Concepts 2

Question 1

reason should be taught to both men and women (Wollstonecraft)

Answer 1

because it is the special faculty granted to all of humanity and constitutes all humans’ path to improvement and perfection

• especially under Rousseau’s model, women are instead educated to learn sensibility, obedience, and appeal for marriage; they are taught to be dependent emotional companions (dealing with intermediate means) for independent rational men (who deal rationally with final ends)
• because of this, women’s pleasures can only be ephemeral (based on fading beauty rather than eternal virtue), and the only power they acquire is manipulative, tyrannical power (based on cunning rather than wisdom)

Question 2

Eros and Ananke

Answer 2

are the two bases of civilization- Eros is the libidinal drive to secure a love object; ultimately, civilization was founded in order to protect, via the power of the community, the individual’s pursuit of Eros from the aggression of the death instinct- Ananke, or civilization or the super-ego, imposes ideal demands (laws) which force individuals to repress Eros (even though civilization’s ultimate, impossible goal is to promote Eros)- the super-ego is the aggression of the death instinct turned inwards (while one originally fears society’s law, they come to identify with it and internalize its aggression) producing eternal guilt and unhappiness- there is a cultural super-ego that functions similarly to the individual super-ego- when an instinct is repressed, its libidinal (Eros-linked) elements become symptoms and its aggressive (death drive-linked) elements become guilt

Question 3

analytic and synthetic judgements

Answer 3

analytic judgements follow from the definition of the concept itself, belongs to and is contained in the subject. Can also be thought of as clarification. In the example “All bodies are extended” the concept of body itself contains the meaning of extension. Synthetic judgements affirm something in the predicate that is not contained in the subject. Connected but outside, without identity, can also be thought of as amplification, or as adding something to the concept. “All bodies are heavy” for example, says something about bodies that the concept of body does not contain. COPR tries to show how a priori synthetic judgements are possible.

Question 4

institutional ethnography

Answer 4

rather than classifying behaviours according to the broad norms of accountability imposed by the bureaucratic ruling apparatus, understands institutions (intersections of modes of the ruling apparatus) in an ideological dialectic with everyday work processes that sustain these institutions
- everyday competence, practical reasoning, and work processes are Smith’s “points d’appui” or marshalling points–the goal is to emphasize the (often feminized) work that makes institutionalized understandings viable, and to understanding that we are always enmeshed in institutions and must “begin where we are” rather than taking an indifferent totalizing perspective

Question 5

totalitarianism (Arendt)

Answer 5

totalitarianism is the employment of utilitarian organization without a real-world collective interest (e.g. class, race, or national interest); while classes want particular victories with real implications, fanatical totalitarian masses (the mob) only want abstract victory as such

• totalitarianism appeals to the masses by gathering up everything excluded from public discourse into a fantasy world that replaces reality with the image of a total, consistent conspiracy
• Arendt stresses that, unlike other parties’ propaganda, totalitarian propaganda does not persuade but rather organizes: it produces a living structure that cannot be challenged without the whole actualized structure of life collapsing
• front organizations have a double function: they insulate party initiates from the sharp contrast of totalitarian fantasy and reality, and shield the masses from the movement’s full intensity
• totalitarian elites acknowledge no distinction of fact and fiction: every statement of fact should be taken as a statement of purpose, and anything is possible (human omnipotence) if organization centred on an infallible leader is maintained
• the downfall of totalitarian movements is their underestimation of stable factuality, which is preserved and mobilized by the non-totalitarian world

Question 6

spectrality/hauntology

Answer 6

hauntology invokes the ‘other side’ of the text and life (the other announced by differance)
- spectral asymmetry/the visor effect: the spectre sees us but we cannot see it, so it infects us with an injunction or an inheritance which is beyond logical knowledge (think Hamlet’s dad’s ghost)
- “one always inherits from a secret,” since to know something fully would be to embody it
and not to inherit it; inheritance in this sense is the condition of our finitude
- the spectre is “plus d’une,” the dispersed multiple which is both more and less than one, without gathering itself together–it does not take an identifiable shape in our logical order
- see Irigaray, this sex which is not one
- the spectre is a revenant: it “comes back in advance” from an absolutely deferred future
- the spectre makes time ‘out of joint’ or causes the “non-contemporaneity with itself of the present,” through which we are affected by the absolute future/other
- the spectre invokes a peaceful justice based on the future-to-come or messianic (eschatology), as opposed to the law, which renders justice based on restitutive calculation (teleology)
- again, see Benjamin
- capitalism is “spectropoetic”: it produces commodities as spectres–Marx is a ghostbuster

Question 7

“lips speaking together”

Answer 7

women must form a community and discourse apart from phallocratic logic

• characteristics of this community: against likeness (relations and sameness without simulacra and originals), against countability and oneness, wholeness without totality, life- and self-giving exchange and sharing without calculable transactions between individuals, openness and movement without end, flattening out of relationships rather than vertical structuring, body rather than memory, against moralization and judgment, simultaneity of plurality
• Irigaray proposes to emphasize traditional feminine “weakness” (i.e. suppleness, inconstancy, lack of resistance) and embody it outside of its patriarchal marking

Question 8

being-with (mitsein, with-being)

Answer 8

refers to the fact that the world Dasein is being-in is essentially inhabited and defined by other Daseins–thus Dasein is Dasein-with (mitDasein), primordially determined in itself by its being-with others

Question 9

the unconscious is pre-ontological

Answer 9

neither being nor non-being but the unrealized–for this reason, Lacan can view all systematic philosophy as an attempt to repress the unconscious
- Freud’s method is not based in truth, but in certainty (that conscious observations are traces of the unconscious, in which the Real always repeats itself via the drive, Trieb)

Question 10

the gaze (Lacan)

Answer 10

is the objet petit a in the scopic field–as something that is mine, and which constantly misses the real (centred on a lack), my gaze constitutes me as a subject (ego distinct from unconscious)

• the gaze depends on the eternal “vascillation” by which the unconscious supports the subject, whose constant slippage is elided in the fantasy of “seeing myself seeing myself” (mirror stage), or imagining the gaze in the field of the (little o) other
• the gaze is desire: it catches objects in its desire (it acts as a lure) and distorts them based on anamorphis (the visual effect of a flat image’s distortion based on the geometral focal point)
• but the gaze, since it is based on a lack, does not completely belong to or emanate from the subject–the subject is also caught in the gaze and distorted by anamorphis
• hence, desire is the desire of the Other, the unconscious is the Other’s discourse
• paintings contain the gaze, and thus produce a calming, Apollonian by forcing the viewer to lay down or abandon their own gaze

