Category: the real

Ž interview 2008

Unbehagen and the subject: An interview with Slavoj Žižek  Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 15.4. 2010. 418–428

If beneath what you are asking me now is the big question, where does Freud really stand with regard to politics, I think the answer is pretty clear if you really look. I think Freud’s position was, to put it very simply, that psychoanalysis allows us, when you analyse a society, to formulate, to articulate Unbehagen in der Kultur literally, the uneasiness in culture, but more famously translated as Civilization and Its Discontents.

It does this basic symptomal job of showing how the failures, the pathological malfunctions, are symptomatic of the whole. I think that, for a true Freudian, it is totally wrong to distinguish the proper domain where you can use psychoanalysis. For the true Freudian it is not that Freud did his true job in his clinical analysis but then got a little bit crazy when he was writing Totem and Taboo and Unbehagen in der Kultur [Civilization and Its Discontents]. No, because the whole point of Unbehagen in der Kultur is that these pathological phenomena are conditioned by the truth.

They are the symptom, the result of what is wrong in the entire social body as such. In this sense, the two sides are necessarily connected. What is totally alien to Freud is this purely clinical idea that there is the normal functioning of society, then somebody doesn’t work, then the psychoanalyst would have been like the psychological mechanic, the repairman who will set me straight.

I think that Freud, to put it in fashionable terms, isolates a certain excess. He calls it death drive, a certain excess of destructability that is, as it were, undermining, destabilizing the social order, an excess that is ambiguous in the sense that it can be a source of constructive energy or it can be purely destructive.

The idea is that Freud isolates this space of excess, which then, of course, opens up the space for possible change. I think Freud’s basic answer would have been: psychoanalysis just does this elementary job of showing how there is a gap, a failure, a nonfunctioning excess in society. But then, about what to do, he leaves it open. We cannot jump from here directly to positive programs.

This then opens up all possible versions. You can have a conservative Freudian answer: the whole point is to control this threat. You can have a Reichian, naïve, Leftist answer: what is a threat is only a threat from the ruling perspective and we should identify ourselves with it. And you can have a liberal, middle-of-the-way game.

Žižek the Real Winnebago Tribe

Here is a version from Parallax View I think
Short 6 minute video on the Real, Birkbeck 29 June, 2011

The real is at the same time the obstacle that makes reality inaccessible.

Recall Claude Levi-Strauss’s exemplary analysis, from his Structural Anthropology, of the spatial disposition of buildings in the Winnebago, one of the Great Lake tribes, might be of some help here. The tribe is divided into two sub-groups (“moieties”), “those who are from above” and “those who are from below”; when we ask an individual to draw on a piece of paper, or on sand, the ground-plan of his/her village (the spatial disposition of cottages), we obtain two quite different answers, depending on his/her belonging to one or the other sub-group.

Both perceive the village as a circle; but for one sub-group, there is within this circle another circle of central houses, so that we have two concentric circles, while for the other sub-group, the circle is split into two by a clear dividing line. In other words, a member of the first sub-group (let us call it “conservative-corporatist”) perceives the ground-plan of the village as a ring of houses more or less symmetrically disposed around the central temple, whereas a member of the second (“revolutionary-antagonistic”) sub-group perceives his/her village as two distinct heaps of houses separated by an invisible frontier… 20

The point Levi-Strauss wants to make is that this example should in no way entice us into cultural relativism, according to which the perception of social space depends on the observer’s group-belonging: the very splitting into the two “relative” perceptions implies a hidden reference to a constant – not the objective, “actual” disposition of buildings but a traumatic kernel, a fundamental antagonism the inhabitants of the village were unable to symbolize, to account for, to “internalize”, to come to terms with, an imbalance in social relations that prevented the community from stabilizing itself into a harmonious whole.

The two perceptions of the ground-plan are simply two mutually exclusive endeavors to cope with this traumatic antagonism, to heal its wound via the imposition of a balanced symbolic structure. It is here that one can see it what precise sense the Real intervenes through anamorphosis. We have first the “actual,” “objective,” arrangement of the houses, and then its two different symbolizations which both distort in an anamorphic way the actual arrangement. However, the “real” is here not the actual arrangement, but the traumatic core of some social antagonism which distorts the tribe members’ view of the actual arrangement of the houses in their village.

