





















































The Vagaries of the Superego


Elementa
Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology 
and Empirical Perspectives

1 
(2021) 

1-2

Pierpaolo Limone
Editorial 7

First Section

Slavoj Žižek
The Vagaries of the Superego 13

Ricardo Espinoza Lolas
Nature and Pandemic 33

Paolo Ponzio
Mask and Otherness between Recognition and Concealment: 47 
Notes on the Self and the You

Daniela Savino
“Liquid” Identity and Otherness in the Phenomenon 61 
of Religious Alienation: The Loss of Critical Thinking 
and the “Barter” of the Self in the System of Communion

Francesca R. Recchia Luciani
The Sexistential Vulnerability of Bodies in Contact 85 
in the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy

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Elementa. Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology and Empirical Perspectives

Second Section

Martina Rossi
Universal Design for Learning and Inclusive Teaching: 103 
Future Perspectives

Marco Ceccarelli
A Historical Account on Italian Mechanism Models 115

Giusi Antonia Toto - Alessia Scarinci
Cyberfeminism: A Relationship between Cyberspace, 135 
Technology, and the Internet

Luigi Traetta - Federica Doronzo
Super-Ego after Freud: A Lesson not to Be Forgotten 153

Federica Doronzo - Gianvito Calabrese
Functioning of Declarative Memory: Intersection 163 
between Neuropsychology and Mathematics

Giuliana Nardacchione - Guendalina Peconio
Peer Tutoring and Scaffolding Principle for Inclusive Teaching 181

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The Vagaries of the Superego
Slavoj Žižek
Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities of the University of London (England)

doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.7358/elem-2021-0102-zize
slavoj.zizek@guest.arnes.si

Abstract

Starting from the distinction between “ideal ego”, “ego-ideal” and “superego” structured 
from the Imaginary-Symbolic-Real triad made by Lacan, this study investigates how is 
possible to distinguish the a-sexual social space from the domain of libidinally-cathexed 
interactions. Through the analysis of Balibar’s, Miller’s, Schuster’s and Hägglund’s ideas, 
paths and strategies are defined to analyze the existing dynamics between symbolic power, 
law and superego. What emerges is the reconstruction of a new subjectivity which is 
capable, at the same time, to overcome the jouissance-superego dynamic at the basis of 
Lacanian reflection and face the challenges of contemporary post-humanism. Therefore, 
what subject stands for is the inhuman core of being-human, what Hegel called self-
relating negativity, what Freud called death drive. The text proposes, in short, how the 
Subject is what is in a human being more than human, the immortality of the death-
drive which makes it a living dead, something that insists beyond the cycle of life and 
death. 

Keywords: ego; jouissance; Lacan; law; superego.

The big question Freud addressed in the aftermath of the Great War was: 
how does the a-sexual social space distinguish itself from the domain of 
libidinally-cathexed interactions? For Freud, the operator of this a-sex-
ualization is superego. In his superb essay The invention of the superego, 
Etienne Balibar (Balibar, 1922) deals with the dialogue between Freud 
and Hans Kelsen, the leading Austrian legal philosopher, after the publi-
cation of Freud’s Crowd psychology and the analysis of the ego (1921). One 
should mention here also The Ego and the Id (1923) which is Freud’s 
reaction to Kelsen’s critique of Crowd psychology. The irony is that the 

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Slavoj Žižek

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title The Ego and the Id is in some sense deceiving: the crucial new term 
introduced in the booklet is superego which forms a triad with ego and 
Id, and the main point of Freud’s detailed analysis is how superego, the 
instance of our psychic life that acts as a self-critical conscience, internal-
izing social standards mostly learned from parents and teachers, draws 
its libidinal energy from the darkest sadist and masochist depths of the 
Id. However, Lacan has convincingly shown that there is a confusion in 
Freud: the title of the third chapter of The Ego and the Id is “The Ego 
and the Super-Ego (Ego-Ideal)”, so Freud tends to use these two terms as 
synonyms (conceiving the ego-ideal as a forerunner of the superego), plus 
he also uses ego-ideal and ideal ego as interchangeable terms. The premise 
of Lacan’s clarification is the equation between jouissance and superego: 
to enjoy is not a matter of following one’s spontaneous tendencies; it is 
rather something we do as a kind of weird and twisted ethical duty. Based 
on this equation, Lacan introduces a precise distinction between the three 
terms: the “ideal ego” stands for the idealized self-image of the subject 
(the way I would like to be, I would like others to see me); the ego-ideal is 
the agency whose gaze I try to impress with my ego image, the big Other 
who watches over me and propels me to give my best, the ideal I try to 
follow and actualize; and the superego is this same agency in its revenge-
ful, sadistic, punishing, aspect. The underlying structuring principle of 
these three terms is clearly Lacan’s triad Imaginary-Symbolic-Real: ideal 
ego is imaginary, what Lacan calls the “small other”, the idealized double-
image of my ego; ego-Ideal is symbolic, the point of my symbolic iden-
tification, the point in the big Other from which I observe (and judge) 
myself; superego is real, the cruel and insatiable agency which bombards 
me with impossible demands and which mocks my failed attempts to 
meet them, the agency in the eyes of which I am all the more guilty, the 
more I try to suppress my “sinful” strivings and meet its demands. The old 
cynical Stalinist motto about the accused at the show trials who professed 
their innocence (“the more they are innocent, the more they deserve to 
be shot”) is superego at its purest. So for Lacan superego “has nothing 
to do with moral conscience as far as its most obligatory demands are 
concerned” (Lacan, Miller, & Porter, 1992, p. 310): superego is, on the 
contrary, the anti-ethical agency, the stigmatization of our ethical betrayal 
(Žižek, 2006). 

