'traversing the fantasy' [La traversée du fantasme] is a step which can be taken only from 'inside' this fantasy.
Zupančič's pivotal insistence on the immanence of traversal — it is not an exit from fantasy but its completion from within — which links the concept to the ethics of pure desire and separates it from any model of external critique.
Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (page unknown)
'Traversing the fantasy' does not mean going outside reality, but 'vacillating' it, accepting its inconsistent non-All…to 'traverse the fantasy' therefore means, paradoxically, to fully identify oneself with the fantasy
Žižek's paradoxical inversion of the common-sense reading: traversal is not abandonment of fantasy but full identification with its real core, a formulation that has decisively shaped post-Lacanian political theory.
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (p.82)
The traversing of fantasy is the process by which the subject subjectifies trauma, takes the traumatic event upon him or herself, and assumes responsibility for that jouissance.
Fink's clinical-structural definition, grounding traversal in the schema of alienation/separation and specifying it as the assumption of the Other's desire as one's own traumatic cause.
Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution (p.54)
The subject traverses the fantasy when it recognizes that there is no object beyond the fantasy that it might obtain. Traversing the fantasy requires accepting that satisfaction derives from the fantasy itself rather than from obtaining the object.
McGowan's Hegelian reformulation, which aligns traversal with reaching the Absolute: accepting that satisfaction is structural (residing in the contradiction/fantasy itself) rather than telic (located in a recoverable object).
Cited examples
Sygne de Coûfontaine's final 'no' in Claudel's The Hostage (literature)
Cited by Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan (p.245). Zupančič reads Sygne's final refusal (Versagung) not as a mysterious afterthought but as the necessary outcome of having pursued pure desire to its ultimate horizon — the sacrifice of the very thing in whose name she sacrificed everything. This trajectory from sacrifice to 'no' models the immanent movement of traversal: the fantasy is not negated from outside but followed to its dissolution point, opening onto the register of jouissance.
Orson Welles's film version of Kafka's The Trial — the rereading of the parable 'Before the Law' (film)
Cited by Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (page unknown). Žižek invokes Welles's adaptation as an exemplary breaking of the fantasmatic spell: Josef K.'s cutting short of the parable and refusing the lawyer's fantasmatic narrative models how traversal does not mean accepting reality as it is, but vacillating its consistency by refusing the fantasmatic frame that makes it appear solid.
John Murdoch in Dark City (1998) — the traversal of the Shell Beach fantasy (film)
Cited by Lacan and Contemporary Film (page unknown). Murdoch's discovery that Shell Beach does not exist — that the wall at the end of the tunnel gives way to nothing — models the clinical structure of traversal: the subject recognises the object of desire as a product of its own positing, breaks its fantasmatic investment in symbolic authority (the Strangers), and can thereby undertake an authentic political act that transforms the entire ideological edifice.
Jonathan in Rollerball — erasing the video of Ella (film)
Cited by Lacan and Contemporary Film (page unknown). Jonathan's act of erasing the video of his lost love Ella — the fantasmatic object sustaining his compliance with corporate authority — illustrates traversal as the relinquishment of the fantasmatic support, after which he is able to unite the crowd in collective political defiance.
Mulholland Drive (Lynch, 2001) (film)
Cited by The Impossible David Lynch (p.114). McGowan reads Mulholland Drive as a film that traverses fantasy by following it to its dissolution point, where the intersection of fantasy and desire reveals the traumatic real (Diane's dead body). Lynch illustrates that the logic of fantasy itself pushes the subject toward the point of its own dissolution — traversal is not imposed from outside but is an internal movement of fantasy's own structure.
Bicycle Thieves (de Sica) — Antonio's capitalist individualist fantasy (film)
Cited by The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan (p.125). McGowan argues that de Sica's film stages the illusoriness of Antonio's individualist fantasy for the spectator (if not for Antonio himself), with the final shot of Antonio merging into the anonymous crowd dissolving the fantasy of exceptional individuality. The film's formal choices enact traversal for the spectator, demonstrating how Italian neorealism makes the political act of sustaining desire possible.