The Real is thus the disavowed X on account of which our vision of reality is anamorphically distorted; it is SIMULTANEOUSLY the Thing to which direct access is not possible AND the obstacle which prevents this direct access, the Thing which eludes our grasp AND the distorting screen which makes us miss the Thing.

More precisely, the Real is ultimately the very shift of perspective from the first to the second standpoint. Recall the old well-known Adorno’s analysis of the antagonistic character of the notion of society: in a first approach, the split between the two notions of society (Anglo-Saxon individualistic-nominalistic and Durkheimian organicist notion of society as a totality which preexists individuals) seems irreducible, we seem to be dealing with a true Kantian antinomy which cannot be resolved via a higher “dialectical synthesis,” and which elevates society into an inaccessible Thing-in-itself; however, in a second approach, one should merely take not of how this radical antinomy which seems to preclude our access to the Thing ALREADY IS THE THING ITSELF – the fundamental feature of today’s society IS the irreconcilable antagonism between Totality and the individual.

What this means is that, ultimately, the status of the Real is purely parallactic and, as such, non-substantial: is has no substantial density in itself, it is just a gap between two points of perspective, perceptible only in the shift from the one to the other.

The parallax Real is thus opposed to the standard (Lacanian) notion of the Real as that which “always returns at its place,” i.e., as that which remains the same in all possible (symbolic) universes: the parallax Real is rather that which accounts for the very multiplicity of appearances of the same underlying Real – it is not the hard core which persists as the Same, but the hard bone of contention which pulverizes the sameness into the multitude of appearances.

In a first move, the Real is the impossible hard core which we cannot confront directly, but only through the lenses of a multitude of symbolic fictions, virtual formations. In a second move, this very hard core is purely virtual, actually non-existing, an X which can be reconstructed only retroactively, from the multitude of symbolic formations which are “all that there actually is.”

zupančič sexual difference pt 3

Sexual Difference  Her lecture at EGS 2011 Summer course

Goto part 2

And sex does not function as a stumbling block of meaning (and of the count) because it is considered morally naughty. It is considered morally naughty because it is a stumbling block of meaning.

This is why the moral and legal decriminalization of sexuality should not take the path of its naturalization (“whatever we do sexually is only natural behavior”).

We should instead start from the claim that nothing about (human) sexuality is natural, least of all sexual activity with the exclusive aim of reproduction.

There is no “sexual nature” of man (and no “sexual being”). The problem with sexuality is not that it is a remainder of nature that resists any definite taming; rather, there is no nature here — it all starts with a surplus of signification.

If we now return to the question of what this implies in relation to ontology in general, and, more specifically, to the performative ontology of contemporary gender studies, we must start from the following, crucial implication: Lacan is led to establish a difference between being and the Real.

The real is not a being, or a substance, but its deadlock.

It is inseparable from being, yet it is not being. One could say that for psychoanalysis, there is no being independent of language (or discourse) — which is why it often seems compatible with contemporary forms of nominalism.

All being is symbolic; it is being in the Other. But with a crucial addition, which could be formulated as follows: there is only being in the symbolic — except that there is real.

There “is” real, but this real is no being. Yet it is not simply the outside of being; it is not something besides being, it is — as I put it earlier — the very curving of the space of being.

It only exists as the inherent contradiction of being. Which is precisely why, for Lacan, the real is the bone in the throat of every ontology: in order to speak of “being qua being,” one has to amputate something in being that is not being.

That is to say, the real is that which the traditional ontology had to cut off in order to be able to speak of “being qua being.” We only arrive to being qua being by subtracting something from it — and this something is precisely that which, while included in being, prevents it from being fully constituted as being. The real, as that additional something that magnetizes and curves the (symbolic) space of being, introduced in it another dynamics, which infects the dynamics of the symbolic, makes it “not all.”

It is because sexual difference is implicated in sexuality that it fails to register as symbolic difference.