In his critique of Freud’s notion of the crowd, Kelsen as a neo-
Kantian implicitly relies on the distinction between ego-ideal (the anony-
mous big Other, the symbolic order the status of which is non-psychic, i.e., 
which cannot be reduced to empirical psychic processes) and superego (the 
product of empirical psychic dynamic in an individual’s interaction with 

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others) 1. The reproach to Freud is, to simplify it, that he only provides 
the empirical psychic genesis of a crowd held together by a Leader – there 
is no space in his theory for the big Other, for the ideal symbolic order 
which sustains individual subjects, for the public space of institutional 
state authority which makes us subjects in the double meaning of the 
term (autonomous subject and an individual subjected to the Law). More 
precisely, what Freud describes is the pathological distortion of the Law, is 
regression into mythic crowd-psychological level: Freud describes crowd 
pathology (constituted through the short-circuit of I and a, in Lacanese), 
and since he lacked the notion of the Symbolic, he misses the normal-
normative big Other. (x) That’s also why, from Lacan’s standpoint, there 
is no space in Freud’s triad of ego-superego-id for the “pure”/barred 
subject ($), subject of the signifier, for the subject which is not psychic-
empirical but equal to the Cartesian cogito or Kant’s transcendental apper-
ception: the Lacanian subject is not ego (which, for Lacan, is defined by 
imaginary identifications). 

At this point, Balibar returns to Freud and defends him: superego as 
a psychic process is not just an accidental pathological distortion, it is the 
process which enables the subject to internalize the law, to integrate it into 
its psychic life as an agency which exerts an authority over him/her. As such, 
superego is a “pathological” supplement which necessarily accompanies the 
law, since the public law exists ONLY as internalized by subjects. What 
this means is that a subject is the subject of law only insofar as s/he remains 
caught in the unresolved Oedipal tensions which are the form of the inter-
personal politics of power and subordination. These persisting tensions 
open up the subject to the authority of the Law – they push the subject to 
accept authority of the Law as the external (non-psychic) agency, the stable 
point of reference which can ease the inner-psychic tensions. The tensions 
described by Freud are, of course, not simply internal to the subject but 
are part of the interpersonal (family) politics, power struggle – this is why 
Balibar points out that, in his description of the formation of a crowd 
and the genesis of the superego, Freud doesn’t provide a “psychoanalysis 
of politics” (an explanation of the political dynamic of crowds through 
libidinal processes which are in themselves apolitical) but rather its oppo-
site, the politics of psychoanalysis (the explanation of the rise of the triadic 

 1 There is a crucial difference here between Kant and Hegel: for Kant (and Kelsen 
as a neo-Kantian) empirical perversions are secondary, while for Hegel they arise from the 
immanent tensions of the notion itself – absolute freedom necessarily turns into terror, the 
honour of serving the Master who personifies a Cause into hypocritical flattery (as in the 
passage from Lenin to Stalin). 

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structure of ego-id-superego through the familial “political” power strug-
gles) – or, as Lacan put it, the Freudian Unconscious is political. 

But, as Lacan repeatedly points out, the big Other of the symbolic 
Law must already be here if a subject is to refer to it as the neutral external 
space – so we should make here one step further: how can the public 
authority itself, in its non-psychic status, emerge? Lacan’s answer is: the 
big Other cannot be reduced to a psychic agency, but it exists only if it is 
“externalized” by subjects – the “internalization” of the Law is effectively 
its externalization, its (presup)position as a non-psychic symbolic space. 
The Law is non-psychic, but it exists only if there are subjects who take 
it as existing. One has to be very precise here: Lacan is not providing the 
genesis of big Other from psychic dynamics, his thesis is rather that the 
subject is constitutively divided in itself, that its psychic intimacy exists only 
if there is a big Other, a space alienated from the subject to which it relates. 
(Only in psychosis this alienation is suspended.) The subjective correlate of 
the big Other is the empty “barred” subject ($) which is more “intimate” 
than all the intimacy of even the deepest psychic processes. So we should 
turn around the usual notion that the “pure” abstract subject (the Cartesian 
cogito) is a kind of ideological illusion whose reality is the actual concrete 
individual caught and torn in psychic antagonisms: all the wealth of the 
individual’s “inner life” is a content which ultimately just fills in the void of 
the pure subject – in this sense, Lacan said that the ego is the “stuff of the I”. 

Today, however, fathers behave more and more as ideal-egos, engaged 
in narcissistic competition with children – they no longer dare to assume 
the “authority” of a father – and, paradoxically, this process poses a serious 
obstacle to the emancipatory process. Let’s take the case of Chile: the 
difficulties in the ongoing struggle there are not the legacy of Pinochet’s 
oppressive dictatorship as such but the legacy of the gradual (fake) opening 
of his dictatorial regime: especially through the, 1990s, Chilean society 
underwent what we may call a fast post-modernization: an explosion of 
consumerist hedonism, superficial sexual permissiveness, competitive 
individualism, etc. Those in power realized that such atomized social 
space is much more effective than direct state oppression against radical 
Leftist projects which rely on social solidarity: classes continue to exist “in 
themselves” but not “for themselves”, I see others from my class more as 
competitors than as members of a same group with solidary interests. 

Direct state oppression tends to unite opposition and promote organ-
ized forms of resistance, while in “postmodern” societies even extreme 
dissatisfaction assumes the form of chaotic revolts (from Occupy Wall 
Street to Yellow Vests) which soon run out of breath, unable to reach the 
“Leninist” stage of an organized force with a clear program. 

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At a more general level, this means that, if the symbolic Law (Name-
of-the-Father) loses its authority – i.e., if there is no prohibition –, desire 
itself (sustained by the prospect to transgress it) vanishes – this is why 
permissiveness kills desire. Along these lines, Pierre Legendre and some 
other Lacanians claim that the problem today is the decline of the Name-
of-the-Father, of the paternal symbolic authority: in its absence, patholog-
ical Narcissism explodes, evoking the specter of the primordial Real Father. 
Consequently, we should try to restore some kind of Law as the agent of 
prohibition. 

