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浪🧩📞 LACAN LESSONS 浪🧩📞

(Turkish, German, Four Degrees of Acceptance and Rejection)

Introduction: Framing the Question of Acceptance and Rejection

At the heart of Lacanian psychoanalysis lies a rigorous formalization of subjectivity through language. Jacques Lacan defines the symbolic order with the following axiom: a signifier represents the subject for another signifier. This formulation establishes the subject as not a self-present entity, but a position in a chain of signifiers—a vanishing point between representations. The subject, in this view, is constituted by the symbolic order, which is structured like a language. Every act of signification is simultaneously an act of substitution, wherein the subject is both revealed and effaced in its passage from one signifier to the next.

In this article, this Lacanian axiom is paraphrased as follows: An authority represents a will for a system. This reformulation maintains the same formal structure—representation mediated through a symbolic chain—but rearticulates the terms to make explicit their socio-political resonances. Here, “authority” takes the place of the signifier, “will” replaces the subject, and “system” stands in for the second signifier. The subject is thus reinterpreted not as an empty placeholder in language, but as a will that demands representation, and whose legitimacy is at stake in the operation of authority within systemic structures.

Yet Lacan’s framework includes not three, but four terms. In addition to the triadic circuit of signifiers and the subject, Lacan introduces a fourth term: objet petit a. This “object-cause of desire” is the residue, the leftover, the irreducible kernel that cannot be symbolized but which structures the subject’s drive. In the present framework, objet a is reinterpreted as the body. This is not the biological body as such, but the body as marked by signifiers—the body as it appears in transference, affect, and the symbolic order’s failures. It is the body as felt, judged, stigmatized, or idealized: a body that acts as a limit or excess to representation.

These four terms—authority, will, system, and body—form the structural basis for a typology of acceptance and rejection. What does it mean to be accepted or rejected, and by whom? On what grounds? Is the rejection immediate and visceral, or mediated and systemic? Does it issue from desire, power, knowledge, or affect? To answer these questions, we must conceptualize different degrees of acceptance and rejection, each of which corresponds to one of Lacan’s four discourses: the Analytic, the Hysteric’s, the Master’s, and the University discourse.

The four degrees begin from zero and ascend through increasing levels of mediation and abstraction. The zeroth degree operates at the level of the body (objet a), as a visceral, pre-reflective response—an affinity or aversion that is often interpreted through political or cultural codes. The first degree pertains to will and desire, and unfolds in the space of communicative affirmation or denial (“You are right” / “You are wrong”)—linked to the Hysteric’s discourse, where the subject challenges the authority. The second degree enters the realm of authority, where moral normalization dictates the good and the bad representations (“You are normal” / “You are abnormal”), producing the violent binaries of legitimacy and invalidity—this is the Master’s discourse. Finally, the third degree refers to the systemic level, where acceptance or rejection is mediated statistically or bureaucratically (“You are typical” / “You are atypical”), invoking the neutral-seeming objectivity of the University discourse while reinforcing underlying normative structures.

Thus, the four degrees of acceptance and rejection are not simply levels of emotional or institutional response. They articulate the structural relations between body, will, authority, and system, each of which is grounded in Lacan’s topology of discourses. Through this framework, we can trace how legitimacy is conferred or denied, how individuals are marked and categorized, and how systems reproduce themselves through discourse. What follows is an elaboration of each degree, beginning from the zeroth level of visceral reaction, and ascending through willful, authoritative, and systemic forms of judgment—each carrying distinct modes of power, interpretation, and resistance.

0. The Zeroth Degree: Embodied Context and Visceral Legitimacy

Before any word is spoken, before any argument is formed, before judgment appears—there is a body. And this body is not neutral. It is already inscribed in a context of being. The zeroth degree of acceptance or rejection emerges here, where meaning is not yet stabilized in the symbolic, but erupts through affect, style, and presence. It is a visceral yes or no, a gut-level affinity or aversion. You walk into a room and someone feels wrong. Or they look right. No reasons are offered, none are required. This is the terrain of the body as objet petit a, the object-cause of desire, the elusive, unlocatable remainder that resists capture by signifiers—and yet orients the entire symbolic edifice around itself.