Indeed, psychoanalysis doesn’t try to de-essentialize sexual difference. What de-essentializes it most efficiently (and in the real) is its implication in sexuality as defined above; that is, as the out-of-beingness of being.

And this is what psychoanalysis brings out and insists upon — as opposed to the gender differences, which are differences like any other, and which miss the point by succeeding too much, and by falling in the trap of providing grounds for ontological consistency.

It might seem paradoxical, but differences like form- matter, yin-yang, active-passive  … belong to the same onto-logy as “gender” differences.

Even when the latter abandon the principle of complementarity and embrace that of gender
multiplicity, it in no way effects the ontological status of entities called genders. They are said to be, or to exist, emphatically so. (This “emphatically” seems to increase with numbers: One is usually timid in asserting the existence of two genders, but when passing to the multitude this timidity disappears, and their existence is firmly asserted.)

If sexual difference is considered in terms of gender, it is made — at least in principle — compatible with mechanisms of its ontologization.

De-sexualization of ontology (its no longer being conceived as a combinatory of two, “masculine” and “feminine” principles) coincides with the sexual appearing as the real/disruptive point of being.

And taking the sexual away (as something that has no consequences for the ontological level) opens again the path of the ontological symbolism of sexual difference.

This is why, if one “removes sex from sex,” one removes the very thing that has brought to light the problematic and singular character of sexual difference in the first place. One doesn’t remove the problem, but the means of seeing it and eventually tackling it.

Continued in pt 4 the final part

ethics is not w/in framework of law

We might say that the ethical dimension of an action is ‘supernumerary’ to the conceptual pair legal/illegal.

This in turn suggests a structural connection with the Lacanian notion of the Real. As Alain Badiou has noted, Lacan conceives of the Real in a way that removes it from the logic of the apparently mutually exclusive alternatives of the knowable and the unknowable. The unknowable is just a type of the knowable; it is the limit or degenerate case of the knowable; whereas the Real belongs to another register entirely.

Analogously, for Kant the illegal still falls within the category of legality -they both belong to the same register, that of things conforming or failing to conform with duty. Ethics – to continue the analogy – escapes this register.

Even though an ethical act will conform with duty, this by itself is not and cannot be what makes it ethical. So the ethical cannot be situated within the framework of the law and violations of the law. Again, in relation to legality, the ethical always presents a surplus or excess. The question then becomes: ‘what exactly is the nature of this excess?’ The simple answer is that it has something to do with the Kantian conception of ‘form’. The exact meaning of this requires more careful consideration. EOR 12

Verhaeghe pre-ontological cocktail

Verhaeghe, Paul. “Causation and Destitution of a Pre-ontological Non-entity: On the Lacanian Subject.” Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Ed. Dany Nobus. 1999. 164-189

The important thing about the divided subject is that it has no essence, no ontological substance, but, on the contrary, comes down to a pre-ontological, indeterminate non-being which can only give rise to an identity, an ego, in retrospect. Difficult as this may seem, it is rather easy to grasp.

Just think of what we will call ‘the cocktail experience.’ You are invited for a drink with a group of people you do not know. You have to introduce yourself, and so you have to produce signifiers. This production of signifiers will never be satisfactory. Furthermore, the more signifiers produced, the more contradictions, gaps and difficulties will become clear.

Therefore, the ‘Experienced Cocktail Consumer’, will stick to the proverbial ‘That’s me!’ and produce a stock introduction.

From a Lacanian point of view, it would be wrong to assume that the difficulty lies in finding the correct signifiers to present oneself. On the contrary, one is produced by the uttered signifiers, which are coming from the field of the Other, albeit in a divided way. It would also be a mistake to assume that the subject is identical to the produced signifier(s).

The identification with a number of signifiers, coming from the Other, presents us with the ego. The subject, on the contrary, is never realised as such; it joins the pre-ontological status of the unconscious, the unborn, non-realised etc.

In this sense, the Lacanian subject is exactly the opposite of the Cartesian one. In the formula ‘I am thinking, therefore I exist’ Descartes concludes from his thinking that he has a being, whereas for Lacan, each time (conscious) thinking arises its being disappears under the signifier.