Although this idea is to be rejected, it correctly points out how the 
decline of the Master in no way automatically guarantees emancipation 
but can well engender much more oppressive figures of domination. Is, 
however, the return to Prohibition sustained by Law the only way out? It 
seems that the very last Lacan, aware of this problem, proposed another 
solution which Miller, in his reading of Lacan, calls “cynical” – we cannot 
return to the authority of the Law, but what we can do is act as if we 
sustain the Law, we should maintain its authority as necessary although 
we know it is not true. Adrian Johnston (Johnston, n.d.) brought out the 
intricacies and ambiguities of this solution:

Passage through a concluding experience of “subjective destitution”, in 
which ego-level identifications as well as points of reference such as big 
Others and subjects supposed to know vacillate or vanish altogether, indeed 
is an essential, punctuating moment of the Lacanian analytic process. Never-
theless, Lacan does not consider it possible or desirable to dwell permanently 
in such an analysis-terminating destitute state. He sees it as both appropriate 
and inevitable that egos, big Others, subjects supposed to know, and the like 
will reconstitute themselves for the analysand in the aftermath of his/her 
analysis. Hopefully, the versions of these reconstituted in the wake of and in 
response to analysis will be better, more livable versions for the analysand.

What we get here is some kind of “postmodern” Lacan: we can confront the 
Real only in rare moments of lucidity, but this extreme experience cannot 
last, we have to return to our ordinary life of dwelling in semblances, in 
symbolic fictions… So instead of erasing god out of the picture, the only 
way is learn to how “‘make use of ’ Dieu comme le Nom-du-Père”. In what 
precise sense, then, les non-dupes errent, i.e., those who pretend not to be 
duped by the religious illusion err, are in the wrong? Johnston indicates the 
way:

Lacan’s paraphrase of Dostoyevsky, according to which “if God is dead, then 
nothing is permitted”, seems to convey the sense that permanent radical 
atheism is undesirable as per the strict Lacanian definition of desire. De 
Kesel claims that, for Lacan, religion enjoys the virtue of sustaining desire. If 

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so, does Lacan’s version of analysis really seek to do away with theism, religi-
osity, and the like? […] The libidinal economy of the unconscious, centered 
on desire with its fundamental fantasies involving objet petit a, is sustained 
by the Law of God as the dead father and/or Name of-the-Father. If this 
God dies, then the entire economy He supports collapses (i.e., “nothing 
is permitted”). In Télévision, Lacan, speaking of matters Oedipal, remarks, 
“Even if the memories of familial suppression weren’t true, they would have 
to be invented, and that is certainly done”. Paraphrasing this remark, one 
might say that, by Lacan’s lights, if God is dead, then, at least for libidinal 
reasons, he would have to be resurrected – and that has certainly been done. 
(Johnston, n.d.)

This is also how one can read Agamben’s idea that if there is no god then 
reason itself disappears. Does “if god doesn’t exist, then everything is 
prohibited” not mean that, in order to avoid the deadlock of everything 
being prohibited, there has to be a big Prohibition which calls for excep-
tions, i.e., which opens up the space for transgressions which generate 
jouissance? Or that, in order to sustain our desire, we need something 
like god (even if it is only in its more neutral irreligious form, as subject 
supposed to know)? How to combine this with Lacan’s claim that atheism 
is the pinnacle of psychoanalytic experience? Is Lacan’s line that name-of-
the-Father should not be abolished but make use of the only way out? 
Jacques-Alain Miller has fearlessly spelt out the political implications of 
this stance: psychoanalysis 

reveals social ideals in their nature of semblances, and we can add, of sem-
blances with regard to a real which is the real of enjoyment. This is the 
cynical position, which resides in saying that enjoyment is the only thing that 
is true. (Miller, 2008, p. 109) 

What this means is that a psychoanalyst:
acts so that semblances remain at their places while making sure that the 
subjects under his care do not take them as real… one should somehow 
bring oneself to remain taken in by them (fooled by them). Lacan could say 
that “those who are not taken in err”: if one doesn’t act as if semblances are 
real, if one doesn’t leave their efficacy undisturbed, things take a turn for the 
worse. Those who think that all signs of power are mere semblances and rely 
on the arbitrariness of the discourse of the master are the bad boys: they are 
even more alienated. (Fleury, 2010, p. 96) 

The axiom of this cynical wisdom is that 
one should protect the semblances of power for the good reason that one 
should be able to continue to enjoy. The point is not to attach oneself to 
the semblances of the existing power, but to consider them necessary. “This 

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defines a cynicism in the mode of Voltaire who let it be understood that God 
is our invention which is necessary to maintain people in a proper deco-
rum”. Society is kept together only by semblances, “which means: there is 
no society without repression, without identification, and above all without 
routine”. (Fleury, 2010, p. 95) 

But is this cynical stance the only way out? It raises a series of questions. 
First, what if God, the divine authority, only really functions when the 

believer is aware that “God is our invention which is necessary to maintain 
people in a proper decorum”? Baudelaire saw this well – he wrote: “God is 
the only being who, in order to rule, doesn’t even need to exist” Dieu est le 
seul être qui, pour régner, n’ait même pas besoin d’exister (Baudelaire, 1920, 
p. 3). If a believer directly “really believes”, we slide into fundamentalism – 
every authentic religion is aware that its authority is a fetishist fake: I know 
it is not really true, but I believe in it. The opposite of fundamentalism 
is the awareness that the authority we refer to has no real fundament but 
is self-referentially grounded on an abyss. Let’s take a perhaps surprising 
example: the finale of Wagner’s Rhinegold which ends with the contrast 
between Rhinemaidens’ bemoaning the lost innocence and the majestic 
entrance of the Gods into Valhalla, a powerful assertion of the rule of Law. 
It is customary to claim that the sincere and authentic complaint of the 
Rhinemaidens makes it clear how the triumphant entrance of the Gods 
into Valhalla is a fake, a hollow spectacle; however, what if it is precisely 
the saddening background of the Rhinemaidens’ song which gives to the 
entry into Valhalla its authentic greatness? Gods know they are doomed, 
but nonetheless they heroically perform their ceremonial act. This is why 
we are not dealing here with the usual fetishist disavowal but with a cour-
ageous act of taking a risk and ignoring my limitations, along the lines of 
Kant’s Du kannst, denn du sollst! – I know I am too weak to do it, but I’ll do 
nonetheless do it – a gesture which is the very opposite of cynicism. 

Let’s ground this conclusion from another starting point. Authority 
has the effect of symbolic castration on its bearer: if, say, I am a king, I have 
to accept that the ritual of investiture makes me a king, that my authority 
is embodied in the insignia I wear, so that my authority is in some sense 
external to me as a person in my miserable reality. As Lacan put it, only 
a psychotic is a king who thinks he is as king (or a father who is a father) 
by his nature, as he is, without the processes of symbolic investiture. This 
is why being-a-father is by definition a failure: no “empirical” father can 
live up to his symbolic function, to his title. How can I, if I am invested 
with such an authority, live with this gap without obfuscating it through 
psychotic direct identification of my symbolic status with my reality? 
Miller’s solution is cynical distance: I am aware that symbolic titles are just 

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semblances, illusion, but I act AS IF they are true in order not to disturb 
not only the social order but also my own ability to desire. Aaron Schuster 
adds three modes to deal with the impossibility of acting with authority (it 
is because of this impossibility that Freud counted exercise of power as one 
of the three impossible professions): “to pretend as if there were no Other; 
to make oneself the mouthpiece of the Other; to identify the Other with 
one’s charismatic persona” (Schuster, 2016, p. 191). The example of the 
first option is that of a postmodern friendly boss who acts as if he is one 
of us, part of the team, ready to share dirty jokes with us, joining us in a 
drink, etc. – but while doing this, he retains his full symbolic authority and 
can treat us in an even more ruthless way. The second option is personified 
in the figure of an expert, a medium through which the authority of the 
impersonal science (or law) speaks; such a figure avoids the position of 
authority by pretending that he is not giving orders, just say what science 
tells it has to be done (like an economist who claims market mechanisms 
should not be disturbed). The third option is exemplified by an obscene 
charismatic leader like Donald Trump who takes himself, with all his 
personal quirks, as a direct embodiment of the big Other – his authority is 
not based on his knowledge but on his will: “It is so because I say so”. At 
this point, Schuster makes a crucial observation:

The leader of competence and calculation, disappearing behind and speak-
ing in the name of the big Other, finds its uncanny counterpart in the over-
present leader whose authority is based on his own will and who openly 
disdains knowledge – it is this rebellious, antisystemic theater that serves as 
the point of identification for the people. (Schuster, 2016, p. 234)

The obscene charismatic leader is thus the “return of the repressed” of the 
expert knowledge which pretends to act without support in a figure of the 
master: the repressed Master (authority which personifies the Law) returns 
in its (almost, not quite) psychotic form, as a lawless obscene Master. The 
Master is here “overpresent”: he is not reduced to his symbolic dignity, he 
stands for authority with all his idiosyncrasies. 

So is there a way out of this deadlock? The obvious one would have 
been for the bearer of authority to admit openly to those subjected to him 
that he is not qualified to exert authority and to simply step down, leaving 
his subjects to confront reality as they can – Schuster quotes Hannah 
Arendt who outlines this gesture apropos parental authority:

Modern man could find no clearer expression for his dissatisfaction with the 
world, for his disgust with things as they are, than by his refusal to assume, 
in respect to his children, responsibility for all this. It is as though parents 
daily said: ‘In this world even we are not very securely at home; how to move 

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about in it, what to know, what skills to master, are mysteries to us too. You 
must try to make out as best you can; in any case you are not entitled to call 
us to account. We are innocent, we wash our hands of you. (Arendt, 1961, 
p. 191)

Although this imagined answer of the parents is factually more or less true, 
it is nonetheless existentially false: a parent cannot wash his/her hands in 
this way. (The same goes for saying: “I have no free will, my decisions are 
the product of my brain signals, so I wash my hands, I have no responsi-
bility for crimes that I committed!” Even if this is factually true, it is false 
as my subjective stance.) This means that 

the ethical lesson is that the parents should pretend (to know what to do and 
how the world works), for there is no way out of the problem of authority 
other than to assume it, in its very fictionality, with all the difficulties and 
discontents this entails. (Schuster, 2016, 219)

But, again, how does this differ from Miller’s cynical solution? Paradoxi-
cally, it is that that the subject, although fully aware of his/her incom-
petence to exert authority, assumes it not with a cynical distance but 
with fully sincerity, ready even to sacrifice his/her life for it if needed. To 
grasp this difference, one should also bring into view libidinal economy, 
different modes of jouissance. Politics does not happen primarily at the 
level of semblances and identifications (imaginary and symbolic), it always 
involves also the real of jouissance. Political semblances and identifications 
are profoundly impregnated by different modes of jouissance – can one 
even imagine a racism or anti-feminism which does not mobilize jouis-
sance (jouissance attributed to other race or women, jouissance I find in 
attacking and humiliating them…). That’s why, in his detailed analysis of 
the Petainist discourse in the Vichy France, Gerard Miller (Miller, 2004) 
speaks of Petain’s “pushes-to-enjoy (even pushes-to-come)” – and, in a 
homologous way, can one even hope to understand Trump without taking 
into account his “pushes-to-enjoy”?

The same goes also for societies with emancipatory goals. Let’s take 
Lacan’s own psychoanalytic society (which he dissolved, thereby admitting 
it was a failure): was it also a society “kept together only by semblances”? Is 
the only step out of the domain of semblances only the individual moment 
of “traversing the fantasy” in the analytic process? It certainly wasn’t meant 
to be this: was Lacan’s attempt to organize a society not a “Leninist” attempt 
to constitute a society which is NOT kept together “only by semblances” 
but by the Real of a Cause. (This is why, after dissolving his school, Lacan 
formed a new one called École de la Cause freudienne – a school of the 
Cause itself – which, it is true, failed again.)

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Does it help to introduce some order in this confusion if we turn 
Lacan’s anti-Dostoyevsky formula around: if god DOES exist then 
NOTHING is prohibited? It is clear that this holds only for so-called 
“fundamentalists” who can do anything they want since they act as direct 
instruments of god, of his will. We can see how PC rigorism and religious 
fundamentalism are two sides of the same coin: in both cases, there is no 
exception – either nothing is prohibited or everything is prohibited… To 
bring some clarity into this picture, we should perhaps bring into the play 
Lacan’s so-called formulas of sexuation. The two couples of universality 
grounded in exception and non-universality (“non-all”) which implies 
there is no exception. 

So what is the status of the postmodern permissiveness in which 
everything turns out to be prohibited by infinite PC regulations? Are they 
masculine (everything is permitted except…) or feminine (there is nothing 
which is not prohibited)? It looks that the second version is the right one: in 
a permissive society, violations of the regulations (which allegedly guarantee 
sexual permissiveness) are themselves really prohibited and not secretly 
tolerated. This means that we should transpose Lacan’s claim into feminine 
form: if god doesn’t exist then there is nothing which is not prohibited, 
which means that not-all is prohibited, and this not-all exists in the guise 
of a universal a permissiveness: in principle, everything is permitted (all 
different form of sexuality), but every particular case is prohibited. Recall 
the proverbial figure of a permissive husband who, in principle, allows his 
wife to have lovers, but is opposed to every particular choice (“why did you 
have to choose precisely THIS appalling guy? Anyone BUT him…”), or, at 
a political level, Chapter 15 of the Khmer Rouge constitution of Kampu-
chea: “Every citizen of Kampuchea has the right to worship according 
to any religion and the right not to worship according to any religion. / 
Reactionary religions which are detrimental to Democratic Kampuchea 
and Kampuchean people are absolutely forbidden” (Documentation 
Center of Cambodia, DC-Cam). So, again, any religion is permitted but 
every particular existing religion (Buddhism, Christianity…) is “absolutely 
forbidden” as reactionary. 

How, then, do things stand with today’s pandemic regulations? 
Do they also solicit transgressions (private rave and parties, even violent 
outbursts)? But they are not the Law, they are scientifically-grounded 
regulations, they belong to the university discourse. Scientists and health 
administrators gladly explain why they are demanded, they don’t function 
as the abyssal law, as regulations which should not be questioned. Is thus 
the hedonism of jouissance the other side of the reign of the university 
discourse? But what if those who resist pandemic prohibitions and regula-

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tions are confusing scientifically-grounded regulations with ungrounded 
arbitrary prohibitions (which solicit transgression)? Of course, one should 
add: but what if this confusion is already present in the thing itself? Is the 
“truth” of the university discourse not a Master, or, as we say today, is the 
(not even so) secret agenda of those who impose anti-pandemic prohibi-
tions not to assert social control and domination?

To complicate things further, we should introduce here two other 
axes. First: permitted versus enjoined (ordered). Lacan’s argument was that 
enjoyment, once permitted, sooner or later inevitably turns into injunc-
tion – you HAVE to enjoy, hedonism is superego at its most cruel. This 
is the truth of today’s permissiveness: we feel guilty not when we violate 
prohibitions but when we cannot enjoy. That’s why psychoanalysis aims 
not to enable the patient to fully enjoy but to limit the power of the 
superego, to turn enjoyment from enjoined to permitted (you can enjoy 
but you are not obliged to).

The other axis is the one of possibility and impossibility. Prohibition 
is, as Lacan repeatedly claimed, here precisely to create the illusion that 
enjoyment is not in itself impossible, that we can reach it through violating 
the prohibition. The goal of psychoanalysis is precisely to make the move 
from prohibition to immanent impossibility. So a prohibition primarily 
prohibits something that is in itself impossible… But is this not going too 
far? When a poor starving man is prohibited to grab a piece of food which 
is not his, does this prohibition not prohibit something that is in itself 
quite possible? In other words, is an elementary operation of ideology also 
not to present as in itself impossible something that is prohibited because 
of economic class interests and the interests of domination? (No universal 
healthcare because it is impossible, it would ruin economy…)

Further paradoxes arise here. There are prohibitions one is not only 
permitted to violate but obliged to violate, so that the true transgression is 
to stick strictly to the rule of prohibition. (This is what I called inherent 
transgression: if you do not participate in the secret transgressive rituals of 
a closed community, you are excluded faster than if you violate its explicit 
rules.) And then there are prohibitions that are themselves prohibited (one 
obeys them, but one cannot announce them publicly). The big Other of 
appearances enters here: you obey a prohibition, but you publicly act as 
if this means nothing, as if it is just a chance that you don’t do that, as if, 
if you wanted, you could easily do it; plus the obverse, you can violate a 
prohibition, just not publicly, in an open way. (Trump and today’s New 
Right populists break this rule: they violate prohibitions openly, in public.)

A further complication: what if we enjoy oppression itself, not just 
its violation? Is this not the elementary form of surplus-enjoyment? For 

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example, with regard to the pandemic, Darian Leader pointed out how 
obeying the rules imposed by the authorities because of the pandemic can 
bring its own compulsive satisfaction. Similarly, the Politically Correct 
enjoyment arises through the very process of discovering how we unknow-
ingly violated the PC rules (“now I discovered that the phrase I used has a 
racist dimension…”). 

The worst solution here is to oppose necessary repression (renounci-
ating the satisfaction of some of our desires as the condition of our survival) 
and surplus-repression done on behalf of exploitation and domination, 
as Herbert Marcuse did (Marcuse, 1974) – for conceptual reasons, this 
distinction cannot be drawn. First, domination and exploitation are as a 
rule operative in the very way the renounciations necessary for our survival 
are libidinally cathexed. Second (and in an apparent contradiction to the 
first point), it is the surplus-oppression (the prohibition for which there is 
no apparent reason) which generates surplus-enjoyment – as Lacan says, 
enjoyment is something that serves nothing… Third, one should draw 
another distinction here: between oppression and repression. Oppression 
(brutal exercise of power) is not repression: oppression is directly experi-
enced as such, but we are not aware of repression (in the Freudian sense). 
When I am oppressed, what is often repressed is the way I enjoy this 
oppression (with all that it involves: my complaints, etc.). 

So what we get here are not just the two axes of a semiotic square: 
(impossible-possible, prohibited-permitted) but a complex texture which 
includes the axis of permitted-enjoined and even a triangle of oppression-
repression-depression. Miller simplifies the image here: he claims that oppres-
sion is necessary, by which he means that there is no enjoyment without 
oppression (obstacles, prohibitions to our desires). The opposite of oppres-
sion is not freedom to do what one wants but depression, the loss of desire 
itself. But is oppression the only way to save our desire, the only way to avoid 
depression? The question we should raise at this point is: where is repression 
here? Lacan strictly opposes the traditional Freudo-Marxist thesis that repres-
sion is the internalization into the victim’s psyche of the external oppres-
sion (I misperceive social oppression as a psychic force that sabotages my 
desires) – repression comes first (in the guise of what Freud called “primor-
dial repression”), it designates an immanent impossibility that is constitutive 
of human subjectivity. This “primordial repression” is the other face of what 
we call “freedom”: it opens up the void, a crack in the chain of natural causes, 
which makes us free. The figure of an external symbolic Law as the agent of 
Prohibition already obfuscates this immanent impossibility of desire. 

That’s why psychoanalysis does not aim at liberating our desires so 
that we can freely desire what we want (what we want is not what we 

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desire: our innermost desire as a rule appears to us as what we don’t want, 
what terrifies us) – more precisely, it liberates our desires only in the precise 
sense that we fully assume the impossibility on which our desiring capacity 
is grounded. Psychoanalysis endeavours to mark out in a new way this 
impossibility – it’s premise is that we cannot get rid of a constitutive impos-
sibility, but we can re-inscribe it in a different way. An elementary example: 
the imaginary number (square root of -1). It is an impossible number, but 
while it was traditionally dismissed as simple nonsense (even Marx did it in 
one of his manuscripts), modern mathematics uses it in its calculations and 
it work – the statics of real buildings are constructed based on calculations 
which include the imaginary number. At a different level, modern democ-
racy did something similar: what was for a premodern political order the 
moment of threat to be passed over as quickly as possible (when, after the 
monarch’s death, the throne is empty), becomes in modern democracy a 
positive feature (as Claude Lefort demonstrated it): no one can legitimately 
make a direct claim to power, the place of power is in principle empty, it 
can only be temporarily occupied by democratically elected persons. 

And is this also not the lesson of psychoanalysis: there is no “true” 
object of desire, every object is a place-holder of Nothing? This is why 
one should resolutely reject the idea that the goal of the psychoanalytic 
treatment is to enable the patient to move from internal psychic conflicts 
(between his conscious ego and unconscious desires and prohibitions) to 
external obstacles to his happiness which s/he can now approach without 
self-sabotaging inner conflicts. This idea was not foreign to Freud: already 
in his early Studies on hysteria (1895, co-written with Breuer), Freud wrote, 
addressing an imagined reader/patient, that “much will be gained if we 
succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappi-
ness. With a mental life that has been restored to health, you will be better 
armed against that unhappiness” (Freud & Breuer, 1999, p. 305). Later, 
however, the new topics of death drive and the so-called “negative thera-
peutic reaction” – clearly point towards an immanent conflict constitutive 
of our psychic life. 

The move accomplished by psychoanalysis is thus a Hegelian one: 
from external opposition to immanent impossibility, and this holds also 
for the vision of a Communist society: there is no freedom without impos-
sibility, and this impossibility not just the limit imposed on us by external 
reality (the limited amount of objects that satisfy our needs) but also the 
immanent “self-contradiction” of our desire. There is, however, another 
trap that lurks here: to confuse this impossibility with our finitude, so 
that the impossibility that grounds our freedom is the fact of our mortal 
life full of risks and non-transparencies – there is no freedom in immor-

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tality. Exemplary is here Martin Hägglund who, through new readings 
of Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, and Martin Luther King, deploys a coherent 
global vision which brings together materialism, existential finitude, and 
anti-capitalism (Hägglund, 2019). His starting point is the rejection of the 
religious ideal of eternity: the only life we have is THIS life, our social and 
bodily existence which is irreducibly marked by mortality and incertitude. 
Every faith in another world or a higher being that guarantees our fate is 
an illusion, so faith has to be reconceived in secular terms: it expresses our 
practical commitment which, due to our finitude, exposes us to contin-
gency and always involves a risk of failure. However, precisely because we 
are finite beings who have to decide without any higher guarantee, we are 
free: freedom and mortality are the two sides of the same coin. 

In the second part of his book, Hägglund turns to the socio-economic 
and political implications of his focus on “this world” of our finite temporal 
existence. Since, as finite mortal beings, we don’t have an infinite time at 
our disposal (and since our eventual immortality would also make our life 
meaningless: choosing a life project that determines our engagement can 
only occur in a finite lifetime), our central preoccupation is to own our 
time, getting as much of it as possible disposable for the free development 
of our creative capacities in all their diversity. This, however, by definition 
cannot happen in capitalism where, in order to survive, we have to spend 
most of our time working for a wage, “losing time” for things we intrinsi-
cally don’t care about. If we want to overcome this alienation, we should 
enact a new revaluation of our values, replacing the money-form of value 
with the value of the free time at our disposal. The only way to do this is 
to replace capitalist form of life with a post-capitalist democratic socialism 
where private ownership of the means of production as well as the alienated 
state apparatuses regulating our lives will disappear; in this way, we will no 
longer be competing with each other for the possession of money-value 
but spontaneously working for the common Good – the very antagonism 
between the common Good any my personal interests will disappear. 

Hägglund doesn’t go into the specifics of how to realize this radical 
social change, and many critics of his work see in this vagueness the main 
failure of his book. One can also speculate that it is precisely this vagueness 
which made This life susceptible to being praised not only in academic 
circles but also by the big media. The topic of disalienation, of people 
directly exerting their power, is a feature that, in spite of their radical differ-
ences, unites Hägglund and Trump. 

But what I find much more problematic is that, to put it in a 
brutally simplified way, there is simply no place for Freud in Hägglund’s 
universe. How can he claim that, in a post-capitalist society, people 

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would spontaneously tend to work for the common Good – why? 
Where is the envy constitutive of human desire? Where are all the basic 
“perversions” of human desire described by Freud and concentrated in 
his notion of death-drive? It is his humanist trust that all the horrors 
humans are capable of – all the self-sabotaging, all the complex forms of 
search for unhappiness, of pleasure in pain and in humiliation, etc. – can 
be reduced to the effect of a specific alienated social form, that makes 
Hägglund’s book so attractive for broad public. What I try to develop is a 
vision of Communism compatible with all these horrors, with the “alien-
ation” implied by the very fact of language, with all the reflexive twists of 
human desire (how the repression of desire necessarily turns into a desire 
for repression, etc.) (Kevin Bacon said: “I’ve been told I’m more well 
known for being well known than for anything I’ve acted in’”) – this is 
the reflexivity of language or, in Hegelese, the way, in a language, a genus 
can be one of its own species: being-well-known-for-something has many 
species, and one of them is being-well-known-for-being-well-known. 
The same holds not only for Kim Kardashian but also, in a more specific 
way, for love: you can well [and you always do] love somebody for love 
itself, not just for reasons to love (her/him/it.) This reflexivity is Hegel’s 
name for actual infinity (as opposed to the spurious infinity of a series 
without end), and, since this reflexivity is constitutive of the Freudian 
death-drive, we encounter here – from my Freudo-Lacanian standpoint, 
at least – a fateful limitation of Hägglund’s insistence on radical finitude 
of the human condition. 

The axiom of the philosophy of finitude is that one cannot escape 
finitude/mortality as the unsurpassable horizon of our existence; Lacan’s 
axiom is that, no matter how much one tries, one cannot escape immor-
tality. But what if this choice is false – what if finitude and immortality, 
like lack and excess, also form a parallax couple, what if they are the same 
from a different point of view? What if immortality is an object that is a 
remainder/excess over finitude, what if finitude is an attempt to escape 
from the excess of immortality? What if Kierkegaard was right here, but 
for the wrong reason, when he also understood the claim that we, humans, 
are just mortal beings who disappear after their biological death as an easy 
way to escape the ethical responsibility that comes with the immortal soul? 
He was right for the wrong reason insofar as he equated immortality with 
the divine and ethical part of a human being – but there is another immor-
tality. What Cantor did for infinity, we should do for immortality, and 
assert the multiplicity of immortalities: the Badiouian noble immortality/
infinity of the deployment of an Event (as opposed to the finitude of a 
human animal) comes after a more basic form of immortality which resides 

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in what Lacan calls the Sadean fundamental fantasy: the fantasy of another, 
ethereal body of the victim, which can be tortured indefinitely and none-
theless magically retains its beauty (recall the Sadean figure of the young 
girl sustaining endless humiliations and mutilations from her depraved 
torturer and somehow mysteriously surviving it all intact, in the same 
way Tom and Jerry and other cartoon heroes survive all their ridiculous 
ordeals intact). In this form, the comical and the disgustingly-terrifying 
(recall different versions of the “undead” – zombies, vampires, etc. – in 
popular culture) are inextricably connected. The same immortality under-
lies the intuition of something indestructible in a truly radical Evil. This 
blind indestructible insistence of the libido is what Freud called “death 
drive”, and one should bear in mind that “death drive” is, paradoxically, 
the Freudian name for its very opposite, for the way immortality appears 
within psychoanalysis: for an uncanny excess of life, for an ‘undead’ urge 
which persists beyond the (biological) cycle of life and death, of generation 
and corruption. Freud equates the death drive with the so-called “compul-
sion-to-repeat”, an uncanny urge to repeat painful past experiences which 
seems to outgrow the natural limitations of the organism affected by it and 
to insist even beyond the organism’s death. 

Matthew Flisfeder noted two features that clearly distinguish the 
“theoretical anti-humanism” of the, 1960s from today’s post-humanism:

Whereas the anti-humanists of the, 1960s proclaimed the death of the sub-
ject, today we encounter a far more unnerving death of the human. While 
the anti-humanists sought merely to deconstruct the subject within dis-
course, the Posthumanists today are far more ambitious in realizing a return 
to matter and objectivity that they claim has been displaced by the verticality 
of humanity. (Flisfeder, n.d.)

So in the, 1960s, with Foucault and Althusser, the notion of subject (our 
self-perception as subjects) was “deconstructed” as a historically-specific 
discursive formation (although, for Althusser, it was more a universal ideo-
logical misrecognition); plus the ultimate horizon of this deconstruction was 
discourse, i.e., discourse was posited as a kind of transcendental a priori, as 
that which is always-already here in our dealings with reality. Today’s post-
humanism, on the contrary, doesn’t deal with the “death of the subject” but 
with the “death” of humans, it asserts the falsity of our self-perception of 
humans as free responsible beings, demonstrating that this self-perception 
is based not on some ignored discursive mechanisms but on our ignoring of 
what we really are – the “blind” neuronal processes that go on in our brain. 
In contrast to the anti-humanism of the, 1960s, today’s posthumanism 
relies on direct materialist reductionism: our sense of freedom and personal 

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dignity is a “user’s illusion”, we are really just a complex network of bodily 
processes in their interaction with environment…

An ironic consequence of this shift from anti-humanism to post-
humanism is that the remaining anti-humanists or their followers (like 
Miller), when confronted with the posthumanist challenge of full naturali-
zation of human beings, all of a sudden start to talk (almost) like human-
ists, emphasizing the uniqueness of human self-experience (“decentered” 
as it is), and the impossibility to fully reduce it to “objective” neuronal 
processes. A further difference is that, while discursive deconstruction 
doesn’t directly affect our everyday life (where we continue to experience 
ourselves as free responsible agents), posthumanism promises (and to some 
extent already achieves) interventions into our reality which will radically 
change our self-perception: when we are submitted to total digital control 
and our brains will be directly wired, when our DNA can be modified, 
when pills can change our behaviour and affections, this basically affects 
the way we experience ourselves and act. 

