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I’d like to start with what we can call the problem of extimacy (extimité),1which 
centres on the mixture of how ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ allows for the specificity of 
both knowledge and know-how. Here we are exploring how extimacy articulates 
the problem of traversing knowledge into know-how, that is, a praxis of truth of 
the symptom. Such a praxis harnesses knowledge of the unconscious as a spe-
cific knowledge which affords boundless, repetitive jouissance. However, the 
perception of ourselves as subjects in the world is never immediate – as Freud 
observed, “truth is complicated and not particularly obvious”2. As divided sub-
jects we must contend with the distinctive, disorienting Lacanian gaze in order 
to contend with his proposition that the “unconscious is outside”3. 
What precisely are we dealing with here? On the one hand, the unconscious – 
the cause of the symptom – is inside and feels internal to the subject – dreams, 
slips of tongue and other parapraxes emanating from the symptomatic body. 
Such parapraxis is a replication of an articulation which stands out verbatim: 
the symptom literally speaks. On the other hand, these very symptoms are ori-
ented outwards towards the Other. Thus as we crawl around the Möbius Strip 
being careful not to trip here or fall off the edge there, we know that there is no 
smooth pathway out of the symptom. We are both Kafka-esque like bugs crawl-
ing along the Möbius strip, weaving in and out of its coil unable to find our way 
and simultaneously traumatic witnesses to this stupid repetitive act of chasing 
our tails. Even when we can rise above ourselves, all we see is the symptom’s 
1 This contribution is a result of work conducted within the research project “Theatricality 
of Power” (J6-1812), financed by ARRS, the Slovenian Research Agency. I should like to 
acknowledge the ongoing invaluable intellectual exchanges I share with Jelica Šumič-
Riha, Nick Derrick and Jan Völker as well as my close Lacanian friends who comprise the 
'Aotearoa/New Zealand Center for Lacanian Analysis' collective.
2 Isidor Sadger, Recollecting Freud, trans. A. Dundes, Madison, University of Wisconsin, 
2005, p. 19.
3 Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. D. Porter, London, 
Routledge, 1992. 
* University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zeland | https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0575-4760 | 
 cindy.zeiher@canterbury.ac.nz
Cindy Zeiher*
Sensation(all) Ontology1
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insistence on repetition, a symptom we count on to perpetuate our search for 
something, anything which might pertain to knowledge which enables us to 
take up a subjectivity of knowing how to be in the world.4 
At this point we can say that while the subject may not know about their symp-
tom, they certainly suffer from it. This specific knowledge is justified by being a 
lexicon within everyday life, yet it is at the same time opaque. That is, the forma-
tion of the symptom is beyond the reach of the ego, but the ego is not altogether 
aware of this and pushes for the unconscious tendency to repeat. It cannot be 
easy for us in our search for knowledge, to admit to knowing nothing else but to 
repeat (our initial relationship to truth), because as we travel along the Möbius 
Strip only to return to where we started, knowledge remains the elusive object of 
the drive which all the while structures mastery of manoeuvring along the strip’s 
continuous surface. It is important to remember that the purpose of the drive 
(Triebziel) is not so much to reach a final destination, but rather to follow its way, 
which is to circle round the object, this being the attainment of knowledge. And 
here we have the perfect entry into know-how (praxis) which encompasses the 
elements of the knowledge drive. The desire to know, to seek knowledge is a con-
stant force which is taken up rhythmically, building momentum into desire which 
is at the same time unconscious yet physical. That is, one has to do something in 
order to find out about things which remain elusive and just out of reach. In this 
way for Lacan, the Möbius Strip is a metaphor for the subject’s relationship to 
their desire to know something, to possess this object we name knowledge.5 
4 Thank you to Jelica Šumič-Riha for here reminding me of the tradition of Walter Benjamin, 
which maintains that all discourses allow us to be opaque and enigmatic subjects in the 
world, willing dupes to our imaginary Other. As a further association, in Brecht’s poem, 
On Suicide subjective enigma is discarded in favour of complete and utter realistic desti-
tution, powerfully realised in Hanns Eisler blending of words with sound as specifically 
arts for the commons. We can even say that the Brecht-Eisler’s fate-determining qualities 
of their characters assemble the subject as a repetition of the drive and towards a coher-
ence of endurance. Brecht, Bertolt, “Über den Selbstmord”, The Brecht-Eisler Song Book, 
Michigan, Oak Publications, 1967. To continue this thread, I am also reminded of Lacan’s 
reference to Louis Aragon’s poem, Contre-chant in Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental 
Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Here Lacan captures the symptom relationship between un-
conscious truth and its discontinuity: “Je suis ce malheureux comparable aux miroirs”. 
Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts 
of Psychoanalysis, trans. A. Sheridan, New York, Norton, 1981, p. 17.
5 It is important to distinguish between drive and instinct – the latter we can think of as 
flight or fight whereas the former does not harbour such a preserving quality, being inter-
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The Möbius Strip as Lacan’s specific topology illustrates how opposites are in-
trinsically bound in a repetitive and conflicting dialectic. Such a conflict exists 
as the centre is always shifting and ‘outside’ of the subject. As David Pavón-
Cuéllar says, “exteriority is intimacy, but intimacy, as exteriority, is rather an ‘ex-
timacy’, that is no longer either intimacy or exteriority.”6 The strip itself is nar-
rower than we think, this path we tread is precise and to veer off it means certain 
death or at least, demise of subjectivity. Each time we repeat the journey we are 
guided by the traces we left when we walked the same path many times before. 
This path, much like our conception of what we think we know, is somehow 
comforting because it is already trodden and somewhat familiar. For the divided 
subject who is struggling to reconcile this journey of repetition which encom-
passes two gazes (the well-worn path ahead and the outer gaze which attempts 
to look for a horizon), the question arises of which gaze to trust amidst the so-
matic upheaval of jouissance. This is the ultimately unanswerable question, che 
vuoi?, unanswerable because the question itself captures us in an excessive an-
guish of jouissance. This immanence of jouissance brings together the divided 
subject’s necessary relation with the extimacy which structures their division. 
