Voice

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (238)

1. #01

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.159

   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.

   this introduction of the voice and the gaze (the two Lacanian objects par excellence) is a result of a manoeuvre which aims to fill a hole in the Other (the Law) by means of supplementing the Other by the object that it lacks

2. #02

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.168

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

   Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the Kantian sublime is structurally homologous to the Freudian superego: the subject's conversion of anxiety into elevated feeling relies on a "superego inflation" that displaces the ego's concerns while simultaneously functioning as a strategy to avoid direct encounter with das Ding and the death drive in its pure state. The sublime's narcissistic self-estimation, its link to moral feeling, and its metonymic evocation of an internal "devastating force" all reveal the superego as the hidden engine of the sublime.

   it corresponds very well to the agency of the superego, that is, to the law equipped with the gaze and voice which can 'make even the boldest sinner tremble'.

3. #03

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

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

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

   he hears at once its fearful voice. ... conscience is peculiar in that, although its business is a business of man with himself, a man constrained by his reasons sees himself constrained to carry it on as at the bidding of another person.

4. #04

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.204

   Ethics and Tragedy in Psychoanalysis > Oedipus, or the Outcast of the Signifier > The death of the Thing

   Theoretical move: Against Coux's reading of Oedipus as failed initiation due to insufficient matricide, Zupančič argues that Oedipus enacts the *most radical* killing of the Thing precisely by naming it (word over force), and that the objet petit a is not a pre-symbolic remainder but the remainder generated by the signifier's own self-referential dynamics — the bone of spirit itself — so that tragedy originates from within fully accomplished symbolization, not from its failure.

   in his famous 'graph of desire' Lacan situates at the place of the remainder of the signifying chain the voice which is, strictly speaking, a product of the signifying chain itself — of the chattering away of signifiers — not a remainder of something prior to the advent of the symbolic.

5. #05

   Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.173

   <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Ideology in Fight Club** > **Narration**

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that Fight Club's formal system—voice-over narration, second-person address, fourth-wall breaks, and multi-narrator rivalry—enacts the ideological contradiction between the imaginary and the symbolic, modeling both interpellation and its potential undoing through medium-consciousness and situated subjectivity.

   The form of the voice-over is a highly unusual choice... The voice-over introduces the problematic element to foreground the limits of visual filmic representation.

6. #06

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

   [Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > The psychoanalytic unconscious of the psychological unconscious

   Theoretical move: Lacan argues that pre-Freudian (and ego-psychological) hierarchical dualisms between conscious and unconscious encode a political bias that is itself legible as the 'unconscious of scientific discourse'; true psychoanalytic insight locates conflict not in biological or archetypal sources but in the linguistic structure of the symptom as articulated in speech.

   The unconscious, though, is a voice that interferes with that basic text

7. #07

   Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.169

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

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

   'the signifying chain imposes itself, by itself, on the subject in its dimension of voice' … in hindsight it could be argued that these remarks … point to the dimension of the voice qua object a

8. #08

   Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.173

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

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychotic hallucinations—both 'code phenomena' (autonomous neologisms) and 'message phenomena' (disrupted signifying chains)—are not symptomatic of an underlying illness but ARE the structure itself, revealing the subject's relationship to the signifier as mapped by the Graph of Desire; the subject is constituted as an effect of signifier-to-signifier reference, not of any neurological or imaginary substrate.

   With Lacan's later work it could be argued that the refrains exemplify the voice qua object a.

9. #09

   Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.190

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

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

   in these phenomena the object a is expressed in the invocative register, as a voice. In terms of speech production and reception, the voice suddenly invades consciousness.

10. #10

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

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

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

    The moral law's source, Lacan argues, is no longer thought to be anything cosmic or wondrous, or divine, but is seen to be rooted in a voice in our past, in the internalized voice of the Other.

11. #11

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.53

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

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

    The most notable among those additions— the voice and the gaze— are especially interesting because of the way they are so much more intimately related to the unknown void of the Other-Thing.

12. #12

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

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

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

    the most primitive launching of the signifier, the vocal object that is 'ceded' into the space between the subject and the Other

13. #13

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

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

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

    Lacan analyzes the monosyllabic sounding of the second-person pronoun as itself a primitive defensive gesture, the emission of a kind of sonic object that functions to put the Other at a safer distance.

14. #14

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

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

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

    Yahweh is above all the God who speaks to man. He makes himself known only as a voice.

15. #15

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.125

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

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

    According to Lacan, the shofar serves to evoke the pure voice, the voice stripped of its function of locution and reduced to its bare sounding.

16. #16

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.180

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

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

    Nishitani thus plays on the original meaning of persona as the mask from behind which the actor projects a voice. 'We can understand person as persona— the face that an actor puts on to indicate the role he is to play on stage— but only as the persona of absolute nothingness.'

17. #17

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.203

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

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

    In that alternative gospel, the rolling din of thunder, consistently associated by Greeks, Jews, and most Christians with a masculine deity, is understood as the voice of a distinctly feminine power.

18. #18

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.224

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

    Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section (endnotes for Part 2 of "Rethinking Religion") containing citations to Lacan, Hegel, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Homer, and others; it is not substantively argumentative but does contain a few brief theoretical asides linking das Ding, objet a, and the shofar, and connecting monotheism to trauma and the signifying chain.

    Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More

19. #19

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_142"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_page_0161"></span>***P*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_144"></span>**part-object**

    Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's theorisation of the part-object from its Kleinian and Freudian origins through to its reformulation as objet petit a, arguing that for Lacan objects are partial not because they are fragments of a whole body but because they are only partially represented in the unconscious via the signifying system, and that they lack specular image—making them irreducible to narcissistic completeness.

    the phoneme, the GAZE, the voice and the nothing (E, 315). These objects all have one feature in common: 'they have no specular image'

20. #20

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

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

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

    Both the masochist and the sadist locate themselves as the object of the invocatory drive, the voice.

21. #21

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_199"></span>**superego**

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

    The superego is related to the voice, and thus to the invoking drive and to SADISM/MASOCHISM.

22. #22

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

    <span id="Chapter13.htm_page140"></span>Hauntological Blues: Little Axe

    Theoretical move: Fisher develops a theory of sonic hauntology through Little Axe's music, arguing that the combination of blues and dub constitutes a political-aesthetic practice that confronts American slavery as unassimilable trauma by detaching sound from presence (acousmatic production), producing a "dyschronic contemporaneity" that refuses to let the dead be silenced.

    Dub, evidently, goes in exactly the opposite direction – it estranges the voice, or points up the voice's inherent strangeness.

23. #23

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

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

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

    what Tricky unsettles – both as a vocalist and as a writer/producer who coaxes singing from an Other – is the idea of the voice as a rock solid guarantor of presence and identity.

24. #24

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

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

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

    Rock depends crucially on a particular body and a particular voice and the mysterious relationship between the two

25. #25

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

    <span id="Chapter9.htm_page113"></span>Downcast Angel: Interview with Burial

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

    he removes voices from biography and narrative, transforming them into fluttering, flickering abstractions, angels liberated from the heavy weight of personal history.

26. #26

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.96

    **vin** > **1**

    Theoretical move: Through the clinical case of Robert, Mme Lefort demonstrates how a near-total absence of the symbolic function (Name-of-the-Father, stable object relations, body schema) produces a child whose only self-representation is an anxiety-laden series of bodily contents, whose ego is indistinguishable from its objects, and where the sole "signifier" available — "Wolf!" — functions not as a metaphor but as a cry marking the threat of self-destruction and dissolution.

    He yelled the only two words he knew — Miss! and wolf! This word, wolf!, he repeated throughout the day

27. #27

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

    **Xffl**

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

    the anticipating provocation of Its absence and Its presence… through the voice

28. #28

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.307

    xxn > A spoken commentary on Freud's *Verneinung,* by Jean Hyppolite\* > **INDEX**

    Theoretical move: This is an index page (partial, letters I–L) from Seminar I, listing page references for key concepts and proper names; it is non-substantive in itself but registers the conceptual vocabulary in use across the seminar.

    without Voice 265

29. #29

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.326

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

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

    the same function in the voice and how to us it appears… to be capable of belonging to the realm of yieldable objects, those objects that can be lined up on the shelves of a library in the form of gramophone records or reels of tape

30. #30

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.266

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that visual desire masks anxiety by substituting the non-specular Objet petit a with mere appearances, and pivots to establishing the voice as the most originary partial object — more fundamental than the scopic or anal object — whose relation to anxiety and desire must be grasped through the myth of the father's murder rather than through the primacy of maternal desire.

    the relation to this essential object that acts as a, the voice, and what its function brings by way of new dimensions in the relationship between desire and anxiety.

31. #31

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.263

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

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

    What object is at issue here? This object is the one that is called the voice.

32. #32

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.306

    **xx** > **FROM ANAL TO IDEAL**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues for a "circular constitution" of objet petit a across all libidinal stages—against Abraham's linear-developmental model—grounding the cause-function of desire structurally in the gap between cause and effect, with excrement as the paradigm case that reveals how biological objects only acquire their subjective destiny through the dominance of the signifier.

    its obvious connection with this form of the object a that the voice is, I indicated that there cannot be any valid analytic conception of the superego that loses sight of the fact that, in its deepest phase, it is one of the forms of the object a

33. #33

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.270

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

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

    last time you saw me oscillating between the oral stage and something which is the voice, which I supported through its evocation in a separated form, materialized in an object, the shofar.

34. #34

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.255

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Reik's analysis of the shofar—a ritual horn sounding at the voice-level of the object—to illustrate both the promise and the structural limit of analogical symbol-use in early psychoanalysis, positioning the voice (as objet petit a) as the final, fifth object relation that ties desire to anxiety in its ultimate form, while distinguishing rigorous theoretical grounding from mere intuitive analogy.

    this is a broad presentation of things... it is a matter of ascertaining what the function of desire is at each of these levels... that of the ear.

35. #35

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.361

    **xx** > **Notes** > Chapter XVIII The Voice of Yahweh > Chapter XXII From Anal to Ideal

    Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index excerpt from Seminar X (Anxiety), listing key concepts, proper names, and page references without advancing any theoretical argument.

    vociferated object, ear, voice 243, 246, 249,252,259,274-7,295,302,315, 323

36. #36

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.288

    **xx** > **WHAT COMES IN THROUGH THE EAR**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the voice, as object a, is not assimilated but incorporated (Einverleibung), functioning not as sonorous resonance in physical space but as what resonates ex nihilo in the void of the Other — thereby linking the voice-object to anxiety, the desire of the Other, and ultimately to sacrifice as the capture of the Other in the web of desire.

    A voice, therefore, is not assimilated, but incorporated. This is what can give it a function of modelling our void.

37. #37

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.85

    THE SPLIT BETWEEN THE EYE AND THE GAZE > OF THE GAZE

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the primal scene is constitutively traumatic—not grounded in libidinal empathy or instinctual maturation but in a 'factitious fact' structured by the tuche (the encounter with the Real)—and that the split in the subject persists as the deeper division between the dream-image and the invocatory/scopic solicitation of the gaze and voice.

    the invocation, the voice of the child, the solicitation of the gaze—Father can't you see...

38. #38

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.210

    FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

    Theoretical move: Lacan reformulates Freud's drive theory by substituting 'machen' for 'werden' to reveal that the drive's loop is structured around 'making oneself' (se faire) — seeing, heard, sucked — thereby showing that each drive's reflexive turn constitutes the subject while also introducing the voice drive (making oneself heard) as a structural complement to the scopic drive.

    making oneself heard goes towards the other. The reason for this is a structural one

39. #39

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

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

    Theoretical move: By showing that the sovereign good can only be located at the level of the law (not pleasure), Lacan argues that the objet petit a—those objects (breast, faeces, gaze, voice) that serve no function—is the pivotal term that introduces the dialectic of the subject of the unconscious, grounding alienation/division of the subject in the recognition of the drive rather than in any dialectic of beneficial objects.

    the breasts, the faeces, the gaze, the voice

40. #40

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.289

    IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > TO CONCLUDE

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analyst's desire—as an unknown x oriented against identification—is the operative force that enables the subject's crossing of the plane of identification, thereby returning the subject to the plane of the drive and the reality of the unconscious; he further situates the voice and the gaze as the two privileged objects (objet a) through which science's encroachment on the human field can be illuminated.

    the voice—partly planeterized, even stratospherized, by our machinery

41. #41

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.74

    TUCHE AND AUTOMATON > TUCHE AND AUTOMATON

    Theoretical move: Lacan reads Freud's dream of the burning child to argue that desire manifests not as wish-fulfillment but as loss at the most cruel point of the object, and that the real—figured by the child's voice—can only be encountered in the dream, never in waking consciousness; the passage culminates in the formula 'God is unconscious' as the true formulation of atheism.

    only the voice is heard, Father, can't you see I'm burning? This sentence is itself a firebrand

42. #42

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.273

    FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

    Theoretical move: Through the function of objet petit a, the subject achieves separation from the vacillation of being that constitutes alienation; Lacan uses the phenomenon of verbal hallucination—where the subject is immanent in the hallucinatory voice—to reframe the analytic goal not as purification of the percipiens but as the subject's grounding encounter with the object-voice as support.

    It is in so far as the object of the voice is present in it that the percipiens is present in it. Verbal hallucination is not a false perceptum, it is a deviated percipiens.

43. #43

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.74

    TUCHE AND AUTOMATON > TUCHE AND AUTOMATON

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's dream of the burning child to demonstrate that the Real irrupts precisely at the junction of dream and waking, that desire in the dream manifests through loss rather than wish-fulfilment, and that the 'missed encounter' with the Real is commemorated only through repetition — culminating in the provocation that the true formula of atheism is not 'God is dead' but 'God is unconscious.'

    only the voice is heard, Father, can't you see I'm burning? This sentence is itself a firebrand

44. #44

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.85

    THE SPLIT BETWEEN THE EYE AND THE GAZE > OF THE GAZE

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the fundamental relation to sexuality in analytic experience is not grounded in libidinal empathy or instinctual maturation, but in a traumatic, factitious fact (the primal scene), and that the subject's split—exemplified by the dream-awakening structure—points toward a more profound split between the representative image and the invocatory/scopic causality (voice and gaze) that underlies it.

    the invocation, the voice of the child, the solicitation of the gaze—Father can't you see...