This explains two basic characteristics of the Lacanian subject: it is always at an indeterminate place and it is essentially divided:

Alienation consists in this vel, which - if you do not object to the word condemned, I will use it - condemns the subject to appearing only in that division which, it seems to me, I have just articulated sufficiently by saying that, if it appears on one side as meaning, produced by the signifier, it appears on the other as aphanisis.74

Again, Lacan distances himself from any idea of substantiality.

The subject is not an unconscious intention that will interrupt the normal conscious discourse.

The interruption or division does not take place between a real or authentic part and a false, external one, but the split defines the subject as such. The subject is split from its real being and forever tossed between eventually contradicting signifiers coming from the Other.

This rather pessimistic view confronts us with the issue of therapeutic and psychoanalytic possibilities.

Paradoxical as this may seem, Lacan’s point of view is more optimistic than the Freudian one. Freud’s theory is by and large deterministic, whereas Lacan leaves an element of choice, albeit a ‘forced’ choice.

It is this element that brings us to the second operation, separation, and to the theme of our final investigation: the goal of psychoanalytic treatment.

zizek on malabou descartes malabranche autism

Žižek. S. “Descartes and the Post-Traumatic Subject.” Filozofski vestnik. 29. 2 (2008): 9-29.
Žižek. S. “Descartes and the Post-Traumatic Subject: On Catherine Malabou’s Les Nouveaux Blessés.” Qui Parle. 17.2 (2009): 123–147.
online
PDF download

Catherine Malabou Replies to Žižek

In the new form of subjectivity (autistic, indifferent, without affective engagement), the old personality is not “sublated” or replaced by a compensatory formation, but thoroughly destroyed — destruction itself acquires a form, becomes a (relatively stable) “form of life” – what we get is not simply the absence of form, but the form of (the) absence (of the erasure of the previous personality, which is not replaced by a new one).

More precisely, the new form is not a form of life, but, rather, a form of death – not an expression of the Freudian death drive, but, more directly, the death drive. 15

does she not forget to include herself, her own desire, into the observed phenomenon (of autistic subjects)? in an ironic reversal of her claim that the autistic subject is unable to enact transference, it is her own transference she does not take into account when she portrays the autistic subject’s immense suffering. This subject is primordially an enigmatic impenetrable thing, totally ambiguous, where one cannot but oscillate between attributing to it immense suffering and blessed ignorance.

What characterizes it is the lack of recognition in the double sense of the term: we do not recognize ourselves in it, there is no empathy possible, AND the autistic subject, on account of its withdrawal, does not enact recognition (it doesn’t recognize US, its partner in communication). 17

the real

Žižek, Slavoj. “Zizek_TheLacanianReal_Television” The Symptom 9 Summer 2008.

The usual idea of the Lacanian “real” is that of a hard kernel resisting symbolization, dialectization, persisting in its place, always returning to it. But this is just one side of the Lacanian real; it’s the side which predominates in the fifties, when we have the real – the brute, pre-symbolic reality which always returns to its place, then the Symbolic order, which structures our perception of reality, and finally the Imaginary, the level of illusory entities whose consistency is the effect of a kind of mirror-play, i.e., which have no real existence but are just a structural effect.

With the development of the Lacanian teaching in the sixties and seventies, what he calls “the real” more and more approaches what he called, in the fifties, the imaginary.

Let’s take the case of traumatism: in the fifties, in his first seminar, the traumatic event is defined as an imaginary entity which wasn’t yet fully symbolized, given a place in the symbolic universe of the subject.

In the seventies, the traumatism is real; it is a hard core resisting symbolization. But the point is that it doesn’t matter if it took place, if it “really occurred” in so-called reality; the point is just that it produces a series of structural effects (displacements, repetitions, etc.).

The real is an entity which should be constructed afterwards so that we can account for the distortions of the symbolic structure.

The most famous Freudian example of such a real entity is of course the primal parricide: it would be senseless to search for its traces in prehistoric reality, but it must nonetheless be presupposed if we want to account for the present state of things.

It’s the same as with the primal fight to death between the (future) master and servant in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind: it is senseless trying to determine when this event could have taken place; the point is just that it must be presupposed, that it constitutes a fantasy- scenario implied by the very fact that people are working – it is the intersubjective condition of the so-called “instrumental relation to the world of objects.”

