To: Dr. Shepherdson
From: hescobar.datasys.com.mx (Hector Escobar Sotomayor)
Subject: Comments on your paper in Internet about Foucault and Lacan
Dear Dr. Shepherdson:
I’m a Mexican student of Philosophy and now I’m working on my thesis devoted to an archaeological study of Psychology, considering the relation Foucault-Lacan so I’d like to get in contact with you and to interchange ideas. If you like, I could send you a copy of my thesis (in paper or by e-mail) (it’s in Spanish). My proposition is that according to Foucault in The order of things we have reached a new epistemic period that can be defined as a Postanthropologic one, in which is neccesary to leave the notion of the human being and replace it with the notion of the Subject of Desire. The importance of Lacan’s work is obvious mainly in his idea of Jouissance (“Goce” in Spanish), which opens a new line of philosophical arguments.
Please, as you can see, my written English is not very good, but I think we could establish a communication. My adress is hescobar@datasys.com.mx.
Thank you very much for your attention
PMC Reader’s Report on Shepherdson’s article on “History and the Real”:
Dear Mr. Shepherdson:
I’m a psychoanalyst and I’m on my way to mastering desire [in] psychoanalytical theory. I read you paper “History and the Real” and really “enjoyed” it, even knowing very little about Foucault. But there’s one thing that called my attention in such a special way, that I want to discuss it with you:
Under your topic nr. 42, you wrote: “(. . .) the element of lack that destablizes the structural, symbolic totality.”
It then seemed to me (I may be wrong) that you suggest that the structure (and this must be a subjective structure) has something out of it which causes a kind of effect on it somehow. I’ve found close concepts to this (which I’m not sure if it is what you intended at all) [in] many earlier Lacanian authors.
Now, this is a very hot question. For me, it is much easier to understand the cause for the structure as being the structure itself; in other words, what is prohibited is part of the structure, and what makes the prohibition be is also a part of the structure. The lack of the structure is also [in] the structure and, futher, it’s only because of its lack that the structure can be . . . (I’m not being original at this point: I think you know G. Deleuze’s paper “On quoi reconnait-on le structuralisme?”).
Well, I also must say that this interests me because I didn’t find any answer which could be conclusive. What do you think about that?
Yours,
Marcus Lopes
marclop@omega.lncc.br
Charles Shepherdson
Pembroke Center
Brown University
engcs@mizzou1.missouri.edu
Dear Mr. Lopes:
Thank you for your questions on my article “History and the Real,” which Postmodern Culture recently forwarded to me. It is always interesting to me to hear from practicing psychoanalysts, and from others in the medical profession who have an interest in Lacanian theory. In the United States, of course, interest in Lacan has mainly arisen through philosophy, or literary theory and cultural studies, so it is not always recognized that in Europe and South America — as well as in Australia and Mexico — Lacan has a much greater impact on clinical circles. I say this only because, if you are looking for clinical material, there is much more information in French and Spanish than in English. But I am grateful for your question, and I will do my best with it, because it gives me a chance to try to clarify — even for myself — a difficult and important issue.
You asked in your letter about the concept of the “real,” and especially about its relation to the symbolic order. You say I suggested that the real is “outside” the symbolic structure: “the structure (and this must be a subjective structure) has something out of it which causes a kind of effect on it somehow.” And you say it is “easier to understand the cause for the structure as being the structure itself.” These are interesting and difficult questions. Many readers have asked me a related question: “Is everything really a ‘discursive construction,’ a product of the symbolic order, and if not, how can we speak of an ‘outside’ without returning to a naive realism?”1 This is one of the most important problems in contemporary intellectual life, and it might be said that one’s response to this single issue is enough to define one’s theoretical orientation today.
A map of postmodernism could even be drawn on the basis of the answers that are given to this question. It would have three major areas: in the first, we find an emphasis on the “symbolic order,” and certain theories of “social construction”; in the second, we find a reaction against “post-modernism,” and a return to “positive” and “empirical” investigation, together with a return to biological, genetic, and endocrinological accounts of consciousness, behavior, and sexuality; in the third area, we find an effort to think through the “linguistic turn” — not to react against the formative power of representation, but rather to think its limit. This is where I believe the most interesting contemporary work is being done, and this is the problem that is held in common by Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida, though they do not elaborate the issue in the same way. There are many ways to approach the question, as it concerns Lacan, and I will therefore try to touch very briefly on a whole range of directions in which your question might take us. I will loosely organize the discussion under three headings: “Inside/Outside,” “The Limits of Formalization,” and “Two Versions of the Real (Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek).”
1.1. Inside/outside
First, concerning the idea that the real is “outside” the symbolic. As you probably know, Jacques-Alain Miller developed the term “extimité” from Lacan, suggesting that the real is not exactly “outside,” but is a kind of “excluded interior,” or an “intimate exterior” (see Miller, “Extimité”). In Seminar VII, for example, in the chapter “On the Moral Law,” Lacan says of the “thing”: “das Ding is at the center only in the sense that it is excluded” (SVII 71). And again in the chapter on “The Object and the Thing,” he speaks of what is “excluded in the interior” (101), noting that this exclusion presents us with a “gap” in the symbolic order — something that escapes the law — “a gap once again at the level of das Ding,” which indicates that we can “no longer rely on the Father’s guarantee” (100). However much one may stress the notorious “law of the father” in Lacan, it is clear that the symbolic order is not the whole story, and that the relation between the symbolic and the real (or between language and das Ding) involves a certain failure of the law. We must therefore take account of this element that “escapes” the symbolic order, or renders it “incomplete.” The problem remains as to how exactly this “excluded object” should be conceived, but we can already see that it is not simply “outside” the structure, but is missing from the structure, excluded from within. So your question is: just how we are to understand this “belonging” and “not belonging” to structure, this “intimate alterity” of the real?
1.2 Topology
Lacan often drew on topology in his attempts to describe this peculiar “extimate” relation between the symbolic and the real. One could thus approach the question in geometrical terms. For the usual relation between “inside” and “outside” that exists in Euclidean space (a circle, for example, has a clearly defined interior and exterior) is disrupted by topological figures such as the Klein bottle, or the torus (the figure shaped like a doughnut, which is structured around a central hole). Even with the Mobius strip, it is difficult to say whether it has “one” side or “two” — the usual numerical ordering is disrupted. Juan-David Nasio has a very good book in which he argues that each of these topological figures is meant to address a specific problem within psychoanalytic theory. Thus, (1) the torus describes the relation between demand and desire, (2) the Mobius strip describes the relation between the subject and speech, (3) the Klein bottle describes the relation between the master-signifier and the Other, and (4) the cross-cap describes the structure of fantasy, where we find the subject’s relation to the object. There also is a fine short book on these issues by Jeanne Granon-Lafont.
1.3 Being-toward-death
Without developing these points in detail, it is easy to see this material at work in Lacan’s text. Even in the familiar “Rome Discourse,” Lacan says that the human being’s relation to death is unlike the “natural” relation to biological death, and that death is not a simple “event,” a moment “in” chronological time, but rather the very opening of time, its condition of possibility. Instead of being placed at the end of a temporal sequence, as a final moment in biological time, the relation-to-death is placed at the origin, and understood as the “giving” of human time, the opening of possibility, of time as a finite relation to the future and the past, structured by anticipation and memory. Death thus involves a peculiar link between the symbolic and the real, presenting us with a sort of hole or void in the structure of meaning — a void that is not a deficiency, but virtually the opposite, an absolute condition of meaning. The human relation-to-death (discussed in such detail by Heidegger) is thus in some sense at the “origin” of the symbolic order — not represented “in” language, or entirely captured by the symbolic rituals that seek to contain it, but rather “primordial” to language: “So when we wish to attain in the subject . . . what is primordial to the birth of symbols, we find it in death” (E 105). The topological reference to a “missing” center (added to the text in 1966) follows: “To say that this mortal meaning reveals in speech a center exterior to language is more than a metaphor; it manifests a structure . . . it corresponds rather to the relational group that symbolic logic designates topologically as an annulus.” He adds, “If I wished to give an intuitive representation of it . . . I should call on the three-dimensional form of the torus” (E 105). I won’t go into this matter in detail, but one can easily see that the relation between the symbolic and the real cannot be approached if one begins with a dichotomy between the “inside” and “outside.” It is rather a matter of a void “within” the structure. This is of course what the theory of “lack” in Lacan tries to address. And this is why those for whom “lack” is foreclosed — those who “lack lack” — are in some sense deprived of access to language.
1.4 The structure of the body
Lacan’s topological formulations may seem esoteric, and many commentators have ridiculed them, denouncing his “pseudo-mathematical” interests as chicanery or mysticism or intellectual posing. But if one thinks for a moment about the body — about the peculiar “structure” of the body, and all the discussions in Freud about the “limit” of the body, the difficulty of “containing” the body within its skin, or of determining what is “inside” and “outside” the body (the “relation to the object,” the mechanisms of “projection” and “introjection,” and so on), it becomes obvious that the space of the body is not really elucidated by Euclidean geometry. The body is not easily “closed” within itself, as a circle is “closed” with respect to the “outside.” The body does not “occupy” space as a natural object does. When it comes to the “body,” the relations of “interior” and “exterior” are more complex and enigmatic than one would suspect if one began by regarding the body as an “extended substance” in Cartesian space, or by presupposing that space is structured by Euclidean dimensions, and that the “place” of the body can be delimited in the same way that the natural object can be located by spacial coordinates in Euclidean geometry. So the discussion of topology may seem esoteric, but it addresses problems that are obviously fundamental to psychoanalysis. Freud speaks, for example, of the “orifices” of the body as points of exchange with the “outside” — points where the “limit” of the body is most obscure, where the relation between the “inside” and “outside” of the body is unstable and problematic. All the analytic problems having to do with “incorporation,” “mourning,” “abjection,” and the “object-relation” — even the themes of “aggression” and “love,” and the entire question of the “relation to the other” — can be put in terms of the “inside” and “outside” of the body.
1.5 From the “imaginary body” to the symbolic containment of the void
These observations are very brief, but they should be enough to indicate that the “body” in psychoanalysis is not simply an “imaginary body.” To be sure, Freud speaks of the “ego” as a “bodily ego,” and Lacan says that the body is an “imaginary body.” And this bears not only on the “space” of the body, but on “external” space as well: in the “Mirror Stage” he notes that the imaginary order allows the world of objects to appear, calling it “the threshold of the visible world” (you may know Kaja Silverman’s recent book by this title). But discussions of the “imaginary body” have tended to obscure the fact that the symbolic and the real also play a crucial role in the constitution of the body. Furthermore, if we speak of the body as “imaginary,” we will tend to regard the “symbolic” as if it were a purely “linguistic” matter, a domain of speech and “representation,” and not a matter of our embodiment as well. I remember visiting a clinic in Boston once — a halfway house for schizophrenics. Many of the patients had specific materials — scarves or string or favorite hats — that they would attach to their bodies. Without these things, they became extremely anxious and refused to go outside, as if the body were not “unified” without this external prop. The body does not automatically cohere by nature: it holds itself together as “one” entity, and is able to move through “space,” not naturally, with the physical coherence of an objective “thing,” but only with the help of imaginary and symbolic props that give space and time their consistency. So we could say that the relation between the real and the symbolic — the formation of a “structure” which also includes the real as an “interior exclusion” — allows the body to move, and gives coherence to “external space.” This human “space” — the space of desire and human movement–cannot be grasped in terms of Euclidean space, and the space of the “body” therefore cannot be adequately conceived through the usual geometry of “inside” and “outside.” Thus, while we are often told that the “body” is an “imaginary body” for Lacan, the constitution of the body also depends on the inscription of the void, the symbolic “containment” of lack. I have tried to make this argument in more detail (partly in reference to anorexia), in “Adaequatio Sexualis.”