My only difference with Flisfeder is that, based on these insights, he 
argues for a new universal humanism that could ground the global eman-
cipatory struggle needed today. His argumentation is ultimately a new 
version of transcendental reflection: when I as a neuroscientist argue that 
I am just a set of neuronal and biological processes, I always do this in 
the form of rational argumentation, trying to convince others, as a part of 
scientific community – the space of this community where I address others 
(and act as) a free rational being convinced by reasons is always-already 
here, operative in my activity, not as an abstract Cartesian cogito but as a 
human collective… So, to simplify the image a little bit, while Flisfeder is 
ready to sacrifice subject but not humanity, not the basic dimensions of our 
being-human, I am tempted to do the exact opposite: I am ready to sacri-
fice (what we perceived till now as) the basic features of our being-human 
but not subject. “Humanity” is a notion at the same level as personality, 
the “inner wealth” of our soul, etc. – it is ultimately a phenomenal form, a 
mask, which fills in the void that “is” subject. What subject stands for is the 
inhuman core of being-human, what Hegel called self-relating negativity, 
what Freud called death drive. So in the same way that Kant distinguished 
the subject of transcendental apperception from a person’s soul and its 
wealth, in the same way Freud and Lacan distinguish the subject of the 
unconscious from the Jungian personality full of deep passions, we should 
in our unique predicament stick to the inhuman core of subjectivity against 
the temptations of being-human. Subject is what is in a human being more 
than human, the immortality of the death-drive which makes it a living 
dead, something that insists beyond the cycle of life and death. 

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References

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Baudelaire, C. (1920). Journaux intimes Fusées, mon coeur mis a nu. Les Éditions 
G. Cres et Cie.

Flisfeder, M. (Manuscript). Renewing humanism against the anthropocene: Towards 
a theory of the hysterical sublime. 

Floury, N. (2010). Le réel insensé. Introduction à la pensée de Jacques-Alain Miller. 
Éditions Germina. 

Freud, S., & Breuer, J. (1999). Studies in hysteria. In The standard edition of the 
complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. II. Vintage Press. 

Hägglund, M. (2019). This life: Why mortality makes us free. Profile Books. 
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Christian atheism. Non-accredited quotes that follow are from this text.
Lacan, J., Miller, J. A., & Porter, D. (1992). The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 7: 

The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960. Routledge. 
Marcuse, H. (1974). Eros and civilization. Beacon Press. 
Miller, G. (2004). Les pousse-au-jouir du maréchal Pétain. Points. 
Miller, J. A. (2008). La psychanalyse, la cité, les communautés. La Cause Freu-

dienne, 68, 105-119. 
Schuster, A. (2016). The trouble with pleasure: Deleuze and psychoanalysis. MIT 

Press. 
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psicoanálisis y política ante el 18 de octubre chileno. Política y Sociedad. 
Žižek, S. (2006). How to read Lacan. Granta. 

Riassunto

Partendo dalla distinzione fatta da Lacan tra “io ideale”, “ego-ideale” e “super-io”, 
strutturata dalla triade Immaginario-Simbolico-Reale, questo studio indaga come sia 
possibile distinguere lo spazio sociale a-sessuale dal dominio delle interazioni libidiche-
cattive. Attraverso l’analisi delle idee di Balibar, Miller, Schuster e Hägglund, vengono 
definiti percorsi e strategie per analizzare le dinamiche esistenti tra potere simbolico, 
legge e super-io. Ciò che emerge è la ricostruzione di una nuova soggettività capace, al-
lo stesso tempo, di superare la dinamica godimento-super-io alla base della riflessione 

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lacaniana e affrontare le sfide del post-umanesimo contemporaneo. Pertanto, ciò che il 
soggetto rappresenta è il nucleo inumano dell’essere-umano, ciò che Hegel chiamava ne-
gatività auto-relazionale, e ciò che Freud chiamava pulsione di morte. Il testo propone, 
in breve, come il Soggetto è ciò che è in un essere umano più che umano, l’immortalità 
della pulsione di morte che lo rende un morto vivente, qualcosa che insiste oltre il ciclo di 
vita e morte.

Copyright (©) 2021 Slavoj Žižek 
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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

How to cite this paper:
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Epistemology and Empirical Perspectives, 1(1-2), 13-31. doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.7358/
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	Elementa_1-2021-1-2_00b_Sommario.pdf
	Editorial
	Pierpaolo Limone

	First Section
	The Vagaries of the Superego
	Slavoj Žižek
	Nature and Pandemic

	Ricardo Espinoza Lolas
	Mask and Otherness
between Recognition and Concealment: Notes on the Self and the You

	Paolo Ponzio
	“Liquid” Identity and Otherness
in the Phenomenon of Religious
Alienation: The Loss of Critical
Thinking and the “Barter” of the Self in the System of Communion

	Daniela Savino
	The Sexistential Vulnerability of Bodies in Contact in the Philosophy
of Jean-Luc Nancy

	Francesca R. Recchia Luciani

	Second Section
	Universal Design for Learning
and Inclusive Teaching: Future
Perspectives
	Martina Rossi
	A Historical Account on Italian
Mechanism Models

	Marco Ceccarelli
	Cyberfeminism: A Relationship
between Cyberspace, Technology,
and the Internet

	Giusi Antonia Toto 1 - Alessia Scarinci 2
	Super-Ego after Freud: A Lesson
not to Be Forgotten

	Luigi Traetta 1 - Federica Doronzo 2
	Functioning of Declarative Memory: Intersection between Neuropsychology and Mathematics

	Federica Doronzo 1 - Gianvito Calabrese 2
	Peer Tutoring and Scaffolding
Principle for Inclusive Teaching

	Giuliana Nardacchione - Guendalina Peconio