The paradox of the Lacanian real is then that it is an entity which, although it doesn’t exist (in the sense of “really existing,” taking place in reality), has a series of properties.

It exercises a certain structural causality; it can produce a series of effects in the symbolic reality of subjects.

That’s why it can be illustrated by a multitude of well-known jokes based on the same matrix: “Is this the place where the Duke of Wellington spoke his famous words?” “Yes, this is the place, but he never spoke those words.” These never-spoken words are a Lacanian real.

“What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?”
“Oh, that’s a MacGuffin.”
“What’s a MacGuffin?”
“Well, it’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.”
“But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands.”
“Well, you see how efficient it is!”

That’s a MacGuffin, a pure nothing which is nonetheless efficient. It is needless to add that the MacGuffin is the purest case of what Lacan calls objet petit a: a pure void which functions as the object-cause of desire.

That would be, then, the precise definition of the real object: a cause which in itself doesn’t exist, i.e., which is present only in a series of its effects, but always in a distorted, displaced way. If the real is impossible, it is precisely this impossibility to be grasped through its effects. Laclau and Mouffe were the first to develop this logic of the real in its relevance for the social-ideological field in their concept of antagonism: antagonism is precisely such an impossible kernel, a certain limit which is in itself nothing, and which is only to be constructed retroactively, from a series of its effects, as the traumatic point which escapes them and prevents a closure of the social field.

We might reread this way even the classical notion of the “class struggle”: it is not the last signifier giving the meaning to all social phenomena (”all social processes are in the last instance expressions of the class struggle”), but quite the contrary a certain limit, a pure negativity, a traumatic limit which prevents the final totalization of the socio-ideological field. The “class struggle” is present only in its effects, in the fact that every attempt to totalize the social field, to assign to social phenomena a definite place in the social structure, is always doomed to failure.

If we define the real as such a paradoxical, chimerical entity which, although it doesn’t exist, has a series of properties and can produce a series of effects, it becomes clear that the real par excellence is jouissance: jouissance doesn’t exist; it is impossible, but it produces a lot of traumatic effects.

And this paradoxical nature of jouissance offers us also a clue to explain the fundamental paradox which unfailingly attests the presence of the real: the fact of the prohibition of something which is already in itself impossible. The elementary model of it is, of course, the prohibition of incest; but there are many other examples. Let’s just mention the usual conservative attitude towards child sexuality: it doesn’t exist, children are innocent beings, that’s why we must strictly control them and fight child sexuality.

The real is then at the same time the hard, impenetrable kernel resisting symbolization and a purely chimerical entity which has in itself no ontological consistency. To use Kripkean terminology, the real is the rock upon which every attempt at symbolization stumbles, the hard core which remains the same in all possible worlds (i.e., symbolic universes); but at the same time its status is thoroughly precarious: it’s something that persists only as failed, missed, in a shadow, and dissolves itself as soon as we try to grasp it in its positivity. As we have already seen, this is precisely what defines the notion of a traumatic event: a point of failure of symbolization, but at the same time never given in its positivity.

It can only be constructed backwards, from its structural effects. All its efficacy lies in these effects, in the distortions it produces in the symbolic universe of the subject The traumatic event is ultimately just a fantasy-construct filling out a certain void in a symbolic structure and as such the retroactive effect of this structure.

the real is not a transcendent positive entity, persisting somewhere beyond the symbolic order like a hard kernel inaccessible to it, some kind of Kantian “Thing-in-itself.” 17

death drive in the early middle late Lacan barred subject vs. subject positions

Žižek, Slavoj. “Zizek_TheLacanianReal_Television” The Symptom 9 Summer 2008.

That’s why the Stalinist victim is the perfect example of the difference between the sujet d’énoncé (subject of the statement) and the sujet d’énonciation (subject of the enunciating). The demand that the Party addresses to him is: “At this moment, the Party needs the process to consolidate the revolutionary gains, so be a good communist, do a last service to the Party and confess.”