1.6 Demand and desire
The relation between the symbolic and the real can also cast light on the distinction between demand and desire. In a famous — but still notoriously obscure — passage in “The Meaning of the Phallus,” Lacan distinguishes between demand and desire, calling desire an “absolute condition”: “for the unconditioned element of demand,” he writes, “desire substitutes the absolute condition” (E, 287). Demand is “unconditioned” in the sense that it simply designates the general “deviation” by which human demand comes to be separated from animal “need” (which is “conditioned” by the requirements of survival and reproduction). We thus have a “deviation in man’s needs from the fact that he speaks . . . insofar as his needs are subjected to demand” (E, 286). This has a clear impact on the “object-relation”: for unlike the object of need, the object of demand is symbolic, and is therefore subject to metonymic displacement, losing its natural specificity in a movement along the signifying chain that makes the object a “substitute,” a signifier of the other’s recognition. In Lacan’s words, “demand annuls (aufhebt) the particularity of everything that can be granted by transmuting it into a proof of love” (E, 286). Demand is thus not only perpetually displaced, but also projected to infinity, always seeking “something more.” As Marx also says, human life loses its foundation in nature, in a movement of “excess production” (the arena of “supply and demand”) that goes beyond all biological need and has no natural limitation.
Consequently, at the “symbolic” level of demand, there is a further requirement for a “limit,” and it is precisely desire that emerges as this limit to the infinite displacement of demand, giving a finite shape to the otherwise endless play of symbolic substitution. Thus, as Lacan says in “Direction of the Treatment,” “Desire is produced in the beyond of demand (E, 265; see also SVIII, 246), and introduces a “limit” to the displacement of the signifier. As Derrida also notes in “Structure, Sign, and Play,” the free play of the signifier is in principle unlimited, but in fact is always brought to a certain tentative closure, and thereby grounded in a peculiar “center.” “And as always,” Derrida writes, this “point at which the substitution of contents, elements, or terms is no longer possible . . . expresses the force of a desire” (279). We can also see here why Lacan claims that although the “particularity” of the object of need is lost when we pass to the level of symbolic displacement (“demand annuls [aufhebt] the particularity of everything that can be granted”), he also insists that “the particularity thus abolished should reappear beyond demand” (E, 286). Thus, the “reversal” or transformation that characterizes the shift from demand to desire is accomplished precisely by the institution of a lack, a void or “obliteration” that is not symbolic, that escapes the dialectical movement of “productive negation,” but is nevertheless constitutive of the subject. This “void,” therefore, has an “effect”: it leaves a “remainder,” a “relic” that is regarded as a “power” — “the force of a desire”: “By a reversal that is not simply the negation of a negation, the power of pure loss arises from the relic of an obliteration” (E, 287; see Borch-Jacobsen’s very useful discussion of this text in The Absolute Master, pp. 199-212, where he also corrects some deficiencies in the English translation). We thus return to the “mortal center” of the “Rome Discourse” — as if language were opened by a mark of death that haunts it, but cannot be inscribed or reduced to a symbolic phenomenon. This not only explains the link between “death” and “desire,” but also suggests why Lacan claims, in “The Meaning of the Phallus,” that psychoanalysis goes beyond Hegel precisely insofar as it is able to give theoretical precision to an element of “lack” that is not dialectical — a lack that is not “inscribed” in the movement of symbolic production, but rather makes it possible. This is the “absolute condition” that “reverses” the “unconditioned” character of demand, allowing it to acquire a local habitation and a name.
1.7 The “invention” of the body
Before we close this initial “topological” approach to the problem, the historical aspect of these remarks should also be stressed. It is often said that psychoanalysis is simply ahistorical, and that it promotes a “structuralist” position, a version of the “law” that is inattentive to different social and historical conditions. There are at least three points that should be stressed in this regard. First, “classical” structuralism was in no way simply “ahistorical” (as Piaget pointed out, and as Derek Attridge has recently emphasized). It rather sought to elaborate a model of historical transformation that would not immediately have recourse to the familiar, diachronic and quasi-evolutionary models of history that had characterized the philology of the nineteenth century. For Saussure, it is obvious that there are “living” and “dead” languages, and the “laws” of the symbolic order do not ignore this fact; they simply seek to account for shifts and displacements of the structure — for what one might call the historicality of language — without automatically presupposing a “natural” time of “growth” and “decay.” Second, if — having recognized the historical dimension of structuralism — one then turns from the strictly “structural” conception of the “law” (Saussure and Lévi-Strauss) to Lacan’s concern with the relation between the symbolic and the real, one can see the problem of the real as precisely an additional temporal problem — since it bears on the incompleteness and thus the destabilization of the law. As Slavoj Zizek has rightly said, psychoanalysis is not simply “ahistorical,” but it is “anti-historicist,” insofar as it entails a conception of time that differs from the historically linear, chronologically sequential time of “history” as we usually understand it. Third — to return now to our initial problematic — if one recalls that topology was invented by Leibniz in the late 17th century, as “analysis situs” (a theory of “place” that cannot be formulated in terms of “space”), one might be led to consider that the Freudian theory of the body could only emerge after the “classical,” Euclidean conception of space had been challenged. In short, psychoanalysis is not simply “ahistorical”; on the contrary, it explicitly engages the question of the historical conditions of its own emergence. Indeed, as the reference to Leibniz suggests, Lacan, like many “postmodern” thinkers, is profoundly engaged with the Enlightenment, as a historical moment whose “end” we are still experiencing.
The “body” in psychoanalysis is thus conceivable only on the basis of a certain history. This is why Lacan talks so much about “measurement” and “science” and “Kepler” and “Copernicus.” Even without going into Lacan’s account of the history of science, one can see that the relation between the “real” and the “symbolic” is concerned with the theory of space (or rather “place”), and is such that the real is something like an “interior exclusion” — not simply “outside,” entirely unrelated to the structure, or completely foreign, but — quite the opposite — “contained” by the particular structure which excludes it, like an internal “void”. Many writers have recently taken up this problem — notably Irigaray, in her article on Aristotle, but also Heidegger, whose famous analysis of the jug is intriguing here, since he insists that the jug is not an “object” in Euclidean dimensions, but rather a structure that contains the void. As Heidegger says, the “gift” and “sacrifice” that one encounters in the face of the “thing” cannot be understood unless we see that the jug is not reducible to the “object” in Cartesian space (“the jug differs from an object,” he writes in “The Thing”). As with the “real” in Lacan, the void or “nothing” that is “given a place” by the jug is not a “natural” void (nature abhors a vacuum), but an unnatural “nothingness,” a “lack” that arises only through the structure, and only for the being who speaks: it is a lack that is produced in the symbolic order.
2.1 The limits of formalization
Let us now leave these topological matters aside, and take another approach to your question. We have seen that the real is neither “inside” nor “outside” the symbolic, but is more like an “internal void.” This can be clarified through topological figures, but we could also put the question in a more general way, as a question concerning the “limits of formalization.” This would oblige us to clarify the way in which psychoanalysis goes “beyond structuralism.” Many people condemn Lacanian psychoanalysis for being “trapped” in structuralism, committed to a “science” of the subject and a doctrine of the “law” that claims to be “universal,” and does not adequately attend to the “contingent” historical and cultural specificity of human existence. There is indeed a commitment to a kind of “logic” or “formalization” in Lacan, and an emphasis upon the “law” of the symbolic, but one must recognize it as an effort to theorize the limit of the law, the incompleteness of the law, the fact that the law is “not all,” and that it always malfunctions. Slavoj Zizek has insisted upon this point more than anything else in his writing. In For They Know Not What They Do, he claims that the link between Hegel and Lacan should be seen in this way:
Hegel knows very well that every attempt at rational totalization ultimately fails . . . his wager is located at another level . . . the possibility of "making a system" out of the very series of failed totalizations . . . to discern the strange "logic" that regulates the process. (99)
The task is therefore to grasp what Derrida has called “the law of the law,” the “logic” which governs the malfunction of the law, showing us why the classical position of structuralism is unstable, and allowing us to see in a clear, “rational” and quasi-logical way what Lacan calls the “mystical limit of the most rational discourse in the world” (E, 124). In this sense, Lacan is a “post-structuralist”: the “real” can be understood as a concept that was developed in order to define in a clear way how there is always an element that “does not belong” within the structure, an “excluded” element which escapes the law, but which can nevertheless be approached in a precise theoretical fashion.
2.2 Cause and law
At this point, we could also take up your question concerning the “cause.” For when you ask how the real, if it is “outside” the symbolic order, can possibly have an “effect” on the symbolic, it seems to me that you have expressed the position of classical structuralism (and perhaps the position of “science”). For if we think of “cause” in terms of the usual “scientific” model — in terms of a “lawful” sequence of causes and effects (“the same cause always produces the same effect”) — then we may suppose a continuity between “law” and “cause.” If we can account for the “cause” of a phenomenon (the cause of disease, for example), we have begun to elaborate the “laws” that govern it. Now it is precisely here that Lacan introduces a “discontinuity“: there is a “cause,” he says (in the first chapter of Seminar XI), only where there is a failure of the law. To speak of the “cause of desire” is always to speak of a certain excess or deficiency in the relation between the subject and the Other, a “lack” that cannot be grasped at the level of the signifying chain. From here we could obviously go on to explore the very complex question of whether psychoanalysis is a “science” or not, and how it can claim to be “scientific” while questioning the usual notion of “causality.” And yet, many thinkers in the phenomenological tradition have followed Husserl in arguing that the scientific attitude is a construction that cannot simply be taken for granted as a starting-point, but must be explored in its philosophical presuppositions and its historical conditions of emergence. Lacan addresses these issues explicitly in Seminar XI, where he asks, not whether psychoanalysis is a “science,” but what “science” would have to be, in order to account for the “cause” as a disruption of the “law.” This is the problem of the “subject,” the problem of a “desire” that is normally excluded by “science”: “Can this question be left outside the limits of our field, as it is in effect in the sciences?” (SXI, 9).
2.3 The Other and the object
For Lacan, the very concept of the “subject” cannot be understood without this split between “cause” and “law.” We thus circle back to the “limits of formalization.” For if we start with the Saussurean position, we can elaborate the “law,” but we will not reach the “cause.” According to Saussure, the “laws” of the symbolic order function “internally,” on the basis of the relations between the elements, which are defined “diacritically” in reference to each other, and not to any “outside.” From this perspective, one can indeed claim — as you do in your question — that it is “easier to understand the cause for the structure as being the structure itself.” As Piaget has very clearly shown, this is entirely correct from the standpoint of Saussure: it is impossible to understand the structure, or indeed any of its “elements” (a particular “signifier” for example), except on the basis of the whole. It would be a mistake, from Saussure’s perspective, to regard a particular signifier as having its “cause” outside the system — as though the signifier were based upon designation, and could be derived from “outside,” grounded in an external “reality” which it represents. On the contrary, we must recognize that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts: the “system” is not an atomistic accumulation, and cannot be derived from its elements considered individually. (Foucault makes the same point in The Order of Things, locating this shift in priority from designation to system at the end of the Enlightenment: “in the Classical age, languages had a grammar because they had the power to represent; now they represent on the basis of that grammar” [237]. On this basis, the entire philosophical problematic of “clear and distinct ideas” is replaced by a doctrine of “expression,” “inheritance” and “national identity.”) Contrary to common sense, the system is not built up, piece by piece, on the basis of designation, but rather the reverse: the very possibility of naming is “derived” from the system itself, which is thereby presupposed, since it makes meaning and designation possible. The entire system can thus be regarded as the “cause of itself.” A quasi-theological view, no doubt, in which one cannot seek further into the “origins,” since the system is “always already” in place, arising as it were “in the beginning.”
