“Alireza Taheri’s book provides the ultimate proof that a combination of Hegel’s

dialectics and Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory is the best instrument to analyse

the madness of our late capitalist modernity. Spectre of Madness is not yet another
book on Hegel and Lacan - it is simply a book for everyone who wants to
understand how things could have gone so wrong after Fukuyama proclaimed
the end of history.”
Slavoj Žižek, Birkbeck Institute for the
Humanities, University of London

“Taheri clearly and perceptively retraces the complexity of modern Western

philosophy from Kant onward, using the key concept of Diremption. This
book is a precious tool for anyone looking for an up-to-date examination of
psychoanalysis through philosophical reflection.”
Sergio Benvenuto, Institute of Cognitive Sciences and
Technologies, Italian National Research Council in Rome

“In Hegelian-Lacanian Variations on Late Modernity: Spectre of Madness, Alireza

Taheri creatively recasts the notion of negativity at the intersection of German
idealism and psychoanalysis. On the basis of a Lacanian rendition of Hegelian
contradiction, Taheri’s book meticulously and insightfully explores a series of
irresolvable antinomies both organizing and unsettling human subjects. Kant
famously asked ‘What may I hope?’ Taheri, on the basis of his wide-ranging
assessment of the contradictions that make (and unmake) who we are, could
be said to confront us with the equally important sobering question: ‘For what
may I not hope?’”
Adrian Johnston, Department of Philosophy,
University of New Mexico
Hegelian-​Lacanian Variations
on Late Modernity

The current rise in new religions and the growing popularity of New Ageism
is concomitant with an increasingly anti-​philosophical sentiment marking our
contemporary situation. More specifically, it is philosophical and psychoanalytic
reason that has lost standing, faced with the triumph of post-​secular “spiritu-
ality”. Combatting this trend, this treatise develops a theoretical apparatus based
on Hegelian speculative reason and Lacanian psychoanalysis.
With the aid of this theoretical apparatus, the book argues how cer-
tain conceptual pairs appear opposed through an operation of misrecogni-
tion christened, following Hegel, as “diremption”. The failure to reckon with
identities-​in-​difference relegates the subject to more vicious contradictions that
define central aspects of our contemporary predicament. The repeated thesis of
the treatise is that the deadlocks marking our contemporary situation require
renewed engagement with dialectical thinking beyond the impasses of common
understanding. Only by embarking on this philosophical-​psychoanalytic “path
of despair” (Hegel) will we stand a chance of achieving “joyful wisdom”
(Nietzsche).
Developing a unique dialectical theory based on readings of Hegel, Lacan and
Žižek, in order to address various philosophical and psychoanalytic questions,
this book will be of great interest to anyone interested in German idealism and/​
or psychoanalytic theory.

Alireza Taheri provides psychoanalytic psychotherapy in a private practice in

Toronto where he is also actively involved in teaching Lacanian theory at the
Toronto Psychoanalytic Institute and Society. Alireza is a permanent faculty
member of HamAva Psychoanalytic Institute in Tehran (Iran) where he teaches
psychoanalytic theory and practice. He is also engaged in writing articles on
philosophy and psychoanalysis and is presently the editor-​in-​chief and book
review editor of Psychoanalytic Discourse (an independent international journal
for the clinical, theoretical and cultural discussion of psychoanalysis).
Hegelian-​Lacanian Variations
on Late Modernity
Spectre of Madness

Alireza Taheri
First published 2021
by Routledge
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British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data
Names: Taheri, Alireza, 1976– author.
Title: Hegelian-Lacanian variations on late modernity : spectre of madness / Alireza Taheri.
Description: New York: Routledge, 2020. |
Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “The current rise in new religions and
the growing popularity of New Ageism is concomitant with an increasingly anti-philosophical
sentiment marking our contemporary situation. More specifically, it is philosophical and
psychoanalytic reason that has lost standing
faced with the triumph of post-secular “spirituality”. Combatting this trend, this treatise develops
a theoretical apparatus based on Hegelian speculative reason and Lacanian psychoanalysis.
With the aid of this theoretical apparatus, the book argues how certain apparent contraries appear
opposed through an operation of misrecognition christened, following Hegel, as “diremption”.
The failure to reckon with identities-in-difference relegates the subject to more vicious
contradictions that define central aspects of our contemporary predicament. The repeated thesis
of the treatise is that the deadlocks marking our contemporary situation require renewed
engagement with dialectical thinking beyond the impasses of common understanding. Only by
embarking on this philosophical-psychoanalytic “path of despair” (Hegel) will we stand a chance
of achieving “joyful wisdom” (Nietzsche). Developing a unique dialectical theory based on readings
of Hegel, Lacan and Zizek, in order to address various philosophical and psychoanalytic questions,
this book will be of great interest to anyone interested in German idealism and/or
psychoanalytic theory”– Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020032308 (print) | LCCN 2020032309 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367523077 (paperback) | ISBN 9780367523084 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781003057390 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: New Age persons. | Dialectical theology. | Reason. |
Psychoanalysis–Philosophy. | Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831. |
Lacan, Jacques, 1901-1981.
Classification: LCC BP605.N48 T34 2020 (print) |
LCC BP605.N48 (ebook) | DDC 190–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020032308
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020032309
ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​52308-​4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​52307-​7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-​1-​003-​05739-​0 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Newgen Publishing UK
To the memory of my mother, Pari.
Contents

Acknowledgements  xii

Introduction: The paradox of self-​reflection  1

Variation 1
The diremptive remains  8

Variation 2
The triumph of dialectical “lower” terms  14

Variation 3
Speculative topology  18

Variation 4
Vicious dialectical reversals  23

Variation 5
Faith and reason  32

Variation 6
The paradoxes of love  36

Variation 7
The paradox of identity  43

Variation 8
Subject and collective  49

Variation 9
Ausstossung and Verwerfung  59
x Contents
Variation 10
Symbolic murder and suicide  63

Variation 11
Generational difference: parent and child  67

Variation 12
Power difference: analysand and analyst  71

Variation 13
Sexual difference: man and woman  78

Variation 14
The paradox of a boundary without a limit  85

Variation 15
Good and evil  90

Variation 16
Truth and lies  95

Variation 17
Thrownness and autonomy  104

Variation 18
Life and death  108

Variation 19
The force and frailty of the law  115

Variation 20
Madness and sanity  123

Variation 21
The diremptions of fantasy  126

Variation 22
The untimely-​contemporary  130

Variation 23
Religion and atheism  136
 Contents xi
Variation 24
The death of God  141

Variation 25
The symptom as human notion  146

Conclusion: From via dolorosa to gaya scienza  159

References  168
Index  177
newgenprepdf

Acknowledgements

Firstly, my deepest thanks go to Donald Carveth who took the time to read my
proposal and encourage me to write. I would also like to express my appreciation
for the time Adrian Johnston, Sergio Benvenuto and Slavoj Žižek took to read
and endorse my work. Many thanks to Hannah Wright and Kate Hawes from
Routledge for all the effort they put into realizing the publication of my book.
The many conversations I had with Joël Legault, Zabih Yaqeen, and Maziar Raz
over the years enabled the dialectical shift on the Moebius strip from philo-
sophic despair to joyful wisdom. My sisters (Sharzad and Mojan) have also been
a source of support and love throughout this time. Most importantly, the love
and care of my father (Siavash Taheri) and the many great conversations and
exchanges we had over the years granted me the sobriety of spirit necessary for
philosophic thought. Finally, the memory of my mother was the source of con-
stant inspiration through every patient step of the conceptual labour involved
in shaping this treatise. I dedicate this work to her.
Introduction
The paradox of self-​reflection

… beginning where contraries are stringently opposed and where in their

unyielding antagonism each element falls prey to conceptual narcissistic suicidal
aggression by which inner contradiction transpires, through a process of oppos-
itional determination, in the disparaged mode of a struggle of pure prestige
with the unduly expelled other. The culprit here is the triumph of common
understanding over speculative reason concomitant with the demise of dialect-
ical thought (a pleonasm par excellence). Dialectical reason is not, to echo Žižek,
this book’s “topic” but is, rather, performed in the very form of its exposition.
Thus, the head and tail of this speculative serpent meet to achieve the proverbial
squaring of the circle.1 If neurosis is the index of self-​incarceration, we must
wonder whether a book that spirals around itself, thereby mimicking the circu-
larity of the repetition compulsion, is not the height of neurotic self-​enclosure.
Though this remains probable, one must not forget the speculative verity that
only an exorbitant neurosis can lead the way out of neurosis. Every revolution
paradoxically brings forth the new through the repetition of an older form.The
book’s self-​revolving form thus embodies for us the unexpected identity-​in-​
difference of the innovative and the timeworn.2 This treatise rejects the usual
format of segregation into chapters and eschews the form of the aphorism,
espousing instead the musical practice of variations on a theme.3
If, as François Balmès (2007) argued, for every statement made by Lacan
one can also find the opposite claim, I argue, it is because apparently opposed
pairs conceal deep affinities that common understanding cannot fathom.
Throughout this enquiry, I show how apparent contraries such as truth and lie,
religiosity and atheism, as well as good and evil (to name a few) appear opposed
through an operation of misrecognition I have christened, following Hegel, as
“diremption”.4 I argue that the failure to reckon with identities-​in-​difference
relegates the subject to deeper contradictions that define central aspects of our
contemporary predicament. I use the word “paradox” to denote the unex-
pected identity of seemingly opposed elements as it literally evokes the idea
of something beyond the grasp of ordinary doxa. By contrast, I reserve the
term “contradiction” for the consequence of the diremption of the identity-​
in-​difference in question. Where the former denotes a dynamic interrelation
enriching both elements of the identity-​in-​difference, the latter signifies an
2 The paradox of self-reflection
insuperable impasse of thought. In contradiction, the opposed terms are mis-
takenly perceived as external to each other, while in paradox the alleged con-
traries are perceived as mutually implicated. Borrowing Kantian vocabulary,
one may speak of “noumenal” unity obfuscated by “phenomenal” opposition.
However, the opposition between the noumenal and the phenomenal also
collapses as it can only perdure under the spell of diremption. By insisting on
the identity-​in-​difference of noumena and phenomena we are repeating Žižek’s
move from epistemology to ontology, namely the move from Kant to Hegel.The
unknowability of the world is henceforth not a consequence of human limita-
tion but, rather, of the essentially “not-​all” or incomplete-​inconsistent character
of the world itself: “the limitation of phenomena is not external but internal, in other
words … the field of phenomena is in itself never ‘all’, complete, a consistent
Whole” (Žižek, 2012a, 283). There is thus only a phenomenal realm and the
noumenal is nothing other than phenomenon’s non-​self-​identity; or as Žižek
puts it, “there is no need for any positive transcendent domain of noumenal
entities which limit phenomena from outside –​phenomena with their incon-
sistencies, their self-​limitations, are ‘all there is.’” (ibid, 283). We may import this
argument to the other aforementioned contraries: religiosity’s non-​self-​identity
makes it identical to atheism, truth’s non-​self-​identity equates it with fiction and
lie, the good’s non-​self-​identity likens it to evil.
For Kant, reason must capitulate before metaphysical questions as these yield
antinomies of thought, namely contradictory answers incommensurable with
the principle of non-​contradiction. Hegel agrees that reason encounters contra-
diction when probing foundational questions such as the spatial and temporal
limits of the universe, the existence of an indivisible substance, the possibility
of free will and the existence of God. However, Hegel takes this epistemo-
logical fact (the arising of antinomy) as an ontological clue. Hegel’s response to
Kant is that reason encounters contradiction because nature is in-​itself contra-
dictory or, in Lacanian parlance, not-​all. According to Hegel, Kant wants “to
remove contradiction from [the world] and then to transfer the contradiction to
spirit, to reason, where it is allowed to remain unresolved” (Hegel, 1969, 237).
For Hegel, the “world … is never and nowhere without contradiction” (ibid,
238). Thus, reason, far from entangling thought into an unnecessary quagmire,
points in the right direction, namely the truth regarding contradiction. For
Hegel, the antinomies of pure reason provide, therefore, a correct reflection
of the contradictions of the natural world rather than testify to the follies of
the mind. Kant aptly recognizes the ineluctability of contradiction but misses
the final step which consists of taking these as real attributes of nature rather
than shortcomings of reason. Insofar as Kant wants to hold on to a noumenal
realm free of contradiction, we would say that his thinking is diremptive of the
ontological paradoxes of nature. This diremption leads his philosophy into the
contradiction of depending on a noumenal beyond which he cannot think.5
The move from Kant’s divided ontology of noumena and phenomena to
Hegel’s ontology of immanence necessarily takes us to another central theme
of Hegelian dialectics, that of the identity of contraries. If we restrict ontology
 The paradox of self-reflection 3
to the singular plane of phenomena, the latter must be envisioned as non-​self-​
identical or, what comes to the same, as identical to its Other. Two principal
interrelated philosophical ideas stand out in the transition from Kant to Hegel.
The first concerns the abolition of ontological dualism for the sake of imma-
nence, while the second involves the assertion of the unity of contraries. By
absolving the realm of noumena and thereby reinstating the gap that allegedly
separated noumena from phenomena as a fissure within phenomena itself,
Hegel confirms both of these central philosophical postulates. If there is only
one ontological plane (the first thesis regarding immanence), it is because nou-
mena and phenomena form a dialectical unity of contraries (the second thesis).
This manner of conceptualizing the transition from Kant to Hegel echoes
with the psychoanalytic concept of structural impossibility. For Lacan, the impos-
sibility of enjoyment (castration) is not the result of an interdiction. Lacan is
not as ardent a theorist of the law as he may appear. Impossibility is not tied to
the imposition of a specific agent or socio-​cultural norm. For Lacan, it is lan-
guage itself that introduces an inevitable and therefore structural loss in the living
body. In technical parlance, it is the incidence of the “master signifier” that
determines castration.The limitation of enjoyment and the impossibility to find
again the lost object are not the consequences of the paternal law but are, rather,
imposed on human beings simply from the fact of speaking. My contention is
that this Lacanian conceptualization of castration as structural is best grasped in
light of the move from Kant to Hegel. Rather than view symbolic castration
in terms of “an unconditional obedience of moral Law” (Copjec, 1996), I con-
tend that it is best understood in light of the Hegelian conception of the unity
of contraries. Symbolic castration represents an ideal point where the subject
is reconciled with the identity of contraries and is no longer captive to the
illusion of their opposition.6 The difficulty of symbolic castration is not simply
that one knows what it involves but refuses to accept it. Beyond the emotional
difficulties such as the pain of loss, symbolic castration represents a challenge
to ordinary cognition: how can two things that seem stringently opposed con-
stitute a deeper identity? Kant’s limitation on reason paradoxically attests to a
refusal of castration insofar as it goes hand in hand with the stubborn insistence
on non-​contradictoriness. For Hegel, all things are contradictory in themselves
though consciousness of such inner division will vary depending on the entity.
While inanimate nature knows nothing of contradiction, finite living nature
(e.g. animal life)7 endures it in the form of pain.8 Finally, humans represent the
pinnacle of the consciousness of contradiction; awareness of this inner division
is the cause of infinite anguish.9 Things only evolve and develop at all because
of the inner division that forbids stasis. Contradiction, for Hegel, is the origin
of self-​movement and hence also the source from where novelty is born.10 The
human, through its anguish, is the creature most attuned to grasping its own
paradoxical nature as well as that of the world. In other words, the human is best
equipped with fathoming castration.
Prior to Hegel, Lebrun explains, we had the “ontology of juxtaposition”
where properties are simply juxtaposed rather than united.11 In this community
4 The paradox of self-reflection
of properties we have diversity rather than opposition. There is union and diffe-
rence here but no union in difference. As Lebrun’s Hegel would say, the
moments of similitude and dissemblance fall outside of each other (Lebrun,
1972, 272). Lebrun attributes to Kant the ontology of “real opposition” which,
unlike the community of juxtaposed properties, does not put forward a simple
indifferent diversity. Each term of a real opposition is determined in relation
to its other (ibid, 290). However, the problem is that neither term of a given
opposition is ever thought in-​itself. Kant’s ontology of real opposition is based
on what Hegel calls the operation of “external reflection” through which the
two terms of an opposition acquire their signification through contrast with
one another. Self-​reflection, by contrast, is the operation through which each
term is considered in-​itself and, moreover, through which this consideration
leads to a passage into its Other via a process of self-​undermining. Self-​reflection
leads to each term’s suppression and passage into its Other. Contradiction is
now inscribed in the texture of concepts; it is not the effect simply of their bad
handling (ibid, 297). Where external reflection compares opposites in order to
arrive at a relative determination of each term, self-​reflection is the process by
which an element reaches its Other by undermining itself from within. Thus,
external reflection highlights a term’s difference from its Other while self-​
reflection points to its inner division. Concepts conceived by external reflection
exclude their contrary.12
For Hegel, the move to the Other is more than mere loss or perdition (ibid,
299). It is paradoxically by evacuating itself out into its Other that a given
concept becomes what it is (to borrow a Nietzschean idiom). Self-​reflection,
or sublation as Hegel also calls it, involves an element’s entry into unity with
its Other. For Hegel, something is “sublated only in so far as it has entered
into unity with its opposite” (Hegel, 1969, 107). This move elevates the given
element to its notion and sums up, for us, the whole paradoxical nature of self-​
reflection; identity can only be reached through the positing of contradiction.
Non-​Hegelian conceptions of opposition lead to the phenomenology of “nar-
cissistic suicidal aggression” where the subject does not see that it is “precisely
the kakon of his own being that [he/​she] tries to get at in the object that
he strikes” (Lacan, 2006, 143). Quipping Lacan, we could say that my argu-
ment is based on the following maxim: what is not recognized in its paradox-
ical identity-​in-​difference with its Other returns in the guise of the impasse
of a contradiction. The move from the ontology of juxtaposition to Kantian
external reflection and, finally, to Hegelian self-​reflection requires therefore the
ascent (or shall I say descent and thereby remain equal to Biblical wisdom?) to
castration.
Though my argument is centrally based on the Hegelian insight
concerning the coincidence of contraries, I maintain, as aforesaid, a dis-
tinction between contradiction and paradox such that the former is given a
negative valence while the latter connotes the highest achievement of specu-
lative reason. I am thus sympathetic to the negative valence the Marxist
 The paradox of self-reflection 5
tradition grants the notion of contradiction, while agreeing with Hegel that
paradox (what he calls contradiction) is ineradicable. Hegel’s Phenomenology of
Spirit and Science of Logic trace the movement by which the resolution of one
contradiction indelibly leads to another contradiction that is more difficult to
resolve than the previous. Hegel resolves contradictions only to bring to the
fore progressively more stubborn ones.13 The absolute, for Hegel, denotes the
achievement of the highest contradiction without resolution. It testifies to
contradiction that has become internalized such that it no longer manifests
as external opposition. In Lacanian parlance, the absolute designates the
moment narcissistic suicidal aggression (the specular imaginary) is maximally
obliterated such that internal division is assumed rather than projected. The
aim of this treatise consists of presenting a number of speculative propositions
stating paradoxical identities-​in-​difference that cannot be resolved. I thus
begin somewhere akin to the Hegelian absolute.14 Though it is conceded
that Hegel ends with the absolute idea (the title of the concluding chapter
of Science of Logic), it is also common wisdom to add the proviso that the
absolute was always implicitly there from the beginning.15 Moreover, my
treatise engages with the contradictions that result from the diremptions
of the understanding. Here, contradiction takes on the negative sense of an
internal division that is heeded as external opposition. Dialectical advance
moves towards paradox (to sustain contradiction as inner division) while dia-
lectical regression (diremption) moves towards the apprehension of contra-
diction as opposition to an imagined enemy. In Hegel’s own theoretical
edifice, contradiction has a positive and negative valence. The contradictions
of finite nature are, for Hegel, “low” contradictions insofar as they assail
entities form the outside. Ignorant of its own division, finite nature remains
at the mercy of external opposition. Contradiction gains a positive valence
as spirit no longer misperceives it as an ailment attacking it from without. As
contradiction is internalized and the weight of projection (to borrow a post-​
Freudian idiom) is reduced, I speak of paradox. Contradiction results from
the understanding’s will to eliminate another (dialectically more evolved/​
internalized) contradiction. Paradox, by contrast, results from reason’s ability
to reckon with contradiction. My distinction between paradox and contra-
diction is implicit in Hegel’s claim that when concepts are severed from
their contrary, thought gets “entangled in unreconciled, unresolved, abso-
lute contradiction” (Hegel, 1969, 139) where the word “absolute” clearly
does not carry its usual positive connotation. For Hegel, “Speculative thinking
consists solely in the fact that thought holds fast contradiction, and in it,
its own self, but does not allow itself to be dominated by it as in ordinary
thinking, where its determinations are resolved by contradiction only into
other determinations or nothing” (ibid, 440–​441). The abolition of contra-
dictoriness paradoxically leads to contradiction; we move from contradiction
acknowledged as belonging to the concept, to contradiction experienced
externally as an alien force “that dominates it and resolves it into nothing”.
6 The paradox of self-reflection
Notes
1 Much like Finnegans Wake where the circularity of “narration” overlaps with the
square shape of the book thereby achieving a truly dialectical feat, squaring the circle.
2 The idea that novelty arises out of repetition is a paradox captured by many thinkers
from Nietzsche’s eternal return to Deleuze’s difference and repetition and Lacan’s idea
that love is at once “the sign … that one is changing reasons … one changes
discourses” as well as the source of a repetitive (encore) demand.
3 Was Nietzsche not one thousand times right when he advocated that, as philosophers,
“our thoughts … grow from us with the same inevitability as fruits borne on
the tree –​all related and referring to one another and a testimonial to one will,
one health, one earth, one sun” (Nietzsche, 1998). I chose the theme and variation
model to keep thought within a singular source of inspiration. Adorno’s Negative
Dialectics –​also following a model based on music –​“will become one infinite vari-
ation in which everything is recapitulated at every moment” (Jameson, 2007, 62).
4 As Bernstein (2002, 63) comments, the “theme of diremption –​self-​diremption
as internal cleavage –​reverberates throughout Hegel’s philosophy”. I consider
“diremption” in terms of a separation from self (a refusal of castration and the
unconscious) resulting from common understanding’s inability to fathom the
paradox of identity-​in-​difference.Thus, diremption and the understanding are com-
mensurate insofar as the latter is taken as “as separating and remaining fixed in its
separations” (Hegel, 1969, 45).
5 Kant “constructs a realm external to the understanding that it has no knowledge of
and yet depends on” (McGowan, 2019, 68).
6 Like Hegel, psychoanalysis embraces paradox. Leclaire argues that the function of
the subject is contradiction itself. He reminds us that, for Freud, the principle of non-​
contradiction does not hold in the unconscious (Leclaire, 1968, 137). The expletive
“ne” (the marker of the subject in language) leaves an unresolved ambiguity that
reflects, according to Lacan, a central characteristic of subjectivity. Recent efforts at
bridging neuroscience and psychoanalysis speak of the paradox of neuroplasticity.
Ansermet argues that “experience leaves a trace in neuronal network”, a process
he describes as a “universal mechanism that makes you unique” because the trace
is contingent. Secondly, “the trace will be re-​associated with other traces creating
new traces which are in discontinuity with the experience”. This is “the root of
freedom”. Thirdly, the “ever-​changing brain” introduces “the unpredictability of
becoming”. In short, under the rubrics of uniqueness, discontinuity and unpredictability,
Ansermet highlights the paradox by which universal experience gives way to singular
freedom (interview retrieved on February 21, 2018 from: https://​m.youtube.com/​
watch?v=fqNkMQZT-​3g).
7 Something is “alive only in so far as it contains contradiction within it, and moreover
is this power to hold and endure the contradiction within it” (Hegel, 1969, 440).
8 “It is said that contradiction cannot be thought; but in the pain of the living being
it is even an actual, concrete existence” (Hegel quoted in McGowan, 2019, 35).
9 For Hegel, humans “are inwardly conscious that in their innermost being they are a
contradiction, and have therefore an infinite anguish concerning themselves” (Hegel
quoted in Bernstein, 2002, 66).
10 Hegel thus famously argues that “it shows an excessive tenderness for the world
to remove contradiction from it” (Hegel, 1969, 237). Contradiction permeates all
things as “nothing, either in heaven or on earth … exhibits the abstract ‘either-​or’
 The paradox of self-reflection 7
as it is maintained by the understanding” (Hegel, 1991, 187). Hegel’s philosoph-
ical precursor here is Heraclitus who made licit the union of contraries (Lebrun,
1972, 267).
11 I rely on the sixth chapter of Lebrun’s La patience du concept entitled “La négation de la
négation” where he discusses the ways contradiction has been (mis)-​conceptualized
in the history of philosophy.
12 Since the exclusion of the contrary is tantamount to the loss of self, Hegel also refers
to external reflection as “self-​alienated reflection” (de Boer, 2010, 354).
13 The contradiction of God on the cross is the hardest to resolve (McGowan,
2019, 19).
14 I begin with the absolute because this treatise is principally concerned with human
infinite spirit (psychoanalysis) rather than finite nature (general ontology).
15 Regarding the “True”, Hegel says that it is “the process of its own becoming, the
circle that presupposes its end as its goal, having its end also as its beginning” (Hegel,
1977, 10).
Variation 1 
The diremptive remains

Under the rubric of “diremptive remains”, I reflect on the paradoxical dia-

lectical unity of diremption and self-​reflection. Every self-​reflective act of self-​
evacuating kenosis1 harbours a diremptive shadow. In Science of Logic Hegel
delights in the fact that,

“To sublate” has a twofold meaning in the language: on the one hand it
means to preserve, to maintain, and equally it also means to cause to cease,
to put an end to … It is a delight to speculative thought to find in the lan-
guage words which have in themselves a speculative meaning; the German
language has a number of such.
(Hegel, 1969, 107)

The twofold paradoxical meaning of “sublate” points to the necessity that every
sublation carries with it a diremptive remain. Interestingly the verb “to dirempt”
does not contain its opposite meaning; it is thus itself diremptive. The sublation
of an element into its Other is never complete as something always remains testi-
fying to the fact that even the most thorough sublation is always partial. A min-
imal diremption is a structural necessity of the dialectical process; otherwise we
would be relegated to the “night in which all cows are black” (Hegel, 1977, 9).
The diremptive remains, insofar as they resist philosophical speculation, are akin
to the object a which is “negativized” from the specular image. The object a is
the diremptive remain that hinders the identity of opposites and yet it is also
that which makes that identity possible. The object a is a diremptive-​speculative
remain.2 Likewise, the diremptive remain makes sublation possible, precisely and
paradoxically by virtue of the limitation it imposes on it. Like Hegelian “Spirit”,
it is the “bone” that is at once “the condition of possibility and the condition of
impossibility of the dialectical process” (Žižek, 2015, 32). It provides resistance
to the dialectical process and is yet also its motor. Psychoanalysis deals precisely
with those remnants that philosophy prefers to repress.3 More generally, the
remnants of the self-​reflective process are what the psychoanalytic clinic testifies
to most faithfully and what, by contrast, the purity of theory ignores.
Once we reach a conception of difference that first passes through the experi-
ence of identity which it then relinquishes through the choice of a diremptive
 The diremptive remains 9
remain then, and only then, do we accomplish an ethical and/​or aesthetic pos-
ition which, despite marking its difference from its Other, recognizes the Other
as its neighbour. Sublation posits the essential unity of a concept with its contrary
(a unity that both disturbs and consolidates its identity) while the diremptive
remain testifies to the ineradicable opposition that resists (and yet also makes pos-
sible) the self-​reflective process.4 Speculation emphasizes identity-​in-​difference
and the unity of opposites. This position, though laudable for freeing the mind
from the impasses of common understanding, risks leading to inaction. The
decision for a diremptive remain frees us from the stasis of identity-​in-​difference.
Karin de Boer insightfully distinguishes between the “essential unity” of con-
traries and their “prevailing opposition” (de Boer, 2010, 363). While the former
designates the speculative identity of contraries in the concept, the latter refers
to the actual determination of the opposed pairs in time and space. According to
de Boer, there is always a gap between the speculative identity of the elements
and the opposed manner they actually transpire in the world, and, moreover, this
gap accounts for movement and change (ibid, 365). The speculative identity
of contraries is akin to the quantum superposition of states and the actual deter-
mination to the collapse of the wave function.5 What I call deciding for a diremptive
remain is akin to collapsing the wave-​function and thereby partially annulling
the speculative superposition of states.This ethical-​aesthetic moment marks the
choice for one element over its Other without, however, reverting to blind
diremption. The importance of the diremptive remain consists in that one
cannot simply equate all things insofar as opposed pairs retain their difference
in actuality despite their essential unity. Otherwise it would make no difference
if one lies or tells the truth:

Just as to talk of the unity of subject and object, of finite and infinite, of
being and thought, etc. is inept, since object and subject, etc. signify what
they are outside of their unity, and since in their unity they are not meant
to be what their expression says they are, just so the false is no longer qua
false, a moment of truth.
(Hegel, 1977, 23)

Cast in Heideggerian parlance, at an ontological level, opposites unite such

that each element reaches the dignity of its notion through a paradoxical kenosis
into its Other. Ontically, however, an ethical-​aesthetic6 remainder forces one to
choose one element over its Other. This ethical-​aesthetic-​ontical remainder
disrupts and organizes the domain of speculation.
The coincidence of contraries leads to increased harmony between pre-
viously falsely opposed terms insofar as, post-​speculation, each term recognizes
itself in the Other; the Other becomes my Other. In full-​fledged diremption,
prior to sublation, conflict is reducible to Lacan’s narcissistic suicidal aggression,
Hegel’s battle of pure prestige and Freud’s narcissism of small differences.The “enemy”
is a mere reflection of a disavowed part of the self. By contrast, conflict that
occurs post-​ sublation involves two terms, which, having recognized their
10 The diremptive remains
respective internal divisions, do not split off an undesired aspect (“moment”)
on the Other. Any conflict that may exist concerns actual rather than the
imagined differences.7 Such conflict can be contained within the medium of
speech without spilling into a shouting match. In L’envers de la dialectique. Hegel
à la lumière de Nietzsche, Lebrun puts forward a Nietzschean critique of Hegel
arguing that for the latter there is conflict only insofar as one fights with one’s
shadow (Lebrun, 2004, 113). Lebrun lauds Nietzsche for keeping contraries
opposed rather than reconciling them through speculation. However, the idea
of diremptive remains shows that conflict may subsist even after the specu-
lative identity-​in-​difference of falsely opposed terms has been established. It
is not necessary, as Lebrun’s Nietzsche imagines, to keep contraries opposed
in order to maintain the possibility of conflict. By first subjecting opposed
terms to the operation of self-​reflection, one can better guarantee that conflict
involves difference rather than narcissistic strife. With this Nietzschean critique,
Lebrun feels that he has unearthed the hidden moral core of Hegel’s dialectic
in its alleged evasion of conflict. Nietzsche, as the great celebrator of war, is
thus presented as the welcome antipode and antidote. But this is to misun-
derstand both thinkers. Nietzsche does not keep the contraries apart prior to
self-​reflection. If he celebrates conflict it is, I believe, only insofar as the conflict
stages a battle between different terms –​a difference properly established after
self-​reflection. It is the Nietzschean slave who cannot accomplish self-​reflection
and is thus drowned in a ressentiment that is the mere obverse of his/​her self-​
disrespect. When the Nietzschean master goes to war it is not him/​herself that
he battles but precisely the Other recognized as Other through self-​reflection.
One is more loyal to the essence of Nietzsche’s thought by recognizing him as a
thinker of the diremptive remain rather than as one insouciant of the dialectical
process. Lebrun’s oversight is symptomatically betrayed in the title of the work
(The Inverse of the Dialectic). A more fitting title –​one that would better heed to
the intricacies of both Nietzsche and Hegel’s thought –​would have been The
Remainder of the Dialectic. The intelligence of the Nietzschean master consists of
engaging in conflicts against the Other as perceived through the clarity of the
speculative rather than the murky spectacles of the specular. Narcissistic discord
that cannot discern between self and Other is the folly of the slave incapable
of self-​reflection and the subsequent decision for a diremptive remain.8 Hegel’s
work (akin to psychoanalytic treatment) is to diminish as much as possible
the reign of the imaginary (the misrecognition of internal division as external
opposition) so that the Other can be rightly ascertained as Other, rather than
the mere shadow of the self.This is not to abolish conflict in favour of harmony
but, rather, to create the possibility of a bearable conflict. I thus also part ways
with Žižek’s (2009b, ix) rather one-​sided critique of dialogue. Though there is
truth to Lacan’s indictment according to which all dialogue is the exchange of
two monologues, this should not entail that we relinquish all discussion. The
properly Hegelian view is that a reasonable interchange can be maintained if
the parties involved have sufficiently submitted themselves to self-​reflection.
This is particularly important today with respect to the question of sexual
 The diremptive remains 11
identity-​in-​difference, where discussions around gender and sexuality often
take the regressive form of a puerile battle of the sexes.9 Men’s movements cast
their own frustrated masculinity on the figure of woman while certain feminists
hold an allegedly wicked patriarchal order responsible for all the weight of cas-
tration. In both cases, the failure of each sex to constitute itself through its para-
doxical kenosis in the Other is blindly played out as an external conflict with an
Other that is increasingly little more than a reflection of one’s self.
It is arguably the case that the diremptive remains divide in accordance to
the sacred-​profane identity-​in-​difference. One of two diremptive remains gen-
erally falls on the side of sacralization while the other pertains to profanation.
Thus, the particular identity-​in-​difference positing the unity of the sacred and
the profane provides the general content for the others; a diremptive remain
will thus either choose the sacred or the profane as the determining tendency
of its content. As to form, however, the identity-​in-​difference of the feminine and
the masculine will provide the general prototype. Sexual difference provides
the form of difference tout court.10 Let us recall for a moment Lacan’s formulae
of sexuation:
• Masculine sexuation:
• For All x PHI x.
• There is One x Not PHI x.
• Feminine sexuation:
• There is no X Not PHI x.
• Not All x PHI x.
Masculinity arguably hinges on a profanation that occurs against the back-
ground of the sacred while femininity hinges on a profanation that permeates
the sacred realm. Masculinity is marked by profane exceptions –​the obscene
primal father representing its most overt form –​while the feminine lacks
a profane exception insofar as it is constitutively profane. Linking the perverse
and the profane we may argue, following Benvenuto (2016), that the fem-
inine is constitutively perverse-​profane while masculinity, essentially on the
side of the non-​perverse (sacred) is, instead, plagued by “attacks of femininity”
(ibid) or “attacks of profanity”. Thus, our initial division of form and content
(the product of the understanding’s labour) now reveals itself as a moment
to be surpassed. By providing the form of difference in general, sexual diffe-
rence also determines the content (sacred and profane). With this we may posit
the primacy of the feminine and argue that the masculine is a defence against
the feminine. The feminine position is marked by greater anxiety, insofar as
“‘male anxiety’ stops at castration anxiety” (Zupančič, 2017, 56). According to
Lacan, Zupančič explains, “the feminine position is closest to subjectivity in its
pure state”. For this reason it is more prone to the “radical ontological anxiety”
that is “the prerogative of subjectivity as such” (ibid, 56). With this we can appre-
ciate why the masculine would want to defend against femininity. Hysteria, for
12 The diremptive remains
instance, provides a rather expedient defence, as the hysteric’s belle indifférence
amply testifies. The feminine is less diremptive of the identity-​in-​difference of
femininity and masculinity. The masculine insists more fervently on an alleged
abyssal difference from the feminine, something Adler diagnosed as the “mas-
culine protest” and Freud (1937) christened as the “repudiation of femin-
inity”. The feminine thus better recognizes that femininity and masculinity are
brethren or, shall I say, sisters. The masculine is on the side of semblance while
the feminine is on the side of the real.11
The separation of the diremptive remains into a profane and a sacred element
means that the unity of contraries does not always imply symmetry. Generally,
the profane term represents the Other for both. This is exemplarily so in the
case of the masculine-​ feminine identity-​in-​difference where the feminine
stands in the place of the Other for both male and female positions.This insight
marks male and female homosexuality as radically opposed; where the former
involves two subjects seeking the same, the latter involves two subjects seeking
difference.12 St. Paul and Judas are arguably the respective representatives of the
alternative sacred/​same and profane/​Other diremptive remains.This means that
Judas better renders the truth of the Christian message –​precisely insofar as he
is Other. The Christian message is, after all, ultimately an atheistic message and
the incarnation and the crucifixion mark the moments where God, according
to Žižek’s formulation, profanes Himself, i.e. becomes Other to Himself.

Notes
1 Kenosis refers to the process by which a term empties itself out into its Other in
order paradoxically to reach itself.
2 Žižek underlines this paradoxical function of the object: “In this element (baptized
by Lacan the objet a), opposites immediately coincide … it is simultaneously a par-
ticular idiosyncratic object which disturbs the frame of reality … and the frame itself
through which we perceive reality” (Žižek, 2015, 109).
3 Žižek holds that psychoanalysis deals with what philosophy brushes aside. In our
terms, psychoanalysis obstructs and inspires philosophy at once.
4 In the context of bringing psychoanalysis and Hegel together, the word “resist” is
simply irresistible.The resistance to the speculative process provided by the diremptive
remain is akin to resistance to psychoanalysis. Both are, at once, an obstacle and a
condition. Psychoanalysis without resistance disparages to a facile exchange scarcely
distinguishable from leisurely afternoon tea.
5 Žižek’s interest in quantum physics finds its source in the paradoxes it brings to light.
Lacan also refers to the paradoxes of quantum mechanics as a means of elucidating
something of subjectivity (cf. Lacan, 2007, 103–​104).
6 The aesthetic diremptive remain is none other than taste.
7 McGowan (2019) distinguishes between difference and contradiction. Where the latter
designates internal division, the former represents the obfuscation of division by
falsely presenting it as the difference between two terms. The fascist, for instance,
is preoccupied by his/​her alleged difference from the Jew rather than his/​her own
internal contradiction.
 The diremptive remains 13
8 That self-​reflection is operative in Nietzsche is well attested to in the first essay of
On the Genealogy of Morality where he explicitly states that we are all made up of
slave and master traits.
9 The last American elections boil down to a pipi-​caca kindergarten variety of the
battle of the sexes.
10 “Their homeland [that of the masculine and the feminine positions] is one and the
same: yet this oneness and sameness is the oneness and sameness of pure difference”
(Zupančič, 2017, 61). The idea of two elements sharing a homeland and, further-
more, that this similitude founds the basis of absolute difference provides a succinct
formulation of the way identity-​in-​difference is conceptualized throughout this
treatise.
11 Zupančič argues that masculinity hinges on belief, while femininity rests on pre-
tence. Belief opens the space of the sacred, while pretence hinges on a prior disbe-
lief –​one feigns because one does not believe.
12 Bruno (2010) remarks that female homosexuality involves the relation of Other to
Other rather than same to same.
Variation 2 
The triumph of dialectical
“lower” terms

Following an insight from Karin de Boer regarding the asymmetry of the unity
of contraries we can translate the idea that one element (the profane-​feminine-​
Other) has primacy over another into more rigorous Hegelian theorization.
De Boer argues that only one of the two contradictory elements “constitutes
the true principle of its contrary determinations” (de Boer, 2010, 369). Hegel
makes this point specifically regarding the dialectical unity of infinitude and
finitude where the former has primacy over the latter.1 There is thus an asym-
metry between the two elements of an opposition and, I would add, this asym-
metry, when viewed from the standpoint of the understanding, is interpreted as
hierarchy. For instance, the man-​woman opposition, viewed from the perspective
of the understanding, may lead to a misogynistic conception by which man is
“above” woman. Indeed, the moment of the discovery of sexual difference when
the child perceives the mother’s privation of the penis, can lead to misogynistic
contempt. Much of psychoanalytic treatment consists of correcting this one-​
sided perspective. According to psychoanalytic reason the “lower” term reveals
itself as the symptom (or “truth”) of the alleged “higher” term. Thus, woman is
a symptom of man and thereby stands for his truth while children play this part
for their parents and the psychoanalyst (the quintessential Other) for his/​her
patients. The symptom is a diremptive remain, an index of asymmetry. It testifies
to an encroachment; the element that occupies this position is felt to impinge
upon the imagined self-​identity of the “higher” term. Men are thus wont to feel
persecuted and suffocated by their wives, parents feel that their children drive
them mad while analysands feel pained by the analysts and secretly long for the
end of treatment. The symptom provides a minimal exteriorization of internal
division as outward opposition.
Given this asymmetry, the “higher” term faces the ethical decision of
accepting or rejecting incorporation with the “lower” term. The “higher” term
is now challenged with the task of recognizing in the Other its own truth and
symptom rather than retaining the conceit of its superiority. If the “higher”
term resists-​dirempts incorporation out of fear or conceit, an unexpected tri-
umph of the “lower” term occurs. In this case, both terms dwindle into an exces-
sive form of the “lower”-​profane element2 leading to tremendous suffering. At
times, a nefarious contradiction occurs by which the “lower” term triumphs
 The triumph of dialectical “lower” terms 15
arrogantly (with the spirit of revenge fed by ressentiment) in the very oppression of
the “lower” by the “higher”. Nietzsche’s slave revolt in morality points precisely
to this inversion by which the “lower” term, the slave of yesteryear, seizes power
and oppresses the former noble master with unparalleled rancor. The revalu-
ation of values occurs when the angry dirempted symptom finally becomes the
creator of value. We may christen the symptom that returns after suffering the
blows of the “higher” term’s snubbing diremption as hyper-​symptom.
For Freud, the psychoanalytic symptom is a compromise formation between
the law (“higher” term) and the unconscious wish (“lower” term) that inexor-
ably veers towards the fulfilment of the latter to the detriment of the former. The
very effort to resist one’s wish (one’s jouissance) becomes the very locus of
the satisfaction of that self-​same wish. Resistance is co-​opted by the wish for the
sake of its satisfaction. Nietzsche (1998), with the signature prescience of the
genius of his nostrils, had already sniffed out a similar mechanism in the manner
that the ascetic ideal becomes co-​opted as the principal means to lascivious
jouissance –​the ascetic ideal thus becomes hyper-​symptom of humankind. In
like manner, the conceptual oppositions put forward here veer towards the
“lower” term of the opposition when the “higher” term dirempts its truth as
incarnated by the “lower” term. For instance, in the opposition of truth and lies,
everything slowly veers towards the dominance of lies, which, despite being the
“lower” or profane element of the opposition provides the truth of the “higher”
term. Cast aphoristically, the lie provides the truth of truth. This is a profound
psychoanalytic insight rendered eloquently by Lacan: “there is no truth that, in
passing through awareness, does not lie” (Lacan, 1977).
It is likewise with the inhuman treatment of criminals. Here the good
functions as a “higher” term which, in refusing to recognize its symptom-​truth
in evil, degenerates all the more into savage evil. The good’s domination of evil
thus becomes an even graver instance of evil than the evil it sought to tame.3
Likewise, love that ignores its symptom in hate is an idealizing love more violent
than hate itself. Similarly, love that dirempts its foundation in lack disparages to
bourgeois love, a form of legalized prostitution, as Žižek would say. It is like-
wise with the innocence-​guilt dichotomy. We are innocent because Jesus died
for our sins.Yet we must not forget that Jesus’ guilt is a symptom of our inno-
cence (dare we say that God is a symptom of man?); his guilt is the truth of our
innocence, which is, by virtue of that fact, a compromised innocence (the only
possible kind). Failing to recognize this, our innocence becomes the conceit of
innocence and the height of the most heinous guilt: what is the guilt of lost inno-
cence in comparison to the guilt of the conceit of innocence? Of course, the
greatest instance of such hyper-​guilt posturing as innocence consists of all the
myriad systemic forms of violence that permeate the space of late modern cap-
italism; in comparison to that the robbing of a bank is, indeed, mere child’s play.
Similarly, beauty that resists its dialectical unity with ugliness becomes mere
kitsch, the quintessence of ugliness. Wealth that refuses its kinship with poverty
is the height of all paucity; something that Biblical wisdom knew well when it
counseled that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than
16 The triumph of dialectical “lower” terms
for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God”. Likewise, Lacan (2001b) warned
that the rich man is impotent and cannot love. For Lacan, great dialectician that
he is, to give what one does not have is the crowning pinnacle of wealth. Sanity
that dirempts madness is paradoxically the height of madness. Finally, freedom
that dirempts its ties to dependence risks falling into empty wantonness. One
may even argue that it is generally the pretence to “freedom” and “autonomy”
that seduces the “higher” term to imagine a life untainted by the blemish of the
“lower” term. The reign of the “lower” term (the symptom) is at once farcical
and catastrophic. We live in comical times with the proviso that the comical
represents the height of the tragic. For this reason, Žižek is the philosopher
most contemporary of our time; he is a jester-​philosopher to be taken with
utmost earnestness.
The “lower” term, the symptom-​truth of the “higher” term, also stands for
universality while the “higher” term stands for particularity. By refusing its
identity-​in-​difference with its Other, the “higher” term defines its identity in
opposition to this Other. The “higher” term thus places the Other “as the uni-
versal against which [its] identity must define itself ” (McGowan, 2019, 194).
This insight has its psychoanalytic counterpart in the idea that the abject and
destitute provides the universal truth of humankind once semblances are finally
cast aside.The aim of psychoanalytic treatment is to re-​appropriate as one’s own
the abjection cast out through diremptive self-​conceit. Thus, woman stands for
the universality of castration (anatomy serves as destiny in this regard) that man,
ensnared by the illusion of his masturbatory autonomy,4 pretends to escape.The
child’s helplessness, falsely opposed to the pretence of adult self-​sufficiency, also
belongs here. Likewise, guilt, evil, hate, lies, ugliness and servitude are some of
the many exemplars that provide the ineradicable stain of human destitution
which the semblances of the conceit of innocence, moralistic good, idealized
love, pedantic truth, artificial beauty, idle freedom, boring sanity and vacuous
wealth try to obfuscate. The symptomatic “lower” terms are the torsion in the
Moebius strip that our never ceasing Ptolemaic conceit tries to iron out in vain.
Fear is always fear of the dialectical “lower” term and, therefore, in fearing it one
becomes it.5 The rejection of the dialectical “lower” term reduces the “higher”
term to a degenerated and farcical version of the “lower” term and infuses anger
in the “lower” term, which eventually rises up with the will and ressentiment to
wage a veritably daunting slave revolt.6

Notes
1 Our decision to map this on Lacan’s (1998) formulae of sexual difference is validated
by the fact that Lacan designates masculinity as finite and femininity as infinite.
2 I have cursorily equated the “lower” and the profane term of an opposition. Though
this overlap may often hold, it may be wiser not to raise it to a universal truth without
exceptions.
3 We enter Nietzsche’s dialectical paradigm of a radical revaluation of all values that
recognizes in moralistic “good” an evil greater than evil itself.
 The triumph of dialectical “lower” terms 17
4 The penis is an ellipse that thinks it’s a circle. To truly subsist it needs the two centres
of man and woman. However, in its delusion of self-​sufficiency it sees only itself.
5 The psychotic “push-​to-​Woman” is inseparable from the fear of the feminine.
6 At the risk of anthropomorphism (no sin among we Hegelians), one could frame the
massive changes in the climate as the “lower” term (“Nature”) taking vengeance on
humanity’s diremption of its belonging to it. Nature is today our most angry hyper-​
symptom and Sodom and Gomorrah (or shall I say “corona”) lurk not far away!
Variation 3 
Speculative topology

Lacanian topology is the contemporary heir to speculative philosophy.