45. #45

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

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that ethics fails when grounded in pleasure, and that the Kantian critique of the sovereign good points instead to the Law and desire; it is the recognition of the drive—and specifically of objet petit a as objects that serve no function—that grounds the dialectic of the divided/alienated subject of the unconscious.

    These are the objets a—the breasts, the faeces, the gaze, the voice.

46. #46

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.273

    FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

    Theoretical move: Through the function of objet petit a, the subject achieves separation from the vacillation of being that characterizes alienation; and the paradigm case of verbal hallucination — where the voice is the operative object — reveals that psychoanalysis inverts the classical epistemic ideal of a purified percipiens by grounding subjective assurance in an encounter with the 'filth' of the partial object.

    It is in so far as the object of the voice is present in it that the percipiens is present in it. Verbal hallucination is not a false perceptum, it is a deviated percipiens.

47. #47

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.289

    IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > TO CONCLUDE

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the training analysis is the only genuine analysis because it requires traversing the full loop of analytic experience (durcharbeiten), and that the analyst's desire—as an unknown x oriented against identification—is what enables the crossing of identification through the separation of the subject, ultimately making the drive present at the level of the unconscious; he further situates voice and gaze as the two privileged objects (objet a) whose modern technological proliferation illuminates the contemporary relation to science.

    the voice—partly planeterized, even stratospherized, by our machinery

48. #48

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.160

    **Seminar 12: Wednesday 17 March 1965**

    Theoretical move: Using Munch's *The Scream* as a theoretical figure, Lacan argues that silence is not the ground of the scream but is caused by it—paralleling the structure of the big Other as a holed, divided surface—and uses this to articulate how the o-object emerges as a remainder/residue in the operation of demand, structuring fantasy, desire, and transference around an irreducible cut.

    This image in which the voice is distinguished from any modulating voice, for in the scream, what makes it different even from any of the most reduced forms of language, is the simplicity, the reduction of the apparatus that is involved.

49. #49

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.159

    **Seminar 12: Wednesday 17 March 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that analytic experience centred on demand cannot be grounded in a biologistic or anaclitic conception of the mother-child relation; instead, the o-object (objet petit a) must be understood as what arises in the gap created by demand at the junction of subject and Other, with the demand always referring to the big Other as a third term irreducible to any concrete or fusional origin.

    all the objects articulated no doubt in analytic experience, but in an infinitely less assured way as regards their status than ours, namely the gaze and the voice

50. #50

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.76

    **Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 January 1965** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 20 January 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the figure of Socrates to triangulate the voice as objet petit a, the structure of desire (including its link to the impossible), and the syllogism's topological deception, thereby re-framing the death drive not as a wish for death but as the structural condition that articulates desire, identification, demand, and transference around an irreducible gap.

    the voice which Socrates undoubtedly testifies to us was not at all a metaphor. The voice for which he stops speaking in order to hear what it is saying to him just like one of our hallucinating patients.

51. #51

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.164

    **Seminar 12: Wednesday 17 March 1965**

    Theoretical move: By reading Plato's Symposium—specifically Alcibiades's pursuit of the hidden agalma in Socrates—Lacan establishes the dialectical structure of transference as desire for a concealed object that the Other does not possess, and concludes that the analyst's own identificatory position must be suspended within transference, collapsing the distinction between transference and counter-transference.

    this function of the voice or of the look

52. #52

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.208

    **Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965**

    Theoretical move: Through the clinical case of Philip (Leclaire's analysand), Lacan articulates the drive's circuit as a loop around a gap in the body, where "pure difference" (exquisite/acid fringe of sweetness) functions as the irreducible kernel of desire; the ejaculatory formula Poord'jeli is analysed as a vocal signifier that mimes and masters this circuit, connecting the drive's reversal to the sacred incantatory dimension of the Voice.

    the voice constitutes a sort of privileged model of this first relationship to the other... the voice is all the same the privileged vector of the signifier which, because of this fact, becomes or is above all a verbal signifier.

53. #53

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.66

    **Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 January 1965** > (10) [Various noises] You see that we are in a police state!

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian slip (parapraxis) operates not through any diffuse or motor stumbling but through a phonematic substitution at the level of the proper name, where the Name-of-the-Father functions as the structural pivot linking desire (including the desire to kill the father and Oedipal desire) to signification — and proposes that the desire of the analyst, topologically defined in relation to identification, must be the axis of analytic treatment.

    which passed, by this vocalisation, this emission of the voice, which might be formulated as bin Hure, I am a whore

54. #54

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.175

    **Presentation by Monsieur Oury**

    Theoretical move: Oury argues that the phonematic gestalt "Poord'jeli" is not a fantasy but rather a pre-subjective phonological structure marking the emergence of the speaking subject, located at the articulation between the Imaginary and the Symbolic, while Leclaire's response opens the question of whether fantasy must be organized around the scopic drive or whether it may equally be constituted by the voice as objet petit a.

    what is involved is an object of a different nature, which is precisely an object from the domain of the voice, from what we could call the vocal and acoustic sphere

55. #55

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.312

    **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 23: Wednesday 16 June 1965**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the topological structure of the Möbius strip, Klein bottle, cross-cap, and projective plane is not mere formal play but indexes the subjective positions of being: specifically, the o-object (objet petit a) is identified as the topological element that closes the cross-cap/projective plane, and its function is to cover over the Entzweiung (division) of the subject, making fantasy the fallacious conjuncture of that division with the o-object, while castration names the fundamental relation of the subject to sex/truth.

    the breast, the faecal object or excrement, the look and the voice, it is in this shape, in this topological shape that the function of the **o**-object is conceived.

56. #56

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.160

    **Seminar 12: Wednesday 17 March 1965**

    Theoretical move: Using Munch's *The Scream* as a topological illustration, Lacan argues that silence is not mere absence of speech but the structural correlate of the voice-as-object (objet petit a), such that the scream *causes* silence rather than silence grounding the scream; this models the Möbius/Klein bottle topology of demand, from whose cut the objet petit a falls as remainder—the origin of desire, fantasy, and transference.

    This image in which the voice is distinguished from any modulating voice, for in the scream, what makes it different even from any of the most reduced forms of language, is the simplicity, the reduction of the apparatus that is involved. Here the larynx is no longer anything more than a pipe.

57. #57

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.288

    **PRESENTATION BY MONSIEUR MILNER**

    Theoretical move: Milner's presentation reads Plato's *Sophist* as a proto-logical account of the signifier: non-being is not a sixth genus but the very condition of computability (the "locus of zero"), and the subject—identified with non-being—disappears into the proper name, thereby anticipating the Lacanian structure of the subject as effect of the signifier. Lacan closes by anchoring his own project in the triad subject/knowledge/sex mapped onto the Symbolic/Imaginary/Real.

    this game of hermeneutics and this affirmed position of herald, of the one who lends his mouth to another voice... the Sophist for his part is excluded from this hermeneutic. No one lends his voice to him

58. #58

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.312

    **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 23: Wednesday 16 June 1965**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the topological structure of the Möbius strip, cross-cap, and Klein bottle formally captures the subjective position of being, and that the objet petit a—conceived as a topological "rag" completing the cross-cap—is the operative term that closes the Entzweiung of the subject, enabling the passage from alienation to separation and grounding the structure of fantasy as a fallacious suturing of the subject's division over the real.

    the breast, the faecal object or excrement, the look and the voice, it is in this topological shape that the function of the o-object is conceived.

59. #59

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.175

    **Presentation by Monsieur Oury**

    Theoretical move: Oury argues that the "phonematic gestalt" (Poord'jeli) is not a fantasy but rather the pre-symbolic point of emergence of the speaking subject — the locus from which fantasy and its privileged image arise — while Leclaire's response pivots on distinguishing fantasy-forms by the nature of the Lacanian object (scopic vs. vocal) implied within them.

    what is involved is an object of a different nature, which is precisely an object from the domain of the voice, from what we could call the vocal and acoustic sphere

60. #60

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.66

    **Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 January 1965** > (10) [Various noises] You see that we are in a police state!

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian slip (parapraxis) is not merely a motor accident but a phonematic substitution that traces desire back to the Name-of-the-Father as the structural axis of both repression and identification, and that analysis must topologically define the desire of the analyst in relation to this pass through identification.

    which passed, by this vocalisation, this emission of the voice, which might be formulated as bin Hure, I am a whore

61. #61

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.207

    **Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the clinical case of Philip (Leclaire's analysand) to theorise how the circuit of sense—anchored by pure difference, the gap of the body, and the dehiscence of the other body—produces desire, the drive, and the object voice, culminating in the Shemah prayer as a limit-case where the signifier, jouissance, and the sacred converge around an invocatory formula.

    the voice constitutes a sort of privileged model of this first relationship to the other... the voice is all the same the privileged vector of the signifier which, because of this fact, becomes or is above all a verbal signifier.

62. #62

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.164

    **Seminar 12: Wednesday 17 March 1965**

    Theoretical move: By reading Alcibiades's encounter with Socrates in Plato's *Symposium* as the structural prototype of analytic transference, Lacan argues that the *agalma* (hidden treasure) organises desire-as-lack and that what analysts call 'counter-transference' is properly a moment of unwarranted identification internal to transference itself, thereby collapsing the counter-transference/transference distinction into a single analytic field.

    in other registers which are not those of neurosis, this function of the voice or of the look.

63. #63

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.76

    **Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 January 1965** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 20 January 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the figure of Socrates to articulate the structural relationship between Voice as objet petit a, Desire, Demand, Transference, and the Death Drive, arguing that the syllogism "Socrates is mortal / all men are mortal" is a topological lure whose deceptive diameter maps onto the function of transference as the link between identification, demand, and the indeterminate subject of the unconscious.

    the voice for which he stops speaking in order to hear what it is saying to him just like one of our hallucinating patients

64. #64

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.159

    **Seminar 12: Wednesday 17 March 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analytic experience of demand cannot be grounded in a "living" or anaclitic dependency on the mother, but must be rethought through the articulation of the o-object (objet petit a) as what arises in the gap created by demand at the junction of subject and the big Other — thus correcting post-Freudian reductions of demand to developmental/biological origins.

    namely the gaze and the voice, we have to question ourselves about how... analytic experience can find in it the fundamental status of what it is dealing with in the demand of the subject

65. #65

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.257

    **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analytic dialectic cannot be confined to demand and the maternal Other (as in object-relations approaches), but must pass through desire and ultimately jouissance; castration is reinterpreted not merely as the Oedipal prohibition but as the barrier of desire that bars the subject from jouissance — and the Hegelian master/slave dialectic is criticised for falsely attributing jouissance to the master, revealing it as a mirage.

    this other object, which is strange, in short, because it is linked to the object of the look, I mean the voice... what falls (choit) in this retroaction of one signifier on the other, which is what we have defined as the fundamental condition for the apparition of the subject.

66. #66

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.160

    **Seminar 14: Wednesday 20 April 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Voice as an object has yet to be properly established as a category in clinical thought, then pivots to show why neither Socrates nor Freud produced social critique: in the ancient world, jouissance was 'resolved' by being delegated to slaves, and it was precisely this reserved park of jouissance—not any theoretical lack—that prevented the emergence of science and of the subject; this historical-economic argument positions the problem of jouissance as the hidden thread connecting ancient Greek knowledge-practice to Freudian psychoanalysis.

    The status of the voice is properly speaking still to be established, but not alone is it to be established, it has to be brought into the mental categories of the clinician

67. #67

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.172

    Mademoiselle Grazien

    Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the relationship between Jones's concept of aphanisis and Lacan's theory of the subject's fading, using this parallel to introduce jouissance as a bodily dimension that cannot be reduced to the pleasure principle and that stands in a constitutive tension with the subject's "I am" — arguing that the subject is always already implicated in the duplicity between being and non-being that jouissance makes visible.

    the desire of the Other, which you will already immediately sense is supported by the voice

68. #68

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.87

    Madame le Docteur Parisot

    Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Dragonetti's analysis of Dante's *Divine Comedy*, Lacan deploys the Narcissus myth and the figure of counterfeit money to theorize how the fraudulent (mis)recognition of the image-as-truth constitutes a fundamental structure of conscience and desire: the subject, captivated by its own reflection, mistakes the image of nothing for the real, such that malice (latent falsification) becomes the originary condition of every conscience.

    to break the attachment of his look to error, the intervention of the voice of Virgil is necessary. Virgil says: 'now then, be on your guard'.

69. #69

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.268

    **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the o-object (objet petit a) must be understood not merely at the level of demand (breast, faeces) but through desire and jouissance, where castration is the barrier that projects jouissance onto the murdered father as an Oedipal mirage — a move that corrects what Lacan identifies as the Hegelian error of attributing jouissance to the master rather than understanding its structural unavailability to any subject.

    this other object, which is strange, in short, because it is linked to the object of the look, I mean the voice. But in the measure that, even though it obviously comes from the Other it is, nevertheless, within that we hear it.

70. #70

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.164

    **Seminar 15: Wednesday 27 April 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Augustinian formula *inter urinas et faeces nascimur* to pivot from the subject's corporeal origin to its structural constitution via the o-object, arguing that the subject is not born as a living body but as a subject in relation to the anal and phallic objects—and, crucially, to two further objects that remain undertheorised even in Freud: the gaze and the voice. He then frames the upcoming seminar on the gaze by recommending Foucault's *Les mots et les choses* (the *Las Meninas* chapter) as preparation.

    there are two other o-objects... namely, the look and the voice

71. #71

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.281

    there are normal perverts,

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Oedipus complex is insufficient to ground sexuality unless it is re-articulated as the foundation of desire through the phallic function, and that feminine jouissance is structurally located at the place of the big Other (O), while the minus-phi (−φ) serves as the mediating organ-as-object between male and female jouissance — against any naïve notion of genital maturation or "oblativity" as explanatory.

    the extraordinary value then, for this operation, of what are called feminine men... Let a woman who has had this kind of husband... take the butcher of la belle bouchère, just meet up with a chanteur à voix, and strange things are going to happen.

