Abstract
Lacan makes use of a paradoxical phrase to describe the difficulty of expression accompanying an experience of astonishment, that of “the signifier in the Real.” In this chapter I explore the concept of the Real—an inherent limit to the symbolic capacities of language, as what encapsulates the Lacanian story about the groundlessness of meaning and the temptations to avoid it or conceal it. As I show, the Lacanian Real comes with two interpretative temptations: treating the Real as a pre-symbolic reality that conditions our sense-making corresponds to the temptation of a recourse to a metaphysical grounding of meaning, while treating the Real as a post-symbolic point of failure corresponds to the temptation to treat any limit of expression as a fictional product of the symbolic. However, I argue that there is a way to think about the limit beyond these two temptations through the idea that the Real is a potential state for any signifier when the latter has been excluded from significant use.
It is not for nothing that the real is always in the background, and that I never refer to it directly in our commentaries here. It is, quite precisely, and quite properly speaking, excluded.
Lacan, Seminar I (1991)
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Notes
- 1.
“The two elements [signified and signifier] are intimately united,” in Saussure (1972, 98–99).
- 2.
The real is one of the most complex and obscure Lacanian concepts, with various (sometimes seemingly contradictory) aspects; it is also closely connected to other Lacanian terms such as the symbolic , the imaginary , the objet petit a, jouissance , lalangue, drive . Because of this connection between the concept of the real and other concepts and, therefore, because of the multiplicity of definitions provided throughout Lacan’s work, many commentators approach the real through a schematic division of Lacan’s work into early, middle, and late periods. As Voruz and Wolf put it: “The seminar of Jacques Lacan can be divided into three periods, each lasting for approximately a decade. Roughly speaking, and as developed by Jacques-Alain Miller in his ongoing Paris seminar, each of these periods is characterized by the prevalence of one of the three registers of the analytic experience that Lacan named imaginary , symbolic , and real, and in that order” (Voruz & Wolf, 2007, viii). According to this division, the early Lacan is the Lacan of the mirror stage, in which he is mostly concerned with an elaboration of the imaginary (and the imaginary formation of the Ego ); the middle Lacan shifts to the symbolic and the importance of the signifier, with the Name-of-the-Father being the dominant notion; and the late Lacan brings the real into the centre of his work. Here, the symbolic seems always to be undermined by the real, and the subject becomes an unstable, void construction. I regard this as a simplistic way of understanding Lacan, even if it helps us organize his work. Such readings see the development of the concept of the real in a linear way and fail to take into account the interdependence between all three orders, which Lacan himself repeatedly stresses. Here, I approach Lacan’s work as a continuum, that is, not in terms of separate periods, but mostly as a space of a constant attempt to understand and conceptualize the relation between the real, the symbolic , and the imaginary . This is why I use references from Lacan’s different seminars (or different “periods”) on the real, as well as passages from the “late” Lacan to understand the “early” one, or vice versa. Contrary to the idea that Lacan’s elaboration of the real in his late work cancels out his early one, the different elaborations Lacan offers will be regarded here as different aspects of the real.
- 3.
Lacan uses the term extimité to describe the paradoxical relation of the real to the symbolic , which is neither inside nor outside the symbolic .
- 4.
Shepherdson reads the two versions of the real as follows: “In the first case, one can say the real ‘exists’ independently, and then go on to ask whether we can have any knowledge of it independent of our representations . But in the second case, we are led to speak of the ‘being of lack’—thereby initiating a whole series of apparently paradoxical claims about the ‘being’ of what ‘is not,’ reminiscent, perhaps, of theological disputes concerning the existence of God” (2008, 27).
- 5.
There is an air of paradox here, like the paradox we encountered earlier in our discussion on the signifier and how, as an empty place, it designates both an absence (of the signified that can fill in the place) and a presence (of what could potentially fill in that place). Similarly, the very idea that the real is always in the same place (it is something fixed that precedes our symbolic or imaginary attempts) is bound up with the idea that it cannot be understood; it resists our attempts to come to terms with it. Lacan’s analogy with the stars can be helpful: since the beginning of time, human beings have tried to domesticate their fixity by naming the stars, thus including them in the symbolic . Also, apart from being named, stars have been included in the imaginary by being given an astrological efficacy or by being regarded as a source of truth. Both the symbolic and the imaginary are ways of appropriation and familiarization of the real fixity of the stars that resist a full appropriation.
- 6.
In Lacan’s more complex version of this he cyphers the triplets +++ and −−− as 1, +−+ and −+− as 3, and any other irregular series, +−−, −++, ++−, −−+ as 2. He then adds another level of codification for the series of 1, 2, 3 with the Greek letters α, β, γ, δ.
- 7.
Freud’s account of psychosexual development shows that the way our body desires and gets pleasure is a product of the symbolic progressive creation of erogenous zones as a progressive localization of pleasure. See Freud (1991).
- 8.
Another good example is that of the symptom , which functions as a metaphor for what is not symbolized yet. Before the work of interpretation that allows the symptom to take on a meaning, a symptom is a floating signifier. The symptom is what brings us into contact with this level of ab-sense or non-meaning, with the signifier-in-isolation that awaits, so to speak, (the analyst’s) interpretation.
- 9.
An empty or floating signifier is a signifier without referent.
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Balaska, M. (2019). The Groundlessness of Meaning in Lacan’s Work. In: Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16939-8_4
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