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Man, this has to be one of my favorite Laclau essays ever

I don't think I care as much for the Svolos texts, but the collection so far is outstanding

A truly Sublime essay by Miller!

"But the sinthome is not a construction, it is what I am. I am a sinthome. This is what “to recognize one’s being as sinthome” means; it is to recognize that one is a sinthome. Miller, reading Lacan line by line, adds the following: "by taking its guarantees and a kind of distance.""

"An analysis taken to its term goes through these successive stages: suggestion …., awakening …., dupery (to go back to sleep in the right way, remaining alert thanks to the new use of the signifier Real, which, because it excludes meaning, allows us to not overly believe in truth), mourning …., then to know one’s symptom"

There apparently cannot be a perfect Zizek book. "Wo es war, soll ich werden—where it was (the God-Father who still belongs to the Real), I (Christ) shall become". Here, he's misusing the Real for the sake of the Christian gimmick. No, the God-Father is the Name of the Father par excellence, the paternal metaphor. It covers the Real, therefore it cannot be Real.

I did not care for Ch. 5.1 much, but a noir fan would adore it.

I'm seeing the origin of so many "typical" Zizekian motifs here.

"An analysis does not have to be pushed too far. When the analysand thinks he is happy to live, that’s enough.” It must be understood that this happiness of living, this satisfaction, is a satisfaction of the One."

This is steadily coming to be my favorite Zizekian book, especially after the re-readings of the younger ones.

Zizek loves using the "night of the world" but what happens later in his work is it eclipses what he rightly recognizer here: the radical ambiguity of the Real (objet a) encounter. Thus, by using the phrase, he reifies the Real more or less as always-alaready negative.

This might be Zizek's most parsimonious book ever, so far at least.

"at the end of the imaginary as well as the symbolic itinerary, we encounter the Real" -- Zizek perfectly knows what the Real is here. Which makes Laclau's criticism in 2006 even sadder because it proves us that Zizek deliberately misrepresents theory to fit an agenda, just as Laclau criticises him of doing.

"Neither the phenomenological (imaginary) nor neurobiological (real) .... can be cited as a constituting condition for this objective [symbolic viewpoint]". No, no, no. The neurobiolotical is not the Real; Laclau's critique is spot on again.

How disappointing. "Our habitual way of conceiving of ourselves as composed of body and mind precludes the idea of wholeness that we have been speaking of here. As Gabriel Marcel has said, and many have repeated since him, it is not that we have a body but that we are our body. It is no less true that our mind or spirit are not something we possess but
something that we are."

"What is the first lie, the proton pseudos, of psychoanalysis? Lacan points
to it when he says that it is attention: as soon as one focuses attention on
it, one is outside it. The proton pseudos is the analyst himself, that is, the
insertion of another subject into the relationship that you entertain with
the real unconscious"

"One might say that on the side of history there exists time that is not
only chronological, that is lived in the continuity of its existence, and that
on the other side, there is something extratemporal, which arises when the
temporal flux is interrupted." This is invaluable when it comes to the thesis of THE ATEMPORAL CHARACTER OF PSYCHOSIS.

Note: A huge reading/critique of Badiou/Ruda is part of Chapter 1 and it doesn't necessarily assist Zizek's case. It's an interesting read for advanced readers familiar with both authors, it showcases their differences but in general it's an empty gesture.

Holy fuck, Zizek claims Dune is """proto-Fascist""". What a useless book.

This might also be Zizek's filthiest book I've read.

We find some pretty weird proto-less-than-nothings in this volume; but Zizek never sticks to a single definition of the Real. "The precious agalma perceived .... as the unique ineffable kernel .... is precisely jouissance as that which always remains the same [as Real-impossible]." But he will also claim stuff like science being a manifestation of the Real, which is utterly un-Lacanian, as Laclau claims.