J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace — David Lurie's final gesture (literature)
Cited by Žižek Responds! (p.103). Finkelde uses David's act of giving up the last dog (and himself to his fate) to contest Žižek's reading of traversal as requiring a residual 'pure drive beyond fantasy.' For Finkelde, David achieves a genuinely Hegelian negation-of-negation without the voluntarist remainder Žižek insists upon, suggesting that traversal can occur without the positing of a 'pure drive' excess.
Tensions
Within the corpus
Whether traversing the fantasy means dissolving it (liberation from its hold) or fully identifying with its real core (a paradoxical intensification)
Stavrakakis (reported by McGowan): traversing the fantasy is the task of dissolving utopian-fantasmatic investment, enabling the subject to recognise and accept the constitutive lack in the social — a therapeutic-democratic operation that frees political agency from illusory fullness. — cite: enjoying-what-we-don-t-have-th-todd-mcgowan p. 222
Žižek: 'to traverse the fantasy therefore means, paradoxically, to fully identify oneself with the fantasy' — traversal is not the abandonment of jouissance but its 'unhooking' from the fantasmatic frame; reality is 'vacillated' rather than soberly accepted. — cite: slavoj-zizek-less-than-nothing-hegel-and-the-shadow-of-dialectical-materialism-v
This is the central interpretive fault-line of the concept in the corpus: liberation-from vs. identification-with the fantasy's real kernel.
Whether traversal produces a residual 'pure drive beyond fantasy' (a positive excess) or completes itself without any such remainder
Žižek: the Versagung that equals traversal 'opens up the space for the emergence of the pure drive beyond fantasy' — a figure of undead, repetitive resistance that cannot be reduced to mere acceptance of fate. — cite: todd-mcgowan-dominik-finkelde-eds-zizek-responds-bloomsbury-publishing-2022 p. 103
Finkelde (via the Disgrace reading): there is 'nothing more un-Hegelian than the idea of the emergence of the pure drive beyond fantasy'; David's gesture of giving up the dog shows a negation-of-negation that leaves the subject as subject of (not subject to) its drives, without a voluntarist pure-drive residue. — cite: todd-mcgowan-dominik-finkelde-eds-zizek-responds-bloomsbury-publishing-2022 p. 103
This is an internal tension within a single source, but it stages a substantive disagreement between Žižek and a Hegelian critic about whether traversal has a positive remainder.
Whether the positive political valence of fantasy means traversal should be deferred or complicated, or whether traversal remains the necessary gateway to political action
McGowan (Enjoying What We Don't Have): fantasy has an irreducible positive political valence — it enables transcendent experiences and makes alternatives to the symbolic structure thinkable; the dominant psychoanalytic-political position of 'traversing fantasy' risks abolishing this productive dimension. — cite: enjoying-what-we-don-t-have-th-todd-mcgowan p. 222
McGowan (Lacan and Contemporary Film): 'There is no authentic political act without a prior traversing of the fantasy' — traversal is the unambiguous precondition for political subjectivation and collective action, not merely one option among others. — cite: todd-mcgowan-sheila-kunkle-lacan-and-contemporary-film-other-press-2004
McGowan holds both positions across different works, generating an internal tension between fantasy's productivity and the necessity of its traversal for politics.
Across frameworks
vs Ego Psychology
Lacanian: For Lacan, identification with the analyst — the cornerstone of Ego Psychology's therapeutic model — is a trap that deepens alienation within the Other rather than resolving it. The end of analysis is not a stronger ego modelled on the analyst's but the traversal of the fundamental fantasy, which subjectifies the traumatic cause of the subject's advent and converts fantasy into drive. This is structurally incompatible with the logic of identification.
Ego Psychology: Ego Psychology (Hartmann, Kris, Loewenstein) holds that therapeutic success consists in strengthening the 'conflict-free ego sphere' and enabling the patient to identify with the analyst's healthy, reality-adapted ego. The end of analysis is marked by the analysand's capacity to sustain mature object relations and tolerate frustration — a model in which fantasy is managed and reality-testing is restored rather than the fundamental fantasy being 'traversed.'
