Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real: Theorizing Cultural Criticism.
The subject is what speaks. Language makes us subjects, but in the process permits us to know that we shall rejoin the real in the end. We shall die. … But the relation between language and death goes deeper. The subject’s own constitution in language brings about the ‘death’ of the real for the subject. In that sense, the possibility of absence from the signifying chain is there at the inaugural moment of the speaking being. The absent real anticipates a future absence for the subject itself, marks subjectivity as finite, temporary. 40.
Lacan borrows from Heidegger the awareness of our own death as a perpetual condition of human beings which, whether we know it or not, shapes and influences everything we do. (If you doubt it, imagine a world that had conquered death, or in which death was impossible. How much would be different? Sex, partnerships, parenthood, work, adventures …. If our lives were not finite, would anything remain the same?)
Our own death is difficult to imagine. Freud pointed out that it is virtually impossible to do so, and when we try, we find that we ourselves are present in the imagined scene, hovering somewhere close by (1985a: 77). We cannot represent death to ourselves, even though we can name it, and see it staged in any number of genres from classical tragedy to Hollywood movies. As Roland Barthes might have said, ‘Every night on TV, someone dies’. But this is someone else’s death: our own remains oddly elusive, imaginatively hard to conceive. 41
Death thus constitutes a paradoxically absent presence in the symbolic order, and in that respect it not only exemplifies the real as unknowable, but typifies at the same time the lost object of immediate experience, subsumed, supplanted, and yet not finally abolished by the signifier.
Why is this? Because, Lacan would say, while there is nothing lacking in the real, there is always something missing in the symbolic, but this is an absence that makes its presence felt. As Saussure proposed, language is a system of differences ‘without positive terms’ (Saussure 1974: 120). In other words, nothing in the world anchors the meanings that language itself produces. Language, in consequence, is not to be trusted. The signifier seems to evoke the existence of something on the other side of it, but refuses to tell us what this is. Ordinary language, for example, locates an intention, a reason or a
truth ‘behind’ what is said. But there is no access to this place ‘behind’ the words; whatever inhabits it remains undefined, conjectural. The signifier, then, appears as a veil, but one that veils the unknown, perhaps nothing, a possible absence, the potential absence, even, of the subject itself.