72. #72

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.159

    **Seminar 14: Wednesday 20 April 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analyst's implication in the symptom is not a relativist epistemological problem solvable by expanding the subject's knowledge; instead, a radical topological recasting is required—one that replaces the sphere-topology of classical knowledge (Plato's cave/sun) with an encounter with what language produces as a real, corporeal effect (the o-object), irreducible to any imaginary mirage or metalanguage.

    requires this support of the voice, except, of course, that you should not take the voice as simply sonority, which would make it dependent on the fact that we are on a planet where there is air which carries sound. It has absolutely nothing to do with that.

73. #73

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.249

    **Seminar 20: Wednesday 1 June 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the topology of the Objet petit a by demonstrating that the scopic and invocatory objects occupy a dimension beyond demand/frustration theories of neurosis, and introduces the hyperboloid of revolution as a topological figure that models the structural relationship between subject (S) and o-object, pointing toward a group-structure combinatorial of partial objects culminating in castration.

    the o-object is directly and immediately implicated at the level of desire, is something obvious. If the desire of the subject is founded on the desire of the other, this desire as such is manifested at the level of the voice. The voice is not alone the causal object but the instrument in which there is manifested the desire of the Other.

74. #74

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.281

    there are normal perverts,

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Oedipus complex is insufficient to ground sexuality unless articulated through the phallic function and the (-phi), and that sexual jouissance must be mapped through the structure of the Other — locating feminine jouissance at the place of the Other (O) while exposing "Hegel's error" of placing jouissance on the side of the master.

    Let a woman who has had this kind of husband, the golden type, carved out with a chisel, take the butcher of la belle bouchère, just meet up with a chanteur à voix, and strange things are going to happen.

75. #75

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.249

    **Seminar 20: Wednesday 1 June 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the hyperboloid of revolution to illustrate the structural relationship between the subject (S) and the objet petit a, arguing that the o-object can only function within a group structure that permits negative values, which ultimately grounds the Freudian dimension of desire and castration.

    the o-object is directly and immediately implicated at the level of desire, is something obvious... The voice is not alone the causal object but the instrument in which there is manifested the desire of the Other.

76. #76

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.87

    Madame le Docteur Parisot

    Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Dragonetti's commentary on Dante's *Divine Comedy*, Lacan (or his seminar presenter) elaborates how the myth of Narcissus structures a theory of fraudulent conscience: the mirror of Narcissus figures the capture of the subject by its own image, such that the falsification of the sign (counterfeit money) allegorizes the primal separation of consciousness from truth — a movement from the Real to a self-enclosed fiction that becomes "truth itself" for the pervert.

    to break the attachment of his look to error, the intervention of the voice of Virgil is necessary. Virgil says: 'now then, be on your guard'.

77. #77

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.164

    **Seminar 15: Wednesday 27 April 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan reframes Augustine's 'inter urinas et faeces nascimur' as a statement about the subject's birth rather than the living body, using it to introduce the o-object (objet petit a) — specifically the anal and phallic objects alongside the look and the voice — as constitutive of subjectivity, while situating this against the Cartesian 'I think' and recommending Foucault's analysis of Las Meninas as preparation for the next session on the Gaze.

    there are two other o-objects, a curious thing, which remained, even in Freudian theory, half in the shadow... namely, the look and the voice

78. #78

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.159

    **Seminar 14: Wednesday 20 April 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analyst's implication in the symptom is not a relativist problem resolvable by expanding the subject's perspective, but requires a radical topological recasting; moreover, the psychoanalytic novelty lies in language producing real, corporeal effects that precede and exceed conscious apprehension, with the objet petit a re-introduced through a self-referential puzzle about writing to show that the o-object is a structural effect of language, not an imaginary mirage.

    the relationships of language which, incontestably, in effect, are cut and writing, with what presents itself as discourse, ordinary language and which requires this support of the voice, except, of course, that you should not take the voice as simply sonority

79. #79

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.257

    **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the o-object of demand (breast, faeces) must be distinguished from the objects of desire (gaze, voice) and jouissance (linked to castration), and that castration is not reducible to the Oedipus myth's prohibition but marks the bar between the subject and jouissance — a bar that IS desire itself; further, the Hegelian master/slave dialectic fundamentally misreads jouissance by assuming that renunciation entails its loss.

    this other object, which is strange, in short, because it is linked to the object of the look, I mean the voice… what falls (choit) in this retroaction of one signifier on the other, which is what we have defined as the fundamental condition for the apparition of the subject

80. #80

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.160

    **Seminar 14: Wednesday 20 April 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the status of the Voice as a psychoanalytic object is still to be established against naive empiricism, and links this problem to the Socratic/modern science distinction: the absence of ancient science (and thus of the unconscious) is explained by the slave's function as the reserved site of jouissance, whose structural resolution was the precondition for modern subjectivity and psychoanalysis.

    The status of the voice is properly speaking still to be established, but not alone is it to be established, it has to be brought into the mental categories of the clinician

81. #81

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.172

    Mademoiselle Grazien

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Jones's concept of aphanisis to pivot from a discussion of the o-object's four aspects (breast, faeces, gaze, voice) toward the foundational problem of the subject's being, arguing that aphanisis—the fading of the subject behind the signifier—opens the question of how jouissance (irreducibly corporeal) relates to the subject constituted by the "I think/I am" split, a relation Jones gestures toward without being able to theorize.

    the desire of the Other, which you will already immediately sense is supported by the voice

82. #82

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.268

    **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the object of demand (the o-object as bodily appurtenance recovered from the field of the Other) must be distinguished from the object of jouissance, and that castration is properly understood not through the Oedipus myth of incest prohibition alone, but as the barrier that bars the subject from jouissance—a barrier that is desire itself—thereby exposing the Hegelian error of attributing jouissance to the master in the Master/Slave dialectic.

    this other object, which is strange, in short, because it is linked to the object of the look, I mean the voice. But in the measure that, even though it obviously comes from the Other it is, nevertheless, within that we hear it.

83. #83

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.257

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that perversion is structurally intelligible as the attempt to reconnect jouissance and the body that have been disjuncted by the signifying intervention constitutive of the subject, with the objet petit a (small o) serving as the topological and structural key to this reconnection, while the sadistic act paradigmatically illustrates how the perverse subject, in Verleugnung, becomes the instrument of a jouissance located in the Other rather than knowing itself as the subject of that jouissance.

    there are those I designated under the terms of the look and of the voice

84. #84

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.236

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 21: Wednesday 31 May 1967**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that jouissance as a third function is topologically located at the locus of objet petit a, and that perversion—unlike neurosis or the master/slave dialectic—constitutes an experimental, subject-driven inquiry into jouissance by seeking the partial objects that escape signifying alienation; sadism and masochism are reframed as researches along the path of the sexual act rather than natural gender attributes.

    Nothing can take from the slave the function, either of his look or of his voice

85. #85

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.9

    **Seminar 1: Wednesday 16 November 1966**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the subject originates through the cut — topologically modeled on the cross-cap/projective plane — whereby the o-object is separated and Urverdrängung (primal repression) is defined as what a signifier represents for another signifier; the barred subject emerges only in alienated form, and desire is re-formulated not as the essence of man but as the essence of reality, displacing Spinoza's anthropology into a strictly structural, a-theological account.

    Namely, what one of my pupils, recently, at the Congress of the University of Johns Hopkins, took as a subject calling it 'The voice in literary myth'.

86. #86

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.9

    **Seminar 1: Wednesday 16 November 1966**

    Theoretical move: Through topological figures (cross-cap, projective plane) and set-theoretic logic (Euler circles), Lacan argues that the subject originates not as a pre-given entity but is *engendered* by the signifier through a primary cut; the objet petit a is the first "Bedeutung" — the residue of the subject's alienation from the Other — and desire is redefined as the essence of *reality* rather than of man, displacing Spinoza's formula into a properly psychoanalytic, a-theological one.

    Namely, what one of my pupils, recently, at the Congress of the University of Johns Hopkins, took as a subject calling it 'The voice in literary myth'.

87. #87

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.257

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the golden-ratio schema of objet petit a to articulate how perversion attempts to reconnect the body and jouissance that the signifying intervention (the subject-function) necessarily disjoins — with the sadist as the exemplary figure who, in Verleugnung, becomes the instrument of jouissance rather than its master, ultimately revealing that jouissance can only be located in the 'outside-the-body' part that is the o-object.

    those I designated under the terms of the look and of the voice

88. #88

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.235

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 21: Wednesday 31 May 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that jouissance as a third function is topologically located at the locus of objet petit a — the partial objects that escape signifying domination — and uses the master/slave dialectic to demonstrate that jouissance subsists on the side of the slave, not the master; perversion is then recast as a systematic, subject-driven inquiry into this residual jouissance of the Other, while sadism and masochism are reframed as researches along the path of the sexual relation rather than natural gendered dispositions.

    Nothing can take from the slave the function, either of his look or of his voice

89. #89

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

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

    Theoretical move: The psychoanalytic act produces the divided subject ($) as its truth-effect, with the analyst serving as support for the objet petit a that causes this division; Lacan then pivots to argue that the logical function of the universal quantifier ("all") is itself grounded in — and displaced from — the objet petit a, making undecidability (Gödel-style incompleteness) a structural consequence of the subject's relation to the not-all, rather than a technical curiosity.

    the function of the look and of that of the voice

90. #90

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.161

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

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

    will I go on to evoke, at the end of what I have to say to you today, what we make understood with an 'I am not saying', is in general understood as, 'I am not saying no'.

91. #91

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.103

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Aristotelian syllogistic logic—specifically the middle term—to argue that the Objet petit a functions as the logical middle term connecting the psychoanalysand (as vanishing subject) to the psychoanalyst (as product/predicate), while also theorizing that the analyst's position is constituted by an 'in itself' identification with the o-object, distinguished from narcissistic human relations by the exclusion of the 'I like you' (tu me plais).

    they are themselves this waste product, presiding over the operation of the task, that they are the look, that they are the voice.

92. #92

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

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

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

    the function of the look and of that of the voice.

93. #93

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.275

    Seminar 15: Wednesday 19 March 1969 > **Seminar 17: Wednesday 23 April 1969**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the structure of desire—grounded in the impossibility of the sexual relation and the barrier jouissance poses to Other jouissance—is homologous to formal logical flaws (the undecidable, Gödelian incompleteness), and that psychoanalytic stagnation consists in analysts becoming hypnotized by the patient's demand rather than dissolving the neurotic knot at its structural root.

    it is the analyst that is hypnotised. At the end, the analyst ends up by becoming the look and the voice of his patient.

94. #94

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.361

    Seminar 22: Wednesday 4 June 1969

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychoanalytic act is constitutively structured around failure: the objet petit a emerges as a substitute for the gap left by castration (the impasse of the sexual relationship), the analyst incarnates the 'subject supposed to know' only to evacuate the o-object at analysis's end, and transference is properly defined not through repetition alone but through its structural relation to the subject supposed to know as the illusory One of the Other—while the analyst occupies the paradoxical position of a scapegoat who bears the o-object so the subject can be reprieved from it.

    he is isolated from it by keeping quiet, the voice that is the kernel of what, by being said, creates speech.

95. #95

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.255

    Seminar 15: Wednesday 19 March 1969 > Seminar 16: Wednesday 26 March 1969

    Theoretical move: The neurotic's problem is located in the impossibility of integrating the objet petit a onto the imaginary plane alongside the narcissistic image; Lacan reframes primary narcissism as a retroactive illusion produced by secondary (imaginary) narcissistic capture, and positions the fantasy formula ($ ◇ a) at the level of sublimation—while diagnosing neurosis as a structural failure of sublimation.

    a third object which slips away, just as ungraspable in its way as the look or the voice and this famous breast

96. #96

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.252

    Seminar 15: Wednesday 19 March 1969 > Seminar 16: Wednesday 26 March 1969

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the perverse drives (scoptophilic, sadomasochistic) are fundamentally asymmetrical and structured around the topology of the Objet petit a: each drive operates not as a return of its counterpart but as a supplement to the Other, aimed at producing or evacuating the jouissance of the Other rather than of the subject—a logic that makes the pervert a "defender of the faith" of the Other's jouissance.

    What is at stake is the voice. That the masochist should make of the voice of the other just by itself what he is going to give the guarantee of answering like a dog, is essential in the matter.

97. #97

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.14

    **Seminar 1: Wednesday 13 November 1968**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the structure of surplus-jouissance (plus-de-jouir) to ground the constitution of fantasy as the point where subject and object (objet a) achieve a non-reducible consistency, arguing that truth has no guarantee in the Other but only its correlate in the fabricated o-object, while perversion names the site where surplus-jouissance is unveiled in naked form.

    which go from the breast to dejections and from the voice to the look

98. #98

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.321

    Seminar 18: Wednesday 30 April 1969 > **Seminar 20: Wednesday 14 May 1969**

    Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that the phallus functions as the "missing signifier" of the sexual relation precisely because sexual jouissance is outside the system of the subject — there is no subject of sexual enjoyment — and this impossibility is demonstrated by the untraceable, non-coupled nature of the male/female distinction at the level of the signifier.

    what predestines them to this function of being what, replacing the track, establishes this sort of totality from which a topology is constructed as defining the Other

99. #99

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.318

    Seminar 18: Wednesday 30 April 1969 > **Seminar 20: Wednesday 14 May 1969**

    Theoretical move: Lacan grounds the subject's structure in the logic of the signifier as self-othering: the signifier can only represent the subject for another signifier, and this irreducible alterity of the signifier to itself constitutes the big Other as necessarily incomplete (holed by objet petit a), while the subject is redefined as "what effaces its tracks," making the trace-effacement the originary operation from which the signifier and language emerge.

    this support of the voice is distinct, this the datum of the voice, where there is language, where there is this support that characterises in an autonomous way a certain type of track.