Here, acceptance and rejection are not yet discursively constructed, but automatically imposed by the interpretive context. This is not yet a matter of truth or error, justice or injustice. It is closer to what we call vibes, or in a more politically charged key, the policing of affect and appearance. In this way, the body—both literal and symbolic—becomes the carrier of meaning before meaning itself is declared. Someone is pretty or ugly, creepy or charismatic, respectable or suspicious. These are not evaluations based on reasoning; they are impressions, and they strike with immediate force.

Yet this immediacy is not innocent. It is interpreted immediacy. The body is never just a body—it appears within a context saturated with expectations, norms, and histories. As such, this zeroth degree does not operate outside the symbolic; rather, it reflects the point where the symbolic turns back upon the body to mark it as legitimate or illegitimate, desirable or disgusting, safe or dangerous. What appears as a “natural reaction” is in fact a contextual decision masquerading as instinct.

This is where transference enters, as Lacan names it in the analytic discourse. Transference is not about truth; it is about positioning. It determines which embodiments of speech are taken seriously, and which are disqualified before they speak. A trans woman says something politically charged, and her gesture is not met with critique, but with a slur. A Palestinian expresses grief, and their affect is interpreted as threatening. The words are not even heard before the context of being has already judged their legitimacy.

In this way, expectation precedes intention. Before one even expresses a will, the interpretive field has already decided whether this will can be legitimate. And that decision is carried out on the terrain of the body—as interpreted within a given symbolic structure. Thus, the zeroth degree of expectation is the most foundational, yet the least articulated. It is not grounded in a debate over truth or morality, but in the contingent reading of signs that don’t yet speak, but already mean.

This degree is striking because it cannot be confronted directly. You cannot argue with a vibe. You cannot rationally debate a flinch. You cannot ask someone to justify why your face feels wrong to them. And yet, these are the judgments that structure power at its most intimate level—the instant before speech. It is precisely here that political correctness becomes a battlefield, not because it restricts speech, but because it foregrounds the conditions of hearing. Who gets heard, and who gets silenced—not by censure, but by affective dismissal?

Thus, the zeroth degree of acceptance or rejection is the first operation of ideology, masked as nature. It is the symbolic’s return to the real, where a context of being silently decides which bodies are granted the right to signify—and which are already marked, before they say a word.

1. The First Degree: Desire, Disruption, and the Right to be Right

Now the body speaks. After the silent judgments of the zeroth degree—those immediate rejections or attractions inscribed by the context of being—comes a different terrain: language. The first degree of acceptance or rejection emerges when speech enters the scene, when a subject articulates a position, and someone responds: “You are right” or “You are wrong.” Here, we are no longer dealing with unspoken vibes or automatic aversions. We are within the symbolic network proper—the realm of discourse, of argument, of will. And where there is will, there is desire.

This is the moment the subject appears as a speaking being, le parlêtre, the one who speaks and is thereby divided. To speak is to expose oneself, to risk misrecognition, and to encounter another who replies. The judgment “You are right!” or “You are wrong!” is not merely a correction—it is a positioning within a shared field of meaning, a field that presupposes a common ground. There must be a minimal agreement that words mean and that reasons matter. And yet, even as the symbolic promises order, it always trembles under the disruptive force of desire.

This space of symbolic exchange is the domain of the hysteric’s discourse in Lacan’s schema. Here, the subject ($) confronts the master signifier (S₁), not with passive acceptance, but through interrogation, demand, questioning. The hysteric says: “You claim authority, but who authorized you?” The subject of the hysteric’s discourse is not satisfied with being told what is right—they want to know why it is right, and whether the speaker has the right to say it. In this way, the first degree is defined by its dialectical tension: the subject’s free will confronts the authority of the other in the name of truth.

Crucially, this first degree assumes the possibility of legitimate dialogue between bodies recognized as having will. It is a politics of speech, not of silence. And with speech comes risk: the risk of being misheard, misunderstood, misrepresented. Desire complicates the ground of communication—what is said is never quite what is meant. Speech slips, stutters, and fails. But it is precisely through these failures that desire emerges, twisting the intention and derailing the outcome.

The question “Am I right?” becomes a desire to be recognized as right—not only in logic, but in legitimacy. That recognition must come from an Other, from someone else who grants or denies the subject’s position. And thus, acceptance or rejection at this level is no longer based on the body’s appearance or aura—it is based on the discursive judgment of will. The subject has spoken, and now must be judged. But by what standard? And by whom?

