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In 1990, Jean Baudrillard argued that children’s cunning and seductive power were total. In 1977, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari signed a petition demanding the release of adults prosecuted for sexual acts involving children. The 2026 cover of a Lacan seminar prepared for publication by Jacques-Alain Miller featured a painting by Balthus that exposed the child model’s underwear and a red stain on it. In these distinct interventions, children were attributed seductive power, sexual autonomy, or value as visual representations, while adults’ words, desires, and institutional authority became decisive.

This historical problem found its material counterpart in the child sexual abuse network that Jeffrey Epstein organized through wealth and elite connections. Epstein maintained powerful relationships even after his conviction for a sexual offense, using private properties, travel opportunities, academic connections, and social prestige. Jack Lang’s subsequent connections to Epstein established a personal continuity between two periods, beginning with his signature on the 1977 petition. Noam Chomsky’s expression of his fantasy about Epstein’s Caribbean island in 2016, followed by his advice to Epstein on handling media pressure in 2019, showed how a critique of capitalism and a personal investment in privilege could converge in the same intellectual. Slavoj Žižek’s description of this network as Communism for the elite in 2026 raised the question of how capitalist crime could be retold through the very signifiers of anticapitalist thought.

The same power relations also operate in the protection of children and the economy of visual exposure. In the NÇ case in Mardin, a child was victimized again throughout a prolonged trial following sexual abuse by adults. The missing-person notice concerning ZÇ in 2021 and reports about an adult-content platform in 2025 showed how a problem of protection originating in childhood could reemerge through relations involving adulthood, livelihood, and digital visibility. Social media companies manage the systems that determine the circulation, reach, and economic value of images that people produce of themselves. An activity presented as an individual’s freedom can expand the scope of action available to other people and institutions.

The conceptual history of these relations contains three important tools inherited from Freud and Lacan. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the line of flight describes escape, Baudrillard’s hyperreal describes hyperreality, and Jacques-Alain Miller’s concept of suture describes suturing. The line of flight makes it possible to explain an exit from domination, the hyperreal makes it possible to explain the production of reality through images and models, and suture makes it possible to explain the representation of lack in discourse. Yet movement can serve military occupation, images can serve economic exploitation, and theoretical authority can serve the reproduction of its own institution.

Within the Lacanian development of suture, the distinction between symbolic suture and real suture explains how authorization and embodiment combine. The critique of hyperreality investigates how this combination is reproduced in the economy of visual exposure. The relationship between the line of flight and perspective geometry makes it possible to test a single viewpoint’s image of freedom against the mathematical relationships between different positions. Developed from Karl Marx’s critique of religion, the concept of hypocritique explains how a subject who speaks against domination can maintain their own prestige, income, and fantasmatic satisfaction within that same domination.

Rescuing these three concepts requires examining the theoretical interventions and political actions of the thinkers who developed them within the same material history.

Freud’s Discovery, Reality, and Fantasy

Sigmund Freud challenged the understanding of human behavior in terms of conscious decisions by investigating repressed desires and conflicts. Conflicts could arise between what a person said and did, and between what they consciously wanted and what they repeatedly enacted. Repression explained the unconscious operation of a thought that the subject found difficult to accept; repetition compulsion explained why painful experiences could be reproduced.

In Freud’s early research, sexual interventions carried out by adults during childhood occupied a decisive place. Later, the question of how childhood experience was represented in the unconscious and related to fantasy came to the fore. In a letter to Wilhelm Fließ dated September 21, 1897, Freud explained his theoretical transformation in these words:

Ich glaube an meine Neurotica nicht mehr

[I no longer believe in my theory of neurosis.]

In the same letter, Freud argued that emotional investment in the unconscious could cause an experienced event and a fantasy to become confused with one another. This transformation gave a new direction to the investigation of psychical reality in psychoanalysis. It also placed the problem of distinguishing the material reality of adults’ actions toward children from their unconscious representation at the center of psychoanalysis (🔗).

Freud’s concept of the death drive, developed in 1920, expanded this problem. Repetition was examined as an activity that could contradict a person’s pursuit of pleasure or preservation of their own life. A person could repeatedly enter relationships that harmed them, reenact destructive actions, and encounter drive processes operating against their conscious will.

In his 1924 work The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis (Der Realitätsverlust bei Neurose und Psychose), Freud used the phrase:

eine Flucht aus dem realen Leben

[An escape from real life.]

This phrase reveals the clinical dimension of escape. A subject who comes into conflict with reality may construct a fantasmatic solution and thereby continue the same conflict within another arrangement. In this sense, escape requires examining the person’s relations with others and their recurring behavior.

Jacques Lacan reworked Freud’s discovery of the unconscious through language, signifiers, and symbolic relations. Who a person is takes shape through the words by which they are addressed, the expectations they are called upon to meet, and the prohibitions they encounter. A signifier is an element that functions through its differential relations with other signifiers. Lacan’s concept of objet petit a designates the cause that sets desire in motion rather than the object that desire seeks to obtain.

On December 18, 1967, Lacan explained the relationship between fantasy and reality as follows:

La réalité, de ce fait, est commandée par le fantasme.

[Reality is thereby governed by fantasy.]

Fantasy organizes the value a person assigns to objects, the responses they expect from others, and how they perceive their own position. Freud’s concept of Besetzung (libidinal cathexis) helps explain the dimension of libidinal investment in this relationship. It thereby becomes possible to investigate the conflict between consciously held political views and the persons, institutions, and objects in which investment actually takes place.

Political petitions defending adults by invoking children’s consent, intellectual relationships that confer prestige on a person with a criminal record, and digital platforms on which people work to market their own images constitute different material arenas of this conflict.

French Freudo-Marxism developed from attempts to think Freud’s unconscious together with capitalist production and domination. Wilhelm Reich had established a relationship between sexual repression and social authority. Herbert Marcuse had shown how capitalist consumer society could manage pleasure and the experience of freedom. Lacan had explained the lack constitutive of desire, the subject’s position within the order of signifiers, and the operation of jouissance. Subsequent generations expanded certain elements of this inheritance while making others the targets of their own theories.

Deleuze’s Use of Freud Against Freud

Before attacking psychoanalysis, Gilles Deleuze worked extensively with Freud’s and Lacan’s concepts. In his 1967 book Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty (Présentation de Sacher-Masoch), he used Freud’s accounts of sadism, masochism, repetition, and the death drive. That same year, Lacan praised the book as one of the finest studies of masochism.

In Difference and Repetition (Différence et répétition, 1968), Deleuze reinterpreted repetition compulsion and the death drive within his own theory of difference. Lacan’s concepts of the phallus, symbolic object, displaced signifier, and objet a entered his discussion of the virtual object. Freud’s Rat Man case and Lacan’s study The Individual Myth of the Neurotic (Le mythe individuel du névrosé) were among the principal clinical materials used to explain repetition.

On December 21, 1971, Deleuze praised Lacan’s study of the Rat Man while emphasizing the connection between the case’s debt relations, social classes, and economic investments. He criticized Freud for relating the contrasts between wealth and poverty in the Rat Man and Wolf Man cases to familial conflicts. He wanted a person’s feelings toward their father, mother, or family to be considered together with that person’s economic dependence and social position.

This intervention had a concrete basis. When a woman’s psychoanalytic treatment was paid for by her husband, the economic conditions of the analytic relationship were directly dependent on the distribution of money and authority within the family. Deleuze began examining the clinical relationship itself as part of capitalist circulation.

Anti-Oedipus (L’Anti-Œdipe), published with Félix Guattari in 1972, transformed this critique into a comprehensive theory:

La grande découverte de la psychanalyse fut celle de la production désirante.