100. #100

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.103

     *[A porter appears]*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Discourse of the Master structurally generates surplus-jouissance as the extracted 'tithe' from the slave's knowledge, and that Marx's critique of surplus value is the memorial of this prior extraction of enjoyment — a process whose secret lies in knowledge itself, not in labour, thereby subverting Hegel's claim that labour culminates in Absolute Knowledge.

     I would simply introduce, the question of what can happen about the promotion, of the taking up again of the voice, of what is involved in surplus enjoying, of o

101. #101

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.234

     X: *[On revolutionaries and the proletariat]* > Seminar 13: Wednesday 20 May 1970

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the neologism *lathouse* (from the Greek root of *aletheia*, its aorist form gesturing toward concealment rather than disclosure) to name the objects of consumer-technological civilization that cause desire — distinguishing these from the *alethosphere* — and then pivots to define the analyst's position as a *lathouse*: the one who must inhabit the impossible (not merely the impotent) relation to truth, where the Real is precisely what is impossible in any formalised field.

     it is certainly not for nothing that they always remained within the alethosphere... accompanied all the time by this small o of the human voice.

102. #102

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.36

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the occasion of speaking "to the wall" at Sainte-Anne to develop a structural argument about repetition (which requires a third, not merely a second), tying it to Nachträglichkeit, the Christian Trinity as a model of belief/self-grounding, Plato's cave as a proto-structuralist theory of the object and the origin of language in resonance, and jouissance as what the wall itself occasions.

     Just suppose that Plato's cave is the wall where my voice makes itself heard.

103. #103

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.48

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses topology (the non-orientable surface) to argue that castration is structurally ubiquitous—present at every point of the relational surface between man and woman—and then anchors this topological claim to the Four Discourses, showing that the mathemes ($, S1, S2, a) constitute the logical "walls" behind which enjoyment, surplus-enjoyment, truth, and semblance must be situated.

     it is a matter first of knowing what specifies them as psychiatrists. This does not prevent them, within the limits of these walls, from hearing something other than my voice.

104. #104

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.97

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge > **4 1 \* May 1972**

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the claim that the analytic discourse operates by reproducing neurosis through a model that isolates the master signifier, and that psychoanalysis differs from ideology only insofar as it maps out, rather than veils, the jouissance organised by the signifier's positional effects in a discourse.

     It is an indication about the voice, l'a-voix, which, as everyone knows barks (aboie), and the look (l'a-regard) also which does not aregarde so closely.

105. #105

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.181

     XII > The dream of Irma's injection ( conclusion)

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Freud's Irma dream as staging the structure of the unconscious as a speech that speaks through and beyond the subject, and uses this to pivot toward the death drive as a necessary principle beyond the pleasure principle — a compulsion to return to what has been excluded from the subject that cannot be subsumed under ego homeostasis.

     It is my unconscious, it is this voice which speaks in me, beyond me.

106. #106

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.180

     XII > The dream of Irma's injection ( conclusion)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the symbolic order—specifically the act of naming—is what rescues human perception from the endless imaginary oscillation between ego-unity and object-dissolution, and that the dream of Irma's injection enacts this very joint between the imaginary and the symbolic by revealing the acephalic subject at the limit of anxiety, at which point discourse (the trimethylamine formula) emerges as pure word, independent of meaning.

     a voice which is nothing more than the voice of no one causes the trimethylamine formula to emerge, as the last word on the matter, the word for everything.

107. #107

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.66

     v > IDOLATRY

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject's self-apprehension (self-counting) is not an operation of consciousness but belongs to the unconscious, and that consciousness is 'heterotopic' to the deduction of the subject—a structural third pole required alongside the imaginary dual relation and the symbolic regulation, but not privileged as the ground of subjectivity.

     Isn't it rather the voice Which knows itself when it resounds / No longer to be no one's voice / But that of the waves and the woods?

108. #108

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.136

     **¹⁰⁷x** > Rings of string

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of Borromean knots and rings of string to ground a theory of desire, the subject, and the Other: object a is the void presupposed by demand, the subject's division is structurally equivalent to the 'bending' of a ring, and the Other is not additive to the One but is the 'One-missing' — a difference internal to the One rather than supplementary to it.

     the cause is constituted diversely, according to the Freudian discovery, on the basis of the object of sucking, the object of excretion, the gaze, and the voice.

109. #109

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.252

     (3) Naturally since I made a small mistake

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Borromean knot as a topological demonstration that the One (ring of string enclosing nothing but a hole) grounds both the structure of desire—where the objet petit a is not a being but a void supposed by demand, sustained only by metonymy—and the logic of mathematical language, where removing a single element disperses all the rest simultaneously.

     it is constituted, according to the Freudian discovery, in so far as it is diversely constituted from the object of sucking, the object of excretion, of the look and moreover of the voice.

110. #110

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.144

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 9: Tuesday 8 April 1975**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Borromean knot's topology — particularly the distinction between ek-sistence (the track/cycle) and the hole — as the operative figure for primordial repression (Urverdrängt), arguing that the difficulty of mentally grasping the knot is itself the trace of an irreducible, foundational repression, and that the inexistence of the sexual relationship is not a failure but the very structure knotted into being.

     paranoia is being stuck in the Imaginary. It is the voice that sounds, the look that becomes all-prevailing

111. #111

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.136

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 9: Tuesday 8 April 1975**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Imaginary is structurally "stuck" in the sphere-and-cross figure (a pre-topological image of the body), and that the Borromean knot represents the proper topological instrument for escaping this captivity — linking the knot's discovery to the analytic discourse as a new social bond and to the Freudian "hole" in the universe, while insisting that truth can only be half-said.

     it is perhaps so much the better because if it were stronger, well then I would perhaps in short have less chance of subsisting…whatever voice I may have.

112. #112

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.127

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

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

     it is we who make it say, we talk all by ourselves. This indeed is what I am saying, in connection with any saying whatsoever, we lend our voice. The saying is a consequence, it is not the voice, the saying is an act.

113. #113

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.120

     Seminar 7: Wednesday 17 February 1976

     Theoretical move: The sinthome is theorized topologically as a fourth ring that repairs an error in the Borromean knot—where the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real come undone—and is deployed to explain both Joyce's artistic practice (as compensation for paternal lack) and the clinical phenomenon of imposed words in psychosis, thereby linking the topology of knotting to the structure of symptom formation and paternal function.

     the signifier is reduced to what it is, to equivocation, to a torsion of the voice.

114. #114

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.175

     Seminar 10: Wednesday 13 April 1976 > QUESTIONS

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Borromean knot/chain must be written (not merely thought) to function as a support for thinking, and that this written topology transforms the very meaning of writing by granting it an autonomy irreducible to the signifier's precipitation—the latter being Derrida's domain—while the knot's own logic operates through the 'dit-mension' (dimension of the said), which structurally implies that what is said is not necessarily true.

     What is modulated in the voice has nothing to do with writing.

115. #115

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.99

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 20 January 1976** > Jacques Aubert's intervention > *Where now?*

     Theoretical move: The passage poses a foundational question about the threshold at which significance (as written) distinguishes itself from the effects of phonation, locating the proper name as the privileged site where the signifier's function and phonation intersect — and framing the Borromean knot as only emerging beyond a triple relation.

     the function of phonation precisely in what is involved in supporting the signifier

116. #116

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.79

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 20 January 1976** > Jacques Aubert's intervention

     Theoretical move: Through close reading of Joyce's Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist, Jacques Aubert demonstrates that the Name-of-the-Father functions as a poisoned/self-poisoning signifier, where the father's name change (deed poll), suicide, and spectral return in the Circe episode enact a structural logic of sliding from the paternal (Symbolic) toward the maternal (Imaginary), with the signifier 'Mud' serving as the pivot that triggers the mother's hallucinatory emergence.

     We notice for example the disappearance of the voice of the son, in the quotation given; the son's voice is not mentioned, any more than the father's death. But on the other hand, an effect is produced by this voice of the son displaced into a reply

117. #117

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.95

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 20 January 1976** > Jacques Aubert's intervention > *Where now?*

     Theoretical move: Jacques Aubert's intervention traces Joyce's deployment of legitimacy, certitude, and the voice-effects of the signifier across his work, while Lacan closes by grounding these in the Borromean knot and its irreducible topological ambiguity (the indistinguishability of its rings without colouring), arguing that right/left orientation cannot be expressed in the Symbolic.

     Joyce uses this certitude, stages it in its relationships with the effects of voice. Even if a word, a paternal word is contested qua word in terms of what it says, it seems to me that something, he suggests, gets across in personation, in what is behind personation, is what is on the side of phonation

118. #118

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.83

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 20 January 1976** > Jacques Aubert's intervention > *Where now?*

     Theoretical move: Jacques Aubert's intervention in Lacan's seminar on Joyce traces how the Name-of-the-Father operates as a plural, shifting function in Ulysses—not as a fixed paternal authority but as a series of displacements (Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Virag, Dedalus, J.J. O'Molloy) that fill and re-fill structural holes in the text, while the epiphany is reread as a redoubling that liquidates the poetic dimension, and the mother's imaginary relationship to religion frames Joyce's entire symbolic economy.

     what was she laughing at? At old Royce singing, at what he was saying, at... good, at the tricks of his voice, God knows what...

119. #119

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.11

     Seminar 1: Wednesday 18 November 1975

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Borromean Knot must be understood as a tetradic (four-ring) structure in which the sinthome serves as the fourth element linking the otherwise separate Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real; the Oedipus complex is recast as a symptom/sinthome, and the father's name is itself a sinthome, with Joyce's art exemplifying how artifice can work upon and through the symptom via equivocation in the signifier.

     it is because the body has some orifices of which the most important is the ear, because it cannot be shut, that it is because of this that there is a response in the body to what I called the voice.

120. #120

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.71

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 20 January 1976** > Jacques Aubert's intervention

     Theoretical move: Jacques Aubert's intervention traces how Joyce's textual practice in the Circe episode enacts a logic of signifying displacement and retrospective arrangement, in which the proper name (Mosenthal) functions as a "sup-position" — simultaneously anchoring and disarticulating the paternal voice — thereby threading together questions of the Name-of-the-Father, sexual identity, and suicide through a chain of substitutions rather than through any fixed signification.

     everything can be impersonated there to take up a term that we will later encounter, everything can personate in this text. Everything can be the occasion for voice effects through a mask.

121. #121

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.109

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 20 January 1976** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 10 February 1976**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Joyce's artistic ambition functions as a topological compensation for a de facto Verwerfung (foreclosure) by the father, and uses this to stage the broader claim that the Borromean knot articulates the entanglement of Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real — with the sinthome as the supplementary loop that prevents their dissolution, while also developing the logic of per-version (père-version) as the son-to-father relation structuring the drive.

     the true is self-perforating due to the fact that its use creates meaning out of nothing. This because it slides, because it is sucked in by the image of the corporal hole from which it is emitted, namely, the mouth in so far as it sucks.

122. #122

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.284

     **XXII**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Other must be understood as a *locus* — the site in which speech and the speaking subject are constituted — rather than as a symmetrical alter-ego or existentialist "thou," and uses grammatical evidence (personization across relative clauses) alongside the Schreber case to demonstrate that the asymmetry between I and you, and the structural priority of the big Other, precede and condition any imaginary intersubjectivity.

     T H E VOIC E INTERPELLATIO N O F TH E SIGNIFIE R

123. #123

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.126

     **VIII**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian unconscious is nothing other than the continuous circulation of the symbolic sentence (the "discourse of the Other"), from which the ego functions precisely to shield consciousness; psychosis makes this structure visible by exposing the internal monologue as an articulated, interrupted, and grammatically structured discourse — as Schreber's voices demonstrate — thereby grounding both the theory of the unconscious and the theory of psychosis in the same structural account of language.

     we have no reason to refuse to recognize his voices when the subject testifies that they are something that forms a part of the very text of his lived experience

124. #124

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.289

     **XXII** > **2**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a linguistic analysis of the second person pronoun ('you') to demonstrate that the superego operates as a foreign-body signifier rather than a dialectical law, and that the foundational function of speech—mission or mandate—is what generates the subject's latent question about its own being, with the 'you' as quilting point between address and subjectivity.

     Need I invoke the philosophy of Kant, who recognizes a fixed reality only in the starry skies above our heads and the voice of conscience within? This foreignness... is the true possessor of the house who readily says to the ego - You will have to leave.

125. #125

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan

     **XVI** > *Reading from the* Memoirs, *308-10*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the signifier is structurally indivisible—its meaning-effect overruns any mechanical interruption—and uses this property to reframe the question of libidinal investment in psychosis: what is at stake is not energy per se but the subject's fundamental relationship to the signifier as such.

     within a delusion voices play upon this property

126. #126

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.135

     **VIII** > **IX**

     Theoretical move: By insisting that the unconscious is fundamentally structured by language and that the signifier plays the primary role, Lacan argues that Schreber's delusion is fully legible through psychoanalytic method—the terminal state of the delusion preserves the same signifying elements as the originary experience of psychosis, making the symbolic relationship analyzable throughout.

     this discourse is always present, uninterrupted. The subject can, as he says, drown it out with his actions and his own words, but it's always ready to recommence at the same noise level.

127. #127

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.162

     **X** > **XI** > **1**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychosis cannot be adequately explained at the level of the imaginary (projection, narcissism, ideal ego) because alienation is constitutive of the imaginary as such; what distinguishes psychosis is a breakdown at the level of the symbolic order, specifically through Verwerfung (foreclosure), which operates in the field of symbolic articulation that subtends the reality principle — a field Lacan grounds in the primordial symbolic nihilation of reality itself.

     the fundamental alternation of the vocal connoting presence and absence, on which Freud hinges his whole notion of beyond the pleasure principle.

128. #128

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.352

     **XXV** > **INDE X**

     Theoretical move: This is an index from Seminar III, non-substantive in itself, but it maps the conceptual architecture of the seminar by clustering key Lacanian terms (Verwerfung/foreclosure, signifier, unconscious, symbolic, subject, Verneinung, etc.) with their page references, making visible the theoretical relations Lacan constructs across the seminar.