Fault line: The deep disagreement is over whether the subject's alienation is a structural condition that must be assumed (Lacan) or a pathological deviation from a norm of autonomous ego-functioning that can be corrected through identification (Ego Psychology).
vs Humanistic Self Actualization
Lacanian: Lacanian theory holds that there is no pre-existing self to be actualized: the subject is constituted by the Other's desire, structured by a fundamental fantasy that screens the constitutive lack. Traversing the fantasy does not reveal an authentic self beneath the distortions; it reveals the void — the subject as barred, as nothing but the cut that separates it from the Real. The 'beyond of analysis' is not fullness but drive without fantasmatic support.
Humanistic Self Actualization: Humanistic psychology (Maslow, Rogers) posits a natural tendency toward self-actualisation that is blocked by social conditions, conditional regard, and inauthentic self-concepts. Therapeutic work consists in removing obstacles so that the organism's intrinsic growth potential can unfold. The goal is a fuller, more authentic experience of the self — a positive plenitude rather than an encounter with a constitutive void.
Fault line: The fault line is constitutive lack vs. adaptive plenitude: Lacan holds the subject is structured around an irreducible void, while humanistic theory holds that beneath distortion lies a healthy, growth-oriented core self.
vs Frankfurt School
Lacanian: Lacanian traversal of fantasy does not aim at ideological demystification through reason or the recovery of undistorted communication. It targets the libidinal investment in fantasy that persists even after ideological critique — the level at which rational argument leaves fascination intact. Žižek explicitly argues that Enlightenment anti-racism fails precisely because it operates at the level of rational argumentation while leaving the fantasmatic spell unbroken.
Frankfurt School: Frankfurt School critical theory (Adorno, Horkheimer, Habermas) frames ideological domination as the distortion of rational capacities — through the culture industry, instrumental reason, or systematically distorted communication. Emancipation proceeds through immanent critique that exposes these distortions and restores the conditions of autonomous reason and undistorted discourse. The assumption is that ideology critique, properly conducted, can free subjects from false consciousness.
Fault line: The disagreement concerns whether ideology's grip is primarily cognitive (distorted reason, false consciousness — Frankfurt School) or libidinal-fantasmatic (sustained by jouissance that survives rational demystification — Lacan), and correspondingly whether emancipation operates at the level of critique or of traversal.
All occurrences
Where it appears in the corpus (31)
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#01
Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.245
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.
We cannot 'get beyond' the fantasy by giving up on the Cause that animates us but, on the contrary, only by insisting on it until the end. Such a 'traversing the fantasy' [La traversée du fantasme] is a step which can be taken only from 'inside' this fantasy.
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#02
Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.222
I > Th e Politics of Fantasy > Th e Psychoanalytic Embrace of Fantasy
Theoretical move: Against the dominant view — shared by philosophy, Marxism, and a strand of psychoanalytic practice (Stavrakakis) — that psychoanalysis should dissolve fantasy by "traversing" it, McGowan argues that fantasy has an irreducible positive political valence: while it conceals subjection to the symbolic structure, it simultaneously enables experiences of transcendence that make alternatives to that structure thinkable, facilitate encounters with traumatic disruption, and link loss to enjoyment.
Stavrakakis sees the contemporary political task of psychoanalysis as one of 'traversing the fantasy of utopian thought.'
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#03
Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.338
I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 8. The Politics of Fantasy
Theoretical move: This notes section advances the argument that fantasy is theoretically inescapable—neither Western philosophy nor Marxist politics can fully overcome it—and that the properly psychoanalytic (Lacanian) attitude toward fantasy is not its elimination but its dialectical traversal, which simultaneously dispels and reconfigures it.
Traversing the fantasy as overcoming fantasy's power over the subject so that the subject can act as a political being... Richard Boothby sees traversing the fantasy in almost the opposite way, as a way of devoting oneself completely to the kernel of the fantasy.
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#04
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 end of analysis is thus not conceived of by Lacan as the realisation of some blissful plenitude, but quite the contrary, as a moment when the subject comes to terms with his utter solitude.
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#05
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_90"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_page_0108"></span>**imaginary**
Theoretical move: The Imaginary order is defined not as mere illusion but as a structurally necessary, symbolically conditioned register whose basis is the mirror-stage ego-formation; the passage argues that reducing psychoanalysis to the imaginary (identification with the analyst, dual relationship) betrays the symbolic essence of analytic work, and that the only therapeutic purchase on the imaginary comes through its translation into the symbolic.