Interestingly, the word “speculative” with its explicit reference to mirrors
already points in the direction of topological rather than temporal thought.
Lacan’s Moebius strip, the torus and the Klein bottle all stage paradoxes for the
common understanding (e.g. an object that has its centre of gravity outside
itself, a surface with only one side).The move to topology is altogether different
from Lacan’s notion of the “imaginary” and Hegel’s “picture” or representa-
tional thinking. For Hegel, the limitation of picture thinking consists of the fact
that reflection cannot keep firm the unity of the object. By contrast, to

think speculatively means to resolve anything real into its parts and to
oppose these to each other in such a way that the distinctions are set in
opposition in accordance with the characteristics of thought and the object
is apprehended as the unity of the two.
(Hegel, 1970, 147)

Hegel holds that “the object is one, although it has characteristics which are
distinguished from it, and it is speculative thought which first gets a grasp of the
unity in this very antithesis as such” (ibid, 147). Only a paradoxical topology,
beyond the limitations of temporal thinking, can grasp the object in its inherent
contradictions. Inasmuch as the term picture thinking points to the visual, we
may surmise that Hegel’s critique also involves a critique of the spatial. As a
result, Lacan’s move to topological thinking must be seen as a corrective to both
spatial and temporal thought (two aspects of picture thinking). The Lacanian
equivalent of “picture thought” is the imaginary, the lure of the mirror image
where the object a is “negativized”. The mirror image cannot grasp the subject
in his/​her dialectical unity (i.e. a true unity that includes all contradictions).
Interestingly, however, the mirror image nevertheless points towards dialectical-​
paradoxical unity in that the image shows the subject in inverted form (the left
and right sides are switched).1 We could say, quipping Lacan himself, that the
mirror returns the subject’s image in an inverted form.2
For Hegel, “space and time are the primal forms of ideology” insofar as their
form “permits us to see difference in the place of contradiction” (McGowan,
 Speculative topology 19
2019, 117). An inherent limitation of representational thought is that it depicts
contradiction in such a way that “the contradictory is held external to itself,
next to and after itself ” (Hegel quoted in ibid, 118). Time and space are ideo-
logical categories insofar as they dirempt the paradoxical unity of an entity
by falsely dividing it into disparate moments. Rather than depict one thing
that is internally divided, picture thought represents two separate self-​identical
objects conceived as different only from one another. The notion of “moment”
in Hegel is thus not a temporal idea; it is, as Jameson shows, (2010) more akin
to “aspect”.3 Lacan’s topology corrects the shortcomings of representational
thought. The aim of this topology is, for Lacan, to provide a new “imaginary”
that is better suited to the paradoxes of the real and which, as such, can paradox-
ically give body to that which it is impossible to incarnate, the object a:

The ambiguity is due to the fact that we can’t do otherwise than to imagine
it in the specular register. It’s precisely a matter of establishing another type
of imaginarization here, if I may express myself in this way, whereby this
object may be defined.
(Lacan quoted in Wegener, 2016, 40)

“All space is flat” according to Lacan (ibid). Depth is an illusion created

by space; it is not space itself. Lacanian topology targets the idea of psycho-
analysis as “depth-​psychology”. Lacan held that the unconscious, as discourse
of the Other, is located on the surface, namely at the level of everyday speech
and social interaction –​something entirely in keeping with Freud’s discovery
of the psychopathology of everyday life. However, if we take Lacan’s notion of
extimacy4 seriously we must not forget that the unconscious, while being
situated somehow “outside”, is also deeply intimate.Thus, the notion of “depth
psychology”, despite some inaccuracy, should not be entirely discredited.
Perhaps one should say that psychoanalysis is a paradoxical depth psychology of
the surface. Or, we may say that depth is a diremptive remain that paradoxically
enables while obstructing the speculative identity of unconscious and surface.The
“purloined letter” (Lacan, 2006) is “deep”, invisible to first glance, precisely
insofar as it is there on the surface for everyone to see. The neurotic uncon-
scious testifies to the paradox by which the unconscious acquires depth precisely
insofar as one fathoms that it is simply “floating” on the surface.The phenomenology
of the psychotic unconscious, where foreclosure prevails, fails to testify to this
paradox; the unconscious remains out there “à ciel ouvert”, neither “deep” nor
“shallow”.5
Insofar as the torsion on the surface gives paradoxical incarnation to the
object a, it is synonymous with what we have christened as the diremptive
remain. As such, the torsion is, at once, 1) the condition for the speculative rec-
ognition that the unconscious is on the surface and 2) the obstacle to full sub-
lation. In other words, the kink on the surface both reminds us that there is no
secret to the unconscious (it’s right “there”) and provides the illusion that the
unconscious is somewhere “below the depths”.This simultaneous reminding and
20 Speculative topology
forgetting (reminding in the modality of forgetting) is, of course, the very marker of
repression, which is, for Lacan, equivalent to the return of the repressed.The strength
of Lacan’s topological surfaces is that they evoke (better than the specular image
which “negativizes”) the diremptive remain of the object a. One irresistibly
feels like one got a glimpse of it and then it vanishes. More specifically, one gets
the feeling that there is “depth” and then one realizes that the surface has no
“inside”.The topological surface is a surface with a torsion that keeps sustaining
the illusion of the depth (hence depth is a diremptive remain). The constancy
by which the illusion is maintained by the topological surface may be likened
to Freud’s “secondary repression”.
Lacan casts his topological project of creating a new “imaginary” capable of
giving body to the paradoxical object a as an endeavour that would overcome
the limitations of Kant’s transcendental aesthetics.: “Is topology not this no’space
[n’espace] where mathematical discourse takes us and which necessitates a revi-
sion of Kant’s aesthetics?” (Lacan, 2001a, 472, my translation). Similarly, Hegel
casts his own speculative philosophy in opposition to Kant. Does this common
urge to overcome Kantian ontology not further confirm the kinship between
Lacan and Hegel? The Lacanian “No ’space” (as an alternative to Kantian tran-
scendental aesthetics) provides the most current manifestation of the Hegelian
project. The transition to Lacanian topology is thus akin to the move from
the “salad” ontology of juxtaposition to Hegel’s speculative philosophy via
Kant’s transcendental aesthetics. The pre-​Kantian ontology can be likened to
a flat torsion-​less Euclidean surface with two sides. Kant introduces verticality
with the idea of the noumenal realm beyond phenomena. Hegel, by contrast,
returns to the ontology of the surface with the realization that the surface is
not Euclidean. A torsion on the surface creates the illusion of depth and ver-
ticality. He did not, like Kant, fall into the trap of hypostasizing the torsion
as a noumenal beyond. We may deepen this intermingling of Lacanian and
Hegelian idioms by recalling the fact that for Hegel, there is, strictly speaking,
no such thing as a “pure” notion. Excessive one-​sidedness disparages the notion
to the level of what he calls a “pure thought”. Thus, Hegel argues that it is only
by “giving up the fixity of its self-​positing” that “the pure thoughts become
Notions” (Hegel, 1977, 20). In light of this terminological clarification (notion
vs. “pure thought”) we could say that the Hegelian notion is a topological
surface with torsion while a “pure thought” is an unwrinkled “pure” surface
without a kink. Quipping Lacan, we may say: the kink, foreclosed from the flat
surface of pure thought, returns as the full-​blown (religious) delusion of depth.
The kink on the surface, another name for the symptom, is given concrete
reality as a distinct order of being while it is, in fact, nothing more than a scar
of non-​being (lack) within being.
Lacan took his engagement with topology and knot theory very seriously
and, more importantly, also very literally. In response to Harry Woolf ’s question
about whether his preoccupations with “this fundamental arithmetic and this
topology are not in themselves a myth or merely at best an analogy for an
explanation of the life of the mind”, Lacan emphatically states that it
 Speculative topology 21
is not an analogy. It is really in some part of the realities, this sort of torus.
This torus really exists and it is exactly the structure of the neurotic. It is
not an analogon; it is not even an abstraction, because an abstraction is
some sort of diminution of reality, and I think it is reality itself.
(Lacan, 1970)

Lacan, by contrast to Kant, had ontological aspirations. And of course, a cen-

tral contrast between Kant and Hegel consists of the latter’s preoccupation
with metaphysical matters which, unlike Kant, he did not entirely throw into
the wastebin of noumenal unknowability. Here we should contrast Žižek’s
Hegel and Badiou’s Hegel. Both react positively to Hegel’s decision to move
beyond Kant. However, a closer look at their respective sympathies for Hegel
reveals a stark contrast. Badiou finds the limitation Kant places on know-
ledge completely anathema to his own ambitions. In his view, Hegel lifts this
ban on knowledge and thereby grants us the confidence that everything is
knowable (cf. Badiou, A. and Nancy, J-​L. (2018)).6 For Žižek, by contrast,
the relation between Hegel and Kant is subtler in that the former does not
simply lift a taboo imposed by the latter. Žižek believes that Hegel achieves
a radicalization of Kant insofar as he raises the limitation on knowledge
to the ontological level; if we cannot know things-​in-​themselves it is not
because knowledge is forbidden to us but, more generally, because the so-​
called thing-​in-​itself is inherently unknowable. Thus, an epistemological bar-
rier is fortified into an ontological one such that even God is denied access
to full knowledge. We could say that Žižek’s Hegel is “hyper-​Kantian” while
Badiou’s Hegel is pre-​Kantian. The former absolutizes the unknowability
of the world while the latter does not shun the conceit to know all. An
attempt can be here made to view these two different “Hegels” as moments
of the same Hegel. The first moment lifts the limitation on knowledge to
the ontological level. This means (and we are already and immediately at the
second moment) that unknowability is an attribute of the thing-​in-​itself, an
attribute that, moreover, we can claim to know. The speculative unity of the
two contradictory moments of Hegel’s philosophy renders for us the truth
that the world is in-​itself not knowable, that it is not-​all as Lacan would
say. Lacan’s topological exploits give body to the two moments of Hegel’s
speculative philosophy: 1) the paradoxical-​impossible surfaces incarnate a
certain ontological unknowability, and yet 2) insofar as this unknowability
is precisely incarnated (i.e. given shape in a “new imaginary”) an essential
ontological claim is made. The speculative unity of the two contradictory
(paradoxical) moments of Hegel’s philosophy gives us the complete notion of
Hegel as opposed to accentuating one moment at the expense of the other.
Of course, it must be pointed at that Žižek’s Hegel as the “lower” profane
element already contains both moments while Badiou’s Hegel is diremptive
in this regard. Žižek’s Hegel, by contrast to Badiou’s, attests to the Kant-​
Hegel identity-​in-​difference; a subtle parallax shift, rather than the grand leap
Badiou imagines, takes us from Kant to Hegel.
22 Speculative topology
Notes
1 I later distinguish between a diremptive and non-​diremptive mirror stage (variation 7).
Where the former involves a cloning of the “subject” (the scare quotes indicate that
such a “subject” is in reality a non-​subject insofar as a subject cannot be duplicated),
the latter makes room for a minimal difference through which subjectivity can be
asserted.
2 Despite reference to time (six months of age), Lacan’s conception is markedly spa-
tial if not yet topological (the French word stade literally means stadium –​cf. Lacan
(2006)).
3 The parallel with Freud is uncanny. The notion and the unconscious are outside
of time.
4 The word “extimate” combines “external” and “intimate” to capture the liminal pos-
ition of the object.
5 Hegel provides a proto-​Lacanian expression of the immanence of the unconscious to
the surface when discussing the absolute’s inherence to the here and now:

We usually suppose that the Absolute must lie far beyond; but it is precisely what
is wholly present, what we as thinkers, always carry with us and employ, even
though we have no express consciousness of it.
(Hegel, 1991, 59)

6 Badiou’s anti-​kantianism is so stark that he considers himself a pre-​Kantian pre-​

modern thinker. His influence on Meillassoux is evidenced in the latter’s critique of
Kant’s “correlationism”, his view that all knowledge is confined within the purview
of the subject’s historical situation (transcendental frame). For Meillassoux (2008),
modern science accesses truths beyond the transcendental.
Variation 4 
Vicious dialectical
reversals

Žižek speaks of dialectical thinking which is not yet speculative. This, he

argues, is

the vibrant domain of the tremor of reflection and reflexive reversals, the
mad dance of negativity in which ‛all that is solid melts into air’ –​this
is dialectics as eternal warfare, as a movement which ultimately destroys
everything it gives birth to.
(Žižek, 2015, 16)

This “vicious” aspect of the dialectic has a very clear instantiation in polit-
ical struggle, where every sincere attempt towards emancipation risks not only
failing but, even worse, dwindling into its opposite thereby reconfirming the
rule of an even more stringent power. For Žižek, such nefarious reversals, rather
than being an index of a deficiency of the actors involved, is a necessary dia-
lectical outcome:

From the standpoint of emancipatory struggle, it is thus crucial to take into

account how, in the process of the actualization of a Notion, the Notion
itself changes (into its opposite). And the purer this Notion is, the more
brutal the reversal.
(ibid, 36)

Far from pointing to an impurity in the intent of the revolutionary movement,

the dialectical reversal is all the more brutal the purer the notion seeking actual-
ization. According to Žižek’s view, “one must first fail in reaching the goal, as
the intended reconciliation turns into its opposite, and only then, in a second
moment, will the true reconciliation come, when one recognizes this failure
itself as the form of success” (ibid, 37). But is it not somewhat defeatist to rec-
ognize “failure itself as the form of success”? Is it always true that, “for imma-
nent conceptual reasons, its [a revolution’s] first strike has to end in fiasco, the
outcome must turn out to be the opposite of what was intended” (ibid, 36–​37)?
Must we resign ourselves to the “impossibility of the agent’s taking into account
the consequences of its own act” (ibid, 36–​37)?
24 Vicious dialectical reversals
If the purity of a notion leads to its dialectical demise it is because “purity”
should be taken to refer to a notion’s inability to recognize its identity-​in-​
difference with its Other. It is precisely by virtue of this méconnaissance that
the notion is led to embody this Other in a subsequent dialectical turn. What
accounts for the vicious dialectical turn of destiny is a purity of the notion
that excludes from itself acknowledgment of its speculative identity with its
Other. Here “purity” designates something like diremption or one-​sidedness; its
result is that the Other, excluded from the notion’s self-​understanding, returns
“in the real” of the dialectical turn. A vicious dialectical reversal is thus con-
sequent upon diremption. Revolution would not necessarily lead to terror if it
contained within itself its Other (i.e. the idea of a return to something prior).
It is no coincidence that our word for the most radical change bringing about
the most far-​reaching social transformations is synonymous with the idea of
something that revolves to a previous state. The lesson to be drawn from this
etymological (non)-​coincidence is that a revolution will succeed in instanti-
ating its notion if the latter resists the pretence of standing independent of its
Other. Žižek himself formulates a similar idea when he insists quite correctly
that only the gesture of a return can bring about novelty, a point he argues à
propos Lacan’s famous return to Freud. We know from subsequent history that
Lacan’s return to Freud constituted a veritable revolution in psychoanalytic
theory and practice. Moreover, we know that Lacan was driven by the pure
passion of reviving Freudian theory from the straying into which it had erred
in the hands of post-​Freudian ego-​psychology. His pure passion for Freud was
akin to that of Antigone for Polyneices; he sought to provide for him a proper
burial so that his legacy could live henceforth at the height of the dignity of
its notion. However, this precisely pure passion of Lacan’s did not lead to this
allegedly necessary dialectical shift; Lacanian psychoanalysis did not “melt into
air” and become reabsorbed by post-​Freudian theory. It is precisely insofar as
the novelty introduced by Lacan was posited in its identity with what Freud
had already achieved that the Lacanian revolution did not falter into a counter-​
revolutionary ego-​psychology. Lacan’s passion may have been a pure passion but
it was not a pure thought.1
It is likewise in the realm of human sexuality and desire. Sadism always
reverts to masochism –​Benvenuto (2016) puts it best quipping that “masochism
is the subjectivization of sadism” –​precisely because, enthralled by its own
blind will to push “the suffering of existence into the Other” (Lacan, 2006), it
fails to be mindful of its identity-​in-​difference with its victim. Sadism is anti-​
kenosis par excellence. Dirempted from the symbolic, masochism returns in the
real of the dialectical shift where the splendour of sadism suddenly vanishes and
“melts into air” relegating the subject to lowly self-​contempt.
When a notion is actualized in the world, a gap separates the essential prin-
ciple of that notion, namely the unity of itself and its contrary, and its actual
determination. The greater the diremptive gap, the greater will be the dialectical
shift “making good” that gap. The “corrective” work of the dialectic (uniting
moments separated by diremption) will be as harsh and brutal as the purity of
 Vicious dialectical reversals 25
the actualized notion. Though this reading may smack of pre-​modern mys-
ticism granting mysterious power to a transcendental agent (“the corrective
work of the dialectic”), one must not forget that Lacan provides a very similar
explanation for the emergence of psychotic phenomena when he says that
“What has been foreclosed from the light of the symbolic returns in the real”.
Both the “mystery” of the Lacanian “return in the real” and the Hegelian dia-
lectical reversal can be understood in light of Hegel’s notion of the absolute
which we may take to designate the impossible point of the full sublation of con-
traries. According to de Boer, a notion suffers “from the contradiction between what
it is in itself (the unity of its contrary moments) and what it has actually become
(a determination opposed to its contrary)” (de Boer, 2010, 362). Psychotic
hallucinations and delusions are a means of correcting the one-​sidedness of
the subject’s notion of self –​the “notion” is in this case more akin to a pure
thought.2 When Lacan says that the psychotic is spoken, we must ask: who
speaks. The answer is the absolute. The excessive diremption of psychosis leads
to a return of the absolute speaking through them with a vengeance (and jouis-
sance). According to Lacan, the psychotic is the martyr of language and of the
unconscious. Cast in Hegelese, he/​she is the martyr of the absolute.3
The suffering of the notion (caused by the contradiction between what it
is in itself and what it has actually become) points to the fact that we cannot
reduce everything to what it has become, namely its actualization. The spectre
of the absolute haunts all things in the form of suffering; this is true also for
animal life where Hegel speaks of pain. The absolute casts its spectre on the pre-
sent; it is not to be reached in the “future” but insists in all current moments.
All things, through their pained contradictions, suffering and the ultimately
disappointing vicissitudes of their destiny,4 carry in varying measure the spectre
of the absolute. If we suffer because of the gap that separates us from the abso-
lute it must mean that we are somehow connected to it. As Žižek remarks, the
absolute is nothing other than the gap that separates us from it and, we may add,
thereby makes us suffer; the latter alone is the index of our connection.
Given that all things (though to varying measure) are an expression of the
highest paradoxes of the absolute then the foreclosed paradox of the maximally
one-​sided “pure notion” will be “corrected” in time and space by a return of the
foreclosed Other which is constitutive of its essential principle.5 The universal
has a certain “bias” grounded in the paradoxical nature of the absolute6 and
will “step in to the world” in order to “correct” the diremptions of one-​sided
notions. The key here is that this “intervention” does not happen externally-​
transcendentally but internally-​immanently. But to actualize a “pure notion” is
the will of the man of ressentiment whose raging fury blinds him to speculative
reason. The “purity” of the notion is an unreasonable (and thoroughly non-​
Hegelian) idea of the understanding. Žižek is thus right when he argues that
vicious dialectical reversals are the result of a thinking that is dialectical but not
yet speculative. But then one wonders why he deems wild dialectical reversals
to be immanent conceptual necessities. This is to view contradiction too exter-
nally and temporally. If time, for Hegel, is an ideological category this means
26 Vicious dialectical reversals
that the two moments of the notion (the two contradictory aspects paradoxic-
ally united together) need not be separated temporally. If, however, one insists
on this separation –​insofar as the actualization of any notion always bears the
trace of a certain one-​sidedness –​then one could, at the very least, suggest the
necessity of a diremptive remain rather than full diremption. The diremptive
remain will lead, indeed, to inevitable historical vicissitudes but, by contrast to
the terror, these may not entail “destroying all that one gives birth to”.7
In his thesis concerning vicious dialectical reversals, what Žižek has there-
fore in mind are not notions but pure thoughts. The latter testify to the failure
of achieving speculative reason. Like the zealot who, due to the actualization
of his/​her “notion” in pure one-​sidedness, risks losing his/​her humanity, the
notion ceases to be a notion when it regresses to a pure thought and takes
up a battle of pure prestige with its foreclosed Other. Such a pure thought
degenerates into a “manic notion” or, more precisely, a “manic non-​notion”.
Here the non-​notion falls to the mercy of jouissance which deregulates it from all
reasonableness. Every one-​sided diremption leads to jouissance. Exemplary here is
the dogmatism of religion where the jouissance generated is so strong that even
the ascetic ideal (religion’s most faithful ally) is impotent against it. We owe to
Nietzsche the insight concerning the ascetic ideal’s subordination to jouissance;
rather than limit the latter, the ascetic ideal itself lapses into “saintly debauchery”
(Nietzsche, 1998). Rather than testify to the lofty purity of the actors involved,
a dialectical shift attests quintessentially to paradox experienced externally (i.e.
ideologically). The integrity of the notion consists of its resilience in the face of
the vicissitudes of fortune; its ability to bear contradiction internally strengthens
it immanently. What Seneca says of real joy is also true of the notion: “It is a
characteristic of real joy that it never ceases, and never changes into its opposite”
(Seneca, 2016). Notional joy is speculative; its Other, which it must keep tenderly
by its chest like a sister, is Freud’s common unhappiness. The latter, far from alien-
ating joy, immunes it to the wild dialectical vicissitudes of the one-​sidedness of
the pure thought of manic delight. And could the same not be humbly asked of
revolution, namely that it achieves the speculative and thereby reach beyond the
autophagic vicissitudes of the dialectic of revolution and terror?8
An interesting example of a vicious dialectical shift occurs when zealous
devotion undermines a cause more effectively than it furthers it, something
Žižek demonstrates when he critiques zealotry in favour of true fidelity
which, he argues, requires constant regulation by betrayal. For Žižek, a “subject
truly dedicated to his Cause regulates his eternal fidelity by means of inces-
sant betrayals” (Žižek, 2018, xiv note 9). The dialectical shift through which a
subject’s zeal renders the opposite of the intended effect (undermining rather
than elevating a cause) is not a dialectical necessity but, rather, the effect of the
subject’s position. As Žižek himself notes, “a zealot’s fanatical attachment to his
Cause is nothing but a desperate expression of his uncertainty and doubt, of
his lack of trust in the Cause” (ibid). Relevant here is Adam Phillips’ (2012)
brilliant argument questioning the all too facile opposition of fidelity and
betrayal in a text tellingly entitled “Judas’ Gift”. Phillips shows how the act of
 Vicious dialectical reversals 27
betrayal sometimes advances a cause more efficiently than it undermines it. Zeal
gets caught up in vicious dialectical reversals precisely because it abandons its
identity-​in-​difference with betrayal/​doubt thereby disparaging its notion to the
level of a pure thought.
In a rather enigmatic passage from The Psychoses, Lacan speaks of the so-​
called “providential function”, something he likens to what we may colloquially
call “karmic” retribution. Interestingly, Lacan isolates the providential function
to neurosis alone. It is only when castration is operative that this function is
effective. If symbolic castration is concomitant with speculative reason9 then we
may argue that this function is related to the subject’s recognition of the fact
that excessively diremptive attitudes will be “punished” by vicious dialectical
shifts. Lacan also puts forward the idea that the superego is tied to the function
of the “you” (the second person singular). We may explain this rather nebu-
lous claim through the theoretical apparatus here put forward. The emphatic
“you are …” always rests on an implicit (if not overt) “and I am not so”.10 The
function of the “you” is diremptive of the subject-​other identity-​in-​difference;11
it pushes in the Other what it cannot bear to see in itself.12 Through the logic
by which diremption leads to an undesired dialectical shift, the superego will
eventually sting the subject with the proverbial bite of conscience.Thus, linking
Lacan’s reflections on the “providential function” with dialectics renders for us
a certain kinship between psychoanalysis, Hegel and morality. In his L’envers
de la dialectique: Hegel à la lumière de Nietzsche, Lebrun (2004, 203) argues that
Hegelian dialectics holds a hidden connection to Christian morality which
Nietzsche’s genealogical method can help diagnose and overcome. Interestingly,
Deleuze and Guattari (1972), also in light of Nietzsche, make a similar critique
of Lacan. Is it enough to refute a theory by simply connecting it to Christian
morality? Is it not, rather, testament to the genius of Christianity to have
prefigured (and indeed made possible) so long ago these two pillars (German
idealism and psychoanalysis) of enlightened modernity? I must add to this the
proviso that there is no place in secular thought for a “providential function”.
However, this illusion does nonetheless approximate psychoanalysis and specula-
tive philosophy by providing the subject with an inkling of castration, albeit in
the disparaged mode of superstition.The commonest morality thus knows how
the immoralist gets him/​herself entangled in wild dialectical turns, swinging
the pendulum from manic freedom and profligacy to despondent guilt and
self-​torment. Again, despite this proximity, Hegel’s thought and Lacanian psy-
choanalysis are irreducible to Christian morality and, even more so, to the myth
of a providential function. Where the latter splits apart the moments of the
criminal act and its punishment, for Hegel the separation of moments is a
quintessential ideological operation insofar as it unnecessarily introduces the
dimension of time. For Hegel, the crime is its own punishment. Quipping
Brecht we may ask: what is the punishment against an offense in comparison
to the punishment that is the offense? The so-​called law of attraction (the
lynchpin of contemporary popular/​ideological consciousness) does the same; it
splits the thought (fear of some future event) from its realization. The problem
28 Vicious dialectical reversals
with magical thinking is not simply that it is not based on “reality” but, more
importantly, that it splits the moments of the thought and its alleged “later
effect” –​therein lies its ideological efficacy.13 To fear poverty is not the cause
of eventual poverty. The fear of poverty, much more radically, is poverty itself.14
Thus, “magical thinking” errs because it is not, if I may, magical enough. It does
not realize that the moments of fear and its “actualization” are identical; the
“effect” is hyper-​magically spontaneous.
Symbolic castration means that the subject must hold him/​herself respon-
sible for the dialectical setbacks consequent upon diremption. If the ego-​ideal
reverts to superegoic barbarism it is, by dint of the purity of the manic non-​
notion, consequent upon an exclusion of its Other. Could we thus not argue, in
this light, that the failures of 20th century communism were consequent upon
diremption? Žižek argues something of this sort when he refuses to let Marx off
the hook when considering the catastrophes of 20th century communism. He
holds that Marx’s ridiculing of Hegel’s defence of monarchy –​Marx famously
argued that the “Hegelian Monarch is just an appendix to his phallus” (Žižek,
2015, 368)15 –​is the weak point of Marx’s thought and the possible explanation
of how Soviet communism dwindled into a tyrannical bureaucratic university
discourse. In the theoretical idiom here put forward, the Soviet revolution, heir
to Marx’s thought, dirempted the paradoxical identity-​in-​difference of com-
munism and monarchism (in Kojève’s (2014) estimation, Marx, unlike Hegel,
lacked a theory of authority). Perhaps communism may achieve the dignity of
its notion when held in identity with its Other, namely monarchy. Diremption
here corrupts the concept precisely by robbing it of its Other. The dialectical
shift to Stalinist tyranny would thus be tied to a specific Marxian diremption
of a Hegelian insight.
Some (non)-​notions are constitutively diremptive and are therefore immedi-
ately contradictory. For instance, according to Žižek, law, property and (loveless)
marriage immediately reverse, respectively, to crime, theft and adultery (at other
times, Žižek equates marriage to legalized prostitution). In the loftiness of their
self-​conceit law, property and marriage dirempt their identity-​in-​difference
with their contraries and thereby pave the way to a “corrective” return in the
real. Quipping Brecht, Žižek thus asks, “what is a crime against the law in
comparison to the crime that is the law” or, “what is a theft against prop-
erty in comparison to the theft that is property” and, finally, “what is adultery
against marriage in comparison to the adultery that is a loveless marriage.”
Interestingly, Žižek speaks in these cases of notions that are distorted in order
to explain the dialectical reversal but when it comes to the massive dialectical
reversal by which the Soviet Revolution lapsed into 20th century communism,
Žižek idealizes this outcome as an index of the “purity” of the notion. Does
this mean that the defeat of Nazism was due to the “purity” of its notion,
and that its failure provides the “form of its success”? Though my question
is meant ironice, today’s political climate may sadly force us to admit that it
may harbour more truth than any alleged triumph of communism through its
20th century failure. The purity of a notion (its diremption-​separation from its
 Vicious dialectical reversals 29
Other) causes its inner distortion –​through which its very notional vocation is
lost –​leading to whirlwinds of dialectical insanity. Each pole of an opposition
remains bound within the walls of what Adorno christened as the “principle of
identity” (the target of Negative Dialectics)16 only insofar as its identity with its
Other is denied. Paradoxically, it is when identity with the Other is admitted
that the principle of identity is also overcome. With this, we witness the iden-
tity of identity and non-​identity and, we must further note, it is precisely
this latter paradox that enables one to claim that all cases of identity involve
identity-​in-​difference.The principle of identity is synonymous with the principle
of contradiction; insofar as manic non-​notions lead inevitably to their contrary,
all one-​sided aims towards emancipation are thwarted leading to the impasse
of contradictory identity.
We may say, at the risk of anthropomorphism, that the contradictions resulting
from diremption testify to speculative reason’s “vengeance” for having been
pushed aside by common understanding. The superego is the psychoanalytic
name for speculative reason in its vengeful guise. Hegel’s notion of the “end of
history” denotes the time when contradiction is sufficiently internalized as to
minimize the workings of the “corrective” (dare I say, correctional) superego, its
effort to make good the one-​sidedness by which (non)-​concepts have hitherto
been actualized. It is likewise with the end of analysis where inner division (cas-
tration) takes the place of external opposition (superego).
Another related limitation in Žižek’s thought consists of his account of
current times as marked by the elimination of the “toxic” element (coffee
without caffeine, love without the fall etc.). To say that love is now “without
the fall” is to massively overlook the pain that love continues to inflict on
frail human hearts. Dating sites and agencies do not eliminate the pain of
love. The very “self-​commodification” (Žižek) that takes place leads to the
experience of abysmal abjection. The experience of being “ghosted”, of not
making enough matches, the ordeals of love at first sight based on profile
pictures and other cyber-​torments by no means constitute a “love without
the fall” but rather open the space for a “fall without the love”, a fall into
abjection which Freud (1920) had christened as the deeply anguishing sui-
cidal experience of falling form another’s estimation (Niederfallen or liegen
lassen). The contemporary abolition of the fall from love simply means that
the fall will return with a vengeance at a later time. The two contradictory
moments of fall and love are severed and forced to join each other through a
temporal lag. In “traditional” love, jouissance and castration, namely the limit
placed on jouissance, intermingle such that neither tendency preponderates.
All the institutions that surrounded love such as marriage, religion and family
enabled maintaining the semblance of harmony between the couple. In
“modern love”, the separation of jouissance and castration leads to alterations
between manic bliss and melancholic despondency rather than more harmo-
nious intermingling. Modern dating sites aim to instantiate a “love without
the fall”. However, insofar as such a love does not maintain its paradoxical
identity-​in-​difference with its other (all the complications that come with
30 Vicious dialectical reversals
love, namely the fall), such a love becomes pure. Finally, the “purity” of this
love leads to the vicious dialectical reversal of the triumph of a fall without the
love thereby rendering for the subject the truth that, in the last instance, purity
is the greatest impurity of all.

Notes
1 The purity of Lacan’s passion led to his excommunication. He was the torsion
on the surface that the International Psychoanalytic Association finally foreclosed.
Following the logic of the triumph of the “lower” term, I predict that eventually
the International Psychoanalytic Association will become Lacanian against all its
(conscious) wishes. This new Lacanianism may sadly take the form of a fanatic
hyper-​Lacanianism.
2 According to Pommier (2013), in psychotic hallucination, the subject’s “other
half ” “comes back” to him/​herself from the outside. This idea is, at once, Hegelian,
Lacanian and Kleinian (the idea of “split off ” parts of the self).
3 These are the same insofar as the unconscious is the absolute, something Lacan
renders quite literally with “God is unconscious” (Lacan, 1977).
4 Heidegger (2015) provides an insightful reading of Hegel’s philosophy as the epic
of successive disappointments.
5 The phenomenon of a return of the dirempted Other led Hegel to wonder whether
“beneath the superficial din and clamour of history, there is not perhaps a silent and
mysterious inner process at work” (Hegel, 1975, 33).
6 This is most evident in Hegel’s writings on religion where he says that the “deepest
need of spirit is that the antithesis within the subject itself should be intensified to
its universal, i.e., its most abstract extreme” (Hegel, 2008b, 310).
7 What Žižek says of love, namely that it is never “pure” insofar as “the very features
which allegedly stain it … are what can effectively trigger it” (Žižek 2015, 72) is
also true of the notion.
8 One could perhaps say, arguably entirely in keeping with Lacan, that the pure
thought of revolution is shameless.
9 I take the absolute as synonymous with castration. Insofar as insanity hinges on
the foreclosure of the latter, it implicates the subject in radical separation from the
absolute.
10 Alma’s emphatic “I am not like you” uttered to Elisabet in the famous monologue
in Persona is a great instance of the “you are … I am not” dialectic. Alma denies her
guilt for the rejection of maternity and finds it in Elisabet.This comes back to haunt
as her denial fails to achieve its purpose. Bergman captures this failure in the fusion
of the faces which immediately ensues.
11 Martin Buber’s I and Thou is an expression of this speculative identity.
12 What post-​Freudians have christened as “projection” may be recast as the diremption
of the subject-​other identity-​in-​difference.
13 All law, be it “karmic law” or “law of nature” is ideological insofar as it separates the
moments of immanence.
14 As Montaigne (2009) put it best, “He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what
he fears”.
 Vicious dialectical reversals 31
15 Žižek argues that Marx’s acerbic remark hit the nail on the head as the monarch is
just such an appendix. Marx did not recognize the veracity of his own sarcastic claim
and could not appreciate the importance of “the coincidence of the highest (pure
signifier) and lowest (biology, contingency)” (Žižek, 2015, 368). A great example of
truth achieved in the mode of misrecognition.
16 Adorno imputes this principle to Hegel’s thought. This (false) indictment fails to
appreciate that Hegel rejected such a principle to the extent of denying the exist-
ence of analytic judgments altogether.
Variation 5 
Faith and reason

For Hegel, religion is a form of knowledge and, as such, is inseparable from

what we understand by cognition. Even when speaking of devotion (Andacht)
or feeling (Gefühl), Bernstein explains, Hegel is concerned, above all, with
the cognitive aspect (Bernstein, 2002, 62). Hegel thus laments the “mutual
distrust” (Hegel, 1970, 141) that plagues the relation between religion and
knowledge. According to Hegel, philosophy, like religion, renounces sub-
jective opinions in order to concern itself with God (ibid, 145). In the Middle
Ages, figures such as Anselm and Abelard attested to the fact that the union
of religion and philosophy was then less opaque (ibid, 146). By contrast to
Kant who “found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for
faith” (Kant, 1929, 29), Hegel, refusing to partake in the pseudo-​religious
debasement of reason, claims that “God is not the highest emotion but the
highest thought” (Hegel, 1970, 184).1 Moreover, he warns that the “opinion
that thought is injurious to religion, and that the more thought is abandoned
the more secure the position of religion is, is the maddest error of our
time” (ibid, 185). A similar prejudice against reason is endemic of many
approaches to mental health today. Among psychoanalysts, it is not rare
to hear someone critique a colleague for “intellectualization”. Supervisors
and teachers who emphasize the importance of the “counter-​transfer” insist
that the clinician should stay close to his/​her emotions as a measure for
gauging the stirrings of the patient’s unconscious. The analyst’s engagement
with theory is taken as a defence against the testing emotional vicissitudes
resulting from the intimate bond to the analysand. The royal road to the
patient’s unconscious is now located in the analyst’s reverie, while the
latter’s knowledge of psychoanalytic theory is deemed a hindrance on this
arduous path. By contrast to this prejudice against the intellect we strin-
gently hold, with Lebrun’s Hegel, that “the problem of the Understanding
is not ‛intellectualism’ but, rather, that it remains embedded in the imme-
diate” (Lebrun, 1972, 78). According to Hegel, the opposition between faith
and reason is only a stage of their mutual development. When the oppos-
ition reaches a climax the need for reconciliation arises (Hegel, 1970, 142).
For Hegel, Christianity is where this takes place. It is in Christianity that
 Faith and reason 33
the division between faith and reason grew into its most stringent oppos-
ition and therefore also here where reconciliation finally took place (ibid,
142–​143). Interestingly, the increasing emphasis on counter-​transference and
emotionality accompanied by the progressive straying away from Freud made
psychoanalysis (much like Christianity before it) another privileged locus of
the heightened tension between emotion and thinking. Lacan’s very intellec-
tual return to Freud –​mediated by encounters with structural anthropology,
linguistics, game theory, philosophy and not to mention topology (to name
a few) –​was an opportune antidote to a tendency that increasingly sought
to establish the hegemony of affect and sentiment at the cost of a general
dumbing down of psychoanalysis. Lacan’s return to Freud was a return to
the reconciliation of reason and the unconscious –​something Žižek echoes
when he argues that our only hope lies at “the intersection of reason and
drive” (Žižek, 2012a, 1010) –​in the face of an increasing emphasis on the
“irrational id” erroneously locating the origins of psychoanalysis in the
Romantic celebration of intuition and emotion.
By contrast to this tendency, psychoanalysis (much like Christianity) represents
the point of the highest reconciliation of the unconscious and reason. One may
attest to this idea on a number of different levels. Firstly, it is false to assume that
the id is unorganized; the repetition compulsion and the indestructibility of
the unconscious wish have taught us that the id has structure (Lacan, 2006, 551).
Secondly, Freud’s insistence that “the possibility of the attribute of unconscious-
ness would be completely excluded as far as emotions, feelings and affects are
concerned” (Freud, 1915b) strictly forbids the idea that the latter is a cauldron
of affects. Such a misunderstanding is symptomatic of the Freudo-​Marxist trad-
ition where a rather naïve libertarian conception of psychoanalysis prevails (a
kind of “wild psychoanalysis” après la lettre).Today this misunderstanding persists
in the idea that outbursts of intense emotion (often accompanied by acting out)
testify to a “failure of repression” requiring the creation of new clinical entities
such as the “borderline” and the “narcissist”. This ignores the fact that Freud, in
his Studies on Hysteria, crucially posited a “proton pseudos” (false premise) at the
basis of neurosis and its accompanying wild paroxysms of affect. In other words,
it is precisely the repression of a certain ideational content that has aetiological
importance for Freud. The will to elevate psychoanalysis to a management
of emotional life has led to an outright dismissal of this central inaugurating
tenet of Freudian theory. Finally, Freud’s pioneering work on fantasy involved
the counterintuitive discovery of infantile sexual theories through which the
toddler addresses questions concerning sexual difference, procreation, the rela-
tion between the parents and so on (Freud, 1905). The neurotic does not suffer
from “bad” emotions but from erroneous thoughts. The child is, for Freud, an
investigator/​scientist addressing the riddle of sex in a proto-​theoretical manner.
In brief, the structured nature of the unconscious, the absence of emotions in the
unconscious and, finally, the fact that the latter is a locus of theoretical elaboration
all testify to the fact that, quipping Hegel, the unconscious is not the highest emotion
34 Faith and reason
but the highest thought. Lacan explicitly demystifies the myth of the “emotional
unconscious”:

The unconscious is neither the primordial nor the instinctual, and what it
knows of the elemental is no more than the elements of the signifier …
The intolerable scandal when Freudian sexuality was not yet holy was that
it was so “intellectual”.
(Lacan quoted in Žižek, 2015, 163)

Like Christianity, as conceived by Hegel, Lacan’s return to Freud is today’s

privileged sanctuary for the safeguarding of the identity-​ in-​
difference of
religion-​faith-​emotion and philosophy-​knowledge-​reason. Diremption has
here led to the devastating de-​intellectualization of psychoanalysis and the
rise of contradictory notions such as emotional intelligence, life coaching and other
like concoctions resulting from the increasingly anti-​philosophical nature of
our times. Lamentable here is that a certain trend of psychoanalysis has given
this hostile aversion to thought a good conscience by dressing it up in the
“sophisticated” attire of its own concepts.
One of Hegel’s great merits is to treat concepts like human subjects: the
“Notion is not merely soul, but free subjective Notion that is for itself
and therefore possesses personality” (Hegel, 1969, 824). Conversely, Lacan
deserves our praise for treating human beings as concepts2 (e.g. the formulae
of sexuation, the “mathemes” of the four discourses etc.). The Lacanian nar-
cissistic suicidal aggression –​the correlate to Hegel’s battle of pure prestige –​ is
a vicissitude reserved as much for conceptual “dead letter” (an oxymoron
indeed as nothing thrives more fervently than the concept) as for living
human consciousness. A little dialectic playfulness (is there any other kind?)
will render the following: concepts and persons stand in speculative identity-​
in-​difference. However, when this is dirempted they play out their dialectical
unity in the disparaged mode of narcissistic suicidal aggression. This is the
case today as well as with all other epochs plagued by the sombre spectre of
anti-​intellectualism (e.g. consider the number of derogatory words used to
designate intelligent people (“nerd”, “geek” or “techy”)). Hegel’s “anthropo-
morphism” of the concept and Lacan’s “formalization” of the human sub-
ject are the best antidotes against this obscurantist diremption. Concepts and
humans should stand in speculative identity rather than specular strife. To quip
Heine, let us be warned: where they burn notions, they will too in the end
burn people.3

Notes
1 Meillassoux (2008) argues that the limitation Kant placed on reason paved the
way for hypotheses regarding supposedly less restricted modalities of knowledge.
Similarly, Badiou (2003b) feels that the Romantic disparagement of mathematics led
to the prevailing belief in the “ineffable” that can only be accessed through intuition.
 Faith and reason 35
Likewise, Hegel believes that the language of the understanding is still too represen-
tative and that, as such, it engenders the illusion of the ineffable (Lebrun, 1972, 62).
2 Bion (1959) moves in the same direction as he rightly makes the link between cog-
nition (the linking of concepts and thoughts) and copulation.
3 In today’s late capitalism, rather than view notions as people, we view corporations
as persons endowing them with all the personality of souls. In this regard, Jameson
speaks of “the soulful corporation” (2010, 102).
Variation 6 
The paradoxes of love

For Hegel, the turbulent destinies of lover and beloved are not isolated to the
human realm but form, rather, the very structure of the concept both in its rela-
tion to other concepts and, more importantly, in its self-​relation. Hegel clearly
states the link between the concept and love, stipulating that this love entails “the
seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labour of the negative” (Hegel,
1977, 10).1 More specifically, love challenges common understanding and thus
pushes the subject to ascend to speculative reason. For Hegel, the paradox of
love consists of the fact that in love “I do not wish to be a self-​subsistent and
independent person and that, if I were, then I would feel defective and incom-
plete” (Hegel, 2008a, 162). Love thus severs the subject from humankind’s most
fundamental conceit, that of autonomy or, cast psychoanalytically, narcissism
(what Lacan (2006, 153) recognized as “the passion of the soul par excellence”).
For Hegel, “Love is at once the producing and the resolving of this contradic-
tion” (Hegel; 2008a, 162) and as such it pushes us to go beyond the doxa of the
understanding (and thus narcissistic self-​conceit) and take on the challenge of
speculative thought. Following Hegel’s idea that love provides the structure of
the logical concept, I will put forward various paradoxes of love and consider
the resulting contradictions ensuing from diremption.2
Love is the site of intense dialectical tensions insofar as it involves the para-
doxical identity-​ difference of a number of opposed terms. In Anxiety,
in-​
Lacan makes the surprising claim that in love man does not have the phallus
and woman is not the phallus. It is as though love requires that each partner
flounder on the path of ordinary sexuation. Love is thus, firstly, the place of the
identity-​in-​difference of winning and losing. Woman must lose her femininity
(being the phallus) while man must lose his masculinity (having the phallus)
so that love may arise. Love’s triumph rests on the lovers’ defeat. The touching
beauty of Haneke’s Amour consists precisely of staging a love where old age
has robbed the woman of being the phallus and the man of having it. Here age
shows that love has endured the loss of phallic triumph. It is easy to love when
blinded by the splendor of youth. The true test comes when that has faded and
idealization no longer provides a support for passion. Also, it is important to
further note that the dichotomy by which man has and woman is the phallus
hinders the path to sublimation. One must here distinguish idealization from
 The paradoxes of love 37
sublimation.Where the former rests on a woman’s admiration of a man’s phallic
potency and, correlatively, on a man’s fixation to his partner’s beauty, the latter,
by contrast, rests precisely on the opposite, namely the realization regarding the
partner’s failure to meet that phallic standard. This realization is what sublim-
ation proper consists of. As Žižek puts it rather poetically, “if it’s true love, then
I don’t love the woman for her smile, eyes, legs, etc. –​I love her smile, eyes, etc.
because they are hers” (Žižek, 2015, 21). True sublimated love requires phallic
demise where blind idealization gives way to insight that chooses to remain silent
about the beloved’s flaws, not out of ignorance, but out of the modest humility
of love. Idealization rests on a diremption of the very paradoxical identity-​in-​
difference of the beautiful and the ugly. The ugly is beauty’s Other; without it
the latter dwindles to mere decorative finery. Nietzsche’s aesthetic genius expli-
citly posited the paradox by which beauty finds its origin in the experience of
ugliness: “What would be ‘beautiful’, if the contrary to it had not first come to
awareness of itself, if ugliness had not first said to itself: ‘I am ugly’?” (Nietzsche,
1998). Žižek gives voice to a similar idea with the following subchapter
title: The Birth of Beauty Out of the Abject. The psychoanalytic commonplace, by
which idealization is said to rest on splitting, can now be sharpened with the
idea that it is, more precisely, the splitting of beauty and ugliness that is at stake.
Can the beauty of woman, of the “fairer” sex, be separated from the abjection
of woman, that she stands as the bearer of the literal mark of castration? Is her
greater attunement to the arts of aesthetic refinement not dialectically bound
to the horror she hides?
Secondly, in love only a lack has the power to fulfil. In love, Lacan explains,
one is not asked to give one’s overabundance, one’s excess or one’s resources.
Under the demand of love, one is not even invited to give one’s joy but, simply,
what one does not have. Lacan (2001b) reminds us that, according to Plato,
it is only sorrow (Penia) that can give birth to love (Eros). Echoing an old
evangelical saying, Lacan (2001b) repeatedly states that the “rich man” cannot
access love. The whole comedy of love lies precisely in the fact that a lack
comes to play the role of excess. One can also find in this paradox the key
to understanding the tragedy of love. In love, Lacan explains, the lover seeks
a non-​existent object in the beloved. The disappointment of love, its tragic
dimension, emerges when the discrepancy between what is sought and what
the beloved has is revealed. Thirdly, there is no love that does not stand in dia-
lectical union with hate. Love without hate flounders into the contradiction of
passionless adoration:

the more a man can believe a woman confuses him with God, in other
words, what she enjoys, the less he hates, the less he is –​both spellings
are intended3 –​and since, after all, there is no love without hate, the less
he loves.
(Lacan, 1998, 89, emphasis mine)
38 The paradoxes of love
A love worthy of its name must not shy away from the aggressivity and hate that
constitutes the kernel of my jouissance. When Freud (1930) explicitly refuses to
love the neighbour, Lacan sees there a fleeing from aggressivity and hate, one’s
own as well as the Other’s:

We can found our case on the following, namely, that every time that
Freud stops short in horror at the consequences of the commandment to
love one’s neighbor, we see evoked the presence of that fundamental evil
which dwells within this neighbor. But if that is the case, then it also dwells
within me. And what is more of a neighbor to me than this heart within
which is that of my jouissance and which I don’t dare go near? For as soon
as I go near it, as Civilization and Its Discontents makes clear, there rises up
the unfathomable aggressivity from which I flee, that I turn against me, and
which in the very place of the vanished Law adds its weight to that which
prevents me from crossing a certain frontier at the limit of the Thing.
(Lacan, 1986)

To love the neighbour, for Lacan, means to embrace the kernel of hate-​
evil-​jouissance that inhabits my neighbour and myself. In loving the Woman-​
neighbour-​Thing, man must be willing to hate and explore the realms of
evil. Interestingly, Lacan (1998) recalls that Freud makes use of Empedocles’
idea that “God must be the most ignorant of all beings … insofar as he
does not know hate”. Freud was, perhaps more than any of his predecessors,
aware of the intricate tie linking love and hate, and yet, he fails to love the
neighbour out of a fear of aggressivity and hate. If, as Benvenuto argues,
“Eros is making the other the finality of my subjectivity” (Benvenuto, 2016,
154) we must also recall that the courage for aggressivity is crucial on this
path. With Lacan we may say that “as long as it’s a question of the good,
there’s no problem” (Lacan, 1986). The true test consists of accommodating
the neighbour’s evil as well as our own.
Fourthly, for Badiou (here following Lacan), love and jouissance are distinct
and opposed precisely insofar as the former inaugurates the Two as the min-
imal form of collective –​Badiou poetically claims that “love is communism”
(2003a) –​while the latter further fortifies the hegemony of the One. We may
here add, however, that Badiou’s definition of love misses another of its fun-
damental paradoxes, namely that love at once marks the decline of egotism4
and represents the height of narcissism (Lacan, 1988).5 As Radiguet (2004) put
it, “love is the egotism of two”. Is Genesis not a story of self-​diremptive love,
namely the colossal egotism of love that leads frail humanity to the conceited
defiance of God? Badiou’s diremption of this paradoxical identity-​in-​difference
pertaining to love may account for the somewhat idealistic views he holds in
this regard (cf. Éloge de l’amour). He cannot appreciate what psychotic lucidity
alone could unveil, namely the fact that love, despite its healing powers, is
undeniably also a fatal disease (for Lacan (1998), the greatest student of the
psychotic, love is also a form of suicide).6 We cannot allow idealistic and/​or
 The paradoxes of love 39
cynical simplifications to obfuscate the dialectical tension between Badiou’s
love as communism and its obverse love as egotism.
Consideration of the fifth paradox of love requires a brief foray into Badiou’s
reflections on love in general and, more specifically, his thesis according to
which true love, understood as “the immanence of the Two”, is atheism (Badiou,
2003a). In What is Love?, Badiou (2000) attempts to distinguish veritable love
from four “simulacra” of love: fusional, oblative, purely sexual and Platonic/​
asexual love.These are experiences that may be mistaken for love but which fall
short of the Event of love because they do not attest to the sexual disjunction:

1. In fusional love, the disjunction is foreclosed in the name of the One. The
two lovers constitute a unity and difference is entirely obliterated. Here the
real of the disjunction is obliterated through a striving for unity which may
even culminate in death.
2. When love becomes a mere affect of tenderness towards the other, the
dimension of ambivalence and hence disjunction is veiled over.
3. A pure sexual encounter cannot attest to the disjunction as each partner
remains entirely at the level of masturbatory jouissance. For Badiou, sex
taken alone keeps two partners solipsistically isolated from each other.
Badiou, in Éloge de l’amour, explicitly states that desire separates the two
partners. Žižek often expresses the view that the sexual act is “masturba-
tion with a real partner” (Žižek quoted in Zupančič, 2000, 293). Here the
dimension of the disjunction is indeed experienced but then arrogantly
and selfishly disregarded.
4. Platonic love outright refuses to experience the disjunction through sexual
abstinence.

The sexual disjunction is the psychoanalytic name of the biblical fall. The
derivative modes of love represent yearning for prelapsarian bliss, namely the
desire to obliterate, veil, disregard or simply refuse the truth of the sexual disjunc-
tion. This temptation must be resisted. True love is atheistic resignation where
the fantasy of paradise beyond disjunction is abandoned.To Badiou’s reflections,
I would simply add that love is, indeed, atheism but it is also deepest piety and
faith. The fusional, oblative, erotic and Platonic conceptions mark as much of
a straying from true atheism as they do from veritable faith. True faith, as true
atheism, can only be achieved after the fall. One must have faith in the name-​
of-​the-​father in order to reach the atheism of sexual disjunction.
In Encore, Lacan argues that recognition of the impossibility of the sexual
rapport opens the path of wisdom. Could we then say that to love is to give
up the fantasy of finding the person that is “right for us”? The following anec-
dote illustrates this idea. It is said that a married couple asked Socrates whether
their son should wed a particular woman.7 Socrates immediately replied “He
should marry at once”. Puzzled, they asked how he came to such a rash decision
without reflection. “There are two possible outcomes”, he replied. “Either she
will be right for him or she will not. If she is, there is nothing else to be said. If
40 The paradoxes of love
she is not, one also need not worry as he will then become a philosopher”. To
this anecdote, I add the following sequel which will deepen the idea of love as a
paradoxical expression of identity-​in-​difference. Let us imagine the concerned
parents respond thus:

We entirely understand what you are saying but the problem here is a
bit more complicated, as our son is certain of one thing alone, namely
that he wants to become a philosopher. As a result, the most dreaded out-
come would be, in fact, that she is right for him as that would put all his
ambitions to peril.

