“The point of la traversee du fantasme is not to get rid of jouissance (in the mode of the old leftist Puritanism): the distance toward fantasy means, rather, that I as it were “unhook” jouissance from its phantasmatic frame and acknowledge it as that which is properly undecidable, as the indivisible remainder that is neither inherently “reactionary,” the support of historical inertia, nor the liberating force that enables us to undermine the constraint of the existing order.”
“he has to produce what she lacks, he has to guarante a wholeness. In exchange she offers herself as the answer to the question she has asked in his place, an answer she refuses beforehand. In a tacit conspiracy, the lack is never brought to the negotiating table.” — Paul Verhaeghe
“Phallic jouissance is the obstacle … [because of] which man does not come to enjoy woman’s body, … because what he enjoys is the jouissance of the organ.” — Lacan
“The fact that the phallus is not found where it is expected, where it is required, namely on the plane of genital mediation, is what explains that anxiety is the truth of sexuality … The phallus, where it is expected as sexual, never appears except as lack, and this is its link with anxiety” — Lacan
“The phallus that one finds on the side of the man is nothing a man can be happy about. Although a woman relates precisely to this phallus, the man is not at all in control of it. A man thus constantly tries to take on his symbolic function, since he knows that the symbolic function is what the woman sees in him. However, he necessarily fails in this attempt, which causes his anxiety and inhibition.” — Renata Salecl
“There was no rule which would say that he could not still enjoy these things, but he knew that it would be useless to try. It was only the fantasy that his life might be shared, and shared by someone so alien to himself, that had enabled his imagination to open up these vistas” — Renata Salecl
“the subject sees himself in his mirror image as someone else, someone who is more advanced than he actually is. This relation with the image brings utter despair to the subject, since it shows how unformed and split the subject actually is. In his misery, the subject takes the double as a threatening, deadly figure. … The double comes to incarnate death, and the subject then constantly engages in a struggle with this deadly figure. For the male obsessional, this deadly double is someone who knows how to enjoy and thus at the same time becomes a figure of admiration and fear.” — sic 3, duke press
“a man struggles with … enjoying. … A man … is perturbed by a woman but then tries to find a rescue in the self-imposed rules which govern his daily routine. However, after indulging in fantasies of a journey [he] cannot easily go back to his orderly life: ‘‘Through envisioning a future so different from his own undoubted and authentic past he had given way to the charm of an idyll, one which could hardly stand up to the light of day” — SIC 3, Duke Press
“in addition to the lack in the subject, … the Other is also experienced as lacking and how these two experiences of lack are such that they cannot be taken to coincide – that is to say, the subject and the Other are neither reducible to one another nor are they complementary in the sense that they would seal each other to form a whole. The persistence of lack in the subject and in the Other will be shown to give rise to a movement of desire, a desire to recapture the unity which will be taken to have preceded the disunity with which the subject necessarily experiences itself and a desire to shore up the lack experienced in the Other, to complete the Other. This movement of desire will be distinguished from the other ‘forces’ which would affect the subject – need, demand and the drive - and explained in terms of both jouissance, as the purely presumed completion which would be the impossible satisfaction of desire, and objet petit a, as that illusory stand in for that which would afford such a completion. … The subject at one and the same time maintains itself in relation to objet petit a and safeguards itself from the encounter with jouissance which would, insofar as it would annul desire, be destructive of the subject. The chapter will thus have shown that the subject is such that it must maintain itself in a relation of fantasy but that through traversing the fantasy, through refusing the sedimentation of any particular fantasy, the subject is capable of locating itself, rather than the illusory non-object that is objet petit a, as the cause of its desire.Importantly, as traversing the fantasy can be understood as a refusal to allow any particular fantasy to sediment and as fantasy itself is a necessary aspect of subjectivity, as fantasy is that which supports desire, the traversing of the fantasy should be understood as a pulsational possibility. It is not for the subject to traverse the fantasy once and for all. Rather, traversing the fantasy should be understood as an endeavour which must be repeated.” — Bruce Fink, on why psychoanalysis is interminable for Freud
“By assigning [its] cause[s] to something else, the subject denies itself and places itself under the sway of the Other, albeit in a deluded form. …” — Calum Neill
“What is feminine is not … to be admired, but … disguising the desire to be admired. If you have a hundred Channel dresses, you can still say ‘I’ve got nothing to wear’. The one dress you don’t have is … what it is to be the Women, the definitive answer to the question of femininity.” — Darian Leader
“Maude falls into a melancholic state when she recognizes that she is not the phallus that will complement the Other. In contrast to Maude, Hettie is less concerned with the question of whether she is loved by the Other or not. In her seclusion, she comes closer to the other problem of love: that the subject loves from her lack alone. Her solitude thus appears to be an immersion in a state where the subject comes closest to the lack that marks her being.” — salecl
“And when she chooses to live a reclusive life, … Hettie’s desire targets this very lack, the emptiness of the object” — Salecl
“Hettie’s refusal to pursue Jack shows that she knew very well that Jack was just a stand-in for the empty object—the object cause of desire.” — Salecl
“[occupying himself with obsessive work] gives the man … assurance that the symbolic has endowed him with phallic power” — Salecl