Question 11

The Cheerful Robot

Answer 11

replacing the free Renaissance man) is alienated man in bureaucratic society
- the point is that, while liberalism and socialism (Enlightenment ideas) both assumed reason and freedom would accompany one another, bureaucratic society is rational but does not allow for the individual use of reason (which is freedom)

Question 12

individuality (Stuart Mill)

Answer 12

drives both individual and societal development: people should be encouraged to be eccentric (for example, because it is necessary for genius) and society should be diverse

Question 13

property (J. S. Mill)

Answer 13

(including one’s life) is the most important right enshrined by natural law

• property is created when what is held in common (created by God) is mixed with one’s labour
• it is against natural law to take more from what is held in common than one can use; however, money is a conventionally agreed upon way for someone to own more than they can use (because it is actually useless and cannot spoil)

Question 14

intellectual craftsmanship (Mills)

Answer 14

Mills devotes a whole chapter to “intellectual craftsmanship,” intended to guide students of sociology: among other things , he suggests keeping a journal and file of ideas, staging playful interactions and reorganizations between theoretical structuring and empirical facts (keeping the former at the forefront of research), and avoiding academic jargon

Question 15

substance (spinoza)

Answer 15

“By substance I understand what is in itself and is conceived through itself.. that whose concept does not require the concept of another thing, from which it must be formed” p 1 of ethics-only one substance, monism-God is the only substance-Everything that exists is God or a mode of God (mode = modification), and the parts of God are an infinite number of attributes expressing eternal essences-Natura naturans: God, or nature, is the cause of itself(see diagram in Evernote)

Question 16

the unconscious is structured like a language

Answer 16

signifiers precede and determine the subject

• the unconscious (or primary process) is situated in the gap or lack (cut) between the signified subject and the real (unspeakability, indeterminateness, Freud’s unanalyzable “navel” of the dream); this gap is the locus of the law of the signifier (its arbitrariness in relation to the signified) experienced as a surprising loss or forgetting–thus the unconscious also structures the bar (in S/s, signifier/signified) or (Freudian) censor which distinguishes the ego by effacing the unconscious, and it structures desire (want-to-be, unconscious-driven cathexis based on the subject’s lack)
• we may say, then, that there are significant similarities and/or mirrorings between the unconscious (linked back to the Real) and the symbolic order or superego: both function as signifying chains (big O Other) that signify the subject and their double as (little o) other; however, while the symbolic law is an ideal known and recognized by the subject, the law of the unconscious is the law of the signifier (the Real), which is unknowable

Question 17

specularity

Answer 17

is a founding principle of phallogocentrism which women have privileged access to

• the sexualization of discourse combats phallogocentrism by revealing how the “scenography” of discourse is made possible by the linguistic and grammatical silences of feminine specularity
• this is accomplished through mimcry–by working back through the specular (mirroring, reflective, reduction to the same) logic of phallogocentrism, women can prove their true selves are elsewhere, not reducible to the ‘matter’ of phallocratic discourse

Question 18

world history (Hegel)

Answer 18

is Spirit’s actually working out (through Reason) the potentiality/Notion of its self- consciousness of its own Freedom as Spirit

Question 19

commodity fetishism has been replaced by production fetishism and fetishism of the consumer (Bauman)

Answer 19

• production fetishism fetishizes the localized process of production and masks the reality of increasingly transnational relations of production
• fetishism of the consumer depicts the consumer as a sign of agency while real agential power is located in the relations of production

Question 20

immortality and eternity (Arendt)

Answer 20

in the ancient Greek bios politikos or via activa, mortal humans achieve immortality/divinity through lasting deeds (actions or words) that become significant to the deathless cycles of life and existence
- eternity, however, the “unspeakable” underpinning of theoria/contemplation/metaphysics, is absence from the world akin to death

Question 21

expression and meanings (Husserl)

Answer 21

are positive, unified identities (ideas) with a universal existence distinct from their means of conveyance and their objects–the science of logic deals with pure meanings and underpins any science (sciences develop the theoretical unity of meanings)

• meanings are communicated by expressions, which are signs accompanied by intentionality (while indications are signs without intentionality)
• speech is expressive (meaningful) and indicative (it intimates an inner experience to a listener); internal monologue is expressive but not indicative (because the correlated object is already believed); scientific data are merely indicative
• expressions do not contain pure meanings, but meaning-intentions (meanings mixed with the actions required to convey meaning) which may or may not be fulfilled (received by a listener; actualized in an objective correlate)
• however, meaning itself is the same regardless of the context of its expression - our consciousness is naturally consciousness of meanings and not of signs

Question 22

virtu and fortuna

Answer 22

virtu is talent/skill/expertise, a flexible tactical disposition ranging from good to evil
- virtu is the ability to respond to fortuna–when fortune clears the way, human actions are integral; one should act with the spirit of the times
fortuna or luck is wanton, reckless, unpredictable (feminine)–the natural inevitability of disaster

Question 23

Godhead

Answer 23

the superior part of God is absolute freedom or spirit, not attributable to contradiction

• the Godhead has no being except in relation to its Other, the nature/necessity of God, which is subordinate to it and takes on the figure of the past
• all consciousness is an expression of this relationship to a subordinate pastness
• that nature subordinate to the Godhead yearns for freedom creates an actual elevation wherein the elements of the contradiction are separated out, in space, into higher (unity) and lower (negation)

Question 24

tuche (Lacan)

Answer 24

the encounter with the real–it is the missed encounter that repeats behind repetition in act, i.e. ego repetition that resists the sameness of the real by producing and identifying unique subjective experiences

Question 25

ideology and utopia (Ricoeur)

Answer 25

while Marxism rejected both (they’re both unscientific) and Mannheim proposed a dialectical progression of counter-utopias towards scientific Marxism (chiliastic, liberal-humanitarian, conservative/reactionary, Marxist-scientific synthesis), Ricoeur generally believes that scientific matter- of-factness has failed and we should revitalize the appeal to utopia