From Lacan’s point of view, this is not altogether incorrect, and it is indeed the case that we cannot derive language “naturalistically,” on the basis of designation (“there is no Other of the Other”). But we cannot stop with this observation: we must go on to note the incompleteness of the system, the fact that the Other functions only by the exclusion of a peculiar “object,” such that the smooth, consistent functioning of the law is disrupted, destabilized by what Lacan calls the “cause” — among other things, the “cause of desire,” which is not the “object of desire” (in the sense of an actual thing “outside” language), but rather the “object-cause of desire,” the “lack” that gives rise to desire, and yet is not present “in” the symbolic order, or situated at the level of “signifiers.” Lacan makes this explicit in “The Meaning of the Phallus,” when he notes that if we may use structural linguistics to clarify Freudian doctrine, we must also recognize that Freud introduces a problem of “lack” that goes well beyond Saussure: “during the past seven years,” he writes,
I have been led to certain results: essentially, to promulgate as necessary to any articulation of analytic phenomena the notion of the signifier, as opposed to the signified, in modern linguistic analysis. Freud could not take this notion, which postdates him, into account, but I would claim that Freud's discovery . . . could not fail to anticipate its formulas. (E, 284)
We must not stop here, however, as if Freud simply refers us to the structuralist “theory of language,” for Lacan adds that “[c]onversely, it is Freud’s discovery that gives to the signifier/signified opposition the full extent of its implications,” by raising the question of a certain “outside,” or an “interior exclusion” that has effects on the body which linguistics does not try to address. As he puts it in “Subversion of the Subject”: “[i]f linguistics enables us to see the signifier as the determinant of the signified, analysis reveals the truth of this relation by making ‘holes’ in the meaning . . . of its discourse” (E, 299, emphasis added). With this reference to “holes” in the meaning,” we see the step that takes Lacan beyond classical structuralism, to the “limits of formalization,” the element of the “real” that escapes symbolic closure. The “cause” is therefore “outside” the law as Saussure presents it.
2.4 The Subject and the Real
This notion of “cause” should also allow us to situate the place of the subject as real, and not simply as “symbolic.” We often hear that for Lacan, the subject is “constituted in the symbolic order,” but the subject is not entirely “symbolic” (as is suggested by some accounts of “discursive construction”). If we think of the autonomous sequence of signifiers as governed by the “internal” laws of the symbolic order, the diacritical relations between the elements (S1-S2-S3), we can consider the “subject” ($) as a “missing link,” a “place” that is marked, and that can be located through the symbolic, but does not actually belong to the chain of signifiers (S1-S2-[$]-S3). We must be careful here to note the peculiar status of this subject, which is partly symbolic and partly real. In Freud, this “place” of the subject can be located in specific symbolic phenomena — the lapsus, the dream, free association, and so on — which reveal the repressed “unconscious thought.” We find here the “symbolic” aspect of the unconscious, where certain “slips of the tongue” indicate a “discontinuity” in the chain of signifiers, a disruption of conscious discourse, and a sign of unconscious desire. This is consistent with the famous Lacanian thesis that “the unconscious of the subject is the discourse of the Other.” We must be careful, however, if we are not to reduce the unconscious to a purely “symbolic” phenomenon. We must stress that although the “place” of the missing link is marked or “filled in” by certain symbolic formations, the “subject” does not belong to the chain, but indicates a point of non-integration or malfunction. This is why Lacan insists on the “bar” that divides the subject ($): the subject of the unconscious is “represented” in the symbolic order (through the dream, or free association, or other symbolic forms), but in such a way that something of the “being” of the subject remains excluded — “absent” or “barred,” but nevertheless “real” — and not without a certain “force,” an ability to have “effects.” In “Subversion of the Subject,” Lacan says, “we must bring everything back to the function of the cut in discourse . . . a bar between the signifier and signified” (E 299), adding: “This cut in the signifying chain alone verifies the structure of the subject as discontinuity in the real” (E 299).
2.5 Formations of the unconscious ($), formations of fantasy ($ 
a)
We thus see more clearly how the “object a” emerges in Lacanian theory: Lacan introduces the “object a” precisely in order to distinguish between the subject as “real” and the subject as manifested through the symbolic order. Thus, among all the “mathemes” and “formulae” that we find in Lacan, we can take our bearings — as Marie-Hélène Brousse has suggested — from two basic forms: generally speaking, the “formations of the unconscious” (the lapsus, dream, symptom, parapraxis, etc.) reveal the “subject” in a symbolic form (the unconscious as “discourse of the Other”), whereas the “formations of fantasy,” by contrast, provide us with a relation between this “subject” and the “object a” — that peculiar “object” which does not appear in the signifying chain, but which marks a point of pathological attachment, bound to the “real” of the body, a point of libidinal stasis where desire is lost. Accordingly, we find these two aspects of the subject linked together in the formula for fantasy ($ a), which concerns the relation that binds the “split subject” of the symbolic order ($) to a certain “real” element (a) that exceeds the symbolic order. In a manner that is similar to fantasy, the “object of the drive” designates a point of bodily jouissance, a “libidinal attachment” which does not appear at the level of the signifier, and is irreducible to the “symbolic” order. This is why Freud speaks of the “silence” of the death drive — the fact that (unlike other “symptomatic” formations) it does not emerge in speech, and cannot be resolved through “free association.” We must stress here the peculiar status of the “object,” for the “object” of the drive, as “real,” is not a matter of biological instinct (“it is not introduced as the original food . . . the origin of the oral drive” [SXI, 180]), but it is also irreducible to language, since it concerns a “remainder” or “excess” that escapes the symbolic “law” (“this object, which is in fact simply the presence of a hollow, a void,” Lacan says, “can be occupied, Freud tells us, by any object” [SXI, 180]). It is therefore not a matter of a “prelinguistic” material that is simply “outside” language and prior to it. It is rather a question, as Judith Butler has said, of the particular “materialization” of the object — the specific “occupation” of the void being unique to the individual subject. The problem is therefore to define the relation between the Other (the symbolic order) and this object which is “outside” the law. And we can regard this problem in terms of the “limits of formalization” — that is, in terms of a certain failure of the law.
2.6 A new division: free association and transference
Once this distinction between the “symbolic” and the “real” has emerged, we are led to a radical shift in psychoanalytic theory, a splitting of the transference — a sudden division between “transference” and “free association.” For at first, in the period of the “Rome Discourse” (which is perhaps canonical for the secondary literature), Lacan relied heavily on the symbolic order, stressing the difference between the imaginary (the ego) and the symbolic (the “subject divided by language”). The great battle against ego psychology was thus presented as a “return to Freud,” a return to the unconscious, presented as a “discourse of the Other.” The “subject” was marked by a “split” that could not be overcome, though the ego always tended to conceal this division, in the name of imaginary unity. This argument is condensed into “schema L.” On this account, analysis could be presented in a “classical” Freudian manner, as grounded in free association, which would reveal the discourse of the Other in the symbolic form of symptoms, dreams, the lapsus, parapraxis, and so on. The difficulty arose when the symbolic order encountered an impasse, something that was in principal beyond the reach of symbolization (the “silent work” of the death drive). This is where we first find Lacan claiming that the transference is no longer simply a “symbolic” matter, an intersubjective relation governed by speech, and aiming at the “discourse of the Other.” Instead, the transference suddenly presents us with an “object” — something “outside” the symbolic order — an object that marks a point of impasse, a sort of “affective tie” that stands as a limit to symbolization. Freud spoke of this when he characterized the transference as a form of love, and noted that this “love” could actually be an impediment to the patient — an impasse to analysis rather than a means. The crucial point for Lacan is thus to recognize that this dimension of “transference-love” (identification with the object) presents us with a form of identification that is opposed to symbolic identification.
We thus reach a split between free association and the transference, a split between the symbolic and the real. In Seminar XI, Lacan is explicit, insisting that we must now confront something “beyond” the symbolic order, “precisely what one tends most to avoid in the analysis of the transference” (SXI, 149):
In advancing this proposition, I find myself in a problematic position -- for what have I taught about the unconscious? The unconscious is constituted by the effects of speech . . . the unconscious is structured like a language . . . And yet this teaching has had, in its approach, an end that I have called transferential. (SXI, 149)
We are now faced with a dimension of bodily experience that cannot be reduced to the symbolic order, a problematic division between “language” and “sexuality.” Lacan returns here to Freud’s persistent claim that the unconscious always has to do with “sexuality” — that “the reality of the unconscious is a sexual reality.” In spite of his emphasis on language, Lacan cannot ignore this claim, since “at every opportunity, Freud defended his formula . . . with tooth and nail” (SXI, 150). This is a crucial shift in Lacan’s work: if the classical method of “free association” once provided access to the unconscious (as a “symbolic” phenomenon), it now appears that some aspect of the transference disrupts that process, and works precisely against “meaning” and “interpretation.” In Lacan’s words: “the unconscious, if it is what I say it is,” can be characterized as “a play of the signifier” (SXI, 130), and the relation to the analyst should allow this play to unfold; and yet, we must now recognize that “the transference is the means by which the communication of the unconscious is interrupted, by which the unconscious closes up again” (SXI, 130). “I want to stress this question because it is the dividing line between the correct and incorrect interpretation of the transference” (SXI, 130). The same claim marks the very beginning of the seminar as a whole, so its importance is unmistakable. There Lacan rejects “the hermeneutic demand,” which characterizes “what we nowadays call the human sciences” (SXI, 7). In explicit contrast to this “hermeneutic demand,” then, we find psychoanalysis insisting on the limit of the symbolic order, a certain dimension of the “real,” an aspect of the unconscious that is linked to the “body” and “sexuality,” and not to the symbolic order. Viewed in this light, the first sentence of Seminar XI (written afterward, in 1976), could not be more of a challenge: “When the space of a lapsus no longer carries any meaning (or interpretation), then only is one sure that one is in the unconscious” (SXI, vii).
2.7 Against hermeneutics
A similar shift can be found in Freud. Initially, it seemed to Freud that free association, as a relatively loose and uncensored mode of speech, would allow the unconscious to emerge, permitting analysis to gather up the unconscious associations and construct the logic of this “Other” discourse in which the subject’s destiny was written. But as Freud himself observed, there often comes a point at which analysis encounters something “unspeakable,” a center that cannot be reached by analysis:
There is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted dream which has to be left obscure; this is because we become aware during the work of interpretation that at that point there is a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unravelled and which moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of the content of the dream. This is the dream's navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown. (SE 5:525)
We have here precisely the relation between the symbolic and the real. Faced with this “absent center,” analysis is suddenly confronted with the prospect of becoming “interminable.” The transference, guided by free association and a “symbolic” conception of the unconscious (as “discourse of the Other”), is suddenly insufficient. Something else must come to pass, some non-symbolic element must be grasped, if analysis is to reach its “end.” The “aporetic” point described by Freud — the “nodal point” that resists symbolization and “adds nothing to our knowledge” — leads Lacan to the concept of the “object a,” which can be understood as a point of identification that is opposed to symbolic identification. As he says in Seminar XI:
what eludes the subject is the fact that his syntax is in relation with the unconscious reserve. When the subject tells his story, something acts, in a latent way, that governs this syntax and makes it more and more condensed. Condensed in relation to what? In relation to what Freud, at the beginning of his description of psychical resistance, calls a nucleus. (SXI, 68)
Some analysts regard this “psychical resistance” as a phenomenon of the ego, calling it a “defense” and suggesting that analysis must “break down the resistance” and reveal the unconscious. In Lacan’s view, however, such a procedure amounts to imaginary warfare between egos. He therefore insists that “we must distinguish between the resistance of the subject and that first resistance of discourse, when the discourse proceeds towards the condensation around the nucleus.” For this nucleus is not a “content” or “meaning” that might be reached through the symbolic order, if only the ego were not “resisting.” On the contrary: “The nucleus must be designated as belonging to the real” (SXI, 68). The fundamental issue of Seminar XI could be reduced to this single point, where it is a question of elaborating the limit of the law, the peculiar relation between the “symbolic” subject and the subject in the real. All of the chapters — on the “gaze,” on “sexuality,” on the “transference,” and so on — could be seen as different perspectives on this single problem.