The answer lies in the ground of communication, which is always fragile, always contested. What appears as shared meaning is often just a temporary equilibrium between competing wills. At the first degree, this equilibrium is constantly disrupted—not only by misunderstanding, but by the excess of desire that no statement can fully contain. Even agreement (“You are right”) carries within it the potential for rupture: the subject may ask, “But why am I right?” and thereby reintroduce the doubt that threatens the entire edifice.

Thus, the first degree of expectation is structured by the possibility of shared discourse—but a discourse haunted by miscommunication. The legitimacy of will is judged in real time, in the act of speaking and hearing, affirming and denying. Every utterance is a gamble: to be recognized or disqualified, to be embraced or dismissed. This is not merely about being heard, but about being taken seriously—about being counted as a will worthy of recognition.

This is why the hysteric’s discourse is dangerous to systems of power. It does not merely complain—it demands that the master justify himself. It is subversive, not because it breaks the rules, but because it insists that rules must explain themselves. It exposes the fact that authority is not self-grounding—it requires the complicity of those who accept it. And when that complicity is withdrawn, when someone dares to ask “Says who?”, the symbolic begins to crack.

In sum, the first degree of acceptance or rejection is where the subject speaks—and is spoken back to. It is the battleground of reason, rhetoric, and recognition. It stages a confrontation of wills, mediated by the symbolic, destabilized by desire, and haunted by the possibility that no one, in the end, can say for certain who is right.

2. The Second Degree: Moral Authority and the Machinery of Normalization

After the body has spoken without words, and after the subject has entered discourse to assert its will, there comes a more chilling verdict: “You are normal” or “You are abnormal.” This is not an opinion. It is not a disagreement among equals. It is a judgment—uttered not from beside you, but from above you. With these words, the second degree of acceptance or rejection announces itself: the level of authority, where the subject is no longer simply right or wrong, but is measured against the totalizing gaze of a moral norm.

This is the domain of the Master’s discourse, where the authority does not need to argue, does not need to desire, does not even need to understand. It declares. It names what is valid and invalid, included and excluded, acceptable and unfit. The sentence “You are abnormal” carries with it the full weight of symbolic power—not just a denial of one’s claim, but a delegitimization of one’s being.

In Lacan’s formulation, the Master’s discourse is the regime where the master signifier (S₁) speaks first and grounds the entire structure. It does not explain itself; it does not justify. It imposes. It names a truth that is not negotiated but installed. And with this installation, it creates the Other—the one who does not belong, the deviant, the one who must be normalized or eliminated. This act is not merely descriptive—it is prescriptive: it constructs reality according to a moral hierarchy, and commands that reality to conform.

What is at stake here is not individual disagreement but systemic validation. Normalization, in this context, is not the identification of a statistical average—it is the moral consecration of a way of life, declared to be universal, inevitable, and righteous. And yet, this universality is always a lie, always defended through layers of denial. The “normal” position does not recognize itself as a position—it claims to be reality itself.

But reality, when constructed through normalization, becomes a moral bomb. Why? Because the more normalization insists on its universality, the more it must disavow the existence of alternatives. Every difference becomes a threat, every deviation a pathology, every marginal voice a symptom to be corrected or silenced. This creates a positive feedback loop: the more the authority denies the legitimacy of the abnormal, the more it must amplify its assertion of what is normal. The bomb is armed, and the more it is denied, the more it is ready to explode.

This is not a passive exclusion. It is active confrontation. The authority must confront its other because that other exposes the arbitrary nature of the supposed norm. The mere existence of an “abnormal” subject is enough to destabilize the symbolic fiction of universality. And so, the authority must either assimilate that other—by forcing it into normalcy—or destroy it, by marking it as illegitimate beyond repair. In either case, the systematization of authority depends on this confrontation, this forced reckoning with what cannot be integrated.

Here, the second degree of expectation comes into focus. Unlike the first degree, which presumes a shared discursive space between willing subjects, the second degree presumes a vertical relationship between a legitimized authority and a questioned other. The expectation is not that we speak as equals, but that the other conforms to the standard already imposed. Acceptance becomes conditional: one is accepted as normal only if one submits to the normative framework. Rejection, conversely, is not a rebuttal—it is an expulsion.