Here we have the division of the subject in its purest form: the only way for the accused to confirm himself as a good communist at the level of the sujet d’énonciation, is to confess, i.e., to determine himself, at the level of the sujet d’énoncé, as a traitor.

Ernesto Laclau was perhaps right when he once remarked that it isn’t only Stalinism which is a language-phenomenon; it is already language itself which is a Stalinist phenomenon. 2

Here, however, we must carefully distinguish between this Lacanian notion of the divided subject and the “post-structuralist” notion of the subject-positions. In “post-structuralism,” the subject is usually reduced to subjection.

He is conceived as an effect of a fundamentally non-subjective process: the subject is always caught in, traversed by, the pre-subjective process (of “writing,” of “desire,” etc.), and the accent is put on different modes of how individuals “experience,” “live,” their positions as “subjects,” “actors,” “agents” of the historical process.

For example, it is only at a certain point in European history that the author of works of art, a painter or a writer, began to see himself as a creative individual who, in his work, is giving expression to his interior subjective richness. The great master of such analysis was, of course, Foucault: one might say that the main point of his late work was to articulate the different modes of how individuals assume their subject-positions.

But with Lacan, we have quite another notion of the subject. To put it in a simple way: if we abstract, if we subtract all the richness of the different modes of subjectivization, all the fullness of experience present in the way individuals “live” their subject-positions, what remains is an empty place which was filled out with this richness; and this original void, this lack of the symbolic structure is the subject, the subject of the signifier.

The subject is therefore to be strictly opposed to the effect of subjectivation: what the subjectivation masks is not a pre- or trans-subjective process of writing but a lack in the structure, a lack which is the subject.

Our predominant idea of the subject is, in Lacanian terms, that of the “subject of the signified,” the active agent, the bearer of some signification who is trying to express himself in the language. The starting point of Lacan is, of course, that the symbolic representation represents the subject always in a distorted way, that it is always a displacement, a failure, i.e., that the subject cannot find a signifier which would be “his own,” that he is always saying less or too much, in short: something other than what he wanted, intended to say.

The usual conclusion from this would be that the subject is some kind of interior richness of meaning which always exceeds its symbolic articulation: “language cannot express fully what I’m trying to say…”

The Lacanian thesis is its exact opposite: this surplus of signification masks a fundamental lack. The subject of the signifier is precisely this lack, this impossibility to find a signifier which would be “his own”: the failure of his representation is a positive condition.

The subject tries to articulate himself in a signifying representation, and the representation fails; instead of a richness we have a lack, and this void opened by the failure is the subject of the signifier.

To put it in a paradoxical way: the subject of the signifier is a retroactive effect of the failure of his own representation; that’s why the failure of representation is the only way to represent him adequately. 3-4

It is at the level of this difference between the two deaths, of this empty place in the very heart of the Other, that we must locate the
problematic of the death drive.

The connection between the death drive and the symbolic order is a constant with Lacan, but we can  differentiate the various stages of his teaching precisely by reference to the different modes of articulation of the death drive and the signifier.

In the first period (the first seminar, “The Function and the Field of Speech and Language…”), it is the Hegelian phenomenological idea that the word is a death, a murder of a thing: as soon as the reality is symbolized, caught in a symbolic network, the thing itself is more present in a word, in its concept, than in its immediate physical reality.

More precisely, we cannot return to the immediate reality:even if we turn from the word to the thing, from the word “table” to the table in its physical reality, for example, the appearance of the table itself is already marked with a certain lack. To know what a table really is, what it means, we must have recourse to the word, which implies an absence of the thing.

In the second period (the Lacanian reading of Poe’s Purloined Letter), the accent is shifted from the word, from speech, to language as a synchronic structure, a senseless autonomous mechanism which produces meaning as its effect If, in the first period, the Lacanian concept of language is still basically the phenomenological one (Lacan is repeating all the time that the field of psychoanalysis is the field of meaning, la signification), here we have a “structuralist” conception of language as a differential system of elements.

The death drive is now identified with the symbolic order itself: in Lacan’s own words, it is “nothing but a mask of the symbolic order.” The main thing here is the opposition between the imaginary level of the experience of meaning and the meaningless signifier/signifying mechanism which produces it.

