Eyers, Tom. Lacan and the Concept of the ‘Real’ New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
It is worth registering at this early juncture the significance of Lacan’s insistence on the inability of Hegelian logic to capture the paradoxical
character of the psychoanalytic object. If it is commonplace to associate the development of Lacan’s early ideas as discussed above with Hegel’s account of the lord and bondsman in his Phenomenology, then such a reading is placed in question if, as I argue, the precisely non-dialectical object finds its genesis in a concept (the ideal-ego) located and consolidated at this putatively ‘Hegelian’ stage of Lacan’s thinking. 31-32
Lacan himself makes this link explicit when he describes the ‘i(a)’ qua image of the other, in a discussion of the myth of Oedipus, as the ‘complement’ to the object-cause of desire: ‘he [Oedipus] is thus the victim of a lure, through which what issues forth from him and confronts him is not the true petit a, but its complement, the specular image: i(a)’.
If, for Kojève’s Hegel, desire is ultimately a desire for recognition predicated on a negativity conspicuous in its contingent movements but statically fixed in form, Lacan here figures desire in an ambivalent relationship to an object that is simultaneously constituting and threatening, in the same way that the pre- Oedipal relationship with the mother is both mourned by the post- Oedipal subject and emerges in fantasy as something over-proximate and anxiety inducing.
Lacan takes from Kojève’s Hegel something of the contingent movement of what he calls, as the title of a famous article, the ‘dialectic of desire’, but not the immovability of the form of productive negativity, stopping up the movement of desire with objects whose obstinacy consists as much in their refusal to succumb to dialectical supersession as in the impossibility of the subject ever truly to ‘possess’ or know them, situated as they are in the opaque field of the Other 34 … Philosophically, we might distinguish between Kojève and Lacan’s logic here in terms of a distinction between dialectic and paradox.
While the dialectician seeks an overcoming that retrospectively reconstitutes what it has superseded at a higher level of becoming, the Imaginary (and later Real) object of paradox discussed by Lacan represents an impasse in such a movement, an impasse that can be generative as well as disruptive. 34
to the extent that the Real permits of no absence, no division and no mediation, the ontological ‘being’ of the signifier, paradoxically, escapes the metonymic logic of the Symbolic 53
The signifier qua letter, defined as it is through its persistence in the Real , is constructed by Lacan as a material unit that underlies, and undermines, the temporary epistemological sedimentation of meaning via the ‘Imaginary effects’ of the signifier-in-relation. 53
The dispersed protosignifiers that shore up the movement of primary narcissism, minimally co-coordinating the process of ego-formation, seem to live on in the signifier’s post-Oedipal isolated dimension, a paradoxical point of nondialectical collusion between the Imaginary and the Real-in-the-Symbolic… 53-54
What might seem, then, to be the relatively simple positing of a material, formal substrate and its Imaginary effects, a kind of linguistic structure of form and content, is in fact the overcoming of the form/content division, a theory of signification that posits a Real materiality only to insist on its Imaginary genesis. 54