Disavowal, by Alenka Zupančič

Reviewed by Patrick Pender

Alenka Zupančič, Disavowal (NJ: Polity Press, 2024), iv + 133pp.

In Civilization and its Discontents (1930), Freud argued that repression was the foundation of civilisation, meaning the so-called ‘civilised’ human being was essentially neurotic—not simply repressed, but haunted by returns of the repressed, i.e., symptoms, dreams and parapraxes, hieroglyphs of desire enciphering everything he has to thrust aside in order not to go mad.^[1]

Freud’s ‘repressive hypothesis’ has since been put in question by clinicians working in the Lacanian orientation. Neurosis is no longer the norm. We no longer even meet with repression in the clinic. Today’s clinic is the clinic of the psychoses. Psychosis is a subjective structure organised not by repression but foreclosure, that is, the radical absence of the fundamental signifier known in Lacan’s teaching as the Name/No-of-the-Father (le nom-du-père). According to Lacan, the symbolic cannot function as an order unless one of its terms functions as a transcendent term or quilting point, the No! which fixes and enables signification, thus preventing speech from sliding into an endless deciphering, a flight of sense—delirium. Precisely this signifier is missing today, foreclosed. Foreclosure corresponds to the fact that capital cannot valorise itself without devalorising the master signifiers, i.e., the ideals, principles and authorities, which have traditionally guaranteed hierarchy, institutions, places and duties. All that is holy is profaned! Not simply this long-cherished ideal or that time-honored authority, but the very Name-of-the-Father, the structural support for symbolic authority. Without this signifier, we lose the basis for collective regulating ideals, and therefore also for the repressed unconscious, neurosis as ‘bad conscience’.

In Freud’s time, you could still tell madness from normality. No more! Who really knows what’s ‘normal’ anymore? By the same stroke, who can really say where madness begins and ends? ‘Everyone is mad, that is, delusional’.^[2] Herewith, the late/last Lacan announces the dawn of a new civilisational era, the emergence of the capitalist subject properly speaking, hence also of a new clinic, no longer the binary clinic of neurosis/psychosis, which still took its bearings from a transcendent No(r)m, but the ‘continuous’ clinic of ordinary psychosis, psychoanalysis as a practice of pure singularity, oriented by the madness of each One.

Disavowal intervenes at this point to outline yet another permutation of capitalist subjectivity, not ordinary psychosis, but instead ‘ordinary perversion’. Across wide-ranging analyses of contemporary culture, politics and society, Zupančič demonstrates that perverse disavowal structures our individual and collective life from top to bottom, liberal mainstream to alt/far-right. ‘It is the contention of this essay that (perverse) disavowal, which sustains some belief by means of ardently proclaiming the knowledge of the opposite, is becoming a predominant feature of our social and political life and goes well beyond personal psychology’ (2).

Disavowal is only the latest in a series of theoretical interventions exploring the Freudian-Lacanian notion of perversion and its various substructures, i.e., fetishism, sadomasochism, exhibitionism, etc. Stephanie Swales’ remarkable theoretical and clinical study, Perversion (2012), stands out as the best book-length study of the classical Lacanian theory of perversion.^[3] A more ‘contemporary’ treatment of perversion may be found in Perversion Now! (2017), a collection of essays exploring the impact of culture, politics, and society on the notion of perversion, considered both as a clinical concept and also as a critical theoretical lens.^[4] Alongside this expanding interest in the perversion, there has also been a spurt of interest in one particular perverse substructure—sadomasochism. Dany Nobus’s book The Law of Desire (2017) has provided us with a comprehensive commentary on Lacan’s famously obtuse écrit on sadism, ‘Kant avec Sade’.^[5] A more expansive treatment of sadomasochistic cruelty may be found in Lacan’s Cruelty (2022), a collection of essays exploring perversion from the perspective of cruelty.^[6]