What makes this structure so dangerous is that its power is not just political or institutional—it is moral. It does not merely say, “You are not one of us.” It says, “You shouldn’t be.” That is the horror of the Master’s discourse: it justifies violence through virtue. Its superiority is not loud—it is self-evident, which is why it is so rarely questioned and so often obeyed.

And thus, normalization functions as a machine. It builds a world in its image, while denying that it is an image at all. It declares certain lifestyles, bodies, and ways of speaking as self-evidently valid, while branding others as errors to be corrected. But beneath the moral clarity, there is panic. For every “abnormal” life that resists correction is a crack in the mirror the Master holds up to itself.

The second degree of acceptance or rejection is the axis of power where judgment becomes law, and law disguises itself as truth. It is where the Other is not just misunderstood, but condemned. It is here that the moral bomb is armed: ticking silently beneath the surface of every smug assertion of normalcy, every quiet dismissal of the strange, every official smile that conceals the will to erase.

And when it explodes, it reveals what the Master most fears: that its authority was never natural, only normalized.

3. The Third Degree: Statistical Objectivity and the Systemic Gaze

There is a moment when the Master’s voice grows silent—not because it has been defeated, but because it no longer needs to speak. Its declarations have already been encoded into procedures, translated into data, encrypted in protocols. The judgment no longer shouts, “You are normal!” It now whispers through charts and graphs, “You are typical,” or worse, “You are atypical.” This is the third degree of acceptance or rejection, the coldest and most insidious level: the level of the system.

Here, we are not judged by visceral reactions (zeroth degree), nor by discursive confrontation (first degree), nor by moral normalization (second degree), but by algorithmic correlation, by quantitative deviance, by our position on a curve. This is not personal. This is not emotional. It is objective, statistical, scientific. And that is precisely what makes it lethal.

This is the terrain of the University discourse, Lacan’s fourth structure of discourse, where knowledge (S₂) speaks, and the subject ($) is reduced to an index, a case, a data point. The discourse of the University hides its power behind the pretense of neutrality. Unlike the Master’s discourse, which openly commands, the University discourse presents itself as innocent, as if it merely reports what the numbers say. But Lacan is clear: this knowledge is never innocent. It is always in the service of a structure, a system, a symbolic order that already knows what it wants to find.

At this level, the very words used to define us—“normal,” “dominant,” “expected”—are evacuated of their moral content and reintroduced as statistical categories, as if the normative violence they once carried has now been dissolved into mathematics. But this is doublespeak. These terms have not lost their normative force; they have simply disguised it. Their judgments now masquerade as descriptions of reality, even as they produce and enforce it.

The system no longer needs to say, “You are wrong.” It only needs to say, “You are an outlier.”

This is where the logic of impairment emerges. To be atypical is to be marked—not because you broke a rule, but because your body, your behavior, your pattern does not conform to the expectations of the model. These models, of course, are built from past data, which encode the very biases, exclusions, and dominations that earlier degrees have already established. The system counts bodies, but it counts them according to a predefined schema. The statistical “objectivity” merely recirculates past injustices under a new name.

This is the third degree of expectation: the system’s silent presupposition of conformity. You are expected to be predictable, legible, and classifiable. Your deviation becomes a disruption—not because it is morally wrong, but because it is anomalous. And so you are diagnosed, monitored, “assisted,” or discarded—not out of malice, but out of efficiency.

Crucially, this entire process is organized around the gaze—not of an explicit judge, but of an innocent bystander, a third party whose perspective is invoked to justify the system’s actions. The logic says: “This isn’t about us. It’s about what any neutral observer would conclude.” But there is no neutral gaze. The third party is a phantom—a stand-in for hegemony, pretending to be impartial. And thus, the hegemonic force of the system is not wielded through direct violence, but through statistical objectification, the kind that leaves no fingerprints.

What makes this structure devastating is that it conceals its own origins. It mobilizes the moral bomb of normalization—constructed in the Master’s discourse—but buries the fuse under layers of data and terminology. It crushes difference not through the voice of a tyrant, but through the weight of numbers. The system doesn’t argue. It doesn’t punish. It merely sorts.