• ideology is social (mass behaviour) and utopias are historical (events reflecting an era); Ricoeur wants to bring them together in sociological history, or what Engels denounces as “social poetry”
• both deal with power: ideology legitimates current power, utopia unmasks and replaces power
• but for Ricoeur, we always oscillate between ideology and utopia–the imaginative (i.e. based on images) fiction of lateral possibility (utopia) is part of (ideological) identity
• the goal is to change the “circle” of ideology and utopia into a “spiral” by dedicating ourselves to concrete, particular values and projects, not broad relational perspectives

Question 26

pleasure principle vs. reality principle (Freud)

Answer 26

are linked to id’s primary process and ego’s secondary process - the pleasure principle: all psychic operations tend to seek to produce pleasure by quantitatively reducing excitement or instability-the reality principle modifies the pleasure principle according to the ego’s instincts of self-preservation; immediate pleasure-seeking is often repressed, creating unpleasure

Question 27

logos (Plato)

Answer 27

a rational account of something, achieved through a dialectic (a philosophical Q and A) - a dialectic or living discussion is needed to produce logos–writing does not fulfill this

Question 28

Enlightenment (Kant)

Answer 28

• Enlightenment is “the human being’s emancipation from its self-incurred immaturity” based on the public use of reason (while in private situations such as civil office, obedience should be practiced)

Question 29

first cause or prime mover (Aristotle)

Answer 29

an imperceptible substance which does not move but moves everything, the good/best, or God in Christian theologyfrom Metaphysics, also “nature” as physis (growth): the genesis of growing things, the immanent part of a growing thing, “the source from which the primary movement in each natural object is present in it in virtue of its own essence” p. 755

Question 30

Antigone (Lacan)

Answer 30

her tragedy symbolizes a variety of limits and effects that are important for Lacan

• Antigone’s beauty is situated between life and death, representing the limit at which desire is refracted, disrupting the identification of the object and causing the subject’s excitation(not as an emotion, but as a loss of power or means)
• Antigone’s position affirms the unique value of being ex nihilo or without determinate moral content, which for Lacan is the break in life produced by language, a legality without written law
• Antigone’s desire and tragedy is the excess of Creon’s (Kantian) logical goodness and error –it is a divine desire or tragic fate situated in Ati, the field of the other
• Antigone’s limit is structural, synchronic, while Creon’s error is logical, diachronic

Question 31

transcendental dialectic

Answer 31

is a repeating structure of argument that prevents subjective a posteriori principles from appearing as fact, which is only formally determinable a priori

• the impulse to interpret subjective principles as fact leads to transcendent (pertaining to things beyond a priori reasoning) principles that cannot be proven, such as the idea of God
• other parts of the transcendental dialectic deal with the transcendent solutions to antinomies–situations where there are equally valid arguments for contradictory opinions

Question 32

The Great Beast/idolatry

Answer 32

idolatry upholds the social collective (the great beast), or party or association, as the absolute because it transcends the collective; however, it is subordinate to the divine
- while associations can absorb individuals’ rights (relational and conditional), they cannot be the target of obligations, which represent the true and only respect individuals owe to individuals

Question 33

the sociological imagination

Answer 33

allows one to consider the relationship between the individual biography and the larger social structure or history
- this is especially necessary in the post-modern age of fact, in which people are overwhelmed with information and don’t understand their place in a larger historical structure

Question 34

the supplement (Derrida)

Answer 34

is yet another term more or less equivalent to the trace: it describes writing as something that supplements or supplants a previous ‘presence’ that was never actually a fully presence (as evidenced by the fact that it demanded a supplement)–there is only a chain of supplements

• for Rousseau, supplementarity (exemplified in education) is a scandal that corrupts the original presence of nature (and is also comparable to onanism, masturbation); for Derrida, the supplement is “dangerous” to ideas of presence and nature but also fundamental to them
• the supplement is exorbitant: it opens up the production of readings that are not “proper” to the presence supposedly at issue, but it also allows one to escape orbits (ideology, etc.)
• this exorbitance is established through writing as a mise en abyme, or (re)placement of elements around the limits of the abyss of non-signifying difference
• An example of the supplement is the appearance of writing as Pharmekon in Phaedrus/Plato’s pharmacy

Question 35

dreams and wish-fulfilment

Answer 35

dreams are wish fulfilment of unconscious desires, distorted by a censor before becoming conscious - underlying latent dream-thoughts, the truer and unconscious representatives of the psyche, are symbolically translated (as between languages) into manifest (conscious) dream content- condensation: many meanings present in latent content are condensed or crystallized into just a few strategic images in manifest content (manifest dream content is overdetermined)- displacement: the content and especially psychical (affective) intensity of latent content is displaced onto different centres in manifest content–this is due to the work of the censor- representability: the unconscious does not present logical relationships (which are the results of secondary-process conscious thinking), only subject-matter representable in images- moreover, the unconscious often relies on preset image patterns rooted in childhood - secondary revision refers to the distortions and even pre-waking interpretations the censor contributes to dream creation in aiming to make the dream benign and intelligible

Question 36

Leviathan or the state or commonwealth

Answer 36

is image of the artificial man or mortal God composed of the collected wills of many subjects
- the sovereign is the artificial soul of Leviathan: it is an indivisible power (held by a group or preferably an individual) created when all citizens give up their right of self-governance to the sovereign, becoming subjects
- the sovereign is obliged by natural law to protect its subjects (because it is the author of its subjects’ wills)
- subjects are bound by duty to obey the sovereign, as if the sovereign were God (because they
granted the sovereign its authority, and one cannot oppose oneself)

Question 37

language games (Wittgenstein)

Answer 37

the meaning of a word is its use: language is not a system, but a series of language- games with family resemblance; words are ‘moves’ that do different things in different contexts

• a game is an indistinct concept: it is learned by example and by doing, not by a definition of rules (which, if it does happen, constitutes its own separate language-game)–definition cannot be properly completed and so learning by example is not derivative of it
• the essence of language is not a final answer hidden from us, but something operating in the open which we survey by rearranging (i.e. playing new language-games)

Question 38

the blasé attitude

Answer 38

is developed by city-dwellers as a defence against the intensification of nervous stimulation in the metropolis: they are more distanced, less emotional, more rational, have a lower capacity for qualitative discrimination (this is also the logic of money)

Question 39

justice (Arendt)

Answer 39

is based on the ability to make moral judgments freely without pre-determined rules and with an acknowledgement of risk–it recognizes humans as humans