Should we not all likewise seek in our beloved someone who will help fulfil
our philosophical vocation, someone not “right for us”?
Finally, another paradox of love revealed by psychoanalysis is the incon-
gruity between love and the feeling of love. Lacan (1977) defines the psycho-
analytic process as a movement from i(a) to a, namely from the specular image
to the object that slips from that image and therefore plays the part of cause of
desire. Psychoanalytic treatment moves from the narcissistic field to that which
disturbs it; it transitions from i(a) or the field of love to a, that of desire. In
Encore, however, Lacan defines the analyst discourse as love. On the one hand,
we have a narcissistic love based on the libidinal investment of the specular
image and, on the other hand, we have the psychoanalytic process, namely what
was formerly defined as the patient libidinal dis-​investment of the image. Insofar
as psychoanalysis is equated with the latter form of love, it is safe to surmise
that it is deemed the wiser love, commensurate with the slow ascension of the
concept. It is certainly the more speculative love, insofar as it must endure the
paradox of giving up the feeling of love pertaining to the narcissistic domain.
Psychoanalysis begins with love (transference to the supposed subject of know-
ledge) and ends with the deeper more paradoxical love, namely dis-​investment
from the first love. To borrow again from Hegel, the first is mere “disporting
Love” while the latter testifies to the “labour of the negative” (Hegel, 1977,
10). The love that pertains to the narcissistic field is the love of the other who
matches my ideal; it is the index of a happy correspondence between my fan-
tasy and the other’s appearance. This love, simple and there from the start, must
be relinquished through the slow and arduous work of abandoning the narcis-
sistic field (the feeling of love) and taking the challenge of a paradoxical love.
Philosophical love is the transition from the specular to the speculative.
The wisdom required by love is that of speculative reason insofar as love is
the intense expression of the identity-​in-​difference of 1) triumph and defeat,
2) plenitude and lack, 3) love and hate, 4) communism and egotism, 5) piety
and atheism, 6) the person not “right” for us and the one who will raise us
to the heights of philosophy (the concept) and, finally, 7) true love is at odds
with the feeling of love.8 Love is lost when it is deprived of its dialectical unity
with its contraries. The “lower” profane terms take ghastly vengeance when
dirempted by the snobbery of the “higher” term’s conceit. This leads to sick
 The paradoxes of love 41
love manifesting in the one-​sided triumph of despondent defeat, abysmal lack,
appaling hate, dreadful egotism, sinful impiety and discordant incompatibility.
Insofar as the concept emerges from the experience of the dialectical tensions
of love, the loss of love entails a concomitant loss of the concept –​something
widely attested to in the endemic anti-​philosophical tenor of our times. One
may argue that the rise of generally anti-​Hegelian postmodern philosophies
attests, if you will allow me the malice, to new modes of thought without the con-
cept, an undertaking as tepid as it is decaffeinated.
A shortcoming of Badiou’s thought lies in repeatedly missing the import-
ance of this profane element. His excessive fidelity to fidelity castrates his thought
from appreciating the paradoxical intertwinement of betrayal and fidelity. This
is an ever more acute problem when dealing with the specific question of love
which, as we know from the many paradoxes it entails, is far from a simple
matter of fidelity. Badiou (2009) is, in this regard, too quick to dismiss Proust’s
insistence on the link between love and jealousy.With Proust (and Freud insofar
as he placed Oedipal triangulation at the heart of human passion), we must
insist on the centrality of jealousy and betrayal in love. Badiou misses the crucial
point that the emphasis on fidelity in love (a specifically feminine demand) is
there precisely to counter the inherent threat of betrayal, infidelity and jealousy.
If perfidious deceit and suspicious distrust did not constitutively plague love from
within, why would vows of fidelity play a central role between lovers? One
cannot but notice the very feminine traits of Badiou’s thought. This is not, of
course, a reproach in itself but only in that its one-​sidedness hinders Badiou’s
philosophy of love from accounting for emergences of masculine profanation
as sexual infidelity. Insofar as the masculine is prone to attacks of profanity, man
is subject to attacks of betrayal (temptation). Femininity, standing for the con-
stitutively profane, is inherently betraying and is therefore immune to attacks
in the form of exception. Lacan (2006) even argues that the feminine demand
for fidelity is tied to a projection of her own constitutive infidelity to the
male partner. Just as fidelity that dirempts betrayal becomes zealotry, love that
is not also betrayal is tantamount to idolatry, namely pure sacralization that has
dirempted profanation.To love requires, at the very least, the betrayal of the first
incestuous other. The subject incapable of this profanation-​betrayal is doomed
to impotent love. The impasses of male and female homosexuality lie precisely
in that in one case we have an excess of profanation in the form of attacks of
betrayal while, in the other, we have a quasi-​paranoid demand for fidelity faced
with the excessiveness of constitutive infidelity.9

Notes
1 Freud (1915a) also put forward a theoretical apparatus based on a consideration of
love and its contraries. He distinguished three polarities of the mind (economic, bio-
logical and real) built upon the principal contraries of love, namely to be loved, indif-
ference and to hate.
42 The paradoxes of love
2 This, I hope, will provide further insight regarding the structure of the concept,
something that will be indispensable at the end of the treatise when I consider the
notion of the human.
3 The original French plays on the homonymy of “il hait” (he hates) and “il est” (he is).
4 Freud (1911) quotes the Persian mystic poet Rumi: “when the flames of love arise,
the self that ruthless tyrant dies”.
5 Hegel also disregards this aspect in his account of the paradox of love.
6 As Lafontaine said it: “Love, Love when thou holdest us/​One can well say: ‘Farewell
prudence’”. www.aesopfables.com/​cgi/​aesop1.cgi?jdlf&iv1jd&iv2l.jpg. Though
there is much to be praised in love there is much to be warned against too (Romeo
and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde etc.).
7 This is evidently an untrue story for which I cannot even find a source.That said, the
anecdote is informative for our purposes.
8 Lacan and Badiou opted for a logic of love: “It is thus necessary to keep the pathos
of passion, error, jealousy, sex, and death at a distance. No theme requires more pure
logic than love” (Badiou, 2000, 266).
9 On the impasses of homosexuality see Morel (2000) and Soler (2000).
Variation 7 
The paradox of identity

In the spirit of Freud’s discovery of the psychopathology of everyday life, the

Lacanian subject emerges only in shadowy glimpses and ephemeral moments
such as slips of the tongue, dreams, jokes and so on. As soon as one has taken the
slightest glimpse of the subject it vanishes. When Lacan claims that “a signifier
is that which represents the subject for another signifier” he means that there is
no signifier that discloses the subject entirely; no slip of the tongue will com-
pletely unveil the unconscious. All signifiers point to other signifiers –​the sub-
ject emerging transiently between two signifiers. It is likewise with the object
which, insofar as it is “negativised” from the imaginary (i.e. “reality”), may be
glimpsed only in fleeting moments. The psychoses provide, once again, a chal-
lenging exception to this rule concerning the ephemeral nature of subjectivity
and, concomitantly, the transience of the object. Clinically, the former is most
vividly attested to in the hardened identifications of the psychotic where the
subject is reduced to the level of mere meaning: “when the subject appears
somewhere as meaning, he is manifested elsewhere as ‘fading’, as disappearance”
(Lacan, 1977, 218). With respect to the object, it has failed to be constituted for
lack of separation. Scotomized pregnancies and the phenomenology of hoarding
testify to this phenomenon. We thus find ourselves facing two homologous
paradoxes at the level of the subject and the object. Firstly, we see that there is a
subject only insofar as it disappears; a diehard clinging to identification only leads
to aphanisis, the disappearance of the subject. The caricature of an army private
zealously attached to his duties most comically attests to this fading. Guyomard
(1992, 19) gives very eloquent expression to this paradox when he argues that
the less we have identifications the more we have an identity (in a truer sense of
the word). One must, however, avoid the misleading dichotomy of “true” and
“false” selves as that too would be diremptive. To further complicate matters
(in our dialectical paradigm complications are always welcome), Lacan (2006)
argues that “the I and the ego separate and overlap in every particular subject”.
In other words, what blocks the subject is also what is the subject. The true
and false selves are not merely opposed and, as a result, the army private’s false
pretences will inevitably give way to instances of subjectivity even in the very
effort to hide these. Secondly, we see that the object emerges only on the background
of its loss without which it is reduced to the inert stasis of a heap of junk.
44 The paradox of identity
In Archive Fever, Derrida argues that mourning is already desire. To lose the
object is already to find it again and, conversely, to find it already implicates
the subject in loss. This identity-​ in-​
difference remains massively hidden
from the perspective of melancholic diremptivity. In “Melancholia and the
Unabandoned Object” Russell Grigg puts forward a compelling critique of
Freud’s idea linking melancholia to loss. Against Freud, Grigg (2015) argues
that “the melancholic response arises because of the proximity of the object
through its failure to have become lost”. By contrast, I hold that little is gained
by simply swinging away from Freud. Melancholia is neither simply the out-
come of an unconscious loss (Freud) nor is it tantamount to the object “not
being lost”. It is crucial to posit the concomitance of the object and its loss and
maintain that melancholia emerges precisely where this is dirempted. More
precisely, diremption may take two forms depending on which moment of the
identity-​in-​difference is occluded. Where loss is emphasized to the detriment
of the object, we have melancholia. Where the object’s presence is noted at
the expense of loss, the subject falls prey to mania. Ultimately, the direction of
diremption hardly matters as melancholia and mania form an anxious dialectical
unity in the manic-​depressive psychoses, where we testify to the contradiction
of depressions that are themselves manic. We no longer have a mere alternation
between polarized states but a ghastly fusion of a subject at once manic and
depressed. As one suffering subject put it, “My depressions were tornadolike –​
fast-​paced episodes that brought me into dark rages of terror” (Leader, 2012).
The dialectical shifts between mania and melancholia represent two moments
of a concept disparaged through the ideological work of illness. The subject, incap-
able of seizing the contrary moments in speculative unity, experiences discord
between massively contrasting affective states. The separation of moments can
also occur through the ideological distortion of space where two insufficiently
differentiated subjects each stand for one of the moments in its “purity” (e.g.
a perennially elated man married to a woman suffering from unipolar depres-
sion –​a model instance of woman as symptom of man). Here the kinship between
Hegel and Klein becomes apparent. Where the depressive position hinges on
the ability to sustain the speculative unity of contraries, the paranoid schizoid
position results from diremption dividing and intensifying the two logical
moments. Mania’s frantic denial of depression leads to the triumph of the latter
“lower” term. Depression is the truth (subjectivization) of mania, as much as the
aforementioned woman is symptom of her frenzied man.
Here the proud jubilation of identification (cf. The Mirror Stage) is hardly dis-
tinguishable from the defeated despondency of destitution. The mirror stage –​
the process by which identity is formed –​protects the infant from these mad
alternations or, what is equally distressing, the rigid fixation to either extreme.
The infant acquires a self-​image through the experience of recognizing him/​
herself in the mirror and thereby gains respite from inner bodily incoordin-
ation. For Lacan, the infant’s initial inner self-​experience is marked by motor
insufficiency. Identification with his/​her body image allows for the illusion
of bodily unity, which has real effects insofar as it allows the child to gain
 The paradox of identity 45
increased motor agility. In a nutshell, the mirror stage brings about a divorce
from the body proper for the sake of an engagement with the body’s image.
The result is an extraction of jouissance insofar as the body, in its palpitations
and tremors, is partially forsaken for the sake of a fascination with the self-​
image. This is how the structure of neurosis is established, a structure where the
image of the self reigns supreme. The neurotic becomes henceforth engrossed
in how he/​she is seen by others and him/​herself. The psychotic, by contrast, is
without body image and will therefore not benefit from the ego’s capacity to
limit jouissance. It is no wonder then that it took Nietzsche whom, quipping
Žižek (1999), we may christen the “psychotic philosopher if there ever was
one”) to wake Western philosophy from the slumber of its ascetic denial of
sensuality –​a denial which is, paradoxically, itself imbued in sensualist jouis-
sance. Psychotic grandiosity has nothing to do with excess narcissism but is,
rather, consequent upon the lack of a consistent ego. Freud often referred to the
psychoses as the “narcissistic neuroses” with the idea that such subjects are so
deeply engrossed in “primary narcissism” that transference to an analyst would
take place only very problematically. This idea fails to appreciate the extent to
which the psychotic lacks any properly sustained image of self, something we
see most explicitly in the phenomenology of the schizophrenias. According to
Lacanian theory, the psychotic, far from exhibiting an overly infatuated self-​
rapport, is so engrossed in the Other that his/​her “self ” has hardly formed. In
the face of an absence of cathexis of the body image, psychotic jouissance risks
exploding beyond measure.This is the source of the grandiosity; excessive jouis-
sance rather than self-​infatuation. The lack of an ego in the psychoses results at
times in an acute preoccupation with the jouissance of body. This is most expli-
citly attested to in schizophrenic “organ speech” (Freud, 1915b) as well as the
various forms of psychotic hypochondria, not to mention the experiences of
bodily fragmentation consequent upon depersonalization. The transition from
object of jouissance to object of desire may be understood in light of the mirror
stage. The formation of a self-​image requires the gradual “phallicization” of the
child’s body, namely the process by which different parts of the body enter into
the metonymy of the mother’s desire (“he has his father’s eyes” and so on). This
process drains the body of jouissance leaving behind only localized remainders
in the form of partial objects and erogenous zones.
This movement from the inner sensation of the jouissance of the body to
a fixation to the externally imposed image of the body has an earlier philo-
sophical correlate in the thought of Schopenhauer (1966), who distinguished
between the experience of the world as “Will” and as “representation”. The
former involves the experience of the world through the feeling of one’s vis-
ceral inner sense, while the latter involves an experience of the world mediated
by what one sees rather than feels. We could say that the mirror stage marks the
transition from an experience of self as “Will” or jouissance to an experience
of self as “representation” or ego. The Nietzschean (1999) re-​appropriation of
Schopenhauer’s distinction, under the rubrics of the Dionysiac and the Apolline,
also evokes a duality between the body as jouissance and the body as image.
46 The paradox of identity
The mirror stage involves the following identity-​in-​difference: one can have a
“healthy” relation with the body (i.e. some minimal mastery) only if one is alienated
from that body. The Apolline will rise in beauty only at the cost of relinquishing
Dionysiac ecstasy. Arguably, the psychotic and pervert’s deeper awareness of
jouissance is the effect of the diremption of the mirror stage’s paradox. Psychosis
and perversion thus attest to the contradiction of an over-​investment in the
body (rather than its image) accompanied by radical anomalies in the subject’s
relation to the body.
We may here distinguish between a diremptive and a non-​diremptive mirror
stage, where the former would be incomplete, insofar as identification with
the specular other is not followed by an equally important process of dis-​
identification.1 Such a mirror stage is reducible to master discourse (“le discours
du maître”) centred on a delusional sense of self-​mastery founded upon the ego’s
fallacious sense of having substantive being (“le discours du m’être”) (Encore). We
are here at the level of jubilation where the subject is veritably enthralled by the
image. Feelings of extreme despondency may follow every time the fixity of the
identification is challenged by the vicissitudes of life. Such diremptive forms of
mirroring mark the contemporary cult of the “selfie”. Here the subject’s jubilant
cry is sometimes tragically followed by death, thereby staging the ironic contra-
diction by which solipsistic self-​mastery overlaps with the most literal staging
of subjective destitution. The paranoid subject too testifies to this diremptive
mirror stage; the pathos of narcissistic suicidal aggression manifests as the contradic-
tion of suicidal homicide or, where the will to preserve the Other persists, as homi-
cidal suicide. All the depersonalizations of the schizophrenic also belong here, as
identification without dis-​identification is as fragile as the proverbial unbending
tree. Shame is not operative in the diremptive mirror stage. This leads to the
painful contradiction of shameless humiliation so beautifully captured by Julien
Green: “God, unable to make us humble, made us humiliated” (quoted in
Goddard, 2014). The obsessional neurotic’s total disdain for his/​her body is also
a result of this diremption at the level of identification. He/​she is so wedded and
infatuated with his/​her image that the body proper is entirely forgotten (e.g.
Narcissus, so deeply enamored with his image, did not notice he was drowning).
A non-​diremptive mirror stage, by contrast, includes identification and dis-​
identification alike. What is at stake is an image of the self that includes lack.
We have here the non-​specularizable object that is, paradoxically, crucial for
specularity. Without the object a which slips out of the image we do not have
a self-​image at all. Moreover, the identity-​in-​difference of shame and dignity is
here operative. The humble subject of the non-​diremptive mirror stage enjoys
solemn self-​respect. Shame is speculative. We may here delight, as Hegel surely
would, at the speculative coincidence of the meaning of the words shameful and
shameless; despite contrary suffixes they mean the same thing.
The distinction here put forward between a diremptive and non-​diremptive
mirror stage can aid us in giving added theoretical precision to André Green’s
(2007) differentiation between “life narcissism” and “death narcissism”. Where
the latter would involve diremptive identity formations, the former would be
 The paradox of identity 47
more attuned to the paradoxes of identity. However, to maintain the rigour of
our Hegelian reading we must immediately add that the diremptive mirror
stage is but a “moment” of its non-​diremptive counterpart. For Hegel “being
evil means singularizing myself in a way that cuts me off from the universal
(which is the rational, the laws, the determinations of spirit)” (Bernstein, 2002,
62). However, Bernstein also adds that this is a necessary stage in the devel-
opment of the I (ibid, 63). The jubilatory moment of the mirror stage is the
diremptive “evil” moment where I cut myself off from the Other in triumphant
exaltation. If we bear in mind that, for Hegel, evil is the source of all problems
but also the place where reconciliation finds its source (ibid: 63), then we may
suggest that the non-​diremptive mirror stage is a sublation of the diremptive
mirror stage. Self-​diremption, Bernstein notes, brings about evil but it is also the
condition for the sublation of evil (ibid: 63). Likewise, jubilation brings with
it strife and conflict, but without it the conditions for reconciliation and love
would also be lost.
For Hegel, the subject is “what maintains itself in being-​other-​than-​itself ”
(Hegel quoted in Althusser, 2006).To be “I” one must be “not-​I”.2 This paradox
is, indeed, what radically separates Lacan’s mirror stage (heir to Hegel) from
Winnicott’s (1971)3 “mirroring” or Fonagy and Target’s “mentalization”. The
latter miss the fact that what guarantees the minimal consistency of identifica-
tion is precisely the very thing that contests it. This is the object a, that which
gives the image its consistency precisely by resisting inclusion in the image
and thereby contesting that consistency. The ego holds together only on the
basis of an extraction.4 Traditional ontology posits a substantial subject that has
full being, while postmodernism denies the notion of the subject altogether
(e.g. Foucault’s “the death of man”). By contrast to these two insufficient
alternatives, Lacanian psychoanalysis posits (with Hegel) the paradox of a sub-
ject who acquires a substantive “essence” precisely from his/​her lack of sub-
stantiality. Many non-​Lacanian schools of psychoanalysis attest to a regression
to traditional ontology. This is evidenced by the prevalence of notions (pure
thoughts, I should say) such as “character” (Reich) and a continued adherence
to biologistic conceptions of the human libido. The aforementioned theory
of mentalization as a means of acquiring a robust identity also adheres to this
mirage of traditional ontology. Thus, beyond the mirror stage’s dramatization
of a certain paradox at the level of the imaginary (“I” = “not-​I”), we now
attest to the expression of a paradox at the level of the real or the object a. The
object’s obstinacy –​forever slipping out of our grasp –​denies the completion
of our self-​image and through this denial, paradoxically, gives the image its
consistency. The subject maintains itself precisely by perpetually losing a part of
itself; to be “I” one must be “I minus a”. The drive thus becomes a death drive,
insofar as it emerges primordially as the fool’s despairing attempt to remedy
this paradox through vain aggressive attempts to desperately secure a hold on
the ever-​fleeting object.The logic according to which I must lose something of
me in order to be me is the source of aggression in the mirror stage where this
structural necessity is blamed on the specular other, accused of robbing me of
48 The paradox of identity
my identity in the very gesture by which it grants me this identity. The mirror
stage dramatizes this paradox, thereby confusing a structural necessity with the
contingency of an imaginary other’s presumed will. When André Green asserts
that the death drive is narcissism (2007), he may be drawing inspiration from
Lacan’s theory of the imaginary, according to which the subject wants to des-
troy the source from where he/​she acquires a self-​image. The specular relation
thus accounts for aggressivity and the death drive is indeed tied to narcissism.

Notes
1 Moncayo (2014) also asserts that identity functions according to the law of
contradiction.
2 As Lebrun puts it, “Spirit harbours within itself its own opposite” (1972, 57, my
translation).
3 Winnicott erroneously found in Lacan’s mirror stage a predecessor to his mirroring. As
Bowie (1991) aptly argued,Winnicott’s Lacan is “Lacan without Lacan” insofar as the
reference to alienation is missing.
4 This conception takes us very far from self-​psychological models, seeking to make
good “deficits” of self-​image prevalent in “disorders of the self ”.
Variation 8 
Subject and collective

When Lacan claims that “the collective is nothing other than the subject of
the individual”, we must sharply differentiate collective, subject and individual.
For Lacan, psychoanalysis is not a science of man/​individual insofar as “there
cannot be a science of man since science’s man does not exist, only its subject
does” (Lacan 2006, 730).1 The “subject of the individual” is the gap (subject)
in the ego’s (individual) imaginary edifice signalling a point of impossibility in
the subject’s self-​representation. As Žižek puts it most eloquently: “the subject
is nothing other than the impossibility of its own signifying representation”
(1989). The subject emerges precisely where the Other’s signifiers fail the ego
in its self-​representation. Only against the background of the lack in the Other
is subjectivity possible. When Lacan thus claims that the subject is “the col-
lective” or, in similar vein, that the “unconscious is the social”, we are left all the
more puzzled insofar as the subject is here equated with the social Other. This
is, seemingly, a blatant contradiction of the idea that the subject of the uncon-
scious is a gap in the Other. This paradox re-​inscribes itself in the following
paradox as well. On the one hand, Žižek shows, we have the universality of lan-
guage and social otherness that inhibits the subject from realizing itself:

does not Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit tell us again and again the same
story of the repeated failure of the subject’s endeavor to realize his project
in social Substance, to impose his vision on the social universe –​the story
of how the “big Other”, the social substance, again and again thwarts his
project and turns it upside-​down?.
(Žižek, 1999, 76)

On the other hand, however, the subject will only arise out of the ponderous
edifice of language and social substance if, and only if, he/​she agrees to partake
in the collective social bond. The solution here is to recognize the paradox by
which one may reduce the suffocating weight of the Other (thwarting the subject’s pro-
ject) by getting close to it (making it extimate) and joining the social substance (accepting
thrownness, to put it in Heideggerian terms –​see variation 17). In other words, the
Other ceases to be “substance” as the “individual” approaches it less frightfully.
At that “magical” point of encounter between subject and Other (a point of
50 Subject and collective
extimacy one may christen as “cure”) “substance” becomes “collective” and
“individual” becomes “subject”. Subject and collective are thus two synonymous
words for the point of intersection at which individual and Other meet; this
point of intersection is a point at which both are lacking. In Hegelian terms,
where individual and substance are pure thoughts, subject and collective are, by
contrast, notions. Once the transition to the notion takes place, the big Other
ceases to be a massive obstacle to the subject’s self-​realization (turning his/​
her plans “upside down”). The vicious dialectical reversals thwarting the sub-
ject give way to milder and more reasonable fluctuations. As with revolution’s
turn into the terror, these failures of the subject are not (contra Žižek) necessary
dialectical outcomes; they are, rather, the result of diremption. Though failure
does indeed provide “the form of success”, failure may be held in speculative
identity with success as its Other such that the two need not split as massively
separate temporal/​historical moments of a dialectical shift. Indeed, the subject
who maintains his/​her success in speculative identity with failure (common
morality christens him/​her as modest) is less likely to succumb to devastating
miscarriages.
Psychoanalysis’ starting point is the collective, namely the space where sub-
jectivity emerges. Herein lies the importance of projects aiming the treatment of
the psychoses within institutional spaces. Guy Dana (2010) argues that the aim
of the clinical work within institutional spaces is to create a plurality of locations
in such a way that the question of the subject awakens through the tension
created by the whole. Groups are created where patients can speak to each other
and where partial identifications are made.This creates the possibility for social-
ization and allows the subject to loosen the hold of previous identifications now
rendered unnecessary. In neurosis, the subject emerges between signifiers. In
psychosis, the plurality of institutional places replaces the plurality of signifiers.
It is thus hoped that the subject may appear in the interstitial zone between
these spaces.With only one institution (the hospital), Dana argues, the collective
is lost and so is subjectivity; paraphrasing Lacan, we may quip that the sub-
ject of psychosis fades behind the ponderous presence of the hospital-​signifier.
Within a pluralistic arrangement, substance is more likely to transform into col-
lective insofar as the interval between spaces may institute a lack in the Other.
Paradoxically, it is by relinquishing itself as universal (i.e. abolishing the univer-
sality of the hospital) that the institution truly universalizes itself as a collective.
The hope is that a similar logic would occur at the level of the subject such
that the psychotic would slowly rework and partially abandon a terrifyingly
specular imaginary built around the (false) universality of the primal mother/​
father in order to then achieve the (true) universality of a subject recognized
by the collective (rather than recognized only by a primal mother/​father as the
latter’s object of jouissance). The introduction of space and lack (or “interval”,
as Dana tellingly names it) allows for “the dialectic” by which the individual
may “universalize [his/​her] particularity” (Lacan, 2006, 148) and thereby gain
recognition by a collective that has also universalized itself by relinquishing its
hegemony. The foreboding space of the hospital is a place where precisely this
 Subject and collective 51
dialectic of universality and particularity is dirempted, leading to the ominous
contradiction of subjects (patients) entirely cut-​off from social otherness and
yet entirely drowned in the discourse of the Other (psychiatry) with its weighty
signifiers in the guise of the unequivocal “pseudo-​scientific” language of the
DSM from which little respite can be envisioned. The distinction between a
hospital and a pluralistic clinical institution may now be given more precise
theoretical acuity with the formulation according to which the former is a pure
thought while the latter is a notion.The subversive and curative potential of the
clinical institution lies precisely in the fact that it functions as notion and hence
symptom for the subjects. The pluralistic nature of the institution prevents any
one sector from assuming the aura of a pure thought or master signifier. The
fact of constituting one link in a chain prevents any link from asserting itself as
pure thought. Laudable projects such as Dana’s embody the great communist
ideal as it is sung in the International: “We are nothing, let us be all”. The psy-
choanalytic institution is indeed a collective of “nothings” (subject’s reduced to
bare life through the vicissitudes of fate) seeking to create together a veritable
“all”, namely a universal that is free of the hegemony of the One. The great
medieval Persian poet Attar’s The Conference of Birds tells the tale of thirty birds
(si morgh) flying together in pursuit of a God/​leader (simorgh).2 At the end of
their journey they realize that God is nothing other than the collective they
have created. A perfect tale, indeed, of nothings becoming all!
The diremption of the subject-​collective dialectical unity goes hand in hand
with the failure of intimacy. According to Dana (2010), the psychotic is not
capable of constructing the Other as intimate. His/​her Other is either intrusive,
totally untouchable or both. Schreber’s God provides a paradigmatic example
insofar as He is, at once, massively invasive and curiously ignorant of human
affairs. Both extremes testify to a failure of intimacy that we may tie, more gen-
erally, to the failure of accomplishing neighbourly love.3 Love, for the psychotic,
entails a cosmic catastrophe –​hence all the efforts to deflect it through the
grammar of paranoia (Freud, 1911). To slightly sharpen Dana’s claim, it is per-
haps more accurate to say that it is the domain of extimacy that has not been
duly constituted. The psychotic cannot constitute the object since the latter is,
by definition, extimate; it is both external and intimate –​it touches the subject
at his/​her most intimate core while, nonetheless, retaining a radical exteriority.
The clinical picture testifies to great difficulty in separating from the object; as
Lacan (1969) famously quipped,“the psychotic carries the object in his pocket”.
The object is, so to speak, grafted onto the body. The most striking example is
that of a scotomized pregnancy where the object (baby) is reduced to an exten-
sion of the self, such that the mother does not even recognize it. Alternatively,
we have the mother who knows she is pregnant but speaks, without irony or
metaphor, of the baby as “the monster”. In one case, the baby is in no way
made external while in the other case it is so utterly and literally foreign that
no intimacy is achieved at all. To be theoretically accurate we should say that in
both cases the object-​baby has become neither external nor intimate. Extimacy
has not occurred insofar as its achievement involves recognizing the paradox of
52 Subject and collective
an object made intimate precisely through becoming external. For the psychotic, the
baby is either a foreign intruder or a mere extension of the mother, seamlessly
sewn onto her body without a trace of separation. To experience the object as
extimate is a veritable achievement akin to acknowledging the unconscious,
the intimate-​external Thing par excellence. As the by-​product of the discourse
of the Other, the unconscious is, indeed, a foreign entity and yet also what is
most internal.
Grave problems ensue precisely when the subject chooses the path of volun-
tarism rather than that of the sacrificial emptying into the Other.We may argue
that the diremption of the identity-​in-​difference of kenosis and self-​realization
leads to the severe impasse of the “beautiful soul”4 with its ungodly contra-
diction, so elegantly expressed by Jameson, of a “desperate dialectical unity” of
“philanthropy and paranoia” (Jameson, 2010). One may here add that philan-
thropy and paranoia are in-​themselves sites of contradiction as both represent
the height of narcissistic conceit manifesting as excessive preoccupation (nega-
tive or positive) with the external world. This is arguably the reason for Lacan’s
suspicion of philanthropy expressed with vigour as early as in The Mirror
Stage: “we place no trust in altruistic feeling, we who lay bare the aggressivity
that underlies the activity of the philanthropist, the idealist, the pedagogue,
and even the reformer”. Here we also stumble on a central shortcoming of
Foucault’s thought. The ethics of the so-​called care of the self does not appre-
ciate the fact that the path to self-​realization must go through the channel of
kenosis-​evacuation. This misrecognition inherent to Foucault’s ethics may be
the reason why Žižek (1999) baptizes him as “the pervert philosopher if there
ever was one”. Foucault’s diremption of the paradoxical self-​realization through
kenosis leads to the contradiction of narcissistic perdition where a subject’s narcis-
sistic practise (dieting, asceticism and so on) furthers alienation.
Hegel believes that fear emerges insofar as the subject flees kenosis (Hegel,
1970, 189). We could say that Lacan’s “Other” or Hegel’s “World Spirit” is a
symptom of the subject.5 When Jameson (2010) claims that “Spirit is the col-
lective”, we may add that spirit is the collective insofar as the latter is the
symptom that the subject must identify with lest he/​she fall in the tumultuous
vicissitudes of diremption and the consequent triumph of the “lower” term.
Lebrun thus notes that for Hegel, “all suffering is the price that the particular
pays for obstinately maintaining its difference” (Lebrun, 1972, 48, my transla-
tion). The refusal of kenosis is tantamount to rejecting this symptom and may
lead, in the worst instance, to paranoia (a return of world spirit –​the “lower”
term from the standpoint of the pretence to autonomy –​in the guise of a perse-
cutor). In Freudian terms, we could say that the refusal of kenosis disparages the
homosexual social bond to the disparaged modality of “the grammar of para-
noia” (Freud, 1911). The refusal of kenosis is tantamount to a subjectivist self-​
assertion that paradoxically leads to de-​subjectification. Adorno (2009) comes
to a similar idea when he argues that the “more reification there is, all the
more subjectivism will there be”.The refusal of kenosis represents a heightened
stubborn assertion of self which leads to a reified (non)-​subjectivity. Rather
 Subject and collective 53
than sacrifice in the form of kenosis we have real sacrifice such as terrorism and
the self-​sacrifice for capital.
For Hegel, the refusal of kenosis brings about the anxiety of total loss and
is, moreover, the condition for the subject’s relinquishing of responsibility (the
plight of the beautiful soul). Žižek explains that we experience our destiny as
an external fate despite the fact that we are creating it every day (Žižek, 2012a,
984). We see as the working of the Other what is in fact our own doing. As
Dupuy puts it,

destiny is here this exteriority which is not exterior, since the agents them-
selves project it out of their system: this is why it is appropriate to talk
about auto-​externalization or auto-​transcendence.
(quoted in ibid, 984)

For Hegel (1970, 189), kenosis is equivalent to the abolition of dualism. By

emptying itself into the Other, the subject-​Other dichotomy is dissolved, para-
doxically making possible a modicum of self-​assertion. Through kenosis and
the positing of the identity-​in-​difference of the subject and Other, the subject
re-​appropriates what was projected outwards and “destiny” is, at least partially,
transformed into agency. A kind of madness ensues as the subject dirempts the
dialectical unity of subject and Other. Paranoia involves the impossibility of re-​
appropriating what has been auto-​externalized such that the Other becomes a
mere mirror reflecting the subject’s own partial drives. Thus, Žižek’s claim that
those who cannot relate to the presupposition of “a spectral or virtual substance”
(i.e. the “big Other”, an “objective order” emerging “out of the interaction
of individuals” and “experienced by the individuals involved as a substantial
agency which determines their lives” (Žižek, 2012a, 972)) are psychotics (ibid,
972) is not entirely accurate insofar as psychotics do relate to such an entity.
Indeed, the risk of a total and literal hypostatization of the Other is much more
likely in psychosis. The most accurate rendition of this problem, I claim, is to
argue that the psychotic’s absolute diremption of the identity-​in-​difference of
the subject and the Other leads to the contradiction of a subject at once entirely
related to the Other (Schreber is intimately, indeed anally, connected to God)
and also totally detached from the Other (this same Schreber reduced much
of humanity to the evanescence of “fleeting improvised men” and, as aforesaid,
his God was utterly ignorant of human affairs, and hence remarkably absent in
His asphyxiating presence). The aim of analysis is to reduce the weight of this
diremption.
The paradox of the Lacanian “big Other” is that it is an effect of the actions of
the individuals that make up a society and yet it is irreducible to those individuals
whose actions it, in turn, regulates. As Žižek notes, the Other “is experienced
by the individuals involved as a substantial agency which determines their lives”
(Žižek, 2012a, 972).The individual is faced with the speculative challenge –​and
this is the very basis of subjective responsibility –​of recognizing this “spectral
or virtual substance” (ibid, 972) as his/​her self-​reflection. The psychotic, and
54 Subject and collective
more generally the Hegelian beautiful soul, cannot grasp the paradox that the
Other is the result of his/​her own self-​reflection. As a result, he/​she is relegated
to the destiny of rectifying in the Other a moral flaw pertaining to him/​her-
self. Interestingly, we may redefine foreclosure (and perhaps also, though to
a different extent, the negations involved in repression and disavowal) as the
subject’s failure to fathom the self-​reflexive relation he/​she maintains with the
Other. The result of this failure is a re-​emergence of this Other (“in the real”
according to Lacan’s famous quip) as an externally perceived Other whose dia-
lectical relation to the subject remains entirely opaque. Laplanche’s reduction
of Lacan’s Other simply to that of “others” (as in “other people”) fails to grasp
the self-​reflective relation that subsists between the subject and the Other.6
Laplanche’s revision thus regresses to a salad ontology obfuscating the Hegelian
dialectical opposition crucial for understanding the elementary phenomena of
psychosis resulting from foreclosure.
The following example helps elucidate how the spectral Other comes to
be and gives an idea of the myriad ways a subject may relate to it. Imagine a
young man from a conservative family where homosexuality is still an abso-
lute taboo. It is conceivable that after some time all the members of the family
would know about it. A secret would thus emerge that would be paradoxically
known by all.The only “person” that would remain ignorant of it would be the
big Other. In other words, the continued effort to maintain the “secret” would
serve only the function of protecting this spectral non-​existent entity which,
though resulting only from the behaviour of the actors involved, is irreducible
to any one of them or even the sum of them all; the proof, of course, lies in
the fact that this very Other is now determining the agents’ behaviours. Thus,
Hegel advocates for “the substantiality of the ethical order” for which “individ-
uals are accidents” (Hegel, 2008a, 161). However, insofar as “Ethical life is not
abstract like the good, but is intensely actual” (ibid, 161) this order is not an
abstract universal placed from above on human subjects; it is rather the product
of the real interactions of the agents themselves. No one can escape from this
spectral entity, and if any modicum of autonomy is to be achieved the subject
must take cognizance of the fact that the Other is a product of his/​her self-​
reflection, i.e. that subject and Other stand in identity-​in-​difference. To return
to our example, the secret is kept for the sake of the Other (which is instituted
by nothing other than this effort to retain secrecy), and, more importantly, each
subject will relate in his/​her own way to this Other, or, more accurately, each
subject will constitute this Other in accordance to his/​her own subject position.
For instance, for the anxious man who stays in the closet, the Other is the stand-​
in for his own inhibition, while for the parents, fearing the loss of social dignity,
the Other is the reflection of their own shame. Both will have complaints (the
marker par excellence of the refusal to take responsibility) to the extent to which
they cannot appreciate their involvement in the creation of the Other. Where
the parents will say “our friends will laugh at us”, the son will say “I have no
freedom”. A modicum of freedom will be achieved only when all recognize
and perhaps alter their involvement in the situation that they bemoan. The
 Subject and collective 55
degree of madness and paranoia a person will experience is a measure of the
denial of his/​her role in the constitution of the Other. A subject who absolutely
forecloses any involvement in the emergence of the Other will feel persecuted
by this Other as by a totally foreign entity that cannot be re-​appropriated.
The spectral Other is thus ineradicable. Hegel makes this point lucidly evi-
dent in the following notable passage:

The educational experiments, advocated by Rousseau in Émile, of

withdrawing people from the common life of every day and bringing them
up in the country, have turned out to be futile, since no success can attend
an attempt to estrange people from the laws of the world. Even if the young
have to be educated in solitude, one should still not imagine that the fra-
grance of the spiritual world will not ultimately permeate this solitude or
that the power of the world spirit is too feeble to gain mastery of those
outlying regions. It is by becoming a citizen of a good state that the indi-
vidual first comes into his right.
(Hegel, 2008a, 160–​161)

The remarkable notion of “the fragrance of the spiritual world” points pres-
ciently to Lacan’s notion of the big Other, namely an entity that lacks con-
crete existence and which is yet impossible to escape. Hegel’s definition of
language as “the most spiritual existence” (2008a) is further evidence of his
incredible prescience. Like psychoanalysis, Hegel is interested in providing a
modern/​secular outlook concerning intangible things.This is the true meaning
of materialism: to view “spectral” or “spiritual” things (the Other, language,
God, miracles, ghosts) in a non-​spiritual way. Symbolic castration faces the
challenge of the following speculative proposition: the essence of the spectral is
the material and, conversely, the essence of the material is the spectral. Ignoring
the spectral altogether is tantamount to scientism, while resorting to spiritual
explanations involves the pre-​modern hypostasis of otherworldly realms. The
tightrope upon which Hegel and Lacan (and we with them) walk is situated
precisely between arrogant scientism and ignorant obscurantism. Fortunately,
we are accompanied by topology on this tightrope; it tells us that the spectre
is nothing other than the torsion on the surface creating the illusion of height
and the fear that we may fall.This should give us the courage to skate along the
surface insouciant of the imagined perils that plague our foes.7
Symbolic castration requires the difficult task of reckoning with the spec-
tral dimension without recourse to superstitious obscurantism. This requires
fathoming the theoretical concept of structure. Structure denotes a domain
irreducible to constitutional inheritance (Freud’s phylogenetic schemata) as
well as experience (Freud’s theory of seduction). More specifically, the idea
of structure marks the identity-​ difference between that which is neces-
in-​
sary and that which is external or foreign. Essentialism weds the category of
necessity with that which is internal: the human being is said to be necessarily
and innately predisposed to an inclination. By contrast, social constructionism
56 Subject and collective
brings together the contingent and the external: a subject is said to be this way
because of a particular externally imposed norm/​experience. Structure rejects
these commonplaces and proposes, instead, the paradoxical category of some-
thing necessary yet external. With this, we reach the idea that the human being’s
“essence” –​much like the torus’ centre of gravity –​lies outside of him/​herself.
The diremption of this paradoxical category has led to the contradiction by
which the intellectual good conscience of our day vacillates between the two
aforementioned conflicting and equally insufficient alternatives (though more
palatable to the common understanding) of biologistic essentialism and social
constructionism/​relativism.8 One could reframe the debates between Žižek and
Butler (Butler, Laclau and Žižek, 2000) in terms of this paradoxical notion of
external necessity. According to the Lacanian/​Lévi-​Straussian view espoused by
Žižek, the symbolic order is a universality that is irreducible to biology or any-
thing “internal” to subjects (it is an external universality/​necessity). For Butler
(and Derrida (2014) whose work she closely follows in this regard), by con-
trast, the symbolic is reducible to the social, i.e. the set of contingent customs,
laws, ideals and so on that shape a group of people. By contrast to Derrida and
Butler, the view espoused by Chomsky does not reject the category of univer-
sality. Chomsky holds that there is a universal capacity for language. However,
by contrast to Lacan, he locates this universality within an innate biological dis-
position. The radicality of Lacan’s view lies precisely in achieving the paradox
of an external universality.9
But how are we to grasp the externality of this necessity? Is this to be simply
conceived as something distinct from the subject? If so, this would take us
back to the ontology of juxtaposition. In light of what was discussed above
regarding the subject’s task of recognizing the Other as his/​her symptom (i.e. as
the result of his/​her self-​reflection), we may argue that what here “acts” exter-
nally (language, the Other) on the subject is its own Other which, paradoxically,
reveals itself as the locus where it always had all its signification. However, in
order not to fall into Kant’s ontology of opposition by which this otherness is
conceived merely conventionally, we must also add that the subject-​Other rela-
tion is not reciprocal; the Other is symptom of the subject and not vice-​versa.
For Lacan, what is ultimately decisive, as far as psychoanalysis and the analysis of
the unconscious are concerned, is the subject’s relation to the Other of speech
and language; the relation to others, the counterparts that populate our lives,
is but a special case of that determining relation. This move already takes us
away from the ontology of juxtaposition (a world made up of counterparts)
and beyond Kant’s ontology of opposition (where the subject and the Other
are opposed though a mere quantitative consideration) to the Hegelian schema
here put forward. The shift of emphasis away from others to the symbolic Other
of speech and language represents a generalization much like that of the shift
from Newtonian physics to Einstein’s Relativity. Gravity for Newton is a force
between two bodies while, for Einstein, it is the result of a curvature of space-​
time. Thus, for Einstein it is not the relation between bodies that matters but
the relation of each with the medium in which they are all embedded, namely
 Subject and collective 57
space-​time. For Lacan what is likewise decisive is each subject’s relation to the
medium in which he/​she is embedded, namely speech and language (the sym-
bolic Other). The intersubjective relations between subjects are of secondary
importance. Where Einstein’s field equations state that “mass tells space-​time
how to curve and curved space-​time tells mass how to move”, 10 Lacanian psy-
choanalysis holds that “the subject receives his own message in an inverted form
from the big Other”. In our analogy between Einstein and Lacan, the subject
corresponds to “mass” while the Other corresponds to “space-​time”.The subject
free associates to the Other (“mass tells space-​time how to curve”) who, in turn,
returns this message to the subject in an inverted form (“curved space-​time tells
mass how to move”). In the analytic setting, transference stands for “the curva-
ture of space-​time”. If the transference moves the subject hither and thither, it
is due to “the ripples in space-​time” caused by his/​her own “mass”, i.e. speech.
Kenosis involves the subject’s recognition that the institutions that govern his/​
her world are the products of his/​her own doing. Failure in this regard relegates
the subject to the paranoid position of taking all objective institutions as imposed
on him/​her in order to limit his/​her freedom from without.11 Jameson explains
that for Hegel, the law is “a desperate attempt of Verstand to think immanence
by separating its moments: inside from outside, before from after, cause from
effect, possibility from actuality” (Jameson, 2010, 70–​71). In the ethical domain,
we may say that the law is the result of the understanding’s diremption; incap-
able of recognizing that the Other is his/​her symptom, the subject conceives of
the Other as a law imposed on him/​her as an external limit to his/​her freedom
and subjectivity. The more vehemently the subject persists in this diremption,
the more he/​she “founders on the impossible contradiction of the very notion
of ‘law’” (ibid, 70).
The subject-​Other identity-​in-​difference overlaps thematically with the dia-
lectical unity of the private and the public.12 The dissipation of the boundaries
separating public and private involves diremption of the identity-​in-​difference
between externality and interiority, namely the idea that intimacy/​ inter-
iority require sociality. Joan Copjec captures this well in her splendid analysis
of Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us, where she argues that rather “than
protecting women from exposure, the limitation of their access to public
forums can only turn them inside out, externalize them completely” (Copjec,
2006). Simply put, deprived of public life the subject also loses access to inter-
iority. The failure to fathom this identity-​in-​difference has arguably led to the
contradictions involving the encroachment of private obscenity into public
space and vice versa (e.g. social media) as well as the contradictions related to
sexual life attested to in the growth of sex without love/​intimacy (the increase
of pornography and dating sites) and in the rise of love without sexuality
(sexless marriages).13 Numerous ways in which Lacan theorizes this identity-​
in-​difference could be isolated: 1) the notion of extimacy, 2) the topology of
the Moebius strip which arguably elucidates the working of all paradoxical
identities-​in-​difference and 3) the claim according to which the “unconscious
is politics” (Lacan, 2002).
58 Subject and collective
Notes
1 Lacan follows Heidegger’s critique of all sciences that reify Dasein into a “human
being” with positive qualities (Heidegger, 1967, 45–​52). However, by contrast to the
“anti-​humanism” of Althusser, Lacan holds that a subject exists.
2 Attar plays on the Persian homophony between thirty birds (si morgh) and phoenix
(simorgh, the bird that would be their eventual leader).
3 Reinhardt (2006) argues that the psychotic has failed neighbourly love insofar as
he/​she “loves his delusion as himself ”.
4 For Hegel, this is one who cannot appreciate his/​her complicity in the situation
that he/​she bemoans.
5 Benvenuto (2016, 98) aptly reveals the kinship between Lacan’s Other and Hegel’s
“World” or “Objective Spirit”:

Ultimately, Lacan’s theory tries to provide clinical substance for what to Hegel
was the objective spirit: a subjectivity that does not identify with the individual
mind but that determines it, while at the same time being anonymous, collective,
logical, and formal.

6 “The theory of seduction affirms the priority of the other in the constitution of
the human being and of its sexuality. Not the Lacanian Other, but the concrete
other: the adult facing the child” (Laplanche, 1999a, 212).
7 Could the alleged necessity of terror after revolution not be such an imagined
danger?
8 For Badiou, the event is contingent. It graces only the few. The notion of structure
tells us, by contrast, that we are all graced and cursed by this necessity.
9 The postmodern aversion to dialectical thought (is there any other thought?) is
captured in Baudrillard’s sweeping claim that “there is no dialectic in primitive soci-
eties, no unconscious in primitive societies” (Baudrillard quoted in Pagès, 2015, 36).
Could there be a more blatant case of what Lévi-​Strauss (1991) called the “archaic
illusion”, namely the ideological mystification involved in fathoming an otherness
so exotic as to not even share with “us” the very structure of thought?
10 Retrieved, February 22, 2018 at: www.youtube.com/​watch?v=9_​vYz4nQUcs
11 Jameson (2010, 112) feels that the modern subject is burdened by precisely this kind
of paranoia.
12 Jameson gives expression to this link in the following:

This simultaneity of the coming into being of my individuality and its being-​
for-​others … is however itself the moment of a second unexpectedly complex
and paradoxical dialectic: one in which … my private “I” will vanish behind the
public “I” … kenosis, as Hegel will call it, in which the private is emptied out in
order to make way for the public.
(Jameson, 2010, 38–​39)

13 A rather pernicious instance of the violation of the private by the public is attested
to in the current state of psychiatry. Benvenuto notes that “the object of psychiatry,
a discipline of the private world par excellence, remains paradoxically public: like no
other discipline, it depends on public opinion, on the idols of town squares and
(pharmaceutical) markets” (Benvenuto, 2016, xxv).
Variation 9 
Ausstossung and Verwerfung

In a passage from Less Than Nothing concerned with no less than “the negativity
which founds the symbolic order itself ” (Žižek, 2012a, 860), Žižek argues that
Freudian “primordial repression” is not the repression of something into the
unconscious but, rather, a repression constitutive of the unconscious. Insofar as
it involves the expulsion of the real into the symbolic, this “Ausstossung” appears
diametrically opposed to the Freudian “Verwerfung” entailing the foreclosure of
a signifier into the real. In the first case, we have a movement away from the
real towards symbolization, while in the latter case we are dealing with the vio-
lent expulsion of a signifier outside the symbolic network. Žižek paradoxically
argues, however, that Ausstossung and Verwerfung occur simultaneously in the
founding gesture of the symbolic order.The expulsion of the real into the sym-
bolic cannot occur without the exclusion of a signifier from the symbolic order
thus constituted: “The price the symbolic has to pay in order to delimit itself
from the Real is its own being-​truncated” (ibid, 863). The simultaneous inter-
play of Ausstossung and Verwerfung implies that “there is no Other of the Other”;
the symbolic order is deprived of a signifier completing it. Symbolic castration
involves the recognition that Ausstossung and Verwerfung are part and parcel of
the same process; integration into the symbolic and expulsion into the real
belong together. For the symbolic order to have consistency it must, paradox-
ically, be deprived of something. As Maleval puts it, the primordial Ausstossung
“assures the consistency of the signifying chain only by de-​completing it”
(Maleval, 2000, 63, my translation). The failure to recognize this identity-​in-​
difference (the symbolic order’s lack is also its support) involves diremption, the
most radical form of which is the specific foreclosure involved in psychosis.The
notion of a general foreclosure, or Verwerfung, constitutive of the symbolic order
is thus to be distinguished from the specific foreclosure involved in psychosis
where it is a question of a very particular signifier, namely that of the Name-​
of-​the-​Father (Maleval, 2000). Interestingly, however, there may be a way of
relating these together. The specific foreclosure of psychosis is tantamount to
the diremption of the general foreclosure constitutive of the symbolic order
and subjectivity. The failure to fathom the constitutive paradox of the symbolic
order (a lack completes it) relegates the subject to the central contradiction of
psychosis, namely a “full” symbolic order devoid of lack which, paradoxically,
60 Ausstossung and Verwerfung
is all the more depleted. The emergence of the subject, concomitant with the
founding of the symbolic order, also requires the simultaneous operation of
Ausstossung/​Verwerfung. If Ausstossung corresponds to the expulsion of the real
through the intervention of speech and the articulation of desire, Verwerfung
points to the ineradicable alienation such an articulation of speech and desire
entails: “desire is inarticulable precisely insofar as it is articulated in a signifying
chain” (Žižek, 1996, 6). The subject is decentred in the Other (“desire is the
desire of the Other”) and, Žižek reminds us, this Other is also decentred. The
act of speech through which the subject asserts him/​herself is equivalent to
the moment of ineradicable alienation. The movement away from alienation is
not only alienating but is alienation itself. As Žižek notes, Agamben shows that
“‘desubjectivization’ (‘alienation’) and subjectivization are thus the two sides
of the same coin: it is the very ‘desubjectivization’ of a living being, its subor-
dination to a dispositif, which subjectivizes it” (Žižek, 2012a, 984). The psych-
otic subject, neither “desubjectified” nor alienated, is all the less “subjectified”.
According to Agamben, this individual reduced to total obedience and hyper-
bolic “normality” is taken to be the terrorist. The more “normal” one appears
today the more one risks being taken for an assassin (ibid, 986).
Ausstossung/​Verwerfung occurs through the paternal proclamation of the law.
Prior to it, we are at the level of the primal “symbolic” mother who has not
yet become “impossible” and who makes law in a capricious way. The way out
of this monstrosity is through the father’s word which sets in motion the oper-
ation of Ausstossung/​Verwerfung. The cost of this Ausstossung is that the symbolic
order thus constituted is de-​completed, insofar as the empty place of the law
can no longer be filled in with a primal father. The correlate to this, at the
level of the subject, is an ineradicable alienation in the Other. The operation of
Ausstossung/​Verwerfung requires elevating the father’s particular enunciation to
the status of a universal law. The difficulty of the paternal function lies in that
it involves the gesture by which a particular poses as the voice of universality.
Here we encounter the discrepancy between the real and symbolic father. The
latter places himself beneath the law that he proclaims. In terms of Lacan’s
formulations on sexual difference, the symbolic father says: “all are subject to
castration” (for all x, Φ x). By contrast, the real father, as agent of castration, cannot
enforce this law “democratically”. He imposes castration while excluding him-
self from this prohibition insofar as he sexually enjoys his wife. Drawing again
on the formulae of sexuation, the father now seems to say: “there is one that is
not subject to castration” (∃x, notΦ x). The point from which the incest taboo
is pronounced is a point of its radical transgression.1 To institute the All of cas-
tration, we must accept the One of the paternal exception embodied by the real
father in the family kinship structure. Here too, however, we must be attentive
to the logic of identity-​in-​difference, lest we overlook the fact that the father’s
potency hinges precisely on his castration. If the father can successfully trans-
gress the law, he proclaims it is because he has submitted to his own father’s law.
It may be arguably the case that the diremption of this identity-​in-​difference
(castrated father = potent father) has led to the contemporary crisis of paternity
 Ausstossung and Verwerfung 61
marked by the virulent contradiction of the simultaneous rise of “humiliated”
fathers, on the one hand, and perverse seductive ones on the other –​not to
mention that these two opposed figures are often imagined to co-​exist in the
same person.2
For Lacan, the father is a “père-​version” insofar as there is no pure symbolic
father without a perverse underside, sustaining his law in the autocratic mode
of the exception. Without it his word is deprived of the force of law. The father
may reign as a name only insofar as he is supported by what Žižek (1992) refers
to as the superego figure of the father as enjoyment, a father deriving jouissance
from his status. For Žižek, the father represents “the most radical perversion
of all” (Žižek; 1992, 25). The father’s position does not allow for rivals. Insofar
as he assumes the place of exception, despite being the voice of the universal,
his position cannot be duplicated; there cannot be two exceptions. As Allouch
(2004) says, the father is non-​specularizable insofar as he is the One and only
exception to the All of castration. The paradoxical identity-​in-​difference of
the symbolic father of universal castration and the perverse superegoic father
provides yet another index of the difficulty to fathom castration.
Interestingly, Žižek defines radical evil as a particular’s pretence to pose as the
universal. Evil is thus not “particularity as such but its false,‘perverted’ unity with
the universal”. It is a presumption “that inverts the proper relationship between
the particular and the universal”. In evil, the universal is debased “to a mere
means of my self-​assertion” (Žižek, 1996, 15). If the paternal function requires
a living, breathing, particular father to represent the universal incest taboo then
we must conclude that the subject’s acceptance of this universal interdiction
requires a paradoxical acceptance of a paternal radical evil. In proclaiming the
Law –​and yet exempting himself from its jurisdiction –​the real father becomes
a figure of radical evil; the father’s voice, in all its jouissance and particularity, poses
as the agent of universal castration. If we take seriously Lacan’s claim that the
father is “a sacred reality, more spiritual than any other” (Lacan, 1981, 244, my
translation) and Žižek’s (1996, 18) Schellingian quip according to which evil is
“incomparably more spiritual, remote from sensual Genuβ, than is the Good”,
are we not forced to conclude that the father is the embodiment of a radical
“spiritual evil” insofar as he represents, as Žižek’s Schelling would say, the “false
unity of Ground and Existence”?
Before yielding to the conclusion cynically equating paternity and evil, we
must remember that the father’s intervention will be seen as evil, only insofar as
the subject does not accept the paternal word as an equitable law above all. The
child needs to harbour the belief that the father submits to his own law –​that he
represents something beyond the parents3 –​even though things are not entirely
such (recall that the father is an exception). Symbolic castration thus involves an
act of faith on the part of the child akin to the Latin Credo quia absurdum, “I
believe it because it is absurd”.4 This is why Lacan speaks of the necessity to be
duped5 for the symbolic law to have efficiency. The real father may facilitate this
duping if he assumes his position with a sense of irony. If, like the proverbial
king, the father really thinks he is a father, difficulties will arise; we would then
62 Ausstossung and Verwerfung
be really dealing with radical evil, namely a particular man debasing the uni-
versal to his own self-​assertion.The unduped subject sees evil in the field of the
Other and he/​she will respond with evil, his/​her only means of protest. Instead
of a subject assuming alienation in a symbolic order that is itself decentred, we
have two figures of radical evil in a struggle of pure prestige. Firstly, we have the
evil of the symbolic order imposing its particular symbols in a false pretence to
universality. Secondly, we have the evil of a subject who refuses to acknowledge
his/​her reliance on these symbols in a posturing of autonomy. A subject who
does not relinquish his/​her defiance against the paternal law will transform the
latter, in fantasy or delusion, into a monstrous Thing. As Hegel says, “Evil resides
in the gaze itself which perceives the object as Evil” (Žižek, 1998b).