     Schreber … voices, 114, 121 … subject and voices, 123

129. #129

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.149

     **X** > **On the signifier in the real and the bellowing-miracle**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Schreber's psychosis to develop a theory of the signifier in the real: the verbal hallucination is not a false perception but the limit-phenomenon where discourse opens onto a signifier that precedes and exceeds the subject's intentional grasp, reframing the ego and the Other in terms of this foreign discourse at the heart of subjectivity.

     it's this God who speaks non-stop inside me, through his various agents and extensions... I can't play an aria from The Magic Flute without having him who speaks immediately attribute the corresponding feelings to me, but I don't have them myself.

130. #130

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.229

     **XVII** > **1**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that in psychosis (particularly Schreber's hallucinations), the signifier's dimension of contiguity dominates over the dimension of similarity/metaphor, and that misrecognising the primordial mediating role of the signifier — reducing analysis to the signified — renders psychosis unintelligible; the hallucinatory phenomenon is precisely the grammatical-syntactic part of language imposed as an external reality, marking a failure of the metaphoric function.

     the voice stops, forcing the subject to utter the meaning in question in the sentence... What imposes itself on the subject is the grammatical part of the sentence, the one that exists only by virtue of its signifying character and by being articulated.

131. #131

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.37

     **II** > **The meaning of delusion** > **1**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the defining feature of psychotic delusion is not its content or degree of understandability but its closure to dialectical movement — its "dialectical inertia" — and that the question "Who speaks?" must govern the analysis of paranoia, as demonstrated by the centrality of verbal hallucination and the Schreber case.

     the source of auditory hallucination was not external... Are they not always more or less psychomotor hallucinations?

132. #132

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.112

     **VII** > **1**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the purely imaginary relation — illustrated via Schreber's psychosis — is structurally doomed to collapse (collision/fragmentation) unless stabilized by the symbolic order, specifically the Name of the Father; Schreber's delusion is then read as a clinical demonstration of what happens when that symbolic anchoring fails, leaving the subject exposed to an unchecked imaginary invasion legible through the disintegration of identity, voice phenomena, and the decomposition of language itself.

     there are extremely nuanced auditory phenomena all throughout Schreber's delusion. These range from low whispers to the voice of waters when at night he encounters Ahriman.

133. #133

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.139

     **VIII** > **IX**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Schreber's delusion to elaborate the structure of psychotic discourse: the *Unsinn* (nonsense) of the voices is not simple privation of sense but a positively organized, contradiction-laden discourse from which the subject is alienated, while the threat of being 'forsaken' (*liegen lassen*) functions as the persistent thread tying together the entire delusional structure — with the implication that what is at stake is the subject's relation to language as a whole, not a providential/superego mechanism.

     What is this God, then, who has revealed himself to him? First, he is presence. And his mode of presence is the speaking mode.

134. #134

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.142

     **VIII** > **IX**

     Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Schreber's delusion, Lacan argues that psychotic experience is structured around a fundamental disturbance in the symbolic order: God's radical incomprehension of the human, the 'writing-down system', and the self-contradictory nature of the delusional universe all index a breakdown in the total functioning of language, with the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary as the analytic framework for understanding delusional interlocution.

     There is nothing more fascinating than to see how the delusional voice that has emerged from an indisputably original experience involves in this subject a sort of burning of language

135. #135

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.368

     XVIII CIRCUITS > AN ESSAY IN RUBBER¬ SHEET LOGIC

     Theoretical move: By using the anecdote of a woman artificially inseminated by her dead husband's preserved semen, Lacan sharpens the distinction between the real father and the symbolic father, arguing that paternity is fundamentally a function of speech and the Symbolic Order rather than of biological fecundity — a theoretical move that both grounds the Oedipus complex in the paternal metaphor and exposes the irreducible gap in sexual relations.

     if something of the father has been cut out in this instance... by cutting out his speech, then how and by what path, in what fashion, will the speech of the ancestor be inscribed into the child's psyche? Ultimately, the mother will be the sole representative and conveyer of this speech, so how will she give voice to the bottled ancestor?

136. #136

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.65

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE SIGNIFIER AND THE HOLY SPIRIT > THE DIALECTIC OF FRUSTRATION

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that frustration must be re-theorized through a structural distinction between the real object and the symbolic agent (the mother), showing how the presence-absence opposition introduced by the fort-da game grounds the virtual origin of the symbolic order, and how the mother's failure to respond converts her from symbolic agent into a real power, causing a reversal whereby the object becomes symbolic (a gift-token) rather than merely real.

     The maternal object is called upon when it is absent, and rejected when it is present, all within the same register of appeal, by modulating his voice.

137. #137

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.344

     XVIII CIRCUITS > TRANSFORMATIONS > ^I (o P°)

     Theoretical move: Lacan identifies the "axial moment" in the Little Hans case as a fantasy of mastery over the mother, whereby Hans reworks the castration threat through a series of signifying transformations (objects substituting for one another) culminating in his symbolic reversal: turning the mother's castrating knife into an instrument he controls, making the hole himself.

     the hole where the doll lets out its squeaking voice

138. #138

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.213

     FROM IMAGE TO **SIGNIFIER - IN PLEASURE AND IN REALITY**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that hallucinatory satisfaction is not a primitive imaginary phenomenon but is constituted at the level of signifiers and presupposes the locus of the Other; consequently, both the pleasure principle and the reality principle must be rethought as effects of the signifying chain rather than of need-satisfaction or experiential adaptation.

     the principal means of expression of his experience of reality... is surely the voice. The teaching he receives comes to him essentially from the speech of adults.

139. #139

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.328

     **SIGNIFIER, BAR** AND PHALLUS

     Theoretical move: The passage theorises the bar as the essential property of the signifier — its capacity to be cancelled/effaced — and uses this to ground the relationship between the signifying chain, the subject, desire, and the phallus; the Aufhebung of a non-signifying element (real or imaginary) is precisely what raises it to the dignity of a signifier, making the bar the hinge between signification, subjectivity, and the castration complex.

     It's this passage from one to the next that constitutes the essential feature of what I call the signifying chain... it's the voice that sustains this passage.

140. #140

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.144

     **FORECLOSURE OF THE NAME-OF -THE-FATHER**

     Theoretical move: Lacan demonstrates that Foreclosure (Verwerfung) of the Name-of-the-Father destroys the message/code circuit at point A (the locus of the Other), thereby collapsing the signifying conditions for desire's satisfaction and precipitating psychosis—illustrated through Schreber's voice hallucinations as substitutes for the absent paternal signifier.

     In no case, effectively, can what you say really make you understood … The word 'invocation' … it's what was performed … to get the gods of the others on their side … One needs to give him the very voice we want him to have.

141. #141

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.161

     THE LITTLE COUGH AS A MESSAGE

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the clinical vignette of a patient's "little cough" to demonstrate that a seemingly somatic act belongs to the symbolic (vocal) register and functions as a message — doubly so when the patient himself thematises it — and to show how fantasy operates as the subject's mode of adorning/investing himself with a signifier that both conceals and reveals his desire.

     Here we see the symbolic power and dimension insofar as it extends to everything in the vocal register. Regardless of the fact that a cough may give the impression of being a purely somatic event, it is situated in the same dimension as sounds like 'Uh, huh' and 'Yes ...'

142. #142

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.398

     IN THE FORM OF A CUT

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject encounters itself only as gap or cut in the unconscious chain, and that objet petit a is constituted structurally as a cut: the pregenital objects (oral, anal), the phallus (castration complex), and delusion are three forms of a that share the formal property of coupure, functioning as signifying props that screen the hole in the unconscious chain for a barred subject who fundamentally misrecognises itself there.

     it is through this very same orifice that the voice passes. Now, vocal production is something that is cut and scanned [se scande]. This is why later today we will come back to the voice when we turn to delusions.

143. #143

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.401

     IN THE FORM OF A CUT > A few tangential remarks are in order here.

     Theoretical move: Lacan develops the voice as the third form of objet petit a — specifically as a pure cut or gap — by contrasting it with ordinary vocal function and analysing the hallucinatory voice in psychotic delusion, where the interrupted sentence (Schreber's Sie sollen werden…) produces a call to signification that swallows the subject; he then frames this alongside the mirror-stage, narcissism, and the phallus to insist that fantasy's "dimension of being" cannot be collapsed into any reality-adaptation model of analytic technique.

     We will not be able to understand the phenomenological characteristics of the voice in delusions unless we have first been able to grasp in what respect it corresponds quite specifically to the formal requirements of little a, insofar as it can be raised to the signifying function of a cut or gap as such.

144. #144

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.418

     CUT AND FANTASY

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the function of fantasy in Hamlet is not instrumental (a 'means employed') but structural: the ghost's revelation — a paradoxical speech-act that poisons Hamlet through the ear — constitutes a hole/wall/enigma that traps the subject in a permanent deferral of truth, and only the artifice of theatrical representation partially restores Hamlet's capacity for desire and action.

     it is the father's revelation... that lives on in its consequences. His revelation is presented to us in the form of the wall that it forms, the hole that it digs, and the impenetrable enigma that it constitutes... if there is anyone who gets poisoned through the ear, it is Hamlet himself. And what plays the role of poison in his case is his father's speech.

145. #145

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.410

     CUT AND FANTASY

     Theoretical move: This passage systematically works through the upper level of the Graph of Desire to show how fantasy functions as an imaginary prop that substitutes for the unattainable articulation of the subject as subject of the unconscious—bridging the gap between the barred subject's encounter with demand and the insufficiency of the Other's guarantee of truth.

     the third object here involves an incarnated voice, it is less an interrupted discourse than a voice that is cut from the text of the subject's internal monologue.

146. #146

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.41

     **II**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's apparatus of the pleasure/reality principles is not a psychology but an ethics, and that the structural necessity of language (the cry as sign) to render unconscious processes conscious demonstrates that the unconscious has no other structure than the structure of language — a claim grounded in a close reading of the Entwurf's distinction between identity of perception and identity of thought.

     a hostile object is only acknowledged at the level of consciousness when pain causes the subject to utter a cry. The existence of the feindlicher Objekt as such is the cry of the subject.

147. #147

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.63

     **IV**

     Theoretical move: By reading das Ding as the 'beyond-of-the-signified' — the absolute, prehistoric Other that can only be missed, never reached — Lacan grounds the clinical structures of hysteria, obsessional neurosis, and paranoia in differential relations to this primordial lost object, and then opens the path toward a Kantian ethics where das Ding is replaced by the pure signifying system of the moral law.

     the way in which the stranger, the hostile figure, appears in the first experience of reality for the human subject is the cry.

148. #148

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.320

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **PENSÉE'S DESIRE** > And a bit further on she continues:

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Claudel's blind Pensée as an incarnation of the partial object of desire — specifically as a figure that, through her blindness, escapes the scopic economy (seeing-oneself-seen) and instead operates through the structure of the voice and speech, which cannot be heard hearing itself except in hallucination; this leads to the claim that castration alone separates absolute desire from natural desire, and that the sublime object of desire functions as a substitute for das Ding.

     This is where I wish to lead you - to the distinction between two relationships: that of seeing oneself and that of hearing oneself… one cannot hear oneself being heard.

149. #149

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.399

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE RELATIONSHIP BETW EEN ANXIETY A N D DESIRE** > **M O U R N IN G THE LOSS OF THE ANALYST**

     Theoretical move: The passage articulates the structural function of objet petit a as the remainder that animates desire: the partial object is constituted by the elision of the phallus from the narcissistic image, such that libidinal cathexis (Besetzung) circulates around a central blank, and the object of desire is precisely what is 'saved from the waves' of narcissistic love — establishing the dialectic between being and having through the oral, anal, and phallic stages of demand.

     Perhaps this is what is known, strictly speaking, as 'a voice crying in the wilderness' [parler dans le désert]

150. #150

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.11

     Lecture Announcement

     Theoretical move: This lecture announcement frames Lacan's ethics seminars as a challenge to normalization in analytic practice and to religious monopoly on morality, positioning Freud's articulation of the unconscious as capable of grounding an ethics that goes beyond hedonism, altruism, and phenomenological critique — centering Das Ding and the Name of the Father as the structural pivots of desire and moral law.

     to recognize the voice of the Father in the commandments his Death left intact

151. #151

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.88

     The voice and the drive > His Master's Voice, His Master's Ear

     Theoretical move: Dolar uses the HMV logo as a theoretical parable: the voice-as-object (acousmatic voice) operates as a Lacanian drive-montage that simultaneously structures authority/obedience, deceives via a trompe-l'oreille analogous to trompe-l'œil, and exposes the speaking subject to the power of the Other's ear — thereby showing the voice's irreducible asymmetry with vision and its constitutive role in psychosis and subjective interiority.

     The voice is elusive, always changing, becoming, elapsing, with unclear contours, as opposed to the relative permanence, solidity, durability of the seen.

152. #152

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.179

     Silence

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the voice occupies a structurally privileged position at the point of exception within the law: it epitomizes "validity beyond meaning" (Geltung ohne Bedeutung), functioning as the non-universal partial object that captures desire and holds the subject in thrall, thereby linking Lacan's topological account of subject/Other desire (via the torus) to Kafka's literary figures of bare life and sovereignty, and to Agamben's inclusive exclusion.

     the voice epitomizes at best validity beyond meaning, being structurally placed at the point of the exception… the voice stands at the point of exception, the internal exception which threatens to become the rule

153. #153

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.62

     chapter 2 > Shofar

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

     the voice that commands and binds, the voice of God. If there is to be a founding law, a covenant, the voice has to play a crucial part in it.

154. #154

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.138

     The voice and the drive > The voice and the letter

     Theoretical move: Dolar uses Freud's well-known ambivalence toward music as a pivot to argue that the voice operates across three registers in Freud's texts (fantasy, desire, drive), and that the key fault-line in the Freudian corpus is between an unconscious that "speaks" (structured like a language) and drives that are constitutively mute — with the death drive as the silent, invisible shadow subtending the "clamor" of Eros.

     His immunity to its aesthetics and its seductive Sirens' song has its counterpart in a great susceptibility for listening to voices in another register, and for hearing the voice precisely where the friend of the Italian opera is hearing-impaired.