[The great discovery of psychoanalysis was the discovery of desiring-production.]

According to Deleuze and Guattari, Freud discovered the productive power of unconscious desire and subsequently restricted that productivity through Oedipus, the family, and castration. Oedipus meant placing the child’s desire within the triangular relationship among mother, father, and child. Desiring-production, by contrast, described the unconscious as capable of investing directly in social classes, institutions, objects, and processes of production.

In his lecture of February 15, 1972, Deleuze brought Lacan’s concept of objet a into this new arrangement:

l’objet (a), c’est finalement un élément machinique

[Object (a) is ultimately a machinic element.]

He then acknowledged Lacan’s precedence in the critique of Oedipus:

Le premier à l’avoir dit, c’est Lacan.

[Lacan was the first to say it.]

Deleuze’s conclusion was that the critique initiated by Lacan had to be extended to castration and the death drive. He called these three concepts:

les trois formes de la mystification pure

[The three forms of pure mystification.]

He argued that psychoanalysis introduced them into the patient’s experience:

c’est la psychanalyse qui vous injecte tout ça

[It is psychoanalysis that injects all of this into you.]

Here Deleuze modeled his argument on Marx’s critique of political economy. He described how Adam Smith and David Ricardo discovered wealth as a general activity of production and then tied it to the conditions of private property. He argued that Freud similarly discovered libido as a general activity of desiring and tied it to the modern family:

Freud, c’est Ricardo, c’est Smith.

[Freud is Ricardo, he is Smith.]

The Freudian discovery thus became evidence used to condemn Freudian theory. According to Deleuze, psychoanalysis bound the social production of desire back to the family and thereby perpetuated the capitalist process of renewed alienation. The objet a inherited from Lacan, meanwhile, became an element of machinic production (🔗).

In an interview published that same year, Deleuze acknowledged that both he and Guattari owed a great deal to Lacan. He also explained that they had moved away from the concepts of structure, the symbolic order, and the signifier. Their theoretical collaboration constituted a rupture developed from within Lacan’s thought.

The debate over the death drive exposed the limit of this rupture. Confronted with the objection that desiring-machines could produce deadly consequences, Deleuze reacted:

C’est terrible ça!

[That’s terrible!]

He thought that reintroducing the death drive would mean returning to Oedipus. The problem of the destructiveness of desiring-production had become an issue that threatened the foundations of his own theory.

This debate marks the beginning of the subsequent history of the line of flight. Desire’s departure from familial and institutional limits also means a transformation of its relations with other people. The conditions under which movement becomes productive or deadly were therefore questions that had to be investigated using Deleuze’s own concepts.

Guattari’s Machine and the Authority of the Psychoanalytic Institution

Félix Guattari was a psychoanalytic thinker who emerged from Lacan’s circle. His letter to Lacan dated December 8, 1961, shows that he was working on problems of the signifier and identification in the seminar Identification (L’identification). On January 31, 1968, he spoke during a session of The Psychoanalytic Act (L’acte psychanalytique) attended by Lacan and criticized the members of the École freudienne for their habit of repeating Lacan’s words.

Guattari’s concern was how the teacher’s authority restricted the students’ capacity to produce new concepts. In his 1969 work Machine and Structure (Machine et structure), he described Lacan’s concept of objet a as an element intervening within structure:

à la façon d’une machine infernale

[In the manner of an infernal machine.]

This transformation opened a struggle between explaining the unconscious through the lack within a fixed structure and explaining it through machinic processes that generate new connections and interventions within structure.

Guattari’s work at the La Borde clinic was the institutional application of this thinking. Institutional psychotherapy aimed to reorganize treatment by changing relations between patients and staff, as well as the institution’s own hierarchy. Transversality (transversalité) described the establishment of new relations of communication and intervention between closed groups.

Anti-Oedipus, published in 1972, reinterpreted Freud’s Rat Man, Wolf Man, Little Hans, and Schreber cases through this machinic understanding. Children’s desires were connected not only to family members but also to social classes, productive activities, and institutions. Deleuze’s argument of December 21, 1971, that the child’s libidinal investment was directed immediately toward the social field was an early expression of this shared theory.

The critique of family authority consequently expanded. This development also sharpened the question of which political demands would govern the material relations of dependence between children and adults. Publications from 1976 to 1979 and the petitions of 1977 brought this question directly into children’s lives.

1977: The Child’s Consent Becomes the Adult’s Criminal Defense

On January 26, 1977, a petition titled À propos d’un procès [Concerning a Trial], published in Le Monde, demanded the release of three adults named Bernard Dejager, Jean-Claude Gallien, and Jean Burckhardt. The defendants were accused of engaging in sexual acts with children under fifteen and photographing the children’s sexual behavior. They had been arrested in the autumn of 1973 and had spent approximately three years in pretrial detention.

In describing the accusations, the petition used the phrase:

avoir eu des relations sexuelles avec ces mineurs

[Having had sexual relations with these minors.]

Yet when demanding the defendants’ release, it renamed the acts:

Trois ans de prison pour des caresses et des baisers, cela suffit.

[Three years in prison for caresses and kisses is enough.]

This change in wording was central to the political demand. The accusations concerning sexual relations with children and the photographing of sexual behavior were drawn into the mitigating effect of the words caresses and kisses.

The petition asserted that the children had experienced no physical violence and had consented. It established a connection between the criminal responsibility of thirteen- and fourteen-year-old children and their capacity to consent to sexual relations with adults. The availability of contraceptive pills to thirteen-year-old girls was also invoked as an argument against punishing the defendants.

Alongside Deleuze and Guattari, Guy Hocquenghem, René Schérer, Jean-François Lyotard, Roland Barthes, François Regnault, and Jack Lang signed the first petition. The appeal received support within the broad intellectual and political circles of the time. The petition’s text and list of signatories are available in open archives (🔗).

On January 28, 1977, the Yvelines Assize Court sentenced the three defendants to five years’ imprisonment each, with the sentences suspended. The prosecution had sought six years’ imprisonment. The defendants were released in light of their previous period of detention.

A second appeal, published on May 23, 1977, carried the same issue into a demand to amend the criminal code. It called for the relaxation of provisions concerning sexual acts between adults and children under fifteen and for certain cases to be heard by courts carrying lighter penalties rather than assize courts. The same appeal also targeted provisions that imposed different age limits on homosexual relations involving persons between fifteen and eighteen.

The second petition’s signatories included Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida, Françoise Dolto, and Michel Foucault. Deleuze and Guattari also joined this appeal. Thinkers occupying different theoretical positions thus came together in a political intervention that linked children’s professed sexual autonomy to demands for reducing adults’ criminal responsibility.

The decisive operation is clear: consent attributed to the child was used to secure the adults’ release and change the conditions under which they were tried. Adults speaking about children’s developing sexual lives attempted, through their own political decisions, to alter the boundaries of adult responsibility toward children.

Michel Foucault’s activities during the same period extended this relationship into theoretical debate. The preface he wrote in 1977 for the English edition of Anti-Oedipus was titled:

An Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life

Foucault presented Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of desire as a political program against the penetration of power into people’s everyday behavior and desires (🔗).

That same year, in the interview Le jeu de Michel Foucault, he situated Freud’s psychoanalysis within an older apparatus of sexuality and power:

un dispositif général dans lequel Freud aura sa place

[A general apparatus within which Freud will have his place.]

This statement repositioned the foundational privilege attributed to Freud’s discovery of the unconscious within the historical apparatus of sexuality. Jacques-Alain Miller directly challenged this interpretation during the interview.