2.8 Identification with the object
The “object a” thus emerges in Lacanian theory at the moment when the “symbolic law” no longer has the final word. This is the point at which we can “no longer rely on the Father’s guarantee” (SVII, 101). We are thus led to what Jacques-Alain Miller calls “the formula of the second paternal metaphor,” which “corresponds point by point to the formula of the name-of-the-father,” but which adds a twist that “forces us to operate with the inexistence and the inconsistency of the Other” (85). In fact, Miller locates this moment in the development of Lacan’s thought between seminars VII and VIII (the ethics and transference seminars). In the former, we find “the opposition between das Ding, the Thing, and the Other,” but it is “worked out enigmatically” and remains “wrapped in mystery”; in the transference seminar, however, “this opposition is transformed into a relation,” giving us “a revolution in Lacan’s teaching” (80). However one may date this shift in Lacan’s work, the question it entails is clear enough. We must now regard the transference as bearing on a certain “affective tie,” a certain “libidinal investment,” a dimension of “identification” that cannot be reached by the symbolic work of free association — an “attachment” to an “object” of jouissance that is not reducible to the symbolic order, and is linked to the patient’s suffering — to the symptom, and the body, insofar as they are irreducible to the symbolic order. This is where the question of “sexuality” (of the drive and libido) emerges in a certain “beyond” of language. In the seminar of 1974-75 called R.S.I., he will take this question up in terms of “affect.” “What is the affect of existing?” (FS, 166); “What is it, of the unconscious, which makes for ex-istence? It is what I underline with the support of the symptom” (FS 166). “In all this,” he adds, “what is irreducible is not an effect of language” (FS 165).
2.9 The “end” of analysis
The question of identification — and, to be precise, identification with the object, as distinct from symbolic identification — introduces a limit to the process of symbolization. If something about the transference suddenly distinguishes itself from the labor of free association, it is because the endless labor of speech (the “hermeneutic demand”) cannot reach the “rock of castration,” the point of pathological attachment that binds the subject to a suffering that will not be relinquished. If analysis is suddenly faced with the prospect of becoming “interminable” — if it cannot simply proceed by resting on free association — this means that the “end” of analysis requires a certain “separation” between the subject and the “object a,” insofar as that object is understood to entail a bodily jouissance that works against desire, a “suffering” akin to what Freud called the death drive. Seminar XI closes on this very topic: “The transference operates in the direction of bringing demand back to identification” (SXI, 274), that is to say, by revealing the link between the unending series of demands and the singular point of identification that underlies them. But the “end” of analysis requires a move “in a direction that is the exact opposite of identification” (SXI, 274), a direction that amounts to the destitution of the subject. This act of “crossing the plane of identification is possible,” Lacan says, and it is what one might call the “sacrificial” dimension of psychoanalysis. It is therefore the “loss” of this pathological attachment that marks the terminal point of analysis: “the fundamental mainspring of the analytic operation,” Lacan writes, “is the maintenance of the distance between the I — identification — and the a” (SXI, 273). These details are perhaps somewhat technical, and warrant further discussion, particularly with respect to the problem of the relation between the “symbolic order” and “sexuality,” but I will not pursue them here. I have discussed the problem in “Vital Signs” (following some remarks by Russell Grigg), where I have tried to show how the “limit” of the symbolic order (and the question of “sexuality”) has consequences for Lacan’s reading of the case of Anna O.
2.10 Aporetic sciences
Let us now turn from the “internal affairs” of psychoanalysis and try to sketch the intellectual horizon it shares with some other domains. Our remarks should be sufficient to show that the “unconscious” cannot be reduced to a purely “symbolic” phenomenon, and that the theory of “sexuality” and “jouissance” will only be understood if the relation between the symbolic and the real is grasped — in such a way, moreover, that we do not simply return to familiar arguments about the “real” of sexuality as a natural phenomenon, a libidinal “force” that is simply “outside language.” It is often said that Lacanian theory places too much emphasis on the “law” and the “symbolic order,” and we have suggested that this is not the case. But if we refer to the “real” (to “sexuality” and the “drive”), does this mean that we are now returning to a “prelinguistic reality,” a “natural” aspect of the body that is “outside” the symbolic order? Is this evidence of the “biological essentialism” that is often attributed to psychoanalysis, in spite of its apparent emphasis on the “symbolic order”? This is what many readers have concluded, and yet “everyone knows” that Lacan rejects the biological account of sexuality. In what sense is the real “outside” the symbolic order, if it is not an “external reality,” or a “prelinguistic” domain of “sexuality”? This is the point at which the “logical” aspect of psychoanalysis and the “limit of formalization” becomes especially important. For it allows us to elaborate the “real,” not as a “prelinguistic reality” that would be “outside” the symbolic order, but precisely in terms of a lack that arises “within” the symbolic order. The “object a” is this element put forth by Lacan, not as an object “in reality,” an “external thing” that is somehow beyond representation, but as a term that designates a logical impasse. Jacques-Alain Miller has this problem in mind when he writes that, with the “object a,” we are dealing with a certain “limit” to presentation, but a limit that cannot be grasped by a direct approach to “reality”:
If there were an ontic in psychoanalysis, it would be the ontic of the object a. But this is precisely the road not taken by Lacan . . . Where does the object a come from in Lacan? It comes from the partial object of Karl Abraham, that is, from a corporeal consistency. The interesting thing is to see that Lacan transforms this corporeal consistency into a logical consistency. (85)
Without following the theory of the “body” further here, we can nevertheless see that the general form of the question can be posed in terms of the “limits of formalization,” thereby recognizing that psychoanalysis is not in fact committed to the “law” in the manner of classical structuralist thought — in the tradition of Saussure and Lévi-Strauss. In view of this, we might try to make this “aporetic” point more concrete by referring to a “paradox” that takes a similar form in various disciplines.
2.11 Incest
In anthropology, the “incest taboo” is not simply a “law,” but a logical aporia: it functions as a sort of “nodal point” where the symbolic and the real are linked together. As is well known, the incest taboo presents us with a peculiar “contradiction”: on the one hand, it is a “prohibition,” a cultural institution that imposes “family relations” and kinship structures upon what would otherwise be the state of nature; at the same time, however, this “law,” because of its “universality,” is also defined as something “natural,” since it cannot be ascribed to a particular social group, or located in a single historical period. Lévi-Strauss and others have stressed the “paradox” or “scandal” of the incest taboo in just this way: “It constitutes a rule,” Lévi-Strauss says, “but a rule which, alone among all the social rules, possesses at the same time a universal character.” Citing this passage in “Structure, Sign and Play” (283), Derrida has stressed that this impasse should not be reduced to a mere “contradiction,” but must be given its own theoretical precision. It is not a question of eliminating ambiguity by determining, for once and for all, whether this law is “cultural” or “natural” — whether it is “really” a human invention, or a biological principle that insures genetic distribution. The “scandalous” or “paradoxical” character of the incest prohibition is not an ambiguity to be eliminated, but must rather be taken as the actual “positive content” of the concept itself: it suggests that, properly speaking, the incest taboo must be situated prior to the division between nature and culture. In Derrida’s words,
The incest prohibition is no longer a scandal one meets with or comes up against in the domain of traditional concepts; it is something which escapes these concepts and certainly precedes them -- probably as the condition of their possibility. (283)
Like the nodal point of the dream, the incest taboo thus isolates a singular point which “reaches down into the unknown,” a point “which has to be left obscure,” which cannot be interpreted (“adds nothing to our knowledge of the content”), and yet is absolutely indispensable to the organization of the dream. We thus return to the “limit of formalization,” an impasse in the symbolic system of cultural laws, but on which, far from being a “mistake,” is curiously imperative, irrevocable, and necessary — as if it were somehow integral to the law itself.
The crucial point, however — and the connection between this “logical” impasse and the “object a” — is to recognize that this scandal somehow “materializes” itself. For the prohibition is not only a “paradox”; it has the additional characteristic that it “condenses” itself into an enigmatic “thing” — what Freud calls the “taboo object.” Is this not the crucial point of Totem and Taboo, this peculiar relation between the “symbolic” system of totemism (the system of the name), and the taboo “object” that somehow accompanies it? Indeed, as Derrida points out in speaking of the “limits of formalization,” it is not simply a matter of “aporiae”; if we are confronted with an “impasse” in the concepts of nature and culture, “something which escapes these concepts,” it is because “there is something missing” (289). This “missing object” entails a certain “materialization,” but it cannot be clarified by a simple empiricism, a simple reference to “presymbolic reality.” For there are two ways of asserting the impossibility of formalization. As Derrida notes, “totalization can be judged impossible in the classical style.” This would consist in pointing to an empirical diversity that cannot be grasped by a single “law” or “system,” an external wealth of historical differences that cannot be mastered by any theoretical glance. The other way consists in recognizing the intrinsic incompleteness of the theoretical gaze itself, the fact that the “law” is always contaminated by a “stain” that escapes the system:
if totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not because the infiniteness of a field cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature of the field -- that is, language and a finite language -- excludes totalization . . . instead of being an inexhaustible field, as in the classical hypothesis, instead of being too large, there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions. (289)
Psychoanalysis can be described as the theory which tries to grasp the bodily consequences of this fact, the physical effects of this “object” on the structure of the body. It is not a theory aimed at describing the connections between a supposedly biological “sexuality” and the symbolic codes that are imposed upon this original “nature,” but rather a theory which aims at understanding the corporeal materialization of this “impasse,” the concrete somatic effects of this “excluded object” that accompanies the law of language.
2.12 The gold standard
In economics, a similar “nodal point” might be found, which seems to be both “inside” and “outside” the structure. If one speaks of money as a “symbolic order,” a conventional system of representation governed by certain internal laws, a “formalist” or “structuralist” account would say that it is not a question of what a particular amount of money will buy (what it “represents”), but a question of purely “internal relations.” Precisely as with the “signifier” in Saussure’s account, we are concerned not with the relation between the “sign” and “reality,” but with the “internal affairs” of the symbolic order — with relations between the signifiers, and not with what the signifier “represents” outside the system. Accordingly, “ten dollars” is not defined by what it will buy, or by its relation to external “reality.” That is a purely contingent and constantly changing relation — today it will buy three loaves of bread, but next year it only serves as change to ride the bus. If we wish to define ten dollars “scientifically,” we must therefore take a “formalist” perspective and say ten dollars is “half of twenty,” or “twice five,” and then we have a constant measure, in which the definition is given not by any (contingent) external reference, but rather by a (lawful) “diacritical” analysis, which places it in relation to the other elements in the system.
Nevertheless, there is a point at which the structure is paradoxically “attached” to the very reality it is supposed to exclude. Although “ten dollars” has no fixed or necessary relation to anything “outside” the system, but should rather be defined “internally,” in relation to five dollars or twenty, the system itself is said to rest on a “gold standard,” a “natural” basis that guarantees or supports the structure. “Gold” is thus both “natural” and “symbolic” — or perhaps neither, since it has no natural value “in itself,” and yet also no place “within” the system of money that we exchange. On the one hand, it is a pure “convention”: unlike bread (which we “need”), gold has no value in itself, but is entirely “symbolic” (a pure “signifier” without any “use value”). On the other hand, it is not an element “within” the symbolic system of money, something we might define in relation to other elements: instead of being a signifier in the chain (S1-S2-S3), it is a “ground,” a gold “reserve” that stands “outside” the system of exchange, giving value to the symbolic elements — whose purely formal relations are supposed to operate precisely by excluding any such “outside.” We are faced here with the same “enigma” we encounter in the incest taboo. And again, it would be a mistake to think that we have simply found a “contradiction” or “inconsistency” in the concept; we should rather be led to recognize this “scandalous” and “paradoxical” character of the “object” (gold), not as a confusion that might be removed (for example, when we finally “come to our senses” and realize that gold is “merely symbolic”), but as its “positive” content: it is to be understood (in Derrida’s words) precisely as “something which no longer tolerates the nature/culture opposition” (283). “Gold” thus functions as a kind of “nodal point,” a paradoxical element that is neither “inside” nor “outside” the structure.