Notes
1 Lacan (2001a) speaks of the fact that “the parent of the same sex appears to the child
as both the agent of sexual interdiction and the example of its transgression” (Lacan,
2001a, 46 my translation).
2 Another important paradox here is that the father’s power (power in general) must
remain hidden to hold sway:

The real in the background that serves as the ultimate guarantee and support
of the public power is thus a spectral entity –​not only does it not need to exist
in reality, if it did appear and directly intervene in reality, then it would risk
losing its power, since, as Lacan made clear, omnipotence (toute-​puissance) neces-
sarily reverts into “all-​in-​potency” (tout en puissance): a father who is perceived
as “omnipotent” can only sustain this position if his power remains forever a
“potential”, a threat which is never actualized.
(Žižek, 2015, 54)

We may add power to the list of spectral entities of concern to any true materialism.
3 The mother’s role in enabling the father to assume this function must not be
underestimated. Lacan emphasizes the importance the mother “attributes to [the
father’s] speech –​in a word, to his authority –​in other words, with the place she
reserves for the Name-​of-​the-​Father in the promotion of the law” (Lacan, 2006, 482).
4 This phrase is attributed to Tertullian’s De Carne Christi (cf. Wikipedia https://​
en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Credo_​quia_​absurdum)..
5 Lacan plays on the French homonymy between “les noms-​du-​père” (the names of the
father) and “les non-​dupes errent” (those who are not duped err), in order to stress the
importance of taking the leap of faith with respect to the paternal law, allowing one-
self to be its dupe.
Variation 10 
Symbolic murder and
suicide

Relating to the Other requires that the subject become its dupe; this is the
act of faith through which symbolic castration occurs. Paradoxically, this
opens the way for a possible subversion of the Other, its ideals, injunctions
and imperatives. In psychosis, both of these are lacking. The subject is not
duped by the Other and remains passive with respect to the Other. Being
duped by the Other and subverting the Other are two sides of the Moebius
strip. They are the two symbolic deaths necessary for sociality; the subject
must die (i.e. give up some of the jouissance tied to being the Other’s object)
and the Other must die too, opening the path for the child’s subjectivity. The
paradox of being the Other’s dupe and subverting the Other is beautifully
captured by the tension between two contradictory stories of enormous
import for psychoanalytic thought. The first is the myth of the murder of the
primal father and the second is the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac.1 The
former narrates the tale of the necessity of sacrificing the primal father who
stands in the place of the Other of jouissance; the primal figure of obscene
enjoyment must be abolished for desire and social co-​existence to emerge.
The latter, by contrast, relates the need to sacrifice the son. Rather than
choose between these alternatives, we must posit their identity-​difference
such that the murder of the father (i.e. the subverting of the Other) may
only take place as the subject assumes his/​her own castration or symbolic
death. Insofar as the vocation of man is, first and foremost, that of a son we
must all first die by a suicidal act of faith through which symbolic castra-
tion occurs –​this is Isaac submitting himself to Abraham’s knife. Only then,
paradoxically, will we have successfully killed our fathers and opened for
ourselves a margin of freedom. Interestingly, the story of Isaac and Abraham
contains within itself the dialectical tension between the death of the subject
and that of the Other. Is the focal point of the story Isaac’s submission to the
knife (i.e. the child’s castration and symbolic death) or is the principal motif
that of God tearing Abraham’s hand away from his son (i.e. the castration of
the father)? Or does it concern God’s own indecision and internal division?
The unexpected identity-​in-​difference of the primal murder and the
subject’s own symbolic death should make us attentive to the centrality
that we, following Freud, have granted to the theme of patricide. Lacan
64 Symbolic murder and suicide
will abandon this theme as it involves the obfuscation of the father’s cas-
tration. He controversially argues that the Oedipus is a “dream of Freud’s”
that veils the father’s mortality by falsely positing the alleged wish as the
cause of his death (Lacan, 2007). In this light, Freud’s theoretical insistence
on patricidal fantasies appears as a diremption of the identity-​in-​difference
of the father’s “death” with his ability to function as the representative of
castration. Aphoristically, we may put forward the following speculative prop-
osition: only a dead father lives up to his symbolic role. Lacan’s progressive
de-​Oedipalization of psychoanalysis, for better or for worse, could be under-
stood as intended to counter this alleged Freudian diremption.2 Aligning
psychoanalytic theory with Kantian philosophy, Copjec reads the Freudian
primal murder as a “noumenal” event that cannot be an object of experience.
She further introduces the notion of “subreption” to denote the operation
through which “a supersensible idea” is “falsely represented as if it were a pos-
sible object of experience” (Copjec, 1996, xx). The subreption of the primal
murder, she explains, corresponds to representing this event as something one
may experience, a deed not yet realized. This has “the effect of both exoner-
ating us of the murder and making us guilty of its nonaccomplishment” (ibid,
xxii).The subject thus falls prey to the cruel logic of the superego that punishes
“severely every failure of will to realize itself ” (ibid, xxii). Any external obs-
tacle hindering the realization of this heinous crime is vilified as the impedi-
ment to a delusional sense of freedom. By locating the primal murder in the
noumenal realm, Copjec achieves a decisive step towards reducing the spell
of the patricidal theme haunting psychoanalytic theory. However, following
Hegel’s dissolution of the noumena-​phenomena divide, must we not relocate
the primal murder within phenomenal experience? But would this not impli-
cate us in the dangerous error of “subreption”? Can we rethink the primal
murder within the order of phenomena without regressing to a subreption?
Copjec is right in warning against falsely envisioning the primal murder as an
act that remains to be accomplished. Her theorizing is a laudable achievement
in the way of traversing the fantasy and freeing the subject from the duty of
realizing this act. However, a more thorough crossing of the fantasy could
be achieved if the primal murder is thought anew in light of its identity-​in-​
difference with its Other, namely the subject’s own symbolic death. Such a
perspective, informed by speculative reason, would free the subject from the
superegoic injunction to “kill the father” without unnecessarily positing a fic-
titious noumenal realm where this would have allegedly already taken place.
In brief, the notion of subreption involves the diremption of the identity-​in-​
difference of phenomena and noumena. As such it entangles Copjec’s thinking
in the ideology of time insofar as she expects salvation or grace to occur in some
imaginary future day of judgment. A Hegelian perspective, by contrast, would
not unduly separate the moments of 1) symbolic murder (having already taken
place) and 2) grace that will occur at a later time. The speculative positing of
the identity-​in-​difference of murder/​suicide immediately entails the moment
of grace in the here and now.
 Symbolic murder and suicide 65
One must here beware, however, of falling prey to the idealization of a
totally harmonious phenomenal realm; neither Copjec’s efforts to cast the
primal murder into noumenon, nor the Hegelian move of equating the primal
murder with an act of faith will rid the world of aggressivity. The good will
here not entirely sublate evil as one can not take their identity-​in-​difference as a
statement of their absolute positive unity. As a result, despite the insight of Lacan’s
critique of the Freudian patricidal theme, one should remain Freudian in this
regard insofar as the movement towards the universality of law occurs through
this radical “crime”. Though Freud’s patricidal theme involves a diremption of
the identity-​in-​difference of the father’s death and his ability to live up to his
role, one needs to bear in mind that, insofar as identity-​in-​difference is never
complete, one cannot fully abandon the Oedipal-​patricidal theme which will
always persist as an ineradicable diremptive remain. Here, evil functions as the
protest through which the subject and the symbolic order arise. We must avoid
idyllic readings that emphasize the primordial “yes” or “Bejahung” to the father
without underscoring the crime at the base of peaceful co-​existence. Where
the constitution of the subject and the symbolic order are concerned, evil has
primacy over the good. Radical evil, or the death drive, makes possible the
advent of the subject; it is, Žižek argues, “the primordial act by means of which
I choose my eternal character” (Žižek, 2007, 69) or, in Lacan’s words, “the
unsoundable decision of being” (Lacan, 2006, 145).3
It is a delicious bit of irony that Lacan’s de-​Oedipalization of psychoanalysis
and concurrent critique of the patricidal theme achieves precisely what Lacan
was preaching against, namely the symbolic murder of Freud his (Oedipal)
father. Lacan’s “return to Freud” may arguably be part and parcel of a greater
ambition to kill the master-​father through the duplicitous means of flattery
and idealization. For everyone, this symbolic murder is an essential step in the
transition to subjectivity. Every subject must move beyond Oedipus through
a symbolic murder. This may occur either through the psychoanalytic process
(in light of the paradoxes of psychoanalysis Leclaire could have also titled his
piece A Parent is Being Killed or, to echo the Biblical story with an added sado-​
masochistic twist, A Parent’s Hand is Grabbed) or through the ascension to sexual
love through which the subject surmounts the castration of latency. For those
subjects living out their loves in the intellectual realm, this symbolic murder
may take the form of a theoretical lèse majesté. I venture the controversial claim
that “beyond Oedipus” is a mere “dream of Lacan’s”, murder in effigy. One is
not “beyond Oedipus” from the outset; a transformation is required to get there.
This may occur through amorous sexual love, the arduous path of analysis or the
toils of theory. Lacan’s “beyond Oedipus” fails to recognize the Oedipus as a
necessary diremptive remain and, ironically, this “foreclosed” diremptive remain
returns in the “real” of Lacan’s (patricidal) relation to Freud. Lacan’s statement
regarding the Oedipus as a “dream of Freud” is immediately contradicted by the
evidently Oedipal nature of his enunciation. It is thus Lacan, rather than Freud,
who falls prey to diremption, insofar as he underestimates the fact that what
allegedly keeps us bound to the Oedipal (this “dream” of the neurotic) is also
66 Symbolic murder and suicide
what may liberate us. As diremptive remain, the Oedipal dream/​wish is, at once,
the obstacle to and the condition for sublation. In short, what escapes him is the
following speculative proposition: only the Oedipus can take us beyond the Oedipus.

Notes
1 Leclaire’s masterpiece tellingly entitled A Child is Being Killed begins with a reference
to the story of Abraham and Isaac as a metaphor for the psychoanalytic process. The
child that is “killed” is the “imaginary phallus”, namely the object of maternal desire
that forms the kernel of the ego formed in the mirror stage. It is a site of alienation
from which treatment seeks to liberate the subject.
2 On Lacan’s de-​Oedipalization of Freud see Demoulin (2002) and Van Haute and
Geyskens (2012).
3 Note the euphemism involved in recasting the act as a “decision”. Is it speculative
reason or pusillanimity at work here?
Variation 11 
Generational difference:
parent and child

In Le Sacrifice, Rosolato (2002) isolates three principal differences that organize

mental and social life, namely sexual, generational and power difference.
Firstly, we have the opposition of man and woman. Second, we have parents
distinguished from children and finally, we have, to put it in Kojève’s words,
“the principle of the essential difference between those who exert it [authority]
and those who are subject to it” (2014). I attempt to show that each of these
is founded upon an essential identity-​in-​difference, the diremption of which
leads to the obliteration of these differences thereby relegating the subject to
an undifferentiated (non-​)space where the peace and respite afforded by clear
boundaries is lacking.
With respect to generational difference, it is evident that the parent-​child
relation cannot be conceived in terms of the classical ontology of juxtaposition;
a parent and a child are not different in the same way that any two randomly
chosen subjects differ. Moreover, Kant’s ontology of opposition is also insuf-
ficient insofar as the two terms considered are not interchangeably different;
it is not a matter of indifference who is called the parent and who the child.
Moreover, two generations are not separated by a mere quantitative differenti-
ation; a certain difference in age, for instance, does not suffice to establish the
abyss separating father from son. Following Hegel’s notion of self-​reflection, if
we look at the parent in him/​herself we see that becoming a parent requires a
subjective transformation: one must relinquish one’s infantile position. A child
has to die for a parent to be born.1 This process is complicated, however, by
the fact that the very desire to become a parent arises, paradoxically, “from
the position of the child” (Pommier, 2013, 149). Pommier explains that, for
a potential parent, “a child can appear as the payment of a debt since she has
been conceived fantasmatically of the father or for the mother of the man who
is her progenitor” (ibid, 150–​151). A paradox thus plagues the assumption of a
parental role; the desire to be a father or mother requires a transition away from
childhood and yet this desire is itself rooted in an infantile wish. What further
complicates matters is that two subjects engaged in a sexual relationship (i.e. in
a sexual non-​rapport marked by impossibility) will tend to regress somewhat
to their respective Oedipal complexes where their infantile sexualities played
themselves out. The family constellation will thus involve as many Oedipus
68 Generational difference: parent and child
complexes as it has members.The difference, however, between the adult couple
and the child in their respective experiences of sexuality is that the interdic-
tion is suspended for the adults. It is as though the inherent madness of the
couple (“there is no sexual rapport”) is tied to the fact that the couple involves
a transgression of the incest taboo (Apollon, 1997, 148). Being in a sexual rela-
tion complicates the possibility of assuming a parental role. The sexual rapport
suspends the Name-​of-​the-​Father in such a way that the parents become the
real children in the family: “there are no other children in the family but the
parents” (Lacan, 2006, 482). The fact of being involved in a sexual relation –​a
precondition of parenting –​ironically complicates assuming a parental role. In
Hegelian parlance, the self-​reflection of the parent leads it to pass over into its
Other. Conversely, insofar as children are the ones who, unlike their parents,
respect the incest taboo, we may say, inverting Lacan’s quip, that “the are no
other adults in the family but the children”. One must not forget that couples
often decide to have children in the (unconscious) hope that this change in
the family constellation will somehow make the sexual rapport a little more
“possible”. As such, children are –​even prior to their birth –​placed in the
role of the Name-​of-​the-​Father, namely the signifier that grants some inkling
of possibility to the sexual rapport. Papageorgiou-​Legendre (1990) discusses
the tradition where a father names his son after his own father. She interprets
this custom as pointing to the unconscious knowledge that one’s relation to
one’s children often repeats undesirable aspects of one’s relations to the previous
generation. Insofar as this repetition occurs, one forces one’s children into the
position of one’s parents, to the extent that one has failed in undergoing the
necessary internal transformation required to become a parent. Here again, we
see that the parent-​child opposition is partly mitigated by a hidden identity-​in-​
difference which comes to light only after speculative reason’s theoretical effort
to bring each into self-​reflection.
Despite insisting on the radical difference of parent and child one must also
acknowledge the concealed identity that this difference obscures. Denying the
difference represents an outright assault on the most basic tenets of decency.
Transgressions of the incest taboo (the sexual exploitation of children) hinge
precisely on the denial of this difference, something that Ferenczi (1949) took
care to address in his seminal “Confusion of the Tongues Between the Adults
and the Child”. However, to ignore the identity also leads to nefarious outcomes
such as parents who have entirely relinquished their infantile positions. Such
parents think of themselves as the founders of a lineage, as if they were born
ex nihilo. This fantasy of omnipotence creates a parent without lack (a parent
as one-​sided pure thought), something that could lead to an eventual psych-
otic structure in the child. The diremption of the child’s passing over into his/​
her Other is also not without its own hazards. A child who in no way echoes
or evokes the parent’s infantile attachment to his/​her own parents is, simply
put, an undesired child. Such a child will remain, instead, an object of jouis-
sance. The development of a child requires that the mother ceases (or, at the
very least, limits) enjoying the child and begins, instead, to desire him/​her. This
 Generational difference: parent and child 69
distinction is not one of mere words. For a mother to desire rather than enjoy
her child requires a deep recognition, on her part, that the child belongs to
a larger kinship structure. In this way, the child is both dethroned from his/​
her regal status as “his majesty the baby” (Freud, 1914) and, more importantly,
rescued from a suffocating position and granted sanctuary in a more modest but
also more liberating place as a member of the family and, eventually, society at
large. When the mother can say of her baby something like “he has his uncle’s
nose” or “she has her aunt’s smile” and “her father’s gaze” the transference to
desire takes place. Tragically, in the case of a child born with a birth defect such
analogies are sustained with difficulty, precisely because the child’s appearance
makes such comparisons difficult. As such the child cannot enter into the meto-
nymic chain of the objects of his/​her mother’s desire and retains a position as
object of her jouissance. The transition from object of jouissance to that of desire
requires that the child be partially identified with the figures populating the
mother’s desires and fantasies. Insofar as these will have formed in her infancy,
her own parents will be the central figures here. As a result, the crucial process
of “phallicization” by which the child acquires a sense of self-​worth as this
person’s daughter or son involves the paradox by which he/​she be also identi-
fied with this person’s mother or father. A great store of libido gets transferred
to the child form the parent’s own infantile attachment to his/​her own parents.
Thus, the diremption of the paradoxical identity-​in-​difference by which the
self-​reflection of the child and that of parent pass to their respective Other has
the potential consequence of leading to foreclosure and psychosis. In order to
rightly secure the abyssal gap separating parent from child one must paradoxic-
ally also posit their identity.The key to the process of self-​reflection by which an
element reaches its Other is that it is only this way that each term retroactively
also becomes “at home” with itself. This latter point is crucial for grasping
the gap separating Hegel from Kant; without it one falls into the ontology of
opposition, according to which parent and child differ only in name and where,
therefore, the distribution of tasks and responsibilities fitting to each generation
dissolves into abomination. Lacan’s idea according to which “children are the
symptoms of their parents”2 succinctly captures the identity-​in-​difference here
put forward. As what is most intimate, a subject is in a relation of identity to his/​
her symptom.Yet, insofar as this relation is not reciprocal/​symmetrical –​parents
are not a symptom of their children –​difference is not abolished through the
positing of identity. Indeed, the whole tenor of the Hegelian argument here put
forward is that difference perdures paradoxically only under the auspice of an
identity revealed through self-​reflection.
Hegel argues that “parents are, for their children, an obscure and unknown
presentiment of themselves” (quoted in Kojève, 1980). Perhaps we could say that
the symbolic permutation of roles (Papageorgiou-​Legendre, 1990, 56) alters a
subject by elevating him/​her to the dignity of his/​her notion (something of
which they acquired a “presentiment” in childhood through their parents).3
The psychotic collapse that occurs when faced with paternity is the inverse
of this elevation to the notion. The vertigo caused by the elevation to the
70 Generational difference: parent and child
height of notional dignity leads the subject to seek refuge in the collapse to
a pure thought, namely madness. The idea that a child is a symptom of his/​
her parents means that the opposition can neither be conceived of horizontally,
where parent and child would be reduced to mere counterparts akin to siblings,
nor simply vertically, where one term (the parent) would stand “higher” than the
other “lower” term (the child). Rather, the relation characterized as symptom of
implies a horizontality with a torsion. If parent is the surface, the child is the
invisible kink that permeates it all over (the infantile is indeed ubiquitous).
Or, to put it somewhat differently, parent and child are paradoxically on the
“different” sides of a surface with only one side. The parent who, seduced by
the ideal of false freedom, resists recognizing in his/​her child the symptom of
his/​her own being is a perverse parent, an infantile parent, who through his/​
her diremption pushes the child into increased infantilism and stubborn defi-
ance. Here the parent-​child relation degenerates into a petulant battle of pure
prestige, where the specular imaginary triumphs over any semblance of com-
munication. The child-​symptom may then get motivated by angry ressentiment
and become a hyper-​symptom of the parents precisely in his/​her forceful refusal
to be symptom of the parents. This is the plight of the psychotic child (heir to
the perverse parent) who incarnates the contradiction of a hyper-​symptom orphan
child of his/​her parents.

Notes
1 Interestingly, the symbolic transmutation of roles required to become a parent entails
a surprising dialectical reversal of sexual position. In becoming a mother, the woman
assumes the phallic position of having the baby-​phallus and, conversely, in becoming a
father, a man takes on the feminine position of paternal exception (the place of excep-
tion is quintessentially feminine).
2 Nietzsche (1996) seizes this beautifully: “What was silent in the father speaks in the
son, and often I found in the son the unveiled secret of the father”.
3 A person need not literally become a parent. What is required is a paradoxical
maturing through reconnecting with childhood. This may occur by becoming a
(good enough) parent or simply though the painstaking conceptual labour of reaching
for that imaginary point at infinity christened adulthood.
Variation 12 
Power difference:
analysand and analyst

A prototypical instantiation of the difference of power, one highly pertinent

for this enquiry, is that between analyst and analysand, namely the pair forming
the phenomenon of transference. Reverting back to the analogy with Einstein,
we could say that the end of analysis marks the moment when the subject
realizes that it was he/​she who all along told “spacetime how to curve”. Such an
assumption of responsibility is nothing other than symbolic castration. For this
to occur the subject must achieve two difficult realizations. Firstly, he/​she must
see that the complications plaguing his/​her relations with others is but a reflec-
tion of the more general context (linguistic, cultural, familial and so on –​all
that is subsumed under the rubric of the Other) in which these intersubjective
exchanges take place (“it is not this or that body that causes me to move this
way but, rather, the general curvature of spacetime”). This is the transition from
the ontology of juxtaposition to Kantian opposition. Secondly, he/​she must also
recognize that this Other (the curvature of spacetime), when considered in-​
itself, reveals itself to be the place where he/​she had firstly placed (“projected”
some would say) all of his/​her own significations (“the curvatures of space
time are due to my mass”). This last step takes us to the Hegelian ontology
of an alterity that is not reducible to mere convention. In other words, it is
not a matter of indifference who is named the analyst and who the analysand.
The power-​differential between analyst and analysand is what prevents the
regression to the ontology of opposition conceived as convention.1 Through
the artifice of the subject supposed to know the subject empties (kenosis) his/​her
unconscious knowledge on the figure of the analyst. The final re-​appropriation
of this knowledge confirms that the initial evacuating into the Other-​analyst
was not a loss but the condition through which the subject can realize him/​
herself as the Other of its Other. If there is any validity to Lacan’s “there is
no Other of the Other” it is simply because you yourself are this very Other.
The end of the treatment ideally brings about the subject’s self-​reflection by
which he/​she can recognize him/​herself as the Other projected all along on the
person of the analyst. At this point, the analyst is revealed both in his/​her radical
alterity and in his identity with the analysand (“it was my own knowledge that
I had displaced in him/​her all along”). This may explain Lacan’s reluctance to
fully appropriate the notion of counter-​transference into his psychoanalytic
72 Power difference: analysand and analyst
lexicon. He insisted that the transference is a unitary phenomenon between
analyst and analysand and that, as such, it should not be divided into two
parts. In the idiom here developed, breaking this unity into transference and
counter-​transference is a diremption of the identity-​in-​difference of analyst
and analysand; this diremption (as all others) leads to the dissolution of each
in their specificity and, consequently, also to the gap that separates one from
the other. Following Lacan, we may quip that the analyst is the symptom of the
analysand2 –​perhaps something akin to what Freud had in mind in devising
the notion of transference neurosis –​in the hope of asserting the identity of the
two in a way by which their radical difference is also posited. In this light,
what we call transference is the diremptive remain of the impossible total sub-
lation of analyst-​analysand, leader-​follower and teacher-​student, to name the
various relationships that constitute Freud’s (1900) notion of “the impossible
professions”, namely psychoanalysis, governance and pedagogy.3 The impos-
sible professions (insofar as they involve transference) are notional rather than
one-​sided.The diremptive remain of transference, at once, enables and hinders
the self-​reflection of each term to its Other. All the impossible professions
concern love above all else, namely the very model for the notion –​recall that
for Lacan (1998) the psychoanalytic discourse is equivalent to love. Working
with psychotics, by contrast, puts the profession at the risk of becoming impo-
tent rather than impossible; here the work may undergo the vicissitudes of
vicious dialectical shifts consequent upon the reign of the pure thought.
Transference that is denigrated to the one-​sided instability of pure thought
disparages into full-​fledged suggestion, where the identity-​in-​difference of
analyst-​analysand is completely dirempted. This is, of course, most preva-
lent in hypnosis (the quintessential impotent profession) where the relation
between the two subjects is totally vertical. It is also an imminent outcome of
badly handled psychotherapy. We could thus translate Lacan’s idea according
to which “transference without interpretation is acting-​out” (Lacan, 2004) to
the following adage: notional transference without interpretation disparages
to the one-​sidedness of acting out and suggestion. Transference is notional
while suggestion and acting out are one-​sided pure thoughts. For this reason,
the former is erotic while the latter are either entirely desexualized or overtly
erotomanic.4
We may expand on this Hegelian recasting by considering the structural
differences of transference in various clinical structures. Schizophrenia, Soler
(2012) explains, is marked by an avoidance of transference. However, Soler
(ibid) notes, the absence of transference does not mean that there is no relation.
A simple object relation (different from transference) is nonetheless possible and
beneficial results may be obtained from it. Here there is no opposition in the
transference, the analyst does not occupy the position of the Other; he/​she is
just another person.5 The clinical work is confined to the ontology of juxtapos-
ition. In paranoia and its variations (erotomania, delusional jealousy), the analyst
functions as a mirror of the subject’s partial drives. For Schreber, God is in the
place of the small other rather than the big Other:
 Power difference: analysand and analyst 73
For the psychotic the only other is the small other. It is true that Schreber
talked about god, who was the main personage of his delirium, but for him
god wasn’t a third term; god was just another image of himself.
(Safouan, 2004, 37)

God (and also Dr. Flechsig) embodies Schreber’s own drives returning in
the real. Here the imaginary is reduced to a specular mirroring where symbolic
positions (doctor, patient, God, creature) merge into one another in a merely
nominal opposition. This is the level of the Kantian opposition by mere con-
vention. Indeed, the “grammar” that Freud (1911) discovered in the paranoias
amply attests to how fluidly interchangeable the positions of self and Other
are in this structure. Here the analyst is not just any other person insofar as the
relation of opposition is in place. For Freud and Lacan, one major difficulty in
the treatment of paranoia consists of the fact that the transference constitutes a
triggering element (Soler, 2012, 19). Soler explains that the mobilization of the
subject supposed to know is equivalent to an appeal to the Name-​of-​the-​Father
(ibid, 19). How are we to avoid this nefarious consequence without entirely
cowering in the face of the clinical challenges posed by paranoia? A few words
regarding the theory of transference will prove invaluable.
In classical psychoanalysis, transference is viewed as a repetition of an object
relation. Lacan (1977), by contrast, distinguished transference from repetition as
two distinct “fundamental principles” of psychoanalysis. The emphasis on repe-
tition diminishes the specificity of transference as a phenomenon particular
(though not exclusive) to the analytic setting. Such a conception remains at the
level of an ontology of juxtaposition, insofar as the specificity of the subject-​
Other opposition enacted in the transference is obfuscated. We may say that
only the imaginary dimension of the transference is brought to light. Lacan
(2004) provides a precise definition of transference as the introduction of the
symptom into the field of the Other. The symptom, he explains, is nothing but
a bit of botched jouissance. As such, it is perfectly masturbatory. If love is what
brings subjects together, jouissance, by contrast, is what separates them.When the
symptom becomes too painful, when jouissance becomes unbearable suffering,
the subject may seek help.This is the beginning of transference as the symptom
is minimally removed from its autoerotic shell and brought into contact with
the Other. Henceforth, the knowledge hidden in the symptom is transferred
on to the analyst. This is why the analysis can cause a mild “paranoia” –​one
assumes the Other knows something. The neurotic transference constitutes a
“healthy” paranoia insofar as it is the source of a curiosity that ignites the taste
for truth. The analysand wonders about signs from the analyst. This is a great
source for the elaboration of fantasies. By contrast, transparency destroys the
power of the transference. A certain enigma needs to be maintained. Some
“paranoia” can even be triggered in the spouse of the analysand. There may
be fear that he/​she will be “found out” through the partner’s analysis (as an
internet meme has it, “someone’s therapist knows all about you”). One’s own
unconscious is also at stake in the analysis of one’s loved ones.
74 Power difference: analysand and analyst
The use of the word “paranoia” may be surprising to those who limit para-
noia to the psychoses. Strictly speaking, some may argue that in neurosis we
have transference love, while psychosis is where paranoia proper may arise.
However, if we retain the link between love and paranoia established by Freud’s
grammar of paranoia then the idea that neurotic transference love involves a
mild “paranoia” would not be so strange.6 The difference with psychotic para-
noia is that in neurosis the love (and hence “paranoia”) is mitigated by the
fact that knowledge is only supposed in the analyst –​we may say that the love
is erotic-​fantasmatic rather than erotomanic-​delusional. As a result, the ini-
tial deflection of knowledge will, over the course of the analysis, be undone
such a that the end of treatment will mitigate transference love and terminate
the mild “paranoia” consequent upon the deflection of knowledge. This is the
achievement of symbolic castration where the knowledge deflected on to the
analyst is re-​appropriated as the analysand’s own subjective truth. Such an out-
come is less likely in psychosis where the deflection of knowledge and the con-
sequent paranoia is more radical and literal.
In short, we may distinguish the mild notional “paranoia” of neurosis
from the veritable paranoia as pure thought in psychosis. In the latter case,
transference testifies to paranoia imbued with certainty rather than doubt.
Alternatively, in the case of schizophrenic indifference, there is no paranoia
at all and the transference thereby becomes flat and affectless. We either have
an attachment that has no common measure, namely delusional transference
love, or very little to no attachment. Either way, the transference does not lead
to curiosity about the unconscious. The function of the subject supposed to
know involves serious risks here as it may be replaced by the conviction in a
subject that knows (the element of supposition being eliminated) accompanied
by the belief in the jouissance of an Other taking the subject as target. In para-
noia, the clinician-​patient relation assumes the topology of total verticality.
The paranoid subject is incapable of making a symptom of his/​her analyst and,
instead, looms over the clinician as a towering despot. Lacan explains that the
psychotic enters discourse as master. This is because he/​she experiences sub-
jective division (castration) as fragmentation and depersonalization. To avoid this,
he/​she assumes the role of the undivided master (S1). Of course, this decision
is not without its impasses as the master’s position is fraught with diremptions.
Reticence, the general refusal to speak, is another protection against this
always-​imminent threat of depersonalization. However, given the logic of the
triumph of the “lower” term, a sudden dialectical turn will immediately trans-
form the clinician into a towering figure hovering above an indigent and
persecuted patient. In schizophrenia, the clinician-​patient relation assumes the
topology of a flat surface. The two terms co-​exist on a simple horizontal plane
without symptomatic torsion. Only in neurotic transference do we testify to
the kinked surface where the clinician and patient occupy “different” sides of
the Mobius plane. So, once again, how to avoid the dangers of triggering the
madness that transference poses for the psychotic without entirely giving up
on the efficiency of the clinical work?
 Power difference: analysand and analyst 75
The analyst’s position is precarious as it risks wavering between the safe
place of a secretary and that of a persecutory knowing Other. To prevent being
put in the place of the persecutory Other, we have no other choice than to
be the witness or “secretary” (Lacan) of what the psychotic has received from
the Other. Otherwise we may be conflated with that Other. It is best to let
the psychotic retain the position of subject supposed to know while we are
his/​her secretary. The madman and the analyst are both witness to the Other’s
cruelty/​jouissance, although the madman is a closer witness than we are. Allouch
(2015) elegantly shows that the kinship between the analyst’s and the madman’s
relation to the Other explains why Freud felt that Schreber’s memoir was so
much like his own theory of libido. The psychotic forces us into transference
while he/​she occupies the position of subject supposed to know.7 Accordingly,
Allouch argues, the psychotic transference is a reversal of the neurotic transfer-
ence. In the same spirit, Maleval holds that in “the case of neurosis, the analysand
addresses the analyst insofar as he is supposed to know. In the case of psychosis,
the analysand presents a certitude with which he tries to interest the analyst”
(2015). More specifically, the inversion of the transference is typical of paranoia.
The reason for this inversion does not lie in narcissism but in the difficulty of
subverting the Other. If he/​she begins to love the analyst transferentially this
may entail either total indigence or the various vicissitudes of love in paranoia
(“she loves me”, “she hates me” etc.). Changing the direction of transference
love is an important manoeuvre used to avoid this. Again, this is not due to nar-
cissism or self-​love but, rather, to a lack of self (a failure of narcissism) resulting
from a total failure to subvert the Other. As the secretaries of their testimony
we help them outwit the Other and reduce something of the mortifying jouis-
sance they are subjected to. Love, including transference love, is a cataclysm for
the psychotic. In Hegelese, psychotic love is not yet notional-​sublimatory but
a one-​sided idealizing pure thought under which the subject is crushed to
lowly destitution. The danger of such one-​sided transference consists of the
risk of vicious dialectical shifts and the triumph of the “lower” terms by which
love is disparaged, as aforesaid, to one-​sided lack, hate, egotism, impiety and
incompatibility.
To summarize, transference can take various forms each corresponding
respectively to the ontologies here outlined. In schizophrenia we have the
ontology of juxtaposition, while in paranoia and its variants we have the
Kantian ontology of opposition. In the latter case, it is more important than
ever to refuse the position of subject supposed to know as the subject’s
evacuating (kenosis) of unconscious knowledge onto the analyst will lead
to a paranoia that may proliferate endlessly without the respite afforded by
a subjective re-​appropriation in the form of truth. Here kenosis becomes a
literal self-​evacuation leading to radical transference hate or total infatuation
and idolization of the analyst. Insofar as the Kantian ontology of opposition
posits an otherness that is merely nominal, the analyst must here invest in a
surplus of vigilance by making sure the transference does not indifferently
alternate directions. In other words, it is crucial that the paranoid subject’s
76 Power difference: analysand and analyst
position as knowing subject be fixed securely since madness will likely ensue
if the analyst takes the role of subject of knowledge. It is only in the neurotic
transference proper that kenosis-​transference is irreducible to pure perdition. At
the termination of treatment the “cured” neurotic finds him/​herself paradoxic-
ally “at home” through the process of passing over into his/​her Other, namely
the analyst-​symptom.
Finally, a clinician who resists his/​her dialectical unity with a patient is
not a psychoanalyst though he/​she may be a psychiatrist or a psychologist.
Such diremption places the clinician in the position of the “higher” term
and the patient in that of the “lower” without recognition of the complex-
ities of dialectical unity. This is the hallmark of the university discourse. Only
a clinical approach that takes seriously the vicissitudes of transference and
counter-​transference can heed to the complications of the dialectical rela-
tion. If the clinician accepts the speculative identity-​in-​difference then the
roles are reversed from their common acceptation and the analyst comes
to occupy the lower abject position (the symptom) while the analysand
takes up the higher more dignified position. In the psychoanalytic setting,
it is the analysand who snubs the analyst-​symptom. Freud’s clinical acumen
is not separable from the dignity he grants to the speech of patients. The
onus falls on the analysand to not resist his dialectical unity with the analyst
thereby paving the way towards subjective destitution and the universality
of castration.

Notes
1 In some parts of the world (e.g. Toronto) mental health clinicians are asked to be
transparent with patients by disclosing aspects of their own lives (“safe and effective
use of self ”) and, if asked, by revealing case notes. Within such a space, the required
power-​differential for triggering transference is flattened. Here the analyst-​analysand
relation is reduced to the ontology of juxtaposition or, at best, to the Kantian ontology
of opposition by mere convention.
2 Like the symptom, the analyst is the person we all want to get rid of but panic as soon
as the prospect of separation becomes imminent.
3 The following from Freud is telling: “And it must dawn on us that in our technique
we have abandoned hypnosis only to rediscover suggestion in the shape of transfer-
ence” (Freud, 1916–​1917).
4 In variation 13, we will consider how desexualization involves the disparagement of
notional eroticism to desexualized pure thought.
5 This absence of transference is never absolute as there is always some confrontation
with the Other (Zenoni, 2013, 115).
6 Lacan explicitly likened the analytic work to a guided paranoia: “Far from attacking
it head on, the analytic maieutic takes a detour that amounts, in the end, to inducing
in the subject a guided paranoia” (Lacan, 2006, 89).
7 The idea that the psychotic occupies the place of the subject supposed to know seems
to contradict the aforementioned idea that he/​she deflects all knowledge (unmiti-
gated by the dimension of supposition) in the analyst. The clinical reality is that in
 Power difference: analysand and analyst 77
psychosis we either see a deflection of knowledge on the analyst without possibilities
of reversing the process or, by contrast, certainty about knowledge residing in the
subject. The latter (namely the reversal of the transference) is a preferred outcome
and the suggested clinical technique aiming to ward off the deflection of knowledge
on the analyst insofar as that may aggravate paranoia and trigger insanity.
Variation 13 
Sexual difference: man
and woman

Sexual difference too rests on a crucial identity-​ in-​

difference generally
obfuscated by common understanding while underscored by Freudian theory.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, the son inherits his father’s masculinity
only at the cost of a prior submission to the father’s phallic power. Without
this primary feminization the eventual advent of masculinity will founder.
Aphoristically, it is only the daughter in the son that will ever grow to become
a man. The erect male penis comprises the co-​existence of two contradictory
moments. It is testament to masculine power and attests to sad need, akin to a
homeless wanderer seeking warm shelter. These two moments correspond to
the masculine and feminine perspectives on the male phallus. To a heterosexual
man, another male phallus is a threat, an insignia of his potential domination –​
and, mutatis mutandis, his own phallus is the marker of his triumph. To a het-
erosexual woman, by contrast, the male phallus is “filled to the rim with tears”
(Duras, 1983 –​my translation). Agamben’s view (1998) that “there is no man …
who does not want to be a despot when he has an erection” is markedly one-​
sided insofar as it fails to appreciate precisely the sad tears that this pretense to
tyranny veils. When the “higher” perspective, granting pure power to the male
organ, dirempts its speculative identity with the “lower” (truer) perspective, it
paradoxically leads to the triumph of the latter.
The diremption of the identity of masculinity-​femininity (positive and nega-
tive Oedipus complexes) has led, at the social level, to various contradictions
regarding gender, which are, I believe, emblematic of our contemporary situ-
ation. On the “conservative” end, we have excessive masculinity co-​existing
with impotence (various men’s movements growing as a result of the current
frustration of masculinity), while on the “liberal” end we have the discourse
of transsexualism which thinks itself forward-​thinking and subversive while
anachronistically appealing to the essentialist idea of an “error of nature”.1 At a
theoretical level, the diremption of sexual identity-​in-​difference leads either to
1) the impasses of essentialism where sexual difference is solidly grounded in
nature or 2) postmodern approaches where difference is relegated to the ruses
of ideology. Regarding the latter, a central error of Butler’s (1997) work on
gender is that she takes a certain contradiction regarding sexual orientation –​
heterosexuality as “melancholic” identification caused by the un-​mourned loss
 Sexual difference: man and woman 79
of the homosexual other –​as constitutive of sexuality rather than as a spe-
cific outcome of the contemporary diremption of sexual identity-​in-​difference.
Where the essentialist posits difference as incontrovertible, the postmodernist
stubbornly insists on identity. Both miss the specific dimension of sexual
identity-​in-​difference upon which alone castration is sustained.
More specifically, Butler treats the masculinity-​femininity divide as a Kantian
opposition. In what appears as Hegelian self-​reflection she shows that mascu-
linity and femininity pass over, respectively, into male and female homosexuality.
The first problem with her argument is that she places sexuation (masculinity
and femininity) on the same plane as object choice (heterosexuality and homo-
sexuality). Secondly, she misses the asymmetry of the two processes in question.
Masculinity does not pass over into femininity in the same way that the latter
passes over into the former. As we will soon see the relation is not symmet-
rical. Finally, she also misses the point that the failure of sexuation constitutes
its very success. To reduce sexuation to a “melancholy gender” is to miss the
crucial Hegelian idea according to which kenosis is not tantamount to total
perdition but is, rather, the means of self-​realization. The diremption of the
paradoxical identity of the failure of sexuality (we may call it sexual-​kenosis)
and its (always partial) success relegates Butler’s work to the contradiction by
which it wavers from a blatant denial of sexual difference and hence castration
(“undoing gender”) to the aggrandizement of the latter to the grand scale of
melancholic despair. Hegel may indeed have fallen prey to a naïve optimism
claiming that the “wounds of the Spirit heal, and leave no scars behind” (Hegel,
1977, 407), but Butler’s inflation of the wound of castration to the proportions
of a universal “melancholia of gender” is no less hyperbolic.
Here an important question emerges: why should the loss of homosexual
attachments have such dire consequences (i.e. melancholia)? Why is it not the
same for all the heterosexual attachments that one may never make or mourn?
Why do these losses not contribute to identification with the other sex? It seems
that Butler implicitly takes sexual difference as a given insofar as she grants such
an importance to homosexual attachments over heterosexual ones. If one were
to mourn every lost possible object of love, every missed encounter and every
forbidden pleasure, the world would be reduced to a psychic memorial, a ceme-
tery of buried possibilities in the realm of love. Adam Phillips, in his response to
Butler, argues that one cannot do away with exclusion and difference.The wish
to live in a world with no lost attachments and no exclusion or difference is, he
argues, part of our primary process tendencies (i.e. our wishes unconstrained
by the reality principle): “Every child rightly wants to know whether there is
a position beyond exclusion or difference or separateness –​a world in which
leaving and being left out disappears” (Phillips, 1997, 158).
Each gender must pass over into its Other in order to be “at home” with
itself. The man who refuses all feminization and flaunts a pure, untarnished
manhood will founder in the face of the contradiction that makes “virile display
in human beings seem feminine” (Lacan, 2006, 584). If the man has the phallus
while the woman is deprived of it, one must remember that her lack remains
80 Sexual difference: man and woman
irreducible to total privation. In the symbolic order, Lacan explains, absence is
itself a form of presence: “However, to not have the phallus symbolically is to
participate in it by way of absence, it is thus to have it in some way” (Lacan,
1994, 153). Likewise, for the boy to have it, the possibility that he does not
have it must also subsist. Being castrated is essential in the ascension to having
it (ibid, 186). Thus, rather than simply claim that the boy has the phallus, Lacan
prefers the equivocal litote, according to which the boy is “not without having
it”. The self-​reflection of having (in the case of the boy) takes it to its Other,
namely not having. It is indeed a commonplace of Lacanian theory that the
burden of castration actually falls mainly on the man. This is well attested to by
the clinical phenomenon of stuttering, something that one sees almost exclu-
sively in men. Likewise, the self-​reflection of not having it (concerning the girl)
passes it over to its Other (i.e. having it). Interestingly, this idea is corroborated
by Lacan’s controversial claim according to which a woman cannot be castrated.
This dialectical procedure by which having and not having pass into each other
explains how Verhaeghe (1999, 49) came to conclude that penis envy is actually
more of a man’s issue while the fear of loss of the object is primarily a woman’s
concern. Lacan famously put forward the idea that woman is the phallus while
man has the phallus. However, here too ambiguities prevail. If being the phallus
means being the object of desire, then one must not forget that the achievement
by which a woman succeeds in winning over a man’s desire entails acquisition
of the phallus. Thus, to be the phallus reveals itself as somewhat akin to having
it. Likewise, when a man seeks a woman, Chiesa explains, “he unconsciously
repeats in the fantasy his Oedipal offering of himself as an imaginary phallus
that would fully satisfy the mother” (Chiesa, 2016, 189 n.71). Just like having
and not having, the opposition between having and being is subject to dialectical
reversal.
In today’s liberalism, the identity-​in-​difference of masculinity and femin-
inity is dirempted, with the resulting triumph of the ontology of juxtaposition
and its concomitant notion of diversity taking the place of that of difference.
We have a proliferation of sexual identities, with numbers increasing every
day. According to the ontology of juxtaposition, there are as many genders
as people out there.2 Derrida’s (1990) plea for a “plurivocal” conception of
sexual difference belongs to this regressive ontology where the dialectical
tension between man and woman is absolved in a diremptive move that shuns
the horror of castration. Elsewhere it is the interpretation of sexual diffe-
rence as Kantian opposition that results from the diremption of Hegelian
identity-​in-​difference. Here masculine and feminine are akin to Yin and Yang
(see Salecl (2000) who speaks of the “New Age Jungian resexualization of
the universe”), two equal forces in opposition which can interchangeably
be called positive and or negative.3 This Manichean nominalism of sexual
difference fails to heed the fact that the dialectical shifts between masculinity
and femininity are not reciprocal and/​or symmetrical. Sexual difference is
not a matter of Kantian opposition. Insofar as there is a real of sexual diffe-
rence, it is not a matter of indifference who is called man and who woman.
 Sexual difference: man and woman 81
The self-​reflection of man and woman paradoxically asserts each term in its
own specificity precisely by passing it over to its Other. Through this process
alone can man become a man and woman a woman. I am here quipping Legendre
(2000) who, in the face of the postmodern near-​abolition of sexual difference,
claims that “a man is a man and a woman is a woman”. Of course, this prop-
osition, if it is not to flounder to patriarchal diremption, should be taken as a
speculative, rather than tautological, proposition.4 The repetition of the words
“man” and “woman” both as subject and predicate should be taken to des-
ignate the contrasting moments of the respective terms. The shortcoming of
patriarchy, McGowan explains, is that it fails to appreciate the contradictions
of femininity by which a woman may be, at once, a caring mother as well
as a sexual object, innocent and yet coquettish and so on (McGowan, 2019,
81). Ordinary feminism is, interestingly, also diremptive in this regard. As
Benvenuto (2016) explains, it is a masculine ideal that most feminists seek to
erect, thereby dirempting, no less than chauvinists, the feminine moments of
the woman-​notion.
Insofar as Hegelian self-​reflection precludes symmetry between the sexes,
we reach Lacan’s controversial “woman is a symptom of man”. It is pre-
cisely as symptom that the feminine has suffered throughout the ages and,
still today, all the heinous vicissitudes of diremption. As symptom, woman is
a torsion of man, the kink on the Mobius strip. Lacan’s claim that “woman
does not exist” is entirely commensurate with her status as symptom; the
torsion on the surface of Moebius strip does not exist and yet it is also, for
that very reason, ubiquitously dispersed on the surface. The torsion is, at
once, nowhere and everywhere. We may thus supplement Lacan’s claim with
the equally valid assertion concerning woman’s omnipresence, namely the
ubiquity of the feminine not-​all. Sexual difference understood according to
the ontology of juxtaposition envisions a flat surface without torsion. Here
difference is abolished. Patriarchy, by contrast, posits a stark hierarchy where
the “higher” masculine term dirempts the “lower” feminine term with the
paradoxical result of the triumph of the “lower” symptomatic term. The
demise of patriarchy is undoubtedly tied to this diremption and triumph of
the “lower” term, something that is attested to widely by the contemporary
crisis of masculinity. One could say, not without accuracy, that the kink of
femininity, foreclosed from the surface, returns in the real of the demise of
patriarchy. This “elementary phenomenon” at a large-​scale social level is sub-
sequently “symbolized” with the paranoid delusion, rampant among “men’s
groups”, through which women have staged an arduous plan to bring about
the demise of men.5 What is missed here is the subject’s assumption of the
responsibility of his/​her diremptions. The absence of woman in the male
homosexual couple means that the kink on the surface has been likewise
obliterated. In this case the kink returns in the form of the extreme hedonism
of sado-​masochism rampant in the gay community.6
In woman, man encounters his own castration and must therefore choose
whether he will accept or oppose this incorporation into the feminine.7
82 Sexual difference: man and woman
The explicit oppression of women is a modality of diremptive refusal. Here,
the “higher” term dominates the “lower” without recognizing in her a reflec-
tion of itself. Ironically, however, this oppressive attitude, fuelled by the vio-
lent repudiation of the feminine, reduces men to effeminacy and impotence.
Nothing smacks more of meekness than a man’s wrathful repudiation of the
feminine; an insight that popular-​colloquial consciousness arrives at when mis-
chievously equating this wrath with feminine menstrual pain. One should also
not underestimate the diremption involved in the “lower” term’s refusal to be
symptom of the “higher” term, namely woman’s repudiation of femininity, her
hysteric refusal to be symptom of man.When this refusal is motivated by the spirit
of revenge, we get a vicious dialectical reversal by which woman becomes instead
the hyper-​symptom of man.8 The obstinacy of both male and female “camps”
increasingly aggravates the conflict between one-​sided notions unwilling to
meet within the sane space of acknowledged identity-​in-​difference. A para-
noid climate ensues where anything can be expected but love and reparation.
It is here noteworthy that the conservative and liberal understandings of sexual
difference reproduce the vicissitudes of sexual difference in their encounter
with one another. Liberals emphasizing sameness (difference as a social con-
struction) do so from the feminine standpoint while conservatives empha-
sizing difference (usually understood by them as rooted in biology) do so from
the masculine-​ patriarchal perspective. The contradictions inherent to these
positions are that the masculine-​conservative-​patriarchal, by positing difference,
unwittingly upholds the feminine, while the feminine-​liberal, by insisting on
sameness, endorses a masculine view –​from a psychoanalytic point of view, the
feminine stands for difference while the masculine/​phallic denotes sameness.9
To Benvenuto’s claim that some feminists advocate for a phallic ideal of femin-
inity, I would add that the flag-​bearers of the masculine-​patriarchal ideal speak
from a position of feminine “impotence”. It is as though the statements they pro-
nounce are, in both cases, a priori contradicted from the position of enunciation
from where they are uttered.
Finally, let us take a brief foray into the dialectics and erotics10 of power.
Psychoanalysis has taught us that power and eroticism belong together such
that sexual tension can only be maintained through an ambiguity within
power relations between subjects: “Our point here is not merely that the
relationship of domination in a sexual contact is always tainted with ambi-
guity, but that it is the very ambiguity, ‘undecidability’, of a Master/​Servant
relationship that ‘sexualizes’ it” (Žižek).11 Power, much like the mercurial
phallus, is a symbolic “object” that flutters equivocally between participants,
thereby creating, precisely through this indistinctness, the tension required
for erotic passion. Freud (1905) isolates three central obstacles to sexuality,
namely shame, disgust and morality. In an effort to sharpen Freud’s meta-
psychology, I venture to claim that all three of these constitute specific effects
of the more general phenomenon of power disambiguation. De-​sexualization
occurs when the dynamics of power falter into the inertia of sheer domin-
ation. When it becomes all too clear where the locus of power resides, we
 Sexual difference: man and woman 83
have the flattening of the erotic tension. Here shame, disgust or morality set
in. Wielding too much power over another who refuses to even feign the
slightest resistance leads to guilt and resentment (morality), shame in both
parties or simply disgust at the lowly position assumed by the victim. The
resilience of a subject’s sexual desire in the face of heightened power dis-
ambiguation constitutes the measure of his/​her perversion. By contrast, the
more readily de-​sexualization sets in when confronted with the slightest
power disambiguation gives us a measure of a subject’s neurosis.12

Notes
1 Regarding the use of the phrase “error of nature” in transsexualist discourse see
Gherovici (2010, 165).
2 In a 2014 article ABC News isolated 58 different gender identities found on
Facebook. (retrieved on June 27, 2019 at https://​abcnews.go.com/​blogs/​headlines/​
2014/​02/​heres-​a-​list-​of-​58-​gender-​options-​for-​facebook-​users/​). Salad anyone?
3 Shannon Bell’s (2010) “fast feminism” not only reduces sexual difference to this
Kantian opposition but also uncannily resorts to a literalized version of Kant’s
“negative size”. Bell speaks of the “female penis” differing from the male only in
size. Her public displays of orgasm show that women can cum just as much as men.
In this grotesque display we attest to a literalized parody of Kant where the latter’s
laudable theoretical notion is degraded to a puerile “mine is as big as yours”. The
agonal has veritably given way to the gonadal.
4 Or perhaps both, namely a paradoxical speculative-​tautological proposition.We will
consider another such proposition in variation 25.
5 Some of Jordan Peterson’s conjectures on “cultural Marxists” are not far from such
assumptions.
6 Benvenuto (2016) explains that the lack of difference in the male homosexual couple
leads the partners to search for that lost difference in the excesses of varied sexual
practices. We may wonder whether the over-​used term “hetero-​normativity” (with
all its negative connotations) is not a contradiction insofar as the “hetero” may be
the best chance to break out of the closure of “normativity” (see Soler, 2000 and
Morel, 2000).
7 The proverbial masculine fear of “commitment” is exemplary of this refusal.
8 Nietzsche’s “misogyny” targets the vengefulness of woman as hyper-​ symptom
rather than women altogether.
9 A man will be relieved to find other men dressed like him at a party while a woman
may drown in dread faced with such a discovery. Where sameness fortifies mascu-
linity, it abolishes the feminine.
10 Is there anything more erotic than dialectics? Was Nietzsche (1999) not one thou-
sand times right when he sacrilegiously christened Socrates (the eternal dialect-
ician) as the “true eroticist”?
11 www.lacan.com/​frameXI2.htm
12 Insults and profanations offer a delicious spice to the exquisite delights of the
forbidden fruit. However, when these break a certain threshold sexual tension
is flattened, thereby paving the way to the triumph of the comic or the tragic.
A joke testifies to this. A young woman tells her partner that she finds it kinky
to be insulted during sex. In the midst of their next sexual encounter, he thus
84 Sexual difference: man and woman
exclaims: “I shit on your father’s grave”. Of course, he missed the subtle mark of
the sexual. If at that moment she did not burst out laughing (comedy) she would
have fallen instead into tears or deep rage (tragedy). What was surely missed was
the orgasm as she pulls her body away from the stunned boy, leaving his sword
unsheathed, hanging ridiculously in the stupefaction of man’s ignorance of the
feminine.
Variation 14 
The paradox of a
boundary without a limit

The three central differences structuring psychoanalytic theory all hinge on the
identity-​in-​difference of opposed terms such that, upon self-​reflection, each
passes over to its Other. Paradoxically, it is this very loss of self through the
transfer to the Other that secures the specificity of the term in question. We
may here recast Santner’s (1996) notion of a crisis of investiture in terms of our
Hegelian idiom. A symbolic title will hold if its self-​reflection brings it to pass
to its Other. Only in this way, paradoxically, will it not flounder into a plethora
of other determinations. Our late modern crisis of investiture is thus a special
case of a current crisis of diremption. Symbolic positions (child, parent, man,
woman, analyst, analysand) can only perdure when their identity-​in-​difference
with their Other is posited. Only this way will a title’s status as notion be secured;
the crisis of investiture means that titles have disparaged to pure thoughts. The
diremption at the level of sexual identity-​in-​difference has led to the contra-
dictory pansexual-​asexuality defining our contemporary culture of jouissance.
Each of the three paradoxical identities-​in-​difference should be conceived as
asymmetrical relations where one term stands as the symptom of the other.
The establishment of these principal differences structuring mental life
is concomitant with the creation of the unconscious. More precisely, these
differences, despite constituting the unconscious, do not themselves hold in
the unconscious. Since the unconscious does not know time (Freud, 1915b)
generational difference is absent there. The notion of an adult is a fiction; at the
level of the unconscious we are all infants. If there were at all any such thing
as an adult, it would involve someone who has, paradoxically, achieved much
in his/​her reconnection to the “child within”. Winnicott’s (1971) reflections
on the importance of playing testify to the paradoxical identity-​in-​difference
by which a human being matures only through a return to infantile frolicking.
Moreover, given that for Freud there is only one masculine libido (in Lacan’s
words, there is only one (phallic) signifier to denote sexual difference), the
unconscious ignores sexual difference too.1 It is likewise with respect to the
difference of power. The clear boundary separating those who exert power
from those subjected to it is inoperative in the unconscious. In short, at the
level of the unconscious there are only men and children co-​existing in a wild
primal state anterior to the imposition of the master signifier through which
86 The paradox of a boundary without a limit
the difference of power is established. However, this very unconscious can only
be constituted as an unconscious (rather than subsisting in the open à ciel ouvert)
once these differences have been established. In an effort to locate these prin-
cipal differences topologically we may say that they are found at the periphery
of the unconscious in a place of extimacy. They are the stitching that separates
the unconscious from the preconscious and the conscious. As such, the insti-
tution of these three central differences is tantamount to the work of primary
repression.They are the very torsion on the surface of the unconscious; they are,
at once, absent from it and yet ubiquitously present.
To state the identity-​in-​difference of two terms does not simply entail stating
their unequivocal sameness. The self-​reflection of an element does indeed lead
it to its kenosis in the Other. However, this is the condition for the term’s
accession to its own notion. Through its kenosis to woman, man gains his vir-
ility; emasculation (Entmannung) and feminization (Verweiblichung) occur when
that specific kenosis fails. What is at stake is the question of the notion of a
limit or boundary. How can we establish the separate identities of each term
without establishing a diremptive boundary between them such that one term
arrogantly snubs its other? Here it may be useful to consider Hegel’s distinction
between a limit/​boundary (Schranke) and lack. Where the former is imposed
externally on the two entities in question, the latter arises immanently within
each term as an expression of its internal division.2 To cast it in the vocabulary
we have developed throughout this treatise, a boundary needs to be imposed
when diremption is operative.3 Man’s diremption of his identity-​in-​difference
with woman leads, paradoxically, to his feminization. To counter this, he may
resort to various artificial limits and semblances to re-​establish his masculinity.
What is reviled, not without a smidgen of hysteric embellishment, as “toxic
masculinity” is linked to this desperate re-​claiming of the masculine in the
form of a quasi-​paranoid barricading intended to prevent intrusions of the fem-
inine. However, as the deadlocks of patriarchy have shown, this kind of bulwark
against the threat of waning masculinity has its impasses. What is required is a
“boundary” created immanently through self-​reflection rather than imposed
externally from above, i.e. as the doing of the “higher” term threatened by
the force of the symptomatic “lower” term. If the “higher” term receives the
“lower” as its symptom, then each term accedes to its notion and the required
separation is established in the paradoxical modality of identity-​in-​difference.
Stability can only be achieved through the immanence of the speculative.
The process by which man, parent and analysand take their respective Others
(woman, child and analyst) as their symptom has an affective correlate, namely
shame. Kant had already come to an explicit formulation of its importance in
regulating the relations between the sexes. Moreover, he specifically argued that
shame (modesty) prevents the sexual exploitation of one sex by the other:

It is true that woman would not be content if the male sex did not appear
to pay homage to her charms. But modesty (pudicitia), a self-​constraint that
conceals passion, is nevertheless very beneficial as an illusion that brings
 The paradox of a boundary without a limit 87
about distance between one sex and the other, which is necessary in order
that one is not degraded into a mere tool for the other’s enjoyment.
(quoted in Žižek, 2015, 60)

Similarly, Lacan argues that in the absence of a sexual rapport, modesty (pudeur)
is the only virtue (Lacan, lesson of March 12, 1974).The lack of a rapport implies
an absence of any kind of natural “harmony” that would guide the behaviour of
one sex towards the other.This absence makes more likely occurrences of sexual
exploitation. As a result, shame is required as a signal affect warning the subject
of a possible traumatic intrusion. Earlier, we saw the importance of shame in
establishing for the subject a non-​diremptive identity. The same can now be
said regarding the subject’s appurtenance to his/​her gender. A sense of modesty
in a man is an index of his femininity (to blush in modesty is characteristic-
ally feminine) and, paradoxically, it is, precisely for this reason, the ground for
his masculine power, namely his ability to approach woman. Through a similar
speculative process, a woman’s modesty, though providing the quintessential
insignia of her femininity, protects her from the undesired man; the blush to
her face will either signal her flight away from him or, even more expedi-
ently, tell him to back off.4 In this light, her blush functions as a phallic shield.
Shame (modesty) is thus the affect that regulates the relations between men and
women precisely insofar as it is the correlate to self-​reflection. For Hegel, love
and shame allow for the restraint that enables sexual relations to remain ethical.
He thus defines “the ethical aspect of love” as “the higher aspect which restrains
purely natural impulses and puts it in the background. Such restraint is already
present at the natural level in shame, and it rises to chastity and modesty as con-
sciousness becomes more specifically spiritual” (Hegel, 2008a, 167).We thus see
a kind of progression from shame to love and finally to chastity and modesty,
with the latter deemed to be the most spiritual.We must not, of course take this
progression in a teleological sense or, even worse, in an instinctual-​biological
sense à la Karl Abraham. What is at stake, rather, is the movement from external
opposition to inner division; it is a question of recognizing that the Other as
symptom is the product of one’s own self-​reflection. When Lacan states that for
man and woman, woman is the Other sex, this means that woman is symptom
of both men and women. Woman thus stands for the symptomatic “lower”
term that every subject (male or female) must decide to embrace or dirempt.
The more spiritual affect of modesty entails the greatest recognition of the
symptom as a kernel of one’s own being rather than a foreign abject entity to
be discarded.5
Modesty also regulates the relations between different generations. Talking
about sexual matters between parents and children brings about a feeling of
unease akin to shame. Its function is to protect the individual from the threat of
incestuous desire. For the child, the acquisition of shame guards him/​her from
the confusion of tongues that could lead to sexual seduction. Shame was listed by
Freud (1905) as one of the chief obstacles to sexuality along with morality and
disgust –​the latter two are less spiritual in the Hegelian sense and thus more
88 The paradox of a boundary without a limit
akin to a diremptive limit/​boundary. Finally, the relation between analyst and
analysand also requires the operation of shame in order to properly handle the
eroticization of the transference. Here the requirement of the psychoanalyst’s
neurosis, as opposed to perversion/​psychosis, is central. The analyst should
be capable of desexualization when faced with the conscious or unconscious
advances of a seductive patient. By modelling modesty for his/​her patients,
the psychoanalyst can aid them to achieve that required movement by which
external opposition gives way to internal division. The analysand’s seductions
obfuscate the analytic work and hinder the progress of the treatment. They are
the quintessential expressions of resistance. As such, these seductions function as
a rejection of the analyst-​symptom. Through this manipulative manoeuvre the
patient dirempts his/​her identity-​in-​difference with the symptomatic “lower”
term embodied by the clinician. This leads, paradoxically, to the triumph of the
rejected “lower” term attested to in the high propensity of acting out in the
erotically heated moments of an analysis. Refusing to work with an analyst-​
symptom, the subject inadvertently reduces him/​herself to a literal “walking-​
symptom” (acting out and passage à l’acte). Such a subject, in the grips of a
momentous diremption of the analyst-​symptom, imagines (through projection)
that it is the analyst that rejects him/​her in his/​her disparaged and self-​imposed
position as abject symptom. Needless to say that hate may follow in the transfer-
ence and that aggressivity towards the analyst will accrue. By valiantly bearing
this aggressivity (cf. Winnicott’s “The Use of an Object”), the analyst may be
able to instil an effect of shame and thereby enable the analysand to realize
that he/​she (like the aforementioned (pseudo)-​feminist is waging a war with
his/​her own diremptions. Again, shame functions here as the rampart against
diremption and the correlate affect to self-​reflective kenosis.
What is common to the three relations that constitute the three principal
differences is that they all involve sexuality in a central way. In the case of the
parent-​child relation sexuality is what must be at all costs resisted, while in
the man-​woman relation it is a requirement to transgress the taboo. For the
analyst-​analysand couple, sexuality is also barred but the taboo is not as severe
as with parent and child. In the relation between man and woman, the erotic
must remain notional so that it does not wane into tepidity. Many patients who
come to the analyst for problems related to their conjugal life complain of lack
of passion; for them, the notion of love has given way to the desexualized pure
thought. We try to help them revive the notion of eroticism precisely through the
eroticism of the notion, namely a talking cure. In the analyst-​analysand relation,
the eroticism of the notion should not be obliterated but should be mitigated
through the functioning of shame and modesty. The taboo needs to be in place
at the level of the act, but it need not be so stringent at the level of fantasy. The
free associative work, the notional activity of language par excellence, requires
maintaining an as if eroticism without which the efficacy of the work dwindles
into the placidity of the one-​sided pure thought and, more worryingly, the pos-
sible dialectical shifts it may lead to (these latter two extremes refer to a morti-
fied non-​transference and to a wild erotomanic non-​transference). Finally, in the
 The paradox of a boundary without a limit 89
case of the parent-​child relation, notional eroticism must completely give way
to the pure thought of desexualization, mostly in the form of disgust. Without
this near total disparagement of the erotic notion, the child is at the risk of
severe mental illness. Needless to say, these ideal vicissitudes seldom transpire as
the imposition of the taboos in their appropriate form requires the arduous and
patient labour of self-​reflection by which a term accedes to its notion through
the paradoxical kenosis to its Other-​symptom. This achievement requires, of
course, nothing less than that most difficult love which Christian wisdom has
christened love of the neighbour and which psychoanalytic sagacity may rename
as the love of the symptom. The parent must love his/​her child-​symptom as man
must adore his woman-​symptom and, finally, the analyst must love the patient
sufficiently to agree to be his/​her abject-​symptom regardless of all the wild
dialectical vicissitudes this may entail. Only through this difficult love can a
paradoxical boundary without a limit be achieved that will safeguard these prin-
cipal differences such that each term may endure at the height of the dignity
of its notion.

Notes
1 Soler (2000) speaks of the “homosexual unconscious”.
2 It is remarkably prescient and proto-​Lacanian of Hegel to speak of “lack” with
respect to the manner of maintaining boundaries through internal division rather
than external imposition.
3 More precisely, a boundary is a diremption and as such it leads to impasses and
contradictions. For Hegel’s discussion of the contradictions inherent to the concept
of “limit” see de Boer, 2010 (372), and Hegel, 1969 (127 onwards).
4 The dialectical nature of shame is most evident in that the slightest nuances in a
woman’s blush will make it clear whether she signals desire or disgust/​unease. The
same affect with nearly identical external insignia indicates two opposed meanings.
5 Much of the (pseudo)-​feminist reviling of men is likely based on the following
mechanism. A woman rejects her femininity casting it out as a rejected “lower” term
that blemishes her masculine ideal of womanhood. However, unaware of her own
diremptive tendency she projects it on to men (“they hate and vilify the feminine”)
against whom she then stages a battle of pure prestige. She thus wages war against her
disavowed diremptions displaced on to men.
Variation 15 
Good and evil

Žižek argues that evil contains itself only by becoming infinite/​absolute evil.
Evil cannot be contained by a transcendent power. Only evil has, paradoxically,
the power to properly contain evil.The good is thus not an overarching higher
principle controlling/​containing evil from above.1 The stringent opposition of
evil and the good is the result of the diremptions the understanding that cannot
see that violence is contained by violence. Controversially we may say that
Nazism is arguably the result of the diremption of this identity-​in-​difference.
National Socialism sought a good that it conceived as starkly opposed to evil,
thereby failing to recognize an essential unity of opposites. Fascism does not
consist of an insufficient separation of good and evil but rather from an over-​
stringent division. Žižek argues similarly when he claims that “barbarism is not
the opposite of culture, but rather, it is pure culture –​culture without civil-
ization” (Žižek in Badiou, 2010, 163). For Žižek, “it is no accident that Hitler
was Austrian, fanatically devoted to Wagner and in thrall to German Kultur
much more than to Prussian militarism” (ibid, 163). Fascism is the result of
a good that rejects its formal unity with evil. The “higher” term’s diremption
of the symptomatic “lower” term led to a generalized and ubiquitous evil.
What is more evil than the pretence to pure good? Interestingly, the identity-​
in-​difference between violence and the restraint of violence is also operative
in what Dupuy notes as the paradoxical relation between interdiction and
ritual: “Often, the ritual consists in staging the violation of … prohibitions and
violations” (Dupuy quoted in ibid, 975). With this added insight we may shed
light on the relation between the rise of violence and the decline of symbolic
rituals. If these two are linked it is not because ritual enacts a prohibition but,
to the contrary, because it stages a violation. The decline of symbolic ritual
leads to violence because we have lost the means by which to contain vio-
lence through the paradoxical process of making it “exorbitant”. As Bernstein
puts it, evil is necessary for the sublation of evil (Bernstein, 2002, 68). Political
correctness is diremptive in this regard. It is based on the puerile fantasy that
thinks we can eliminate violence and aggression by making a taboo of every-
thing. This effort has created a civilian-​ruled police state dressed in the false
attire of benevolence.
 Good and evil 91
Following Girard, Žižek explains that under Christianity the logic of sac-
rifice becomes inoperative. By telling the story of sacrifice from the perspec-
tive of the victim, scapegoating is undermined insofar as the innocence of the
victim is asserted (Žižek, 2012a, 975). Sacrifice becomes fake and the contain-
ment of violence through sacrifice is also lost, thereby opening the space for
uncontained violence. The loss of sacrifice and, concomitantly, the loss of the
containment of violence through violence have brought about a central contra-
diction of our time by which the cessation of sacrificial violence has unleashed
a state of global civil war. Here violence emerges as the “implicit admission of
impotence” (ibid, 998). These times of ubiquitous combat testify to the contra-
dictory dialectical unity of riots and terrorism where, according to Žižek, the
former represents a zero-​level protest sustained by no desire while the latter
acts “on behalf of that absolute Meaning provided by religion” (ibid, 998). The
aforementioned suspicion cast on the intellect among certain psychoanalysts is
related to the fact that evil and knowledge, according to Hegel, belong together.
The biting of the apple of knowledge led to the fall into evil (Bernstein, 2002,
62). However, knowledge, though forbidden, is also what makes us human (ibid,
64). One must pass through evil-​knowledge in order to eventually sublate it. If
we admit that knowledge in psychoanalysis must be sublated (otherwise psy-
choanalysis becomes a university discourse) we must also add that this sublation
can, paradoxically, only take place under the auspices of an “exorbitant” know-
ledge. Lacan’s intellectual forays into a plethora of academic disciplines are a
necessary step on the way towards this sublation.
The ethical act, Žižek (1996) argues, has the same formal structure as radical
evil insofar as both are unmotivated by simple egoistic concerns. Žižek thus
posits the identity of good and evil with the claim that “Evil is ‘Good in
becoming’” (Žižek, 2003, 88). Is the murder of the father then an ethical act or
an instance of evil? It depends on the perspective. If the father’s enunciation of
law is seen as evil (a particular debasing the universal for its own self-​assertion),
then the correlative murder of the father will be felt as evil too.The subject may
literally kill the father insofar as the symbolic murder has failed. If the father’s
proclamation of law is seen as an instance of a particular sacrificing itself for
the universal, then the subject’s own symbolic murder will be less tarnished
with guilt. It will then become evident that the father’s law and the primal
murder are, in fact, part and parcel of the same process of the expulsion of the
real into the symbolic. By proclaiming the law, the father “dies” insofar as he
subordinates himself to the law. He lessens the burden of the symbolic murder
and allows the subject to take responsibility for his/​her act. The father’s law,
though it involves a particular posing in the place of the universal, is not a case
of evil but represents, rather, a prime instance of the good. Good and evil are
thus formally the same. For Badiou, evil is not the outcome of ignorance (i.e. a
state of unknowing or “innocence”) but is, rather, the consequence of a “truth
procedure” that has not been properly limited. Evil is thus the outcome of an
“over-​fidelity” to a truth:
92 Good and evil
As can be seen with scientism, or with totalitarianism, there is always a
desire for the omnipotence of the True. There lies the root of Evil. Evil is
the will to name at any price. Usually it is said that Evil is lies, ignorance, or
deadly stupidity.The condition of evil is much rather the process of a truth.
(Badiou, 2003a, 66–​67)

Good and evil are separated by a mere quantitative consideration; evil is the
good that has lost its sense of measure. The challenge of symbolic castration is
here felt with all its ethical weight as the subject is beckoned to recognize a
kinship between the most heinous evils and the loftiest goods. The failure to
recognize this formal identity relegates us to the mediocrity of compromise
formations in the realm of ethics. Today’s emphasis on compromises attests
to the veritably reformist times in which we live. Nietzsche had presciently
diagnosed this long ago: “This modernity made us ill –​this indolent peace,
this cowardly compromise, the whole virtuous filth of the modern yes and no”
(Nietzsche, 2005, 4).
Likewise, the symbolic murder of the father, as an act of pure defiance, is
radical evil from one perspective and the height of good from another. This act
is essential for the advent of the symbolic order and the subject. It is the radical
Ausstossung through which the subject gains respite from the monstrosity of
the primal Thing. The symbolic murder is an exorbitant evil that creates the
good.This primordial Ausstossung manifests as a decision to speak and articulate
desire. The subject abandons the silence of infancy and joins the community of
speakers. However, insofar as Verwerfung must accompany every Ausstossung, the
subject’s speech will always be tainted with an ineradicable stain of falsehood.
He/​she is forced into a minimal lying gesture as the truth may be spoken only
through the medium of untruth. If symbolic castration occurs, this minimal lie
at the basis of all enunciation will not be seen as evil. For the psychotic subject
for whom castration is inoperative, the lie which accompanies all truth as its
shadowy other side plagues him/​her with melancholic guilt when observed in
him/​herself and paranoid rage when witnessed in the signs emanating from the
Other. What the psychotic cannot fathom is the identity-​in-​difference of truth
and lies. Strictly speaking, it is not accurate to say (as has become common-
place) that the psychotic cannot lie. The clinical experience amply testifies to
the opposite. The psychotic cannot fathom that a lie is a means to truth.
Evil has primacy over the good, which must, therefore, allow itself to be
incorporated by it. The man poised to do the “good” must recognize his act
as a mere moment of evil, the principal element (symptom) of the conceptual
pair, in order to avoid the delusional self-​conceit of the over-​virtuous. Lacan
asks us nothing less than to recognize our good as a moment of evil when he
reminds us that psychoanalysis places “no promise in altruistic feeling” (Lacan,
2006, 80) in that it lays “bare the aggressiveness that underlies the activites of
the philanthropist, the idealist, the pedagogue, and even the reformer” (ibid,
80–​81). Much of post-​war twentieth century philosophy falls prey to the error
of embracing the good prior to its incorporation by evil. Exemplary here is, of
 Good and evil 93
course, Levinas’ critique of Heideggerian fundamental ontology. Like Levinas,
Badiou too misses the dimension of evil antecedent to the good. In both cases,
an ethical decision for the diremptive remain of the good is taken as the onto-
logical priority of the good over evil. Badiou and Levinas explicitly and avowedly
follow Plato for whom, as Pagès explains, dialectic designates the knowledge
of Ideas and, as such, the science of the good, namely the Idea that gives to all
other Ideas their unity and force. Plato takes the diremptive remain of the good
as ontologically grounded and therefore prior to the speculative process rather
than as a question of ethical choice made a posteriori.
Žižek puts forward a similar critique of Badiou:

In Badiou’s affirmative approach, Evil is a defective mode of Good, and the

hypothetical subject is a defective mode of the subject as agent of truth,
while from the Hegelian (and Lacanian, I would claim) perspective, the
negative move comes first: loss is prior to what it is the loss of, betrayal is
prior to what it is the betrayal of, the Fall is prior to what it is the Fall from.
(Žižek, 2015, 79–​80)

The Greeks too fall prey to the same error:

The Greeks lost their moral compass precisely because they believed in the
spontaneous and basic uprightness of the human being, and thus neglected
the ‘bias’ towards Evil at the very core of humanity: true Good does not
arise when we follow our nature, but when we fight it.
(Žižek, 2015, 132)

By contrast, for Hegel “the gesture that opens up the space for the Light of
Logos is absolute negativity, the ‘Night of the World’, the point of utter madness
in which fantasmatic apparitions of ‘partial objects’ float around” (ibid, 184).
Kierkegaard also chooses the good/​sacred over the evil/​profane. However,
unlike Badiou and Levinas, for Kierkegaard faith is a leap and, as such, it cannot be
grounded in any ontological priority of the good.Tertullian’s faith is interesting
insofar as it is not only not grounded in any sense of the good’s primacy but
is, rather, chosen despite awareness of profanity’s precedence; as is famously
known, Tertullian claims to believe because it is absurd. Philosophies that choose
the diremptive remain of the good speak from a masculine position. The pos-
sible pitfalls of these philosophies would thus mirror the impasses of masculine
sexuation; by choosing the good, evil may return in the form of “attacks of
evil”. More accurately –​and to be fair to such thinkers –​it is a question of
whether the good is chosen as a diremptive remain, with the recognition of the
speculative identity of good and evil, or whether the good is chosen in strict
opposition to evil, in a diremptive act that posits a pure good untainted by evil.
Only in the latter case would “attacks of evil” be an imminent possibility. By
contrast to Badiou and Levinas, Nietzsche’s celebration of cruelty and his dis-
paragement of morality are tied to his fidelity to the diremptive remain of evil,
94 Good and evil
namely what he argues an older and more noble morality considered the good
(Nietzsche, 1998). Evil is less diremptive of the identity-​in-​difference of evil
and good. The good insists more fervently on the abyssal difference with evil.
Evil better recognizes that evil and good are brethren; the good makes claims
to much higher pretences than evil. Everyday language has a term to desig-
nate the “holier than thou” but the opposite, namely to designate someone as
“more profane than thou” smacks of absurdity.2 Where evil is on the side of the
real, the good provides the shelter of semblance. It is, as Lacan would have it,
the penultimate barrier to the real (Lacan, 1986). Nietzsche, de Sade, Schmitt,
Machiavelli and Hobbes choose the diremptive remain of evil and thus speak
from a feminine position. Rousseau is ambiguous in this regard. In his general
assessment of his contemporaries he sees evil everywhere and yet, as though to
buttress this acute consciousness, he posits, almost as an afterthought, the prim-
ordial existence of a noble savage, a mythical repository of the good.

Notes
1 Also, clinically, one cannot impose on the analysand a higher principle by which he/​
she could limit aggression. This would be re-​education rather than psychoanalysis.
2 In Seven (Fincher, 1995), the murderer shows that he and the cop are both sinners. He
knew it all along. The cop, however, lived in the convenient illusion of their radical
difference.
Variation 16 
Truth and lies

If the early Lacan (of the symbolic order) emphasized the importance of sense
while the later Lacan (of jouissance and the real) shifted attention to non-​sense,
we may bridge these together thereby positing the continuity of the Lacanian
oeuvre with the idea of a paradoxical sense from non-​sense.We may here speak
of a paradox at the level of meaning insofar as sense hinges on the presence
of an ultimately nonsensical phallic signifier. For Paul de Man (1979), every
text is an allegory of its own unreadability. This elegant definition may also
be applicable to the “text” of the unconscious and thus provide an interesting
model for the direction of the psychoanalytic treatment. A subject is “cured”
when he/​she can come to better terms with the unreadability of the uncon-
scious rather than rage against it with fixed narratives, master signifiers and
static constructions. The aim of interpretation would consist of simply punc-
turing such rigid significations, forcing the subject to narrate their ego anew.
Where psychoanalytic constructions would move towards the further consoli-
dation of meaning, interpretations would move in the direction of revealing
the fault lines that ultimately make every text “unreadable”. Such a technique,
consisting of revealing the points of impossibility-​illegibility of the subject’s free
association, would work only in the neuroses. In the psychoses, it may lead to
disastrous effects such as depersonalization and fragmentation, as the undoing
of the ego may not easily be rectified by new discursive productions. This will
either lead to increasingly paranoid elaborations with greater weight cast on the
specular imaginary or to a depressive void of subjectivity. If, as aforementioned,
meaning (the imaginary) is stable only if it is not univocal, then the equivo-
cating interpretation may result, in the psychoses, in forms of speech testifying
to a radical and dangerous instability such as attested to by manic proliferations,
depressive silences and paranoid constructions. In the neuroses, where the afore-
said paradox of meaning is operative, one can more confidently hope that the
puncturing of meaning through interpretation will lead to broader and more
flexible constructions from the analysand.1 Only in this case can the allegory of
the text’s unreadability retain its metaphoricity; otherwise it may slide into the
dangerous realm of the literal where the text’s unreadability will be experienced
as a real and concrete threat not only to identity but also to the body proper.
This reference to non-​sense at the basis of sense is also crucial for understanding
96 Truth and lies
how subjective responsibility can be assumed through the analytic process. The
interpretation, insofar as it aims primarily to deconstruct, is most efficient when
ambiguous. The link between interpretation and enigma is therefore not arbi-
trary. It is only in this way that the space of non-​sense can be preserved so that
a novel sense may emerge. Cast in Lacanian parlance, the analysand can take
responsibility only for a message received in inverted form, i.e. upside-​down and
somewhat nonsensical. Interpretations that focus too stringently on meaning
further alienate the subject who will respond with either total obedience or
maintain a position of defiance. With the formulation according to which “the
subject receives his own message in inverted form”, Lacan takes us further away
from the Romantic (post-​Freudian) misunderstanding of the unconscious as a
cauldron of wild unorganized affects. By stark contrast to this Groddeckian and
(pseudo)-​Nietzschean “unconscious”, Lacan’s dictum reveals once again that the
unconscious has structure (one could not, otherwise, speak of inverted messages)
even if such structure precludes the presence of unequivocal meanings.The idea
of signifiers unhinged by signifieds gives the unconscious the form of music (a
symbolic system of signifiers without signifieds, as in mathematics). Moreover,
the importance of the motif of inversion as the very form of interpretation
engages the analytic couple in a contrapuntal exchange where the analyst offers
variations on themes introduced by the analysand.
This particular topology by which interpretations invert the analysand’s
speech only to paradoxically better render it on its feet is intimately tied to
the dialectic by which truth and untruth mutually implicate each other. Where
symbolic castration is operative, the truth is negated such that it re-​emerges
half-​said (mi-​dit) within the interstices of quotidian discursivity. Truth and
untruth are not radically opposed insofar as the former manifests itself partially
only through the latter. Undoubtedly, Lacan draws inspiration from Heidegger’s
(1967) notion of truth as a-​letheia, according to which truth and untruth form
a unity rather than stand opposed. Heidegger’s penchant for etymologies served
him well here insofar as the Greek word for truth (a-​letheia) involves a negation;
the “a” prefixing “letheia” denotes that truth is the negation of oblivion (“lethe”).
For Lacan, as we have seen, this translates into the idea that truth manifests
itself as fiction. This means that the unconscious manifests itself clinically in
the guise of lies: “there is no truth that, in passing through awareness, does not
lie” (Lacan, 1977). The Lacanian-​Heideggerian thesis concerning the identity-​
in-​difference of truth and untruth (a-​letheia) implies that truth emerges only as
negated.2 What makes truth inoperative in psychosis is, quite paradoxically, the
fact that it has not been repressed.
A brief analogy with photography may help. To obtain a photograph we
need, firstly, a negative that we may then develop. If the final picture is to
be labelled “truth”, its production requires the negative that we take to the
lab. The contradiction of psychotic foreclosure is that, on the one hand, it
represents a much deeper rejection of truth and/​or castration3 than repres-
sion while, on the other hand, it involves a failure of the negation of truth.
This apparent inconsistency is resolved if we remember that truth is its own
 Truth and lies 97
negation.4 There is no “raw” truth prior to its suppression; the truth emerges
as the result of an arduous play of concealment and dis-​concealment emerging
in the dialectical process of psychoanalytic treatment. Reverting back to our
analogy, the “truth” in psychosis is reduced to the bit of “brute reality” sitting
“out there” waiting to be photographed. From a psychoanalytic point of view
this does not constitute truth proper insofar as no symbolic inscription of that
“reality” has taken place given the failure to register it in a negative that may
be then developed into a photograph –​the latter alone would correspond
to the psychoanalytic notion of the return of the repressed truth. Something
is surely lost in every photograph, and it is precisely this loss that allows
the photograph to represent for us the “truth” of the recorded event more
efficiently than our actual lived experience of the moment. It is usually
when looking at old photographs that one realizes what one really had and
is now lost. The experience of the present moment is always tainted with
a kind of hypomanic disavowal (something akin to ingratitude). Looking at
old photographs requires a decidedly depressive position that facilitates the
access to truth. Insofar as the identity-​in-​difference of truth and lies is rad-
ically dirempted through foreclosure we may argue that the latter puts truth
altogether out of efficiency. In this light, it may be arguably the case that the
so-​called disenchantment of the world has made more difficult our access
to truth. Interestingly, the immense popularity of video games and virtual
reality testifies to a return to fiction, thereby marking our contemporary
situation with the contradiction of a heightened reality principle accom-
panied by a need to bury oneself entirely in the unreal. Psychoanalysis resists
this contradiction by holding on to the paradox of truth-​fiction. As apogee
of materialism, it represents the paradoxical unity of the pre-​modern mytho-
logical and the modern scientific.5
The result of this diremption is that truth is reduced to the dimension of
knowledge.6 Thus, the pursuit of knowledge (as opposed to truth-​fiction)
would be solidary with a will to ignorance: “there is no knowledge which
doesn’t emerge against a background of ignorance” (Lacan, 1992, 171). The
apex of this will to ignorance is found in psychotic foreclosure, thereby
rendering paranoid, according to Lacan, the very structure of knowledge. The
diremption of the truth-​fiction identity-​in-​difference leads to the contradic-
tion of paranoid knowledge; the rejection of the dimension of fiction, rather
than leading to a more lucid vision of the world, gives rise to paranoid systems
of thought. Scientism is a degradation of truth-​fiction to knowledge-​paranoia
arising from the vain attempt to access a “pure” truth untainted by fiction-​
untruth. Modern American psychiatry, behaviourism, cognitive science as
well as 19th century physiognomy and phrenology hinge precisely on such a
degradation of the dimension of truth-​fiction. The upshot of this scientistic
diremption is an immediate reification of subjectivity into something akin
to physical matter. As Findlay notes in his foreword to Hegel’s Phenomenology
of Spirit, if Hegel were alive today he would rail against the contemporary
reifications of consciousness:
98 Truth and lies
This treatment of conscious inwardness as if it had the contingency and the
singularity of external, natural being, leads, however, inevitably to attempts
to physicalize consciousness, to identify it with a thing, or a set of things,
that we find out there in the natural world. Had Hegel lived in the pre-
sent age we should now have had a long treatment of the behaviourisms of
Watson and Tolman and Skinner.
(Hegel, 1977)

Interestingly, Findlay continues, Hegel would not have fallen in despair faced
with this kind of scientistic reductionism insofar as he would retain hope that,
through a dialectical reversal, matter (rather than mind) would be reduced and,
consequently, mind would be able to reassert its primacy:

All that is important in Hegel’s long attempt to make dialectical sense of

these primitive exercises is the final outcome: that if self-​consciousness can
be reduced to something like a bone or a bone-​structure, then a bone or a
bone-​structure must be credited with all the intentional negativity, and the
negation of this negativity, involved in self-​consciousness. The manoeuvres
of reductionism are accordingly vain: if mind can be modelled by matter,
matter must be possessed of every intricate modality of mind. Nothing has
been achieved by the “reduction”, and, since the phenomena of self-​con-
sciousness are richer and more intrinsically intelligible than the limited
repertoire that we ordinarily ascribe to matter, it is matter rather than mind
that is thereby reduced. This conclusion is what Bertrand Russell would
call “malicious”. Hegel, however, is not ashamed of the vengeful ingrati-
tude of consciousness and spirit: it overreaches its pitiable “other”, and
reduces it to itself.
(ibid, xix)

We have, firstly, the paradoxical dialectical unity of truth and fiction. Secondly,
we have the scientistic diremption of this identity-​in-​difference leading to the
contradiction of paranoid knowledge. This is finally followed by the “vengeful
ingratitude of consciousness and spirit” by which matter is reduced and spirit
finds again a path to self-​assertion freed from reification. If Russell deems this
a “malicious” operation, it is arguably because truth’s final triumph by reversal
is seen as malicious from the standpoint of the paranoia of knowledge; it is the
envious eye of diremption that perceives its own malice in the Other. Today’s
scientistic reductionism casts matter as the “higher” term unaware that its
diremptive snobbery of mind only further fortifies the latter’s ultimate triumph.
Maleval (2000, 16) aptly argues that the pharmaceutical industry uses neuro-
science as its veil of modesty. This, we may add, is a ploy by which it hides its
impudence (Soler, 2011, 94) as well as its “malice”, namely its own will to per-
ceive the subject’s resistance to scientistic reductionism as malice, something the
subject often tragically pays the price for with the straitjacket. Another possible
outcome of the diremption of truth-​fiction is the rise of what we colloquially
 Truth and lies 99
christen as “bullshit”. Bullshit is undeniably less spiritual than lies which, unlike
the former, retain a dialectical kinship to truth. In On Bullshit, Harry Frankfurt
puts forward such an argument when he claims that where “the liar cares about
the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn’t care if what they say is
true or false, but rather only cares whether or not their listener is persuaded”
(Frankfurt, 2005, 61). Perhaps we should here ask ourselves the following daring
question, leaving it for posterity to find an answer: is Modern American psych-
iatry an instance of the paranoia of knowledge, or, more innocently, is it the
quintessential manifestation of bullshit?
Political correctness, that most pusillanimous of delusions, is also
diremptive of the truth-​lies identity-​in-​difference insofar as, according to
Žižek, it abolishes the domain of “sincere lies.” Following Kant, Žižek locates
this paradoxical realm somewhere “between the two extremes of pure inner
morality and external legality”; it is the domain of politeness which is “both
more than just obeying external legality and less than pure moral activity”
(Žižek, 2015, 60). Politeness involves the paradox of sincerely saying things
which, upon deeper self-​reflection, we know we do not really mean (e.g.
asking people how they are doing, wishing them well and so on). With
political correctness, “in place of spontaneous customs followed in a non-​
reflexive way, we have explicit rules (‘blacks’ become ‘African Americans’,
‘fat’ becomes ‘weight-​challenged’, etc.)” (ibid, 151). This threat to the order
of sincere lies leads to the contradiction of politically correct impoliteness. Here
the “higher” term (the pretence of political correctness) dominates the lower
term (the “incorrect”).Yet it does so in a thoroughly impolite manner; what
is more truly incorrect than to tell people how to speak while falsely waving
the flag of tolerance and diversity? We thus come to the contradiction by
which the politically correct reveals itself as the quintessentially incorrect and
impolite. Political correctness veers into sheer rudeness precisely insofar as it
refuses to see in the “incorrect” (sincere lies) its symptom and truth. Political
correctness is held captive to the illusion of pure and unadulterated polite-
ness-​correctness. This provides yet another instance of the disparagement
of the “higher” into the “lower” term consequent upon diremption. The
impasses of political correctness are akin to those of the obsessional demand
for truth entirely untainted by lies. Here the moral trumpeter stands for the
“higher” term radically censoring all lies. The upshot is that he/​she can do
so only from a position of constitutive insincerity.
What we see, at many levels of social life, is the rise of rudeness and impu-
dence with explicit right-​wing effrontery at one end and the (pseudo)-​left-​
wing conceit of dictating to others how they should speak at the other end.
What joins the ubuesque7 leaders of the far right and the eternally wounded
social justice warriors of the (pseudo)-​left is precisely their shared fore-
closure of the domain of sincere lies which, we must add, represents for Kant
the only means for the civilizing of an otherwise wild humanity. For Kant,
the human being achieves civilized morality only through a long process of
acting:
100 Truth and lies
On the whole, the more civilized human beings are, the more they are
actors.They adopt the illusion of affection, of respect for others, of modesty
and of unselfishness without deceiving anyone at all, because it is under-
stood by everyone that nothing is meant sincerely by this.
(quoted in ibid, 147)

As La Rochefoucauld (1976) puts it most eloquently, “hypocrisy is the homage

which vice pays to virtue”. The hypocritical pretence to goodness eventually
leads to “real” goodness. The waning of this dimension of sincere lies, namely
politeness, is nowhere more visible than in the form that some public “debates”
have taken today where few even bother to feign civility. Intellectual/​political
arguments are increasingly indistinguishable from the triumphalism of gangster
rap battles. Debaters are increasingly proud of “destroying” the other’s argu-
ment, unwilling to even fake respecting the alternative position or, at the very
least, the other person.8 Instead of the required politeness of sincere lies, public
debates now resort to the subterfuge of passion which attempts to fill in the
gaps in argumentation with sheer bravado. Peterson’s brazen dismissal of French
intellectuals, Marxists, postmodern theorists (as if they were all the same) in
grand sweeping ad hominem statements is exemplary here (e.g. “Foucault The
Reprehensible & Derrida The Trickster”). Even if Peterson’s (rather paranoid)
critique was “valid” it would still suffer from the fact, so lucidly observed by
Hegel, that such fixation “on the antithesis of truth and falsity9 … does not
comprehend the diversity of philosophical systems as the progressive unfolding
of truth, but rather sees in it simple disagreements” (Hegel, 1977, 2). Today the
increased polarization of the judgments “true” and “false” in public debates (as
if we were simply dealing with facts –​incidentally this last word has become
another contemporary fetish, a kind of trump card that “wins” every time) has
hindered the slow and patient unfolding of truth through the notion that pro-
gressively sharpens its speculative complexity. Passion is indeed veritably un-​
dialectical as it blindly rejects its identity-​in-​difference with its Other through
fatuous claims to purity. With the obliteration of politeness –​now even the
rich, Jameson argues, exercise the privilege of being crass –​public debates have
become the site of battles of pure prestige where not only right and left are
pinned against each other like wild hounds but, in an uncanny twist, men and
women re-​enact an infantile battle of the sexes. Today it is conviction, rather
than the lie, that is slaying the dimension of truth.
The dialectical unity of truth and lies is nowhere more apparent than when
observing children at play; make-​believe amply testifies to the fictitious structure
of truth. Indeed, nothing would attest more humorously to clumsy parenting
than recourse to “hard factual truth” when introducing a child to novel truths.
It would be mere folly to replace the old stories of “the birds and the bees”
with actual “scientific” facts or real images. Such interventions would be more
akin to transgressions of the veil of modesty that should be maintained between
the generations. Old-​fashioned myths around sexuality may be further from
the “facts” of sexuality as regards their content, however, the very form of their
 Truth and lies 101
expression conveys the truth of the matter more efficiently. These stories, pre-
cisely by virtue of their fictitiousness, relay to the child the message that things
should here remain unspoken and secret. The fabricated nature of the tales will
convey to the child something of parental unease and this, surprisingly, is perhaps
what will be most beneficial insofar as it will establish for the child the domain
of taboo. The child will thereby understand that sexuality, the quintessential
domain of the subtle, involves innuendo.The sexual arises in the very gesture of
its repression.This lesson in subtlety, secrecy and innuendo is precisely the most
important lesson a child can learn as he/​she acquires what, as aforesaid, Lacan
deems the highest virtue of the sexual, namely modesty (pudeur).
The analogy with photography shows that truth requires the minimal death
that the dimension of fiction casts upon the all too real. To Hegel’s “the word is
the murder of the thing” we add that the word is also “the life of the thing”;
without the death cast by language, the realm of things would paradoxically
remain a brute reality devoid of vitality.The symbol must embody the paradox-
ical identity-​in-​difference of the life and death of the thing: “All things human
may live only if they have been first killed and later reawakened to the life of
the symbol. All things human must cross death and enter into resurection”
(Lacan, 1987–​1988, my translation). With this we may sharpen Legendre’s
(2000) distinction between symbol and idol. Where the former represents the
identity-​in-​difference of the life and death of the thing, the latter dirempts
this with the paradoxical result of words imbued with jouissance while lacking
emotional vigour. Heidegger’s view that massive changes were on their way
regarding our relation to language10 could be understood as the dominance of
this diremption in late modernity. Moreover, the “all-​too-​living” language of
fascism represents perhaps another such instance of diremption where words
fuelled with the energy to mobilize masses are senseless bravado aimed at con-
juring hate. Fascism thus reveals itself as a linguistic/​aesthetic and political phe-
nomenon, something Benjamin (1969) presciently understood: “The logical
result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life”. In an effort
to abate prevailing fears that Trump will bring fascism to America, Žižek has
argued that Trump is a centrist politician.Though this statement may have some
political validity at the level of policies and so on, one should not dismiss the
fact that Trump’s use of language, most notably as an effort to conjure intense
emotions, is fascist in the linguistic-​aesthetic sense. Trump’s diremptive use of
language has the contradictory result of at once inflaming the passions while
numbing the mind.11 Trump makes much diremptive use of idols rather than
symbols; or, cast in Hegelese, his language is imbued with pure thoughts to the
detriment of notional ambiguity. Following Freud and Lacan, Legendre (2000)
explains that primary repression leads to the essential separation of words and
things. To this we should add that primary repression leads to the successful
division and union of words and things. Repression allows for idols to become
symbols and, therefore, for pure thoughts to elevate to notions. Adding a nuance
to Freud’s perspicacious observations regarding the psychotic relation to lan-
guage, we suggest that psychosis does not only involve the equation of words
102 Truth and lies
and things but also entails their radical separation, whereby words become so
distant from things that the vitality of language is entirely lost.
Derrida (1987) critiques Lacan’s “a letter always arrives at its destination” (Lacan,
2006, 30). For this teleology to be guaranteed, he argues, the letter must always
crystallize into a meaning (Derrida, 1987). Can this critique of Lacan’s thesis
concerning the letter and its destination be extended to the notion of truth?
Does the notion of truth require a crystallization of language into meaning?
Lacan’s notion of truth does not depend on a prior emergence of meaning
through a process whereby the signifier leaps to reach the otherwise forbidden
signified. For Lacan, truth resists such “apotheosis” of language towards fixed
meanings. Truth deconstructs the narratives by which the ego establishes its
empire; all who have undertaken the emotionally arduous task of analysis will
attest to this. Derrida’s critique fails to heed to this speculative proposition: truth
is “the very antidote for fragmentation” (Derrida, 1987, 441) only insofar as it is
also the very vehicle of the deconstruction of meaning. Another formulation of this
paradox would state that the letter’s teleology is guaranteed only when its meaning
and content are compromised by the half-​saying of truth.12 Derrida misses the critical
nuance by which every letter reaches its destination “in an inverted form”. If
the letter fails to reach its destination, it is because meaning has crystallized all
too solidly. Such is the letter’s destiny in psychosis where the fixity of meaning
(the triumph of the idol) eclipses the half-​said truth.

Notes
1 Laplanche (1999b) very pertinently remarks that interpretations originate from the
analyst while constructions are the work of the analysand.
2 Freud’s “On Negation” (1925) makes precisely this point.
3 Freud (1911) describes foreclosure (Verwerfung) as a “not wanting to know about cas-
tration even in the sense of repression”. Foreclosure represents the obliteration (rather
than displacement, conversion or dissociation) of an idea.
4 Truth is doubly contradictory; first, by virtue of the fact that a statement and its
opposite may be both true, and second, more immanently, by virtue of the fact that
a truth emerges only through its negation. Of course, we should here add that the
former is merely a special case of the latter.
5 Clemens (2013) provides a twin genealogy of psychoanalysis in modern science and
literature, thereby giving support to the thesis put forward here that psychoanalysis
represents the paradoxical dialectical unity of the pre-​modern and the modern.
6 Laurent (2012) has thus argued that Joycean sublimation takes place entirely within
the dimension of knowledge.
7 In order to underscore the increasing buffoonery of political leadership, Foucault
(1999) coined the term “ubuesque” after Jarry’s Ubu Roi. The contradiction here is
that the buffoonery of power has done nothing to reduce it but has even strengthened
its hold through this artifice.
8 Consider the following titles of YouTube videos: “Ben Shapiro Absolutely Destroys
People with Facts”, “Jordan Peterson OWNS Everyone”. The puerile triumphalism
never fails to put a smile on my face but, alas, it is a grin that hides chagrin.
 Truth and lies 103
9 Consider how often, with zeal bordering on the religious, Peterson imputes to an
idea the simplistic judgment that it is “PLAIN WRONG”.
10 Interview retrieved on April 7, 2017 at: www.youtube.com/​watch?v=9_​vYz4nQUcs
11 Is it not, moreover, a delicious irony of chance that this tasteless conjuror of popular
sentiment should be christened by a name evoking his triumphalist buffoonery as
well as conjuring the image (as in a mirror) of a hot air–​spouting brass instrument?
12 Interestingly, Poe’s The Purloined Letter tracks the itinerary of a letter whose location
is always precisely known but whose content remains an enigma.
Variation 17 
Thrownness and
autonomy

For the subject to have a subjectivizable relation to his/​her own past, primary
repression needs to be operative.To remember his/​her past in a psychically effica-
cious manner, he/​she must also forget the past. Psychosis provides a limit to this
idea. Insofar as the psychotic subject has not achieved primary repression, he/​
she will often recall very precise childhood memories. However, the meaning
he/​she will draw from these remembrances may be very static as he/​she will
be unable to engage the past in a dialectical relation to future events that may
bestow on them new meanings or important nuances. The foreclosure of the
past implies an inability to assume his/​her genealogy, namely the contingent
cultural and familial inheritance that make up the content of what Heidegger
christened “thrownness”. This notion points to what predates the birth of the
subject and which he/​she cannot escape; it is a limit to freedom and self-​
determination.1 Heidegger argues that thrownness means that Dasein has no
power of determination over that which constitutes his/​her “basis”: “In being
a basis –​that is, in existing as thrown –​Dasein constantly lags behind its possi-
bilities. It is never existent before its basis, but only from it and as this basis. Thus,
‘Being-​a-​basis’ means never to have power over one’s ownmost Being from
the ground up. This ‘not’ belongs to the existential meaning of ‘thrownness’”
(Heidegger, 1967, 329–​331).
This limitation on freedom, arguably the condition for the little freedom we
have, entails that the subject accept being excluded from his/​her thrownness.
Cast in Lacanian diction, to be dupe means to take one’s contingent thrownness
as an irreducible necessity. The psychotic, refusing “to be excluded from his
origin” (Lacan), cannot accept thrownness. The neurotic faces challenges of
his/​her own in this regard –​thrownness raises the indignation of even the most
privileged and sagacious. Neurotic fantasy is a protest against thrownness. In
neurosis, fantasy addresses the problem of thrownness as a response to a question
(“where do babies come from?” and so on), while in psychosis no question is
posed at all. Here, there is only certainty about an answer. Fantasy represents a
less radical rejection than psychotic delusion. In paranoia, the structural necessity
of thrownness is taken to be the contingent effect of the Other’s will, a conspiracy
planned to serve its own singular jouissance. The paranoid subject, unwilling
to accept the paradox of limited freedom, is relegated to the contradiction
 Thrownness and autonomy 105
of unbound sovereignty indistinguishable from subjection. When Lacan claims
that “the madman is the free man” (Lacan, 1969, 17, my translation), we must
add that this “freedom” is tantamount to utter servitude. In melancholia we
have a subject casting all the blame of thrownness on him/​herself. Paradoxically,
this delusional sense of guilt absolves the possibility of subjective responsibility,
leading, in the extreme, to the ghastly contradiction which Freud so elegantly
christened as “criminals out of a sense of guilt” and which Nietzsche named the
“pale criminals”, subjects reduced to “a coil of wild serpents that are seldom at
peace among themselves … seeking prey in the world” (Nietzsche; 1969, 66).
The clinic also testifies to instances where a psychotic subject rejects his/​her
genealogy and symbolic debt to the past in the form of identity amnesia or
as a decision to change his/​her identity in an effort to make a radical new
start. Both instances are well attested to, respectively, in Wenders’ Paris, Texas
and Antonioni’s The Passenger. In the former, Travis, in the grips of complete
amnesia, slowly re-​enters the social bond and confronts subjective historical
truths regarding his failed marriage and the question of paternity. Interestingly,
the transitional space (to borrow a Winnicottian term) from the no-​man’s land
where he had been relegated back to social co-​existence was a desolate oasis
named “Terlingua”, akin to the Latin for “land of language”. Travis’ return to
society and his re-​engagement with historical truth begin with an effort to
relinquish the silence of foreclosure and engage again with the Other of speech.
The Passenger recounts the story of a man in pursuit of an alternate identity/​
reality, the quintessential gesture of foreclosure moving in the direction diamet-
rically opposed to symbolic castration. In both cases, the identity-​in-​difference
of freedom/​autonomy and thrownness is dirempted, thereby relegating the
subjects to the contradiction of complete social impotence co-​existing with a
gargantuan effort towards absolute self-​sufficiency.
Thrownness is intimately connected to the irremediable debt that structures
the relation to previous generations. Thrownness means that this debt cannot
be effaced. Attempts to obliterate it for the sake of total self-​sufficiency à
la Rousseau2 result in the buildup of actual (rather than symbolic) debts. As
Darian Leader (2012) has convincingly argued, this tendency is most evident
in the manic-​depressive psychoses. In such cases, the substitution of the sym-
bolic debt to the past for a monetary debt to a present creditor exemplifies
an instance of the psychotic re-​emergence in the real. Interestingly, this phe-
nomenon lends further credence by way of psychoanalytic proof, above and
beyond the already existing economic evidence, that capital is today’s real (cf.
Žižek). Late modernity thus testifies to subjects who, rather than acquire their
dignity through a relation of reverential deference to the past, are reduced to
the humiliating submissiveness to a literal creditor inspiring more fear than
respect. The religion that is capitalism (cf. Benjamin (2004)) functions in pre-
cisely this manner. Having abolished the subject’s reverential relation to his/​her
forefathers –​the great achievement of capitalism consists of having severed us
from the chains of tradition –​the foreclosed Other of thrownness returns in the
form of faith in the future, namely in one’s ability to later pay one’s debts to
106 Thrownness and autonomy
one’s creditor.3 In paranoia thrownness is reduced to a persecutory conspiracy,
in melancholia it is depreciated to a delusional sense of guilt and, finally, in the
manic-​depressive psychoses it is transformed into an actual debt taking the
form of an overwhelming sense of obligation to an idealized Other or, more
literally, a financial debt to a creditor. In all cases, the subject desperately flees
from the structural necessity of thrownness through an omnipotent delusion of
autonomy. Each time, the subject is paradoxically doomed to fulfil his/​her des-
tiny through the very effort of trying to surmount it.Thrownness here functions
as the ineradicable symptom-​torsion that is, at once, the obstacle to autonomy
and yet also its very sine qua non condition (Žižek, 2015, 69). Diremption leads
to the triumph of the “lower” term such that the very effort to assert uncondi-
tional autonomy paradoxically flounders into indigent dependency. The rejec-
tion of the past –​American a-​historicism as Lacan (2006) had it –​is a feeble and
puerile attempt at “freedom” which enslaves one all the more.
The hypotheses that Lacan put forward regarding Joyce provide a very
interesting and fascinating exception to the rule concerning thrownness as
a condition of sanity. What Lacan shows with Joyce is a subject capable of
dirempting his past (foreclosure of the name of the father) without thereby
suffering the consequences of madness. According to Lacan, Joyce separates
from his ancestors and thus rejects his genealogy. As Soler puts it, Joyce is
“voluntarily uprooted” (Soler, 2015, 70). Joyce rejects the genealogical tree;
he wants to make himself the origin (ibid, 130). Such a string of foreclosures
would generally lead to madness if it were not for the very successful work of
compensation Joyce achieves by way of his writing. How, according to Lacan
(2005a), Joyce achieves stabilization within foreclosure goes beyond the scope
of this treatise. However, what is important to note for our purposes is that
Joyce, according to Lacan, was able to provide an exception to psychoanalytic
theory. To this we may add that Joyce also provides an exception to dialectical
thinking and speculative philosophy. He shows us how much a subject can bear
diremption without going mad. In this way, Joyce could indeed provide a great
example of the Deleuzian “nomad”, namely the subject who, by contrast to
Žižek’s (generally valid) contention, does not require thrownness as a condition
of his autonomy.The topology of knots that Lacan further develops in his work
on Joyce takes psychoanalysis beyond its previous purview and, perhaps, beyond
Hegel’s speculative philosophy. Taking us well beyond the scope of this treatise,
one may ask whether Hegelian dialectics consists of a special case of Lacan’s later
topological advancements.4

Notes
1 The concept of thrownness represents one of Heidegger’s greatest weapons against
what he elsewhere (1991) termed “Western subjectivism”, namely the tradition of
Western conceptualizations of an endogenous human striving. Erroneous interpret-
ations of Freud may include the sexual drive or Eros under the same banner of “sub-
jectivism”. It is to Lacan’s credit to have corrected such biologistic and subjectivist
 Thrownness and autonomy 107
misreadings of Freud by showing that human sexuality is imposed on the subject from
the outside.
2 Soler (2012) explains that Rousseau’s father blamed him for his mother’s death at
his birth. She argues that this nonsensical guilt led to Rousseau’s total refusal of guilt
henceforth. In Heideggerian parlance, Rousseau’s thrownness constituted too much
of a heavy debt. It could not be subjectivized and haunted him in the form of a con-
viction regarding a conspiracy to defame and slander his name.
3 Agamben (2019) puts forward the argument that capitalism is based on the religious
faith in one’s ability to later pay for what one has borrowed today. To highlight this
same centrality of belief, Sloterdijk (2018) argues that capitalism should be called
“creditism” insofar as the word “credit” comes from “credere” meaning to believe.
4 This may explain the limited interest Žižek has in Lacanian topology.
Variation 18 
Life and death

The paradox in relation to time (to have a past one must accept being excluded
from it, i.e. one must repress it) is intricately linked to another important
paradox concerning the human being’s rapport with life and death. For the
subject to maintain a relation to the future and thereby sustain desire for even-
tual projects (and thus feel alive), acknowledgment of mortality must be opera-
tive. The most famous philosophical articulation of the relation between the
subject’s engagement with life and his/​her assumption of mortality is Heidegger’s
notion of “being-​towards-​death”. As with the identity-​in-​difference of truth
and untruth, the psychotic poses an exception to “being-​towards-​death”. The
psychotic presents a subjectivity that does away with mortality. Let us consider
Balmès’ argument as it is paraphrased by Žižek:

Francois Balmès makes here a perspicuous remark that it is as if Lacan’s

implicit clinical reproach to Heidegger’s existential analytic of Dasein as
“being-​towards-​death” is that it is appropriate only for neurotics and fails
to account for psychotics: a psychotic subject occupies an existential pos-
ition for which there is no place in Heidegger’s mapping, the position of
someone who in a way “survives his own death”. Psychotics no longer fit
Heidegger’s description of Dasein’s engaged existence, their life no longer
moves in the coordinates of freely engaging in a futural project against the
background of assuming one’s past: their life is outside “care /​Sorge/​”,
their being is no longer directed “towards death”.
(Žižek, 2012b)

To have an engaged existence that is dynamically coordinated to the future as

well as to the past, the subject must assume finitude and mortality. Insofar as
Heideggerian “care” is based on the notion of being-​towards-​death it is not
applicable to the psychotic who has foreclosed the dimension of mortality. The
psychotic is thus excluded from a crucial feature of Dasein and thus falls out of
the frame that constitutes the universality of being human. This is most poign-
antly and literally seen in the clinical picture of the Cotard syndrome1 where
one witnesses the horrific sight of a subject who has in fact veritably “survived
his own death” as Žižek elegantly put it. The striking clinical picture of Cotard
 Life and death 109
syndrome involves the contradiction of a delusional certainty of being literally
dead co-​existing, at times, with the idea of being immortal. The psychotic is
one who, having foreclosed the dimension of being-​towards-​death, is paradox-
ically more “dead to the world” than the neurotic who lives in the horizon of
mortality. Schreber died as a subject (he describes himself as a “corpse carrying
another corpse” (Schreber, (2000)) but maintained certainty regarding his own
immortality.
Without directly appealing to psychoanalysis or psychosis, Alain Badiou
(2015a) put forward a critique of Heidegger’s idea that death represents the
culmination of Dasein’s immanent “ownmost potentialities”. Heidegger (1967)
likens death to the ripening of a fruit; death marks for him the realization
of Dasein’s inner necessity. Badiou explains that Heidegger’s notion of death
is much like Hegel’s absolute insofar as both orient human life from within.
By contrast to Heidegger, Badiou insists on the radical externality of death
as a contingency foreign to the subject: “Death is something that happens to
you; it is not the immanent unfolding of some linear programme” (Badiou,
2015a). For Badiou, death is not immanent to the subject. Following Spinoza
who claims that “nothing can be destroyed except by an external cause” (ibid),
Badiou ventures to say that the human is not even mortal if “mortal” is taken
to mean that the human being immanently contains the virtuality of death.
Badiou also argues that the Heideggerian insistence on mortality is symptom-
atic of “capitalist and religious nihilisms” (ibid) which he defines as the belief
that nothing is important because of death. Such nihilism, for Badiou, equalizes
and thereby devalues everything. Despite agreeing with Badiou’s first claim
regarding the externality and contingency of death, one should think longer
about the ramifications of his second claim regarding nihilism. Indeed, death
is not immanent to life; it simply intervenes. However, to immediately dismiss
Heideggerian (but also religious, as Badiou insists) being-​towards-​death as nihil-
istic fails to heed to an important psychoanalytic point captured by Balmès’
critique of Heidegger’s claim to universalize being-​towards-​death rather than
limiting it to the neuroses. The limit case provided by psychosis offers great
proof of Badiou’s point regarding the externality of the death. Indeed, death
is not immanent to human life; but neither are sex and paternity. Paternity
is something we encounter in the symbolic order and sex is not a biological
striving internal to human life, it is a drive thoroughly mediated and subverted
by language.That death and paternity are external to the human being does not
imply that there should be no endeavour to internalize these. Indeed, infantile
sexual researches are attempts to come to grips with the externality of sex,
death and paternity in order to then subjectivize what is initially imposed from
the outside.The institution of the family constitutes a crucial dispositif for enab-
ling this process.2
By stark contrast to Badiou’s indictment against Heidegger’s alleged nihilism,
psychoanalysis holds that without death nothing is important.3 Death must be
internalized for life to have meaning and for the subject to access a sense of
future. Paradoxically, the psychotic is not able to open the space of human
110 Life and death
temporality to include a futural dimension wherein the possibility for a project
could be established precisely because his/​her future is reduced to a chrono-
logical sequence devoid of a reference to death.The inability to internalize mor-
tality, paternity and sex leads to the great impasses of subjectivity. For Schreber,
the promotion to Supreme Court judge (an emblematically paternal role) led
to the displacement of his non-​subjectivized sexual libido on to the imaginary
figure of a cruel God of jouissance and to the absurd contradiction of a delusion
of quasi-​immortality co-​existing with the aforementioned conviction of being
a corpse carrying another corpse. With Badiou, it must be held that death (but
also sex and paternity) is not immanent to human life. However, one must not
label as “nihilistic” the effort to internalize it insofar as the failure to do so risks
leading us to the true nihilism of total de-​subjectivization. It is curious to note
how the contemporary philosopher most intent upon reviving the notion of the
subject (in the face of its deconstruction in post-​war French philosophy) fails
to recognize that human subjectivity hinges on the gesture by which the exter-
nality of death is partially internalized to give life meaning and open the realm
of human temporality for existential projects requiring futural engagements. By
opposing life and death and thereby failing to see the coincidence of contraries,
Badiou remains bound to the finite. Against Badiou’s “Down with death!” –​a
hysteric (but not so sublime) protest against the (absolute) master if there ever
was one –​one must say “rise with death” as the only possible life for a human
subject is a life after resurrection.4 As Žižek argues, “the awareness of one’s fini-
tude immediately reverts into the experience of one’s true infinity” (Žižek,
2012a, 994). In similar vein, Lebrun notes that, for Hegel, the subject can show
him/​herself to be free and elevate him/​herself above all constraints only insofar
as he/​she is capable of dying (Lebrun, 1972, 29). For Hegel, “the life of Spirit is
not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation,
but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it” (Hegel, 1977, 19).5
The defiant “Down with death!” precludes such awareness and, as a result, rather
than open access to the infinite, appends the subject all the more stringently to
finitude. Death is an external universality that singularizes. If we lived forever,
infinite time would level all differences and singularity would be abolished. We
all die and yet the awareness (symbolization-​internalization) of this universality
is the only thing that singularizes us. Moreover, the awareness of death is what
allows the subject to separate minimally from his/​her own image. Lacan makes
this pivotal point in the following passage:

Indeed, it is by means of the gap in the imaginary opened up by this pre-

maturity, and in which the effects of the mirror stage proliferate, that the
human animal is capable of imagining himself mortal –​which does not
mean that he could do so without his symbiosis with the symbolic, but
rather that, without the gap that alienates him from his own image, this
symbiosis with the symbolic, in which he constitutes himself as subject to
death, could not have occurred.
(Lacan, 2006)
 Life and death 111
It is only through the awareness of death that the human being is able to achieve
a symbiosis with the symbolic and, therefore, some separation from his/​her
self-​image. Interestingly, we here see the way various identities-​in-​difference
intermingle in mutual implication. Through awareness of the dialectical unity
of life and death, the subject achieves symbiosis with the symbolic (i.e. the
subject-​collective identity-​in-​difference is achieved) and can, thereby, separate
from him/​herself such that the I coincides with the not-​I.
Badiou takes affirmation for granted without giving enough consider-
ation to its dialectical rapport with negation (death/​mortality). For Žižek too,
freedom requires detachment from the body (a kind of “Down with death!”).
However, this detachment occurs through an excessive attachment to an “organ
without a body” (Žižek, 2012a, 992).Thus, “attachment itself becomes the form
of appearance of its opposite” (ibid, 992). The subject can only be free from the
body (and therefore partake in the infinite) through a paradoxical excessive
affirmation of the body (a partial object):

The paradox is thus that the zero-​level of negativity is not a negative ges-
ture, but an excess affirmation: by getting stuck on a partial object, by
affirming it repetitively, the subject detaches itself from its body, enters into
a negative relationship towards its body.
(ibid, 992)

The “subject as actual infinity” arises insofar as “the very worthlessness of

the object for which I am ready to risk everything makes it clear that what is at
stake is not it but myself, my freedom” (ibid, 992).
Though death is external to life, the human subject will necessarily experi-
ence this exteriority. Žižek provides an overview of the different ways Lacan
conceptualizes the manner in which language accounts for the death drive.
At the time of the “Rome Discourse”, Lacan’s notion of the death drive owes
much to the Hegelian idea that “the word is a death, a murder of the thing” (Žižek,
1989, 131). By relegating a “thing” (corporeal reality) to the status of a con-
cept, language introduces a radical “negativity”. In the period of the “Purloined
Letter”, the death drive is equated to language as a whole. Here the symbolic,
conceived as “a differential system of elements” (ibid, 131), disturbs the imaginary
order of homeostasis through its “blind automatism” (ibid, 132). The third and
final stage introduces the notion of the real. Here, the symbolic is the principle
of homeostasis while the real is the “traumatic core” lying beyond the grasp
of the symbolic (ibid, 132). What is important to remember with respect to
this third formulation of the death drive is that the real emerges only retro-
actively as an effect of the symbolic itself. As a result, in all three cases, it is lan-
guage that introduces a radical negativity leading the sexual drive away from
any kind of pre-​given goal such as reproduction or harmonious union with a
counterpart. The fact of speaking subjects the human being to a sexual drive
that is always also a death drive. There is thus a parallel between death and the
symbolic order; both are a necessary exteriority that the subject encounters as
112 Life and death
something foreign yet ubiquitous. The consciousness of death is encountered
in lived experienced rather that acquired innately. It is absolutely necessary and
certain that every subject will encounter death though each subject will do so
in his/​her own singular way.
Badiou reduces the relation of life and death to simple difference; they
are conceived as external to each other. Death is thus a “radical exteriority”.
For this reason, Badiou also commends La Palice who, regarding a recently
deceased person, states that “a quarter an hour before his death, he was still
alive”. Badiou continues, “ ‘a quarter an hour before death’ he wasn’t what
Heidegger sees as ‘a quarter hour before death’ –​he wasn’t ‘a-​being-​toward-​
death’ ever since his birth”. It is indeed true, perhaps trivially true, that death
is not programmed into the living. It just happens from the outside. If an entity
can only be destroyed from the outside, it is also true that an entity can only
be enriched from the outside; and what is outside need not remain outside.
To die is not the only experience a subject has of death. As we have seen,
the subject will encounter the death drive through many registers of human
experience. Access to the eternal or the infinite can only arise through this
first experience of the death drive. For Hegel, the encounter with death leads
to the recognition of infinitude. Life and death stand in a paradoxical relation
of mutual interdependence such that each comes to itself through a kenosis in
the Other. Badiou is right to claim that the deceased man La Palice speaks of
does not suddenly become “a-​being-​toward-​death” retroactively on the basis
of his literal physical death. That Badiou would even bother to refute such a
view is, of course, intended to mock Heidegger’s philosophy of death. The
subject was “a-​being-​towards-​death” prior to his actual death through other
experiences where the ubiquity of the death drive made itself felt in his living
body. Psychoanalysis claims that every subject necessarily encounters death
through the particular idiosyncratic vicissitudes of his/​her life. This necessary
encounter with death leads to the possibility of becoming being-​towards-​
death through subjective responsibility (the internalization/​subjectivization of
the externality of death). If this transpires, it opens the space of the infinite
thereby freeing the subject from the cage of finitude. Badiou’s passion for the
infinite is something that our Hegelian inspiration celebrates and commends.
However, following Žižek and Hegel, we add that this awakening to the posi-
tive dimension of the infinite occurs through the negativity of the death drive.
To Montaigne’s (2009) assertion, with which I agree, concerning the fact that
“to study philosophy is to learn to die”, I simply add that learning to die will
also teach us how to live and, more importantly (and in line with Badiou), it
will teach us how to live as subjects aligned with immortal aims. For life to
have vigour it must accept death (the death drive) as its symptom and Other.
To reject the death drive as symptom disparages life itself (the “higher” term)
to lowly death; yet another instance of the triumph of the “lower” term con-
sequent upon diremption. As aforesaid, psychosis represents the exemplary
case of such diremption. The result is the massive mortification of the subject.
 Life and death 113
Interestingly, if we combine Hegel with simple biology we come to the con-
clusion that infinite spirit requires mortal being (i.e. beings that reproduce
sexually and which are hence mortal). Creatures that reproduce through cel-
lular division (mitosis) are by contrast literally immortal in that their genome
is reproduced infinitely. For Hegel, such creatures are confined to finite spirit.
The encounter with death and the ability to tarry with it are essential for the
ascension to infinite spirit.When the “higher” term (life or infinitude) dirempts
the symptomatic “lower” term (death or finitude), we get a massive separation
by which the subject is doomed to the vicious dialectical unity of an infinite life
of morbidity.
Badiou’s “Down with death!” suffers from the symptomatic limitation of his
work which consists of repeatedly denying the element of the death drive. The
celebration of life and disdain of the memento mori may seem like a profanation
(against death) but, above all, they are expressions of the sacredness of life. What
is missed here is the dimension of a profanation against life itself. A neces-
sary “Down with life!” should accompany Badiou’s “Down with death!” The
strength of psychoanalysis lies in that it dares to celebrate the profanatory-​
suicidal dimension under the rubric of the death drive. Badiou, by contrast,
generally opts for the sacred diremptive remain, something that gives his
thought an undeniably religious tenor. Could we not say that Badiou’s phil-
osophy (despite its merits) represents the contradiction of a religious thought
that poses as atheist? Badiou’s celebration of life and infinitude (against mor-
tality and finitude) misses the crucial point that our conception of infinity and
eternity is born out of the experience of mortality. When a loved one dies we
inevitably face the fact that we will never see them again. The never becomes
here the marker, albeit in negative form, of the infinite. A statement of infini-
tude that is utterly unwedded to the experience of the negative dwindles to
the absurdity of infinitude as never-​ending, something that lives on forever tem-
porally and literally. This is most evident in psychosis where it is precisely the
memento mori that is foreclosed and where, as a result, infinitude emerges in the
disparaged mode of forever-​ness. The memento mori is the torsion that permeates
the surface of life, something Hans Holbein’s artistic intuition knew well as he
incorporated it in the guise of anamorphosis, a distortion that paradoxically sets
the world aright.

Notes
1 The central symptoms of Cotard syndrome consist of convictions regarding the
rotting (or even total disappearance) of the body and its internal organs, damnation
and, most importantly, the certainty of being dead.
2 Althusser views family with an altogether negative valence as a central “ideological
state apparatus” (2012) or as “conjugal obscenity” (2014b). Hegel and psychoanalysis,
by contrast, view the family as a necessary bridge to civil society.
3 Lacan states that life would be intolerable if we lived with the idea that we are
immortal (https://​m.youtube.com/​watch?v=i43rWqNwnd0).
114 Life and death
4 This is not only the explicit meaning of Christ’s example but also the very founda-
tion of psychoanalytic treatment. If the cure involves a child being killed this is so that
the subject may rise again on his/​her ashes and finally truly live after having under-
gone a symbolic death.
5 Most famously, Hegel asserts, “Spirit is this power only by looking the negative [i.e.
death] in the face, and tarrying with it” (Hegel, 1977, 19).
Variation 19 
The force and frailty
of the law

The human being’s relation to law also involves a central paradox with the
ensuing risks of diremption. Modern legal thought promotes an external and
objective conception of the law thereby obfuscating the intrinsic tie connecting
law and desire (Goodrich and Carlson, 1998, 1). By contrast, psychoanalysis
reveals the “Law’s unconscious, its ‘other scene’”, (ibid, 1998, 3). Following
Lacan, Legendre underscores the fact that desire itself is at work in the law as
the subject’s “love of the censor” (ibid, 1998, 9). Likewise, for Žižek, “the system
of Laws” is inconsistent insofar as “the Other’s impenetrable desire, as well as
its jouissance, are [therein] located” (Žižek, 2018, 16). The desire inherent to
law splits it from within, thereby making it weak and inconsistent. However,
psychoanalysis reveals the paradox according to which the force of law is tied
to its frailty. When Lacan claims that the “symbolic father is, strictly speaking,
unthinkable” (Lacan, 1994, 210, my translation) he means that no father can
hold his symbolic mandate without blemishing it with a taint of personal jouis-
sance, thereby partially delegitimizing his authority. The wager, however, is
that without this blemish, the father’s authority falls. The paradox of paternal
authority is that it can sustain itself only when partly discredited from its sanc-
tity by the father’s own jouissance. For Lacan, “there is cause only in something
that doesn’t work” (Lacan, 1977, 22). The law is no exception; to have causal
efficiency it must be tainted by failure. The power of the law and its weakness
are one and the same but for the understanding they appear opposed. Common
understanding cannot grasp this paradox and thus denies the inconsistencies
of law in the hope of establishing an “objective” law. However, speculative and
psychoanalytic reason tell us that the law as “objective” and “consistent” leads
to a law deprived of force. Moreover, such an “impotent” law leads to more
oppressive subjugation.This is the university discourse with its principle contra-
diction of an “objective” law “without force” that is all the more tyrannical.This
leads to a contradiction at the level of the subject: the “free” and “equal” subject
of liberal democracy is more than ever constrained by a “theo-​technological
power, which is incontrovertible [and] speechless” (Schütz, 1998, 206).
Drawing on Agamben (1998), Santner (2011) explores the contradiction
by which the subject of university discourse is at once “sovereign” and “bare
life”. Like the medieval king, this subject has two bodies, one made sublime
116 The force and frailty of the law
through symbolic investiture and the other made abject by the imminent threat
of social upheaval. With the decline of paternal authority, children are today’s
sovereigns. The child who is the object of maternal jouissance has two bodies
wavering from the sublime privilege of having the mother’s unique attention
to being haunted by a possible castration which, foreclosed from the sym-
bolic, may vehemently return in the real thereby confirming the body’s abject
destitution. In Althusserian terms, we witness a decline of the “ideological
apparatus” of the family. Formerly, the family was the principle ideological
apparatus (with the Church and education apparatuses also having important
roles) responsible for assuring symbolic castration. Today we see the child’s
direct and premature encounter with the ideological apparatus of psych-
iatry and, what is worse, the repressive police apparatus. Parents are increas-
ingly distrustful of their own authority and rely on police and psychiatrists
to discipline their child. The danger is that the child’s confrontation with
such apparatuses is far more terrifying than former negotiations with parents.
Punishment in the hands of the police cannot claim the expiatory power it
had when delivered by parents.
Insofar as the family ideological apparatus is the home of symbolic castra-
tion minimally guaranteeing subjectivity, the negative designation of “ideology”
requires some elucidation.The family represents the beginnings of the encounter
with the values of society. A tremendous process of internalization takes place
through which social substance marks itself on the flesh. The Name-​of-​the-​
Father allows for some respite from the spell of this subjugation enabling the
child to work through trauma in an on-​going neurotic questioning. Repressive
apparatuses, Althusser explains, leave little room for flexibility (Althusser, 2014a,
248) while ideology has a “double character”; it is a recognition in the form of
misrecognition or an allusion in the form of an illusion (ibid, 259). Ideological
apparatuses are founded upon fictions (ibid, 252) while repressive apparatuses
appeal to force in brute reality. As fiction is the condition of truth, the loss of the
family threatens the space of working through where truth may emerge in the
interstice of fiction, where recognition may occur in the site of misrecognition
and where an allusion to a subject is made in the midst of illusion.
Some ideological apparatuses are arguably more conducive to truth and sub-
jectivity than others. Psychiatry, for instance, harbours a more distant relation
to subjective truth than family. Here fiction, illusion and misrecognition do not
readily pave the way to truth, allusion and recognition. Perhaps the older feudal
apparatus of the Church provided a space commensurate with truth and sub-
jectivity. One should not undervalue the potential for subjective truth concealed
within Christianity’s mystifications.1 Much likens family and Church. Firstly,
both appeal to paternal authority. As Kojève explains (2014), the authority of
the father was theoretically elaborated by scholastic philosophy and theology.
Secondly, the Christian religion is arguably founded on a “family romance”
(the virgin mother, the immaculate conception) and, conversely, Biblical stories
offer allegories for the dramas of family life (the story of Abraham and Isaac
delivers an unparalleled metaphor of symbolic castration). Thirdly, faith plays a
 The force and frailty of the law 117
prominent role in both; the religious man must take a leap to enter the com-
munity of believers as the good son must give his “yes” to the father to partake
in the privileges of family.
The constricted spaces of psychiatry and disciplinary power are not abodes
for myths through which truth emerges. A young subject relegated to the
apparatuses of police and psychiatric power finds reconfirmed in the Other
his/​her paranoid defiance against society. Family enables the ever-​renewed
construction of fantasies-​ideologies commensurate with the growth of sub-
jectivity. It hinges on the identity-​in-​difference of submitting to the law and
finding refuge from it: one must say “yes” to paternal authority in order to thereby
gain some freedom from the family. Psychotic children who refuse this affirm-
ation are more tightly bound to the family, seldom leaving home –​so much
for the “nomadic” schizophrenic. Likewise, the seeming paradox of faith is
that atheism is possible only for those who do not relinquish Christianity;
something Žižek has argued in his effort to reveal the materialist potential of
Christianity. Those who cannot grasp this remain bound to the contradiction
of naïve atheism where vulgar materialism enslaves the subject more stringently
to the Other. The liberating identity-​in-​difference through which adherence
to an ideology affords respite from that ideology is less likely to operate in
medical ideology where the subject faces the contradiction of increased subju-
gation with every effort towards freedom –​the more passionately one claims
sanity, the more the medical straightjacket is enforced. The scientistic space of
psychiatry leaves little space for truth and the thriving of subjectivity. This is
truer for the repressive apparatuses where Agamben’s (2009) sinister idea of
subjugation without subject is a looming threat. The emancipatory potential
of a given apparatus is thus proportional to how close it remains to the coinci-
dence of contraries (truth-​fiction, recognition-​misrecognition). Psychiatry and
the police are, in this regard, more diremptive than the apparatuses of Church,
family and education.
The decline of the family “state apparatus” is commensurate with the rise of
the university discourse. In the family, law and authority could be encountered
by the child in less daunting ways. In other words, in the family, the child may
more readily experience and fathom the paradox of the force and frailty of law.
The paternal law is more easily accepted insofar as the real father’s lack –​ pre-
cisely his lack of power (and therefore the ground of his power) –​is more visible
than that of a police officer.When Hegel claims that the aim of the punishment
of children is “to lift the universal into their consciousness and will” (Hegel,
2008a, 173) this implies that the law must be accompanied by force. However,
we must also note that (for Hegel himself) a serious ideological operation is at
work in the chastizing of children. For Hegel, a criminal act is its own punish-
ment. To separate the two moments of crime and punishment is to suffer of the
ideology of time. In short, to be a criminal is its own punishment –​what need
then for greater reprimand?2 Nevertheless, this minimal ideological operation
is a necessary diremptive remain without which the realization that one’s crime
is its own punishment would be impossible. When punishment is delivered
118 The force and frailty of the law
with love, opportunity is given to the child to achieve true concern for the other
(conscience) and realize that the pain inflicted on the other was already and in-​
itself pain inflicted on the self (for “no man is an island”, as Donne would say).
Achieving the height of this Christian wisdom requires a bit of the proverbial
paternal stick but its aim is precisely to overcome the stick. The paternal stick
provides its own sublation. If it hits the child once, it is with the aim of never
having to do so again. As self-​sublating, the stick is a speculative object, namely
a thing of love. Finally, the pain felt by the loving father as he chastizes his child
will reinforce belief in the goodness of the law. The encounter with paternal
lack, namely the father’s pain and trembling as he delivers the stick, will not
reduce his authority. Our father can still have authority even after his lack is
exposed: “The subject is free only when its substantial Other suffers abject
humiliation without ceasing to be the expression of authority” (McGowan,
2019, 162). As speculative object, the paternal stick is, to quip Hegel, “not only
as Substance, but equally as Subject” (Hegel, 1977, 10). The policeman’s club is
sheer loveless substance.There is no law without a voice of law. Lebrun speaks of
a voice as the necessary median of communicative content. He adds, however,
that the voice must disappear so that its message is received (Lebrun, 1972, 298–​
299). He makes use of Hegel’s notion of expression, referring to a presence that is
inseparable from dissolution (ibid, 298). Castration will be rejected (foreclosed)
if the voice carrying it out persists beyond its message –​the persistence of the
voice is an instance of a psychotic return in the real. The voice of the father and
the fear that it arouses must be flushed out so that a law remains that is less
heavily tainted by the jouissance of the voice.
The “repressive” moment of authority is indispensable, without it one falls
into university discourse. We witness this at the levels of the state, the family
and the psychoanalytic setting. For Žižek (2015), the way out of the contin-
gency of law is through its redoubling in the figure of the monarch. Without
this, we err into the university discourse which veils the contingency of power
with the false semblance of knowledge. Žižek here draws on Hegel for whom
the king is closer to the universal than the Estates Assembly which is a group
of private individuals fighting only for their private interests (McGowan,
2019, 79). Paradoxically, McGowan explains, the king is closer to the people
than their representatives in the Estates Assembly. Althusser (1999a) argues the
same concerning Machiavelli in whom he sees a proto-​Marxist who seeks to
strengthen the power of the prince so that the latter better protects the people
from the nobility, which, insofar as it is a special interest group, cannot access
a universal perspective.3 Within the family a similar problem occurs when the
redoubling of contingency fails, when the father fails to embody law while
also standing outside it. The escape from the “caprice” of maternal law is not
achieved by grounding her power in “scientific” necessity (endless books on
parenting) but by repeating this contingency with the father as family “mon-
arch”. When the task of castration is left to the public sphere (psychiatrists and
police) rather than a loving father, it is harder to reduce the persecutory tenor
of the voice. The “mirror stage” takes on a peculiar form as the “clinical gaze”
 The force and frailty of the law 119
of psychiatry and the disciplinary measures of law replace the mother’s gaze
and the father’s voice; pure thoughts take the place of these speculative objects.
For some, the psychiatric label and the criminal record are the last vestiges
of (one-​sided) identity for bodies reduced to bare life. Althusser’s notion of
interpellation arguably represents a reformulation of the mirror stage in light of
the late modern decline of family. In the past, institutions liminal to the public
and the private (school or Church) provided spaces enabling symbolic castra-
tion. Today, the repressive apparatus is a veritable emergence of castration in the
real resulting in Foucaultian “carceral archipelagos” (Foucault, 1975), such as
Goffman’s “fugitive communities” testifying to “the massive expansion of crim-
inal justice intervention into the lives of poor Black families” (Goffman, 2014,
249) where the subject is forced into exemption from whole sectors of public
life. Analogous difficulties result within the therapeutic setting when the analyst
does not occupy the place of sovereign exception. This occurs when the analyst
opts for transparency and erases any trace of difference in power.4 The Lacanian
scansion re-​introduces sovereignty in the analytic session thereby opening the
space of the treatment –​without a sovereign exception there is no transference.5
The cure involves the realization that the analyst is not a subject of know-
ledge but, rather, someone akin to the Žižekian-​Hegelian “idiotic” monarch
there to “dot the ‘i’s”, namely to simply “return the analysand’s own message
in an inverted form”.6 When hierarchy is flattened and the place of authority
abolished, the unconscious remains closed and transference cannot transpire.
The transference cannot emerge without a radical dissymmetry, suspending
notions of reciprocity: “The relation of the one with the other that is set up
in analysis … is established on a plane that is not reciprocal, not symmetrical”
(Lacan, 1977, 137).
The function of the monarch, the father and the psychoanalyst is to make
apparent division/​lack. By founding all three of these in the contingent will of a
particular subject, it becomes evident to the people, the child and the analysand
that these cannot be grounded on pure knowledge alone. The paradox consists
of the fact that authority incarnated by a “sovereign” provides the means of
better enabling the subject to heed to the force and frailty of law. It is, as it were,
a way of creating an exit out of the university discourse for the subject.The idea
that decisions are grounded, in the last instance, in the will of these three figures
makes evident what would otherwise remain mystified, namely the fact that law
can never be fully substantiated in necessity. It would be a dystopian nightmare
to live in a state where every decision purported to be “scientifically” justified.
Where in such a constellation would the confidence to question and subvert
law and power come from? The analyst too functions to mitigate the illusion of
the scientificity of the process rather than add to its prestige. By contrast, psych-
iatry eschews appeal to the subjectivity of the clinician perpetrating thereby the
myth of scientificity. While the psychiatrist seeks refuge in the aseptic setting
of the hospital where the aura of knowledge is magnified, the psychoanalyst
prefers a personal space that functions as insignia of his/​her subjectivity and
therefore lack of (scientific) substantiality.7
120 The force and frailty of the law
The slave revolt in morality involves what Schmitt diagnosed as the ubiqui-
tous “onslaught against the political” (Schmitt, 1985, 65) where endless par-
liamentary debates replace the political. If, as Badiou (2013) holds, Nietzsche
is the thinker of the “archi-​political” it is because he fought most stringently
against the “democratic prejudice in science” that has obliterated authority and
installed the reign of endless chatter. Psychoanalysis as “conflictual science”
(Althusser, 1999b) cannot regress to dialogue. The decline of the political
implies the demise of the therapeutic.8 Kojève (2014) argues that the polit-
ical defends the exercise of authority while the sphere of ethics critiques it.
The contemporary late modern disparagement of the notion of authority is
symptomatic of the waning of the political and, concomitantly, the obliteration
of the dimension of conflict. To counter this tendency, Žižek (2012a) argues
for “a political suspension of ethics” rather than the ethical deferment of the
political where authority is weakened, for instance, by the nagging subterfuge
of political correctness (what Kojève would call “private ethics” deployed to
eradicate the political dimension of conflict). Nietzsche’s critique of a “slave
revolt in morality” points towards a similar discontent with the waning of
authority. The neologism “politico-​ therapeutic” may denote the common
object of Marx’s critique of political economy and Freud’s discovery of the
unconscious and help us better appreciate that the law is at once political and
intimate, political because intimate.The slave revolt in morality grounds the end
of the politico-​therapeutic and paves the way for the triumph of the univer-
sity discourse, the antithesis to the conflictual sciences. With the decline of the
politico-​therapeutic, late modernity testifies to the daunting contradiction of
subjugation-​interpellation without subjectivity, a predicament akin to madness.
According to Hegel, the slave provides the truth of the master. If the master
refuses this truth his position flounders into impotent rage thereby rendering
for us that the truth of power is impotence. Concomitantly, Lacan highlights
the speculative identity of freedom and servitude: “This means that, in the
movement that leads man to an ever more adequate consciousness of him-
self, his freedom becomes bound up with the development of his servi-
tude” (Lacan, 2006 148). Freedom that refuses its kinship with servitude risks
becoming hedonistic debauchery where man is serf to aimless passion. The
master’s “freedom” is a pure thought that disparages into its opposite. Insofar
as the master rejects-​dirempts his/​her dialectical unity with the slave, the latter
becomes the master’s truth-​symptom and, unless an epiphany of wisdom ter-
minates diremption, the slave will be experienced as an ever greater assault on
the identity of the master. A master who accepts his/​her identity-​in-​difference
with the slave is no longer a master but a leader.The step taken to acknowledge
this dialectical unity represents the shift from master to analyst discourse. All the
ideological jargon currently surrounding “authentic leadership” may be granted
greater credulity with the idea that such a leader embraces his/​her identity-​in-​
difference with his follower. In such a case the master-​slave relation gives way
to leader-​follower; where the former involves the master as pure thought (S1
 The force and frailty of the law 121
in Lacanian parlance), the latter comprises the cooperation of two agents in
raising the notion of authority to its dignity.When Hegel claims that the “essen-
tial nature [of lordship] is the reverse of what it wants to be” (Hegel quoted in
Jameson, 2010, 41), he is pointing to the master’s unwillingness to recognize
in the slave-​symptom the secret of his/​her own identity. For Hegel, the master
faces the impasse of being recognized by one whom he/​she does not recog-
nize. The master, in refusing to recognize the slave, rejects-​dirempts the very
kernel-​symptom of his/​her own being. As a result, the rejection of the slave is,
for the master, a repudiation of self. It is akin to a father who, in rejecting his
son, denies the very heart of his own being.The parent must accept the child as
his/​her symptom. Only this way will the child be able to free him/​herself from
the position of symptom. The monarch makes evident the contradiction of the
social while the psychoanalyst embodies the symptom so that the subject can
eventually re-​appropriate it as his/​her own. When authority does not dirempt
its extimate relation to the symptom it will dwindle neither into tyranny nor
libertarianism. Here authority is modelled on the analyst discourse where the
frailty/​inconsistency of the law is revealed precisely and paradoxically to render
it more integral.

Notes
1 “In the end, for Bloch, the point of religion is that, within its fables and mytholo-
gies, its inconsistencies and its dangerously irrational tendencies, it contains a kernel
of truth which is about the fulfilment of the dream of Utopia” (Peter Thompson in
Bloch, 2009, xxv).
2 Freud’s hypothesis concerning “criminals out of a sense of guilt” and Nietzsche’s
“pale criminal” reverse the ideological temporality according to which crime is the
cause of guilt and thereby reach the speculative wisdom that posits the identity-​in-​
difference of crime and guilt/​punishment.
3 In all his lunacy and lies,Trump helps us see (albeit in the modality of deception) the
secret kinship between monarch and people. He got elected on the (false) rhetoric
that he is for the people and not the elite. Sanders would represent the authentic
version of the same promise of a paradoxical kinship between the highest and the
lowest.
4 The comparison with the therapeutic and family settings shows that the redoub-
ling of the contingency of power need not absolutely take the form of a monarch
even in the case of the state. Means more appropriate to our times may be devised.
5 Could not Lacan’s eccentric clinical style (digging into purses, pulling hair, throwing
a flower pot, caress of the face while saying geste à peau and so on), scandalous to our
squeamish ears, be understood as practices intended to establish the position of sov-
ereign exception and thereby facilitate access to the unconscious?
6 Strangely, the obliteration of the sovereign position is today accompanied by the rise
of despots.
7 McGowan put what is at stake very accurately:

Hegel’s political philosophy includes the monarch as the mark of the state’s
insubstantiality. It is the point at which individuality manifests itself in the
122 The force and frailty of the law
universality of the state, the point at which the state expresses its own self-​div-
ision. The monarch lays bare the state’s absence of any self-​identity. It is thus a
moment of failure within the successful state.
(McGowan, 2019, 208)

The argument could be extended to the respective roles of the father and the psy-
choanalyst in the family and the clinical setting.
8 An imposition is also at work in psychoanalytic treatment; it goes by the euphemism
of interpretation.
Variation 20 
Madness and sanity

At times, Lacan deems madness to be the kernel of inhumanity, the classic

insignia of the death of the subject (Lacan, 2006, 473), while elsewhere he holds
that “Not only can man’s being not be understood without madness, but it
would not be man’s being if it did not bear madness within itself as the limit of
his freedom” (ibid, 176). An abyss seemingly separates the early “Not just anyone
can go mad just by wanting it” (ibid, 176) from the later “We are all mad, that
is to say, we are all delusional” (Lacan, 1979, 278). A stringent divide between
neurosis and psychosis thus paradoxically co-​exists with the dissolution of the
barrier separating madness from normality. How to do justice to the claim
positing the continuity of madness and sanity while also acknowledging the
clinical and theoretical acuity of the strict boundary Lacan rightfully maintains
between neurosis and psychosis? As with all other identities-​in-​difference, the
self-​reflection of madness and sanity leads each term to its respective Other.
To proudly proclaim one’s untarnished sanity is the quintessential pretence
of madness itself. Likewise, to humbly confess one’s madness is the sign of
sanity. Thus, Lacan posits the identity of insanity and being human stating that
“men are so necessarily mad that it would be another twist of madness not
to be mad” (Lacan, 2006, 283). It is precisely this paradoxical logic that is not
operative in psychosis. The psychotic subject cannot fathom that the absence
of madness is insanity itself. Psychosis is more diremptive of the sanity-​madness
identity-​in-​difference. The division of subjective structures (neurosis/​perver-
sion vs. psychosis) takes the identity-​in-​difference of madness and sanity into
account. It posits that the neurotic symptom is a madness, which is, paradox-
ically, the condition of our only modicum of sanity. The diremption of this
paradox leads to the contradiction of the ordinariness of madness marked by the
striking lack of a symptom. We must thus first posit the identity-​in-​difference
of madness and sanity so that we may then starkly distinguish neurosis from
psychosis in terms of how each relates to this paradox. Where neurosis can
better fathom this paradoxical identity, psychosis displays a greater tendency
towards diremption. Modern American psychiatry has relinquished the division
of structures and posits instead a salad ontology marked by an ever-​increasing
plethora of novel diagnostic categories such as the downright ridiculous “dys-
calculia” and “trichotillomania”. Foucault (1972) famously revealed the falsity of
124 Madness and sanity
the madness-​sanity division. His error was to claim that psychoanalysis is guilty
of this division. He could not appreciate that the Freudo-​Lacanian division
between psychosis and neurosis-​perversion does not overlap with the Cartesian
error of excluding madness. The division of structures hinges precisely on the
firm affirmation of the dialectical unity of madness and sanity. The prevalent
continuum hypothesis in the American psychiatric model is diremptive of this
identity-​in-​difference and thus leads to the contradiction by which the vague
idea that we are all somewhere on a mental health continuum (this is its “dem-
ocracy prejudice”) is accompanied by the most inhuman treatment of the mad.
The mad are here seen to lie outside the realm of what is treatable by speech
while, for Lacan, all structures are within the purview of what is amenable to
speech and language.1 Sadly, the prevalence of the developmental model in
post-​Freudian thought (most notably due to the influence of Karl Abraham) has
led to the idea that the neurotic is more “mature” than his/​her psychotic coun-
terpart more prone to “primitive” libidinal fixations. Regarding the use of the
word “primitive” in non-​Lacanian psychoanalysis (it is a remarkably popular –​
indeed “fetishized” –​word in the International Psychoanalytic Association),
all one can say is that a little familiarity with Lévi-​Strauss’ (1991) critique of
this notion would liberate discourse from this rather –​dare I say –​“primitive”
diction. The intervention of language into the human organism means that
we are all forever separated (dirempted) from the primitive. We must recall
that psychosis, in general, is marked by an overinvestment of words, and para-
noia, more specifically, involves an intricate theoretical system which, more-
over, Freud saw as akin to his own libido theory. Even the most “primitive”
mind could see that there is little here of the primitive. What are missed are the
advantages and disadvantages of each structure. For instance, the psychotic subject
(due to a less stringent alienation) is a keener observer of his/​her social world
as he/​she is less duped by the social semblances that rivet the naïve neurotic eye
to false paradises (see variation 22).
Intimately tied to the dialectical unity of madness and sanity are the
diremptive remains of the symptom and the sinthome. We all secretly claim, even
if minimally, our untainted sanity which means, paradoxically, that we are all
mad. Alternatively, my claim that I am mad does not immediately and com-
pletely exempt me from madness. Likewise, the claim that I am sane does not
immediately make me mad. An obstacle resists full sublation in both directions.
In the first case, it is the symptom that prevents the full assertion of my untainted
sanity. In the second case, it is the sinthome that prevents the psychotic’s plea to
sanity to be reduced to utter madness. No matter how “insane” the pretence
to sanity may sound, there is a kernel of truth that it hides (even the wildest
delusion is an attempt at a cure). Formulaically, we may argue that the symptom
is the neurotic diremptive remain of the self-​reflection of madness to sanity while the
sinthome is the psychotic diremptive remain of the self-​reflection of sanity to madness.
These two diremptive remains, through which the psychotic can have his/​her
share of sanity and the neurotic/​pervert his/​her share of madness, are arguably
the reason for the persistence of the continuum hypothesis in psychology and
 Madness and sanity 125
modern American psychiatry. Psychiatry has taken a diremptive remain (i.e. a
surplus) and, by the power of its prodigious ignorance, elevated it to the status
of a full blown diremption of thought resulting in the abolition of the notion
of distinct and separate psychic structures (neurosis, perversion and psychosis).
The aim of my speculative rendition of the difference between structures is to
provide an immanent boundary without a limit separating the clinical structures
without recourse to an externally imposed border susceptible to the aforemen-
tioned vicious dialectical reversals.2

Notes
1 Lacan’s doctoral dissertation (1975) revealed the aetiology of paranoia in the “person-
ality” rather than some mythical biology.
2 The gesture of delimiting an externally imposed frontier between madness and
reason is itself the very essence of madness: “what is the mere madness caused by the
loss of reason compared to the madness of reason itself ” (Žižek, 2012a).
Variation 21 
The diremptions
of fantasy

Love entails the crossing of fantasy through which the paradoxes of castration
can be fathomed. At the level of the subject, castration involves the idea that
lack coincides with phallic power. At the level of the Other, castration involves
the recognition of the identity of the force and weakness of law. My contention
is that once these are recognized, castration ceases to be a fantasy and becomes,
instead, an acknowledgment of the impossible-​real. This occurs if the identity-​
in-​difference of the structural manque-​à-​être and the phallic function is firmly
posited. The fantasies of origin, isolated by Laplanche and Pontalis, also move
in the direction opposed to the impossible-​real. Here too, crossing the fantasy
entails unveiling the identities-​in-​difference hidden by fantasy. If the fantasy of
castration hides the identity-​in-​difference of lack and phallic power, the seduc-
tion fantasy obfuscates the fact that passivity alone provides the basis of any
possible activity. The primal scene fantasy hinders the subject from agreeing to
be excluded from his/​her own origin in order to minimally partake in social
co-​existence. Traversing the fantasy entails giving up the myths of origin by
which the subject stages an Other that deprives, assaults and excludes. This
marks the transition from ressentiment to loss understood as an effect of structure
rather than the ill will of an Other. Fantasy always stages a dominator set against
a victim, a strong subject vis-​à-​vis a weak counterpart. In fantasy there are only
winners and losers. Fantasy cannot fathom that the greatest loss lies precisely
in the folly of triumph and, conversely, that the greatest victory consists of
defeat1 –​hence Leclaire’s claim that the aim of analysis is to kill the child within.
Indeed, only a thin threshold separates the guillotine’s blade from the piercing
edge of interpretation. For humanity not to perish under violence, a symbolic
death is needed (Legendre, 2000). Nasio (2005) perspicaciously remarks that
fantasy stages the Other’s annihilation and murder –​something removing us
far from the apprehension of the Other’s non-​existence. Crossing the fantasy,
by contrast, entails recognizing that there is no big Other; something which
paradoxically allows for relations to otherness. Through it the subject can also
acknowledge that “the Woman does not exist”; something which, oddly, makes
possible some symbolization of feminine difference. Finally, traversing the fan-
tasy means that the subject acknowledges that there is no sexual rapport; a real-
ization ironically central to the possibility of sexual intimacy.
 The diremptions of fantasy 127
The “me too” movement –​though a laudable and necessary effort to lessen
abuses of male power –​may degenerate into an attempt to make the Woman
exist as “victim” and create a semblance of the sexual rapport on the rudimen-
tary “predator-​victim” model. Such praise-​worthy and courageous movements
need to remain attentive to the dangers of diremptions. Here the reign of fan-
tasy may block precisely the advent of love and reparation, replacing it with the
vengeful spirit to win, a desire that leads to the contradiction of triumphant
despondency. Just as the tendency to blame the Other hinges on the belief
in an Other, the prevalence of misogyny in male paranoia pivots on the fact
that the non-​existence of the Woman has not been registered in psychosis.
Against superficial feminist critiques of Lacan, it may be suggested that the
thesis concerning Woman’s non-​existence is a first step towards the abolition of
misogyny. Indeed, once men fully recognize that the Woman does not exist they
will assume responsibility for the impasses of jouissance and sexuality. The real-
ization that the Woman does not exist brings about trust and faith in women;
it is akin to the paradox of faith and atheism where true belief leads to the
realization that the Other does not exist. As anathema as this may sound to the
shallow ears of the understanding, Woman does not exist may be the only viable
motto of a future feminism.
Contrasting Sophocles’ tragedy with Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Lacan claims that
we Moderns, unlike our Ancient counterparts, cannot act insofar as we are held
firmly in the grips of fantasy. Moderns have more deeply fallen prey to the
understanding’s inability to fathom the paradoxes hidden by fantasy. Each fan-
tasy of origin corresponds to the misrecognition of an identity-​in-​difference. In
turn, each of these misrecognitions results in a specific contradiction plaguing
our contemporary situation. The castration fantasy’s misrecognition of the
identity-​in-​difference of lack and phallic power has led to the modern contra-
diction of heightened narcissism accompanied by increased self-​abjection –​an
incongruity poignantly captured by Agamben. Moreover, the misrecognition of
the identity of the castrated and the potent father has led to the aforementioned
contemporary crisis of paternity (see variation 9 where I speak of the simul-
taneous rise of “humiliated” fathers and perverse seductive fathers). The mis-
recognition of castration has resulted in the contradiction by which the radical
repudiation of femininity has led to the push-​to-​Woman. Thus, beyond Eric
Santner’s splendid reading of Schreber’s Memoirs as testament to modernity’s
“crisis of investiture”, this confession is also a harbinger of the contemporary
rise of transsexualist discourse with its at times contradictory blend of the
postmodern denial of sexual difference and the quasi-​essentialist reference to
“nature’s error”. Seduction fantasy’s obfuscation of the concomitance of pas-
sivity and activity has led to the contradiction of hyper-​masculinity co-​existing
with impotence. Moreover, subjects held in the grips of this fantasy ceaselessly
rail against the alleged seducer in manic paroxysms of hate with the uncanny
result that their petulant cries (often going viral in epidemics of hysteric mim-
icry) only fortify their sense of passivity and inability to achieve empowerment.
At a theoretical level, we have the contradiction by which the denunciation
128 The diremptions of fantasy
of the so-​called assault on truth (Masson, 1984) is itself nothing more than
the cowardly retreat in the face of the inevitable assault of truth. Finally, the
primal scene fantasy’s rage against exclusion results in the contemporary craze
of social media where, in the vain effort to partake in the lives of all, the subject
paradoxically increases her sense of marginalization as she enviously watches
a fabricated display of artificial paradises. Fantasy’s degradation of identity-​in-​
difference represents the transition from impossibility to impotence –​in lieu of
dynamic paradoxes we have the deadlock of contradictions.2 Heirs to Hamlet,
we moderns are afflicted with the contradiction of inhibition coinciding with
jouissance. The modern superego does not simply say “Enjoy” by contrast to the
pre-​modern interdiction. More subtly, it is a contradictory incitement to enjoy
one’s inhibition paving the way to morbid political inertia.
When Lacan claims that the Oedipus complex is a “dream of Freud’s” he
urges us to traverse Freud’s fantasy. Žižek follows Lacan’s abandonment of the
patricidal theme in order to discredit the myth of a “crime” at the basis of
power. To Joseph de Maistre’s “anti-​Enlightenment axiom” concerning the
“mysterious laws which … should be covered by a religious silence and revered
as a mystery” (Žižek; 2012a, 971), Žižek adds that “we should resist the false fas-
cination: what the law ultimately hides is that there is nothing to hide, that there is
no terrifying mystery sustaining it … that the law is grounded only in its own
tautology” (ibid: 971–​972). The diremption of the paradox by which what “the
law ultimately hides is that there is nothing to hide” leads to conspiracy theories
(fantasies) and the contradiction by which a subject’s over-​vigilance regarding
a malevolent Other subjugates him/​her all the more. Žižek (1998a) elsewhere
elaborates on this same theme by a consideration of the distinction between syn-
chrony and diachrony. While the former is connected to the everyday experi-
ence of the force/​weakness of law, the latter denotes the narrativization of this
experience as a myth of origin concerning a primal crime. The synchronically
experienced inconsistency of the law leads to the narrativization of a diachronic
myth of origin: “this diachronous process, the story of the ‘original crime’, is
the narrativization of the necessary, structural, synchronous incoherence of the
Law” (Žižek, 1998a, 90). The law’s inherent violence does not repeat that of the
original crime. Rather, the so-​called original crime repeats3 the incoherence of
the law (its “everyday” superegoic violence). The result of the repetition is the
never-​ending constant (re)-​narrativization of the “original crime”. The idea
that the law is “violent” involves a form of diachronic revision of the fact that
synchronically the force/​violence of law is, in fact, tied to its frailty/​weakness.
As Hegel puts it best, “we say that tyranny is overthrown because it is execrable,
odious and so on. In reality, it is simply because it is superfluous” (Hegel quoted
in Lebrun, 2004, 214 my translation).

Notes
1 Psychoanalysis is wary of the diremptions of triumph: “psychoanalysis does not seek
to convince/​triumph” (Lacan, 1998). He is here playing on the homonymy between
“convaincre” (convince) and “vaincre” (to triumph).
 The diremptions of fantasy 129
2 Fantasy’s attempt to avoid paradox thus leads to the return of the latter as contradic-
tion insofar as the latter is, for Hegel, inescapable. As McGowan explains, “One never
escapes contradiction for good through the neurotic fantasy because this fantasy
nourishes itself on contradiction. It stages what it avoids” (2019, 152).
3 According to Deleuze (1968), a temporally earlier event “repeats” a later one.We may
shed light on this counterintuitive logic through the psychoanalytic idea of the après
coup. The later synchronically lived experience gives rise to an urge to build the fan-
tasy of an earlier “experience” that would constitute the basis of the later. Deleuze’s
theory of repetition and the psychoanalytic notion of après coup thus provide the
greatest bulwark against myths of origin.
Variation 22 
The
untimely-​contemporary

Agamben (2009) introduces his notion of “the contemporary”, an idea which,

following Barthes, he likens to the Nietzschean idea of the “untimely”. For
Agamben, those

who are truly contemporary, who truly belong to their time, are those who
neither perfectly coincide with it nor adjust themselves to its demands.
They are thus in this sense irrelevant. But precisely because of this condi-
tion, precisely through this disconnection and this anachronism, they are
more capable than others of perceiving and grasping their own time.