On April 4, 1978, Foucault, Hocquenghem, and the lawyer Jean Danet participated in a radio discussion titled La loi de la pudeur [The Law of Modesty]. The discussion addressed the state’s penal authority over sexuality, children’s consent, and the role of psychiatric expertise in law. The transcript was published in a 1979 issue of Recherches.

Foucault’s political intervention contributed to the reinterpretation of provisions protecting children through a critique of state control and psychiatric authority. The differences in age, experience, livelihood, and authority between children and adults thus came into direct confrontation with a discourse of liberation opposed to the regulation of sexuality.

Recherches: The Publishing History of the Discourse of Liberation

Recherches, published by the CERFI circle with which Guattari was associated, was one of the important institutions of theoretical and political activity during this period. The journal published texts criticizing psychoanalysis, the family, sexuality, and social institutions.

The 1976 issue Co-ire: Album systématique de l’enfance was prepared by René Schérer and Guy Hocquenghem. It addressed child abduction, incest, adults’ erotic fantasies involving children, and the adult male character in the novel Lolita. The child’s liberation from the family was presented as a project opposed to adult authority, while the journal also provided a publishing platform for adults’ sexual desires directed toward children.

Françoise Collin identified the adult interest at the center of the issue in a critique published that same year. In her review in Les Cahiers du GRIF, she used the expression:

Les hommes et les enfants d’abord.

[Men and children first.]

Collin showed how the call for liberation could remove children from family authority while exposing them to the desires of other adult men. She focused particularly on children’s feeding, hygiene, illnesses, and everyday care. She asked whether adults who emphasized children’s erotic attractiveness would also undertake the demanding responsibilities of their care.

This intervention connected the protection of children to everyday care work, moving beyond an abstract debate about rights. Which of the activities necessary to sustain a child’s life were actually undertaken by the person speaking about the child’s freedom became a concrete criterion (🔗).

The 1979 issue Fous d’enfance: qui a peur des pédophiles? [Mad About Childhood: Who Is Afraid of Pedophiles?] provided a more direct platform for views defending sexual relations between adults and children. Guattari was among its contributors. Texts by Hocquenghem, Schérer, and Gabriel Matzneff also appeared within the same publishing circle.

Reviewing the issue in 1979, Nancy Huston observed that the experiences of adult men and boys were foregrounded, while the voices of women and girls were relegated to the background. She showed how the discourse of children’s liberation centered the sexual experiences and demands of adult men (🔗).

The journal’s later editorial management withdrew the 1976 and 1979 issues from circulation. The history of this publishing circle provides direct evidence for examining the responsibilities generated by institutional claims of liberation.

In his 1983 interview La psychanalyse doit être en prise directe avec la vie [Psychoanalysis Must Be Directly Engaged with Life], Guattari described how the Lacanian structuralist circle had turned psychoanalysis:

en culte

[Into a cult.]

and theory:

une sorte de théologie

[Into a kind of theology.]

He criticized Lacanian institutions for dogmatic authority, repetition, and intellectual arrogance. While respecting Freud’s creative power, he targeted the teaching activities of Freud’s successors.

Guattari’s own publishing history extends the institutional criteria of this accusation. The journal associated with a thinker who criticized Lacanian authority had published arguments defending sexual relations between children and adults. Moreover, women thinkers of the period had already openly criticized these publications for centering adult male interests.

The same circle also debated the relationship between libidinal economy and capitalist production. In a lecture on January 4, 1973, Lyotard expressed the union of enjoyment and productive activity as follows:

lorsqu’il jouit, en même temps, il produit

[When he enjoys, he produces at the same time.]

This statement joined jouissance to production. Hocquenghem’s proposal in Homosexual Desire (Le désir homosexuel) to replace the phallic order with other forms of collective libidinal investment, and Jean-Joseph Goux’s interpretation of the phallus as a general equivalent like money, were further examples of the period’s reconceptualization of desire in economic terms.

These developments raised the question of how the productive capacity and value of freedom attributed to desire could merge with capitalism’s own activities of circulation. Baudrillard’s critique became decisive at precisely this point.

Baudrillard: From Freudian Fetishism to Hyperreality

Jean Baudrillard initially drew on Freud’s concepts to explain capitalist consumption. In his 1968 book The System of Objects (Le système des objets), he examined objects such as automobiles, collections, pens, and technological devices. He demonstrated that objects could serve functions of narcissistic wholeness, possession, and symbolic power alongside their practical uses.

One of his statements clearly expressed the phallic meaning of the consumer object:

On ne prête pas son phallus.

[One does not lend one’s phallus.]

When an object became attached to its owner’s personal wholeness or experience of superiority, it became more than an ordinary instrument of use. Collecting could be linked to possession and repetition, technological devices to phallic substitution, and consumption to narcissistic investment.

In his 1970 work Fétichisme et idéologie [Fetishism and Ideology], Baudrillard explained the relationship between capitalist body culture and the Freudian unconscious:

Le Corps est là pour liquider l’Inconscient et son travail.

[The Body is there to liquidate the Unconscious and its work.]

The ideal body of advertising and consumer culture replaced conflicts involving repression and castration with signs of success, freedom, health, and happiness. Rather than serving as a field for investigating a person’s unconscious conflicts, the body became a bearer of values organized by capitalist consumption.

In his 1976 book Symbolic Exchange and Death (L’Échange symbolique et la mort), Baudrillard described the function of the Lacanian phallus in the capitalist order of erotic value as:

Phallus exchange standard

Clothing, jewelry, makeup, and erotic signs could be evaluated through this general equivalent.

In the same book, Baudrillard turned Freud’s death drive against Freud’s other concepts:

Freud contre Freud

[Freud against Freud.]

He located the radical character of the death drive in overcoming Freud’s explanations of libidinal economy, the psychical apparatus, repression, and energy. He wanted the concept to be used directly:

contre Freud lui-même et contre la psychanalyse

[Against Freud himself and against psychoanalysis.]

While Deleuze rejected the death drive as mystification, Baudrillard turned it into a principle through which the Freudian system could destroy itself. The two thinkers intervened in Freud’s work differently, but both reconstructed the relationships between death, repetition, repression, and the unconscious.

Baudrillard’s critique of Deleuze and Lyotard was especially important. Capitalism was already dissolving flows, circulating energies, establishing new connections, and accelerating production. Fluidity, connection, and continuous movement were therefore also activities of the capitalist social order.

This observation required the relationship between the line of flight and freedom to be tested. The flexibility and continuous adaptation demanded by capitalism could also be described in the language of revolutionary movement.

From 1977 onward, Baudrillard increasingly emphasized the concepts of simulation and code. In his 1979 book Seduction (De la séduction), he evaluated Freud’s 1897 transformation as the founding betrayal of psychoanalysis:

l’imposture originelle de Freud lui-même, celle de la forclusion de la forme/séduction au profit d’une science qui n’en est même pas une.

[Freud’s own original imposture: the foreclosure of the form of seduction in favor of a science that is not even a science.]

According to Baudrillard, Freud had neutralized the symbolic power of seduction by incorporating it into his theory of unconscious fantasy and sexuality. Lacan had brought seduction back through relations between signifiers, only to bind it to the authority of symbolic law.

Baudrillard therefore wrote:

La séduction lacanienne est certainement une imposture.

[Lacanian seduction is certainly an imposture.]

He called Freud un Grand Reniement [a Great Renunciation] and Lacan un Grand Imposteur [a Great Impostor]. Freudian fantasy and Lacanian symbolic law became targets of a new theory claiming to explain the reversible power of seduction.