2.13 Supplementarity
At this point, however, we must again (as with “sexuality” and “libido”) be careful not to define this “external” element too “naively.” If it seems at first glance that gold is a “natural” basis for monetary value, the bullion in the bank that guarantees the “purely symbolic” money that circulates in exchange; if gold presents itself as the one element that is not symbolic, but has value “in itself” and thus serves as a ground (insofar as money “represents” it); this view is precisely what we must reject. For like the nodal point in the dream, it would not exist except “through” the system that it is “naively” thought to support. The “enigma” of gold as a “quilting point” is that it has no value “in itself,” but acquires its status as a “natural value” from the system itself, not in the sense that it is simply an “element” within the system, another “symbolic” phenomenon that might be placed at the same level as the money which circulates in the market, but in the sense that it is a “surplus-effect,” a “product” of the system which expels it from the chain of “representations,” and buries it in the earth, where it can be “found again.” Strictly speaking, therefore, the “natural” and “foundational” character of gold, the fact that it was “already there,” apparently “preceding” the monetary system and providing it with an external ground, is an illusion, but a necessary illusion, one which the system, in spite of its apparent “autonomy,” evidently requires. As a result, it cannot be a question of simply denouncing this illusion, and asserting the “purely symbolic” character of “value,” its arbitrary, conventional or “constructed” character. The task is rather to understand just how the system, which at first appeared to be “autonomous,” governed by purely “conventional” and “internal” laws, nevertheless requires this peculiar “object,” and requires that it have precisely this enigmatically “natural” status, this apparent and illusory “exteriority.”
In Tarrying with the Negative, Slavoj Zizek suggests that this peculiar aspect of the “object,” as a surplus-effect of the system, a “product” which is not simply symbolic, but concerns an excluded object that must take on the illusion of naturalness (of “already-being-there-before,” so that it can be “found again”), can be clarified by reference to a famous passage from the Critique of Pure Reason, a passage from the “Transcendental Dialectic,” where Kant speaks of “delusion” — not of empirical delusion (a mistaken impression of the senses, which can always be corrected), nor indeed of merely logical error (which consists in the commitment of formal fallacies, a “lack of attention to the logical rule” A296/B353), but of an illusion proper to reason itself. It is proper to reason in the sense that, as Kant says, it “does not cease even after it has been detected and its invalidity clearly revealed” (A 297/B353). It is thus not an ambiguity to be avoided, but “a natural and inevitable illusion,” an “unavoidable dialectic” which is “inseparable from human reason,” and which “will not cease to play tricks with reason . . . even after its deceptiveness has been exposed” (A 298/B354). It is not that reason (the “symbolic order”) falls into “contradiction” by some error that might be removed; rather, reason would itself be, as Kant says, “the seat of transcendental illusion.” But how is the Lacanian “object a” related to this illusion? How are we to understand the claim that Kant recognizes not only that the idea of “totality” gives rise to contradiction, but also that it is attended by a peculiar surplus-object? For this (the “sublime object”) is what the “antinomies” of Kant’s “dialectical illusion” imply, according to Zizek. The point can be clarified by reference to “sexual difference. For Kant, “there is no way for us to imagine the universe as a Whole; that is, as soon as we do it, we obtain two antinomical, mutually exclusive versions,” two propositions that cannot be maintained at the same time. In Lacan, moreover, this “structure” is precisely what we find in the symbolic division between the sexes: it is not a division into two “halves” of a single species, or two “complementary” parts which together might comprise the whole of “humanity.” On the contrary, the division between the sexes makes them “supplementary” (Lacan: “Note that I said supplementary. Had I said complementary, where would we be! We’d fall right back into the all” FS 144). In Zizek’s words,
the antagonistic tension which defines sexuality is not the polar opposition of two cosmic forces (yin/yang, etc.), but a certain crack which prevents us from imagining the universe as a Whole. Sexuality points towards the supreme ontological scandal. (83)
The status of the “object” is thus clarified, for if an object appears to fill this gap, offering to guarantee a harmonious relation between the sexes (sometimes this object is the child, which “sutures” the parental bond), it can only do so as the “prohibited” object, the product of “dialectical illusion.” We thus see more clearly the relation between the logical aporia that accompanies the symbolic order (the “real” of “incest” or “gold”), and the “object a.”
2.14 The time of the object
Before we close this discussion of the “limits of formalization,” we must stress the peculiar temporality of this object. We have identified the peculiar character of the prohibited or incestuous “object”: unlike the abstract “signifiers” that circulate in the community (diacritically or synchronically), gold is a “product” or “effect” of the system, but a “symbolic effect” whose precise character is to “materialize” itself, separating itself from all the other elements of exchange, in order to “appear” as if it existed before the system ever came into being, and possessed its value “by nature.” Its function is to dissimulate, to “veil” itself — to hide its own nature, we might say, if it were not for the fact that its “nature” is just this “hiding” of itself. We must therefore link the “paradoxical” or “contradictory” character of the object to the peculiar “time” that governs it. It is not enough to stress the “contradictory” character of this object — the paradoxical fact that it belongs to both “nature” and “culture” (or more precisely to neither, since it precedes this very division) — or to recognize that this “paradox” is not an ambiguity to be removed, but rather constitutive of the object itself. We must also recognize that its peculiar temporality is such that it comes into being through the system, but in such a way that it must have been there “before,” so that the system might emerge on its basis. This is why the “incest taboo” always refers us to an earlier “state of nature,” a time of “unrestricted sexuality” that was supposedly limited “once upon a time,” when the “law” was imposed and a certain “object” suddenly came to be prohibited. Since the “taboo object” is not a “prelinguistic reality,” but the place-holder of a lack that only comes into being through the law, we are forced to recognize the purely illusory character of this supposed “past,” as a past that was never present. This temporal aspect of the taboo “object” was clearly identified by Lacan in Television when he wrote that “the Oedipus myth is an attempt to give epic form to the operation of a structure” (30, translation modified). If we now wish to clarify the relation between this “object” and the system of representation in Freudian terms, we might say that gold is, in relation to the system of money, not so much a “representation,” as the “representation of representation,” the “primal signifier” that grounds signification, but whose essential feature is that it had no such status as “ground” prior to the system which is said to be based upon it. In short, gold is the “Name-of-the Father”: as the “quilting-point” of the system, it is not one signifier among others, but the “signifier of signifiers,” the ground of exchange that appears to precede symbolization and guarantee its basis in nature, but is in fact a “by-product” of the structure itself — not an element in the structure of exchange, but peculiar “object” which comes into being to “veil” the lack which inhabits the structure itself. Needless to say, the “phallus” has precisely this status in Lacan. The phallus is a veil.
2.15 The phallus
To set out from the “limits of formalization” would thus allow us to see why the most common debate over the phallus is fundamentally misleading. For it is often said that the concept of the phallus confronts us with a crucial ambiguity: on the one hand, the phallus is a “signifier,” and as such demonstrates the “symbolic” construction of sexual difference; on the other hand, the phallus is by no means “arbitrary,” a purely “symbolic” function, since it clearly refers to anatomy. We are thus led into a familiar debate, in which some readers “defend” Lacan, asserting that the phallus is a “signifier,” and that psychoanalysis rejects any biological account of sexual difference, while others readers insist that in spite of protests to the contrary, the phallus is the one element in the theory that unmistakably implicates psychoanalysis in a return to “biology,” perpetuating the “essentialism” of sexual difference, and securing a certain “privilege” on the part of the male, and a corresponding “lack” on the part of the female. Accounts of psychoanalysis are numerous which vigorously defend both these positions, but in fact neither is accurate, and the entire polemic could be seen as actually concealing the theory it pretends to address. For the phallus is not biological, and does not refer to “prelinguistic reality,” but neither is it purely symbolic — one signifier among others, an element contained within the system. As a “signifier of lack,” it marks the “impossible” point of intersection between the symbolic and the real, the introduction of a lack which allows the mobilization of signifiers to begin their work of substitution, a lack which is the “absolute condition” of desire, but which “can be occupied, Freud tells us, by any object” (SXI, 180). The phallus is this “veil” (“it can play its role only when veiled” [E, 288]), the singular mark of signification itself, the paradoxical “signifier of signifiers” which (as in the case of gold) only functions through a substitution that dissimulates, allowing it to appear in imaginary clothing, as “gold,” a natural ground “guaranteeing” signification — a materialization that, in presenting itself as “already-there-before,” veils its status as a surplus-effect, a non-natural lack in the structure that has been “filled in” by this extimate object. As in the case of “gold” and “incest,” then, it cannot be a question of finally determining whether the phallus belongs to “nature” or “culture,” to the order of “biology” or the order of the “signifier.” Such efforts will only circumvent the “logic” of the “nodal point” which this paradoxical concept is intended to articulate. And insofar as the phallus is also bound up with the imaginary body, one can see that the concept requires clarification in all three registers, as imaginary, symbolic and real. To ask whether the phallus is “biological” or “symbolic” is thus to refuse the very issue it addresses.
2.16 Material aporetics
We have stressed the fact that with this “paradox,” it is not simply a question of a “logical” contradiction, a “term” which belongs to both nature and culture — or, more precisely, which escapes this very distinction — nor only a question of time, but also a question of a certain “materiality.” For gold is also an “object,” unlike the “signifiers” that are said to represent it, but also unlike the purely natural “things” that might be said to exist independently of any language. Need we add here that in the case of the incest taboo, we are also faced with a certain “materialization” of the taboo object, the “thing” that is excluded from the “totemic” order of the name? And is not psychoanalysis the theory which endeavors to articulate the consequences of such “materialization” in terms of our bodily existence? Discussions of Lacan that insist on the “linguistic” or “symbolic” character of his theory (whether to denounce or celebrate it) only serve to conceal this enigmatic logic of the body. Our general claim is thus given some concrete clarification: every effort to establish a structure “on its own terms,” by reference to purely “internal” relations (money, kinship, language), will encounter a point at which the system touches on something “outside” itself, something that has a “paradoxical” status, being simultaneously “symbolic” and yet also excluded from the system. The “real” in Lacan is a concept that tries to address this enigma. Readers of Derrida will of course recognize that many of the fundamental Derridian terms — the “trace,” the “supplement,” and so on — touch on precisely the same problem, the “limit” of formalization, an element that “founds” the structure while being at the same time excluded from it. One day, someone who knows something about both these writers will develop these issues in more detail.
3.1 Two versions of the real
Let us now attempt a final approach to your question, by distinguishing two versions of the real. This will allow us to develop the concept in slightly more detail. One of the difficulties with the concept of the real in Lacan is that it appears in several different forms as his work unfolds. Without exploring all the detailed transformations, let us simply isolate the most important development in his use of the term. It is this: initially, the “real” seems to refer to a “presymbolic reality,” a realm of “immediate being” that is never accessible in itself, but only appears through the “mediation” of imaginary and symbolic representation (in this case, it tends to correspond to the common meaning of “reality”); later, however, the term seems to designate a “lack,” an element that is missing from “within” the symbolic order, in which case the real can only be understood as an “effect” of the symbolic order itself. One might thus speak of a “presymbolic real” and a “postsymbolic real.” In the first case, the real precedes the symbolic and “exists” independently, while in the second case, the real is a “product” of the symbolic order, a residue or surplus-effect that “exists” or comes into “being” only as a result of the symbolic operation that excludes it. It is perhaps this very duality in the concept that leads you to ask whether the real is “inside” or “outside” the symbolic order.