Jouissance is described by Lacan in Seminar VII as “not purely and simply the 
satisfaction of a need but as the satisfaction of a drive”7. 
For Lacan desire implicates jouissance as a question addressed to the Other – 
what can I be for the Other? – and emerges from the split between need and 
pellated into the Symbolic Order via its own repetition.
6 David Pavón-Cuéllar “Extimacy”, in T. Teo (ed.), Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology, 
Springer, New York, NY, 2014. Available at https://www.academia.edu/4374516/Extimacy, 
accessed 10 October 2022.
7 Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. D. Porter, London, 
Routledge, 1992, p. 209.
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demand for satisfaction. However, what does the subject do when, for one rea-
son or another, negotiating the narrow well-trodden strip evokes not comfort of 
what is presumably known but only the pain of jouissance? Is the subject then 
catapulted into some sort of void, thereby putting at risk the symptom, which 
although not always reassuring is at least reliable? To be clear the symptom an-
chors the unconscious subject, it provides a fixed reference point from which 
the subject can handle and enjoy their singular symptom emanating from the 
unconscious. For the neurotic this transpires as the marking of the oedipal pro-
cedure: what kinds of template slide across their life, what choices mark their 
desires and frames their jouissance as a singular way of being in the world? Put 
simply, the symptom is the way in which the subject attempts to return to that 
which they have repressed whereas the unanalysed subject, normally unaware 
of their symptom, enjoys it but without knowing what to do with it. The subject 
is most present when they do not think but must at the same time struggle with 
the revelation of something unacceptable to the ego. It is here where the uncon-
scious haunts and hunts the subject. The desire of psychoanalysis begins with 
this very ontological curiosity as the object of the drive. 
But first, what exactly constitutes the symptom? It is a form and a force that 
without realising it we are bound to go on repeating, something not far removed 
from libidinal fixation in so far as we are repeating what has been repressed, 
and the act of repetition allows a somewhat clumsy, partial access to repressed 
memory, that is, the fundamental fantasy from which desire springs. At the same 
time the symptom does us a favour in at least allowing us go on living in a com-
plex world – doing this and that, thinking, having relationships, falling in love, 
experiencing desires to take up particular subjectivities and so on. We could say 
that while the subject certainly identifies with the symptom this is not so much 
a given as a cultivation of identification supported by the Symbolic Order. At the 
same time, although ever present, the symptom doesn’t function smoothly in 
that it can present as a companion who is alternately amiable and annoying. It 
is important also to understand that the symptom dates back to infancy when 
the subject as a child was confronted with the psychic trauma of individuation. 
From this arose the symptom which by ensuring subjectivity remains divided 
provides the psychic logic to cope with such alienating trauma. It is important to 
be clear about the origins of the trauma we are referring to arising from the reali-
sation that one is allowed to express sexual energy to anyone else – except one’s 
mother or father, the very source which marks original desire. Hence the impor-
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tance of the symptom, which the analyst with great care both preserves and puts 
to work establishes the specificity, the exactness of jouissance being triggered in 
the analysand. This is the knowledge – of what makes the analysand tick – that 
through transference the analyst seeks. In addition, we might speculate that 
during transference it is not only the analysand’s symptoms which are engaged 
but also those of the analyst’s curiosity to find out what motivates the analy-
sand. Such a transferential transmission can only take place and be sustained 
if the analyst wholly assumes the position of the objet a. It is up to the analyst 
to listen for the signifier, catch it, then throw it back to the analysand, time and 
time again until the analysand realises that what they are catching is something 
with little, if any substance. It is the psychic nature of this procedure which is 
what keeps the analyst curious and listening. Following the analysand’s desti-
tution a different psychic work begins, one which enables the subject to live (as 
much as possible) on their own terms. Thus if the subject repeats, they know 
what they are repeating and if they do not repeat, then they know what they are 
making a cut into. Either way the subject is handling knowledge of their jouis-
sance. Here psychoanalysis has enabled the subject a know-how. 
Prior to undergoing analysis, the analysand may presume that knowledge al-
ways has the upper hand, and not without reason since what we don’t under-
stand we are likely to repeat – we repeat without knowing but with full knowl-
edge that we don’t know what exactly we are repeating. We might either know 
something, think we do when in fact we don’t, or just don’t know at all. Socrates 
addressed this problematic when maintaining that we both know and don’t 
know at the same time. Freud and, later, Lacan suggested that we act with the 
knowledge we think we have, an apparently conscious one which is neverthe-
less driven by unconscious forces in which repetition is retroactively consti-
tuted and reified by the fidelity to repeat. Freud is clear on this compulsion to 
repeat when he says, 
What interest us most of all is naturally the relation of this compulsion to repeat 
to the transference and to resistance. We soon perceive that the transference is 
itself only a piece of repetition, and that the repetition is a transference of the for-
gotten past not only to the doctor [psychoanalyst] but also on to the other aspects 
of the current situation. We must be prepared to find, therefore, that the patient 
yields to the compulsion to repeat, which replaces the impulsion to remember, 
not only in his personal attitude to his doctor [psychanalyst] but also in every oth-
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er activity and relationship which occupy his life at the time – if, for instance, he 
falls in love or undertakes a task or starts an enterprise during the treatment. The 
part played by resistance, too, is easily recognised. The greater the resistance, the 
more extensively will acting out (repetition) replace remembering.8 
Here the symptom comes in very handy in giving repetition a trajectory but with 
a distinctive nuance which imparts to our otherwise familiar journey along the 
Möbius Strip an uncanny feeling of newness. This is what gives a certain pleas-
ure to the journey’s repetition of subverting linear space and oppositional forc-
es. It is important not to forget that such a resistance to binary opposition is 
the project of psychoanalytic praxis. Inside/outside; signified/signifier and so 
on, are not so distinctive as categories from which the conscious/unconscious 
can be clearly articulated. Although we’ve been here before, there is now in our 
journey a hope of experiencing some new satisfaction. In this way the symptom 
promises an ever-better, new and improved jouissance, one in which pleasure 
eclipses pain or offers just enough pain to enhance pleasure. The symptom is 
here ticking along nicely, engaging with fantasies and declarations, acts and re-
sistances, while jouissance is harbouring what can be called the visceral kernel 
of knowledge: I know because I can’t help but feel it. This is a knowledge, a play 
of the symptoms which is immanent, manifesting in the material body as a con-
dition of it. That such knowledge lies beyond language is precisely what charac-
terises the feminine in Lacan’s graph of desire – in Seminar XX9 Lacan talks at 
length about this, especially as it applies to feminine jouissance. Yet there are 
those, Freud and Lacan tell us, who know all about jouissance, where to find 
it, where to get it, and who to take it from. This pervert’s position attempts but 
fails to make feminine jouissance into subjective know-how. However, if we stay 
with the hysteric’s discourse in which jouissance should always remain a ques-
tion, we can say that we thrive on jouissance, indeed that it constitutes our very 
subjectivity at least until the analysand reveals to the analyst the anguish of 
the symptom and the desire to be free from the painful part of their jouissance. 