• justice is inherently unmodern: the modern world treats humans as cogs in machine, eliminates risk, and produces events such as administrative massacres that traditional justice can’t deal with
• genocide is a crime against humanity, or an attack on human status or human diversity as such, the conditions which give humanity meaning in the first place
• see Kant, judgment (Lectures on Kant’s Pol. Philosophy)

Question 40

legislative, executive, and federative power (Locke)

Answer 40

legislative power is the right to make laws assigning punishments to crimes, executive power is the right to enforce those laws, and federative power deals with other nations (which are treated as if in the state of nature)

• legislative power must work for the common good as a corrective to the deficiencies of the state of nature–it must be consented to and act according to the majority (or dissolve) and cannot abuse its power (or else enter a state of war with the people)
• executive power has prerogative: it can make decisions for the sake of the public good without legal support, but ultimately legislative power should produce more positive laws

Question 41

the letter (Lacan)

Answer 41

is the material component of language, the literal reality of the signifier and its traits
- what is most important about language is that it carries the possibility of saying something other than what it means–in other words, that there is a bar or censor between S and s that allows S to ‘enter’ into s differently

Question 42

equiprimordiality

Answer 42

refers to differentiated structures that appear simultaneously and at the same level of authenticity or originality–they are simultaneously self-and mutually reinforcing

Question 43

human life is mechanistic (Hobbes)

Answer 43

external objects produce endeavours (immeasurably small movements) within the body which we call sense, and all internal life develops from this original motion

• imagination/memory, and in general all thought and feeling, is decaying sense
• universals we cannot adequately imagine are not pure ideas, just common designations

Question 44

id, ego and superego

Answer 44

id-unconscious, drives and desiresEgo -the individual’s sense of self-much of the ego is also unconsciousSuperego-laws, social convention etc. that the psyche takes up

Question 45

banality of evil

Answer 45

refers specifically to the case of Adolf Eichmann–the point is that he acted neither with evil instincts nor stupidity, but simply a thoughtlessness or lack of imagination, a refusal to make free moral judgments as a human being

Question 46

rhetoric (Plato)

Answer 46

-Plato changes position on rhetoric in the Republic: must resemble philosophy-Rhetoric is a techne only if it is philosophical-speaker can only speak well if knows the truth of the matter-true rhetoric aims towards proper education-rhetoric as the art of winning the soul by discourse, one must know which kind of speech is suited to which kind of soul

Question 47

potency (Schelling)

Answer 47

A term that for S, much the same as for Aristotle, signifies an active capacity rather than a logical possibility. In his early philosophy of nature the term describes how the original tension between expansion and contraction recurs in the chemical and life processes, but each time in a higher manifestation or ‘power’. In his subsequent system of identity, he began to reduce the potencies to a mathematical formula, detailing the movement from A0 through B to A2 and A3, whereby ‘A’ is identical with real being (or expansion) and ‘B’ with its negation (or contraction). Despite the fact that Hegel caricatured such formulas in the Phenomenology of Spirit, S spent the next four and a half decades of his life in a tireless search for a completed theory. In the philosophy of identity, he thought consistently in terms of magnetic polarity (where the opposing force is present in either of the poles). His goal was to make clear that the sum of opposing and dynamic forces constitutes a point of identity that reconciles all opposition. With the Ages of the World, he articulated a more profound conception of potency that began with the realisation that a Parmenides-like Absolute Identity, while reflecting the view from eternity, is useless as a tool for comprehending finitude. The relationship to potency must characterise eternity itself: finitude becomes an attribute of God.

Question 48

mourning vs. melancholia (Freud)

Answer 48

• mourning is the response to the loss of the loved object which does not result in pathology-through time the work of mourning releases one from the object by “reality-testing”, the repeated demonstration that the object no longer exists and therefore libidinal energy is withdrawn from its attachment to that object-in mourning already it requires time and the expense of “cathetic-energy”-one by one memories are brought up and worked through, libido is detached from the object-when the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free/uninhibited-melancholia is a pathological state of “painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of capacity to love, inhibition of all activity” lowering of feelings in relation to self-in melancholia there is an ambivalence towards the love object, and the libidinal energy that was directed towards the object turns back towards the ego, causing reproach and self-punishment-in melancholia this self-debasement means one can overcome basic instincts of survival or one loses the will to live, and there is a further regression into narcissism “…he knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him”
• “in mourning the world becomes empty, in melancholia the ego itself” 246
• the ambivalence of melancholia can turn to sadism or rage”“by taking flight into the ego love escapes extinction.”-Freud seems uncertain about the work of melancholia

Question 49

monad

Answer 49

monads are the simplest substances that make up the universe: they are indivisible, unextended (non-material), eternal (apart from their original creation by God), and cannot be entered or internally altered

• all monads have perception and appetition (active change from one perception to another), some have memory and consciousness (animal souls), and fewer have apperception or reason (human souls)
• monads reflect the infinite harmony of the entire totality in their perceptions, although these perceptions are confused (only God has a clear perception of everything)
• “nowhere is there perfect symmetry”–all monads are qualitatively different from all others– Leibniz asserts that without unique substances of this kind changes in the extension of matter would be impossible

Question 50

drives (Freud)

Answer 50

• The fundamental hypothesis of psychoanalysis is the shift from natural (animal) instinct for reproduction of the species (Instinkt) to the notion of drive (Trieb), that is a desire that now obeys symbolic and linguistic determinations instead of the Darwinian law of reproduction of the species.
• such as the death drive and the libido; generally cause internal excitations; neurosis results when they are in conflict over the same object cathexis
• the death drive aims to return the organism to a more primitive state of inanimacy
• the libidinal drives or sexual instinct promotes life and seeks potential immortality
• ultimately, the pleasure and reality principles and death drive and libido are tied together: the pleasure principle serves the death drive (which initially appeared to be “beyond” it as the compulsion to repeat) by reducing excitation, and the reality principle, via the libido, serves the pleasure principle by preparing cathexes for pleasurable discharge (orgasm)

Question 51

three faculties of cognition (Kant)

Answer 51

• sensibility collects raw data of phenomena through a passive reception of sensation and an active synthesis performed by intuition (which constructs space [outer sense] and time [inner sense] as a priori sensible intuitions)
• understanding creates concepts which mix with sensibility to form experience
• there are a posteriori concepts (e.g. red) originating in experience, and a priori or pure concepts (e.g. causality) that are necessary for experience but could not have originated in experience
• reason abstracts completely from sensory experience to unify concepts into (supersensible, pertaining to things in themselves) principles, aiming to have as few as possible
• some principles of reason or judgement act as regulative principles applied practically to
  legislate the faculty of desire (will) according to moral philosophy