And yet, this sorting has consequences more violent than any single rejection. It removes subjects from the field of speech. It disables desire. It forecloses the possibility of recognition, not because you were found unworthy, but because you were never seen in the first place. You were a deviation—too rare to be meaningful, too strange to be real.

In the end, the third degree of acceptance or rejection is not about inclusion or exclusion—it is about visibility within a regime of knowledge that has already decided what counts. You are either typical—therefore valid—or atypical—therefore problematic. And this distinction, under the guise of objectivity, reactivates all the moral violence of the second degree, but now without a target, without a voice, without an author. It is the Master’s discourse without the Master, turned into code.

This is the coldest cut of all: when the system tells you that you don’t belong, not because you did something wrong, but because the numbers say so.

From Discourse to Practice: Societal Implications of the Four Degrees

The four degrees of acceptance and rejection do not merely describe isolated psychological or interpersonal dynamics. They map a deep structure of how power operates through language, desire, knowledge, and embodiment—each degree aligned with one of Lacan’s four discourses: the Analytic, the Hysteric, the Master, and the University. These discourses are not abstract categories; they are modes of organization that structure institutions, technologies, ideologies, and social practices. Together, they constitute a machinery that decides which bodies can speak, which desires can circulate, which authorities can rule, and which systems can claim objectivity. This final section draws the consequences of the four degrees into the field of practice.

At the zeroth degree, the context of being governs inclusion and exclusion at the level of embodied presence. This is the pre-discursive sorting of legitimacy based on affective impressions and socially charged reactions—who “feels right,” who makes others flinch, who “looks like” they belong. In everyday life, this structure animates aesthetic hierarchies, implicit bias, microaggressions, and political correctness wars. But beneath these frictions lies a core mechanism: the body as objet a, interpreted and misinterpreted within a symbolic space where transference governs who gets heard and who gets dismissed as noise. Psychoanalytic practice—especially in the analytic discourse—opens this structure to awareness, but society rarely does. Instead, the default is silencing through embodied judgment.

At the first degree, legitimacy is fought over through the assertion of will in speech: “You are right” or “You are wrong.” Here, acceptance or rejection depends on whether one’s desire is recognized in discourse, or invalidated as error, delusion, or madness. This is the site of debates, protests, activism, and everyday arguments, but also of ideological warfare, where truth is claimed through identification with larger wills—“The People,” “The Movement,” “The Revolution.” The structure is hysterical in Lacan’s sense: the subject demands the truth of the Master, and thereby reveals the instability of the Master’s legitimacy. But the hysteric’s discourse is double-edged: it enables resistance, but it also risks being captured by the authority it questions. Desire may disrupt, but it can also be co-opted. The battlefield of speech is never safe.

At the second degree, the discourse of the Master enters full force. Now it is no longer about arguments, but about declarations: “You are normal,” “You are abnormal.” This is the regime of moral authority, of state-sanctioned truths, of institutional hierarchies, where lifestyles and identities are validated or pathologized. Schools, clinics, courts, religious institutions—these are the factories of normalization, manufacturing legitimacy through repetition and exclusion. The moral bomb is always ticking here: every act of normalization is also an act of denial, and denial breeds resentment, rupture, and revolt. The feedback loop becomes vicious. The more normalcy is asserted, the more it must erase that which threatens its hegemony. This is not a stable authority—it is a desperate one, sustained by confrontation with its Other.

Finally, at the third degree, the bomb does not explode—it is quietly buried in spreadsheets, diagnostic manuals, data science models, and bureaucratic reports. The University discourse reigns. This is the world of big data, standardized testing, algorithmic sorting, demographic profiling, and risk assessment tools. Here, acceptance or rejection is not spoken by a person—it is produced by a system. “You are typical,” “You are atypical”—these verdicts are delivered without anger, without passion, without anyone to blame. And this is precisely the horror: the disappearance of the judge behind the machine. No one decides, yet everyone is categorized. Numbers speak, and power listens. The moral bomb is detonated silently, without anyone noticing.

Across these degrees, the subject is progressively erased. From a body that is judged without speaking, to a will that speaks and is judged, to a representation that is normalized or rejected, to a statistical outlier to be flagged or forgotten—this is not a linear progression of development, but a structural logic that undergirds modern life.