Zupančič stakes out a place for herself within this crowded field of scholarship through her focus on the psychological mechanism at the heart of the perverse structure—disavowal (Verleugnung). But what actually is disavowal? Freud first uses the word in a comparatively specific sense in ‘The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis’ (1924), an article dedicated to clarifying the question of differential diagnosis.^[7] How to tell neurosis from psychosis? According to Freud, a neurosis arises from repression, i.e., the decathexis of the conscious-preconscious representations of the drives, which subsequently return in unconscious formations, e.g., symptoms, dreams, parapraxes, etc. By contrast, Freud describes psychosis as arising not from repression but instead disavowal, which defends not against a wishful impulse in the id, but external reality. Strictly defined, disavowal therefore refers to the decathexis of the perception of some traumatic or intolerably frustrating reality, which is then autocratically reconstructed by the ego on the basis of wishful impulses and fantasies in the id. No matter the changes this concept later undergoes in Freud’s work, disavowal will always retain the structure of a two-stage mechanism, involving first a loss of reality and then a compensation for this loss, the function of which is to rebuild a world when the beliefs supporting it have disappeared.

In ‘Fetishism’ (1927), Freud transposes the concept of disavowal into the clinic of the perversions, using it to describe the pervert’s ‘divided’ attitude toward (feminine) castration.^[8] According to Freud, little boys believe women possess a phallus, which is to say, children believe reality (and crucially, other people) to be fully consistent, devoid of traumatic contingencies and irresolvable contradictions. Sooner or later, of course, we are all brought face to face with the reality of experience, the inconsistency of the o/Other, the flaw in things, which (should) compel the ‘little boy’ to abandon his ‘infantile belief’. Only, none of us actually get that far. The psychotic forecloses, the neurotic represses, and the pervert disavows. Now, to say that the pervert disavows castration emphatically does not mean that he continues to profess an unwavering belief in the existence of the maternal phallus—in which case we would be dealing with a psychosis. As strictly distinguished from the psychotic, the pervert fully accepts castration ‘without any hidden remainder’ (76). The pervert knows. He is a kind of master, like the Marquis de Sade, but potentially also a philosophy professor, even a Buddha—in any case, he is someone who faces up to the real, someone who ‘tells it like it is’, calmly chattering on and on about sexual torture, the brutal reality of capitalism, the burning world of samsara, etc. But this master has an air of imposture about him. He behaves as if the real of his knowledge never touched him, as if none of it really mattered or meant anything to him. No matter how much he pretends to face up to the impermanence of things, the perverted Buddha keeps on enjoying, believing and behaving as if, precisely, there were no tomorrow. The pervert knows and does not know. True enough, he acknowledges the reality of castration, the impermanence of things, the scandal and horror of death, etc. But he does not fully assume or subjectivise this inconsistency. Despite his claims to the contrary, his ‘childish’ behavior indicates that his infantile belief has been preserved in his unconscious. Castration is something he both accepts and refuses—he dis/avows it.

Something formally similar may be said of the neurotic, whose unconscious is also constituted by an infantile belief in the maternal phallus. But the pervert and neurotic do not ‘believe’ in the same way. Whereas the neurotic’s unconscious (belief) is concealed as the repressed or hidden signification of a discourse, the pervert’s unconscious (belief) is fully ‘out in the open’, externalised in a really existing thing in the world: a fetish/object—a shoe, a lock of hair, an undergarment, etc., whose function is to serve as a symbolic substitute for the missing maternal phallus. Owing to this pseudophallus, the pervert can acknowledge the reality of castration while at the same time shielding himself from the real of this knowledge, the horror of irrecuperable loss. ‘So, disavowal doesn’t make something disappear; rather, it changes the nature and meaning of this something. We could say that it de-realizes it. It affects its character of the real, as real – that is, as an extra-ordinary, surprising, shattering bit of our reality’ (14-15).

Zupančič argues that perversion/disavowal should be considered not only as a (comparatively rare) subjective or clinical structure, but equally a social form, a transcendental structure or logic ‘built into the very foundations of our objective socio-economic relations, as well as the ideology that sustains them’ (18). In this vein, Zupančič follows in the footsteps of the French psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni, who work links disavowal to ‘the general structure of belief’, as well as the Austrian philosopher Robert Pfaller, whose writings show ‘in what sense belief and illusion are an indispensable and constitutive dimension of all sociality’ (23).

