For Lacan the crucial question is how can we preserve within our symbolisations a space for the recognition of the impossibility of their closure?

The Lacanian system is perhaps the closest we can get to a discourse opening itself up to what exceeds its limits.

Besides, the ethics of psychoanalysis, as formulated in the Lacanian tradition, point to the possibility and the ethical superiority of a symbolic recognition and institutionalisation of the political moment of real lack and this opens a huge field of creation of which the democratic revolution constitutes only one example—perhaps the most important.

Even if this move is possible—encircling the unavoidable political modality of the real—is it really desirable, is it ethically and politically satisfactory?

the ethics of the real entails a recognition of the irreducibility of the real and an attempt to institutionalise social lack. Thus it might be possible to achieve an ethically and politically satisfactory institution of the social field beyond the fantasy of closure which has proved so problematic, if not catastrophic. In other words, the best way to organise the social might be one which recognises the ultimate impossibility around which it is always structured.