3.2 A parenthesis on “being”
These two versions of the real will have two different modes of being, for 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, independently 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. As Lacan says in Seminar XI, “when speaking of this gap one is dealing with an ontological function,” and yet, “it does not lend itself to ontology” (SXI 29). In distinguishing these two versions of the real, we must therefore recognize two different “modes” of being, since the “existence” of the presymbolic real is not the same as the “being” of the “lack” that characterizes the postsymbolic real. Anyone who has read Heidegger knows how complex these questions concerning “existence” and “being” can be. One has only to think of Heidegger’s account of Kant’s thesis that “Being is not a real predicate” — a thesis discussed by Moustafa Safouan in Pleasure and Being — to see how many philosophical issues weigh on the discourse of psychoanalysis. Apart from the question of whether (and in what “mode”) the real “exists” — “inside” or “outside” the symbolic — it may also be necessary to distinguish between real, imaginary and symbolic modes of “existence.” On a first approximation, one might say that the imaginary is a dimension of “seeming,” the symbolic of “meaning,” and the real of “being” (though as we have suggested, this last term can be divided further, into two forms). If, moreover, we recall Lacan’s claim that “the real is the impossible,” we would have to consider the other categories of modal logic as well. Lacan seems to have followed Heidegger to some extent in speaking of the “impossible,” the “contingent,” the “necessary” and the “possible” (categories which have been discussed in some detail by Robert Samuels in Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis).
3.3 “Reality” and “lack”
The significance of the distinction between these two versions of the real should thus be clear: we know the concept of “lack” is central to Lacanian theory, and that it cannot be adequately grasped in terms of the “symbolic,” since it is closely bound up with the category of the real. Much of the secondary literature on Lacan, however, characterizes the “real” as a prediscursive reality that is mediated by representation — the reality that is always lost whenever we represent it. This does in fact capture some aspects of Lacan’s work, but if we wish to understand the relation between the real and lack, it is not sufficient, for the concept of “lack” points us in the direction of a void that cannot be understood by reference to prediscursive reality, as Tim Dean has argued. Thus, even if there is some validity in regarding the real as a dimension of “immediate existence” which is always filtered through imaginary and symbolic representations of it, we will not grasp the concept of “lack” in this way, but only if we turn to the real in its second version, as an “effect” of the symbolic order, in which case we can no longer regard it “prelinguistic.” Let us therefore consider these two versions of the real more closely.
3.4 The “pre-symbolic” real
The first version of the real — the “presymbolic” real — provides the more familiar account. One often hears that, according to Lacan, the real is “organized” or “represented” through images and words that do not actually “capture” the real, but always “misrepresent” it. Human life is thus subject to a fundamental and irremediable “misunderstanding,” such that the “real” is always already “lost” — figured or disfigured in some manner. Such a conception, however, makes it difficult to understand what Freud means by the “reality principle” or “reality-testing,” and it completely obscures the concept of lack, since the real, understood as a prediscursive reality, is “full.” Nevertheless, Lacan himself sometimes used the term in this way, and it cannot be entirely rejected. We thus face an apparent conflict between the prediscursive real (which is “full”), and the real as a “lack” which arises through the symbolic order. One recalls the Lacanian dictum, based on our “first version,” that “nothing is lacking in the real” (a phrase often cited in reference to the supposed “castration” of women, which, on this account, is not “real” but strictly “imaginary” castration). One can already see here that symbolic castration (lack) cannot be understood through this account of the “imaginary” and “real,” which circumvents language in order to enter a debate between “imaginary” lack and a “reality” in which nothing is lacking. Let us develop the first version somewhat further, to see why it has played such a prominent role in the secondary literature — for despite its deficiencies, it has a number of virtues, and Lacan’s own text provides some justification for it.
In the first version, the real is construed as a domain of immediate experience, a level of brute sensory “reality” that never reaches “consciousness” without being filtered through “representation” — by memory, by the ego, or by various internal “neurological pathways” that mediate and organize our sensory experience. This is a familiar motif in Freud, who often speaks of “consciousness” and even of “bodily experience” (sensory stimuli) as being fashioned or channeled by past experiences, anticipation, projection, and other forms of representation, which allow some aspects of our experience to become “present” to us, while others are not registered, and therefore remain “absent” even though they are “real.” A correlation would thus be made between two different modes of “presence” (namely, “imaginary” and “symbolic”), and a real that remains “absent,” insofar as it is inaccessible. Robert Samuels uses this notion of the real when he speaks of the subject as the “existential Subject” (7), that is to say, the subject in its brute “existence” prior to imaginary and symbolic formation. The “real” subject (S) would thus designate what Lacan in the essay on psychosis calls a level of “ineffable, stupid existence” (E, 193). This notation, in which “S” designates the subject “in the real,” is useful insofar as it encourages us to separate real, imaginary and symbolic definitions of the subject — distinguishing the subject as “real” (S), from the ego as formed in the imaginary (the “a” of schema L, which designates the “moi” as a correlate of the image or alter ego), distinguishing both of these in turn from “$” — the “split subject,” or the “subject of the signifier.”
Richard Boothby’s book, Death and Desire, gives an excellent account of this argument, in which the “real” is a dimension of “immediate existence” or prediscursive reality that is never actually available to us as such, but only appears through the intervention of the imaginary or the symbolic. He shows how Lacan’s theory of the imaginary — and above all of the imaginary body — allows us to understand what Freud means when he says that even sensory experience and bodily excitations do not provide direct contact with the “real,” since even our most concrete, bodily experience or “perception” is organized and shaped through the imaginary, which “translates” or “represents” the real, thereby also distorting it. As Boothby says, the imaginary is a dimension of narcissism that maintains its own “world” by “defending” itself against the real, “recognizing” only those aspects of the real that accord with the interests of the ego. Boothby stresses the imaginary, but one could also speak of the symbolic here, as another level of “representation” that organizes the real, “presenting” it by translating or mediating it. For as Lacan says, “the symbol is the murder of the thing”; it “mediates” our contact with the real, “negating” the thing and replacing it with a “representation,” and thus with a “substitute.” It is important to recognize that imaginary and symbolic presentation (or representation) do not function in the same way, but in any case, the concept of the real as an immediate or prediscursive “reality” is clear. Eventually, we must come to see why Lacan gave up this notion, why he came to regard this account as inadequate, and was obliged to develop a different conception of the real. But let us not go too quickly.
3.5 The “return” of the real
For it is important to observe that, on this view, the real is not absolutely lost: on the contrary, one can speak of the “real” as sometimes “asserting itself,” or “disrupting” the systems of representation that have been set up to encode and process it. As Boothby suggests, certain bodily experiences can be characterized as “real” if they threaten or oppose the imaginary system of the subject: the narcissistic structure “refuses” or “defends” itself against the real, which is “excluded,” but which nevertheless sometimes “returns,” disrupting the structure by asserting itself. This is in keeping with Freud’s observations in the Project, where he notes that the bodily apparatus, its neurological pathways, act partly by “blocking” certain stimuli, which are in some sense “felt,” but not actually “registered” by the subject. One can then regard the sudden “rupture” of these neurological blocking mechanisms as an “encounter with the real.” A number of Freud’s metaphors appear to work this way, as if the “system” of the body were a system of “pressure” and “release” in which a particular threshold must be crossed before the “real” is allowed to “register.” The advantage of this account is that it allows us to see that the body is not a natural system of “rivers” and “dams,” governed by a biological force of “pressure” and “release,” but is rather an “imaginary” system, in which “force” is the expressly non-biological force of representation. Such an account allows us to explain the “return of the real” as a disruptive or “traumatic” event, while also showing us why the “body” in psychoanalysis is not a biological system. This is why Boothby insists on the “imaginary” structure of the body, and on the fact that the “energy” Freud speaks of is not a natural or “physical” energy, but rather “psychic energy” — whatever that means. As Freud himself says in his late text, the Outline of Psychoanalysis, “We would give much to understand more about these things.”
3.6 Beyond mimesis
This is the most common understanding of the “real,” but it has one great disadvantage, in that it tends to equate the real with “pre-linguistic reality.” On the basis of this conception, psychoanalysis is immediately drawn back into a number of traditional questions about “mimesis.” Starting with the idea that there is a “symbolic order,” or indeed an “imaginary” system of representation, we may ask whether it is possible to have access to an outside “reality,” but we will never be able to clarify the concept of the real. We will be able to enter a whole series of familiar debates about “representation,” in which two alternatives appear to dominate. Some (the “postmodernists”) say that “everything is symbolic”: we have no access to “reality” in itself, for reality is always given through some historically specific “discursive formation”; it is not a question of “reality,” but only of different symbolic systems, different “representations” which compete with each other, and which succeed in becoming “true” either because they are “persuasive” (rhetoric), or because they are formulated by those in power (politics), or because they have the authority of “tradition” (history), or for some other reason — in short, “there is no metalanguage,” no discourse that can ground itself in a non-discursive “external reality,” since the only thing “outside” discourse is . . . more discourse. Others (the “positivists”) say that in spite of these symbolic codes, there is a “reality” that asserts itself, or presents itself to us: we may try to ignore it, or refuse to give it any symbolic importance, or we may construct certain “fantasies” that seek to circumvent reality, or highlight only certain features of reality, but it is still the case that symbolic systems have a more or less adequate “purchase” on reality, and that some discourses are “more true” than others. These arguments are familiar, but they will not take us very far towards understanding Lacan.
3.7 Reality and the real
This is why, if we wish to understand Lacan, we must distinguish between “reality” and the “real” (thereby moving towards our “second version”). In “The Freudian Thing,” for example, Lacan explicitly refers to Heidegger when he discusses the classical definition of “true” representation (“adaequatio rei et intellectus,” the correct correspondence between the idea or word and the thing), saying that the Freudian account of “truth” cannot be grasped in terms of the problem of “adequate correspondence.” Freud’s “truth” cannot be approached in terms of “true” and “false” representations, or in terms of the “symbolic order” and “reality,” for “truth” is linked to the “real,” and not to “reality.” Lacan even coined a word to suggest the link between “truth” and the “real” — le vréel (a term that has been attributed to Kristeva, but came from Lacan). To address the relation between the “symbolic” and the “real” is therefore quite different from engaging in the task of distinguishing between “reality” and the symbolic or imaginary world of the subject.
Let us note, however, that the distinction between “reality” and the “real” must be made in a specific way, according to Lacan. For it is perfectly possible to accept the distinction between “reality” and the “real” while at the same time sustaining the first version of the “real” (as a pre-discursive reality). In this case, “reality” is defined, not as an unknowable, external domain, independent of our representations, but precisely as the product of representation. Our “reality” is imaginary and symbolic, and the “real” is what is missing from reality — that “outside” which escapes our representations (the “Ding-an-sich“). The “real” thus remains an inaccessible, prediscursive reality, while “reality” is understood as a symbolic or imaginary “construction.” Many commentaries have taken this line of argument, distinguishing the “real” and “reality” while nevertheless maintaining our “first version.” As Samuel Weber writes,
the notion of reality implied in the imaginary should in no way be confused with Lacan's concept of the "real" . . . In Lacan, as in Peirce, the "real" is defined by its resistance, which includes resistance to representation, including cognition. It is, therefore, in a certain sense at the furthest remove from the imaginary. (106)
If we turn to Jonathan Scott Lee, we find the same distinction:
All language allows us to speak of is the "reality" constituted by the system of the symbolic . . . Because "there is no metalanguage," the real perpetually eludes our discourse. (136)
The same conclusion appears to be drawn by Borch-Jacobsen, who expresses profound reservations about Lacan’s apparent “nihilism,” and writes that the “truth” ultimately affirmed by Lacan is that we have no access to the “real,” but are condemned to live in a domain of subjective “reality,” a domain of subjective “truth”:
Lacan's "truth," no matter how unfathomable and repressed, remains none the less the truth of a desire -- that is, of a subject. It could hardly be otherwise in psychoanalysis. Isn't the patient invited to recount himself -- that is, to reveal himself to himself in autorepresentation. (107)
The real is thus a prediscursive reality that is always already lost (a thesis tediously familiar to us, Borch-Jacobsen says, from a certain existentialism): “Thus the ‘real,’ as Kojève taught, is abolished as soon as it is spoken” (109). Or, in another passage:
for Lacan -- agreeing, on this point, with Kojève's teaching -- truth is essentially distinct from reality. Better yet, truth is opposed to reality [since] the subject speaks himself by negating, or "nihilating" the "Real." (107)
The peculiarity of this formulation is that it seems to equate the real and reality, but this is simply because we are to understand “reality” not as the constructed “reality” of the subject (what Borch-Jacobsen here calls the subject’s “truth”), but as the external reality that is always already lost. In all these cases, we can distinguish between a “real” (or “prediscursive reality”) that remains outside representation, and “reality” as “constituted” by the subject, while retaining the first conception, in which the “real” is an external domain that precedes representation and remains “unknown.”