The imaginary level is governed by the pleasure principle; it strives for a homeostatic balance. The symbolic order in its blind automatism is always troubling this homeostasis: it is “beyond the pleasure principle.” When the human being is caught in the signifier’s network, this network has a mortifying effect on him;  he becomes part of a strange automatic order disturbing his natural homeostatic balance (through compulsive repetition, for example).

In the third period, where the main accent of Lacan’s teaching is put on the real as impossible, the death drive again radically changes its signification. This change can be most easily detected through the relationship between the pleasure principle and the symbolic order.

Till the end of the fifties, the pleasure principle was identified with the imaginary level: the symbolic order was conceived as the real “beyond the pleasure principle.” But starting from the late fifties (the seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis) it is on the contrary the symbolic order itself which is identified with the pleasure principle: the unconscious “structured like a language,” its “primary process” of metonymic-metaphoric displacements, is governed by the pleasure principle; what lies beyond is not the symbolic order but a real kernel, a traumatic core. To designate it, Lacan uses a Freudian term das Ding, the Thing as an incarnation of the impossible jouissance (the term Thing is to be taken here with all the connotations it possesses in the domain of horror science-fiction: the “alien” from the movie of the same name is a pre-symbolic, maternal Thing par excellence).

The symbolic order strives for a homeostatic balance, but there is in its kernel, in its very centre, some strange, traumatic element which cannot be symbolized, integrated into the symbolic order: the Thing.

Lacan coined a neologism for it: l’extimité — external intimacy, which served as a title for one of the seminars of Jacques-Alain Miller. And what is, at this level, the death drive

Exactly the opposite of the symbolic order: the possibility of what was named by de Sade “the second death,” the radical annihilation of the symbolic texture through which so-called reality is constituted. The very existence of the symbolic order implies a possibility of its radical effacement, of the “symbolic death” … the obliteration of the signifying network itself.

This distinction between the different stages of Lacan’s teaching is not of merely theoretical interest; it has very definite consequences for the determination of the final moment of the psychoanalytic cure.

In the first period, where the accent is laid on the word as a medium of the intersubjective recognition of desire, symptoms are conceived as white spots, non-symbolized imaginary elements of the history of the subject, and the process of analysis is that of their symbolization, i.e., of their integration into the symbolic universe of the subject: the analysis gives meaning, retroactively, to what was in the beginning a meaningless trace.  So the final moment of analysis is here reached when the subject is able to narrate to the other his own history in its continuity, when his desire is integrated, recognized in a “full speech” (parole pleine).

In the second period, where the symbolic order is conceived as having a mortifying effect on a subject, i.e., as imposing on him a traumatic loss – and the name of this loss, of this lack, is of course the symbolic castration – the final moment of analysis is reached when the subject is made ready to accept this fundamental loss, to consent to symbolic castration as a price to pay for access to his desire.

In the third period, we have the great Other, the symbolic order, with a traumatic element in its very heart; and in Lacanian theory, fantasy is conceived as a construction allowing the subject to come to terms with this traumatic kernel. At this level, the final moment of analysis is defined as “going through a fantasy” (la traversée du fantasme): not its symbolic interpretation but the experience of the fact that the fantasy-object, by its fascinating presence, just fills out a lack, a void in the Other. There is nothing “behind” the fantasy; the fantasy is precisely a construction the function of which is to hide this void, this “nothing,” i.e., the lack in the Other. The crucial element of this third period of Lacan’s teaching is then the shift of the accent from the symbolic to the real.

vanheule foreclosure delusional metaphor

Vanheule, Stijn. The Subject of Psychosis: A Lacanian Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

A delusion is primarily a speech event which is why he studies delusions in terms of ruptures in the conventinal use of speech. 98
… at the basis of psychotic outbreak a dramatic mental decomposition can be found and a delusion is an adaptive reaction to this problem of disintegration. … Delusions defend the subject against radical breakdown. … [but] delusions do not inherently provide stability. Only to the extent that a delusion creates an anchor, based on which the process of signification is stablized, can it be thought to be a stabilizing factor in mental life. 99-100

eyers Hegel Lacan is non dialectical

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