155. #155

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.159

     A month later: > Lalangue

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that *lalangue* names the irreducible surplus of phonic materiality over meaning in language, and that this surplus—rather than being aestheticized as poetic effect—is the very site where unconscious desire is constituted retroactively; interpretation's aim is therefore not to supply meaning but to reduce signifiers to their non-sense, revealing desire as the fold of language itself rather than its hidden content.

     once under the auspices of the surplus-voice (lalangue) and once under the auspices of the letter, the senseless letter of the matheme

156. #156

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar

     The voice and the drive > The antipolitics of the voice

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a structural contrast between fascism and Stalinism in terms of their differential relation to the voice: fascism places the Führer's voice *in place of* the law/big Other, while Stalinism paradoxically derives its power from the self-effacement of the voice behind the letter, making the minimal, hidden voice the very mechanism of its terror.

     the voice instead of, in place of, the law. In this light, all the legacy of the Enlightenment... could only appear as an obstacle to the biopolitical agenda.

157. #157

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.181

     Silence > Ulysses

     Theoretical move: Dolar reads Kafka's "Silence of the Sirens" to articulate how the law operates not through command but through silence—its zero-point of voice—which is irresistible precisely because there is nothing to resist, and shows that Ulysses' "escape" relies on a self-cancelling pretense whose structure mirrors the logic of the Jewish joke, leaving the law's mechanism intact.

     The silence which is unbearable and irresistible, the ultimate weapon of the law. […] Silence here is the very form of the validity of the law beyond its meaning, the zero-point of voice, its pure embodiment.

158. #158

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.196

     Silence > The dog

     Theoretical move: Dolar argues that Deleuze and Guattari's concept of deterritorialization of the mouth converges with Freud's drive theory, and that both lines — voice and food — meet in the objet petit a; Kafka's "ultimate science" of freedom is then identified retroactively as psychoanalysis, the science capable of taking this intersection as its object.

     the bit that eludes it can be pinned down as the element of the voice, this pure alterity of what is said. This is the common ground it shares with food

159. #159

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.80

     chapter 2 > The acousmatics of the voice

     Theoretical move: The acousmatic voice structurally resists 'disacousmatization': its source is constitutively concealed, meaning ventriloquism is not an exception but the very condition of voice as object—the voice emerges precisely in the void from which it supposedly stems, operating as both surplus-of-body and no-more-body (plus-de-corps), and thus as the operator of the impossible division between interior and exterior.

     the voice as the object appears precisely with the impossibility of disacousmatization. It is not the haunting voice impossible to pin down to a source; rather, it appears in the void from which it is supposed to stem but which it does not fit, an effect without a proper cause.

160. #160

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.129

     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.

     the voice is structurally in the same position as sovereignty, which means that it can suspend the validity of the law and inaugurate the state of emergency.

161. #161

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.116

     The voice and the drive > The voice of the superego

     Theoretical move: By drawing on Agamben's analogy between phone/logos and zoe/bios, Dolar argues that the voice occupies the topology of extimacy — it is neither simply exterior to speech nor a pre-cultural remnant, but a product of logos itself that is simultaneously included and excluded, haunting language at its core.

     the voice is not simply an element external to speech, but persists at its core, making it possible and constantly haunting it by the impossibility of symbolizing it

162. #162

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.93

     The voice and the drive > The voice of the daemon

     Theoretical move: By tracing the "voice of conscience" from Socrates' daemon through Rousseau's Savoy vicar, Dolar argues that the supposedly pure inner voice — positioned as the ground of morality beyond logos — is structurally tied to the big Other: the apotreptic, negative function of the divine inner voice always requires an external authority (Teacher, daemon, God) to authenticate it, so the ideal of autonomous self-authorization secretly reproduces heteronomy.

     It is a voice, and whenever it speaks it turns me away from something I am about to do, but it never encourages me to do anything.

163. #163

     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 voice is perhaps ultimately the operator which enables this transition.

164. #164

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.32

     A Voice and Nothing More > The voice and the signifier

     Theoretical move: By systematically working through three empirical modes of vocal excess (accent, intonation, timbre), Dolar shows that none of them fully captures the voice as such; he then reframes the voice as coinciding with the process of enunciation itself — the invisible string that holds the signifying chain together and sustains the subject — thereby opening the question of the object voice as irreducible to any material or linguistic description.

     the voice as the agent of enunciation sustains the signifiers and constitutes the string, as it were, that holds them together, although it is invisible because of the beads concealing it.

165. #165

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.99

     The voice and the drive > The voice of reason

     Theoretical move: By tracing the "voice of reason" across Kant, Freud, and Lacan, Dolar argues that the power of reason is paradoxically grounded in a voice whose origin escapes consciousness, and that this voice structurally coincides with unconscious desire—culminating in Lacan's identification of the Kantian categorical imperative with pure desire, and repositioning the ego (not the unconscious) as the true locus of irrationality.

     the voice of reason, which, while silent, is nevertheless so loud that no matter how loudly we cry, we can never cover or silence it. Reason itself is endowed with the divine voice, it coincides with it

166. #166

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.44

     chapter 2

     Theoretical move: The structural reduction of the voice by phonology does not eliminate the voice but produces it as a remainder — the Lacanian object petit a — thereby reversing the phonological assumption that voice is raw material prior to structure and instead positioning it as the outcome of the signifying operation.

     the voice is not taken as a hypothetical or mythical origin that the analysis would have to break down into distinctive traits… but, rather, the opposite—it stands at the outcome of the structural operation

167. #167

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.207

     Notes > Chapter 3 The "Physics" of the Voice

     Theoretical move: This endnote apparatus advances several interlocking theoretical arguments: the drive's aim/goal distinction (via Lacan) explains why the oral drive circles an eternally lacking object rather than reaching satisfaction; the acousmatic voice is shown to be structurally tied to phantomology when seen/heard fail to coincide; and the trompe-l'œil/lure distinction illuminates how deception operates at the level of the sign rather than verisimilitude.

     Orpheus, as opposed to the Sirens, yields authority to the Other and tries to elicit the Other's mercy through his voice, while the Sirens, the depositories of the voice as authority, are merciless.

168. #168

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.209

     Notes > Chapter 4 The Ethics of the Voice

     Theoretical move: These notes to "The Ethics of the Voice" develop the structural homology between the superego's categorical imperative and the Kantian moral law, trace the voice's ethical function across Rousseau, Kant, Freud, and Lacan, and culminate in the claim that the foreclosed Name-of-the-Father returns in the Real precisely as the voice in psychosis.

     Voice without law leads to lethal [mortifère] enjoyment, law without voice remains a dead letter

169. #169

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.117

     The voice and the drive > The voice of the superego > Viva voce

     Theoretical move: Dolar argues that the voice functions as the constitutive internal exterior of logos across key Ideological State Apparatuses (church, court, university, elections), showing that written law, sacred scripture, institutional knowledge, and democratic will can only be enacted and made performative when assumed by a living voice—a structural topology that is not archaic residue but the very mechanism by which symbolic/legal acts acquire their force.

     The voice is intimately linked with the dimension of the sacred and ritual in intricately structured social situations where using the voice makes it possible to perform a certain act.

170. #170

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.211

     Notes > Chapter 5 The Politics of the Voice

     Theoretical move: These endnotes to Chapter 5 develop a set of theoretical positions on the voice as a political instrument: Hegel's monarch neutralizes the exception through signature (the senseless letter) rather than voice, Agamben's biopolitical logic of inclusion-by-exclusion frames the sacred/sacrificial, and Lacan's reading of Nazism as sacrifice to obscure gods is critiqued as inadequate to the problem of the Holocaust.

     The central role of the immediacy of the voice caused many legal problems with the introduction of sound recording and then video into the courtroom

171. #171

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.60

     chapter 2 > A brief course in the history of metaphysics

     Theoretical move: Dolar argues that the history of metaphysics is not simply phonocentric but is structured by a compulsive attempt to subordinate voice to logos; the voice harbors an irreducible alterity and ambivalent jouissance that escapes sense and presence, and it is precisely this excess that constitutes the properly Lacanian 'object voice.'

     the voice against logos, the voice as the other of logos, its radical alterity. 'Metaphysics' has always been very well aware of that, as we have seen, compulsively clinging to a simple exorcizing formula

172. #172

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.13

     A Voice and Nothing More

     Theoretical move: The passage introduces the voice as a third object irreducible to either its function as a vehicle of meaning or as an aesthetic fetish, arguing that psychoanalysis alone can sustain fidelity to this "object voice" — a surplus effect that escapes both interpellation and aesthetic sublimation.

     there is a third level: an object voice which does not go up in smoke in the conveyance of meaning, and does not solidify in an object of fetish reverence, but an object which functions as a blind spot in the call and as a disturbance of aesthetic appreciation.

173. #173

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.35

     A Voice and Nothing More > The linguistics of the non-voice

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that ostensibly "presymbolic" or "presignifying" vocal phenomena—coughing, hiccups, babbling, and the scream—are not external to the symbolic structure but are always already captured by it; their very non-signifying character makes them the zero-point of signification and the minimal condition of possibility for the signifier as such. Simultaneously, the scream's transformation into appeal enacts the passage from need to desire via the structure of address to the Other.

     The voice presents a short circuit between nature and culture, between physiology and structure; its vulgar nature is mysteriously transubstantiated into meaning tout court.

174. #174

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.184

     Silence > The mouse

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Kafkan "strategy of art"—exemplified by Josephine's voice as a minimal, ready-made gap within the law—inevitably defeats itself: the very institutionalization of the exception reinserts it into the symbolic order, closing the gap it opened and confirming that art's transcendence is always domesticated back into a social function.

     Josephine's voice presents a different problem: the emergence of another kind of voice in the midst of a society governed by the law; a voice which would not be the voice of the law, though it may seem impossible to tell them apart.

175. #175

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.40

     A Voice and Nothing More > The linguistics of the non-voice

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the non-linguistic voice (laughter, singing) is neither simply outside linguistic structure nor fully captured by it, and that the singing voice's apparent surplus-meaning is a structural fantasy/illusion that functions as a fetish disavowing castration—the very condition that gives the voice its fascination. The object voice (objet petit a) is precisely what aesthetic or religious idealization of the voice conceals.

     it is in order to silence what deserves to be called the voice as the object a

176. #176

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.108

     The voice and the drive > The voice of the superego

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the voice occupies an irreducible ambiguous position between the ethical and the perverse: the ethical voice is pure enunciation without statement (demanding the subject supply the statement/act), while the superego is a "fat voice" that fills this void with positive content, guilt, and transgressive enjoyment — yet neither exhausts the voice, which always marks a void in both the subject and the Other. The chapter then opens onto the political dimension by following Aristotle's division between mere voice (phone) and speech (logos) as the foundation of the political.

     The voice appears as the nonsignifying, meaningless foundation of ethics... The voice is the element which ties the subject and the Other together, without belonging to either.

177. #177

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.142

     The voice and the drive > The click

     Theoretical move: Dolar argues that the voice functions as a traumatic kernel at the origin of fantasy, specifically the primal scene fantasy: a contingent, inexplicable sound (the 'click') short-circuits inner and outer, revealing an excess of jouissance in the Other that simultaneously constitutes the subject's own enigma, so that subjectivation is grounded not in language structure but in a pre-linguistic sonorous object.

     At the origin of fantasy there is a traumatic kernel materialized by the voice, the noise—we should allow full latitude here to a sonority not pertaining to language.

178. #178

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.71

     chapter 2 > The acousmatics of the voice

     Theoretical move: The acousmatic voice—a voice whose source cannot be seen or located—is shown to structurally produce effects of divinity, authority, and uncanny presence (Unheimlichkeit) by separating the voice from its body, and this mechanism operates through a fantasy-encirclement of the enigmatic object behind the screen, linking the acousmatic to the Voice as Lacanian object.

     the voice itself which acquired authority and surplus-meaning by virtue of the fact that its source was concealed; it seemed to become omnipresent and omnipotent.

179. #179

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.123

     The voice and the drive > The antipolitics of the voice

     Theoretical move: The passage theorizes two opposed political uses of the voice against the letter: (1) a ritual/complementary division-of-labor in which the voice enacts and seals the letter's authority, and (2) an authoritarian-totalitarian use in which the voice supplants the letter — with fascism and Stalinism representing structurally inverse forms of this second mode, the former centred on the charismatic, law-suspending voice and the latter on the self-effacing subordination of voice to the letter-as-Big-Other.

     It is precisely the (appropriately called) authoritarian voice, voice as authoritarian, the voice as the source of authority against the letter, or the voice not supplementing but supplanting the letter.

180. #180

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.151

     A month later: > Lalangue

     Theoretical move: Dolar argues that lalangue names the internal divergence between the signifier's differential logic and the voice's logic of sonic resemblance/contamination, displacing the early Lacanian formula "the unconscious is structured like a language" with one in which enjoyment (jouissance) is not proscribed beyond speech but operates as the inner torsion of speech itself—the Möbius-strip surface on which signifier and voice are the same yet irreducibly split.

     the Lacanian notion of the voice as that part of the signifier which does not contribute to making sense (Miller 1989, p. 180)

181. #181

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.52

     chapter 2 > A brief course in the history of metaphysics

     Theoretical move: Against Derrida's phonocentric thesis, Dolar demonstrates that metaphysics harbors a counter-tradition in which the voice—specifically the voice unmoored from logos/text—is figured as dangerous, seductive, and ruinous, establishing a persistent dichotomy of voice and logos that runs from ancient Chinese precepts through Plato and Augustine, and which Lacan inherits rather than invents.

     There exists a different metaphysical history of voice, where the voice, far from being the safeguard of presence, was considered to be dangerous, threatening, and possibly ruinous.

182. #182

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.81

     The voice and the drive

     Theoretical move: Dolar argues that the voice, as objet petit a, occupies the paradoxical topological intersection of language and the body that belongs to neither, and that this position is what makes the voice the object of the drive rather than of desire — the drive's "aim" (the voice as by-product) is satisfied on the way to the "goal" (meaning), precisely because the voice is a non-dialectical, aphonic remainder that resists signification.

     the object voice, is the by-product of this operation, its side-result that the drive gets hold of, circling around it, coming back to the same place in a movement of repetition.