This transformation had serious consequences for Baudrillard’s statements about victims and children. In interpreting Kierkegaard’s character Cordélia, Baudrillard treated the young woman’s beauty and attractiveness as what set the adult man’s initiative in motion:

Et la victime, elle, ne peut se flatter d’être innocente.

[And the victim, for her part, cannot flatter herself that she is innocent.]

In a 1979 interview with Le Monde, he used the expression:

la soi-disant victime

[The so-called victim.]

He argued that the victim could reverse the relationship of seduction. The adult’s action could thus be reinterpreted through the young person’s symbolic power and attractiveness.

In his 1983 book Fatal Strategies (Les Stratégies fatales), the child’s apparent powerlessness before the adult was interpreted as strategic superiority. The child was positioned as an actor capable of exploiting the adult’s belief in the child’s powerlessness.

This thinking became more explicit in his 1990 book The Transparency of Evil (La Transparence du mal):

Leur ruse (et leur séduction) est totale.

[Their cunning (and their seductiveness) is total.]

Baudrillard argued that children made adults believe in their childhood, while themselves maintaining a particular relationship to the position of childhood defined by adults. Children’s dependence was reinterpreted as the condition of a seductive and strategic power over adults. This passage appears on pages 173–174 of the section La Déclinaison des Volontés (🔗).

In his 1995 article Le continent noir de l’enfance [The Dark Continent of Childhood], Baudrillard also criticized the language of children’s rights as a means by which adults imposed their own developmental and legal categories on childhood.

The critique of capitalism that began with Freudian fetishism thus developed into a theory of seduction that foregrounded the child’s symbolic power in explaining the adult’s actions. Within the theory, the child’s material powerlessness was transformed into a position of strategic superiority over the adult.

Baudrillard’s concept of the hyperreal, developed in his 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation (Simulacres et simulation), was the theory of reality belonging to this same intellectual history:

la génération par les modèles d’un réel sans origine ni réalité : hyperréel

[The generation, through models, of a real without origin or reality: the hyperreal.]

The hyperreal described more than images misleading people’s perceptions: it described the production of the ways in which reality is experienced through models and codes. Advertising, consumption, media, status, and institutional recognition organized which objects people valued and which forms of life they desired.

This concept had considerable power as a critique of capitalism. At the same time, when the model became a system explaining everything, it created the danger that the difference in power between a concrete perpetrator and victim would be subordinated to symbolic reversibility.

The 2026 study A Historical Retrospective from Third-Generation Freudo-Marxism examines Baudrillard’s movement from the consumer object to the sign, and from the critique of production to simulation, from this perspective. Baudrillard’s hyperreal explains the production of reality through capitalist codes while also raising the question of how those same codes become the theory’s own criterion of reality (🔗).

Rescuing the hyperreal depends on investigating whose life a given model organizes and which material institutions operate that model.

As the Line of Flight Becomes a Line of Death and a Military Movement

The relationship between Deleuze’s rejection of the death drive and his subsequent explanations of the line of flight gave another direction to the investigation of capitalist movement and destructiveness.

In his lecture of May 27, 1980, Deleuze acknowledged that a line of flight could become a:

ligne d’abolition, de destruction

[Line of abolition, of destruction.]

He associated fascism with processes that sought the deaths of others and the person’s own death. In distinguishing clinical schizophrenia from the schizophrenic process, he connected illness to the destructive consequences of a process the person could no longer sustain.

He defined death as follows:

Pour moi la mort, c’est l’interruption d’un processus.

[For me, death is the interruption of a process.]

Thus, the destructiveness debated through the death drive in 1972 reappeared in 1980 as a danger inherent in the line of flight itself. Deleuze explained the deadly outcome of movement through the concepts of process, interruption, and the line of destruction (🔗).

In 1990, when recounting his encounter with Guattari, he openly acknowledged their shared history of rupture by saying that Guattari had enabled him to escape psychoanalysis.

The subsequent military use of the line of flight revealed a direct material counterpart to this theoretical problem.

Eyal Weizman’s 2006 study Walking Through Walls documents how, during its 2002 operations in Nablus, the Israeli military advanced by breaking through the walls, ceilings, and floors of houses rather than moving along streets. The military theorist Shimon Naveh explained that concepts from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (Mille plateaux) had become instrumental in military planning.

The concepts of smooth and striated space, the war machine, and the crossing of spatial boundaries were used in particular to organize troop movements (🔗).

The same action produced two different material outcomes. The soldier increased his freedom of movement by passing through buildings. The person living in the house experienced the transformation of their living space into a military transit route.

Here the line of flight combined the moving person’s freedom with the authority to intervene in other people’s spaces. The danger of the line of destruction described by Deleuze in 1980 could be compared with the concrete organization of military movement in 2002.

Capitalism’s presentation of movement, flexibility, and connection as freedom, and the military’s use of crossing boundaries as a tactical advantage, can be subjected to the same criterion: Whose possibilities does movement expand, and whose living conditions does it change?

Miller’s Lacanian Fidelity and Editorial Power

Jacques-Alain Miller’s relationship with Freud and Lacan developed differently from the ruptures undertaken by Deleuze, Guattari, and Baudrillard. Miller assumed authority over transmitting Lacan’s teaching and preparing it for publication. He consequently occupied a decisive position in determining which words would be used to transcribe Lacan’s spoken seminars, how they would be divided into sections, and which explanations would accompany them to readers.

Miller’s 1965 study Suture (La suture) was an early conceptual stage in this history. Using Frege’s logic concerning the constitution of numbers, he explained the subject’s position of lack within the chain of signifiers. The subject absent from discourse was represented through a signifier standing in for that lack.

On May 26, 1965, Serge Leclaire described the analyst’s position in the face of theoretical closure as:

un qui se refuse à suturer

[One who refuses to suture.]

In his reply on June 2, Miller maintained that this objection had been:

déjà anticipé et même contenu par avance

[Already anticipated and even contained in advance.]

within his own theory.

The conflict concerned how a theory determined its own limits. In Miller’s explanation, the analyst’s objection to closure became an element demonstrating the theory’s comprehensiveness.

Miller’s preparation of Lacan’s seminars for publication from the 1970s onward brought this problem back to the material text. The hesitations, repetitions, corrections, and word choices of oral lectures were transformed into written teaching through editorial interventions.

Jean Allouch’s 2005 study On the Transcriptions of Lacan (Sur les transcriptions de Lacan) investigated the concrete results of these activities. In Lacan’s lecture of December 18, 1957, the word soi [self] appeared twelve times as ça [the Freudian id] in Miller’s edition.

A discussion of Hegelian selfhood and comedy was thereby reconstructed in the language of the Freudian psychical apparatus.

Miller’s statement:

Je décide du sens.

[I decide the meaning.]

directly revealed the theoretical scope of editorial authority. The choice of a single word determined how readers would understand the conceptual relationship Lacan had established (🔗).

Miller’s treatment of the farewell to the signifier under the title Adieu au signifiant [Farewell to the Signifier] in 1995 was part of his broader intervention in Lacan’s early teaching. Alongside statements proclaiming the death of interpretation, the place of language and the order of signifiers in Lacanian theory was reevaluated.

In his lecture The Very Last Lacan (Le tout dernier Lacan) on May 16, 2007, Miller considered Lacan’s statement:

j’ai déliré avec la linguistique

[I was delusional with linguistics.]

Asked where this delusion began, he answered:

ça commence avec l’inconscient structuré comme un langage

[It begins with the unconscious structured like a language.]