Zupančič describes perversion as taking on particular importance in periods of ‘profound social tectonic shifts and turbulence’ (22). During moments of crisis and upheaval, disavowal usurps repression as the predominant organising logic of society. Perversion is a kind of last stand against the real, a last-ditch effort at protecting our lifeworld when the beliefs which support it are threatened and the lie belying civilised life stands exposed, irrepressible. Perversion therefore emerges as a topic of literary interest and theoretical reflection during moments of counter/revolutionary fervor. Sade composed The 120 Days of Sodom not only on the eve of the French Revolution, but within the very walls of the Bastille; Mannoni published his seminal article on perverse disavowal, entitled Je sais bien, mais quand même, in 1964, and then again in 1969, between which lies the traumatism of May ’68; and Slavoj Žižek published The Sublime Object of Ideology in 1989, theorising the ideological function of disavowal on the verge of Soviet collapse.^[9]

Disavowal opens with a discussion of nightmares. ‘A nightmare is defined, not only, or not simply, by its traumatic content but by the fact that one cannot wake up (and escape to reality)’ (10). But is the impossibility of awakening not a feature of dreams in general, as defined by Freud? In the service of the wish to sleep, the dream brings the signifier to bear upon the real, filtering a disturbing jouissance through all kinds of ingenious wordplay and puns. As a rule, therefore, dreaming precludes the possibility of awakening. But in that case, why does Zupančič ascribe the impossibility of awakening to nightmares alone? Arguably, Zupančič is here following in the footsteps of Lacan, whose late/last teaching abolishes the distinction between the dream and the nightmare, declaring that every ‘dream is a nightmare, even if it’s a toned down nightmare’.^[10] Every dream is a nightmare because the signifier for the late/last Lacan functions not simply as a means of limiting, restricting and filtering jouissance, but also as its cause. The dream therefore cannot bring the signifier to bear upon the real, cannot impose a bound and limited form upon a disturbing jouissance, without also generating an excess of meaning, a surplus jouis-sens, which is potentially even more disturbing, more real than the real itself. Since every signifying operation has this surplus-object as its irreducible remainder, it follows that the dream cannot fulfill the wish to sleep without also subverting this same wish. The dreamer both sleeps and does not sleep. True enough, the dream is the guardian of sleep. But there is also an awakening at the heart of the dream itself: not an awakening of the dreamer, but of this burning surplus-object, signifier as the cause of jouissance, an overdetermined excess of meaning, which the dreamer cannot tolerate, but also cannot escape – because of course they’re asleep.

For Zupančič, contemporary capitalism is a nightmare in precisely this sense. What is nightmarish about our moment is not the fact that we are confronted with this or that particularly horrifying crisis; rather, the nightmare lies in the fact that we are confronted with an endless series of overdetermined crises, ‘hitting us one after another, faster that we can keep up’ (6). Climate crisis, inflation crisis, constitutional crisis, energy crisis, Middle East crisis, Ukraine crisis, etc. We are stuck with an excessive real which leaves us no way out, no possibility of ‘awakening’ or escape.

What does it mean to say that disavowal represents our response to this nightmare? As a way of clarifying the notion of disavowal which Zupančič is employing in this essay, we should briefly review Lacan’s structuralist revamping of the classical Freudian concept. Although disavowal has effects in the real – in the sense that it de-realises the real – the direct object of disavowal is not the real but instead the symbolic. Disavowal may thus be defined as a symbolic operation involving the substitution of the fetish-object, qua signifier, for ‘the phallus as absent, the symbolic phallus’.^[11] Before broaching the function of the fetish as signifier, let us first clarify why Lacan identifies castration – the ‘absent phallus’ – with the symbolic phallus.

The absent phallus is a symbolic phallus because we have no relationship to absence except through the symbolic. Consider the missing library book. A book is missing only in relation to the place assigned to it in relation to some signifying structure, e.g., the Dewey Decimal System. The signifier alone introduces lack into reality. But we should be careful not to confuse the lack of the library book for the lack which is at stake with castration. Although both lacks are carved out by the signifier, the object which is in either case lacking is not only completely different but situated in an entirely different register. Whereas the missing library book is the symbolic lack of a real object, Lacan defines castration as ‘the symbolic lack of an imaginary object’ (SIV, 261; emphasis mine).

Why an imaginary object? Because, of course, no one is actually missing an organ. Although the advent of the symbolic allows the subject to dissect the body, to name and isolate the penis as an organ and to mark its absence on a woman’s body, woman is not actually lacking anything in the real – she has a vagina. Rather than designating the absence or removal of a piece of the real, e.g., a missing library book or penile organ, the signifier here subtracts a purely ‘imaginary’ phallus – whose loss, it must be said, constitutes a ‘real’ crisis, a traumatism. Castration shatters the coordinates of pre/Oedipal psychical life. Confronted with this lack in the Other, the child no longer derives any assurance from phantasies of maternal omnipotence, of the mother as an all-powerful being capable of satisfying every want and need. It is here, at the level of phantasy, that we should situate the real – what is real, i.e., traumatic, in castration has nothing to do with an anatomical deficit and everything to do with the way in which the symbolic ‘defiles’ the imaginary, shattering our phantasies of wholeness and turning all our dreams into nightmares.

Since castration is essentially symbolic, its disavowal is necessarily also symbolic. Disavowal is always the disavowal of a signifier – and not just any signifier, but the symbolic phallus as the signifier of castration, of lack and desire in the Other, of the Other as barred, S(A).

To better grasp the Lacanian notion of disavowal, it is necessary to first clarify the notion of the symbolic phallus. In the eighth lesson (13/02/1958) of Seminar V, Lacan defines the symbolic phallus as ‘the signifier of the signified in general’.^[12] Some months later, on May 9, 1958, Lacan elaborates on his notion of the symbolic phallus during a talk delivered to the Max Planck Society, the text for which is published as an écrit titled ‘The Signification of the Phallus’. According to this écrit, the symbolic phallus ‘is the signifier destined to designate meaning effects as a whole, insofar as the signifier conditions them by its presence as signifier’.^[13] In other words, the symbolic phallus is that signifier which self-reflexively designates the impact of the signifier upon the signified. It designates not meaning per se, not signification pure and simple, but signification insofar as its illusory or ‘imaginary’ consistency is ‘defiled’ by the signifier, the action of signifying structure—the unconscious.

Lacan dedicates an entire écrit to the symbolic phallus because this special signifier functions as the indispensable possibility condition for psychoanalysis. Without this one signifier which self-reflexively designates the impact of the signifier upon the signified, we would have no way of grasping the dimension of structure either in theory or in analysis, hence no theoretical or practical access to the unconscious (as structured like a language). Phallus is the password to the unconscious, the instrument or prop supporting the subject’s access to the symbolic order.

Let us now turn to fetishism. Following Freud, Lacan understands the fetish as a symbol of castration. Shoes, feet, stockings, etc. – a short effort in analysis reliably indicates that the fetish can be traced back to a particular scene in the subject’s history, a scene distinguished by its incompleteness, a breach in the chain of articulated memory. The subject recalls how his observations (or his recollections thereof) once came to a grinding halt, for example, at the hem of his mother’s dress, right before… Although the chain breaks off at this point, its punctuation mark, e.g., the dress, very well indicates the absent sequence, i.e., the discovery of castration. This signifier constitutes the fetish, which is therefore a signifier of lack, a metonym alluding to the traumatic loss of the imaginary object – a void which the fetish allows to reverberate at a distance.

By coming in the place of this beyond-zone, the void in the Other, the fetish serves as a substitute for the symbolic phallus. However, the fetish is by no means identical to the symbolic phallus. If on the one hand the fetish represents the phallus as absent, it on the other hand conceals or veils this absence. After all, does the signifier constituting the fetish not function like a screen-memory obstructing our access to castration? The fetish here actually goes beyond mere veiling. By re-presenting the absent phallus, the fetish literally replaces this absent phallus. It literally becomes the lost imaginary object, the fabled maternal phallus – the embodied denial of castration.

Herein lies the paradox of fetishism. This paradox lies not only in the fact that the fetish both represents and denies castration; more radically, it lies in the fact that the fetish denies castration precisely through its re-presentation. In other words, it is precisely as a signifier of lack, i.e., a metonym alluding to the symbolic lack of the imaginary object, that the fetish elides this lack and upholds the consistency of the imaginary, ballasting it against the defiles of the signifier.

If disavowal may be defined as a symbolic operation involving the substitution of the fetish for the symbolic phallus, then this substitution is strictly equivalent to the substitution of an imaginary phallus for the symbolic phallus. Since this substitution hinges upon the elision of the symbolic phallus – i.e., the signifier designating the ‘castrative’ impact of the signifier upon the signified, and which therefore gives us access to the symbolic, the unconscious, the dimension of structure, etc. – what disavowal ultimately disavows is not only or indeed even principally the absence of a particular organ on woman’s body, but, more radically, the dimension of structure.

Let’s return to the nightmare of everyday life. When Zupančič says that disavowal represents our collective and individual response to serial crisis, she does not mean that we reject or deny the reality of the crises confronting us. On the contrary, today more than ever we know very well that ‘the house is on fire’ so to speak. What we disavow is rather the dimension of the signifier, that is, the structural causality by virtue of which these ‘burning’ crises represent something more and other than a collection of isolated accidents, namely a series of intertwined crises whose common denominator is capitalism. Consider climate change. Broadly speaking, the reality of the climate crisis is more widely acknowledged today than it was twenty years ago. Nevertheless, ‘growth’ and ‘adaptation’ remain the watchwords of every major political campaign – as if the climate crisis weren’t overwhelmingly the result of extractive capitalist production. What is disavowed here is not the reality of crisis, which we (pretend to) take quite seriously, but the signifier as the cause of jouissance, the nightmare of structure—the capitalist structure.

Throughout its second chapter, Disavowal aims to isolate the permutation which the perverse structure undergoes in our contemporary moment, which Zupančič describes as a ‘doubly perverse’ mode of disavowal: ‘What we are dealing with is thus a configuration in which knowledge about some traumatic reality [. . .] gets strangely redoubled or split and itself starts playing the role of the object that protects us against this traumatic reality. “Knowledge” thus adopts a new and different role: it is no longer simply something to be disavowed but – paradoxically – something that can help us disavow (the real of this same knowledge)’ (79).

Zupančič’s discussion of alt/far-right anti-science obscurantism provides the clearest distillation of the twisted (il)logic at work in this structure. Zupančič observes that climate/vaccine ‘skeptics’ will frequently justify their denial of scientifically accepted facts by appealing to the inextricable entanglement of science and capitalism. ‘The perverse syllogism runs as follows: everything in our social life is about money and financial interests, therefore there is no climate change’ (43). Let us listen closely to what the ‘skeptic’ is saying here. The subject begins by acknowledging that the pervasive, all-corrupting influence of capital leaves us no way out of the suspicion that we are being deceived, manipulated or exploited by ‘money and financial interests’. In other words, the subject begins by acknowledging something formally akin to castration, namely the structural causality of social disintegration, the traumatic breakdown in the imaginary consistency of the social bond. But no sooner is this knowledge pronounced than does the subject draw back before the abyss of their own insight, the hole of castration. Herein lies the moment of disavowal. Rather than concluding that capitalism is not a good economic system, the suspicion instead shifts to science, specifically to climate scientists and/or virologists, i.e., imaginary little others, whose excessive greed and enjoyment has warped and corrupted the social bond. What gets lost between the first and second moments comprising the skeptic’s perverse syllogism is nothing less than the dimension of structure, as if the signifier supporting our access to this dimension, the symbolic phallus, suddenly disappeared. Sliding from the symbolic to the imaginary, social disintegration now appears as an essentially localised phenomenon contingent upon the pathological excesses of isolated actors rather than an inescapable waste-product of capitalism.

For Zupančič, what makes this disavowal doubly perverse is the fact that the symbolic phallus here functions as the operator of its own disavowal. Whereas in the classical Freudian-Lacanian theory the pervert defends themselves against castration by substituting an imaginary phallus for the symbolic phallus – e.g., rather than recalling the precise moment at which they discovered their mother did not possess a penis, the subject recalls how their observations came to a standstill at the hem of their mother’s dress – in Zupančič’s ‘doubly perverse structure’, the symbolic phallus takes the structural place of the imaginary phallus, meaning the symbolic phallus itself plays the role of the fetish-object, such that knowledge of castration becomes the very thing which facilitates our denial of castration. ‘Financial interests, which are obviously a part of capitalism, are acknowledged and used in a way that shields capitalism’s very brutal reality’ (43). It is important to grasp the ir/rationale at work here: it is precisely because the subject knows that the Other is castrated, barred, lacking, etc., that they therefore believe in a phallic, omnipotent, consistent Other. Or again, it is precisely the subject’s knowledge of the brutal reality of capitalism which functions to sustain their belief in liberal capitalist democracy and free markets. Zupančič frames the issue very nicely:

Unlike that raised by classical disavowal, the question is therefore no longer simply why does the knowledge about something, why do revelations such as ‘the emperor is naked’, not really work, so that we continue to believe and behave as if we didn’t know? The question now is, rather, how this knowledge and these kinds of revelations themselves actively help to maintain the very illusion they are supposedly destroying. (80)

Zupančič continues this line of thinking in her third chapter, which explores the dialectical interplay between knowledge and belief through an analysis of conspiracy theories. ‘There exists a curious complicity between the ‘rational’ business-as-usual attitude of mainstream society and the ‘crazy’ attitude of conspiracy theorists’ (92). Rather than decrying conspiracy theories as emblematic of the sheer ‘stupidity of people’, Zupančič contends that the obscurantist beliefs associated with the alt/far-right are up to a point formally indistinguishable from the supposedly clear-sighted attitude of a liberal mainstream over/identified with knowledge. What really distinguishes the ‘insanity’ of conspiracy theorists, specifically those who believe climate change is a hoax, from our supposedly ‘rational’ attitude, which consists in acknowledging the climate crisis, but doing nothing about it, continuing on with everyday life as if, in the end, we didn’t really believe in it either? Conspiracy theories are a return of liberalism’s disavowed. They openly express the unconscious beliefs subtending the illusory rationality of the liberal mainstream.

Zupančič argues that it is precisely this secret tryst of madness and reason that compels the liberal mainstream to arrogantly decry the ‘craziness’ of conspiracy theorists. ‘The elites need conspiracy theorists precisely in order to point their finger at them, to contrast the conspiracist’s craziness with their own supposed rationality and thus make us blind to their own craziness’ (93).

Ultimately, we are not dealing with an enlightened liberal mainstream on the one hand and a ‘crazy’ populist fringe/right on the other. We are dealing with a single civilisational madness, a single psychotic-perverse structure divided against itself, a ‘borderline’ formation defined by two poles, rationality and madness, whose external opposition belies an internal overlapping.

Knowledge is never simply knowledge, never without a perverse supplement of obscurantist belief, a ‘mad’ leap of faith. Conversely, madness is never merely madness, never without an irrational excess of rationality, a delirium of interpretation, such that the madman ultimately suffers not only from delusions, but equally from ‘knowing’ too much, knowledge (connaissance) being essentially ‘paranoiac’ for Lacan, formally identical with delusion.

Zupančič therefore argues that the ‘crazy’ beliefs of alt/far-right conspiracy theorists are organized by a knowledge and rationality all of their own. We already caught a glimpse of this argument in the second chapter, where Zupančič argued that anti-science obscurantism exhibits a displaced rationale, a disavowed knowledge of the brutal reality of capitalism. Now she turns her attention to a host of other examples, most notably QAnon, a far-right political movement whose followers believe that the world is controlled by a cabal of pedophiles said to include business tycoons, high-ranking government officials, Hollywood actors, and medical experts. QAnon conspiracy theories are paranoid delusions which would not be out of place in the clinic of the psychoses. Nevertheless, Zupančič insists that this obsession with the enjoyment and machinations of an omnipotent Other ‘is not only a “clearly insane” personal pathology; it also has a strong basis in social reality and its pathology’ (94). After all, do pedophile business tycoons not in fact exist? Consider Jeffrey Epstein and all his so-called ‘associates’ in D.C., Buckingham Palace, Wall Street, Harvard and so on. Does Epstein not give symptomal expression to capitalism as an apparatus of jouissance, a system of self-intoxication within which each of us is constituted as an object in the field of the Other, i.e., Capital, which enjoys/enriches itself at our expense?

Everyone knows that psychosis involves a loss of reality, that the psychotic replaces a traumatic external reality with a delusional construction, an imaginary world, the materials for which are drawn from fantasies and wishful impulses in the id. But to say that the psychotic forecloses the real does not mean that the operation of foreclosure entirely succeeds, such that the psychotic has no relationship to the real whatsoever. Zupančič argues that the real foreclosed in psychosis returns within delusion itself, such that every delusion therefore contains a ‘side of truth’. This is more than apparent in the case of QAnon. Although these conspiracy theories are unambiguously works of madness, straightforward paranoid delusions, they nevertheless ‘propose a deformed and displaced articulation of something that might be called, following Lacan, le peu du reel, a little piece of the real’ (100). Owing to the fact that the psychotic utilizes wishful impulses and fantasies to construct their delusions, this articulation is deformed and displaced by jouissance, meaning ‘the side of truth’ is warped by a ‘side of enjoyment’.

Delusion tells us the truth about truth. Because the signifier is itself the cause of jouissance, and truth is but an effect of the signifier, there can be no truth without jouissance. ‘Truth, the sister of jouissance’. Owing to their shared parentage, testimony is always compromised by an obscure surplus-dimension. One never tells the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. No truth without riddles – without enjoy-meant – no truth which is not ‘half-said’ (mi-dire).

Disavowal concludes by calling for the invention of forms of thinking which would emancipate us from the grip of disavowal—in other words, from ‘knowing’. ‘Emancipatory thinking is about identifying and locating this gap in causality, this glitch, this point of decision where responsibility, agency and, yes, politics come into play. And where things could have taken a different direction’ (125). What Zupančič is here calling ‘emancipatory thinking’ does not involve simply avowing the disavowed signifier, in other words, the point is not simply to recover the transcendental terms of structure in order to establish ‘the right causality that could ultimately explain these crises’ (125). Rather, emancipating ourselves from the grip of disavowal means emancipating ourselves from the grip of the signifier, that is, from an outmoded notion of (signifying) structure which imagines the symbolic order as a fully consistent Other, an invisible machinery whose reconstruction in theory and analysis would render social/subjective reality fully intelligible. Strictly speaking, this obsession with the machinations of an all-powerful Other is on the side of paranoid delusion and conspiracy thinking, which deforms and de-realizes the real through a delirium of interpretation, thus looping us back into the Möbian space of the doubly perverse structure, where knowledge of the real defends us against the real of this same knowledge. Now, to say that we must emancipate ourselves from the grip of the signifier per se does not mean that we should dispense with the signifier per se; rather, it means emancipating the signifier from the (impossible) demand that it should explain everything, i.e., that there should exist one signifier, the Name-of-the-Father, which would function as the Other of the Other, the Law of Being. Emancipatory thinking therefore begins with the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, with the recognition that there is an irreducible hole in the symbolic, that the symbolic does not make a Whole, that it is inconsistent, lacking, barred: A. By recognizing the incompleteness of structure, we free ourselves to grasp the structural causality of the real as real. Rather than reducing the real to the signifier, grasping the structural causality of the real as real means situating the irruption of the real in the place where the signifier is precisely lacking, the point at which structure de-consists, breaks down, collapses. It’s not enough to say that jouissance is caused by the signifier. Jouissance is caused by the signifier of the barred Other, S(A) – not the Other as a fully consistent causal nexus – but a hole in/as structure, structure insofar as it does not exist, insofar as it does not work.

Zupančič’s concluding remarks echo Lacan’s at the end of Seminar XXIII.^[14] ‘One ponders against a signifier. This is the meaning that I have given to the word l’appensée, appondering. One props oneself contra a signifier in order to think. There you go. I’m setting you free’ (SXXIII, 134). Lacan is not simply dismissing his seminar’s attendees. He is announcing a break with his famous structuralist hypothesis, ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’. Appondering against the signifier means thinking beyond the unconscious, beyond psychoanalysis, beyond Lacan… What lies in this obscure nether region beyond the signifier? Not an abyss of terrifying abstraction. Not at all. Beyond the signifier there is literally nothing: the radical absence of any meta/transcendental ground for language and the structures of kinship, the so-called ‘symbolic order’. Lacan ceased linking the notion of the symbolic to that of order around 1973. In this same year, he introduces the notion of the sexual non-relation, which is the logical consequence of this radical void at the heart of structure. ‘What constitutes the basis of life, in effect, is that for everything having to do with the relations between men and women, what is called collectivity, it’s not working out (ça ne va pas). It’s not working out, and the whole world talks about it, and a large part of our activity is taken up with saying so’.^[15] Rather than explaining how things work, why they go the way they do, appondering against the signifier means attending to the contingent and unpredictable ways in which things don’t work out, the irreducibly singular ways in which things don’t go the way they should (if the Other weren’t barred, if there were a metalanguage, if the Name-of-the-Father were operative, if Woman existed, etc.). Lacan puts it very well. ‘There’s no such thing as a sexual relationship. . . . It’s not a matter of analysing how it succeeds. It’s a matter of repeating until you’re blue in the face why it fails’ (SXX, 58).

1. Sigmund Freud, ‘Civilization and its Discontents’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXI (1927-1931): The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and its Discontents, and Other Works, edited and translated by James Strachey (London, Hogarth Press, 1930), 57-136. ↑

2. Jacques Lacan, ‘There are Four Discourses’, translated by Adrian Price and Russell Grigg, Culture/Clinic 1 (2013), 3-4. ↑

3. Stephanie Swales, Perversion: A Lacanian Psychoanalytic Approach to the Subject (London: Routledge, 2012). ↑

4. Diana Caine and Colin Wright, eds., Perversion Now! (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). ↑

5. Dany Nobus, The Law of Desire: On Lacan’s ‘Kant with Sade’ (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Jacques Lacan, ‘Kant with Sade’ in Écrits, translated by Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), 645-668. ↑

6. Meera Lee, ed., Lacan’s Cruelty: Perversion beyond Philosophy, Culture and Clinic (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). ↑

7. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIX (1923-1925): The Ego and the Id and Other Works, edited and translated by James Strachey (London, Hogarth Press, 1930), 181-188. ↑

8. Sigmund Freud, ‘Fetishism’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXI (1927-1931): The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and its Discontents, and Other Works, edited and translated by James Strachey (London, Hogarth Press, 1930), 147-158. ↑

9. Donatien Alphonse François Sade, ‘The 120 Days of Sodom’, The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings, translated by Austyrn Wainhouse (New York: Grove Press, 1987), 183-674; Octave Mannoni, ‘I Know Well, but All the Same…’ in Perversion and the Social Relation, edited by Molly Anne Rotenberg, Dennis Foster, and Slavoj Žižek (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 68-92; Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso Books, 1989). ↑

10. Jacques Lacan, The Sinthome: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by A. R. Price (Medford: Polity, 2016), 106. Hereafter SXXIII. ↑

11. Jacques Lacan, The Object Relation: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book IV, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by A. R. Price (Medford: Polity, 2020), 154. Hereafter SIV. ↑

12. Jacques Lacan, Formations of the Unconscious: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book V, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Russell Grigg (Medford: Polity, 2017), 223. ↑

13. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Signification of the Phallus’ in Écrits, translated by Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), 575-584, 579; emphasis mine. ↑

14. Jacques Lacan, The Sinthome: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by A. R. Price (Medford: Polity, 2016). Hereafter SXXIII. ↑

15. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999), 32. Hereafter SXX. ↑