183. #183

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.90

     The voice and the drive > His Master's Voice, His Master's Ear

     Theoretical move: The voice, as object of the drive, operates through a constitutive asymmetry of incorporation and expulsion that makes it extimate—belonging to neither interior nor exterior—and this same structural topology grounds the intimate connection between voice and conscience that has animated the ethical tradition.

     The voice is the excess of the signifier, initially displayed as the excess of the demand of the Other, the demand beyond any particular demands, demand as such

184. #184

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.168

     Silence

     Theoretical move: The analyst's silence does not simply oppose lalangue but is its structural flip side: by creating a void in which the analysand's speech resonates through the loop of the Other, silence dispossesses the voice, returning the message of desire as the voice of the drive, and this trajectory—from subject-supposed-to-know through fantasy to the object voice—is the path of analysis itself, culminating in la passe.

     the moment the analysand hears his or her own voice against the backdrop of that silence, there is a structural effect which we could call the dispossession of the voice, its expropriation (ex-proprius—it is deprived of its proper nature).

185. #185

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.215

     Chapter 6 Freud's Voices

     Theoretical move: This passage is a footnotes/endnotes section for Chapters 6 and 7, but it contains substantive theoretical moves: linking Dream-Work to Wish-Fulfillment, articulating the Drive's mythological status, connecting the fundamental fantasy to the drive, and theorizing the Voice and Objet petit a as the eternally lacking object that circumvents oral satisfaction, while also noting the structural role of the Matheme against phonological structuralism.

     The voice is never my own voice, but the response is my own response.

186. #186

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.191

     Silence > The dog

     Theoretical move: By reading Kafka's "Investigations of a Dog," Dolar traces how the acousmatic voice-from-nowhere (objet petit a as pure resonance) converges with the enigma of food to identify objet petit a as the common-source intersection of voice and nourishment—both passing through the mouth in mutual exclusion—while also theorising psychoanalysis as the abandonment of childhood rather than its retrieval.

     The seven dogs' voices come out of a pure void, they spring up from nothing, a pure resonance without a source, as if the pure alterity of the voice had turned into music

187. #187

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.145

     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.

     first, the voice, the noise, things heard, are at the core of the formation of fantasy; a fantasy is a confabulation built around the sonorous kernel, it has a privileged relationship to the voice

188. #188

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.25

     A Voice and Nothing More > The voice and the signifier

     Theoretical move: Dolar argues that the voice, as the material support of speech, functions as a "vanishing mediator" that disappears into meaning, and that the structural-linguistic gesture of phonology is precisely the annihilation of the voice as substance—yet this operation always produces an irreducible remainder that cannot be subsumed into the signifier, establishing the voice as the non-signifying leftover of signification.

     we can put forward a provisional definition of the voice (in its linguistic aspect): it is what does not contribute to making sense. It is the material element recalcitrant to meaning

189. #189

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.204

     Notes > Chapter 2 The Metaphysics of the Voice

     Theoretical move: This is a notes/endnotes section providing bibliographic citations, clarificatory remarks, and brief theoretical asides for Chapter 2 on the metaphysics of the voice; substantive theoretical content is minimal and mostly cross-referential, touching on the mirror stage/objet a distinction, the voice-castration structural tie, and the voice's role in jouissance and sexuation.

     They raise in the most immediate way the question of the relation between voice and castration, a rather too obvious and hence trivial demonstration of the structural tie between castration and the object in psychoanalysis

190. #190

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.46

     chapter 2 > Voice and presence

     Theoretical move: Dolar argues that the object voice, far from grounding a "metaphysics of presence" (as Derrida's deconstruction of phonocentrism might imply), introduces an irreducible rupture at the core of narcissistic self-presence: the voice is not the transparent medium of auto-affection but harbors an alien, Real kernel—the object voice—that makes the subject possible only through an impossible relation to what cannot be present.

     the voice seems to embody a presence, a background for differential traits, a positive basis for their inherent negativity

191. #191

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.166

     Silence

     Theoretical move: Dolar argues that silence must be theorized across Lacan's three registers—symbolic (silence as structural differential element), imaginary (silence as supposed plenitude), and real (silence as the mute insistence of the drives)—and that the analyst's silence is not merely an absence of speech but an act that homologizes the silence of the drives, making it the operative lever of analytic practice.

     the voice, this excrescence of language, is the royal road to the drives, the part which 'doesn't speak.'

192. #192

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.108

     Orthopsycbism > Guilty versus Useful Pleasures > Beyond the Good Neighbor Principle

     Theoretical move: Psychoanalysis corrects both Kantian ethics and utilitarianism by reinstating the superego as the hidden enunciator of the moral law, thereby restoring the division of the subject that Kant's erasure of the enunciating instance threatens to abolish—and exposing how the disavowal of this division underwrites the violence latent in utilitarian happiness-maximization.

     He supposes that the ethical subject hears the voice of conscience as its own

193. #193

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.194

     Detour through the Drive > The Voice and the Voice-Over

     Theoretical move: Against the standard reading that the film noir voice-over signals the hero's limited knowledge, Copjec argues that the voice-over's excess over commentary indexes a surplus jouissance — a private enjoyment adhering in the act of speech itself — and that the "grain of the voice" (following Barthes rather than Bonitzer) functions as a transferential X that eroticizes the voice, preserving particularity and desire rather than marking mere epistemic failure.

     the noncorporealized voice of the classical documentary issues from a space other than that on the screen, an unrepresented, undetermined space; thus transcending the visible, determined field, the voice maintains its absolute power over the image

194. #194

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.204

     Locked RoomILonely Room

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that film noir's characteristic "lonely room" architecture — depopulated, emptied of desire and interpretability — is the spatial correlative of the drive's displacement of the big Other: where classical detection produces an infinite interpretable space (the locked room), noir produces a space of pure being, where the intrusion of objet petit a (the grain of the voice, private jouissance) into the phenomenal public field depletes rather than enriches social reality, and the hero's choice of jouissance over the signifying network yields a satisfying "nothing."

     The intrusion of the private-the object a, the grain of the voice-into phenomenal reality, its addition, is registered in the depletion of this reality.

195. #195

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.268

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale > Sexual Diference and the Superego > Chapter l

     Theoretical move: This passage is a footnotes/endnotes section providing bibliographic citations and brief theoretical asides; it is largely non-substantive, though several notes touch on suture, the logic of the signifier, voice, drive, and democracy as symbolic mutation.

     Pascal Bonitzer, 'The Silences of the Voice' ... Roland Barthes, 'The Grain of the Voice'

196. #196

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.282

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale > Chapter S

     Theoretical move: This passage is a book index (pages 281-283) listing topics, authors, and concepts with page references; it is non-substantive filler with no theoretical argument.

     Voice, in film, 184 1 86, 188 190 Voice-over narrative, 1 83 184, 186, 187 188, 198

197. #197

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

     Detour through the Drive > The Voice and the Voice-Over

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that when desire gives way to drive, the intimate core of being—jouissance—ceases to be merely supposed and becomes exposed at the surface of speech, yet without becoming phenomenal or communicable; this topological shift is then applied to film noir, where the voice-over materializes the subject's irreducible absence from the diegetic reality it narrates.

     In film noir the grain of the voice surfaces alongside the diegetic reality. Issuing from the point of death, it marks not some ideal point where the subject would finally be absorbed into his narrative.

198. #198

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     III

     Theoretical move: Freud theorizes the Ego Ideal as the structural heir to primary narcissism, distinguishing it sharply from sublimation, and identifies conscience as the psychic agency that measures the actual ego against the ideal—an agency whose regressive form reappears in paranoid self-scrutiny delusions and whose normal operation underlies dream censorship.

     They are informed of the workings of this entity by voices, which characteristically speak to them in the third person ('Now she's thinking about that again', 'Now he's going away').

199. #199

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *The aftermath of theology* > *Theology and the voice of God*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that theology should be understood not as human discourse that defines God, but as the site where God speaks into human discourse — a shift from idolatrous representationalism to a responsive, a/theological posture that acknowledges the irreducible excess of the divine over any tradition's understanding of it.

     we must seek, not to speak of God, but rather to be that place where God speaks.

200. #200

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

     Freud against the Illusion of Psychical Freedom > Driven Destiny Makes a Voice

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian drive *is* destiny (Triebschicksale = tautology), because drives are the constant, inescapable force that determines the subject from within, and the four modes of drive-destiny (reversal, turning against the self, repression, sublimation) are defense formations that never abolish what they defend against—meaning psychoanalysis is a rationalist theory of psychical determinism that collapses the distinction between fate and will.

     There must be something which makes a voice within us, ready to recognize the compelling force of destiny in Oedipus

201. #201

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

     <span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_page237"><span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_pg237" class="pagebreak" title="237"></span></span>**Notes** > **Chapter 7**

     Theoretical move: This is a notes/bibliography section for Chapter 7, listing scholarly sources cited in the chapter's argument about statistics, noir film, suture, voice, and drive. The only substantive theoretical content appears in note 16, which argues that Jakobson's differential phonology exhibits the same logic of suture as Frege's, and in note 28, which deploys the drive/defense-against-drive distinction to clarify the theory of film noir.

     Pascal Bonitzer, 'The Silences of the Voice' … Roland Barthes, 'The Grain of the Voice'

202. #202

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.129

     **Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety** > <span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_c05_r1.htm_page127"><span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_c05_r1.htm_pg127" class="pagebreak" title="127"></span></span>**The Drying Up of the Breast**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that vampirism and the uncanny are structurally indexed to the collapse of the fantasy relation to the partial object (objet petit a): when the extimate object loses its status as object-cause of desire and is encountered at zero distance, anxiety replaces desire, the fantasy structure collapses, and jouissance floods in—a logic illustrated through breast-feeding discourse, vampire fiction, Hitchcock's Rebecca, and Marker's La Jetée.

     The breast—like the gaze, the voice, the phallus, and the feces—is an object, an appendage of the body, from which we separate ourselves in order to constitute ourselves as subjects.

203. #203

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.97

     **The Sartorial Superego** > **Beyond the Good Neighbor Principle**

     Theoretical move: Psychoanalysis radicalizes Kant's ethical subject by insisting that the moral law is always enunciated by a superegoic Other whose sadistic enjoyment is concealed when the marks of enunciation are erased; restoring this division of the subject is itself an ethical necessity, and its disavowal generates the violent aggressions disguised as utilitarian benevolence.

     He supposes that the ethical subject hears the voice of conscience as its own.

204. #204

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.189

     **Locked Room/Lonely Room: Private Space in Film Noir** > **The Voice and the Voice-Over**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that the "grain of the voice" operates as a structural limit that collapses universal sense and installs the listener in a relation of transference/desire toward an unknown X; when desire gives way to drive, this private beyond is no longer hidden but exposed as a void—jouissance surfacing within the phenomenal field without becoming phenomenal—a move that explains the film noir voice-over's materialization of the narrator's irreducible absence from diegetic reality.

     The grain of the voice has no content; it appears only as the "friction" (Barthes's word) one hears when one perceives the materiality of language, its resistance to meaning.

205. #205

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.193

     **Locked Room/Lonely Room: Private Space in Film Noir** > **Locked Room/Lonely Room**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that film noir enacts a structural shift from the "locked room" of classical detection (governed by a benevolent-impotent Other that conceals and yields meaning) to the "lonely room" (governed by the drive), where the intrusion of the non-phenomenal private realm—the object a, the grain of the voice—into public space registers not as plenitude but as a depletion of phenomenal reality, so that noir's characteristic emptiness is the positive mark of jouissance overrunning the signifying network.

     The intrusion of the private—the object a, the grain of the voice—into phenomenal reality, its addition, is registered in the depletion of this reality.

206. #206

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.184

     **Locked Room/Lonely Room: Private Space in Film Noir** > **The Voice and the Voice-Over**

     Theoretical move: Copjec contests standard film noir criticism's equation of the voice-over's "grain" with epistemological failure or masculine malaise, arguing instead that the voice-over marks a radical heterogeneity between speech and image driven by the primacy of jouissance (drive) over desire—a structural excess that refuses reduction to either commentary or social particularity, and which Barthes's "grain of the voice" captures more precisely than Bonitzer's "body of the voice."

     the voice-over narration, which definitively links the hero to speech and hence, we would suppose, to community, to sense. Speech, as we know—language—is the death of the thing, it contributes to the drying up of jouissance.

207. #207

     Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.55

     <span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c05_r1.xhtml_page_39" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="39"></span>*5*

     Theoretical move: This passage enacts, in a clinical session, the psychoanalytic dynamic of digression-as-avoidance: the analysand's free-associative detour through childhood memories is retrospectively revealed as a defence against the unbearable grief of the son's death, illustrating how the pleasure of reminiscence functions as a resistance to the traumatic Real.

     a desperate and choking realization that the sound of his voice, like the plink of that old piano, is gone forever.

208. #208

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.243

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 5 </span><span id="ch5.xhtml_p241" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 241. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Figurations of the *Objet a* > The Object-Cause of Desire

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the *objet petit a* is the "object-cause" of desire: a primordially lost, liminal object that is simultaneously imaginary, symbolic, and real yet belongs to none, and whose retroactive ceding—not subtraction from a pre-formed subject—constitutes the desiring subject itself, such that desire paradoxically originates only in and through the loss of its object.

     the phoneme, the gaze, the voice—the nothing

209. #209

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.173

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 3 </span><span id="ch3.xhtml_p133" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 133. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Dialectic > Language Acquisition and the Oedipus Complex

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues that the Oedipal transformation is best understood structurally as a labor of the death drive that deconstructs imaginary identification and installs the child in the symbolic order, linking castration anxiety, superego formation, and jouissance into a coherent Lacanian re-reading of Freudian metapsychology.

     As the psychical agency by which the symbolic function is installed in the child, the very seat of the symbolic imperative, the superego is consolidated around the experience of the voice.