The best-known formula of Lacan’s early teaching was thus reconsidered through the statements of the later Lacan. In the same series of lectures, Miller recounted bringing mathematics books to Lacan and attempting to draw him back toward the symbolic order. He thereby made his own contribution to the logical orientation of the early Lacan part of the theoretical history (🔗).

In 2009, while discussing the concept of ordinary psychosis (psychose ordinaire), he described the production of a new clinical signifier:

j’ai inventé un signifiant

[I invented a signifier.]

He also stated his intention regarding its circulation:

Je voulais qu’il prenne de l’ampleur.

[I wanted it to gain momentum.]

Miller said that ordinary psychosis had been introduced without a definite method of use and that he intended it to attract different meanings among clinicians. He cited Lacan’s initiative of the passe as an example and explained that he expected the new designation to develop through clinical use (🔗).

This statement shows that the invention of a clinical signifier and its institutional circulation were organized within the same activity. The new word named a clinical problem while also creating a new field of teaching in which specialists could position themselves.

In 2012, Miller related the later Lacan’s concept of the Real to contemporary science and capitalism. In 2014, he recalled Lacan’s remark about the Freudian unconscious:

L’inconscient – drôle de mot !

[The unconscious—what a strange word!]

He linked the Lacanian critique of Freud’s term to the growing prominence of the concept of the parlêtre [speaking being]. A transition was advocated from the early Lacan’s unconscious structured like a language to another theoretical arrangement explained through the speaking body and jouissance.

Titles such as AME, conferred on analysts by Lacanian schools, provided institutional recognition of professional competence. Clinical designation, teaching, congresses, and professional authorization reinforced one another within the same institutions.

Miller’s transformation in 2022 of the phrase Tout le monde est fou [Everyone Is Mad] into the theme of the World Association of Psychoanalysis’s 2024 congress was a clear example of these activities. A phrase used by Lacan in a single text gained broad institutional circulation through Miller’s repetition and interpretation.

Miller acknowledged his intervention:

en le coupant de son contexte scripturaire

[By cutting it out of its written context.]

He assessed the resulting effect as follows:

j’ai sans doute favorisé un malentendu

[I probably contributed to a misunderstanding.]

The transformation of Lacan’s words into a congress title showed how an editorial decision could become part of an institution’s shared activities of teaching and recognition (🔗).

Symbolic Suture, Real Suture, and the Embodiment of Authority

The problem in Miller’s history can be explained more precisely through two distinct functions of suture.

The study Separating Authorization (Symbolic Suture) from Embodiment (Real Suture), dated February 28, 2020, develops Slavoj Žižek’s account of double suture in Sex and the Failed Absolute.

Symbolic suture describes authorization through S1. A person or institution assumes the right to speak and make decisions through a particular signifier. The ground of authorization is will; in Lacanian notation, this will is associated with the barred subject, $.

Real suture, meanwhile, describes embodiment through objet a. A symbolic order becomes visible through a concrete body, object, or event. The ground of embodiment is the system of knowledge and relations that produces and sustains this appearance; in Lacanian notation, this system is associated with S2.

When these two sutures fuse, authority and body are experienced as a single whole. A king’s personal body can be regarded as the natural bearer of royal authority. When the two sutures separate, the will underlying authority and the system supporting the body can be investigated independently.

Separation means detaching authority from its material support. This operation reveals which lack the authority conceals and which object confers prestige upon it (🔗).

The study Authorization and Embodiment in Fetish and Symptom, dated February 29, 2020, explains two consequences of this distinction. In the fetish, the body becomes the unquestioned support of authority. In the symptom, the embodied element makes its conflict with authority visible (🔗).

The study The Dialectic of Castration and Jouissance, dated September 8, 2020, develops the same relationship through castration and jouissance. S1 represents the symbolic operation that limits and authorizes the subject; objet a represents the embodiment of jouissance. When they combine, a fetishized relationship between authority and body can be established. When they separate, the symptom can emerge and the subject can question their own position (🔗).

This theory of double suture finds concrete counterparts in Miller’s activities.

The authority to publish Lacan’s seminars concerns symbolic suture. The words, front covers, and back covers of the published books embody that authority. While the invention of a clinical signifier opens new fields of speech and recognition, professional titles regulate the institutional effects of this field.

Allouch’s finding concerning soi/ça makes the distinction between symbolic authority and the material text visible. The meaning assigned by Miller and the word spoken by Lacan can be investigated separately. The analytic cut reveals the difference where these two elements have fused.

Double suture can also be applied to problems of childhood and social media.

The study The Mirror Stage and Social Media: Authorization and Embodiment, dated May 20, 2020, explains the child’s adoption of their own image in the mirror and the adult’s approval of that image as two separate operations.

As the child assumes their body in the mirror, they gain an experience of wholeness. The adult’s approval contributes to the child’s authorization through this image. Over time, the child may begin to distinguish the adult’s will from the system supporting their own body. This distinction is associated with the child’s acquisition of a new subjective position through their own thinking and desire.

On social media, these same two operations appear as the embodiment of the post and the authorizing effect of likes. A post becomes visible through the platform’s technical system. Likes, shares, and follower counts confer social value upon it. As these numbers grow, the actual wills supporting the post and the conditions of algorithmic distribution can become confused with one another (🔗).

In the 1977 petitions, the child’s autonomy was likewise authorized within adults’ political discourse. This authority was exercised through expressions that embodied the demand for the defendants’ release. The difference between the child’s actual life and the legal and political representation established on the child’s behalf by adults becomes available for analytic investigation.

The Representation of the Child’s Body in Psychoanalytic Publishing

Miller’s book covers provide concrete examples of authorization and embodiment in publishing.

The cover of Seminar IV: The Object Relation (Le Séminaire IV: La relation d’objet) used Goya’s painting Saturn Devouring One of His Sons (Saturno devorando a un hijo). The painting depicted the extreme bodily violence of the myth in which Saturn devours his children to preserve his power. The Prado’s art-historical study also discusses interpretations concerning the age and appearance of the dismembered figure; Goya’s composition transforms the mythological conflict between generations into a horrifying bodily scene (🔗).

In his 1993–1994 lectures, Miller assessed the painting’s power to attract attention in bookstore windows and its effect on sales while discussing its impact. The representation of extreme bodily violence was thus combined with the visual identity and marketing of a book about psychoanalytic object relations.

For Seminar VI: Desire and Its Interpretation (Le Séminaire VI: Le désir et son interprétation), published in 2013, he explained that he had selected Bronzino’s composition depicting Venus and Cupid together. The mythological representation of erotic intimacy between mother and son became the visual face of Lacan’s teaching about desire and interpretation.

The book’s back cover contained the following statement:

D’où l’éloge de la perversion qui termine le volume.

[Hence the praise of perversion that concludes the volume.]

Miller explicitly discussed this visual choice in his intervention at PIPOL 6 in 2013. The cover image and the concept of perversion on the back cover were brought together within the same published object (🔗).

In his 2015 lecture Toward Adolescence (En direction de l’adolescence), Miller welcomed psychologist Robert Epstein’s views that adolescents were socially prevented from behaving like adults. He also cited Lacan’s remarks on early sexual differentiation:

La petite fille fait la femme déjà très tôt.

[The little girl assumes the position of a woman at a very early age.]

He then used the expression:

l’immixtion de l’adulte dans l’enfant

[The intrusion of the adult into the child.]

The early emergence of an adult position within the child became part of his theoretical explanation of adolescence and sexual development (🔗).

