The Touch of the Real
The persistence of radical negativity is what the later Lacan generically characterised as the Real: the ultimate “signified” around which all signification is constituted and simultaneously finds its limitation and inexorable failure. As is well documented elsewhere, the Real is inextricably linked with the registers of the Symbolic and the Imaginary and together these form a basic triadic structure for all (human) Being. In general terms, both the Symbolic and the Imaginary may be said to belong to the order of signification. While the Symbolic refers to the (potentially) infinite uses of signification through language and symbols, the Imaginary refers to the particular ways in which signification becomes arrested around certain fundamental images of ourselves that offer a sense of coherence and place in the world. It is through the Imaginary that we achieve particular forms of identification and which enable us to resolve the basic question(s) of who we are for the Other; we “narrate” ourselves around certain basic images with which we identify and/or wish to project.
The Real, on the other hand, not only does not belong (directly) to the order of signification but crucially represents its negation. The Real is rather the transcendental (and constitutive) dimension of resistance in every process of signification. This transcendental aspect is something that does not sit easily with the main trends in postmodern thought. According to Butler, for example, the idea of the Real, as something that cannot be integrated symbolically, is already logically inconsistent: “to claim that the real resists symbolization is still to symbolize the real as a kind of resistance. The former claim (the real resists symbolization) can only be true if the latter claim (“the real resists symbolization” is a symbolization) is true, but if the second claim is true, the first is necessarily false.”
In other words, if you posit something as external to symbolization you can only do so through symbolization itself; you cannot signify anything beyond signification itself. But as Zizek points out, the Real should not be thought of as some kind of external entity (which would indeed invoke the petitio principii to which Butler alludes). The Real is rather strictly an internal point of failure, an inherent limit. Thus what we have is a paradox rather than a logical contradiction:
“The paradox…is that Butler is, in a way, right: yes, the Real is in fact internal/inherent to the Symbolic, not its external limit, but for that very reason, it cannot be symbolized. In other words, the paradox is that the Real as external, excluded from the Symbolic, is in fact a symbolic determination - what eludes symbolization is precisely the Real as the inherent point of failure of symbolization”
The Real is experienced in terms of the Symbolic (dis)functioning itself. We touch the Real through those points where symbolization fails; through trauma, aversion, dislocation and all those markers of uncertainty where the Symbolic fails to deliver a consistent and coherent reality. While the Real cannot be directly represented - hence Lacan’s dictum that nothing is lacking in the Real (lack can only be formulated through some form of symbolic endeavour but has no meaning in relation to radical negativity) - it can nonetheless be shown in terms of symbolic failure and can be alluded to though figurative embodiments of horror-excess that threaten disintegration (monsters, forces of nature, disease/viruses and so on).
- Glyn Daly @ lacan.com
In topological terms, the Real is not compact. Butler simply misses the point.
