Eyers, Tom. Lacan the Concept of the ‘Real’ New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
A successful navigation of the Oedipal imbroglio, then, only allows the emphasis of the Symbolic to fall upon the negatively constituted movements of the signifier in relation. But as the title of a section of the seminar on psychoses states, ‘the signifier, as such, signifies nothing’, which is to say that in isolation and at its most material, which according to this logic points to its lack of relation, its lack of reliance on another signifier, the signifier stops up, rather than facilitates, meaning. […]
This is the signifier as isolated underpinning the movements of sense as its material ground. … Those signifiers that, in their isolation, actively signify the nothing, do so insistently within psychotic subjectivity, whereby the lack of a paternal signifier (essentially a ‘third term’ that dissolves the dyadic logic of the Imaginary) exposes signification to isolation and the failure of relation. Each psychotic signifier, then, is only countable as one; it cannot be taken as containing the potential for a total set of meanings, a logic that Lacan will later expand through his account of non- phallic, or ‘feminine’, sexuality. 43
that aspect of the signifier which cleaves most closely to the Imaginary, those isolated signifiers that route the most elementary forms of egoic identification, persist throughout to the degree that all signifiers, by their ‘nature’, have the potential to uncouple from relations of meaning and exist in isolation. 44
For the psychotic, it is the potential of the signifier to refer to something other than itself that is lost, namely the signifier in its relational aspect; and Lacan usefully compares this loss with the loss of the fundamental human ability to deceive, for signification to say more than it might mean: ‘you are in the presence of a subject insofar as what he says and does – they’re the same thing – can be supposed to have been said and done to deceive you’. …
Lacan’s comment highlights the multidimensional quality of relational signification, whereby the paradigmatic act of communication is to tell a lie by literally telling the truth; to lose this capacity is to reveal the materiality of the isolated signifier in its brute insistence.
What must be more firmly established … however, is the more general claim that the Symbolic as such, for all subjects, contains Real elements that point to the constant potential for meaning to dissolve, even as the very same elements form the essential foundation that allows the very horizon of the Symbolic to cohere.
… the Real simultaneously supports and threatens the Symbolic from within. 45