In an interview published on November 16, 2023, Miller was asked about Christine Angot’s criticism of Catherine Breillat’s film Last Summer (L’Été dernier) and the adaptation of Vanessa Springora’s book Consent (Le Consentement). Angot criticized these works for aestheticizing incest and child sexual abuse.

In his response, Miller described Angot’s writing as cold and rigid like a mathematical theorem, while characterizing Springora’s writing as emotional and oriented toward the pursuit of beauty. He argued that Angot was concerned with the nakedness of facts and expelled the cult of beauty from literature. The question of responsibility in aesthetic representation was thereby answered through a comparison of the two writers’ narrative styles (🔗).

Published on January 23, 2026, Seminar, Book XIII: The Object of Psychoanalysis (Le Séminaire, livre XIII: L’objet de la psychanalyse) became another example in this visual and theoretical history. The cover of the book prepared by Miller featured Balthus’s 1938 painting Thérèse Dreaming (Thérèse rêvant).

The painting depicts Thérèse Blanchard, approximately twelve or thirteen years old, sitting with one leg raised. The position of her skirt exposes her underwear. The reddish-brown stain on the underwear was one of the painting’s details that had long received insufficient examination.

The 2018 study Art, Girls, and Aesthetic Freedom Down Below linked the interpretation of the stain as menstrual blood to the habitual ways of seeing within art history. Katherine Hauser’s study On (Not) Seeing Red: Balthus, Menstruation, and the Limits of Vision, published on March 24, 2026, also examined the stain as menstrual blood and investigated which bodily detail interpretations of the painting had overlooked (🔗).

The book consisted of Lacan’s 1965–1966 lectures on objet petit a, the gaze, the cause of desire, and representation. A painting exposing an intimate bodily detail of a child model was placed on the cover of a psychoanalytic book examining the object of the gaze.

The Italian study Lacan in Perspective (Lacan in prospettiva), dated March 25, 2026, separately discussed the importance Miller attached to cover selection and the relationship between the Balthus painting and the Lacanian problem of the gaze (🔗).

On the book’s back cover, Miller recounted Lacan’s debate with Foucault concerning Velázquez’s Las Meninas. He argued that Lacan ultimately established such theoretical superiority over Foucault that he could characterize Foucault’s understanding of the painting as:

n’avait compris que dalle

[Hadn’t understood a damn thing.]

The front cover contained the visual representation of a child’s body, while the back cover contained the story of intellectual superiority achieved through a theory of the gaze. The material object of the book embodied Miller’s editorial authority.

François Regnault’s signature on the 1977 petition also calls for investigating the political history of the Lacanian circle concerning children’s sexual consent alongside this publishing activity, within the same broad institutional milieu. Miller’s remarks on childhood and representation can be considered together with the historical issues he chose to address.

The theory of double suture becomes concrete here: The editor exercises authority over a work’s meaning and visual identity, while the book cover and published text become the embodied outcomes of that authority. The analytic cut separates authority from the object that bears it, revealing which body, word, and responsibility each choice intervenes in.

Epstein: The Material Network of Wealth, Prestige, and Intellectual Investment

Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal organization demonstrated the grave consequences of a private sphere of action established through wealth and prestige. Epstein organized the abuse of young girls through private properties, travel, intermediaries, and personal relationships. Even after his 2008 conviction for a sexual offense, he maintained relationships within elite circles.

Academic prestige and philanthropy could facilitate access to powerful institutions for someone with a criminal record. Donations to universities, contacts with scientists, and private invitations enabled wealth to generate intellectual recognition as well as economic power.

Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted in 2021 of offenses connected to procuring children for Epstein’s abuse. She was sentenced to twenty years in prison in 2022.

Jack Lang’s later relationships with Epstein created a concrete personal intersection between French intellectual circles and this elite network. Documents released in 2026 revealed the personal and financial relationships between the Lang family and Epstein. Caroline Lang’s offshore art company connected to Epstein also became an issue within these relationships.

Jack Lang resigned as president of the Arab World Institute in February 2026 following a financial investigation and public pressure. The investigation focused on financial relationships linked to Epstein and suspicious money transfers (🔗).

Lang’s political signature in 1977 and his later personal relationships provide a concrete chronology connecting the same individual’s activities across different periods. In the first instance, he made a political demand on behalf of adults prosecuted for sexual acts involving children. In the second, he developed relationships with the wealth and prestige network of a person convicted of offenses involving child sexual abuse.

Noam Chomsky’s correspondence reveals more directly the relationship between conscious criticism of capitalism and personal investment in elite privilege.

On July 9, 2016, he wrote to Epstein:

Valeria’s always keen on New York. I’m really fantasizing about the Caribbean island.

Chomsky expressed particular interest in the island in response to invitations concerning New York or the Caribbean. He added that he needed to think about how to make time for the visit amid his demanding commitments. The correspondence appears in document EFTA00658355, released by the US Department of Justice (🔗).

Freud’s concept of Besetzung (cathexis) explains libidinal investment in an object. In Chomsky’s email, Epstein’s private island emerges as a desired site of elite freedom of movement. Personal fantasy combines with the privileged access provided by wealth.

Correspondence dated February 23, 2019, reveals a more concrete function. Chomsky advised Epstein on how to respond to reports about him circulating in public. He characterized public reactions to the abuse of women with the term hysteria.

Here intellectual prestige becomes a means of providing strategic support to a person with a criminal record in the face of media pressure. The relationships of a thinker known for his critiques of capitalism and imperialism operate together with the advantages provided by capital and elite recognition.

In February 2026, Slavoj Žižek explained Epstein’s circle through Freud’s concept of the Urvater [primal father]. In Freud’s Totem and Taboo (Totem und Tabu), the primal father represents an authority who exempts himself from the restrictions imposed on other members of the community.

Žižek linked the private relationships Epstein offered to elites with capitalism’s obscene underside. He called these relations:

Communism for the elite

Žižek had previously described state support for wealthy people as socialism for the rich. His explanation of Epstein’s criminal network through the signifier communism retold the privileged sharing arrangements among capitalist elites in the words of anticapitalist thought.

By bringing up Chomsky’s earlier dismissal of Žižek’s work in the same article, he also connected the discussion of Epstein to the struggle for academic recognition between the two thinkers.

Žižek’s explanation of Epstein through the figure of the cinematic vampire was another part of this relationship. The study Sinners III: Žižek as the Sucker of the Cinematic Realm criticized the treatment of a real crime through film characters and cultural narratives. As the criminal network became the subject of new films, scenes, and academic disputes, the critic’s cultural authority was also reproduced (🔗).

This activity reveals the cinematic dimension of hypocritique. While explaining the material organization of a real crime, the critic can also produce new interpretations, visibility, and intellectual recognition from that same crime.

From NÇ to ZÇ: Consent, Recording, and Platform Control

The NÇ case in Turkey showed how the conflict between children’s purported consent and adults’ responsibility could operate within judicial institutions.

In 2002, in Mardin, NÇ, then approximately twelve to fourteen years old, was subjected to sexual abuse and forced sexual exploitation by adults. An investigation initiated after a complaint in 2003 identified numerous suspects. The case continued over thirty-five hearings.

During the proceedings, NÇ was repeatedly subjected to medical examinations, questioning, and confrontation with the defendants. The investigation of crimes committed by adults became a process that required the child to recount her experiences again and again.

On February 9, 2021, the European Court of Human Rights, in its judgment N.Ç. v. Turkey, examined the length of the proceedings, failures to protect the child, invasive examinations, and severe secondary victimization. The Court emphasized the state’s obligation to protect the physical and psychological integrity of a child who had suffered sexual abuse (🔗).

