The Looking Glass Existances

Chirality and the Formalized Lacanian Quaternion
Why Question: Why do we encounter the Lacanian subject, the subject of the unconscious, in the very discourse in which it undergoes subjective destitution? (108-109)

Motivational Mechanism: Differences exist in the ways individuals cope with the necessary inconsistencies involved in the act of assuming one and the same universal symbolic feature. (84)

Lacan’s Classic Definition of signifier: that which represents the subject for another signifier. (74)

Symbolic reduplication: The redoubling of an entity into itself and the place it occupies in the structure. (74-75).

Master’s Speech act:
• Level of enunciation versus enunciated content: “A fully realized self contained performative” (76)
• Fantasy emerges to fill the gap between the enunciation and the enunciated content: you are telling me this but why with imperfect fit generating questioning.
o Fantasmatic Formation: Attempts at normalizing the relationship toward the excess.
• The masters discourse relies on the gap between S2 and S1 between the chain of ordinary signifiers and the excessive master signifier.(76)
o Master Signifier: reduction of more complex systems into a simpler holistic response

Position of the agent: (81)
• Master: One who is fully engaged in his speech act…displays an immediate performative efficiency.
• University: Fundamentally disengaged… the self erasing observer and executor of objective laws.
• Hysterical: One whose very existence involves radical doubt… whose very being is sustained by the uncertainty of what he is for the other.
• Analyst: The desubjectivized subject.
o Subjective destitution: Breaks from the vicious cycle of intersubjective dialects of desire and turns into acephalous being of pure drive.
 Acephalous: lacking a governing head or chief.

Primordially repressed: the repression of the secondary signifier i.e. women which then makes its comeback in the return of the repressed. (77)

• Sexual Differences are impossible to symbolize as a symbolic norm. It is because of this gap between the real of sexual difference and the symbolic norms that we have the multitude of perverse forms of sexuality. (82)
o Man: “There are things one should not talk about.” (84)
 Masculine Narrative: “Struggle between the exceptional one and the crowd that follows the universal norm” (108).
o Woman: “One can talk about everything” (84)
 Feminine Narrative: “Shift from the desire to drive. From the entanglement of the other’s desire to the indifference of the desubjectivized being of drive” (108).


Agent Other
Truth Production

Master Signifier S1
Knowledge S2
Subject $
Surplus Enjoyment a

Master Discourse
S1 S2
$ a

University Discourse
S2 a
S1 $

Hysteria Discourse
$ S1
a S2

Analyst Discourse
a $
S2 S1


Matheme of Fantasy: Subject <> surplus enjoyment: $ <> a

Matheme of Perversion: surplus enjoyment – subject: a-$