3.8 “The innermost core of the imaginary”
How then are we to pass beyond the familiar problem of “true” and “false” representations, the classical problem of “mimesis,” the dichotomy between a prediscursive “reality” (which is permanently lost, or which occasionally “returns” in the form of a traumatic disruption of the representational system), and the network of imaginary or symbolic “representations” which either capture or simply replace that “reality”? How are we to move to our second conception in which we arrive at the concept of “lack” — a “void” that is not reducible to the imaginary or symbolic (that remains “absent” from representation), and yet does not exist in “external reality”? Clearly, the real, insofar as it is connected with lack, can only be grasped through this second formulation, as a “post-symbolic” phenomenon, a void that arises through the symbolic order, as an “effect” of the symbolic order which is nevertheless irreducible to the imaginary or symbolic.
At this point, we can return to the question of the trauma, the “return” of the real, in order to see why the first conception of the real is inadequate. For one might well say that certain “experiences” or “encounters with the real” (momentary ruptures of our “defenses”) are traumatic or disruptive, but this is not simply due to their “nature” — as if it were a direct, unmediated encounter with some traumatic “reality.” The “disruptive” character of the real, regarded as a dimension of experience that disturbs the order of representation, is not due to the real “in itself,” but is due to the fact that it is unfamiliar. The “real” is traumatic because there has been no sufficient symbolic or imaginary network in place for “representing” it. It is “traumatic,” not “in itself,” but only in relation to the established order of representation. We must return here to Samuel Weber’s formulation. For if he claims (following our “first version”) that “the real’ is defined by its resistance, which includes resistance to representation,” and that “it is, therefore, in a certain sense at the furthest remove from the imaginary” (106), he immediately adds a curious twist: “At the same time, one could with equal justification describe it as residing at the innermost core of the imaginary” (106). Obviously the Freudian concept of “repression,” as something “contained” (in every sense) by the subject’s “representational system,” would come closer to this conception of the “real” as an “innermost core,” rather than an autonomous, “external reality.” Consequently, the “real,” even if we wish to characterize it along the lines of our initial approach, as a disruptive element that “asserts itself” and threatens the usual expectations of the ego, cannot be understood as “pre-existing reality,” but must rather be understood as an “innermost core,” an “inside” that only acquires its repressed or traumatic character in relation to the familiar order of representation. As early as the “Rome Discourse,” Lacan stressed this aspect of the “trauma,” distinguishing it from any simple “event”:
to say of psychoanalysis or of history that, considered as sciences, they are both sciences of the particular, does not mean that the facts they deal with are purely accidental . . . [or] reducible to the brute aspect of the trauma. (E, 51)
3.9 The phobic object
In “The Story of Louise,” Michèle Montrelay provides a remarkable account of a “traumatic” event, one that obliges us to see the real not as pre-discursive, but as an effect of symbolization. She speaks of the onset of a phobia, describing it as a particular moment in the history of the subject, a “moment” or “event,” however, which is not a simple “present,” and which consists, not of the “immediate experience” of some traumatic “reality,” but of an experience in which two chains of signifiers, previously kept apart, are suddenly made to intersect, in such a way, moreover, that in place of “meaning,” a hole is produced. “This hole opened by the phobia is situated in space like a fault around which all roads would open . . . except that all of a sudden the ground vanishes” (77). Instead of a “metaphor,” a “spark” of meaning, something “impossible” suddenly emerges from this intersection of signifiers, a “hole” or “cut” in the universe of meaning, a cut that is linked to an obscure “knowledge” that Louise suddenly acquires about her father — a “forbidden knowledge” that remains excluded the moment it appears:
knowing is contained not in the revelation of the "content" of a representation, but in a new and impossible conjunction of signifiers. Two signifying chains created a cut or break. That is, they marked the place of an impossible passage. . . . The chains, suddenly brought into proximity, created a short-circuit. (81)
An additional observation is necessary here, if we are to grasp the “object,” as well as this “cut” in the symbolic universe. For we must also note that the phobia dates from this “moment,” this symbolic intersection, this Oedipal crossing of the roads, which is to be understood, not simply as producing a “hole” in meaning, but as having an additional “effect.” Such is the genesis of the “phobic object” in the story of Louise: a fish has come to fill the place of this void that has suddenly opened at the subject’s feet, giving it a “local habitation,” a specific place among all the things spread out across the extended surface of the world — a place that is prohibited and can no longer be crossed. (Other places become contaminated, too, for thereafter, Louise will no longer enter the library, where her father taught her to read.) One day, Louise, who was preparing dinner in the kitchen with her mother (the domestic space is not a matter of indifference), goes to the dining room, and watches while this fish-object (its eye still looking up) is transferred to the father’s plate: “Louise, who was watching the fish cooking without saying anything, begins to scream. Nameless terror. She refuses to eat. The fish phobia has declared itself” (79). The daughter, who had always been clever and mature, becomes dizzy and speechless, to the bewilderment of her parents. She can no longer occupy space as before. As Lacan says in “The Agency of the Letter,”
Between the enigmatic signifier of the sexual trauma and the term that is substituted for it in an actual signifying chain there passes the spark that fixes in a symptom the signification inaccessible to the conscious subject . . . a symptom being a metaphor in which flesh or function is taken as a signifying element. (E, 166)
The traumatic “fact” or “event” in psychoanalysis thus acquires its status not as an encounter with some autonomous, pre-existing “reality,” but only through the network of representation in relation to which the particular thing in question acquires a traumatic status.
3.10 Retroactive trauma
The “trauma” can therefore no longer be understood as a simple brute “reality” that is difficult to integrate into our symbolic universe. Zizek notes this when he corrects his own account of the trauma in For They Know Not What They Do. In a “first presentation,” he referred to the trauma as a sudden, disruptive experience of “reality” that is not easily placed within our “symbolic universe.” But this notion is soon modified: “when we spoke of the symbolic integration of a trauma,” he writes,
we omitted a crucial detail: the logic of Freud's notion of the "deferred action" does not consist in the subsequent "gentrification" of a traumatic encounter by means of its transformation into a normal component of our symbolic universe, but in almost the exact opposite of it -- something which was at first perceived as a meaningless, neutral event changes retroactively, after the advent of a new symbolic network . . . into a trauma that cannot be integrated. (221-22)
Thus, in place of a “pre-symbolic reality” that we might regard as traumatic, and that we must eventually “accommodate” into our symbolic universe, we have a trauma that emerges retroactively, as an effect of symbolization. One might think here of contemporary efforts to re-write the literary canon: for many years, most literary critics regarded the canon as “full,” as a list of “great names”; but after a shift in the “symbolic universe” (which consisted in acknowledging that there might possibly be women who also happened to be writers — mirabile dictu), the past suddenly appeared as traumatic, as “false” and “slanted” and full of “holes” — holding great vacancies that needed to be occupied. Here, the “traumatic event” must be clearly recognized for what it is — not the immediate contact with an external “reality,” the simple encounter with a historical “reality,” the “discovery” of women writers, but a new signification that has retroactive effects on the past. Obviously, this model of the “event” does not fit the “popular” examples of “traumatic events” — the “brute experience” of violence or war that must gradually be given a place in the symbolic universe. In this second version, where the structure of symbolic retroaction is stressed, we are in fact closer to the sort of “trauma” induced by Foucault, whose writings have the effect of making a neat, coherent and familiar past (the “grand narrative”) suddenly emerge as “mad” and “deceptive” and “fictional” — and thus in need of reconfiguration. This is why I have argued that Foucault’s work cannot be understood as a “historicist” description of the past in all its archaeological strangeness and contingency, but must rather be understood as aiming to produce effects, by negotiating te relation between the symbolic and the real.
Given this account of the “trauma,” we are led to shift our account of the real slightly, and ask, not so much about the real “in itself” — the direct, unmediated “reality” that is always distorted by representation — but about the relation between the real and the order of “representation” (symbolic or imaginary). It thus becomes clear that our initial view of the “real” as a “prediscursive reality” cannot be entirely precise, since the real only acquires its “unfamiliar” and “disruptive” status in relation to the symbolic and imaginary. Even without considering the temporal factor of “retroaction” introduced by Zizek, or the peculiar “event-structure” of the symbolic overlapping discussed by Montrelay, we can already see in the account given by Boothby that the disruptive emergence of a “real” that violates the normal order of the ego — the sudden “rupture” of neurological pathways — cannot be characterized simply as a moment of contact with external “reality.” As Boothby suggests, the “real” is constituted in relation to representation, and thus appears as an “innermost core of the imaginary” (or symbolic) itself. We must therefore drop the idea that the real is “presymbolic,” that it is an “unreachable” reality that exists “prior” to language (the “first version”), and recognize that the imaginary, symbolic and the real are mutually constitutive — like the rings in the Borromean knot, which provide us with a “synchronic” and “equiprimordial” structure linking the imaginary, symbolic and real in a single set of relations.
3.11 The “post-symbolic” real
We are thus brought to a second account of the real in Lacan, in which it is no longer regarded as “prelinguistic” domain that is never available to us, or that occasionally “returns” to disrupt our representations. In its “postsymbolic” form, the real designates something that only “exists” as a result of symbolization. On this view, the symbolic order is structured in such a way that it produces a kind of “excess,” a “remainder” or “surplus-effect,” that is not at all equivalent to “reality,” but is rather an “effect” of the symbolic order, though not reducible to it. This refinement of the concept of the real is one of the major interests of Lacanian theory. At this point, however, a new complication arises (we have seen it already in the phobic object), for with this second version of the real, two related problems are now introduced: first, we are faced with a concept of “lack,” a void that cannot be clarified by references to prediscursive reality (which is “full”); and second, we are faced with the “production” of an object, a “surplus-effect,” in which the symbolic order gives rise to a certain “excess” it cannot adequately contain. The real, in this second formulation, would therefore seem to be simultaneously “too little” and “too much” — something “missing,” but also a certain “materialization.” The “object a” is Lacan’s effort to resolve this issue: it is a construction that seeks to address the link between the “void” and this “excess,” by establishing a relation between “lack” and this peculiar “surplus-effect.” Before turning to this enigmatic “splitting” within the second conception of the real, let us characterize the “post-symbolic” version more precisely.