To resist this logic, we must learn to read these degrees as discourses, and to intervene at the level of structure. Not merely by shifting opinions or policies, but by exposing the conditions that produce acceptance and rejection in the first place. The Lacanian framework teaches that every structure has its point of contradiction, its point of impossibility. That is where the real begins—and where the possibility of transformation emerges.

And so, the question is not simply: How do we get accepted? Or: How do we avoid rejection?

The question is: How do we speak from the position that reveals the structure itself? That is the task of psychoanalysis—and perhaps also, the task of politics.

Conclusion: Rethinking Legitimacy Through Lacanian Structure

Lacan’s axiom—a signifier represents the subject for another signifier—defines more than the workings of language. It reveals the recursive logic by which subjects are made and unmade through symbolic mediation. When we paraphrase this into an authority represents a will for a system, we are not merely translating psychoanalytic theory into political terms. We are laying bare the machinery through which acceptance and rejection operate—across the body, will, authority, and system—as four structural degrees of expectation.

Each degree corresponds to a discourse. Each discourse configures a different kind of relationship between subject, signifier, truth, and jouissance. And through this architecture, Lacan does not provide a moral map of good and evil—but a formal framework that tracks how legitimacy is constructed, distributed, and withdrawn.

At the zeroth degree, the subject is not yet speaking—it is felt, interpreted, judged in its mere presence. The objet a, the residue that cannot be symbolized, is here mistaken for a cause of legitimacy or illegitimacy. This is the logic of transference in the analytic discourse, where the analyst holds back from imposing truth, allowing the subject’s relation to the Other to unravel itself. But in society, this degree is rarely analytic—it is immediate exclusion, justified by context, aura, affect. The body becomes the first battlefield.

At the first degree, speech erupts. The subject demands to be heard, asserts a will, and enters the terrain of contestation. This is the moment of the hysteric’s discourse, where legitimacy becomes something to be fought for through desire and contradiction. Here, the subject questions the master, interrogates the rules, and in doing so, exposes the hidden contingency of the authority’s position. But speech is never free of misrecognition, and this is the risk: that the will to be “right” may be folded back into the very power it seeks to subvert.

The second degree arrives when the power that was questioned begins to speak with finality. “You are normal.” “You are not.” This is the voice of the Master’s discourse, which does not argue, but declares—constructing truth through authority, stabilizing identity through exclusion. Here, legitimacy becomes moral law. But this authority is never pure; it survives only through confrontation with its Other. The more it denies the abnormal, the more it depends on the figure of that abnormality to reassert its dominance. This is the circuit of the moral bomb—a feedback loop that escalates with every attempt to suppress contradiction.

Finally, the third degree converts judgment into data. Authority vanishes into systems. The University discourse emerges, no longer issuing decrees, but calculating expectations. Now the subject is not told they are wrong, but shown to be atypical. The violence is diffused, the rejection rationalized. Numbers replace norms—but the old structures persist under statistical veils. The system no longer needs to shout. It only needs to count.

And so, across these four degrees, we trace the full trajectory of symbolic rejection—from the unspoken to the spoken, from the spoken to the moral, and from the moral to the systemic. This structure is not linear. These degrees coexist, interlock, and reproduce each other. The visceral rejection of the zeroth degree fuels the discourse of normalization. The failures of communication in the first degree justify the turn to authoritarian stability. The moral force of the second degree migrates into the faceless objectivity of the third.

The question, then, is not how to escape these degrees, but how to traverse them, how to locate the points where discourse reveals its failure—its impossibility. Lacan teaches us that the subject is not the master of its speech; it is divided, barred, incomplete. But it is precisely in this division that the possibility of truth emerges. Not as correspondence, but as rupture.

To rethink legitimacy in Lacanian terms is to shift the focus from who is accepted or rejected, to how these decisions are structured, staged, and sustained. It is to recognize that every authority that represents a will for a system does so by excluding a body, by disavowing an excess it cannot absorb.

That excess—objet a—never disappears. It returns at each level, as anxiety, as interruption, as noise in the system. It is what remains when the subject is excluded, when the will is misrecognized, when the authority is obeyed, when the system has finished counting.

It is the remainder that cannot be rejected because it was never accepted to begin with.

And so, the subject persists. In silence. In contradiction. In excess.
The only question is:
From which discourse do you speak?