The decisive issue in the case was how the child’s statements and consent were related to the adults’ criminal responsibility. In the French petitions of 1977, children’s consent had been used to demand the defendants’ release. In the NÇ case, following the adults’ actions, the child’s life became the object of judicial recognition, testimony, and evidence-production procedures.

This judicial operation can be compared with repeated demands for evidence on digital platforms. When a person describes the abuse they have experienced, others may demand new records, screenshots, messages, and videos. The demand to produce evidence can result in the person’s experience being repeatedly exposed to the attention of others.

The study The Disgrace of the Pretty-Woman Filming an iPhone in a Corner: Be Neither a Family Servant, Nor a Slave to Capital, Nor a Platform Puppet!, dated November 20, 2025, compares the judicial recording regime in the NÇ case with social media’s activities of recording and exposure from this perspective.

The same study establishes another historical line connecting NÇ and ZÇ.

In 2021, a missing-person notice was published concerning ZÇ, who was still a minor at the time. Her family and relatives called for her to be found. In 2025, reports circulated claiming that the same person was associated with OnlyFans, a platform hosting adult content.

In a public statement, ZÇ said that she rejected allegations that she had been abducted, that she was legally an adult, and that she was satisfied with her life. Other allegations also circulated on social media concerning the dates on which content had been produced and the nature of her past relationships. The evidentiary status of these allegations constitutes a field of investigation that must be distinguished from her own statements and established historical events.

The connection between the two cases lies in the different institutional forms assumed by a problem of protection originating in childhood. Judicial proceedings and the state’s protective activities were decisive in NÇ’s case. In ZÇ’s case, the missing-person notice, public communication, declarations of adulthood, and the economic system of the subscription platform came to the fore.

The source article summarizes this transformation as follows:

NÇ, mahkeme zabıtlarında; ZÇ, abonelik panelinde kaydedilir.

[NÇ is recorded in court transcripts; ZÇ is recorded in a subscription dashboard.]

In both cases, the person’s life enters systems of recording and evaluation produced by other institutions. In the first, judicial proceedings and evidence production take precedence; in the second, digital visibility, subscriptions, account management, and economic access become prominent (🔗).

The character Eylül in the television series Naked (Çıplak), also discussed in the article, provides a cultural representation of this problem. In a 2021 interview, screenwriter Merve Göntem explained that the young woman, who lived with her grandmother and wanted to go to Wales, chose sex in exchange for money as a path that suited her. She emphasized that Eylül was happy while counting the money.

The young woman’s happiness was thus narrated together with the desire to make a living, move up the social ladder, and travel abroad. The character’s economic conditions, desire, and the narrative constructed by adults about her life came together in the same cultural object. These statements became the subject of renewed public debate in 2025 (🔗).

Comparing the dream of Wales with the economy of digital galleries opens an investigation into how young people’s desires for migration and economic freedom can become attached to platform visibility.

In this framework, the concept of the pretty-woman (gözelkarı) describes an algorithmic figure produced by erasing a woman’s economic and personal history from the image. On the screen, her face, body, pose, and attractiveness come to the fore. Childhood, economic hardship, family authority, education, migration, violence, and working conditions become invisible relations determining the image’s value.

Produced in a screenplay, television series, or platform, this figure acquires a commercial form combining audience attention with platform revenue. The activity experienced as the person’s own choice is sustained within the company’s system of access and distribution.

Investigating this relationship requires examining the contract, economic conditions, and institutional authority within which a statement expressing the person’s consent or happiness is used, rather than evaluating the statement in isolation.

From Opium to iPhone: The Platform Economy of Hyperreality

The image of opium in Marx’s critique of religion explained the social function of producing consolation in response to people’s real suffering. In the historical opium trade, meanwhile, British imperialism’s commercial and political pressure on China demonstrated the material organization of dependency.

The From Opium to iPhone connection developed in the study dated November 20, 2025, makes it possible to consider the satisfaction and visibility provided by digital platforms on both levels. The smartphone becomes a means for producing one’s own image while also providing access to the economic order of platform companies.

On television, broadcasters prepared images and viewers consumed them. On social media, users also produce images of themselves. The platform operates the system that determines which people will be shown the content, in what order, and with what intensity.

Users consequently occupy both the position of producers who transform their own lives into images and that of spectators who consume images produced by others.

Likes, shares, follower counts, and viewing time make the social value of an image visible. Advertising, subscriptions, tips, and commission systems convert this value into economic income. Account management, content moderation, and algorithmic distribution determine the material conditions of the visibility a person obtains.

Having an intermediary manage a content creator’s account can create an additional dependency through revenue sharing. Contractual terms distribute the ownership, dissemination, and economic returns of the images produced among different parties.

Platform puppetry describes this situation. The person’s visible movement is their own action. The visibility and income conditions of that movement, however, are determined by platform ownership, algorithms, subscription arrangements, and intermediary relationships.

Here symbolic suture operates through the visibility and approval granted to the user. Real suture emerges through the embodiment of the post within the platform’s system. While users appear authorized, the technical and economic foundations of their visibility may remain in the hands of other institutions.

Baudrillard’s concept of the hyperreal explains this operation. Appearing successful, free, attractive, and independent can increase the value of work dependent on the economic decisions of others. The image does more than represent the person’s life; it also produces a model of how the person should organize that life.

The 2025 study IPA/FLŽ: Strategy Report for Combating Mediatized Syndromes investigates how ready-made fantasies circulated through cinema, television, and social media affect the subject’s way of interpreting their own experience. The concept of the mediatized syndrome focuses on the relationship between the continuous consumption of images and the organization of desire through externally supplied models (🔗).

At this point, the hyperreal can be returned to the explanation of the capitalist economy of visual exposure. The image through which a person acquires value, the company that calculates that value, and the economic conditions under which the person producing the image lives can be investigated together.

Including the NÇ and ZÇ cases in the same investigation further sharpens the relationship between visibility and protection. The entry of a person’s life into a recording system raises the question of who exercises control over that record. A judicial institution or digital platform can reprocess the person’s body and words for another purpose.

From Cinematic Suture to the Analytic Cut

Miller’s concept of suture, developed in 1965, explained through which lack the subject was represented within the order of signifiers. In film theory, the concept was used to explain how camera angles, framing, editing, and off-screen space positioned spectators within the narrative’s perspective.

Jean-Pierre Oudart and later film theorists examined which position an image offered to spectators and which gaze it rendered invisible. The field shown within an image established a relationship with another field left outside the frame. Spectators were drawn into the cinematic narrative through this arrangement of lack and completion.

Stephen Heath’s 1977 study Notes on Suture demonstrated the different consequences of this relationship. He examined, in particular, how sound, image, duration, and off-screen space could alter the spectator’s position. The operations through which cinematic suture established and disrupted identification could be investigated on the same technical plane.

Cinematic idiocy names a critique of the transformation of image consumption into a prerequisite for intellectual activity. Understanding an issue can become dependent on consuming its image or associating it with a familiar film scene.

Žižek’s comparison, in his discussion of Epstein, of Chomsky’s failure to read his works to judging a film without watching it makes this problem visible. The value of criticism is attached to the value of a cultural object that supposedly must be seen. The investigation of a real crime thus becomes intertwined with cinematic references and struggles for academic recognition.

The analytic cut focuses on the word a person speaks and the operation that word enables.

In the 1977 petition, the expression describing adults’ sexual acts with children was renamed caresses and kisses in the demand for release. The change in wording was part of a political operation supporting the defendants’ penal interests.

The soi/ça substitution that Allouch identified in Miller’s transcription can be examined through the same method. Changing the word affected theoretical meaning and editorial authority.