210. #210

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.216

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 4 </span><span id="ch4.xhtml_p191" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 191. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Thing > <span id="ch4.xhtml_p216" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 216. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Speaking of the Thing

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that das Ding is accessible only through language, and that the signifier's binary (presence/absence) structure is what enables it to "represent the unrepresented" — functioning as Vorstellungsrepräsentanz — thereby opening a dimension of constitutive absence in perception that orients speech toward das Ding as its primordial, indeterminate horizon.

     Lacan is gratified to find a trace of this relation in the Project Freud centers the child's discovery of the Thing on the perception of the other's voice—its scream.

211. #211

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.139

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > The call comes first

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Christianity has the structure of a "religion without religion," in which the transformative event (the Word of God) takes precedence over propositional belief or the metaphysical question of God's existence — and that the divine call is constitutively inseparable from its heeding, meaning it is heard only in its transformative effect.

     If the call of God were something akin to an actual voice communicating ideas, then this very communication would become a blockage to God. If this voice were anything other than a happening, it could so easily be heard without being heeded.

212. #212

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span id="chapter008.html_page_45"></span><span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that authentic love operates as a structural excess beyond the law — not as an ethical system that calculates duty but as a force that always already surpasses what the law can command — and pairs this with a parable in which aesthetic appearance (beauty) functions as a concealment that neutralises the symbolic content of a prophetic message.

     both she and her words disappeared entirely beneath her voice and form

213. #213

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.248

     The Writing on the Wall > **Mixing Subjects**

     Theoretical move: Through the concept of *l'immixtion des sujets* (inmixing of subjects), Lacan distinguishes two structural moments in Freud's Irma dream: first, the imaginary decomposition of the ego into identificatory fragments (a polycephalic crowd), and second, the emergence of an acephalic, unconscious speaking subject ("Nemo") at the symbolic level, whose voice exceeds the ego and culminates in the purely signifying, graphic inscription of the trimethylamine formula — thereby grounding the unconscious as a phenomenon of the Symbolic Order that is irreducible to egocentric interpretation.

     a voice echoing at the outer limits of vocalization itself, a voice whose echo is neither vocal nor verbal, but graphic, glyphic, and even hieroglyphic

214. #214

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.128

     Fuzzy Math > **Babble Dabble** > **Maundering Equivocation**

     Theoretical move: Kierkegaard's analysis of Adler's case demonstrates how Hegelian speculative thought produces "dialectical equivocation" — a structural confusion between subjective experience and objective religious authority, between divine logos and public opinion — which degrades authentic religious commitment into probabilistic "preacher-prattle" oriented toward social comfort rather than truth.

     So which was it— the voice of Jesus or the lure of publicity— that woke him in the night and compelled him to write? Adler could not say.

215. #215

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.231

     Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit? > Concluding Remarks > Part I: The Concrete Universal

     Theoretical move: This passage is a collection of endnotes that do bibliographic and conceptual ancillary work: it anchors the chapter's argument about comedy and the universal/particular relation by citing Hegel on the comic emptying of the Beautiful and the Good, by glossing the Borat example as a short circuit between the generic and the individual, and by cross-referencing Žižek, Dolar, and Santner on sublimation, the object-voice, and creaturely life.

     Mladen Dolar develops this point beautifully in relation to the objectvoice (see Dolar).

216. #216

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     III

     Theoretical move: Freud theorizes the ego-ideal as the structural heir to primary narcissism, distinguishes it sharply from sublimation, and then derives the superego/conscience as the agency that measures the actual ego against the ideal—thereby also accounting for paranoid self-scrutiny, dream censorship, and the role of narcissistic libido in self-feeling.

     They are informed of the workings of this entity by voices, which characteristically speak to them in the third person ('Now she's thinking about that again', 'Now he's going away').

217. #217

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.452

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > <span id="scholium_43_beckett_as_the_writer_of_abstraction.xhtml_IDX-162"></span>Beckett as the Writer of Abstraction

     Theoretical move: The "empty" Cartesian subject ($) is not merely an agent of abstraction but is itself constituted through abstraction—its emptiness is ontologically primary, not derivative. This is demonstrated through Lacanian analysis (objet a as objectal correlate of the barred subject), Proust's voice episode, and Beckett's literary practice, all illustrating the concept of "concrete abstraction" as a violent re-totalization that yields deeper truth than direct concrete embeddedness.

     This is how voice as autonomous partial object can affect our entire perception of the body to which it belongs. The lesson of it is that, precisely, the direct experience of the unity of a body, where voice seems to fit its organic whole, involves a necessary mystification.

218. #218

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Sinthome (exemplified by Amfortas's externalized wound) designates a paradoxical element that is both destructive and constitutive of the subject's ontological consistency; this structure is then mapped onto the Enlightenment project itself, where the obscene superego enjoyment is shown to be not a residue but the necessary obverse of the formal moral Law, such that renunciation of 'pathological' content itself produces surplus-jouissance.

     the voice of the Other impelling us to follow our duty for the sake of duty is a traumatic irruption of an appeal to impossible jouissance, disrupting the homeostasis of the pleasure principle

219. #219

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a theory of the Graph of Desire's operation by showing that the point de capiton retroactively fixes meaning through the Master Signifier, and that this quilting operation grounds both ideology (as transferential illusion) and subjectivity (as the difference between imaginary identification with the ideal ego and symbolic identification with the ego-ideal/gaze of the Other).

     the voice is what is left over after we subtract from the signifier the retroactive operation of 'quilting' which produces meaning... the voice as 'object', as the objectal leftover of the signifying operation.

220. #220

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.65

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > **A Utopia Without Disavowal** > The Excesses of W¡/d ot Heorl

     Theoretical move: McGowan reads *Wild at Heart* as a filmic staging of unrestrained jouissance: by denying any space of narrative normalcy against which excess could be measured, Lynch shows that a world without lack produces not liberation but suffocation, figured through the perverse authority of a maternal superego and an anal father of enjoyment who command the subject to enjoy.

     His private enjoyment manifests itself in the most public act of all—that of speaking. Whenever he speaks in the film, his coarse language and overly familiar manner renders obvious his intense enjoyment.

221. #221

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.52

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

     Theoretical move: Lynch's Dune enacts a fantasmatic resolution so complete that it collapses the barrier between fantasy and social reality, revealing that the fantasy of escape can only complete itself by looping back to what it escapes from—and that revolutionary transformation ultimately produces a speculative identity between the new society and the old one, demanding that repetition be embraced freely rather than blindly.

     we hear Alia using the voice and proclaiming, 'And how can this be? For he is the Kwisatz Haderach!' This is perhaps more enjoyment than the cinema has ever created

222. #222

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.115

     ,'\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.

     what is crucial instead is Del Rio's voice—the voice detached from her body as an object, the voice as the impossible object.

223. #223

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.93

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

     Theoretical move: Fantasy structures enjoyment only by maintaining the subject at a distance from its object—when the subject gets too close to fully "having" the fantasy object, the fantasy dissolves, revealing that its promise of direct access to enjoyment is constitutively illusory; the father/phallus functions as the necessary barrier that keeps fantasy operative, and his status is always already fantasmatic.

     Renee's voice becomes completely garbled, indicating that the sense of what Renee is saying here becomes overwhelmed by the enjoyment of the voice itself—an enjoyment beyond the meaning of the word.

224. #224

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.46

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

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

     For Lynch, the voice functions as an impossible object embodying the ultimate enjoyment. Rather than quelling our desire by providing a sense of mastery, he depicts the voice as an engine for our desire-one of the object-causes that triggers it.

225. #225

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.127

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > ² . The Integration of the Impossible Objeet in rhe Elephant Man > 3. Dune ond the Poth to Solvotion

     Theoretical move: This endnotes passage makes several theoretical moves: it deploys Lacanian sexual antagonism as the primary social antagonism underlying Hollywood ideological narrative; it argues that voice-over narration's gaps testify to truth rather than obscure it; and it identifies feminine/mystical enjoyment as an authentic connection with the infinite, elevating Other Jouissance to the level of mysticism.

     One might argue that Lynch's subversion of the mastery typically associated with voice-over narration has ties to cinema's historically patriarchal attitude toward the female voice.

226. #226

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.133

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > 4. Fantasizing the Father in *Blue Velvet* > 7· Finding O urselves on a *Lost* Highway

     Theoretical move: These footnotes theorize how fantasy structures reality (making it perceptible to others), how the superego functions as an irrational, insatiable voice of enjoyment irreducible to meaning, and how symbolic authority has gone underground in *Lost Highway*, thereby exacerbating paranoia about the Other's excessive enjoyment.

     The nonsensical voice is a voice of pure enjoyment, because it is a voice completely stripped of meaning and thus resounds beyond the confines of the symbolic order. The voice is what remains of the signifier once meaning is subtracted from it.

227. #227

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.139

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > 9, Navigating Mulholland Orive , David Lynch's Panegyric to Hollywood > **INDEX**

     Theoretical move: This is a book index — a non-substantive back-matter section listing proper names, film titles, and key theoretical concepts with page references. It contains no original theoretical argument.

     and the voice, 75-79, 23711

228. #228

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.79

     <span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > <span id="page-77-0"></span>*Object* a: *The Other's Desire*

     Theoretical move: Through the operation of separation, the Other's inscrutable desire constitutes object a as the remainder of a hypothetical mother-child unity, and it is only by cleaving to this remainder in fantasy that the split subject sustains an illusion of wholeness and procures a sense of being beyond mere symbolic existence.

     His desire's cause can take the form of someone's voice or of a look someone gives him.

229. #229

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.111

     <span id="page-101-0"></span>Object (a): Cause of Desire > *Real Objects, Encounters with the Real*

     Theoretical move: Desire has no object in the conventional sense but only a cause — object (a) — which is real, unspecularizable, and resistant to symbolization; the passage argues that what elicits desire is the Other's desire as manifested in partial objects (gaze, voice), not the companion or the demand, and that the therapeutic challenge is to dialectize this real cause and disturb the fundamental fantasy organized around it.

     In the case of certain men it is a woman's voice that is of primary importance... the tone and timber of her voice, that arouses their desire.

230. #230

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.231

     Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit? > Concluding Remarks > Part I: The Concrete Universal

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/endnotes section providing scholarly citations and brief elaborations; it is non-substantive in terms of primary theoretical argumentation, though it alludes to several key theoretical touchstones (Hegel on the comic, Freud's 'famillionairely', the Voice as object, sublimation, and the subject-behind-representation).

     Mladen Dolar develops this point beautifully in relation to the objectvoice (see Dolar).

231. #231

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.105

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Difficulty of Being a Kantian

     Theoretical move: Žižek uses the Darth Vader/Anakin figure to argue that the subject in the strict philosophical sense is constituted not by a human face but by an "excessive" ethical commitment that founds rather than corrupts the Good, and that the spectral Voice is the privileged medium of this inhuman subjectivity; this is further extended into a provocation about theology and materialism.

     His voice is enhanced through a machine, artificially amplified; for this very reason, however, it appears as if, on account of the closely registered breathing, the inner life itself directly reverberates in it.

232. #232

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.122

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Too Much Life!

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that shame, castration, and the "undead" lamella are not opposed but structurally co-produced: the noncastrated remainder (lamella/objet petit a) is not what escapes castration but precisely what castration generates as its own surplus, collapsing the distinction between lack and excess into a Möbius-strip parallax.

     a spectral sound emanating from within my body, sound as an autonomous 'organ without a body,' located in the very heart of my body and at the same time uncontrollable, like a kind of parasite, a foreign intruder—in short, what Lacan called the voice-object

233. #233

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.204

     **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.

     the voice of the actor is not the voice of the narrator, and the sound of the words changes as we see the actor speaking them. Rather than locating the nondiegetic narration within the diegesis, here the film shows the correspondence that exists between these two seemingly disparate realms.

234. #234

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.258

     29 > **29. The Sexual Relationship with David Lynch**

     Theoretical move: This passage is a footnotes/endnotes section for a chapter on David Lynch, containing bibliographic references and a brief theoretical note on the superego as externalized, incomprehensible voice in Lynch's *Lost Highway*. The substantive theoretical content is minimal and ancillary.

     The superego is an incomprehensible voice for the subject, even though the subject itself gives birth to this voice.

235. #235

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.29

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

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

     it is much easier to hear the objet petit a in the form of the voice than to see it in the form of the gaze because we are more often confronted with sounds that we would rather not hear than sights that we would rather not see.

236. #236

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.53

     **Neurosis** > **Oedipus Complex** > *objet a*

     Theoretical move: The passage systematically theorizes the *objet petit a* as the object-cause of desire — constitutively absent, irreducible to signification, and functioning as the remainder/gap that both inaugurates subjectivity through loss and sustains desire by perpetually eluding satisfaction, thereby distinguishing it sharply from any empirical object of desire.

     Jacques Lacan distinguishes the gaze and voice as two versions of what he calls the *objet a*

237. #237

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.79

     **Substance**

     Theoretical move: The passage develops two interconnected theoretical moves: first, via Hegel, it establishes that substance is essentially subject through self-equality as thinking; second, and more extensively, it elaborates the paradoxical structure of the superego as simultaneously the law and its transgression, an obscene agency whose insatiable imperative is not prohibition but the command to enjoy (jouissance), drawing on Freud's two fathers (Oedipal and primal) to ground this contradiction.

     The superego is the internalised voice of the father insomuch as it speaks of symbolic limits.

238. #238

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

     Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Interpretation of Lacan’s “Kant with Sade”](#contents.xhtml_ch10)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's reading of Lacan's "Kant with Sade" is incomplete: while Žižek identifies two reasons for the impurity of Sadean jouissance, Lacan's text advances four deeper observations about the fundamental bankruptcy of libertine ideology, and crucially, Lacan accepts the deadlock between alienation and separation as inescapable, whereas Žižek transforms it into a contingency to be resolved through a reconceptualization of the ethical act.

     they remain ineluctably enslaved to the voice of Nature, which is first conceptualized as a fundamentally capricious, external structure, and then reconfigured as an ethical force in its own right.