From a Lacanian perspective such subjects are often the psychotics and perverts,
namely individuals whose paranoid distrust and aversion of the social Other
puts them at odds with their time and society. Indeed, a passage Agamben
quotes from Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations poignantly captures his will to
impeach the jouissance of his epoch:

This meditation is itself untimely because it seeks to understand as an

illness, a disability and a defect something which this epoch is quite rightly
proud of, that is to say, its historical culture, because I believe that we are all
consumed by the fever of history and we should at least realize it.
(Nietzsche quoted in Agamben, 2009)

In psychosis, we may attest, at times, to the paradox of a subject at once con-

temporary and yet out of joint with the present moment. In light of this we may
have to gamble the conjecture that the psychotic is the paradigmatic untimely-​
contemporary; with this we will also have achieved much in the way of forsaking
the deficit-​model of psychosis that plagues much of modern psychiatry. Here
we attest to psychosis as a more apt realization of identity-​in-​difference, one
that a neurotic is more likely to dirempt.
Quoting Marx regarding the great achievements of capitalism –​most not-
ably its central role in eliminating the semblances of feudalism –​Badiou (2011)
argues that philosophy should measure itself against the heights of capital’s
demystifications. In the same vein, I argue that philosophy should not shy from
 The untimely-contemporary 131
the challenges that psychosis poses to thought. Much like capital, psychosis is
an indispensable source for the deconstruction of the artifices that hold psy-
chic life in place. Though at times psychosis testifies to a thinking limited by
the perspective of the understanding, in other ways it opens new pathways of
thought challenging the primacy accorded to neurosis and freeing the space for
the advent of philosophical reason’s better attunement to identity-​in-​difference.
When Thomas Mann exclaims “And I say to you that I am weary to death
of depicting humanity without partaking of humanity” (quoted in Fassbinder,
1979), he gives expression (be it in the form of a desperate cry) to the afore-
mentioned paradox by which deeper immersion into reality may involve a
greater degree of alienation from that reality.
We know from Kojève’s (1980) Hegel that desire follows fashions; subjects
identify with each other’s desires. This philosophically isolated phenomenon is
not, however, generalizable. The neurotic is prone to this epidemic of desires
which comes at the cost of real bodily enjoyment. In some extreme cases,“there
are empty desires or mad desires that are based on nothing more than the fact
that the thing in question has been forbidden you” (Lacan, 1977, 243). Here
the Other’s verdict on an object has absolute primacy over the subject’s own
gratification. The psychotic, by contrast, shuns the domain of the epidemic of
desires. He/​she is not duped by this particular irrationality and remains closer to
the jouissance of the body.The neurotic prefers to forget the drives and jouissance
insofar as these escape the clutches of the symbolic Other. Jouissance violates
what is holiest to a community of people; it breaks their ideals, transgresses their
interdictions and ignores their imperatives. For the neurotic who has taken the
leap of faith that belief in the sanctity of the Other entails, jouissance is inadmis-
sible. It causes anxiety and shame, the insignia of our recognition of the Other’s
gaze. The pervert is not afraid of the transgressive nature of jouissance. If the
neurotic’s faith in the Other leads him/​her to deny jouissance (not necessarily to
give it all up but cover it with a cloak of shame), the pervert’s incredulity makes
for greater fidelity to the jouissance of the body. Apollon (2005) has ventured
to speak of the pervert’s passion for truth. Is it not to this passion that we owe
de Sade and Pasolini’s explorations of the limits of desire and jouissance? Žižek’s
opposition of transgression and subversion is somewhat one-​sided.Though, one
should not confuse transgressions against the law with veritable subversions,
one should also not dismiss the aforementioned passion of truth. One here notes
an excessive prejudice in favor of neurosis in Žižek’s work where, for instance,
Hegel is praised (following Lacan) as “the most sublime hysteric” (Žižek, 1989).
This privileging of neurosis is also seen in Žižek’s critique of Deleuze and
Guattari’s (1972) celebration of the “schizophrenic on a walk” by contrast to
the paltry “neurotic on the couch”.
Much thought has taken philosophical interest in madness. Beyond the afore-
mentioned Anti-​Oedipus, we have Foucault’s effort to re-​introduce the “sover-
eign speech of madness” (1972) after Descartes’ alleged eradication of it from
philosophical reason. Kristeva’s (1984) schizophrenic “khora” concerning a revo-
lution in poetic language is also notable. Deleuze’s Coldness and Cruelty (Deleuze
132 The untimely-contemporary
and Sacher-​Masoch, 1991) sees in masochistic perversion a great resource for
subverting power. Perhaps Žižek’s effort to re-​establish neurosis as the truly sub-
versive structure is a reaction to this trend. Žižek’s return to neurosis is arguably
predicated on a one-​sided conflation of neurosis with non-​diremptive thought.
Though the neurosis-​perversion-​psychosis distinction is clinically invaluable,
drawing philosophical consequences from it concerning possibilities of sub-
version is unjustified. My contention throughout this enquiry has always been
that the distinction (perhaps I should say distinction and equation) between
the recognition and the diremption of identity-​in-​difference is where we have
the highest hope of truly “carving nature by its joints” (Plato, 2015), something
which, I believe, is the crucial theoretical labor that must precede any praxis
aiming to subvert.
The psychotic, unconcerned with shame and profoundly skeptical of the
Other, is more attuned to the palpitations of the body’s jouissance; the pervert
and the psychotic never lose sight of the fact that a body is what enjoys itself.
The paranoid’s hypochondria, the schizophrenic’s “organ speech” and the sadist’s
heedfulness to the tremors of the other’s body all attest to this greater famil-
iarity with jouissance. Can this attunement to jouissance (Lacan (1998) speaks of
the pervert’s supplementary knowledge in the field of sexuality) evince a more
refined adjustment to the stipulations of reason?1 The psychotic’s snubbing of
the follies of the circuitry of desire takes us far from the deficit models of
psychiatry. He/​she has an advantage consisting of not succumbing to “falling
prey” and losing him/​herself in “Das man” (“the they”) (Heidegger, 1967).This
immersion into jouissance further attunes the psychotic to the Other. The cap-
tivation by the Other (Lacan speaks of the psychotic as a “martyr of language”,
the Other par excellence) is precisely what may allow him/​her an easier path to
being a contemporary, namely one who can better perceive the follies of his/​
her time. Psychotic grandiosity (see variation 7) has nothing to do with “too
much” ego but, rather, with the excess of jouissance resulting from a deficient
cathexis of self. When one evinces snobbery from the psychotic this is disdain
for the neurotic’s puerile attachment to epidemic desires. If this, at the very
least, allows the neurotic to question his/​her falling prey, then such condes-
cension should be welcome. Indeed, could Lacan’s enigmatic notion of “met-
empsychosis” (“metempsychose”) (quoted in Massat, 2007), written as a kind of
imperative enjoining us to “put into psychosis” (“mettre en psychose”), consist of
counsel urging the neurotic to follow psychosis in the direction opposed to the
diremption responsible for his/​her falling prey?
Once again, the psychotic poses a challenge to Heideggerian philosophy
insofar as he/​she reveals to us a subject immune to a pivotal feature of Dasein.
Unlike the other central features isolated by Heidegger (e.g. thrownness), falling
prey is the result of a diremption rather than the site of an identity-​in-​difference.
In this case the psychotic is more attuned to reason and less at the mercy of
the understanding. Social media attests most widely to the diremption of desire
keeping the modern subject riveted to the field of Das Man, attached to his/​her
own alienation and thus hindered from joining the epoch as its contemporary.
 The untimely-contemporary 133
As Lebrun notes, “man does not reach his truth by joining the public thing”
(Lebrun, 1972, 99, my translation). This loss of self in the “public thing” is what
the untimely-​contemporary refuses. The prevalence of suicide in the psych-
oses attests precisely to the assertion of such a refusal: “Rather to die than live
among Das Man”. Žižek (1996), inspired by Schelling, speaks of a “contraction
of being” by which the subject severs from the social (an act diremptive of the
subject-​collective identity-​in-​difference) in order to connect to the deepest
kernel of his/​her jouissance.2 Through this reconnection, one may say that sub-
jectivity is in fact lost for the sake of accessing a kind of hyper-​subjectivity, the
genius within. Popular consciousness rightly asserts the link between genius
and madness. The madman is not held in the grips of alienating Das Man. This
allows him/​her to more fully embrace the richness of the inner world. The
pathos apposite to philosophical reflection cannot do without self-​diremptive
severance.
All philosophy, insofar as it makes a claim to love and wisdom, must hold
itself at the height of the psychotic decision to walk against the grain of the
times in order, paradoxically, to grasp the times more profoundly. History has
no shortage of such untimely-​contemporary subjects (some perhaps psychotic
and others neurotics who knew how to “put into psychosis” in order to subvert
falling prey) playing a pivotal role in the critique of the modes of jouissance of
their time. To the aforementioned Nietzsche, we may cursorily add Rousseau
and La Rochefoucauld.The latter is of particular psychoanalytic interest insofar
as he lucidly critiqued the jouissance of narcissism endemic of his time (a quint-
essentially neurotic jouissance). A “thinking” that is diremptive in this regard can
make no veritable claim to thought; here we are in the realm of ideology and
the doxa of the understanding. Insofar as ideology is a diremption of authentic
thought, it may involve (as with other diremptions) the impasse of a vicious
contradiction. This is indeed the case insofar as the most effective ideology,
according to Žižek, takes the form of the phenomenon of “cynical distance”.
Johnston (2004) lucidly summarizes the contradiction involved in such a pos-
ition: “the individual consciously professes disbelief in relation to the status quo
system while nonetheless behaving ‘as if ’ he/​she really accepts the authority of
this system”.
Ego-​ psychology, with its mandate on adaptation, is far from authentic
thought.3 The symptom, by contrast, is the expression of the subject’s fidelity
to what keeps him/​her out-​of-​joint. As such, the symptom is testament to the
budding philosopher within. I expressly note that the symptom points to a
budding philosopher because, as we clinicians know all too well, it is also “the
embodiment of ignorance” (Žižek, 2006, 217). Could this take us to a new way
of formulating the neurotic compromise –​ a healthy way worthy of the Nietzschean
gay science –​as the self-​reflection of ignorance (rather than its adaptive obliter-
ation) into its Other, namely philosophical wisdom?
Strictly speaking, Lacan’s claim that the ego is the privileged symptom
of mankind is not correct. Insofar as it claims unity and mastery, the ego
is a diremption of the symptom. The ego is, moreover, the site of a central
134 The untimely-contemporary
contradiction and impasse; the more stringently it insists on its autonomy the
more fragile it becomes. This contradiction is indubitably the source of all the
ills and pains of narcissism. Where the symptom attests to the feminine and the
infantile, the ego has pretence to the “higher” terms, namely the masculine
and adult. However, insofar as the “lower” term triumphs under diremption,
the ego then becomes, indeed, symptom through a dialectical reversal. When
the symptom is dirempted from the ego’s pretence to normalcy, the ego (as the
“higher” term) dwindles precisely into what it sought to shun. Only by taking
account of this complex dialectical reversal do we reach Lacan’s claim that the
ego is the privileged symptom of humankind. To this we must add the proviso,
however, that the ego is symptom in the sense of a hyper-​symptom disparaged
to pure thought.
The identities-​in-​difference explored in this treatise reveal two contrasting
aspects of the real. We have what I name the paradoxical real, namely the site
of the dialectical unity of two terms, which, from the perspective of common
understanding, stand in rigid opposition. We also have what I designate as
the diremptive real, namely the locus of a contradiction and impasse resulting
from the failure to recognize the paradoxical real.4 The last of the paradoxes
discussed and its accompanying diremptive contradiction has a special place
insofar as it represents at once an identity-​in-​difference (between the untimely-​
contemporary and the maladjusted) and a diremption (of the subject-​collective
unity). To put it formulaically, we may say that it stands for the hyper-​paradoxical
dialectical unity of the paradoxical and the diremptive real. Philosophy, I claim, occu-
pies this hyper-​anxious place of the hyper-​paradoxical identity-​in-​difference of
paradox and contradiction. The philosopher gives expression to the identity-​
in-​difference of the subject and the collective and to the diremption of this
very dialectical unity. Žižek, following Badiou, claims that “thought as such is
communist” (Žižek, 2018, 374). However, he also argues (Žižek, 1996) for a
view linking philosophy and the contraction of being. Does the communist uto-
pian dream not precisely consist of giving body to a paradoxical community
of subjects free to indulge in the conceit of their singular contractive self-​
diremptions? The genius of Nietzsche’s nostrils sniffed out the hidden desire
of philosophy, namely the wish for an absolute diremptive severing from the
world: Pereat mundus, fiat philosophia, fiat philosophus, fiam (Nietzsche, 1998).5
The philosophical passion is, for Nietzsche, an extension of the noble pathos
of distance that unabashedly asserts egoism as “the very essence of a noble soul”
(Nietzsche, 2000a). Philosophy’s impossible task is to minimally reconcile this
diremptive ascetic ideal –​for Nietzsche (1998) self-​diremption is the hidden
meaning of the ascetic ideal in the case of philosophers –​with the communist
motto: “We are nothing, let us be all”. Philosophy is the paradoxical unity of
the highest self-​conceit, the most arrogant assertion of self against the world and
the humblest self-​effacement faced with the universal.6
All authentically philosophical thought rests on a diremptive gesture by
which the subject relinquishes his/​her participation in the collective. As love of
wisdom, philosophy has perhaps no other choice than to hate the masses.We must
 The untimely-contemporary 135
thus posit the paradoxical dialectical unity of diremption and self-​reflection.The
human (philosophical) subject is the diremptive being embodying the contra-
diction of divine bestiality. The philosopher can only reach him/​herself (self-​
reflection) through the paradoxical effort of striving away from him/​herself
(diremption). In the flight away from self and kin, the human being finds again a
forgotten part of him/​herself lost in the hustle and bustle of fallen everydayness.
It is no wonder that Zarathustra’s rise to mountainous heights required the com-
pany of lowly beasts, his eagle and his serpent. The choice of animals replicates
the dialectical tension –​the soaring bird and the slithering snake.

Notes
1 Could this explain Lacan’s enigmatic claim regarding the “rigour” of the psychotic
(cf. Massat, 2007)?
2 In this regard, the understanding immediately (without separating moments) achieves
the work of speculative reason, namely that of sustaining paradox. Through the work
of separation, the understanding joins the subject to its truth. Throughout I have set
the common understanding against speculative reason. We now see that this too is
diremptive.
3 If Freudian-​Lacanian psychoanalysis is founded upon the gesture by which truth is
said to speak (cf. The Freudian Thing) then ego-​psychology marks the moment in the
history of psychoanalysis where the ego, site of irremediable alienation, spoke and,
regrettably, was heard. The result was the deplorable notion of the ego as a “conflict-​
free zone” granting theoretical sanction to the delusional pretence of autonomy. To
speak of a conflict-​free zone in the ego is as contradictory as to speak of a torsion-​
free zone in the Moebius strip. Conflict (symptom) is the kink in the Moebius strip
that is nowhere and everywhere at once.
4 This opposition coincides with Hegel’s distinction between “contradiction” (internal
division) and “difference” (external opposition). The diremptive real is akin to the
specular imaginary and its battle of pure prestige. It thus represents a disparagement
of the real to the imaginary.
5 “Let the world perish, but let there be philosophy, the philosopher, me”.
6 Žižek (2015, 182) counts Plato, Descartes and Hegel among the great philosophers
of madness and self-​withdrawal. Alas, he omits Nietzsche, the thinker who took self-​
diremptive severance to the height of divine madness.
Variation 23 
Religion and atheism

Symbolic castration is a matter of faith. One must, like Tertullian, believe in the
absurdity of a law contradicted by its enunciation. One must be duped by the
paternal law so that one may, in turn, kill the father (dupe him) and emerge as
a subject. One must die to the law in order to live for God. In the psychoses,
where this mutual duping is lacking, the subject is confronted with a monstrous
Other. Unlike this nightmare of the real, “in religion proper”, Žižek argues,
“one does not know God, but risks trusting in him” (Žižek, 2012a, 865). The
psychotic, by contrast, knows God but does not trust Him.1 He/​she has abso-
lute certitude regarding the voices he/​she hears but does not trust them as he
takes them for evil. He/​she sees and hears evil in the voice and gaze-​objects
that surround him/​her to the extent that his own position of defiance is one
of radical evil. The subject is witness to the literal evil of the Other (paranoia,
mania) as well as that of the self (melancholia, schizophrenia). In the constitutive
lie at the basis of truth and in his/​her own gestures of defiance, the psychotic
sees an Other that deceives and a self that is polluted with sin. The literalness of
radical evil in the psychoses, by contrast to hysteric protest, submits the subject
to an Other that remains indifferent to her suffering, a Schreberian God marked
“by a peculiar ignorance about living human beings” (Santner, 1996, 62). The
dimension of religiosity is targeted in psychosis; do Schreber’s memoirs not
testify to the most thoroughgoing perversion of religion fathomable? Atheism
proper is also abolished here insofar as true atheism and religiosity belong
together. Faith and atheism involve symbolic castration. Religion and atheism
without castration correspond, respectively, to fanaticism and scientistic/​dog-
matic materialism.The escalation of religious fanaticism and new religiosities as
well as the rise of vulgar materialism (e.g. Dawkins’ (1989) claim that intelligent
life emerges only when an organism has discovered evolution –​i.e. when it
reduces itself to a mere living creature trapped in finitude)2 represent, according
to Žižek, two sides of the same coin. The atheist’s rage against religion (e.g.
Hitchens’ (2007) puerile “God is not great”) and the fundamentalist’s fury at
heathen faithlessness are manifestations of narcissistic suicidal aggression where
the subject blindly strikes at the kakon of his own being in the other.3 The
plethora of new religions on the rise in our contemporary situation attests to an
ontology of juxtaposition where everything loses its specificity.The diremption
 Religion and atheism 137
of the identity-​in-​difference of faith and atheism leads to the contemporary
contradiction inherent to the trendy Western appropriation of Eastern faiths
(e.g. Buddhism/​Hinduism/​Sufism).This contradiction is evidenced in the phe-
nomenon of the “millionaire yogi” politely christened as “Zorba the Buddha”,
a most ghastly name for the incongruous wedding of the height of materialist
expenditure and the hypocritical pretence to humility. Here a strictly “privatized
eschatology” (Rudolph Bultmann quoted in Bloch, 2009) unabashedly put to
the service of material gain (e.g. techniques of visualizing a wish, referred to
as “manifesting”, in the hope of having it realized) is sold to the naïve as the
height of spiritual attainment.
Lacan rejects Nietzsche’s infamous “God is dead” as “a shelter against the
threat of castration” (Lacan, 1977, 27) as well as Dostoevsky’s idea that the
inexistence of God would lead to everything being permitted (Lacan, 2007).
Dostoevsky fears that the loss of God targets civil society while Nietzsche sees
in this loss the possibility of the overman. We have Nietzsche the atheist and
Dostoevsky the theist; both miss the proper dimension of religiosity-​atheism.
By contrast, Lacan makes many interesting statements attesting to the dialect-
ical unity of faith and atheism. For instance, the idea that “a thinking that is
rigorously atheist” is situated at “the frontiers of the ex nihilo” or “in the per-
spective of creationism” (Lacan, 1986, 303, my translation) will surely shock the
common understanding insofar as the categories of ex nihilo and creationism are
decidedly religious. Ordinary doxa opposes these to scientistic atheism where
the category of causality reigns. Lacan makes the further paradoxical claims that
“theologians are the only atheists” and that the proofs of the existence of God
are the means by which He has been killed (1998). Lacan’s “God is uncon-
scious” (1977, 59) may provide the formula for this atheism as religiosity and,
concomitantly, pave the way towards symbolic castration. Only through sym-
bolic castration can the subject achieve the paradox by which faith in the Other
(religiosity) coincides with its barring (atheism). Incidentally, the failure to rec-
ognize the identity-​in-​difference of atheism and religiosity explains the blaring
contradictions of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche’s personal lives, a pious sinner on
the one hand and an impious saint on the other.4
Earlier (variation 5), the dialectical relation between religion and reason
occupied our attention. We also lengthily considered the opposition between
good and evil (variation 15) where the religious thematic is present such that the
two terms could be replaced with religiosity (piety, the sacred) and ir-​religiosity
(impiety, the profane). Finally, we contemplated the opposition between religi-
osity and atheism where each term accedes to itself through a self-​reflection
taking it to its Other. I would here venture to introduce a fourth opposite to
religion (alongside reason, profanation and atheism). If the word religion comes
from the Latin ligare, meaning to join together, could one not venture the bold
claim that faith should be denoted by another word capturing not only the
aspect of union but also that of separation? Such a word would better render
the idea that true religiosity does not simply consist of union with God but,
more precisely, of a union-​in-​separation. As Žižek argues in light of Hegel, “it is
138 Religion and atheism
our very separation from the Thing that joins us to it”. If we were to coin such
a new word, we would have to look for a Latin term denoting separation or
cut which would take us incidentally to “seco”, namely the origin of the word
“sex”. Sex and religion are thus etymologically opposed as “separation” and
“union”. In light of the Hegelian frame of our study, could we not argue for the
identity-​in-​difference of sex and religion as constituting the veritable “essence”
of both such that one without the other would constitute a disparagement of
both? Sex without the raptures of religion would be but a pale placid imitation,
a mere tomfoolery of the senses rather than veritable eroticism while religion
without sex would be an empty fascination with the divine akin to idolatrous
narcissistic captivation.
Lacan’s teaching is essentially deconstructive, pointing to impossibilities and
negations rather than positive terms. Three principal statements of inexistence
emerge from his thought: 1) there is no Other of the Other, 2) Woman does
not exist, 3) there is no rapport between the sexes. These are inoperative for
the uncastrated subject. For Schreber, the Other did indeed exist in the guise
of a cruel God demanding endless sacrifice for the sake of his own jouissance.
Also, it was bestowed upon him to embody Woman in order to submit to the
dismal God. Finally, Schreber’s vision puts on stage a veritable sexual rapport
between the insatiable God and himself –​a rapport which, unlike neurotic
sexual relations marked by points of impossibility, leaves space for neither frus-
tration nor dissatisfaction. Schreber’s delusion marks the twilight of the symbol
and the advent of the idols of the Other, the Woman and the sexual rapport.
Each of these fills in a gap in the symbolic order, while the symbol holds the
place of the gap without trying to make up for the lacuna.
Madness (neurotic, perverse or psychotic) attests to the incomplete self-​
reflection of religiosity into its four Others, namely reason, evil, atheism and
sex. The failed passing into atheism leads to a diremptive religiosity where
the Other wavers from utter non-​existence to concrete persecutory presence.
What fails to ensue is the instance of a non-​existent Other which, paradoxically,
assures a minimal relation to social otherness. The failed passing into sex results
in either a total/​literal impossibility that flounders into impotence or a mad
effort to sustain the impossible dream of sexual harmony. Here we also have the
erection of the false idol of “The Woman”, a concrete and literal embodiment
of femininity, which, paradoxically, forbids the subject’s access to the feminine.
We may here take our cue from the other two opposites of religiosity (namely,
reason and evil) in order to generate, in the spirit of Lacan, two new propos-
itions of impossibility. With respect to the opposition between good (piety)
and evil (impiety), we may say that there is no tablet of the good. Paradoxically, it
is the recognition of the absence of “Commandments” that allows for a min-
imal guarantee of moral conduct; wild resurgences of depravity are seldom
separate from pretences to moral rectitude. Finally, we may argue that there is no
measure of reason. Paradoxically, it is the realization of the lack of such a common
measure that allows for a modicum of reason. If the phallic signifier provides a
semblance of sanity for the speaking being it is precisely because it is an empty
 Religion and atheism 139
signifier without a signified. The mark of insanity is more the presence (rather
than the absence) of a standard by which the world could be measured. Paranoia
is a knowledge system that proclaims itself as the very measure of all things.
Paranoia is not the lack of rhyme and reason but the testament to a reason that
rhymes all too well; so well, indeed, that it must be the doing of the gods.
The contemporary triumph of the common understanding has led to
the misrecognition of the identity-​in-​difference of religion with its alleged
contraries, namely reason, atheism, evil and sex. Thus, instead of the para-
doxical unity in opposition through which each term accedes to its Other
and itself through self-​reflection, we testify to a regression to a pre-​Kantian
“salad ontology” marked by an endless proliferation of falsely novel elements
celebrated under the banner of diversity. The realms of love, ethics and psycho-
analysis have been thereby disparaged to disciplines of management. Instead
of love acceding to its rightful dignity by joining its opposite, we have the
management of love, “love without the fall”, with its dialectical correlate of
the “fall without the love”. Instead of a good achieved through its courageous
self-​reflection into evil, we have the mediocre ethical stances of what Cortés
christened the “discussing class” (the liberal bourgeoisie), where the lofty realm
of ethics is reduced to a petty calculus of utility. Good unwedded to the added
spirituality of evil is a mere utilitarian negotiation. Jesus’ summoning us to the
good cannot be separated from his call to betray our kin. Finally, instead of the
daring exploration of the unconscious through which humankind’s delirious
madness may self-​reflexively sublate into wisdom, we have the abandonment of
psychoanalysis in favour of “anger management” and “life coaching”. If Žižek
(2012a) locates our only hope in the intersection of reason and drive, it is
because reason is the self-​reflection of madness. If “men are so necessarily mad
that it would be another twist of madness not to be mad” then we live today in
the times of “ordinary madness”, where the divine insanity of love, ethics and
psychoanalysis are replaced by the petty idiocies of management.

Notes
1 With respect to the relation between faith and psychosis, Maleval argues that “the
delusional certainty of the paranoid subject reveals the absence of the term that
founds the doubt that always inheres to faith” (Maleval, 2000, 111, my translation).
2 For Bloch, what is missed by vulgar materialism is that the way out of superstition
into atheism is offered by Christianity: “the counter-​blow against the oppressor is
biblical, too, and that is why it has always been suppressed or distorted, from the ser-
pent on” (Bloch, 2009, xv). For Bloch, Thompson argues, “We seem to be trapped
in a dualistic [specular we may say] but essentially static way of thinking about the
relationship between religion and science” (ibid, x).
3 Thompson (in Bloch, 2009, x) puts it well:

In the forum of religious belief, therefore, theists and atheists battle it out, each
convinced they are on the back foot, each fighting against what they see as a
combined tide of muddle-​headedness, dogmatism and irrationality, threatening to
140 Religion and atheism
overwhelm us with theocracies, technocracies, sterile democracies, faithless scientism,
value-​free liberality and fundamentalist regimes and movements.
Indeed, religion has become today one of the feistiest battlegrounds for the
imaginary mirror relation.
4 Consider the following two remarkable speculative propositions: “Only an atheist
can be a good Christian; only a Christian can be a good atheist” (Bloch, 2009, xxi)
and, more scandalously-​profanely, “The best thing about religion is that it makes for
heretics” (ibid, xxv).
Variation 24 
The death of God

Hegel is undoubtedly the philosopher of the paradox of God:

God has died, God is dead –​this is the most frightful of all thoughts, that
everything eternal and true is not, that negation itself is found in God.
The deepest anguish, the feeling of complete irretrievablity, the annulling
of everything that is elevated, are bound up with this thought. However,
the process does not come to a halt at this point; rather a reversal takes
place: God that is to say, maintains himself in this process and the latter is
only the death of death. God rises to life again and things are reversed…
the death of Christ is the death of this death itself, the negation of negation.
(Hegel, 2008b, 323–​324)

By contrast, Nietzsche is the philosopher of the diremptive remain. Against

Hegel, Nietzsche insists that something of God’s death remains:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we
comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and
mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our
knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean
ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to
invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves
not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
(Nietzsche, 1974, 181)

Following Lacan, we dismissed Nietzsche’s “God is dead” as testament to failed

atheism consequent upon diremption. We may now reconsider that Nietzsche
may be giving voice to the profanatory diremptive remain without which
atheism would dwindle to the insufficiency of the merely secular. If Hegel is,
for Lacan and Žižek, the sublime hysteric subject, Nietzsche is for us, the abject
psychotic hyper-​subject, a necessary surplus to the latter if we are to break from the
chains of the late modern slave revolt in morality. This is why Nietzsche is the
thinker of the “archi-​political” (Badiou, 2013), the hyper-​revolt against “against
everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far” (Nietzsche,
142 The death of God
2000b). The hyper-​melancholic apathy of his late-​life aphanisis is the essential
correlate to his hyper-​subjectivity. Nietzsche’s fall into madness is the fruition
of his wisdom, the necessary Other of the lucidity of his archi-​political hyper-​
revolt. His profanations are indispensable weapons towards the desacralization
of theological modernity. Hegelian-​Žižekian Christianity provided the first
death of God, while Nietzsche’s profanation (too easily dismissed by Lacan
as a shelter against castration)1 grants a necessary second death. Our eman-
cipation from theological modernity requires the convergence of speculative
reason and its partial diremption. It is not sufficient to rise beyond the ontology
of juxtaposition to Kantian opposition and finally to Hegelian self-​reflection.
The latter step must be supplemented with a profanatory thought that heeds
to the diremptive remains. Psychoanalysis has a twin genealogy in Hegelian
dialectics and Nietzschean diremptive profanation. Žižek is the thinker who
has most rigorously and thoroughly argued for the dialectical genealogy of
psychoanalysis while Henry (2003) was a stringent advocate of its Nietzschean
heritage. For us, psychoanalysis is, at once, dialectical-​Hegelian and diremptive-​
Nietzschean. Psychoanalysis is, at once, philosophy and its subversion. It is the
hyper-​paradoxical place where diremption (i.e. separation) separates from itself.
Here philosophy –​also the dwelling place of a hyper-​paradox –​meets itself by
separating from itself. Psychoanalysis completes philosophy precisely by div-
iding it from within. Without its Hegelian heritage psychoanalysis flounders
into the perversity of a quasi-​Sadian jouissance and without its Nietzschean
legacy it is reduced to a mere game of shadows.
The evolution of Žižek’s theory of humour is noteworthy. Žižek initially
believed that all humour, to be effective, relies on minimal cruelty. Later, he
abandoned this view in favour of the idea that laughter can be caused by a simple
unexpected dialectical shift. However, the force of Žižek’s jokes consists of the
fact that both levels remain operative throughout. Without the profanatory
supplement of Nietzschean Schadenfreude humour loses its sting. We may win
a smile with a playful dialectical reversal, but Schadenfreude is indispensable if
we are to achieve Olympian laughter and kill the spirit of gravity haunting theo-
logical modernity. To Lacan’s speculative “God is unconscious” one must add
Nietzsche’s diremptive-​profanatory “God is dead” as the necessary supplement
to complete desacralization.
If God is the name of the paradoxical coincidence of contraries, such
that His death coincides with His resurrection, God is also the appellation
christening the diremptive remains testifying to partial sublation. We may bap-
tise the former as the God of speculative reason and the latter as the God of
psychoanalysis or the God of diremptive remains. This is the God of profan-
ation, the atheist God, the dead God, the evil God and the voluptuous God of
Jouissance. This God is symptom of man; He is a Woman-​God, a child-​God and
a psychoanalyst (plague-​bestowing) God. He is an egotistical God, a narcis-
sistic God, a mad God, a lying and humiliated God. The primordial God is the
God of self-​contracting diremption. The creative God is the God of speculative
reason submitting to self-​evacuating kenosis to realize Himself in spirit. Heine
 The death of God 143
poetically captures these two moments in the History of God: “Illness is no
doubt the final cause of the whole urge to create. By creating I could recover.
By creating I became healthy” (Heine quoted in Freud, 1914). The ill God is
the God of nihilistic self-​diremption caged in the sorrow and self-​laceration of
divine cabin fever.The valetudinary God is the creative God of paradoxical self-​
realizing kenosis.To these we add a third God of the diremptive remain, namely
the psychoanalytic God, the profane remainder of the incomplete sublation of
the primordial self-​contracting God into the God of reason.
Correlative to the identity-​in-​difference of religiosity and atheism we have
the dialectical unity of sacralization and profanation: there is “a zero-​level at
which profanation cannot be distinguished from sacralisation” (Žižek, 2012a,
987). For Žižek, profanation is not the same as secularization, only the former
“is the true materialist undermining of the Sacred” (ibid, 987).2 The thorough
way out of the sacred requires profanation which, as we have seen, stands in
dialectical unity with the sacred. Paradoxically, sacralization alone leads the way
out of the sacred. In a similar vein, Nietzsche argues that atheism is born out of
Christianity’s will to truth (Nietzsche, 1998). He speaks of “the law of the self-​
overcoming of all great things” (ibid) according to which to overcome something
one has to push it to its extreme. Evil is overcome through the radicalization of
evil.The sacred is overcome through its escalation in the profane (the profane is
not the opposite of the sacred, it is its radicalization). Nietzsche’s profanities (tit-
ling a book as “The Antichrist”, mocking Socrates’ ugliness (monstrum in fronte
monstrum in animo), calling Christ a “fool” to name a few) function as inflated
sacralizations through which alone humankind may finally free itself from the
sacred. The style of Nietzsche’s prose is undeniably sacred-​profane (Dionysian
dithyrambs, the Biblical style of Zarathustra). If Nietzsche sought at all to dis-
enchant the world (“sounding out idols” (Nietzsche, 2005, 155)), his preferred
means was always that of an excessive and exorbitant enchantment.
The diremption of this paradoxical identity-​in-​difference (sacralization is the
way out of the sacred) leads to the daunting contradiction by which the sacred
re-​emerges in the very field from which it was excluded by the effort of secu-
larization. As Žižek has shown, “secularization always relies on its disavowed
sacred foundation, which survives either as an exception or as a formal struc-
ture” (Žižek, 2012a, 987). We find the resurgence of the sacred within the
secular world in both forms isolated by Žižek, namely as exception and as formal
structure (these correspond, of course, to the masculine and the feminine). With
respect to the first, Žižek isolates the vastly repeated motif of the “spiritual” in
counterpoint to the dominance of the otherwise largely scientistic paradigm.
We may say that the post-​secular and the secular are one and the same, in a logic
mirroring the return of the repressed on the ashes of the repressed. As for the
resurgence of the sacred within the form of capitalism, we have the functioning
of capital as a mystical real for which the subject is willing to sacrifice him/​
herself.3
According to Žižek, capitalism secularizes rather than profanes the world.
The result of this is that the religious principle is re-​introduced in the capitalist
144 The death of God
economy itself. Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Glory is a testament to the failed
atheism of modernity. For Agamben, modernity “maintains the theological
model of the government of the world” (Agamben, 2011, 285). Interestingly
much of what Agamben says pushes us to the conclusion that it is a diremption
that leads to the contradiction of a theological modernity. More specifically, it
is the diremption of the atheism-​religiosity paradox that is responsible. It is
modernity’s (liberalism, to be precise) emphatic denial of transcendence and
God (“kingdom” as Agamben calls it) that leads to failed atheism:

Liberalism represents a tendency that pushes to an extreme the supremacy

of the pole of the “immanent order-​government-​stomach” to the point
that it almost eliminates the pole “transcendent God-​ kingdom-​ brain”
… And when modernity abolishes the divine pole, the economy that is
derived from it will not thereby have emancipated itself from its provi-
dential paradigm. In the same way, in modern Christian theology, there are
forces that cast Christology into a near a-​theological drift; but in this case
as well, the theological model is not overcome.
(ibid, 284–​285)

The contradiction of modernity is that secularization, rather than lead to

atheism, reinforced instead the theological paradigm: “Modernity, removing
God from the world, has not only failed to leave theology behind, but in
some ways has done nothing other than to lead the project of the providential
oikonomia to completion” (ibid, 287).
Zarathustra incarnates the three aforementioned moments of the divine
with the aim of achieving Nietzsche’s singular vocation to free modernity from
the clutches of the theological. We have, firstly, the resolution to live on the
mountaintop, namely the moment of diremptive self-​contraction. Secondly,
there is a resolve to return from the mountain. Zarathustra now chooses
self-​realizing kenosis as the tension of self-​contracting diremption becomes
unbearable:

I am weary of my wisdom, like the bee that has gathered too much honey;
I need hands outstretched to take it from me. I wish to spread it and bestow
it, until the wise have once more become joyous in their folly, and the poor
happy in their riches.
(Nietzsche, 1969)

Noteworthy here are the dialectical reversals from poverty to wealth and from
foolish wisdom to joyous folly, attesting to the fact that the moment of joining is
the moment reason.The need for kenosis, spilling oneself into the Other, is fur-
ther poetically rendered by Zarathustra’s proclamation to the sun: “O great star
what would become your happiness if you did not have those for whom you
shine” (ibid). The sun here functions as the prophet’s alter ego; what he addresses
to the star is counsel to himself, a reminder of what his joy owes to those who
 The death of God 145
receive his joy. The third Zarathustra is attested to by Nietzsche’s style, the scrip-
tural writing that is, at once, sacred and profane and which, as such, eschews the
pitfalls of the merely secular as it heralds the coming of the overman beyond
the entrapments of theological modernity.

Notes
1 Lacan’s dismissal of the Oedipus as a “dream of Freud” is another refusal of profane
patricide.
2 Žižek’s own forays into the profane (e.g. “Heidegger is ‘great’ not in spite of, but
because of his Nazi engagement” (Žižek, 2017), “crazy, tasteless even, as it may sound,
the problem with Hitler was that he was not violent enough, that his violence was not
‘essential’ enough” (ibid), occasional pornographic remarks and so on) can, in this
light, be understood as necessary steps on the path of de-​sacralization.
3 For a compelling argument regarding the constitutive religiosity of capitalism see
Benjamin (2004) and Agamben (2019).
Variation 25 
The symptom as
human notion

I have christened that which subsists beyond self-​reflection as the diremptive

remains. I group these here into the following categories: 1) ignorance, 2) jouis-
sance, 3) narcissism, 4) difference, 5) fantasy, 6) subject and 7) structure.
Let us begin with those diremptive remains which I connect to inerad-
icable ignorance. Age-​old speculations regarding otherworldly realms belong
here. The presupposition of “noumenon” can never be entirely eliminated,
as there is no full sublation to phenomenon without remainder. The idea of
transcendence will always remain for the speaking being. As Lacan has noted,
“the God hypothesis” (Lacan, 1998, 45) will always persist. Lacan (2005b) thus
speaks of the inevitable triumph of religion. Theological modernity may be a
structural necessity that has taken a particularly virulent form in our epoch.1
Self-​reflection may lessen the force of this theological remnant but the hope
for total disenchantment is as naïve as the prospect of complete sublation. The
move from difference (external opposition) to contradiction (internal division)
requires recognizing that “depth” or “transcendence” is an immanent illusion
of the surface. The surface has a symptom (torsion) that renders the illusion of
depth or otherworldliness. The surface’s self-​reflection renders it a twisted sur-
face with a kink. Concomitantly, faith-​emotion and reason-​knowledge will not
fully reconcile. The hypothesis of modes of thinking beyond reason will always
remain. Meillassoux (2008) unfairly blames Kant for the advent of modalities of
thought other than reason. He holds Kant accountable for a structural problem.
A world of mathematical reason alone may be nothing more than a “dream
of Meillassoux”. Succinctly put, there will always be faith in faith. Atheism and
religion will retain a minimal difference and a degree of fanaticism, however
small, will persist in both. There is always a leap of faith in one direction. This
dimension of the leap is the surplus that resists sublation. Even the most tem-
perate religiosity and the wisest atheism posit a minimal split in relation to
their respective Other.2 Faith (the “irrational” in general) and dogmatism are
the inexorably human all too human faces of ignorance. The spectre of ignor-
ance will retaliate with dialectical vehemence insofar as there will always be a
diremptive resistance to psychoanalysis. The dream will always tempt towards
scientistic rationalization and mystical lucubration. Freud discovered a realm
of thought where pre-​modern mysticism and modern science reconcile in a
 The symptom as human notion 147
new paradoxical dialectical unity. Psychoanalysis is solidary with the paradigm
of modern science (cf. Lacan (2006) and Milner (1995)) and yet it has given
voice again to long forgotten objects of pre-​modern fascination (dream, fan-
tasy, hallucination). As Derrida aptly puts it, psychoanalysis veritably believes in
ghosts.3 It also believes in the miracle, namely the magical process of changing
one’s past through mere speech. Psychoanalysis has achieved the paradoxical
task of re-​enchanting the world without regressing to pre-​modern superstition.
Paradoxically, this is why it alone achieved the most thorough disenchantment
(materialism). Finally, another facet of human ignorance is falling prey where
we attest to a diremptive remain produced by the self-​reflection of untimely
lucidity and social maladjustment. Even the most luminescent are not immune
to the estranging effects of alienation.
Jouissance is arguably tied to the impossible complete dialectical unity of
sex and religion. Religion will always maintain its intrinsic resolute link to
the ascetic ideal, while sex will preserve an unwavering wish to remain an
earthly delight. The ethics of psychoanalysis institutes a third between the two
insufficient alternatives of asceticism and hedonism. The latter are facets of the
superegoic injunction to jouissance, while their dialectical unity gives an idea
of the desire that psychoanalytic treatment aims to recover for the subject. If
Sade represents jouissance in the form of sexual depravity and Kant stands for
the ascetic obedience to moral law –​two sides of the same coin according to
Lacan (2006), Adorno and Horkheimer (1997) and Nietzsche (1998) –​Freud
stands for the singularity of desire. Though “the unconscious is structured like
a language”, reason cannot entirely account for it as a kernel of indecipherable
jouissance forever plagues the human body. The proper handling of the signifier
will not eliminate the unpredictable joys and torments of affective life.
Under the rubric of narcissism, I isolate the diremptive remains tied to the
paradox of identity. There can never be a perfectly non-​diremptive mirror stage
as the dis-​identifications concomitant with identification are partial. Narcissism
remains a fundamental (self-​diremptive) passion of the human soul.The subject’s
mortal relation to his/​her image is ineradicable. All human identity harbours a
stubborn diremptive, I = I, a conceited assertion of self-​identity. Humiliation
will thus forever haunt the fragile precincts of the imaginary. For Levinas (2003,
64), what “appears in shame is thus precisely the fact of being riveted to oneself,
the radical impossibility of fleeing oneself to hide from oneself ”. Humiliation
represents the radical impasse of self-​diremption, namely the vain passion to
flee from oneself that paradoxically confines one to greater narcissistic incar-
ceration. With respect to object loss, all mourning harbours a pathological core.
The object casts an indelible shadow on the mourner plagued with the spectre
of manic-​melancholic despair. With this, I partially reconcile with Butler as the
shadow of the object accounts for a diremptive remain that marks sexual iden-
tity as constitutively melancholic.
With respect to the three fundamental differences isolated by psychoanalysis,
there are remnants testifying to partial sublation.The parent’s envy of the child’s
youth and the child’s jealousy of the parental couple remain insurmountable
148 The symptom as human notion
obstacles to self-​reflection. Something of the hoped for re-​appropriation of
knowledge, through which transference love/​ “paranoia” is brought to an
end, is curtailed. The subject never fully wakes from the transference dream.
Correlatively, the analyst can never observe entirely “without memory and
without desire” (Bion, 1967). Counter-​transference will always taint the ideal of
analytic objectivity. Finally, anatomical difference forbids the full self-​reflection
of each sex to its Other. Lacan’s logical formulation of sexual difference cannot
entirely ignore Freud’s “anatomy is destiny” (Freud, 1924, 178). The dialectical
shifts between having and not-​having or between having and being lose much flu-
idity when faced with the anatomical obstacle. There is real sexual difference
prior to the real of sexual difference.4 Regardless of sexuation, men and women
have concerns that the other sex cannot fathom. A man cannot know of preg-
nancy, labour and menstruation. Likewise, a woman will not know the anx-
iety of impregnating someone accidentally and of having less decision power
regarding abortion.This is not a biological argument. Every subject has to come
to terms with an externally imposed anatomy; one is never quite at home with
one’s body which always retains a quantum of foreignness. One is not born
knowing what to do with one’s anatomy. Anatomy is destiny that must be
reckoned with. By positing an unsurpassable “rock of castration” Freud (1937)
heeds to the bodily diremptive remain.
Fantasy can never be entirely traversed, as the yearning for phallic power
will always defy castration. The seduction fantasy cannot be entirely crossed
insofar as the thirst for activity (mastery) is insuperable. The primal scene fan-
tasy too, cannot be traversed to completion as no subject will ever fully agree
to be excluded from his/​her origin. Myths of origin will remain an ideological
temptation. The idols of Woman, the Other and the (harmonious) sexual rela-
tion will continue to seduce subjects. Finally, the fantasy superegoic underside
of the law can never be fully sublated through self-​reflection.
Sixth, we have the diremptive remains tied to the category of the subject.
The good cannot sublate evil insofar as an exorbitant evil will only partially pass
into the good. Something of evil will remain and be felt as evil. There is thus
no revolution without some “terror”.5 Likewise, one’s symbolic suicide never
suffices to eliminate the patricidal wish.6 What here remains is the Oedipus
complex, which will never be reducible to a mere “dream of Freud”.7 We must
here recall that the force of law is not entirely “false fascination” (as Žižek calls
it (Žižek, 2012a, 971)) hiding an ultimate weakness.There is a power of the law
that is irreducible to fantasy –​belief to the contrary leads to the mystifications
of the university discourse.8 Evil, terror and patricide are arguably counter
measures to the diremptive violence of law which is itself evil and terror; they
are the Verwerfung that accompanies every Ausstossung. Political engagements
always risk regressing into the private use of reason. A self-​diremptive kernel
remains seeking refuge in self-​contracting egotism away from the collective.
The profane and the sacred too will not fully reconcile. A degree of offensive
affront will forever divide them. Lies cannot completely sublate to truth as an
enduring element of mischievous deceit will not be sanitized by the self-​reflexive
 The symptom as human notion 149
process. Even the most sagacious relation to one’s heritage includes rejection
of thrownness. Concomitantly, there is always a minimal denial of death and
mortality. Badiou’s “Down with death!” is part and parcel of a necessary prof-
anation against finitude; what it lacks, however, is profanation against life (death
drive) that founds the basis of all true passion. Even the most serene interiority
(resulting from adjustment to the social) harbours a paranoid kernel. These are
testament to the fact that the subject is primarily a hyper-​subject. Self-​assertion,
faced with the ponderous weight of the pre-​existing symbolic order, requires
the extravagant forms of evil, patricide, obstinate prejudice, egotism, profanity,
deceit, rejection of the past, defiance of mortality and self-​diremptive paranoia.
Today, the violence constitutive of subjectivity fails to assert itself sufficiently.
This may be the real meaning of the “death of man”.9
Finally, the diremptive remain of structure concerns the university discourse,
the realm of abstract universality and formalism. Our relation to the symptom
is not immediately psychoanalytic-​speculative. Looking at the world from the
perspective of the university discourse is a structural necessity, an unavoidable
diremptive remain. The transition to analyst discourse is not immediately given
and, therefore, resistance to psychoanalysis (and Hegel) will always remain.
Freud and Hegel are not merely ahead of their time; they are ahead of all time, as
no epoch will ever be wholly aligned with psychoanalysis and German idealism
(they are the universal symptoms of humankind). The university discourse is a
necessity that cannot be fully overcome. Adam’s decision to bite the apple of
knowledge attests to the great temptation of the university discourse. The uni-
versity discourse is as elemental as the fall.The jouissance of the body compels the
subject towards an explanation in the modality of formal abstract knowledge.10
The child’s epistemophilic drive wants to know in the mode of the university
discourse. Children are veritable researchers with regard to the enigma of sexu-
ality. And if children can also be the psychoanalysts of their jouissance (a bold
claim indeed), such an alleged analyst’s discourse would not be untainted by
university discourse. The fantasies of neurotic children are inextricably linked
to this human tendency towards formalism. They are responses to the enigma
of jouissance in the form of knowledge. Analytic intervention could unveil the
“holes” of truth obfuscated therein.11 God’s command to not bite the apple of
knowledge is a prohibition against this fundamental human tendency (a passion
for ignorance) towards formal knowledge.
Hegel’s thinking, insofar as it champions concrete universality against for-
malism, continues “God’s work” by beckoning us to abandon empty formalism.
Hegel is opposed to “monochromatic” formalism that applies abstract principles
from above. For Hegel, formalism is “cognition naively reduced to vacuity”
(Hegel, 1977, 9). He thus asserts, against Kant, that formalism “imagines that
it has comprehended and expressed the nature and life of a form when it has
endowed it with some determination of the schema as a predicate” (ibid, 29).
At the level of infinite spirit, the inadequacy of formalism is most obvious. By
extension, Hegel rejects formalism even in the case of finite spirit. The laws of
finite nature are also only “valid” by approximation. Nature, much like human
150 The symptom as human notion
spirit, is irreducible to law –​or to cast it in Žižek’s favourite Lacanian idiom,
nature is not-​all reducible to law. All theoretical models are doomed to fall, as
finite and infinite spirit resists formalism. Scientific theories as well as personal
life narratives need constant replacement, though the former enjoy greater lon-
gevity. When Hegel claims that “everything turns on grasping and expressing
the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject” (ibid, 10), he expresses the
limitation of abstract formalism. Subject is the name of that aspect of substance
that will not allow substance to be all substance. This recalcitrance to abstract
universality is most evident in the human being, that entity that most rigorously
defies its definition.12 Lacan’s topology is a paradoxical formalization without
meta-​language or generalization. That all of spirit is irreducible to law can also
help finally put an end to the false idea, repeatedly put forward by biologic-
ally uniformed Lacanians, that animal behaviour obeys predictable laws. Žižek’s
return to an ontological Hegel informs us that all of spirit is not-​all. For Žižek,
all nature is mad and wildly contingent (something that Darwin already knew).
Infinite human spirit only represents the peak and high point of that madness;
it is the point at which the semblance of order is hardest to maintain.13
More specifically, the symptom –​the marker of discomfort par excellence –​
testifies to this highest madness that contests most explicitly all formalism.
Freud’s discovery owes everything to the hysteric symptom’s obstinate insub-
ordination to medicine. The symptom provides the notion of human. As any
notion, the symptom is the antidote to abstract universality. The subject is the
symptom, namely that which he/​she is not. In this regard, McGowan remarks
that absolute knowing involves “identification with the subject’s foundational
symptom” (McGowan, 2019, 47).14 Such an achievement would be the height
of the speculative and highly recalcitrant paradox by which the human and the
inhuman stand in identity-​in-​difference. In Lacanese, the subject would here
achieve the move from i(a) (the specular image or ego) to a (the kernel of sur-
plus enjoyment that is the symptom and which resists inclusion in the image).
This consists of nothing other than subjective destitution.15
The diremptive remains are as necessary as human suffering. De Boer
explains that

the positive turns out to suffer from the contradiction between what it is in itself (the
unity of its contrary moments) and what it has actually become (a determin-
ation opposed to its contrary), and the same is true of the negative.
(de Boer, 2010, 362)

Suffering exists insofar as there is a diremptive remain (“a determination

opposed to its contrary”). Despite an entity’s speculative unity with its Other, it
harbours a kernel of resistance to that identity-​in-​difference and thereby causes
suffering. Man contradicts himself when he dirempts his speculative identity
with woman. This self-​contradiction leads to man’s suffering even though,
and, indeed precisely because this diremption was motivated by a will to avoid
suffering. The diremptive remain brings suffering and therefore jouissance.
 The symptom as human notion 151
Correctly perceiving the jouissance within the suffering (what we owe to Freud’s
interpretive genius) allows one to mitigate the force of the diremption. Man’s
suffering, consequent upon his diremptive denial of femininity, will reduce
once he recognizes suffering as the expression of an unconscious enjoyment
that contradicts his claim to pure masculinity. The Freudian-​Lacanian discovery
of jouissance (the contradiction of enjoyed suffering) is one of history’s greatest
feats of speculative thought countering diremption. Melancholia is an inev-
itable diremptive remain plaguing mourning from within. The recognition of
the jouissance hidden within the pain will help finally overcome the last hurdle
before the acceptance of loss.
Two points need to be highlighted at this moment. Firstly, the diremptive
remain is, at once, an obstacle to and condition of full sublation. Secondly, the
psychoanalytic notion of symptom entails all seven diremptive remains. The
symptom is, more than all else, that which makes speculation possible precisely
by offering an obstacle to it. Let us now consider the symptom in light of the
aforementioned diremptive remains. The symptom is “embodied ignorance”
(Žižek, 2006, 217) and yet, as we will see, it is also the locus of (self-​)conscious-
ness. The symptom is suffering-​jouissance and yet it allows the mitigation of
suffering by recognizing jouissance. Freud discovered the jouissance in suffering
through his self-​analysis (mediated, as Lacan reminds us, by his transference to
Fliess). The discovery of psychoanalysis was thus his symptom.16 It was born of
his suffering and yet it mitigated that suffering by introducing it to the field
of the Other. Thirdly, the symptom breaks narcissism and is, for that reason,
what prompts the subject to erect an ego based on the narcissistic will to deny
the symptom. Without the challenge posed by the symptom to the self, there
would be no will to hoist oneself above it. The symptom abolishes (through
identity-​in-​difference) sexual, generational and power difference and yet it is
the only way of maintaining these differences with the required integrity that
only a boundary without a limit can achieve. Fifthly, the symptom crosses the
fantasy and yet provides the kernel around which fantasy knits its narrative.
The symptom is the marker of the subject’s singularity; it is what is most “me”
despite and by virtue of being also what “feels least me”. Finally, the symptom
is the basis of the university discourse (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders is a list of symptoms in isolation). It beckons the subject to
seek an answer in knowledge. Yet it is also that which contests the university
discourse most rigorously, thereby paving the way, for those who have ears to
hear, for a shift to the discourse of the analyst.17
The symptom as human notion implies that the human being’s conduit to
itself (or, in Hegelese, the absolute) has to take recourse to an ego-​dystonic
path of despair. The symptom, as speculative notion, is at once 1) a symbol,
namely that which unites (symbolein) and 2) that which separates and dirempts
(diabolein).18 As uniting force, the symptom moves the subject to present it to
the Other (e.g. psychoanalyst). The symptom paves the way towards the abso-
lute, if one lets it speak (free association). It is the diremptive remain testifying
to our separation from the absolute and thereby paradoxically also uniting us
152 The symptom as human notion
with it.The symptom is the fragrance of the absolute19 because it summons the sub-
ject to consider the whole rather than speculate on the local (a contradiction
indeed). The DSM represents the epitome of the abstract scientistic formalism.
Its constant changes and revisions testify to the symptom’s recalcitrance in the
face of this inane indexing. In its diabolein aspect, the symptom is suffering
that separates one from others; it is an idiotic autoerotic jouissance. Also, and
most crucially, the diabolical aspect of the symptom most rigorously accounts
for its resistance to formalism and its subversion of pre-​existing doxa.20 The
opposition of the symptom’s two moments (symbolein and diabolein) unite in
psychoanalysis.The symptom’s mutiny separates from psychiatry in order to join
psychoanalysis.
The symptom signals the lack of a human “nature”. Some subjects try to sub-
sume their being under the rubric of a pure thought. This leads to the contra-
diction of fragile rigidity. The symptom provides the form for the notion insofar
as it marks the failure of any formal definition of human being. Earlier, however,
we saw that for Hegel love provided the model for the notion.We now see that
the symptom has usurped love’s privileged position. Indeed, Žižek (2019) even
holds that love is a mask cast upon the trauma of the real (i.e. the trauma of the
symptom). How, if it all, can these two views be reconciled? Can both love and
the symptom provide the model of the logical notion and thereby of human
infinite spirit? This would mean that love and the symptom share the same
basic structure, namely that of giving expression to the same highly recalci-
trant paradoxes. Let us now verify this hypothesis concerning the isomorphism
of love and the symptom by testing whether the paradoxes of the former are
applicable to the latter. Love represents, firstly, the identity-​in-​difference of tri-
umph and defeat. The same can be said of the symptom insofar as it marks
the subject’s defeat (it is radically ego-​dystonic) and from there its triumph (it
testifies to the “true” self). Secondly, like love, the symptom testifies to the dia-
lectical unity of lack and plenitude insofar as it depletes the subject (through
jouissance) and yet it is the only thing that can replenish him/​her and grant a
modicum of meaning to existence. With respect to the love-​hate opposition,
the symptom is the human notion only insofar as it stands for the inhuman in the
human. The symptom occupies, as such, the place of das Ding, namely of hate-​
jouissance. The symptom is the neighbour within. As with love, which is, at once,
communism and egotism, the symptom separates the subject in self-​diremption
and yet also joins him/​her to the community of sufferers.Without the suffering
induced by the symptom, the subject would remain closed upon him/​herself
unable to relate to another.21 Again, in strict parallel with love, the symptom is
both atheism and piety. It marks the fact that there is no Other of the Other
insofar as we have to find our own way of dealing with it. The symptom breaks
with abstract universality. And yet, it connects us with the divine; it is a fem-
inine jouissance seeking its God/​witness. In Encore, Lacan argued that jouissance
seeks a divine witness to sustain itself.22 The psychoanalytic treatment begins
by creating a “God” through the artifice of the transference. For this it makes
use of the symptom’s need to make itself heard. In this initial phase, the subject
 The symptom as human notion 153
seeks an answer in the form of abstract universality to the enigma posed by
his/​her symptom. Where, in psychosis, the symptom is foreclosed, this first
“pious” moment does not occur. This is most evident in the schizophrenias,
namely the structure most impervious to transference. As a result of this fore-
closure, the second atheistic moment, tied to the undoing of transference, also
cannot occur. The symptom is thus instrumental in both erecting the God (the
deity that will hear my pain) and eventually dismantling Him. As aforesaid,
love must be addressed to the person not “right” for us so that this person, by
virtue of this inappropriateness, will raise us to the heights of philosophy. The
symptom is likewise not “right” for us. And yet through this discomfort it raises
us to philosophy and to the dignity of our notion. Finally, true love requires
overcoming the feeling of love; it is neither a pleasure nor a source of happiness.
Likewise, the symptom is quintessentially ego-​dystonic. To love it requires the
challenge of neighbourly love.
Love and the symptom provide the structure of the concept. While Hegel
insisted on love as the key to the notion, psychoanalysis underlines the symptom.
Like the symptom, true love represents, within the realm of infinite human
spirit, the point of highest chaos.The human subject in love is more impervious
to formalism than one unmotivated by this striving. For Hegel, the notion
is inherently “mad” insofar as it stands in paradoxical unity with its opposite.
Formalism refuses the inherent madness of the concept. Love provides Hegel
with the model for the concept insofar as it is marked by intense dialect-
ical tensions. Love and Hegel’s conception of the notion are quintessen-
tially opposed to the principle of identity.23 Love marks the moment of
the subject’s self-​differentiation; like the notion, love transpires in dialect-
ical unity with its Other(s). The love which heeds to the aforementioned
paradoxes is a speculative love, it is a love of the neighbour-​Thing-​symptom
addressed to the real Other rather than the imaginary counterpart (the latter
love is mere specular (pseudo)-​love). This is the most difficult and paradox-
ical love and yet the only love worthy of its name. That is why there is
no true love at the start of an encounter. There we only have love as a
“pure thought”, rather than notional love. As a result, the early stages of an
amorous encounter between two subjects often attest to massive dialectical
swings between the dread of the fear of loss and the bliss of the encounter.
Online dating aggravates this problem insofar as two complete strangers test
out their compatibility for intimacy. The massive dialectical shift involved
in the transition from strangers to lovers reduces love from its privileged
status as notion of all notions to pure thought. For many, the dating app itself
is the partner where the notifications of messages, the number of matches
made, short meaningless dialogues, “ghosting”, “textlationships”, “slow
fade” and so on become the Other more than an actual other person. The
Other is thus reduced to the promise of a potential rather than actual partner.
The promised Other repeats the dynamics of the Oedipal configuration
where the toddler relinquishes the desired parent for the sake of a future
partner. Dating apps capitalize on the store of unresolved infantile tendency in
154 The symptom as human notion
order to maintain subjects within a libidinal economy where virtual potenti-
ality is valued higher than real actuality.This is the general libidinal economy of
capitalism where belief in a better future (recall that credit comes from the
Latin “credere” meaning “to believe”) outweighs concern for the present –​
the quintessential religious idea. Capitalism here makes use of the kinship,
highlighted by Lacan (1988, 197), between the field of love and that of the
promise as symbolic pact. Our late modern predicament thus reveals us as the
dupes of a “broken promise” and the fools of unrequited love.
The (pseudo-​)lover denies the symptom and therefore the dimension of
the human notion. Unlike veritable lovers, they refuse, in the case of women,
to be symptom of man and, in the case of men, to elect a woman as their
symptom.This refusal is tantamount to a denial of the fall. Adam bit the apple
with the hope of ascension. However, it led instead to his descent. Genesis
attests to a vicious dialectical shift consequent upon Adam and Eve’s conceit
to defy God. Paradoxically, newfound mortality made them possibly truly
immortal. The fall is a dialectical notion insofar as the fall is nothing but our
refusal to accept the fall. To speak is to fall and to fall is the only grace available
to the human being. The ideological error, which I christen the pre-​lapsarian
fallacy, is the veritably non-​dialectical idea that falsely opposes fall and grace.
The return to Eden (the refusal to fall) is the biggest fall of all. What is the
fall from Eden in comparison to the fall that is Eden? The symptom is our
fall from grace and, precisely through this fall, our only paradoxical means
of achieving grace. In his seminal piece on the marionette theatre, Kleist’s
(1972) interlocutor-​companion admirably renders this paradox:

We can see the degree to which contemplation becomes darker and weaker
in the organic world, so that the grace that is there emerges all the more
shining and triumphant. Just as the intersection of two lines from the same
side of a point after passing through the infinite suddenly finds itself again
on the other side –​or as the image from a concave mirror, after having
gone off into the infinite, suddenly appears before us again –​so grace
returns after knowledge has gone through the world of the infinite, in that
it appears to best advantage in that human bodily structure that has no con-
sciousness at all –​or has infinite consciousness –​that is, in the mechanical
puppet, or in the God.
(Kleist, 1972)

Kleist then asks whether “we would have to eat again of the tree of know-
ledge in order to return to the state of innocence?” (ibid). His friend answers
thus: “Most certainly… That is the last chapter in the history of the world”.
(ibid). The symptom marks that paradoxical point at infinity where grace is
finally regained, not through the false ideology of a forced return, but through
a second biting of the apple. As Nietzsche puts it most eloquently, “Everyone
who has ever built anywhere a ‘new heaven’ first found the power thereto in
 The symptom as human notion 155
his own hell” (1998).The symptom is the inner hell from which alone a heaven
may emerge.
Sin is diremptive of the paradoxes of love and the symptom. In sin, the
diremptive subject fails the speculative notion and thus regresses to the prin-
ciple of identity. Hegel (2008b) believes it was unnecessary to make Adam a
lone sinner (rather than invoke humanity at large). By contrast, I argue that the
idea of a first lone sinner is crucial as it portrays for us the very structure of sin,
namely its self-​diremptive aspect.24 One is always alone in sin. At most one is
with a woman. In sin the human becomes a manic non-​concept, something
well attested to in plays that stage characters reduced to the one-​sidedness of
pure thoughts (e.g. Molière’s L’avare or his Don Juan25 representing for us the
sins of avarice and lust respectively). The diremptive sin of Don Juan consists
of rejecting the woman-​symptom. He leaves them before they stabilize to
such notional dignity. The consequence, brought about by the triumph of the
“lower” term, is that he becomes symptom himself, the symptom of all women.
Not to mention the angry return of women as hyper-​symptom. The infamous
fiery hell of woman’s rage is that of the hyper-​symptom scorned.
Sin leads to the demise and loss of the human. Yet sin is as constitutive as
the fall. Sins are a lonely idiotic jouissance. They are ways of avoiding love, the
concept and the symptom insofar as these disturb identity. More specifically,
sin –​diremptive of notional love and the symptom –​rejects a “lower” term and
paradoxically reduces itself (by the logic of the triumph of the “lower” term) to
its lowest instance. Greed hides that wealth (the “higher” term) is the highest
paucity (“lowest” term): what is the poverty of the loss of wealth in comparison
to the poverty that is wealth? Wrath hides the fact that power is the greatest
impotence: what is the impotence of the loss of power in comparison to the
impotence that is power? Vanity hides that superficial beauty is the height of
ugliness: what is the ugly in opposition to beauty in comparison to the ugliness
that is shallow beauty? Gluttony hides the fact that satiety is the highest form of
hunger (not to be hungry, to lack hunger, is the greatest hunger of all): what is
the hunger of lost satiety in comparison to the hunger that is over-​satiety? Envy
hides the fact that to triumph is the greatest defeat of all: what is the defeat of
lost triumph in comparison to the defeat that is triumph? Lust hides the fact
that phallic sex is empty jouissance, truncated as it is by orgasm: what is the
renunciation of lost lust in comparison to the renunciation that is lust? Finally,
sloth (the master’s sin par excellence) hides the fact that to not work is greater
alienation than labour: what is the alienation of labour in comparison to the
alienation of the refusal to work.26 In sin, the human remains a pure thought
and thereby avoids, at once, the anxiety of the concept and, to quip Kierkegaard,
the concept of anxiety. Only love, not law, is the antidote to sin.27 If sin is defined as
the triumph of the “lower” term resulting from the “higher” term’s diremptive
will, then we may say that sin is commensurate with the Christian slave revolt
in morality. In the spirit of Nietzsche –​the greatest moral philosopher that ever
was –​we may ask and thereby revive his gargantuan revaluation of all values: what
is a sin against Christianity in comparison to the sin that is Christianity?
156 The symptom as human notion
If, as Schelling (quoted in Žižek, 2009b) holds, “man is nature’s way of
looking at itself ” it is because the human being is endowed with a symptom.The
symptom undoes repression28 and subjects us to the pain of self-​awareness.
The human invented repression to eschew the task of being nature’s self-​
observer. The symptom is a profanation against repression. It aligns human-
kind, once again, with the task of self-​reflection. Kleist’s (1972) interlocutor
argues that the boy dancer falls from grace precisely with the advent of con-
sciousness.The dancer’s grace, by contrast to the marionette’s awkwardness, is
an index of non-​consciousness rather than the opposite. The fall from grace
occurs when the light of consciousness robs us from the innocence of ignor-
ance. Where Plato’s (2000) allegory highlights freedom from the clutches of
illusion, Genesis highlights the dark side of the light. What, to quip Brecht
again, is the darkness before the light in comparison to the darkness that is
the light? The symptom is that kink in the Moebius strip which embodies
the self-​reflexive turn by which humanity falls from grace into the pain of
a veritable bite of (self)-​consciousness.29 And yet, through a dialectical turn,
the symptom is the only viable grace after the fall. Only a heightened con-
sciousness, rather than a dive into darkness, can constitute our grace.
That the symptom is the human notion means neither more nor less than
that the notion itself, in its logical structure, is the human notion. With a flash
of flare, one may say that the notion of love is the love of the notion30 –​ philosophy
is where they meet. We thus come to the unexpected identity-​in-​difference,
hitherto falsely opposed by common understanding, of the speculative and tauto-
logical propositions in the following statement: the notion is the human notion or,
conversely, the human notion is the notion.31 This tautological-​speculative prop-
osition should ring to the dialectically well-​trained ear as at once self-​evident
and paradoxical. The recurrence of notion as subject and as predicate renders its
self-​evidence while the constitutive inner division of the notion32 decrees it as
paradoxical.33

Notes
1 The contradiction of a theological modernity is mostly apparent in America where
the discourse of (pseudo)-​ atheism co-​ exists with the on-​ going growth of new
segregated religious groups.
2 When Freud (1938) decided to generalize the phenomenon of splitting to a universal
mechanism, he was in a sense giving voice to the diremptive remain by which the
setting of antipodes is a universal human tendency. The Kleinian School took this
idea and aptly made it the basis of its metapsychology.
3 Interview: https://​m.youtube.com/​watch?v=0nmu3uwqzbI
4 Gherovici (forthcoming) has written of realness with respect to the actual factors that
influence desire (e.g. penis size rather than symbolic phallus).
5 This may contradict my earlier argument against Žižek. However, my view regarding
a speculative revolution, rather than a wildly dialectical revolution, is that adequate
self-​reflection will only leave behind a diremptive remain rather than a full-​blown
diremption such as 20th century communism.
 The symptom as human notion 157
6 For Pommier (2013), the patricidal wish/​fantasy is the only means at a subject’s
disposal for putting an end to incest. Unable to symbolically kill the Other of seduc-
tion, the psychotic becomes its object.
7 If Oedipus is Freud’s dream, this dream is a particularity that has universal import.
A veritable (concrete) universality finds its support and source only in the singular.
8 As the Latin saying goes, auctoritas non veritas facit legem. Agamben (2005) debunks
the mystifications of university discourse by showing that Western democracy is
sustained by the always-​imminent threat of explicit force.
9 Today, Žižek argues, violence functions as “an implicit admission of impotence”
(2012a, 998). Where “the Paris banlieue or British riots were a ‘zero-​level’ protest,
violent outbursts which wanted nothing, terrorist attacks act on behalf of that abso-
lute Meaning provided by religion” (ibid). In both cases, “violence and counter-​
violence are caught up in a deadly vicious cycle, each generating the very forces it
tries to combat” (ibid).
10 Lacan (2007) spoke of knowledge as “means of jouissance”.
11 For Lacan, truth is a hole in knowledge.
12 Neuroscience and genetics argue that the human being is genetically programmed
to defy its genetic programming (cf. Ansermet and Magistretti (2004)).
13 And yet for centuries the dogma of human superiority, “crown of creatures”,
persisted unchallenged.
14 Jameson (2010, 4) argues that we must “read Absolute Spirit as a symptom”.
15 Disgrace tells the story of a white South African woman who was raped while
her father was held captive. Her decision to keep the child, despite her father’s
admonishments, attests to the courage of admitting the unconscious. It testifies
to the realization that true freedom and enslavement are only opposed from the
limited perspective of diremption. This is a mother who accepts the child as her
symptom –​indeed as the symptom of the complexities of her world. The daughter
(raped) stands for universality, while the father (urging her to abort) remains fixated
to cowardly particularity.
16 That the Oedipus is a “dream of Freud” should thus not be taken only as critique.
17 In abandoning neurology for the sake of founding the pillars of psychoanalysis,
Freud achieved that subtle yet gargantuan shift of perspective. He was aided by love,
which, as Lacan (1998) showed, makes possible all change of discourse. Love of?
Love of the hysteric-​symptom-​neighbor of course, namely the very love that he
later (mistakenly) denied his own capacity to achieve.
18 For the distinction between symbolein and diabolein see (Han, 2018).
19 I am playing on the aforementioned formulation from The Philosophy of Right
where Hegel speaks of “the fragrance of world-​spirit”. A slip of the tongue, a hys-
teric conversion symptom, an unconscious formation in speech and a dream are
all fragrances insofar as they call out minimally to the Other. They are the budding
expression of transference to come. The transference neurosis, by contrast, is no
longer a mere fragrance; it is a full-​blown stench that will dazzle even the insipid
nostrils of the least weathered clinician.
20 Bion’s (1959) “attacks on linking” are the symptom’s diabolical-​diremptive aspect.
They constitute the subject’s foundational “no” to all pre-​existing schemas. We owe
psychoanalysis to this diabolical striving.
158 The symptom as human notion
21 A clinician learns the art of healing precisely through his/​her own suffering, his/​
her symptom. Is every case study not also an intimate memoir of the clinician him/​
herself?
22 Nietzsche (1998) also argued that humans created gods in order to assure that no
suffering would go un-​witnessed.
23 Jameson (2010) agrees that one cannot impute the principle of identity to Hegel.
However, he argues that “Narcissism [is] a better way of identifying what may
sometimes be felt to be repulsive in the Hegelian system as such” (ibid, 130). This is
a strange imputation to make to the philosopher who made love/​kenosis the basis
of his whole speculative philosophy.
24 Hegel also finds that the idea of the inheritance of sin is superfluous. For him, it is
only there to correct the idea of a lone sinner. However, we know that this idea has
great psychoanalytic merit (cf. Freud, 1909 –​“The Rat Man”).
25 On the impasses of Don Juan see (Zupančič, 1996).
26 According to Jean-​Claude Milner (1995), the great achievement of psychoanalysis
(specifically its Lacanian rewriting) consists of the fact of stripping the subject ($)
of all substance (soul etc.) in the same way that Galilean science (according to
Koyré (2016)) stripped the object of all substance (Platonic forms etc.) by intro-
ducing measurement (henceforth the substantives “hot”, “cold”, “tall” and “short”
would be substituted, respectively, by the measurements of degree (Celsius) and
height (metres)). By defining sin as diremptive of the notions of love and symptom
(love of the symptom, one could say), I hope to further the extraction of substance
inaugurated by modern science (cf. Milner, 1995). However, this task should in no
way reduce the ethical weight psychoanalysis re-​introduces into the subject’s life.
The modern de-​substantialization of the subject will heighten responsibility by
removing the various figures-​idols of the Other. We may here speak of disenchant-
ment necessary to the ascension to humanity’s newly found adulthood.
27 Freud’s position in this regard is trepidatious and ambiguous as he dismisses the love
of the neighbour as “an excellent example of the unpsychological [expectations] of
the cultural super-​ego” (Freud, 1930) and yet urges elsewhere that “we must begin
to love in order not to fall ill” (Freud, 1914).
28 More accurately, the symptom is the marker of repression as well as its undoing. If
the repressed is nothing other than the return of the repressed; the symptom is the name
and locus of this paradoxical co-​existence.
29 When Lacan (2006) claims that the ego is the privileged symptom of human-
kind, ego must not be understood as “self-​image” but, rather, as locus of (self)-​
consciousness, namely the marker of the fall from grace into paranoid awkwardness.
30 For Lacan (1998), to speak of love is the same as to make love.
31 Thus, Hegel treats concepts like human beings and Lacan treats human beings as
concepts.
32 For Hegel every proposition is synthetic no matter how seemingly analytic/​
tautological. Speculative reason, McGowan (2019, 26) argues, shows the minimal
synthetic nature of every statement of identity. Psychoanalytic work consists of
the same.
33 Could Heidegger’s late reflections on tautological thinking reveal an unexpected
kinship with speculative philosophy?
Conclusion
From via dolorosa to gaya scienza

The aim of this treatise has been to free thinking from one-​sidedness and recog-
nize, as Hegel put,“the reciprocally necessary moments that take shape as a con-
flict and seeming incompatibility” (Hegel, 1977, 2). The inability to apprehend
contradiction consists of a denial of the subject within substance. This is tanta-
mount to reducing all to the level of things1 or finite nature (for Hegel even the
latter is also subject –​something that quantum mechanics has confirmed in the
most uncanny way). The failure to grasp the contradiction in identity leads to
reification of the object considered and of ourselves as perceiving subjects.We are
becoming more akin to finite spirit in modernity and our self-​understanding
reflects this reification. Scientistic theories concerning the innate predispos-
ition to autism provide an autistic aetiology of autism. They consider the autist
in isolation, thereby perpetuating his/​her segregation, rather than heed to the
dynamic relationships that contributed to foreclosure. The absurdity of treating
psychosis through “faecal microbiota transplantation” (stool transplant) is a
psychotic “remedy” insofar as the anal object is taken in its concrete literality,
rather than in the complex intersubjective relation of demand in which it is
exchanged while potty training. This procedure fails to grasp the anal object
“not only as Substance, but equally as Subject” (Hegel, 1977, 10).
Reification is the result of the aforementioned seven diremptions. In nar-
cissism, we bear witness to the triumph of his majesty the ego, that most rigid
“false self ” lacking verve and spontaneity. Jouissance marks the moment where
the subject is beside him/​herself, overwhelmed to the point of fading.What we
christened as ignorance is the triumph of religiosity where the subject surrenders
sovereignty to the deity. In fantasy, the rich complications of intersubjectivity
are reduced to the determinations of triumph and defeat. The disparagement
of power differential has made of therapy, leadership and pedagogy rule-​ridden
enterprises, while sexuality has become a matter of (rigid) identity rather than
difference. Parenting has lost confidence in itself insofar as the naturalness of
filial love has given way to rule-​obsessed education. The university discourse
(what we placed under the rubric of structure) has invaded all walks of life. It
denotes the triumph of biologistic essentialism that seeks to find a “definition”
(pure thought) for the human. Finally, and surprisingly, the category of sub-
ject too has its de-​subjectifying aspects testified by the rise of bravado, namely
160 From via dolorosa to gaya scienza
the over-​exalted attempt at self-​assertion which, by virtue of its one-​sidedness,
flounders into vacuity and despondency.2
However, total reification is impossible.The universal can never be abolished
and subjectivity can never be entirely lost and truth totally eradicated.
Topologically speaking, the torsion on the Mobius strip can never be fully
ironed out. These real traces of subjectivity will resist reification. Indeed, it is on
the ashes of reification’s seven diremptions that the subject will rise again as
the phoenix. The erasure of the torsion on the surface is the torsion itself –​the
kink will thus never be expunged. The impotence-​rendering contradictions of
our time will themselves pave the path to impossibility. The solution is imma-
nent to the problem; to find it one must simply look awry.3 For Bloch (2009),
even suicide bombers aim to bring paradise on earth. Even such an extreme
case of the impotent one-​sidedness of a pure thought4 carries the torsion that could
lead to the openness of notional impossibility. Such psychoanalytic and Hegelian
optimism requires the courage to see the world from the standpoint of the
absolute. The Hegelian-​Lacanian, and indeed Freudian, topology here put for-
ward advocates (against the rarity of Badiou’s “event”) the utopia of everyday life.
Every slip of the tongue, amnesia, lapsus and dream is the index of paradoxical
freedom through lost sovereignty. The thinness of the eyelid separates “common
man” (Badiou’s ill-​christened “individual”)5 from the great artist; in dream even
the illiterate make claim to creative genius. We all live in a post-​evental6 world
where language’s encounter with the living gives birth to the divine madness
of the human. Badiou misses the fact that the “pre-​evental individual” does not
live in happy ignorance but that he/​she lives in sickness, and that it is this very
sickness itself that attests most passionately to humanity. “The sickness of the
animal is the birth of spirit” (Hegel quoted in McGowan, 2019, 36). The exi-
gency of speculative thought requires that we abolish Badiou’s false individual/​
subject dichotomy and assert proudly that all humanity is subject of truth.
There is no event other than the human and yet the birth of each and every
human subject repeats this event anew in a thoroughly singular way. All humans
are subjects. While some bathe in the graces afforded by art, sex, love, laughter
and music, others bear the curse of illness. However, these are essentially the
same, separated by an invisible torsion on the plane. More accurately, every
human is at once graced and cursed by the human; the human event is the
symptom. Badiou misses the speculative-​tautological proposition: the human
is the human. The only condition of philosophy is the love of the symptom,
namely the pain and sickness of the animal.The universal forced choice, imposed
on all, is that of accepting the singular symptom. True freedom involves the
forced choice of choosing the symptom rather than maintaining self-​conceit
for the sake of a false freedom, which, by virtue of the triumph of the “lower”
term, would dwindle to servile enslavement. The rejection of the symptom
leads to the paranoia of being persecuted by the symptom. Hegel beckons us to

recognize reason as the rose in the cross of the present and thereby to enjoy
the present, this is the rational insight which reconciles us with actuality –​the
 From via dolorosa to gaya scienza 161
reconciliation which philosophy affords to those in whom there has once
arisen an inner voice bidding them to comprehend.
(Hegel, 2008a, 15)

Philosophy affords respite to those willing to comprehend. It allows them

to recognize the symptom as the rose in the cross they must bear. Indeed,
philosophy (the notion) is the symptom itself, with its two faces that are
one, the rose and the cross. Speculative philosophy, like the symptom, is the
locus of a speculative paradox; it is at once “the great way of despair” (“via
dolorosa”) and the “gaya scienza”. Non-​psychoanalytic treatments do not grasp
the paradox of the symptom. The symptom achieves the diremptive work
of the understanding. It separates the subject from his/​her community in
the way that jouissance and suffering separate. But, if the subject overcomes
moral cowardice, the symptom allows him/​her to consider the larger net-
work of interrelations that constitute the totality of which that symptom is
part. The symptom is not an irrational oddity, blemishing the purity of an
otherwise rational being. By contrast to this anti-​psychoanalytic and anti-​
dialectical commonplace of the understanding, the symptom is hyper-​rational.
Hegel’s (in)-​famous “What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational”
(Hegel, 2008a) could be translated thus: what is rational is the symptom and,
conversely, that which is a symptom is rational. The hyper-​rationality of the
symptom becomes increasingly evident as we look at the world from the
standpoint of eternity (the absolute) rather than narrow conceit. The symptom,
viewed locally, is sheer madness. Viewed globally, it is the height of rationality,
as it condenses in one intense paradoxical point the obfuscated complications
of the whole. American psychiatry’s will to pathologize the symptom is itself
symptom of its inability to consider the whole by letting the symptom speak.
Psychoanalysis, by contrast, recognizes that the symptom is the spectre of the
absolute. The symptomatic torsion on the Mobius strip is not the insignia of
unreason but, rather, the sign of reason’s hyper-​presence. As “voice of the
intellect”, the symptom “does not rest until it has gained a hearing” (Freud,
1927, 53).7
Lacan (1977) argues that the voice has the privilege of being the object
whose presence is the most permanent. Unlike the gaze, which vanishes in a
moment, the voice can retain its presence indefinitely: “the invocatory drive
… has … the privilege of not being able to close” (Lacan, 1998, 200). The
superego functions as a privileged partial object insofar as it is vehicled by
the voice, the form of the object a that is the least transient and that hence
poses the least enigma. It is the form of the object a which thus resembles
most a master signifier. The superego is a pure thought rather than a notion.8
It is quintessentially one-​sided and de-​humanizing.9 It represents the dispar-
agement of the human and divine notions10 to pure thoughts. God becomes
“alive” again as “Punisher” and the subject becomes pure “sinner”.11 For Lacan
(1977), the relation to an other mitigates the pain of castration. As a result, the
loss of the other brings the subject back to the condition of being castrated.
162 From via dolorosa to gaya scienza
The one-​sided veiling over of castration is temporally “corrected” by a sub-
sequent one-​ sided re-​emergence of castration. Something similar happens,
according to Freud, with respect to ambivalence. During the relation, ambiva-
lence (notional love-​hate) was veiled over for the sake of maintaining the pure
thought of pure love. However, with the onset of loss, the other side of the
ambivalence (hate –​a “pure culture of the death drives”) rises to consciousness.
Finally, one must recall the importance Freud granted to the narcissistic factor
in the aetiology of melancholia. There too, the one-​sidedness of narcissistic
self-​conceit (prior to loss) takes its vengeance in the form of melancholic self-​
disparagement (after the loss).This narcissistic one-​sidedness testifies to the fore-
closure of the torsion in the Mobius strip, which may explain the infamous loss
of libido and interest in the external world in melancholia. Such a topological
outlook allows us to abandon biologistic models. Libido is not an “organic
substance”; it is simply the kink which gives life and movement to the surface.
Freud’s (1913) myth of the primal murder in Totem and Taboo stages a similar
temporal lag dubbed “deferred obedience”. By contrast to melancholia, here
it is the pure thought of hate that is on the forefront. After the primal murder,
the suppressed love emerges to the fore in the form of pure guilt. In all these
cases, we have two pure thoughts separated in time such that the appearance
of the second functions as a correction to the one-​sidedness of the first in a
violent and persecutory operation that may be felt as “vengeful” (“karma”,
the “evil eye”). Pure thoughts are notions, the two moments of which emerge
separated by a temporal interval thus perpetuating the ideological falsity of
their distinctness. The diphasic nature of trauma, i.e. that it is experienced as
trauma only après coup in a second temporal moment, may be understood with
the idea that trauma is a pure thought. Trauma’s moments necessarily split into
two. The psychoanalytic cure consists of transforming trauma into a notion.
Likewise, the human philosophical vocation consists of the arduous labour of
joining moments slowly together. Was this not precisely the aim of Hegel’s
Phenomenology, to gradually bring together the falsely opposed moments of
a pure thought in ever more recalcitrant paradoxes testifying to the patient
advent of the notion? Sexuality is, at first, one-​sidedly imposed on the subject
in infancy. As such, metabolization-​subjectivation (taking responsibility for and
re-​appropriating the drive as one’s own) must occur at a second time, which
will “correct” a posteriori the one-​sided passivity of infancy. Lacan’s identification
with the symptom may entail precisely this operation, by which the two moments
are brought together in such a way that trauma becomes its own convalescence.
A peculiar ambiguity exists in Freud’s discussion of melancholia. Melancholia
is presented as an error insofar as the subject disparages him/​herself instead of
the actual object of ambivalence. However, Freud also claims that melancholic
self-​complaints actually hit the mark, that the subject has caught sight of some-
thing accurate about himself. At one level, “the shadow of the object fell upon
the ego” (Freud, 1917) and yet, at another level, the subject has gained lucidity.
In light of the latter vicissitude, the spectre (shadow) of the absolute has fallen on
the ego. In melancholia, the absolute shines a glimmer and opens the way to
 From via dolorosa to gaya scienza 163
self-​knowledge. The (melancholic) voice of conscience is a voice of reason and
unreason. As one turns one’s ear away from it, it morphs into the persecutory
voice of punitive unreason. If one grants it a hearing, it reveals its kernel of
rationality. Through the arduous work of analysis, the superegoic voice may
regain its notional status as reason.12 Psychoanalytic treatment combines the via
dolorosa and the gaya scienza, two sides of the Mobius strip that stand in dialect-
ical unity. Marx’s “first as tragedy then as farce” should not be read as the separ-
ation in time of two temporal moments (tragic and comic). Likewise, the “from”
and the “to” of the title of the conclusion –​appearing to separate the via dolorosa
from the gaya scienza –​should be read topologically as a near-​instantaneous
transition between moments of one speculatively unified phenomenon. The
psychoanalytic treatment is a procedure of ideological correction. It aims to
reduce the obfuscations of temporality by bringing together the separated pure
thoughts in an effort to constitute anew the notion in its philosophical dignity.
When ignored and left to insist incessantly, the symptom is the haunting spectre
of madness. However, when it gains the hearing of a receptive ear, it reveals itself
as birth of the absolute, namely the locally isolated bit of singular jouissance that
paradoxically grants a glimpse of the universal.13
Diremption involves the imaginary degradation of the symptom-​ notion.
The neurotic psychical diremption, known as repression-​denial, leads to the
phenomenalization of the object a aimed at obfuscating the horror of castration.
Eventually, castration triumphs as neurotic guilt, where the subject is persecuted
by this very same object a returning as a menacing internal voice. Perverse
diremption involves the erection of a fetish in the service of disavowal. In a
commentary on a boy whose disavowal was immediately followed by the cre-
ation of a symptomatic fear concerning his toes being touched, Freud elegantly
announces the implacable triumph of castration: “in all the to and fro between
disavowal and acknowledgment, it was nevertheless castration that found the
clearer expression” (Freud, 1938, 278). Finally, psychotic diremption (fore-
closure) leads to castration in the real where the subject is confronted with an
“unbarred” and persecutory Other. In all three cases the identity-​in-​difference
of symptom as spectre of madness and advent of the absolute is dirempted, leading to
three contradictions defining each structure. The contradiction central to neur-
osis is that of a subject who refuses “to sacrifice his castration” (assuming that the
Other demands it of him/​her (Lacan, 2006, 700)) but who, for that very reason,
remains all the more bound to his/​her castration. In perversion, we have a desire
that puts on the aura of subverting the law while functioning as the very support
of that law (Lacan, 2004, 176). The pervert does not know for whose jouissance
his activity is exercised.What is sure is that “it is not, in any case, in the service of
his own” (ibid, 177).This subject may indeed use the Other but, in so doing, he/​
she paradoxically instrumentalizes him/​herself for this same Other’s jouissance.
Finally, in psychosis we have a subject sheltering him/​herself from the Other for
fear of becoming its object.Yet this effort to wall him/​herself off reifies him/​her
all the more. In all three cases we witness the triumph of the “lower” term. In
denying the symptom, all become hyper-​symptom and pure thought.14
164 From via dolorosa to gaya scienza
Just as all truth emerges through misrecognition and is thus only a “mi-​dit”
(half-​said), all error is also only partially error. The isomorphic relation of
thought and being15 has the consequence that no thought, irrespective of the
degree of its fallaciousness, can ever be completely divorced from the truth.
There will, of course, be degrees of truth and error but even the wildest bull-
shit retains some kinship, however infinitesimal, to universality. Just as humanity
will never free itself from the clutches of error, it will also never free itself from
truth. We must, however, take this with a grain of salt insofar as the specula-
tive identity-​in-​difference of truth and lies or even truth and bullshit cannot
entirely do away with their opposition in actuality. To achieve speculative iden-
tity will require a stringent effort on the part of the analyst or the thinker; the
modicum of truth that resides as a kernel within falsehood will not easily sur-
render itself.16 Without the decision to engage on this path, speculative identity
is an empty hypothesis akin to abstract universality. It is likewise with Lacan’s
early distinction between full and empty speech. To divide the analysand’s
speech into what is worthy and full, rather than empty and negligible, regresses
from the radicality of psychoanalytic discourse to pre-​psychoanalytic notions
of truth. However, to reach this speculative identity one requires the analyst’s
right interpretation as well as the analysand’s capacity to hear it productively.
Otherwise, empty speech will remain as vacuous as abstract universality. Full
speech is produced in the psychoanalytic relation as the transition from abstract
to concrete universality or, in Lacanese, from university to analyst discourse.
Everything turns, to quip Hegel, on recognizing that all that is said is not only as
empty speech, but equally as full speech.
The modern patient, as Žižek has argued, comes to the session with an
already rather thorough understanding regarding his/​her symptoms.This previ-
ously acquired knowledge may even come as an obstacle to building trust and
faith in the analyst. The proper manner of conducting the clinical treatment is
to neither reject the analysand’s knowledge nor to endorse it but, more artfully,
to consider the form of the exposition and decipher therein the kernel of the
half-​said truth that will begin the unfolding of concrete universality.17 Left alone,
a dream represents the quintessential domain of the mirages of the imaginary
and the symptom is mere idiotic jouissance. However, once brought into trans-
ference and subject to analytic interpretation the dream may become the “royal
road to the unconscious” (Freud, 1900). The transference, which includes the
interpretation and its reception and metabolization, is where the abstract uni-
versality of empty speech meets the concrete universality of full speech. In our
transference-​phobic times, the diremption of the identity-​in-​difference of the
dream as what wakes us from our slumber (“royal road”) and that which keeps
us asleep has led to the contradiction by which today’s cultural climate wavers
between the irreconcilable extremes of the scientistic relegation of the dream
to meaningless non-​sense and its obscurantist elevation to oracle or divination
(the growth of New Ageism and the renewed interest in Jung). In the first case,
the dream is reduced to nothing, while in the second it is celebrated as abstract
universality.18 Both miss the process by which, through the patient labour of the
 From via dolorosa to gaya scienza 165
analytic work, concrete universality slowly unfolds in the transference. What
Žižek christens as the understanding “in its productive aspect” (2016, 45) thus
finds its noblest exemplar in the analytic process. Its effects will only be known
in retrospect, as one listens to whether and how the analysand takes up an inter-
pretation; only then will the path to full speech (concrete universality) have
been opened. The “owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the falling of
dusk” (Hegel, 2008a 16).
Žižek (2012a) argues that we live today in a world dominated by
“paraconsistent” logic that rejects the principle of non-​contradiction while
adhering to the principle of the excluded middle term. We also live in times
that reject the paraconsistent and are therefore subject to the vengeance of the
paraconsistent –​the return in the real of the foreclosed Other of pure thoughts.
Nietzsche has never been more of a contemporary; today he truly weeps as
we enter the reign of the slave revolt, namely the triumph of vengeful hyper-​
symptomatic “lower” terms. Under the slavish revaluation of values, the slave is
master and defeat is victory, as the meek and downtrodden are the new bearers of
the emblems of pride and honour.19 For Badiou (2007), change has to be sought
in “classical” logic endowed with the highest potency of negation, as it endorses
both the principle of non-​contradiction and that of the excluded middle term.
However, Žižek has shown that our solution cannot consist of classical negation
since, under the auspices of the paraconsistent logic, “negation gets caught up
in the game” (Žižek, 2012a, 1010). Where the slave revolt dominates, negating
it will only result in its inexorable triumph. In a paraconsistent world, we must
opt instead, Žižek argues, for the logic that rejects both the principle of non-​
contradiction and that of the excluded middle term –​this is the road of the
weakest negation. We may link this to Žižek’s defence of monarchy; a veritable
middle term that breaks the paraconsistent logic by which slave morality co-​
opts every defeat into a reconfirmation of its hegemony and that also rejects
the principle of non-​contradiction as this “monarchy” is self-​annihilating such
that the king is an “idiot” that “dots the ‘i’s’” (Žižek, 2015), the father a “dead”
and “humiliated” figure and, finally, the analyst but a “dummy” echoing one’s
message. Rather than stark negation, our paraconsistent world requires repe-
tition. Badiou (2007) bemoans the paraconsistent where “everything is iden-
tical”. Moreover, he fails to think of the affirmation of repetition; something
Nietzsche (1969) ardently celebrates as the “marriage ring of rings”, namely the
eternal return of the same. If “the wound can be healed only by the spear which
smote it” (Žižek, 2004) then perhaps nothing is more opportune than repeating
the paraconsistent. Against Badiou, we must here hold that the paraconsistent
does not posit a drab identity between all things. Rather, it posits the specific
identity of opposites through which the said non-​self-​identities may be better
apprehended. As such, a genuinely paraconsistent thought will take us in the
direction opposed to diremption where seeming contraries are set against each
other. Deleuze (1968) does not lament the state where all is the same since the
repetition of the actual is the condition of true change at the level of the vir-
tual. If, according to Žižek (2009a), the superegoic underside of the law is our
166 From via dolorosa to gaya scienza
only prospect of emancipation then the repetition of the paraconsistent logic –​
which recognizes the hidden identity between Benjamin’s (2007) “mythic
Lawmaking” and “divine Law-​destroying” violence –​is our only hope today
of breaking the spell of the slave revolt in morality. Through repetition, the
paraconsistent logic –​heir to the Hegelian dialectic –​sublates into the desired
logic that rejects both aforementioned principles and thereby opens a third way
beyond the endless chatter of the “discussing class” and Nietzsche’s nostalgia
for antique lands, two options we must rigidly discard lest we wish to keep on
weeping. Our only hope today is to will the eternal return and start anew with
the speculative courage that recognizes in every ending a mere fading away
into the …

Notes
1 Milner (2011) argues that today the idea of evaluation reduces humans to things.
This is tantamount to obliterating the symptom (the most spiritual part of human-
kind). This neglect will not remain without consequence, as the vexed symptom will
vengefully return as hyper-​spiritual symptom. Fight Club provides a great elucidation
of the modern tendency towards becoming finite spirit in the narrator’s (an unnamed
character played by Edward Norton) desire to mould himself to the desire of the
Other as his symptom seethes with the vengeance of a neglected “lower” term. Tyler
Durden’s violence represents the return of the symptom as vengeful hyper-​symptom
demanding to be reckoned with.
2 One should here speak of subjectivism (Heidegger, 1991) as opposed to subjectivity.
The former involves the self-​celebrating conceit by which the latter is made to fall.
Such boastful swagger is attested to in rap and hip hop (veritable exercises in tri-
umphalism) as well as in the intellectual sphere that is becoming increasingly akin to
a boxing ring. Is it not emblematic of our times that a UFC commentator is also a
prominent public intellectual?
3 For Bloch, according to Thomson, “the contradictions within a situation carry
within them the potential solution of that situation” (Bloch, 2009, x). Jameson (2010,
72) also notes the immanence of change to the situation: “the future is already
present within the present of time: the present is already immanently the future it
‘ought’ to have”.
4 For what is rage other than one-​sided impotence?
5 For Badiou, the “subject” has seen the grace of the event while the “individual”
lives in a numb and dumb world outside of “truth process”. Badiou cannot see that
everyone is not only as Individual but also as Subject.
6 The word “post-​evental” is a neologism commonly used by Badiou and his followers
as an adjective denoting the state after the event.
7 Denis Lortie entered the National Assembly of Quebec intent on murdering the gov-
ernment. Legendre (1989, 36–​37) explains that this act was a patricide with a corrective
aim, namely that of killing an incestuous primal father. Even the wildest passage à
l’acte attests to the speculative identity-​in-​difference of madness and hyper-​rationality.
8 Klein’s laudable aim of directing the treatment towards the constitution of the whole
object (with its contradictory traits) reveals a clinical will to transition from a fixation
to pure thought towards greater receptivity to the notion.
 From via dolorosa to gaya scienza 167
9 By contrast, Kleinian concern, insofar as it is the mark of the depressive position, is a
notion. True concern is notional; the care, love and intimacy it gives the other are
concomitant with separation. Superegoic diremption leads to the contradiction of
guilt heightened by every renunciation.
10 The gods of the ancient Greek and Roman pantheons were veritable pure thoughts
standing for magnified one-​sided human traits, emotions, capacities, tendencies and
so on. Christianity marks a gradual becoming-​notion of God. And, needless to add, this
paved the way for atheism.
11 The same kind of stringent dichotomy exists in paranoia where the subject is “inno-
cent” while the Other is “guilty”. The Hegelian beautiful soul (like Freud’s (1915a)
“pure pleasure ego”) is the exemplary pure thought, relegating guilt to others while
preserving an untarnished self-​image.
12 Seneca too hastily claims that “Time heals what reason cannot”.Where it seems that
time has healed a wound, reason has surely been secretly at work.
13 The Persian poet Hafez stages an exchange between lover and beloved where the
former says, “The fragrance of your locks has made me lost to the world”. To this
the wise beloved replies, “If you only knew that this itself [the fragrance of the
locks] will be your guide” (Hafez, 2010). The symptom is akin to this fragrance; we
lose ourselves in it and yet that self-​oblivion is our greatest guide.
14 The symptom is indeed the spectral-​spiritual-​materialist antidote to reification.
15 Following Parmenides, Hegel holds that thought and being are isomorphic.
16 Incidentally, this is why Hegel is not a pantheist. Not all is the expression of the
absolute or the unconscious (though, pardon the pun, not-​all may be). The moment
of interpretation and its reception or, more generally, the moment of thinking is
crucial in making possible the movement towards half-​truth.
17 Sometimes a merely well-​timed scansion can wake the subject from the “dogmatic
slumber” of obsessive musing and reveal the hole in abstract universality from where
the movement towards concrete universality begins.
18 Jung’s insistence, against Freud, on the universal meaning of symbols is the very
quintessence of an abstract universality that eschews the strenuous work of concrete
universality.
19 The most comical and distressing of today’s contradictions is undoubtedly the fact
that toddler-​sized hands control the world’s greatest nuclear arsenal. Heidegger’s
“There-​Being” (Da-​sein) –​the reflective being “which in its Being has this very
Being as an issue” (Heidegger, 1967, 68) –​morphs into Hal Ashby’s Being There
(Peter Sellers), a veritable “diremptor-​in-​chief ” granting concrete historical face to
the late modern triumph of the common understanding.
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Index

Abraham and Isaac 63, 116 Dostoevsky, F. 137

Abraham, K. 87, 124 DSM 51, 152
Adorno, T.W. 29, 52 Dupuy, J-​P. 53, 90
Adorno and Horkheimer 147
Agamben, G. 60, 78, 115, 117, 127, 130, 144 Einstein, A. 56–​7, 71
Allouch, J. 61, 75
Althusser, L. 47, 116, 118–​20 Fassbinder, R. M. 131
Antonioni, M. 105 Ferenczi, S. 68
Apollon, W. 68, 131 Fonagy, P. 47
Attar, F. 51 Foucault, M. 47, 52, 100, 119, 123, 131
Frankfurt, H. G. 99
Badiou, A. 21, 38–​9, 41, 91–​3, 109–​113, Freud, S.: ambivalence 162; anatomy is
120, 130, 134, 141, 149, 160, 165 destiny 148; castration 163; child as
Balmès, F. 1, 108 investigator 33; common unhappiness
Benjamin, W. 101, 105, 166 26; criminals out of a sense of guilt
Benvenuto, S. 11, 24, 38, 81–​2 105; deferred obedience 162; dreams
Bernstein, J. 32, 47, 90–​1 164; grammar of paranoia 51–​2,
Bion, W. 148 73–​4; impossible professions 72; love
Bloch, E. 160 of the neighbor 38; majesty the baby 69;
Brecht, B. 27–​8, 156 masculine libido 85; melancholia 44,
Bultmann, R. 137 151, 162; narcissism of small differences 9;
Butler, J. 56, 78–​9, 147 narcissistic neuroses 45; Niederfallen 29;
no time in the unconscious 85; organ
Chomsky, N. 56 speech 45; patricide 63–​5; phylogenetic
Chiesa, L. 80 schemata 55; primordial repression 59;
Christianity 12, 27, 32–​4, 89, 91, 116–​18, psychopathology of everyday life 19, 43;
142–​44, 155 psychosis 101; repudiation of femininity
Copjec, J. 57, 64–​5 12; rock of castration 148; secondary
repression 20; shame, disgust and
Dana, G. 50–​1 morality 82, 87; symptom as compromise
Darwin, C. 150 formation 15; transference neurosis 72;
Dawkins, R. 136 theory of seduction 55
de Boer, K. 9, 14, 25, 150 Freudo-​Marxism 33
Deleuze, G. 131, 165
Deleuze and Guattari 27, 131 God 2, 12, 15–​6, 21, 32, 37–​8, 46, 51, 55,
Derrida, J. 44, 56, 80, 100, 102, 147 63, 136–​7, 141–​144, 146, 149, 152–​4
de La Rochefoucauld, F. 100, 133 Green, A. 46, 48, 32, 37–​8, 46, 51, 55, 63,
de Sade, D. A. F. 94, 131, 147 73, 110, 136–​9, 141–​4, 146, 149, 149,
Don Juan 155 152–​154, 161
178 Index
Green, J. 46 110–​11; definition of the subject 43;
Grigg, R. 44 de-​Oedipalization 64–​5, 128; dialogue
Guyomard, P. 43 10; empty desires 131; formulae of
sexuation 11, 60; freedom and servitude
Haneke, M. 36 120; full and empty speech 164; “God is
Hegel, W.F.H.: absolute 5, 25; abstract/​ unconscious” 137; humans as concepts
concrete universality 164; battle of pure 34; identification with the symptom 162;
prestige 9, 34; beautiful soul 54; birth of impossibility 3; jouissance 151–​2; love
spirit 160; Christianity 32; contradiction 16, 36–​41, 72, 154; madness 123; mirror
2–​5; critique of Kant 2; definition of the stage 44–​48; narcissism 36; narcissistic
subject 47; death 110–​13; diremption 1; suicidal aggression 4–​5, 9, 34; no sexual
end of history 29; evil 47, 62, 91, 152–​3; rapport 138; not-​all 2; paranoid structure
external reflection 4; fear 52; formalism of knowledge 97; paternity 60–​1, 115;
149–​50; immanence 2–​3; Lacanian Other “providential function” 27; return in the
55; language 55; law 57; limit/​boundary real 25; return to Freud 24, 33; scansion
vs. lack 86; love 36, 40, 87; master-​slave 119; science 49, 147; sexual difference
120–​1; metaphysics 21; morality 27; 79–​81, 85, 148; structure 55–​57; subjective
monarchy 28, 118–​19; negativity 93; destitution 150; superego and the function
notion of moment 19; notions as humans of the “you” 27; the Other 52–​55;
34; notion vs. pure thought 20; parents topology 18–​21, 106, 150; transference
and children 69; purity of the notion 25; 72–​3; triumph of religion 146; truth and lies
real as rational 161; religion and reason 15, 96; voice 161; Woman does not exist
32; representational thinking 18, 19; space 127, 138
and time 18, 25; self-​reflection 4, 67, 81; Laplanche, J. 54, 126
speculative thinking 5, 18; sublation 4, 8; Leader, D. 44, 105
suffering 52; World Spirit 52; wounds of Lebrun, G. 3–​4, 10, 27, 32, 52, 110, 118,
Spirit 79 128, 133
Heidegger, M. 9, 49, 93, 96, 101, 104, Leclaire, S. 65, 126
108–​9, 112, 132 Legendre, P. 81, 101, 115, 126
Heine, H. 34, 142 Levinas, E. 93, 147
Henry, M. 142 Lévi-Strauss, C. 56, 124
Hitchens, C. 136
homosexuality 12, 41, 54, 79 Maleval , J-​C. 59, 75, 98
Mann, T. 131
Jameson, F. 52, 57, 100, 121 Marx, K. 4, 28, 120, 130, 163
Jesus 15, 139, 141, 143 Masson, J. M. 128
Johnston, A. 133 McGowan, T. 16, 18, 81, 118, 150
Joyce, J. 106 Meillassoux, Q. 146
Judas 12, 27 Milner, J-​C. 147
Jung, C. G. 80, 164 modernity: changes in language 101; crisis
of investiture 127; debt 105; German
Kant, I. 2–​4, 20–​21, 32, 56, 64, 67, 71, 73, idealism and psychoanalysis 27; mediocre
75, 79–​80, 86, 99, 139, 142, 146–​9 compromise 92; reification 159;
kenosis 1, 9, 11, 24, 52–​3, 57, 71, 75, 76, 79, subjugation without subjectivity 120;
86, 88–​9, 112, 142–​4 theological 142–​6
Kiarostami, A. 57 Molière, J-​B. P. 155
Klein, M. 44 Montaigne, M. 112
Kleist, H. 154, 156
Kojève, A. 28, 67, 69, 116, 120, 131 Nancy, J-​L. 21
Kristeva, J. 131 Nasio, J-​D. 126
neurosis 1, 27, 33, 45, 50, 74–​5, 83, 104,
Lacan, J.: against philanthropy 52; American 123–​5, 131–​2, 163
a-​historicism 106; contradictory claims New Age 80, 164
1; counter-​transference 71; death 108, Newton, I. 56
 Index 179
Nietzsche, F. 10, 15, 26–​7, 37, 45, 92–​4, 105, Schopenhauer, A. 45
120, 130, 134, 137, 141–​5, 154, 155 Schreber, D. P. 72–​3, 75, 109–​10, 127, 136, 138
Schütz, A.115
Papageorgiou-​ Legendre, A. 68–​9 shame 46, 87, 101
Pasolini, P. P. 131 Seneca 26
perversion 46, 83, 88, 123–​5, 132, Shakespeare, W. 127
163 Soler, C. 72–​3, 98, 106
Phillips, A. Sophocles 127
Plato 37, 39, 93, 132, 156 St. Paul 12
Pommier, G. 67 symptom 14–​16, 20, 44, 51–​2, 56–​7, 69–​70,
Pontalis, J-​B. 126 72–​4, 76, 81–​2, 85–​9, 90, 92, 99, 106,
profane 11, 12, 14, 15, 21, 40–​1, 93–​4, 113, 112–​13, 120–​21, 123–​4, 133–​4, 142, 146,
137, 141–​3, 145, 148–​9, 156 149–​56, 160–​5
Proust. M. 41
psychosis: à ciel ouvert 19; body 46, Target, M. 47
132; contemporary and out-​of-​joint Tertullian 93, 136
130; death 109, 112–​13; engrossed
in the Other 45; “faecal microbiota von Sacher-​Masoch 132
transplantation” 159; failure of extimacy
51; failure to subvert the Other 63; Wenders, W. 105
foreclosure of the Name-​of-​the-​Father Winnicott, D. 85, 88, 105
59; hypostatization of the Other 53;
knowledge presented to the analyst 75; Žižek, S.: absolute 25; beauty and ugliness
Laplanche’s view of 54; master discourse 37; betrayal 26; big Other 53; bourgeois
74; martyr of language 132; martyr of the love 15; capital as real 105; choice of
absolute 25; “metempsychosis” 132–​3; eternal character 65; Christianity 12, 91,
misogyny 127; neurosis 123–​5; object of 117; contraction of being 133; crime
the Other 163; paranoia 74; parent-​child and law 28, 117; critique of Badiou 93;
relation 69; philosophy 131; relation of critique of Foucault 52; cynical distance
words and things 101–​2; religion 136; 133–​4; definition of the subject 49; death
return in the real 25; schizophrenia drive 111; dialectic as form 1; dialogue
74, 153; treatment in institutions 10; dialectical reversals 23, 25–​6, 59;
50; thrownness 104; truth 96–​97; epistemology to ontology 2; finitude
thrownness 104 and infinitude 110; freedom 111; jester-​
philosopher 16; law 115, 128; love 29,
quantum physics 9, 59 37; Marx’s critique of Hegel 28; not-​all 2;
monarchy 118–​19; novelty as return 24;
Radiguet, R. 38 organ without a body 111; père-​version
Rosolato, G. 67 61; political correctness, 99; political
suspension of ethics 120; power and
Sacher-​Masoch 132 sexuality 82; psychosis 53, 108; radical
sacred 11, 12, 41, 61, 93, 113, 137, 141–​3, evil 61, 90–​1, 93; reading of Hegel 21;
145, 148 reason and the drive 33, 139; sexual
Safouan, M. 73 act 39; subject as failure 49; symbolic
Santner, E. 85, 115, 127, 136 order 59–​60; thrownness 106; twentieth
Schelling, F.W.J. 61, 133, 156 century communism 28
Schmitt, C. 94, 120 Zupančič, A. 11