Question 52

being-with (mitsein, with-being)

Answer 52

refers to the fact that the world Dasein is being-in is essentially inhabited and defined by other Daseins–thus Dasein is Dasein-with (mitDasein), primordially determined in itself by its being-with others

Question 53

speculative or dialectical thinking (Hegel)

Answer 53

can be defined against argumentation (uses the negative freely instead of determinately) and judgement (fixes subject/predicate, instead of dissolving subject in its object)
- the True results from the correction of the gap between I and what I experience via sublation, which is really the return of experience to itself (the actual development of the Notion, which is the outline of a presupposition of totality)

Question 54

phenomenology (Husserl)

Answer 54

is the rigorous science of intentionality, which is the formal characteristic of consciousness prior to any scientific theory of the natural world, or reflective psychology of inner life
- Husserl insists that European knowledge has come to a crisis because natural sciences have been assumed to be prior to the humanities (which would be based on natural psychology)–this perception should be reversed, because phenomenological intentionality is the basis of science

Question 55

natural law or reason (Locke)

Answer 55

guarantees freedom and equality, either in the state of nature or nation-state

• while in the state of nature men are responsible for punishing infractions of the natural law themselves (executive power), in the nation-state they sacrifice this right to a common judge and offer their service to the executive body
• a state of war often arises from the state of nature, when an accusation of lawlessness cannot be arbitrated by a common judge

Question 56

universal history (Kant)

Answer 56

progress moves towards the full development of reason in humanity as a species, in harmonious communities administering cosmopolitan universal justice
- because administrators will always be prone to individual fallibility, this is an impossible process which must be approximated

Question 57

Gestell and standing-reserve (Bestand)

Answer 57

in the epoch of modern technology, man relates to nature via Gestell (enframing or setting up), a gathering of the setting upon or challenging or appropriation of nature as standing-reserve, something ordered and placed at hand to have its energy extracted
- the creating and createdness of art (linked to poesis and poetry, language as that which first causes beings appear in Being) contrasts with Gestell as making (techne); the latter brings forth out of truth via apprehension of the present, while the former lets something put itself forth

Question 58

the natural attitude (Husserl)

Answer 58

is prior to any theory: the attitude in which I posit a reality presented to me as factually existing
§30 in Ideas I: pure description, a scientific task
There are a few universal characteristics of this attitude that give clarity to description and begin phenomenology
“As what confronts me, I continually find the one spatiotemporal actuality to which I belong like all other human beings who are to be found in it and who are related to it as I am” p 56-57
The natural attitude posits “actuality”, for Husserl the factually existent actuality is posited by the natural attitude
To be struck out of the world in experiences of illusion or hallucination is to be struck out of this factually existent actuality
The aim of the sciences belong to the natural attitude, p 57

Question 59

dialectic (Plato)

Answer 59

-does not mean what it comes to mean with Hegel/Adorno-a philosophical questioning that proceeds by question and answer in order to arrive at logos, a rational account of something-must be living and spoken, writing is suspect and not capable of producing logos (Phaedrus)-maieutics (the Socratic method) a form of cooperative argumentative dialogue between individuals based on asking and answering questions that stimulates critical thinking and draws our presuppositions

Question 60

phono/logocentrism

Answer 60

since the Greeks, the history of metaphysics has unduly privileged speech (signifier of a signified) as a means of direct access to the original logos or true presence, while writing (signifier of a signifier) was repressed; Derrida suggests that original logos and pure presence are a myth
- in the West, this has led to an ethnocentric preference for the phonetic alphabet

Question 61

Forms/Ideas (Plato)

Answer 61

-sometimes expressed as Idea/Essence/eidos-divine models of material things existing apart from the visible/sensible world-eternally present in the divine realm and have no opposites or negation-knowledge (episteme) relates to the forms and is therefore infallible; opinion (doxa) relates to appearance and is therefore suspect-the world as it appears to our senses is defective and filled with error-forms are eternal and “paradigmatic” for the structure and character of the world presented to our senses-fundamental distinction between the observable object that appears beautiful and “beauty” in its singular Idea or Form from which the beautiful object receives its quality of being beautiful-Are no relative or taste or desire (appetite)

Question 62

the mystical (Wittgenstein)

Answer 62

is what makes itself manifest but cannot be put into words

• in sense or logic nothing is accidental, and thus all propositions are equal; this means that ethics or aesthetics (which would maintain some propositions as higher) cannot be put into words
• what is mystical is not an answerable question; instead, there is no question, because what is manifest as the mystical is outside all logic, sense, language

Question 63

the state (lo stato: Machiavelli)

Answer 63

both the nation and the status of the prince (ruler), which the prince maintains
- Machiavelli innovates a concept of the state in an abstract sense

Question 64

the conflict of the faculties

Answer 64

• the higher faculties (theology, law, medicine) merely interpret and obey government statutes - the lower faculty (philosophy) judges on all things freely, with reason alone, ultimately promoting progress by publicly criticizing the higher faculties’ deviation from truth

Question 65

the Absolute (Hegel)

Answer 65

Absolute is Spirit both in-itself and for-itself
- in philosophical thinking, substance (immediate knowledge, thought, in-itself) is taken up by subject (mediation, thinking, reflection, for-itself) as its actual development
- this development is the subject’s recognition of itself in otherness, or science
- as old knowledges are sublated (aufhebung), they are also lingered over; being is recollected in-itself as preparation for becoming being for-itself
• In the intro. to the Phenom., H says that the Absolute “is whatever in truth is”. As such, the Absolute represents a realist element, to be opposed to faulty or partial appearances, semblances, things that, in truth, are not.
• The Phenom. claims to be a “science” of man’s experience of the Absolute’s historical self-manifestation, i.e. Spirit (Geist).
• The movement from sense-certainty to Absolute Knowing is the conceptual path taken by the Phenom.
• Sense-certainty proves to be inadequate (eg. Zeno’s paradox) to the world, so H moves away from it in what he sees as refining it
• This is the knowledge of the Absolute. The Absolute itself is subject/substance, the socio-historical totality of the world – yearning to know itself

Question 66

ideal as content of art (Hegel)