The analytic cut distinguishes the signifier used in these relations, the person authorized by that signifier, and the material consequences of the action. Leclaire’s 1965 characterization of the analyst as someone who resists suturing points to this activity of making discourse’s own conflict visible again.

The contribution of double-suture theory is to identify the fusion upon which the analytic cut intervenes. When the symbolic operation of authorization is separated from the real operation of embodiment, the system that produces the object bearing authority becomes available for investigation.

Analytic activity thereby shifts from reproducing spectacular narratives toward clarifying the material responsibility attached to words and objects.

The Line of Flight, Perspective, and Fundamental Fantasy

Ligne de fuite is also a term associated with perspective geometry in French. In an image, parallel lines extending in the same direction appear to converge at a vanishing point when viewed from a particular perspective. The line formed by the vanishing points of a plane is that plane’s vanishing line.

A vanishing point is not a physical destination within the image. It is the mathematical consequence of constructing the image from a particular viewpoint.

This distinction is important for questioning the reduction of the line of flight to an objective of personal salvation. A person’s movement toward the horizon and their understanding of how their world is constructed from a particular viewpoint are different activities.

In computer vision, two images taken by different cameras of the same three-dimensional scene are compared. If point x in the first image and point x’ in the second correspond to the same point in the world, the correspondence satisfies the constraint of epipolar geometry:

x’ᵀ F x = 0

Here F is called the fundamental matrix. It determines the epipolar line on which the point corresponding to a point in the first image must lie in the second.

This matrix can be estimated from correspondences between images without prior knowledge of the cameras’ intrinsic calibration parameters, such as their focal lengths. The projective relationship between the two images can thus be investigated without knowing the cameras’ particular settings.

When the calibration matrices K and K’ are known, the essential matrix E is obtained through the following relationship:

E = K’ᵀ F K

When the cameras’ relative rotation is denoted by R and their translation by t:

E = [t]× R

The fundamental matrix used in image coordinates also incorporates the effects of calibration:

F = K’⁻ᵀ [t]× R K⁻¹

The fundamental distinction is therefore between F being estimable without calibration information and E expressing the relative geometry between the cameras in calibrated image coordinates.

The study (De)Calibrating Vision: Every Wrapping is a Warping relates this distinction to the concepts of Essential Fantasy and Fundamental Fantasy.

Essential Fantasy describes experiencing a particular calibration as though it were the essence of the world. Fundamental Fantasy, by contrast, foregrounds investigating the condition of correspondence between different images before privileging the viewpoint of any single image.

Traversing fantasy combines examining the settings through which a person turns their own image into an absolute criterion with determining how other viewpoints relate to the same material event (🔗).

The vanishing line of perspective geometry and the correspondence lines of epipolar geometry are distinct geometric objects. The former explains the directions of a plane in perspective; the latter explains the constraint governing point correspondences between two images. Their common subject of investigation is the production of an image from a particular position and the comparison of different positions through mathematical relations.

This idea can be applied to the political evaluation of the line of flight.

In Nablus, the soldier’s field of movement as he broke through walls and the conditions of movement and security of the person living in the house changed within the same event. On a platform, the visibility of the person producing an image and the company’s control over its distribution likewise belong to the same economic relationship.

In both cases, the experience of a single actor constitutes only one appearance of the shared material relationship. Investigating the other positions reveals whose interests movement serves and which forms of authority it reproduces.

Returning the line of flight to the mathematical horizon makes it possible to evaluate freedom through the material relationships connecting different positions rather than measuring it by a person’s progress within an image.

Marx’s Opium and Hypocritique

In his 1844 text Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction (Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie. Einleitung), Karl Marx explained the relationship between religion and real suffering as follows:

Das religiöse Elend ist in einem der Ausdruck des wirklichen Elendes und in einem die Protestation gegen das wirkliche Elend.

[Religious suffering is at once the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering.]

He then used the phrase:

Sie ist das Opium des Volks.

[It is the opium of the people.]

Two activities came together in Marx’s critique of religion. Religion provided meaning and consolation in response to people’s real suffering while also expressing a protest against that suffering.

His subsequent demand therefore extended beyond changing people’s beliefs:

Die Forderung, die Illusionen über seinen Zustand aufzugeben, ist die Forderung, einen Zustand aufzugeben, der der Illusionen bedarf.

[The demand to give up illusions about one’s condition is the demand to give up a condition that requires illusions.]

The target of criticism here is the real social conditions that produce people’s need for consolation (🔗).

The concepts of the French Freudo-Marxists can also be examined through this dual function.

Deleuze and Guattari’s line of flight produces a genuine protest against family authority, institutional hierarchy, and fixed identities. The same concept can confer the value of freedom upon the flexibility, connection-making, and continuous movement demanded by capitalism.

Baudrillard’s hyperreal explains how models of consumption and media organize life. The same critique can become part of the production of new theoretical products, publications, and cultural prestige.

Miller’s suture helps explain the subject’s lack within discourse. The teaching and publishing authority surrounding the same concept can contribute to the institutional production of new signifiers and positions of expertise.

This dual function forms the basis of the concept of hypocritique.

Hypocritique is the fantasmatic satisfaction that a critique of real domination provides to a subject who wishes to maintain their position within that same domination.

A critical subject may correctly explain capitalism’s relations of exploitation while making libidinal investments in the prestige, income, recognition, and privileges offered by capitalist institutions. The conflict between conscious political views and actual investment is reproduced within the activity of criticism itself.

The 2026 study How the Three Great Deviations Connect to Capitalist Discourse investigates the different discursive forms of this relationship. Deleuze and Guattari’s movement is examined through hysteric discourse, Baudrillard’s order of models and codes through master discourse, and Miller’s institutional production of knowledge through university discourse.

In this account, each discourse can transform the crisis it encounters into an input for new movement, new models, or new knowledge. The analytic cut investigates the point at which this operation of reproduction takes place (🔗).

In Epstein’s private world, wealth and prestige expanded the scope of action available to adults while facilitating severe relations of domination over children’s lives. In the petitions of 1977, the child’s consent was tied to adults’ penal interests. In the NÇ case, the protection of the child encountered prolonged and damaging judicial procedures. In the public debate concerning ZÇ, declarations of adulthood became intertwined with the economic relations of digital platforms.

The common question raised by these events concerns not only who speaks in the name of freedom or knowledge, but also whose scope of action is expanded by that speech.

Marx’s demand to cast off the chains is decisive here. Even when criticizing capitalist domination provides a person with satisfaction in their own intellectual superiority, it remains necessary to investigate real dependencies. Hypocritique therefore also makes the critic’s own income, prestige, publishing activities, and cultural visibility objects of investigation.

Rescuing suture separates symbolic authorization from real embodiment, revealing the objects and systems through which authority is established. Rescuing the hyperreal explains the production of images together with the ownership and revenue relations of platforms. Rescuing the line of flight takes as its basis the material and mathematical relationships connecting the different positions of moving actors.

The Epsteinian betrayal of the French Freudo-Marxists takes concrete form in political interventions that turn children’s freedom into adults’ penal interests, in criticism that expands its own institutional authority, and in the incorporation of capitalist privilege into critical intellectuals’ personal investments. Rescuing the concepts means separating the authority, images, and movement produced by these operations to reveal whose lives are organized for whose benefit.

Marx’s demand to transform the conditions that produce real suffering is the final criterion determining the value of these concepts. Freedom is tested by what the moving person changes in other people’s lives; truth by how the system producing an image operates; and knowledge by which authority it empowers and which responsibility it makes visible.