“the logic of courtly love still defines the parameters within which the two sexes relate to each other” (1181, my emphasis).
“erroneous notion of the Lady as sublime object” (1181).
“a kind of automaton, a machine which utters meaningless demands at random” (1182).
“This coincidence of absolute, inscrutable Otherness and pure machine is what confers on the Lady her uncanny, monstrous character” (1182).
“she is someone with whom no relation of empathy is possible” (1182).
“The idealization of the lady . . . is a narcissistic projection whose function is to render her traumatic dimension invisible” (1182).
“if men are to project on to the mirror their narcissistic ideal, the mute mirror-surface must already be there . . . a kind of “black hole” in reality, as a limit whose Beyond is inaccessible” (1183).
masochism: “he stages his own servitude” (1184).
“of crucial importance here is the total self-externalization of the masochist’s most intimate passion: the most intimate desires become object of contract and composed negotiation” (1184).
“there is more truth in the mask we wear, in the game we play, in the “fiction” we obey and follow, than in what is concealed beneath the mask. The very kernel of the masochist’s being is externalized in the staged game towards which he maintains his constant distance” (1184).
“the Real of violence breaks out precisely when the masochist is hystericized—when the subject refuses the role of an object-instrument of the enjoyment of the Other, when he is horrified at the prospect of being reduced in the eyes of the Other to objet a” (1184).
— $ = split subject —
the sadist: “the (mis)perceived effect of the brutal act upon the victim retroactively legitimizes the act” (1185).
“courtly love” is “the most radical strategy for elevating the value of the object by putting up conventional obstacles to its attainability” (1186).
“The place of the Lady-Thing is originally empty: she functions as a kind of “black hole” around which the subject’s desire is structured. The space of desire is bent like space in the theory of relativity” (1186).
“temporal anamorphosis: the Object is attainable only by way of an incessant postponement, as its absent point of reference” (1186).
“the prohibition [of desire] is not to “raise the price” of an object by rendering access to it more difficult, but to raise this object itself to the level of the Thing, of the “black hole” around which desire is organized” (1187).
“how is it that we can attain identity only by losing it? There is only one solution to this problem: the phallus, the signifier of enjoyment, had simultaneously to be the signifier of “castration,” that is to say, one and the same signifier had to signify enjoyment as well as its loss” (1188).
“In this way, it becomes possible that the very agency which entices us to search for enjoyment induces us to renounce it” (1188).
“the Lady is not another name for the metaphysical Ground but, on the contrary, one of the names for the self-retracting Real which, in a way, grounds the Ground itself” (1189).
“the object of love changes into the subject the moment it answers the call of love” (1193).
“True, the courtly image of man serving his Lady is a semblance that conceals the actuality of male domination; true, the masochist’s theater is a private mise en scene designed to recompense the guilt contracted by man’s social domination; true, the elevation of woman to the sublime object of love equals her debasement into the passive stuff or screen for the narcissistic projection of the male ego-ideal” (1197)
“this very semblance of man serving his Lady provides women with the fantasy-substance of their identity whose effects are real: it provides them with all the features that constitute so called “femininity” and define woman not as she is in her jouissance feminine, but as she refers to herself with regard to her (potential) relationship to man, as an object of his desire . . . . By opposing “patriarchal domination” women simultaneously undermine the fantasy-support of their own “feminine” identity” (1197).
“the sexual relationship cannot be transposed into a symmetrical relationship between pure subjects” (1197).