Lacan illustrates this compulsion to jouissance – even when the stakes are high 
such as the realisation that one enjoys being in a bit of pain – in Seminar VII 
8 Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through”, in Further 
Recommen dations in the Technique of Psychoanalysis II, trans. J. Riviere, New York, Basic 
Books, 1914, p. 6.
9 Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX. Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and 
Knowledge, trans. B. Fink, New York, Norton, 1999. 
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Suppose, says Kant, that in order to control the excesses of a sensualist, one pro-
duces the following situation. There is in a bedroom the woman he currently 
lusts after. He is granted the freedom to enter that room to satisfy his desire or his 
need, but next to the door through which he will leave there stands the gallows 
on which he will be hanged... As far as Kant is concerned, it goes without saying 
that the gallows will be a sufficient deterrent; there’s no question of an individu-
al going to screw a woman when he knows he’s to be hanged on the way out...10 
So, we can deduce that one must make a decision in the above fantasy whether 
or not one is Kantian, especially should such a fantasy become an actuality. But 
more than this, the promise of jouissance not only eventually fails to please the 
subject (either way – guilt or death) but the subject feels duped by their compul-
sion towards this choice. Such an inside/outside dilemma captures Lacan’s neol-
ogism of extimacy (extimité) as an uncanny internal feeling which is at the same 
time radically externalised to objects. Samo Tomšič’s uptake of the problem of 
the extimate is notable for its succinct conceptualisation of the word ‘extimacy’:
The infrequent occurrence of this term in no way diminishes its critical value, 
which lies above all in its union of contraries. The prefix “ex-” marks a register 
that precedes the distinction between the intimate (subjective) and the public (in-
tersubjective). Instead of describing the opposite of intimate—as the prefixes “in-
” and “ex-” would normally suggest—the extimate pinpoints a specific modality 
of the intimate, the emergence of an element of foreignness at the intimate core 
of the subject. One could think here of the feeling of Unheimlichkeit, or uncanni-
ness, which according to Freud has a sense of both the proximity of foreignness 
and familiarity.11
What exactly is happening when we think of jouissance as uncanny, that is, 
inside and outside the subject? It is not simply that jouissance is not working 
when it unpleasant or disappointing; rather, on the contrary, it is working only 
too well, with direct access to the subject firmly in place, continuing to give en-
joyment albeit within painful limits. Knowledge of the symptom remains elusive 
because the repetition of jouissance is too fascinating for it to be closely scru-
10 Lacan, Seminar VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 108.
11 Samo Tomšič, “The Ontological Limbo: Three Notes on Extimacy and Ex-sistence”, in N. 
Bou Ali and S. Singh (eds.), Extimacy: Encounters Between Psychoanalysis and Philosophy, 
Evanston, Northwestern University Press (Forthcoming 2023) (unpaginated).
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tinised. That is, until the pain inherent in the orgasmic pleasure of jouissance 
begins to obtrude in hurt and heartbreak. What now? This is where the original 
function of the symptom, in particular the effect of it on the divided subject vis-
a-vis the original psychic trauma, provides a way forward. Until the advent of 
trauma the subject works with such knowledge as a speaking being in the world 
may have. The inheritance of language provides a tool which fixes the subject 
within the paradox of Lacan’s gaze-drive. That is, the uncanny experience of 
being caught both within (ours) and outside (imaginary Other) the gaze also 
means that we are subjects of our singular jouissance. 
At this strange conjuncture we can put words to those objects and subjects 
which circulate us and which we in turn circulate. When such a relation touches 
on the Real, as Lacanians are fond of saying, it is heartbreaking because what 
follows is the terrible realisation that perfect knowledge of language and what 
to do with it, is but a fantasy. Our traumatic breaking away from the inevita-
ble disappointment of the limits of language – the very thing we are thrust into 
prior to our birth – brings with it a different kind of knowledge, one which for 
us as subjects of jouissance causes disorientation and confusion by throwing 
knowledge into chaos and what we think we know into destitution. Here we are 
dealing with two radically different kinds of knowledge: the first is dependent 
on the Symbolic Order, (in order to be in the world, we need to invest our symp-
toms relationally) whilst the second comprises a different language drawn from 
the subject’s experience of jouissance resulting from their particular symptom. 
Although these kinds of knowledge are radically different both are necessary: 
one cannot reach full or true speech without at the same time full immersion in 
the repetition of empty speech.12 
Here the work for the analysand truly commences in putting the symptom to 
work in order to embrace a different knowledge. If we are to grapple with the 
Kantian choice Lacan puts to us, then we could say it is not the fantasy of choice 
which throws us into psychic chaos, but rather that the choice itself is not even 
12 For those of us on the couch and/or in psychoanalytic training, this moment of radical lan-
guage transition becomes abundantly clear when we face our own symptomatic contradic-
tions: the cut is most apparent not when we choose to stop believing in the bullshit of the 
Other, but rather when we stop believing in our own bullshit and thus not be complicit in 
the bullshit of the Other. The uptake of this radical knowledge position resulting from full/
true speech has a permanent and sensational effect. 
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viable one in the first instance. This is what hurts the most: such a proposition 
can be thought of as more Pascalian in that the choice has already been made 
and accommodated as distinctly extimate. The extimate contours of the divided 
subject are here activated: the extimate being a space inhabiting the uncanny 
which is also new yet familiar. What is most important for the subject on their 
well-trodden path around the Möbius Strip is that the extimate feels uncanny. In 
this uncanny space one is free to feel bewildered and confused yet not so much 
that it is incapacitating. The spectre of the uncanny needs to appear to come 
from the ‘outside’, taking the subject by surprise but then disappearing, only to 
reappear later… 
As mentioned, the intimate exterior is often referred to as the extimite space. 
Jacques-Alain Miller puts it succinctly when he says, that “(e)xtimacy is not 
the contrary of intimacy. Extimacy says that the intimate is Other-like a foreign 
body, a parasite”.13 Pavón-Cuéllar elaborates on this duality of extimacy: 
Extimacy indicates the nondistinction and essential identity between the dual 
terms of the outside and the deepest inside, the exterior and the most interior of 
the psyche, the outer world and the inner world of the subject, culture and the 
core of personality, the social and the mental, surface and depth, behaviour and 
thoughts or feelings.14
It is a space somewhat akin to a vortex or riptide: once something is caught up 
it continues to circulate in a flurry of repetition. Although disorienting, the sub-
ject remains aware of being and feeling caught. Prior to all this, knowledge for 
the subject is situated externally and oriented to the subject’s desire for mas-
tery whilst retaining a residual suspicion of it. This is the Hysteric’s discourse 
wherein the Master (who represents the extimate other as the one who is “some-
thing strange to me, although it is at the heart of me.”15 is closely examined and 
knowledge is configured through a dialectic between agency and causality. Such 
knowledge not only captures but also undermines the subject because its under-
13 Jacques-Alain Miller, “Extimity”, The Symptom, 9, (2008). Available at https://www.lacan.
com/symptom/extimity.html, accessed 10 October 2022 (unpaginated).
14 David Pavón-Cuéllar, “Extimacy”, in T. Teo (ed.), Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology, 
Springer, New York, NY, 2014. Available at https://www.academia.edu/4374516/Extimacy, 
accessed 10 October 2022.
15 Lacan, Seminar VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 71.
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pinning dialectic has to be repeated countless times before the subject can make 
any sense of it. It is disconcerting for the subject, especially when on the couch 
and willingly rendered into jouissance, only then to be reminded that the symp-
tom which has kept one nicely ticking over, won’t work in the same way forever. 
This reminder that are we not mere divided subjects of knowledge but rather 
divided subjects of jouissance is unnerving and not really always enjoyable.16 
In this context the Lacanian catchphrase ‘enjoy your symptom!’ appears overly 
vitalist, even somewhat stupid because there is nothing enjoyable about repeat-
ing the anguish of the symptom which is no longer working as it used to do. This 
is the moment wherein know-how gains traction: where identification with blind 
enjoyment of one’s symptom is less about enjoyment and more about uncon-
scious knowledge that one is wrestling and reconciling with one’s mode of jouis-
sance. It is here that one either knows what one enjoys or more poignantly, what 
one loathes enjoying when enjoyment begins to diminish. It gets even worse for 
the subject in that knowledge of one’s symptom is not about mutual recogni-
tion but rather what Lacan refers to as a misrecognition which one is compelled 
to repeat in the quest for elusive recognition. It is at this point the subject must 
contend with the ethical kernel of psychoanalysis: the extimate and not entirely 
knowable space which captivates and nourishes us into a false sense of security 
about who we are and the knowledge we have or presume we have. 
Generally speaking, and unsurprisingly, such destabilisation logically signals 
the end of analysis, especially since, as Jacques-Alain Miller insists that “in no 
way can one say that the analyst is an intimate friend of his analysand. The an-
alyst, on the contrary, is precisely extimate to this intimacy”.17 Only the most 
masochistic and pessimistic could bear continuation of such psychic misery, so 
for some this is where the analytic procedure ends. Yet not always as for both 
analysand and analyst there lingers a strange sense of unfinished business and 
curiosity as to what might constitute different subject positions: for the anal-
ysand who is desperate for a jouissance which works, any other subject posi-
tion is viable, and for the analyst, finally, there is a gleam of insight into which 
16 I am situating the subject as Hysteric here – but of course, the subject can be positioned 
as an object for enjoyment such as in sadism where supposed know-how of short-sighted 
sensation is overdetermined. 
17 Miller, “Extimity”, (unpaginated).
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knowledge structure makes the analysand tick. Furthermore, the analysand is 
provoked by what might happen when they are curious as to the transition from 
one knowledge position to another. It is this specific desire which keeps trans-
ference in place; the analysand returning to the couch and the analyst listening. 
We can say that this is the praxis of the extimate, where the analysand has the 
intermittent ability to gaze upon themselves. This metonymic procedure, where 
two gazes slide into and across each other allows a double perspective: along-
side the fantasy the subject has about themselves as a knowledge subject, the 
subject also slides into another discourse framed by the Other. 
Bearing in mind that the jouissance which continues to torture us holds a kernel 
of truth whilst the knowledge which has been represented to us by the Master 
has a fictional quality, we are led to confront subjectivity as no more than a 
chain of signifiers, a schema which speaks, sometime politely but sometimes 
obscenely to the symptom. Here we can say that the inside/outside extimate 
space is structured like a sensation, which gives ground to the not-all of sub-
jectivity. That is, we experience that which is at the limit or edge of thinking the 
symptom, of the symptom sliding across into another domain, as a sensation 
which cannot altogether be put into words. 
What has been described so far is the subject’s experience of anguish, some-
thing not exclusive to those undergoing psychoanalysis since everyone must 
contend with anguish, especially when it manifests from desire, error, folly, 
trauma and so on. It is traumatic simply being a subject in the world. Such an-
guish is usually met with an affective reaction of some sort, for instance that our 
anguish must have an underlying validation which restores a degree of dignity. 
Such a relation or search for meaning invokes the Hysteric’s discourse which 
looks for the right inscription to mark our anguish and lay it to rest so that we 
can comfortably resume tantalising our jouissance as before or the memory of 
good jouissance. What we are here attempting through invoking discourse is to 
rein-‘state’ our mark (whose inscription has left us with) on to the designated 
subject-supposed-to-know. This keeps us not-all-knowing subjects who are driv-
en by the desire to know something. 
Let us take a close look at how knowledge is inscribed and how one takes up 
this inscription. For Lacan, language is inscribed in us before we are born. That 
is, because we are born into language, we have no choice but to take it up, oth-
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erwise our very subjectivity is cancelled – we go to gallows. Upon birth we en-
ter the field of signifiers and systems which uphold them – family, institutions, 
words, thinking, rituals and so on – already in place and through which we can 
take up knowledge as a discourse ‘to know’. We become attuned to them be-
cause they are embedded in social life so as to maintain the social bond. As life 
continues, we come to embody them, for instance by finding passions, falling 
in love, cultivating talents, experiencing desires, attending to our curiosities, all 
in the name of an inscripted knowledge which logically requires us to maintain 
that knowing is something we ‘do’. We trust not only this knowing but also its ef-
fects, that is, those traces which stick to us as subjects. Although we would like 
to think that we exercise discernment about what kinds of knowledge we want 
to accept, knowledge nevertheless operates as the great external generaliser 
which bonds us. Such an inscription of knowledge is for us profound in so far 
as we inscribe again and again whatever we think affords us the certainty of an 
external coherence to our subjectivity. The more we progress our knowledge, the 
more of it we think we continue to acquire. However, our experience as subjects 
of knowledge is – as Freud contended – overrated (no wonder Freud enjoyed 
the story of Don Quixote, the man who thought he knew everything about wom-
en only then to realise his total ignorance of feminine jouissance! One is here 
reminded of the amusing line indicative of Phallic jouissance as a force which 
somehow transcends desire in the name of brave deeds: “Those whom I have in-
spired with love by letting them see me…”). To presume one’s knowledge is com-
plete or at least on its way to completion is an obvious stupidity: we are better 
off putting knowledge to the test by first admitting that although our curiosity is 
contingent on the acquisition of knowledge, we initially know nothing, not even 
about ourselves. Freud was himself especially curious and felt it his ethical duty 
to act on behalf of the less curious by keeping the traumatised analysand on the 
couch and their analyst listening. For the analysand, the question of how can I 
live the life I imagine the other to have, transforms into a more urgent question 
of knowing: with such knowledge as I have, how can life be bearable under its 
savagery of jouissance? 
My claim here is that we seek truth to short-circuit knowledge which is so in-
credibly savage. To be clear, the psychoanalytic thinker is on par with the phi-
losopher in that they both seek truth. However, the mechanisms and locations 
for such truth are very different. The Freudian-Lacanian looks to the truth of the 
unconscious. Here in our quest for knowledge neither (sometimes) dizzying di-
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alectic nor its antithesis, common sense is necessarily of much help. However, 
Lacan’s metaphoric topology of the Möbius strip as one continuous surface can 
help us traverse this fantasy of knowledge, especially when it is too savage for the 
subject to bear. For Freud and Lacan, knowledge has more to do with sensation 
than with sense, sensations being the repetition of acts which don’t make com-
pletely conscious sense but whose satisfaction comes from suffering the symp-
tom. In Three Essays in Sexuality ,18 Freud contends that we know little about 
what makes up any claim to either normality or abnormality. Notwithstanding 
Freudian psychoanalytic theory has biological – even positivistic – roots, Freud 
insists that there is nothing natural about sex in so far as our knowledge of it is 
a construction derived from the influence of significant others, authorities such 
as parents, morals, social taboos and so on. This construction enables knowl-
edge of how one identifies as a sexed subject in the world, how sexuality func-
tions – or ought to, how in the repetition of daily life we unconsciously resist 
such knowledge to take up a taboo position. For Freud whether we resign to 
the gallows or enjoy our desire with another is neither here nor there: we live 
knowing that what we desire may be the death of us. We unwittingly give our-
selves to desire: everyone has made Freudian slips when saying one thing and 
meaning another; everyone has forgotten something which is important to re-
member; everyone has had a nightmare or an erotic dream. All such sensations 
belong to parapraxis, the emerging pathology of what is knowable in the un-
conscious. They are neither merely distractions nor are they counterpoints sup-
porting so-called legitimate knowledge. Instead, for Freud and Lacan these sen-
sations demonstrate a logic and knowledge of their own precisely through their 
opacity (that is, from symptom to sinthome). They are a repetition of what is 
repressed and are unable to be simplified or domesticated through the Master’s 
discourse. Thus the problematics of uncertainty, unpredictability and indeter-
minacy become hallmarks of a knowledge of which the subject would do well to 
be curious, even and especially if this is destabilising and hurtful. Freud wanted 
to normalise psychoanalysis as science on the couch, a project then refined by 
Lacan into a praxis or method for knowing rather than a science. This method is 
concerned with thinking and putting the symptom to work which is potentially 
a hurtful, even savage project little appreciated by the academy because during 
psychoanalysis the unconscious can be brutal in enabling the uptake of a very 
18 Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. J. Strachey, London, Imago, 
1949.
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different position regarding knowledge and knowing. In this process subjective 
division becomes all too real, widening more and more until the subject sur-
renders to the sacrifice demanded by psychoanalysis namely recognition or ac-
ceptance that the subject-supposed-to-know is also a castrated divided subject. 
The savagery of this realisation – usually occurring when one gets a glimpse of 
the (unshared) desire of the other – is accompanied by the strangely life affirm-
ing framing of desire as a specific ontological form with which the subject must 
now engage. To elaborate, this is the true trauma (sensation) for the Hysteric 
who can go along with a fantasy, even in speech. The acting out or actuality of 
the fantasy is the traumatic tipping point. That is, obtained jouissance is hardly 
satisfactory.
In this Lacanian ontology the subject is one of lack, a gap which symptoms at-
tempt to fill with a feeling of wholeness or at least a fantasy of wholeness.19 
This is how the ontological structure of Lacan’s symbolic order is founded. In 
replying to Jacques-Alain Miller’s question, “what is your ontology?”20 Lacan 
drew attention to the gap as itself the ontology. In, Remembering, Repeating and 
Working Through 21Freud points towards direct access whereby the analysand 
can return to earlier situations, where once unconscious forgotten traumas be-
come a normalised conscious procession. Freud says, “When the patient talks 
about these ‘forgotten’ things he seldom fails to add: ‘As a matter of fact I’ve al-
ways known it; only I’ve never thought of it.”22 As a pointed example of uncon-
scious repetitious acting out which stands in for the forgetting, Freud remarks, 
“…the patient does not say that he remembers that he used to be defiant and 
critical towards his parents’ authority; instead, he behaves in that way to the 
doctor [psychoanalyst]”.23
Part of what makes unconscious knowledge that is uncovered in the transferen-
tial relationship (which is arrived at and produced by the analysand at the end 
of analysis) so potentially savage are the very defences which it engenders in 
us. Why do we feel the need of defences? The answer is that desire, being a law 
19 Jacques Lacan, Seminar XXVI. Topology and Time, 1978-1979, trans. D. Collins, Unpublished 
manuscript, p. 28.
20 Ibid.
21 Freud, “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through”, p. 2.
22 Ibid., p. 3.
23 Ibid.
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sensation(all) ontology
unto itself entices us to live beyond our means, keeping us in a symptomatic rep-
etition which is bound to fail either in fantasy or actuality. Hence the purpose 
– even duty – of psychoanalysis, is that of helping us transform desire and the 
management of joussiance into something akin to a tolerable life. As Verhaeghe 
and Declercq assert,
A psychoanalytic cure removes repressions and lays bare drive-fixations. These 
fixations can no longer be changed as such; the decisions of the body are irre-
versible.24
They elaborate on this claim in a footnote,25
This instance is the Real of the body, that is, the Real of the drive. This Real of the 
bodily drive is independent of the subject; it is an instance that judges and choos-
es independently: Ce qui pense, calcule et juge, c’est la jouissance. [Translated by 
original authors as: “What thinks, computes and judges, is the Enjoyment.”].26
This is not easy and sometimes feels impossible, especially in the extimate as a 
psycho-ontological space of transition between knowledge discourses which re-
veal their circulation and conflicts. It is as much a bodily experience as it is psy-
chical. Here the object (that which is thrust into the domain of desire and which 
was once thinkable, at least) is reconstituted on realising that no object will 
ever fill the gap, not even that of knowledge. We come to understand when tran-
sitioning discourses that life is still possible even when not filled with gap-fill-
ing objects. We might be curious to invest in the sensation of Lacan’s extimate 
ontological space (a ubiquitous form for psychoanalysis) but at the same time 
try to remain impervious to it and its effects. The extimate nature of Lacan’s on-
tology ensures that we are always somewhat lost in both it and the signifiers it 
produces. Furthermore, although it is a fantasy that we can be sovereign from, 
it, at least fantasy triggers the very anxiety needed in grappling with the savage 
abundance of jouissance, one which is so affective, it causes a momentary sen-
24 Paul Verhaeghe & Frédéric Declercq, “Lacan’s Analytical Goal: “Le Sinthome” or the 
Feminine Way”, in: L. Thurston (ed.), Essays on the Final Lacan. Re-inventing the Symptom. 
New York, The Other Press, 2002, p. 62.
25 Ibid.
26 Lacan, Seminar XXVI. Topology and Time, 1978-1979, p. 9. 
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sation of having it all, which is either confirmed or refused within the extimate 
space of which this ontology is constituted. 
I’d like to riff on this notion of having it all, of feeling a sensation(all) drive to-
wards chasing one’s desire. For psychoanalysis, Lacanian ontology shifts the 
focus from the object to sensation manifesting from discontent, anxiety, and the 
desire for wish-fulfillment. All the objects and experiences which make social 
and intimate life possible prepare those fantasies which enable us to put our 
senses to work. Inevitable discontinuity between the pragmatics of life and fan-
tasy are not bridged by objects but rather by understanding the conditions from 
which objects are made intelligible, notwithstanding that eventually objects be-
comes fragmented or even discarded the more one distances oneself from the 
knowledge previously invested in. What emerges is not synchronicity between 
one’s external and internal world, but rather a better way of handling jouissance 
in the contradiction emanating from being situated in the psycho-ontological 
extimate. Jouissance – always a visceral sensation – can be understood not as 
an abridged version of the split subject but instead as emanating from differ-
ence in how one is taking up a new knowledge in which the lost object resur-
faces bearing a different inscription. Thus even knowledge of one’s deception is 
an ontological sensation apprehended within the extimate. In this way we can 
think of ontological sensation as an initial visceral experience of an extimate 
logic drive. By providing both jouissance and its limits, this is where psycho-on-
tology takes place and realised as being in service to the subject. 
Lacanian theory proposes that jouissance, the enjoyment of the symptom, ema-
nates from the subject’s division, from the not-all. It is important to note that jou-
issance is a concept many Lacanians resist translating. Adrian Johnston27 puts 
such resistance under scrutiny when he discusses the distinction between ‘jou-
issance expected’ (full mythical jouissance which is imagined) and ‘jouissance 
obtained’ (pleasure which falls short), claiming that given Lacan located jouis-
sance as beyond the pleasure principle, it necessarily bypasses the mitigation of 
the ego. Simply put, the ego cannot enjoy or is incapable of enjoying jouissance. 
Jacques-Alain Miller offers a functional exposition of jouissance when he says 
27 Adrian Johnston, “The Forced Choice of Enjoyment: Jouissance between Expectation and 
Actualization”, The Symptom, 2 (2002). Available at https://www.lacan.com/forcedf.htm, 
accessed 10 October 2022.
171
sensation(all) ontology
that it is “precisely what grounds the alterity of the Other when there is no Other 
of the Other. It is in its relation to jouissance that the Other is really Other.” 28
We could say that for satisfaction and frustration to not only occur but also to be 
contained within the domain of jouissance, the extimate acts as a vector for such 
libidinal investment to be reiterated. This circulation is all in the name of knowl-
edge as an object, also as an orientation towards it manifesting as a strange sat-
isfaction in two kinds of knowledge. Firstly, that of the subject-suppose-to-know 
(the knowledge presumed to be already known) and secondly, that of the sub-
ject-supposed-to-soon-know (the knowledge yet to come). It is not only knowl-
edge itself which is captivated, and which provides jouissance but rather these 
are two unmoving ever-present simultaneous symptoms. These are firstly, sub-
jective desire to articulate something about what is supposedly known (that is, 
for the knowledge to speak for itself via the subject and in so doing to grapple 
with what needs to be explained). Secondly, it is the subject’s strange and un-
settling curiosity which accompanies this differentiation and which manifests 
as a powerful drive in which pleasure and displeasure, intimacy and the social 
bond, appropriation and alienation are all simultaneously invested as a contra-
dictory and traumatic necessity. 
The function of curiosity especially about the symptom is the foundation to any 
psychoanalytic inquiry. Indeed, it constitutes the method and desire of psycho-
analysis. The question concerning the location of truth is straightforward for 
psychoanalysis: the truth it is so curious about resides in the unconscious. Here, 
curiosity as a specific drive is an unyielding floating attention which navigates 
subjective frustration about what can be known and the trauma of what can’t. 
Samo Tomšič again offers that “[t]he drives, then, are fictions, which neverthe-
less explain the causality pertaining to language, the disturbances and the dis-
equilibrium that the functioning of the symbolic order produces in the speak-
ing body, in short, the production of enjoyment.”29 Thus drive does not seek to 
address empirical questions (notwithstanding these are what often attract the 
analysand to the couch – how and what do I need to be for the other?) but rath-
er it is simply an inscription in the name of jouissance, one which ill-fits either 
the production of knowledge or the social bond. For example, the social bond 
28 Miller, “Extimity”.
29 Tomšič, “The Ontological Limbo: Three Notes on Extimacy and Ex-sistence”.
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cindy zeiher
doesn’t deal with trauma particularly well when issuing judgement rather than 
seeking for a cure. The radical idea that knowledge is a fantasy provides the 
foundation of Lacan’s 1967 proposition in Seminar XI. In this proposition Lacan 
contends that the analyst trusts not how well one can articulate a narrative of 
their supposed knowledge, but what constitutes the desire for this articulation. 
Both Freud and Lacan approach knowledge from a new and original perspective 
in which knowledge is a fantasy whose function is to keep the curiosity of one’s 
jouissance alive. In political terms this might translate into: what is everyone 
getting off on, is everyone delusional? Although in the earlier Lacanian position 
the signifier of knowledge negates jouissance, contemporary Lacanian theory, 
following Encore frames the symptom as coexisting with jouissance through 
producing enjoyment via speech. Considered as a bodily event, we can think of 
jouissance as the vessel which contains the too-muchness of the confrontation 
with the not-all. What this means is that the subject suffers from not only the 
symptom but from over-attachment to its effects. This all-encompassing sensa-
tion is the motor of the drive allowing repetition of that which, in the search for 
knowledge of jouissance, seems impossible to master. It is here that lalangue – 
those elements of speech which on their own are non-sensical (radically outside 
meaning) but which are nevertheless components of speech, for example pho-
nemes, sounds, stutters, prefixes and so on – is operationalised as a great non-
sense mystery. This is what allows us to manage both jouissance and its effects 
differently. Put simply, trying to articulate one’s jouissance can feel impossible, 
partially sensical only when it is half said, unreferenced, not fixed. This leaves 
the sensation of speech (and language) as forever unfinished yet always ready 
to be taken up again.30 Lacan observes that
30 It is worth marking the bodily foundation of the symptom as a specific linkage to lalangue: 
“We must start with Lacan’s contribution. There is language and it is structured. It acts 
as a brake on jouissance; it is used for speaking, communicating and constructing our 
fictions. Then there is lalangue, that is, the material consisting of sounds, phonemes and 
words in their raw state and not articulated into the structure of a discourse – material 
that collides with living bodies. Lalangue is something that is endured or suffered. It is a 
passion. Human beings are the patients of this encounter between lalangue and the body. 