Answer 66

(the idea, spirit, the expression of freedom) represented in a particular form (sensuous material)

• three progressive stages of art:
• the symbolic form: the Idea is forced onto natural forms but remains separate from them and only implicit in them, as sublime (architecture)
• the classical form: corrects this division by determining the spirit in the particular form of the human; however, this does not present spirit in its true nature (sculpture)
• the romantic form: presents spirit in its true internal nature (as inward thought/self- consciousness), free concrete spirituality, by reintroducing the divide between the absolute idea and its particularization, but this time with the sensuous represented as inessential (painting, music, and poetry as the highest art since it is closest to thinking)

Question 67

clear and distinct knowledge (descartes)

Answer 67

is the only true knowledge–it is knowledge that cannot be doubted
- clear and distinct knowledge comes from God–false knowledge has a part in God but is mixed with nothingness, since we create it from nothing

Question 68

Being and beings (Heidegger)

Answer 68

Being and Time opens with the statement that philosophy has forgotten the meaning of being, having replaced it with metaphysics as its primary aim; ontology, however, is more original and foundational than metaphysics and any ontic science

• what is key is that Being is only elucidated by way of beings (“Being is always the being of a being”), but not through a chain of deductive reasoning as if it were a larger genus or merely another, first being–rather, Being is elucidated by a laying bare of the ground of all deductions
• Heidegger’s phenomenological method involves stressing that phenomenon refers primarily to something (being) ‘showing itself from itself’ (as beings)
• ultimately, temporality is the meaning of Being, specifically the meaning of the being of Dasein, but this is so only at the highest level of our ontological understanding

Question 69

Public and private use of reason (Kant)

Answer 69

both important, both have their value-private use of reason restricted to someone’s private office-public use of reason is use of reason for the public good, for the reading public, can’t be done in isolation (C Wright Mills)-example of paying taxes, when one pays they can criticize how they are used-enlightened society is one where everyone can debate and reason through letters

Question 70

spacing (Derrida)

Answer 70

(OG) writing articulates negative spaces which are not in-between presences but structure presence itself, as articulations or “hinges” (brisure)

• (FSW) qualitative difference (for example, conscious memory) emerges from the differential ordering (through signification) of quantitative elements (for example, intensity and repetition of a sensation)–qualitative difference (signification, meaning) is the absent presence (trace) of these quantities manifest in the spacing between them
• the text (like the Freudian psyche) should be seen as a topographical space, amenable to the inscription of differences suggesting an origin
• the articulation of space is also the articulation of time–time is primarily the time of the period between repetitions, or the time constituted by memory, and is equivalent to the spacing of intensities in written inscription

Question 71

imagination as a social practice (Appadurai)

Answer 71

imagination is a site of work that is central to social agency, structuring the relationship between sites of agency (individuals) and global fields of possibility

• individuals construct and live in imagined worlds composed of perspectival, disjunctive, fluid, overlapping dimensions or landscapes of global flows (ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, ideoscapes)
• disjuncture is key for Appadurai: global flows are unpredictable, kaleidoscopic, dynamic, non-isomorphic, and highly contextual (and thus rooted in individuals’ agential imagination); centre-periphery models, even with multiple centres, no longer work

Question 72

free, stoic, skeptical and unhappy consciousness (Hegel)

Answer 72

the free consciousness (after the section on the bondsman) progresses through the Stoic consciousness (the Notion of a free consciousness), the skeptical consciousness (the actualization of the free consciousness by subordinating the reality of/in itself), and the unhappy consciousness (the realization that one contains dual consciousnesses–lord and bondsman)

Question 73

Ideology as a Cultural System (Gramsci)

Answer 73

For G, ideology has taken on a polemical connotation which made it into a “diagnosis” of social, political, and intellectual pathologies. Ideology “draws its persuasive power from any discrepancy between what is believed and what can, now or someday, be established as scientifically correct.” Geertz says that “ideology” has itself become ideologized.

Question 74

Aufheben/aufhebung

Answer 74

incorporates three meanings: (1) to cancel out, (2) to preserve, (3) to elevate
Also: Sublate, sublation. Also translated as ‘supersede’ and ‘sublimate’. It incorporates the senses of (i) to cancel out, abolish, do away with, or reverse (a judgement), (ii) to keep or preserve, and (iii) to lift or raise up. Sublation connotes progress, by virtue of (i)-(iii): when something is sublated, it is not done away with but retained and preserved in the higher product which supersedes it. Sublation involves mediation and (determinate) negation. Hegel speaks of both concepts and things as sublated. The blossom cancels out the bud, but the but is retained.

Question 75

the ‘they’ (Das Man, “one”)

Answer 75

refers to all Daseins absorbed into an undifferentiated mass via their taking care of the with-world together–it is everyday, “levelled down,” ontic and inauthentic
- the authentic self, however, does not surpass the they-self (Dasein absorbed in the they on an everyday basis) but treats it to an existentiell (ontological) modification that recognizes its existential (ontic) necessity

Question 76

the trace (or track)

Answer 76

is both the operation of differance and meaning as it appears in/through differance: every sign functions as a trace in that its appearance defers the reader to the presence of a different sign of which it is a trace–it is the presence of the absence (of this other sign), or the absence of its presence–as trace it marks the non-systematizable, non-signifying difference, absence, or lack ‘originally’ at play in all signification

Question 77

the state of nature is a state of war (hobbes)

Answer 77

because men’s private passions make them act contrary to good

• sovereigns are in a state of war with each other
• the final end of man is to restrain themselves from the condition of war via the commonwealth

Question 78

techne (Plato)

Answer 78

a specific art or area of expertise, a craft with defined limits
- sophistry is not a techne because it is non-specific–it is an art of appearance-making that inserts itself everywhere

Question 79

the future-to-come (Derrida)

Answer 79

in addition to the above (does this contrast or parallel time as spacing?), writing as difference opens up the thinking of a kind of non-quantifiable, unknowable time of the absolute past or future to-come–this is the future bearing a deferred and differentiated presence (whose experience in full is always only ‘to come’) rather than as a simple additive progress

Question 80

freedom of expression (Stuart Mill)