3.12 Butler and Zizek
For in distinguishing these two versions of the real, we may cast light not only on Lacan, but also on some recent discussions of Lacanian theory. Consider Judith Butler’s recent book, Bodies That Matter (Routledge, 1993), which contains a chapter called “Arguing With the Real.” In this chapter, Butler touches on both versions of the real when she observes, in reference to Zizek, that it is unclear whether the real is to be understood as a prediscursive, material realm, a hard “kernel” located outside symbolization, or whether it is to be understood as a product of the symbolic order, “an effect of the law,” in which case we would be concerned, not so much with a “material” real, but rather with a “lack.” Such is the ambiguity Butler points to in Zizek’s work, noting that the real appears in two forms, as both “rock” and “lack.” She writes,
the "real" that is a "rock" or a "kernel" or sometimes a "substance" is also, and sometimes within the same sentence, "a loss" [or] a negativity. (198)
According to Butler, we thus find a certain equivocation: the concept of the real “appears to slide from substance to dissolution” (198). As “substance,” the real would seem to implicate Lacan in a reference to “prediscursive reality.” Lacanian theory would thus cut against the grain of most “postmodernism,” for if we assert the “discursive construction of reality,” stressing its contingent, historical formation, the “real” would seem to be a limit, an external domain that is untouched by symbolization. But as “loss” or “negativity,” the real would seem to bring Lacan closer to the thesis that “reality” is “discursively constructed,” though with the additional complication that the real implies a “lack” that remains in some enigmatic way irreducible to the symbolic — “beyond” discourse, though not simply “pre-discursive.” In view of our distinction between two versions of the real, we might see this “sliding” from substance to dissolution, not as confusion or self-contradiction, but as the simultaneous articulation of two forms of the real.
3.13 Beyond “discursive” postmodernism
In her discussion of Zizek and the real, Butler focuses on the fact that the concept of the real amounts to a critique of the “postmodern” thesis asserting the “discursive construction” of reality. This is indeed the crucial point. Butler notes that the real presents us with a “limit” to discourse:
Zizek begins his critique of what he calls "poststructuralism" through the invocation of a certain kind of matter, a "rock" or "kernel" that not only resists symbolization and discourse, but is precisely what poststructuralism, in his account, itself resists and endeavors to dissolve. (198)
At this point, however, the distinction between our two versions of the real is crucial: for we must ask whether Zizek’s critique of “poststructuralism” — conceived (rightly or wrongly) as a theory of “discursive construction” — amounts to a “naive” appeal to “prediscursive reality” (a “rock” or “substance”) or whether it concerns the “failure” or “incompleteness” of the symbolic order (a certain “lack” or “negativity”). In the latter case, as I have suggested, the Lacanian account of the real would be very close to certain questions formulated by Foucault and Derrida concerning the “limits of formalization” — the supplement, or transgression, or “madness” for example. It is because of this second possibility, moreover, that Butler does not simply reject the concept of the real (as a naive appeal to “reality”), insisting on an equally naive account of the “discursive construction of reality” (a thesis that has often been wrongly attributed to her).
On the contrary, she regards the concept of the real as a genuine contribution, an effort to address a problem that contemporary theory has to confront, if it is to pass beyond certain inadequate formulations of “cultural construction.” For those of us who wish to insist upon an anti-foundationalist approach, and develop the claims of a postmodern tradition that recognizes the contingent formation of the subject, the concept of the real is not a stumbling block, or a naive reference to “reality” that must be rejected, according to Butler, but rather a concept, or a theoretical difficulty, that must be confronted and adequately developed. The question of the body and “sexuality” is one arena in which this issue is particularly important, and which psychoanalytic theory has done much to develop in a clear way, since the “body” and “sexuality” oblige us to recognize the limits of “symbolic construction” without, however, appealing to any “presymbolic reality.” If psychoanalysis has taken on an increasing urgency today, it is precisely for this reason, for psychoanalysis has perhaps the clearest conception of the “real” of the body, as a material dimension of the flesh that “exceeds” representation, yet does not automatically refer us to a “natural” domain of “pre-existing reality.” As I have suggested in “The Epoch of the Body,” debates as to whether psychoanalysis amounts to a form of “biological essentialism,” or whether it asserts the “historical construction” of sexuality only conceal the theoretical difficulty it seeks to address.
Thus, Butler does not simply reject the “real.” On the contrary, the importance of this element “beyond” the symbolic is unmistakable, since it is crucial to recognize the “limit” of discursive construction, what Butler calls the “failure of discursive performativity to finally and fully establish the identity to which it refers” (188). Thus, she agrees that “the category of the real is needed” (189), and notes that if Zizek is right to be “opposed to poststructuralist accounts of discursivity,” it is because we must provide a more adequate account of what remains “outside” discourse, what is “foreclosed” from the symbolic order — since “what is refused or repudiated in the formation of the subject continues to determine that subject” (190). On the other hand, while stressing its importance, she focuses on the ambiguous status of this “outside,” this “foreclosed” element, which remains paradoxical insofar as it is difficult to say whether it is a prediscursive “rock” or “kernel” that is simply “beyond” representation, or an “effect” of language itself, a “lack” that would be produced by the symbolic order, instead of simply preceding it. Butler thus identifies a certain wavering, an apparent duality in the concept, a “vacillation between substance and its dissolution” which is evident in the fact that the “real” is simultaneously “figured as the rock’ and the lack’” (199). Whatever the details of the discussion between Zizek and Butler may be, I have tried to suggest that this difficulty can be clarified by distinguishing between two quite different conceptions of the real, a “presymbolic” real, and a “post-symbolic” real, which would take us in the direction of “lack.”
3.14 The anatomy of criticism
On the basis of Butler’s remarks, in fact, one might even undertake an “anatomy of criticism,” a map of contemporary responses to postmodernism, distinguishing “two interpretations of interpretation” in contemporary cultural theory. One is a “reactive” response that has gained force recently, and that amounts to a “return to reality” — in the form of a call for concrete, historical and empirical research, a virulent rejection of “theory” (which is more and more characterized in terms of “French influences” and regarded as “foreign”), and also in the rise of genetic and biological explanations of “consciousness,” “behavior,” and “sexuality.” The other response is an effort to pass “through” postmodernism, to correct certain deficiencies in the theory of “discursive construction,” and — without returning to the “good old days” in which discourses were thought to be true when they secured non-discursive foundations for themselves, and without appealing to a “subject” or a “human nature” that might be regarded as independent of historically contingent discourses or practices — to develop an account of the limit and insufficiency of discourse, thereby doing justice to the concrete, historical effects of symbolic life, not by disregarding language in favor of a “return to the empirical,” but by recognizing the material effects of the malfunction of the symbolic order itself. This is precisely what is at stake in psychoanalysis, and particularly with respect to the “body.” For in speaking of the “real” of the body, psychoanalysis does not simply endorse a return to biology, or to a prelinguistic “reality” (the “reality” presupposed by bio-medical discourse, which focuses on the organism and not the body). If, however, the “body” in psychoanalysis is distinguished from the organism, it is not because it is simply a “discursive construction” or a “product of language,” but because it is a peculiar “structure” or “phenomenon” that is not governed by nature, but is at the same time irreducible to the “symbolic order.”
3.15 The object — “prohibited” or “lost”?
Let us now take a final step. Having distinguished two versions of the real, we must now return to the problem noted earlier, namely, the fact that the second, “post-symbolic” conception of the real gives rise to two different, apparently paradoxical or contradictory results, since it leads us to speak not only of “lack,” but also of a certain “remainder” or “excess.” As a peculiar “remainder,” the “real” is a “surplus-effect” of the symbolic order — a “product” that cannot be explained by reference to “prediscursive reality,” but that is also distinct from the idea of a “void” or “lack.” We have indicated that the “object a” is Lacan’s attempt to provide a theoretical resolution to this problem, by establishing a relation between “lack” and this peculiar “remainder.” Is this not in fact the “paradox” of the term itself, the “object a,” which allows us to speak of an “object of lack”?
In order to clarify this final point, let us return to the argument of Robert Samuels, who speaks of the “subject in the Real” as an “existential” subject, prior to any imaginary or symbolic mediation — the purely “hypothetical” and always already lost subject of “unmediated existence.” With this “subject in the real,” we would seem to return to our first version of the real, a level of immediate “reality” that is never accessible as such. Beginning with this “prediscursive” conception, Samuels argues for a link between the real in Lacan, and the Freudian account of “auto-eroticism” and “infantile sexuality.” He establishes this link by suggesting that a primitive, more or less chaotic, “polymorphous” and undifferentiated “infantile sexuality” comes to be ordered and unified by the formation of the “imaginary body.” We can therefore regard consciousness, narcissism, the ego, and the body (as imaginary), as a set of related functions that impose unity on the “real” of infantile sexuality. As Samuels puts it, we have an “ideal form of unity that gives the subject the possibility of organizing its perceptions and sensations through the development of a unified bodily image” (18). There are good grounds for this link between the “real” (thus understood) and “infantile sexuality” in Freud, who writes in “On Narcissism,”
it is impossible to suppose that a unity comparable to the ego can exist in the individual from the start; the ego has to develop. But the auto-erotic instincts are primordial; so there must be something added to auto-eroticism -- some new operation in the mind -- in order that narcissism may come into being. (SE, 59)
On this view, the “real” subject of “existence” and infantile “autoeroticism” is an “original state” that is lost with the arrival of the imaginary body, and lost again (twice, like Erotic) with the advent of symbolic mediation. But this “pre-discursive” conception of “infantile sexuality” will soon be complicated.
Later, in a chapter on Totem and Taboo, Samuels returns to this formulation, but in such a way that the question now arises as to the possible “resurgence” of the “real” in the unconscious, what Samuels also regards as a form of “incestuous desire,” outside the symbolic law: “in the position of the Real,” he writes, we find “the subject of the unconscious and infantile sexuality who exists outside the symbolic order” (81). One often hears that the Lacanian unconscious is simply a “symbolic” phenomenon, the “discourse of the Other”; but by stressing the “subject of the unconscious” as “real,” Samuels indicates that he is concerned here with something “beyond” the symbolic order, something that concerns the body, a sort of remnant or “trace” of “infantile sexuality” that persists in the unconscious, in spite of the symbolic law. It is this “persistence” of the real, this “trait” of incestuous desire within or beyond the advent of the symbolic order that we need to clarify, and that will lead Samuels to shift from our “first version” of the real to a “second version” (though he does not mark the shift in the manner we are suggesting). For we must now ask whether the real that “returns” beyond the law, after the imaginary and symbolic have “lost” it, is “the same” as the origin, the initial “infantile” state, or whether this “trait” or “trace” that exceeds the symbolic order is not rather a product, an effect of the law itself — in which case we can call it “infantile” only by a certain metaphorical displacement, a ruse that pretends to locate this incestuous desire before the law, when it is in fact a “product” of the law itself. The consequences are obviously decisive: if we believe that “infantile sexuality” is a “prediscursive” state of “existence” that is gradually organized and made “lawful” by representation (what Foucault calls the “repressive hypothesis”), we may regard the “return” of infantile sexuality as a sort of “liberation.” But if the “return” is in fact a “product” of the law, and not a “pre-discursive” state of nature, then this trait of incestuous desire can only be an effect of the law itself — not a form of liberation, but a surplus-effect of the symbolic order itself. This is in fact Lacan’s thesis, developed in particular when he speaks of “père-version,” a “turning toward the father,” a “trait of perversion” that accompanies the father of the law. On this view, something in the very operation of the law “splits” the paternal function into two incompatible parts, one of which bears on the inevitability of “symbolic mediation,” while the other bears on a certain “trait of perversion” that — far from designating a resurgence of “natural” sexuality — in fact designates a suffering that accompanies the law itself. This is what the concept of jouissance seeks to address.
3.16 The incestuous object
This is also the point at which we must introduce the concept of the “object a,” as a lack that entails a “surplus-effect,” a certain materialization. According to Samuels, this persistence of the real of infantile sexuality “within” or “beyond” the law, is precisely what Lacan addresses in terms of the relation between the symbolic order and the object a. Thus, in addition to distinguishing between the subject as “real” and “symbolic” (S and $) — while recognizing, of course, the ego as imaginary — we must also confront the problem of the “object,” as that which allows us to give concrete, bodily specificity to the dimension of “incestuous desire” that remains alongside, or in excess of, the “lawful” desire that characterizes the symbolic order. