Zupancic, Alenka. “Psychoanalysis” Columbia Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophies. Ed. Constantin V.Boundas, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. 457-468. Print
the Real is not the truth of reality, or the reality without distortion, a ‘naked reality’; the Real is not beyond the reality
the Real is nothing else but a fundamental, structural impasse to which reality gives this or that form. It is not a realm — Lacan defines it as a register.’
If we take away the reality, no Real will be left. The fact that reality as we experience it is always-already distorted (in the sense in which the great twentieth-century theme of ideology conceptualized this distortion, or else in the sense in which Lacan proclaimed that all reality is fantasmatic) does not mean that reality is a distortion of the Real.
The distortions of reality (that is, different narratives that structure our symbolic universe and define the ‘roles’ that we are expected to assume, starting with ‘child,’ ‘woman,’ ‘man,’ ‘mother,’ ‘father’) are different forms built to deal with the impasse of the real that constantly haunts us from within.
To say that this impasse is structural is to say that it ‘ex-sists’ as an irreducible surplus element of reality: as its inherent contradiction that may disappear from one place, yet only to reappear in the other. 463