Answer 80

(which is the same as freedom of consciousness) is the first liberty
- “all silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility” which no human power can assume
- we are only justified in acting on believed truths based on our recognition of opposing opinions; the greatest virtue of reason is that it is open to being corrected
- the complete truth usually includes something from (mostly untrue) adversarial positions
- truth will not survive adversity simply because it is true (men are prone to opinion), but its virtue is that it can be rediscovered later if discussion is kept alive
- what’s crucial is not the content of the opinion (it’s denotation of truth) but its being either
living/active truth or dead prejudice, its being held inside the mind or outside

Question 81

trust (Hegel)

Answer 81

is the substance of ethics: ethical life or the spirit of the people is unity of the universal total idea with the actuality of individualization; trust is the ethical disposition that recognizes this connection between the individual in his/her being and the whole
- trust actualizes itself in relationships progressing from marriage through to the nation-state

Question 82

force (Weil)

Answer 82

enslaves the human spirit by turning man into a thing; its limit is death and it is exercised as the lingering threat of death (either of the enslaved who are made passive, or the warrior caught up in pure momentum)

• no one controls force, which is essentially inhuman: those who wield the power of death are intoxicated by it and will have it wielded against them in turn
• only the Greeks (in the Iliad and Attic tragedy) understood force

Question 83

art is truth (aletheia, unconcealment)

Answer 83

setting itself to work–it is not mimetic, but reveals being

• world and earth are related in the work by strife, which generates aletheia
• the world is the non-objective space we are subject to as living beings, within which decisions become history–the world worlds–an artwork ‘sets up’ a new world
• the earth (physis) is the ground of the arising of things and the sheltering of this arising; it is self-concealing and undisclosable; it is ‘set forth’ into the world through the fact that the work ‘sets itself back’ into a material medium
• thus unconcealment happens in a clearing also marked by concealment or darkness, the possibility of error that makes decisions meaningful
• truth also happens in things like national politics and philosophy; science is always derivative

Question 84

cathexis

Answer 84

-investment or attachment of libidinal energy to an object or an idea-libidinal energy is not only sexual but affective-when object becomes cathected it becomes charged with libidinal energy from within the psyche, and the id or unconscious is believed to be the source of all cathexes

Question 85

erasure (Derrida)

Answer 85

the trace can be thought of as the word crossed out or under erasure (like how Heidegger crosses out “Being,” although Derrida rejects even this lingering reference to a master signifier)–the erased word, like the trace, is marked as the absence of what it ‘really’ means
- erasure also exemplifies Derrida’s insistence that meaning is not based on a pure, simple presence but by presences that are inherently marked, corrupted or contaminated (writing in general), since “crossing out” depends on non-phonetic, contradictory written marks
- the Saussurean “unmotivatedness” of the sign means that the sign is where the other is
announced as such its participation in an arbitrary synthesis–the trace is a self-occultation

Question 86

bureaucracy (Arendt)

Answer 86

as no-man rule replaces the Greek public, political realm of exceptional deeds and action with the private, social realm of normative behaviour

Question 87

oceanic feeling (Freud)

Answer 87

is a pleasurable feeling of reintegration with the world the ego originally set itself off from in order to survive; love is this renewed dissolution of the boundary between the ego and the libidinal object- the oceanic feeling is not the root of religious feeling: religion is the illusion of an enormously exalted father (superego) that protects men in their helplessness- true happiness is impossible

Question 88

phallogocentrism (Irigaray)

Answer 88

and its “sexual indifference” emphasizes a discursive economy of property, identity, and circulation of “the same”–thus it perceives woman as a lack because she is always plural, other to herself, touching herself (as the lips of her genitalia palpate each other), neither one nor two

• woman’s subjectivity defies possession, but in phallogocentrism she is a commodity or locus of calculable, competitive exchange
• thus women’s exploitation is fundamental to the infrastructure of commodity capitalism; formal equality will not rectify this

Question 89

deconstruction

Answer 89

is a tactical close reading of texts that aims to reverse Platonic and metaphysical hierarchies between oppositional terms, such as speech and writing. It aims to overturn what Derrida termed logocentrism. Deconstruction gets inside texts, inhabits them, examines their internal tensions and the ambiguous or undecidable aspects of their language. Further, it gives voice to what they exclude or do not say, and as such affirms a unique and productive reading that demonstrates how the categories a text constructs are based on its omissions and exclusions, and therefore it opens the text (and its political and social implications) to an undecidable future always deferred, always “to come.”

• focuses on denaturalizing of categories and placing them in historical and social relationships of difference
• Derrida does not want his terms or concepts of deconstruction to become transcendental: différance and trace are strategies and tactics to be passed through and written as if they were crossed out
• negative theology
• justice as an impossibility
• doesn’t want to reduce it to a method or methodology
• trying to not privilege present as is done in western thought

Question 90

human personality (Weil)

Answer 90

(that which makes one a person with rights) is worthless; only the impersonal, the good, or that part of the soul which cries out “why am I being hurt?” (the cry of affliction) is sacred
- the personal is social privilege–to claim equality of rights or equal distribution of social privilege is absurd because it is itself inequality
- love is the attention to affliction in the spirit of justice and to truth, and creates beauty; these latter elements are always anonymous (errors express personality, but correctness is universal)
- truth is speechless (language expresses only partial relations, while truth is complete), yet
can be rigorously and clearly known

Question 91

femininity as discourse (dorothy smith)

Answer 91

femininity is represented in discourse, which does not just describe everyday social action but also engages with and structures it

• through the ideality of text, discursive texts provide models of femininity that remain stable even when the documentary evidence women experience in everyday life shifts; discursive texts outside of women’s control establish the meaning of appearances within their control
• through discourse, women relate to their own bodies and selves as objects, establishing their own appearance through an everyday work process
• so, a woman is two subjects at once: there is the subject-in-discourse constructed according to the norm, whose appearance (while seeming natural and being surrendered to the agency of a man) is engineered by a secret agent

Question 92

love (Plato)

Answer 92

-in first two speeches of Phardrus, we hear that non-lover better educated in the affair than a lover-final speech shows that the philosophical lover is capable of bringing out the potential in the beloved-love is connected to rhetoric for Plato because they both educate the soul-the platonic lover/dialectician brings forth from the soul what it already knows (etymology of eduction)-Eros (erotic, sexual passion), philia (affection, friendship, between equals, virtuous and dispassionate), agape (charity, feelings for spouse/children)

Question 93

Intentionality (Husserl)