This use of the symbolic is the only way for the analytic process 'to cross the plane of identification' (S11, 273).
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#06
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.
the task of analysis thus becomes, in one of Lacan's last definitions of the end of analysis, to identify with the sinthome.
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#07
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_61"></span>**end of analysis**
Theoretical move: The passage systematically maps Lacan's evolving formulations of the 'end of analysis' across his teaching, arguing that the end-point is a logical terminus defined by subjective destitution, traversal of fantasy, and identification with the sinthome—not therapeutic cure, ego-strengthening, or identification with the analyst—and that it always involves the fall of the Subject Supposed to Know and the reduction of the analyst to objet petit a.
In 1964 he describes it as the point when the analysand has 'traversed the radical fantasy' (S11, 273)
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#08
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 analysand must go on to 'traverse the fundamental fantasy'… the treatment must produce some modification of the subject's fundamental mode of defence, some alteration in his mode of jouissance.
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#09
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_205"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_page_0234"></span> **topology**
Theoretical move: Topology is argued to be not merely a metaphor for structure but structure itself in Lacan's framework, privileging the function of the cut as a non-intuitive, purely intellectual means of expressing the symbolic order and distinguishing continuous from discontinuous transformations in psychoanalytic treatment.
so the subject can traverse the fantasy without making a mythical leap from inside to outside
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#10
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_125"></span>**moebius Strip**
Theoretical move: The Möbius strip, as a topological figure, is deployed by Lacan to dissolve binary oppositions (inside/outside, signifier/signified, etc.) by demonstrating that apparently discrete terms are in fact continuous, and to model the possibility of traversing the fantasy without a localizable crossing point.
The moebius strip also helps one to understand how it is possible to 'traverse the fantasy' (S11, 273). It is only because the two sides are continuous that it is possible to cross over from inside to outside.
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#11
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.288
IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > IN YOU MORE THAN YOU
Theoretical move: Lacan defines hypnosis structurally as the confusion of the ideal signifier (identification) with the objet a, and then uses this definition to articulate the analytic operation as precisely the maintenance of the distance between these two poles — with the analyst's desire functioning to isolate the a and enable a "crossing of the plane of identification" that ultimately transforms the fundamental fantasy into the drive itself, constituting the uncharted "beyond of analysis."
after the mapping of the subject in relation to the a, the experience of the fundamental phantasy becomes the drive. What, then, does he who has passed through the experience of this opaque relation to the origin, to the drive, become? This is the beyond of analysis
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#12
A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.134
The voice and the drive > The voice and the letter
Theoretical move: The voice occupies the structural position of sovereignty (inside/outside the law simultaneously), functioning as a permanent threat of a "state of emergency" within the symbolic order; this topology extends to psychoanalysis, where the analyst's silence incarnates the object voice as a pure enunciation compelling the subject's response—making the voice the pivot of transference and of political, ethical, and linguistic subjectification alike.
in response to it our fate as linguistic, ethical, political subjects has to be pulled to pieces and reassembled, traversed, and assumed.
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#13
A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.104
The voice and the drive > The voice of reason
Theoretical move: Dolar argues that the voice operates as the operator enabling a transition from the ethics of desire to the ethics of the drive, and that Heidegger's phenomenology of the call of conscience—a pure, aphonic voice that convokes Dasein to Being—illuminates the structural function of voice as extimate alterity, while simultaneously exposing the metaphysical illusion of positing voice as a pure, prelinguistic origin.
the drive emerges when desire is driven to sacrifice not only its objects but its purity itself
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#14
A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.148
A month later:
Theoretical move: The passage argues that fantasy is structurally generated by the temporal gap between hearing a voice and understanding it (après-coup), functioning as a provisional quilting point in place of understanding; crucially, true understanding never dissolves fantasy but only prolongs it, so analytic progress requires traversal of fantasy rather than understanding—with the matheme and formulas of sexuation standing as the non-fantasmatic, purely literal counterpart to the traumatic voice.