It leaves marks on the body. What Lacan calls ‘the sinthome’ is the substance of such 
marks. These are events, bodily events. Man has a body, and events occur within this body 
Bernard Porcheret, “The Bodily Roots of Symptoms”, Psychoanalysis/Lacan, Lacan Circle 
of Melbourne, 2022, unpaginated. Available at https://lacancircle.com.au/psychoanaly-
sislacan-journal/psychoanalysislacan-volume-1/the-bodily-root-of-symptoms/, accessed 
12 October 2022.
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sensation(all) ontology
[t]he drives are our myths, said Freud. This must not be understood as 
a reference to the unreal. For it is the real that drives mythify, as myths 
usually do: here it is the real which creates [fait] desire by reproducing 
in it the relationship between the subject and the lost object.”31 
The myth that the body is a site for knowledge can be traced back to fragments 
of language which present but a tenuous connection with what needs explic-
it linkage. Russell Grigg understands myth as “a fictional story woven around 
a point of impossibility.”32 Esther Faye further comments “that the drive is not 
only a fundamental concept, it is a fundamental fiction – it performs a funda-
mental and fictional function in relation to the real. This highlights the neces-
sary artifice of the drives – the way in which what in itself is un-representable – 
the real from which desire is born – gets represented, or rather, acquires its rep-
resentative through the drives.”33 Such fragments are what constitute lalangue 
and are in themselves meaningless, satisfying nothing and producing suffering, 
confusion and disorientation. The subject’s fixation is on meaning and the pos-
sibility of identification with an intimate part of oneself, notwithstanding that 
suffering feels strangely detached and outside the body. Here we have the real 
of the symptom in action: jouissance without meaning. Psychoanalysis works 
not with the knowledge one purports to have but with the symptom, the strange 
sensation of too-muchness. Engaging the signifier as the site of some specific 
knowledge, as Lacan advocates, binds the body with the signifier. In psychoa-
nalysis these are not unbound but separated allowing the signifier to speak to 
unconscious rather than to material forces. But from the perspective of subject-
supposed-to-know, curiosity as the main instigator for knowledge is foreclosed 
because of the presumption that one already knows and therefore has no need 
to traverse anything. Here jouissance can be understood as an economic as well 
as a psychic problem in that it structures one’s curiosity about one’s symptom: 
Psychoanalysis is an ontological sensation which marks knowledge as a ques-
tion of jouissance. Such a drive is certainly symbolically productive (providing 
one does not fall into cynicism) and validated by the very sensation of it. Jan 
31 Jacques Lacan, Écrits. The First Complete Edition in English, trans. B. Fink, New York, 
London, W.W. Norton, 2006, pp. 723–724.
32 Russell Grigg, “Beyond the Oedipus Complex”, in J. Clemens and R. Grigg (eds.), Jacques 
Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis: Reflections on Seminar XVII, Durham & 
London, Duke University Press, 2006, p. 55.
33 Esther Faye, Esther, “The Real of the Drive”, Analysis, (2014), p. 1. 
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cindy zeiher
Völker34 purports a logic of curiosity in his ontology of speculation as two dis-
tinctive yet combined forms extending beyond the materiality of life. It is at this 
speculative fork in the road Völker marks the commencement of Freudian psy-
choanalysis about what later becomes Lacan’s construction of the enjoyment of 
the symptom:
The most important passage for this can be found in the famous 1921 text, Beyond 
the Pleasure Principle. Following a synopsis of various problems in the theoretical 
construction of psychoanalysis, Freud marks an interruption: ‘What now follows 
is speculation, often far-reaching speculation, that each one will appreciate or 
neglect according to their particular attitude…’35
Later in Four Fundamental Concepts Lacan offers that subject’s orientation to 
the speculation of the symptom “is properly the other, appears in so far as the 
drive has been able to show its circular course.”36 Such speculation provides 
for our desire to be curious about our drive. The subject navigates the gram-
matical ontology of the Möbius strip with two oppositions in mind: firstly, an-
other Lacanian neologism non-sense (which nevertheless harbours a sensical 
logic) and secondly the non-sensical as a rejoinder (a suturing point of knowl-
edge based on presumption, ambivalence, or convenience) which together give 
meaning to the life of the neurotic – arguably also the perverse and psychotic. 
The psychoanalytic cure allows for non-sense to be a source of knowledge by 
allowing the subject to get lost in it for a while until its initial unthinkability be-
comes less fantasmatic as psychic defences start disintegrating, together with 
the compulsion to be sensical, to attribute coherent meaning to symptoms – 
to put the non-sensical to work. Nevertheless, what also happens when navi-
gating the Möbius strip and thereby taking up another position in relation to 
knowledge, is that the subject gains intimate knowledge of their symptom and 
its function in the repetition of a composite of unconscious knowledge and con-
scious knowing. This constitutes a specific drive for the subject of psychoanal-
ysis thrust into the throws of the ‘impossible profession’, to play along with un-
34 Jan Völker, Geteiltes Denken: Marx, Freud, Kant, Hegel. Habilitationsschrift. Eingereicht am 
Fachbereich Philosophie und Geschichtswissenschaften der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt 
am Main im Fach Philosophie, 2022, p. 211.
35 From unpublished manuscript in original German, Geteiltes Denken: Marx, Freud, Kant, 
Hegel. Translation by C. Zeiher. 
36 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 9.
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sensation(all) ontology
certainty. In this situation the signifier acts as a supportive logic of a subjective 
sensation vital to the rationale of transference, which invites identification with 
a tantalising knowledge to be known. Here the Real is allowed to take over and 
only time can reveal the evolution of a new subjective knowledge and its sensa-
tion(all) effects, inevitably absolved as a know-how which is not-all. 
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