Answer 93

is the ‘of’ in the fact that consciousness (whether in an active, actional state or a modified, dormant state) is always consciousness ‘of’ something–in a sense, the structure of intentionality is what is isolated by the epoche
“Intentionality is what characterizes consciousness in the pregnant sense and which, at the same time, justifies designating the whole stream of mental processes as the stream of consciousness and as the unity of one consciousness.” P 199
-Intentionality concerns consciousness in its universality
“Under intentionality we understand the own peculiarity of mental processes “to be consciousness of something.” We first of all encoun­ter this marvelous ownness, back to which all rational-theoretical and metaphysical enigmas lead, in the explicit cogito: a perceiving is a perceiving of something,” p 200

Question 94

intuitive knowledge (Leibniz)

Answer 94

(full knowledge of basic principles) is the only true knowledge (ideas), since in symbolic knowledge (symbols stand in for assumed clear knowledge of more basic principles) there may be confusions we’re unaware of

Question 95

epché, bracketing, phen. reduction

Answer 95

is radical alteration of the natural attitude or “positing.” Husserl also writes “excluding” and “parenthesizing.”
John: “our ability to doubt anything or doubt universally (Descartes) is evidence that we are free to modify the value of what is posited in the natural attitude; thus, by “bracketing” the value of the (transcendent) natural world as posited, delaying the passing of any judgment on it, phenomenology isolates the formal cognitive structure of how objectivity can appear to consciousness at all (the transcendental conditions of the natural attitude, or intentionality)”
“With regard to any positing we can quite freely exercise this peculiar [Epoche], a certain refraining from judgment which is compatible with the unshaken conviction of truthy even with the unshakable conviction of evident truth.” P 59
-Takes the place of the Cartesian attempt to doubt universally, p 60
-A new scientific domain is gained through bracketing
-Bracketing puts out of action the general positing which belongs to the essence of the natural attitude, p 61
-Not a negation of the world as a Sophist, as Descartes, not doubting its factual being: the phenomenological epoché shuts me off from any judgment about spatiotemporal factual being, p 61
-exclusion of all sciences relating to the natural world, not a positivism
-Also a suspension of “trust” in the objectivity of the world

Question 96

negative dialectics

Answer 96

-the consistent thinking of nonidentity: it maintains that concepts do not match up with (real) objects without leaving a remainder—this is contradiction, which is nonidentity measured by identity/unity-thought is always accompanied by an indissoluble “something” (the object, the particular) which ensures that contraction never resolves into simple (identical) being, but always differentiates-negative dialectics runs counter to the identity thinking implicit in Hegel’s affirmative dialectics, which operates via the cogitative law of the unity/identity of the concept and its object, not the real law of their nonidentity-in other words, Hegel’s negation of negation=positive ignores Marx’s real, particular, qualitative use-value; negative dialectical motion is the elimination of conceptual fetishism (p 12)”Having broken its pledge to be as one with reality or at the point of realization, philosophy is obliged ruthlessly to criticize itself” p 1”The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy” p 5”Yet the appearance of identity is inherent in thought itself, in its pure form. To think is to identify… Dialectics is the consistent sense of nonidentity” p 5

Question 97

differance

Answer 97

meaning both to differ and to defer) describes that meaning is established only through the differences between signs (not positive content), and that meaning is simultaneously deferred along the chain of signifiers (there is no final or original meaning) so that signs bear the deferred value of other signs they differ from
- “difference is the non-full, non-simple, structured and differentiating origins of differences. Thus the name ‘origin’ no longer suits it”

Question 98

the state (Aristotle)

Answer 98

-superior to man, the end of man is to form states and this end is superior to the means-natural master/slave relation composes the state (master has reason and the slave only apprehends reason)-warriors (young) and councillors (old) make up the state as citizens, all other roles are peripheral-property should be held in private but used communally, plurality is important-the state should be governed by the middle or the mean, who are most capable of reasoning-the end / telos of the state is justice

Question 99

there is no private language (Wittgenstein)

Answer 99

a private sign (whose meaning was not even defined in public language, since this would make it a part of public language) would not function as language because the rules within which it operates would be immediately implicit in however the sign was used–there would be no possibility for error, or for the use of a sign to be meaningless (i.e. to not have a use as a move in the language-game), nor would that sign be bound to any limits of meaning/use at all
- I do not have knowledge of my private experiences that others do not share (since knowledge would imply there is the option of not knowing its target); rather, I “understand the language” of my senses

Question 100

“the world is all that is the case” (Wittgenstein)

Answer 100

the world is a division of facts (each of which is the existence of a state of affairs–in other words a linguistically definable combinations of objects that can potentially correspond with what is the case) in “logical space”
- objects are the simple expressions of substance (what exists independently of what is the case), which is purely formal: objects express nothing but their possible configurations in states of affairs - we display facts to ourselves as pictures, whose pictorial form depicts objects (which are constant across what is and isn’t the case) in states of affairs that ‘touch’ reality via these objects and are laid out against reality as measures, either reflecting reality or not

Question 101

arche-writing

Answer 101

(also arche-synthesis) reflects the idea that the secondariness of writing (signifier of a signifier, the movement between signifiers in general) is more fundamental than the supposed distinction between signifier and signified that establishes the latter as logocentric meaning or presence–the debasement of presence in writing underpins speech and makes meaning possible
- grammes or graphemes are the smallest units of writing and the smallest objects of grammatological study–they seem sort of like atoms of signifying difference or difference

Question 102

self-consciousness (Hegel)

Answer 102

because a self-consciousness turns in on itself to become its own object, the original object of consciousness it supercedes (object of desire) must also turn in on itself as an independent negativity, as life–so it must be another self-consciousness

• the lord (Master) is the independent self-consciousness, and the bondsman (Slave) is the dependent self- consciousness for another–they are in a life and death struggle (Master/Slave dialectic)
• the lord sheerly negates or enjoys a third element, the thing, by having the bondsman work on it; but because the other and object of their self-consciousness is dependent, the master’s self-consciousness is insecure
• the bondsman, through fear or dread of the master (which makes them into pure negativity, being-for-self) and through their work on the thing (which makes them independent in relation to the thing), becomes a free self-consciousness

Question 103

objet petit a

Answer 103

object cause of desire or unattainable object of desire, lack, centre of the knot, can be constantly deferred, placeholder filled with desires projected

• always remain untranslated, status of algebraic sign
• objet petit a is also defined as the leftover, the remnant left behind by the introduction of the Symbolic in the Real.