understanding is finding oneself in fantasy, reestablishing its framework to accommodate more and more, enlarging it, not dissipating it, not traversing it—but traversing it is the point where psychoanalysis should lead
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#15
Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.371
**Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Persistence of <span id="theorem_iv_the_persistence_of_abstraction.xhtml_IDX-17"></span>Abstraction > [The Inhuman View](#contents.xhtml_ahd24)
Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Lacanian "bar" is not Butler's liberal-hegemonic bar of contingent social exclusion but the constitutive split that separates the subject as void from all objective content—grounded in primordial repression and the fundamental fantasy—and that emancipatory transformation requires not gradual inclusion but the radical act of traversing the fantasy, which institutes an entirely new mode of historicity rather than extending an existing one.
Lacan's premise is that we can—not integrate/subjectivize the fundamental fantasy but—suspend it, its structuring power, and he calls this radical move 'traversing the fantasy.'
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#16
Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.99
**Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Hegel’s <span id="scholium_12_hegels_parallax.xhtml_IDX-834"></span>Parallax
Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Absolute Knowing's self-purifying immanence paradoxically inverts into free association and arbitrary decision, and that the unbridgeable gap between Hegel's *Phenomenology* and *Logic* — readable as a Möbius strip or cross-cap — is the Real/impossible at its purest, while the further reversal between dialectical skepticism and stable encyclopedic knowledge constitutes the ultimate "infinite judgment" of philosophy.
That's why authentic philosophy is a kind of 'theoretical psychoanalysis': it is not a species of university discourse but an existential decision, the enactment of what Lacan defines as the final mutation of the analytic treatment (traversing the fantasy) by means of theory.
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#17
The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.114
,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > **Going AII the Way in Fantasy**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lynch's *Mulholland Drive* stages the full traversal of fantasy by driving it to its dissolution point, where fantasy's intersection with desire reveals the traumatic real; moreover, the film instantiates a specifically feminine fantasy structure—one that goes "too far" rather than stopping short—contrasting with the masculine fantasy of *Lost Highway*, and demonstrates that authentic mourning of the lost object is only possible through fantasy itself.
fantasy holds the key to its own traversal because the logic of the fantasy itself pushes the subject to the point of its dissolution.
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#18
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.82
<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 traversing of fantasy is the process by which the subject subjectifies trauma, takes the traumatic event upon him or herself, and assumes responsibility for that jouissance.
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#19
The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.307
Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The Historicity of the Four Discourses
Theoretical move: The passage argues that power is constitutively obscene—its "truth" is that it always already functions as an illegal excess—and uses this diagnosis to press the question of whether a structurally new Master Signifier (Lacan's *vers un signifiant nouveau*) is possible, or whether every revolution merely returns to the same obscene supplement, a structural problem shared by Badiou's and Miller's frameworks.
heroically assume the need to pass from the negative gesture of 'traversing the fantasy' to the formation of a New Order, including a new Master and its obscene superego underside
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#20
The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.305
Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The Historicity of the Four Discourses
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the discourse of the Analyst and the discourse of perversion share the same upper-level formula (a–S/), such that the crucial difference lies in the radical ambiguity of objet petit a (as fantasmatic lure vs. the Void behind it); consequently, today's civilization functions as a perverse social link, and psychoanalysis—as the only discourse permitting non-enjoyment—points toward a different collective social bond beyond the Master's discourse.
the climax of the analytic treatment is a momentous insight into the abyss of the Real, the 'traversing of the fantasy,' from which, the morning after, we have to return to sober social reality
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#21
The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.63
The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Parallax of the Critique of Political Economy > ". . . ce seul objet dont le Néant s'honore"
Theoretical move: By reading Marx's account of capital's self-movement through Hegel's substance-to-subject passage and Lacan's desire/drive distinction, Žižek argues that capitalism operates at three levels—subjective experience, objective exploitation, and an "objective deception" (the unconscious fantasy of self-generating capital)—and that the shift from desire to drive requires distinguishing objet petit a as lost object (desire) from objet petit a as loss itself (drive), while redefining the death drive as an excess of life rather than a thrust toward annihilation.
we get constituent anxiety only when the subject 'traverses the fantasy' and confronts the Void, the gap, filled in by the fantasmatic object.
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#22
The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.134
The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > interlude 1
Theoretical move: The passage deploys the "parallax view" as a structural principle—no common denominator can resolve the split between incommensurable perspectives (First World/Third World, Milly/Densher/Kate)—and uses this to argue that genuine ethical acts consist not in symbolic reconciliation or hysterical clinging to fantasy, but in a traversal of fantasy that breaks the deadlock from within, as exemplified by Kate's refusal in James and Paul's self-sacrifice in Iñárritu.
what about traversing the fantasy?
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#23
The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.88
The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Traps of Pure Sacrifice
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Kierkegaard's account of the fall from innocence to sin must be supplemented by a Schellingian-Lacanian correction: Prohibition does not disturb primordial repose but resolves a prior, more terrifying deadlock created by primordial self-contraction (sinthome), yielding a three-stage sequence of anxieties that grounds a properly materialist theory of subjectivity and ethical engagement.
the idea is that only such a gesture of just 'doing it' spontaneously, a gesture not covered by any rational consideration, can restore the immediate faith that will deliver us and heal us of our modern spiritual malaise.
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#24
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.
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)
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#25
The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.83
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.
what I then get in exchange for this sacrifice is the loss of this Cause-Thing itself.
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#26
The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.173
Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Toward a New Science of Appearances
Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Lacanian, Freudian, and Marxian "demystifications" share a common structure: they reveal not a hidden reality behind appearances but a split *within* appearance itself—between "the way things really appear to us" and "the way they appear to appear to us"—and that this ontological structure (paralleled in quantum physics) is more radical than any naturalist or perspectivist account of subjectivity.
his ultimate aim is to deprive the subject of the very fundamental fantasy that regulates the universe of his (self-)experience.
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#27
The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.354
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.
what if this self-inflicted wound is to be conceived as 'traversing the fantasy'? What if, through striking at herself, she got rid of the masochistic fantasy's hold over her?
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#28
The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.291
Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Toward the Theory of the Stalinist Musical
Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Stalinism and Nazism represent structurally distinct ideological formations: Stalinism, rooted in Enlightenment universalism, subjects subjects to a reflexive, self-monumentalizing logic (prisoners building monuments to themselves), while Nazism inscribes guilt into biological being, making annihilation the only "solution." The passage uses Nietzsche's racial-mixing formula and a beer-advertisement fantasy to show how overidentification with incompatible fantasmatic elements can traverse the fantasy that sustains ideological domination.
this, then, opens up the possibility of undermining the hold a fantasy exerts over us through the very overidentification with it: by embracing simultaneously, within the same space, the multitude of inconsistent fantasmatic elements.
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#29
The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.169
Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others
Theoretical move: Žižek reframes the modern "humiliation" narrative (Copernicus-Darwin-Freud) by arguing that twentieth-century thought does not simply continue desublimating reduction but paradoxically rehabilitates appearance/Event as irreducible to positive Being—and that the true materialist wager is not reductionism but the capacity to explain mind, consciousness, and sexuality precisely where idealism fails, with Badiou's Event-logic shown to be structurally homologous to the Hegelian non-All.
how is a free act possible? How can we break (out of) the network of the causal connections of positive reality, and conceive an act that begins by and in itself?
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#30
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.
Only by traversing such fantasies and sustaining the path of desire, the film suggests, can we become politicized subjects.
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#31
Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.103
Žižek Responds! > [Slavoj Žižek’s Hegel](#contents.xhtml_ch4)<sup><a href="#4_slavoj_ieks_hegel.xhtml_en4-1" id="4_slavoj_ieks_hegel.xhtml_nr4-1">1</a></sup> > IV
Theoretical move: The passage critiques Žižek's use of "negation of negation" and "pure drive beyond fantasy" as un-Hegelian residues of positivist metaphysics, arguing through readings of Coetzee's *Disgrace* and Hitchcock's *Vertigo* that genuine Hegelian mediation dissolves the fantasy frame without positing an excess or remainder beyond dialectics, and that ideological distortion (not ontological remainder) explains why subjects cannot traverse their fantasies.
the Versagung, which equals the act of traversing the fantasy, opens up the space for the emergence of the pure drive beyond fantasy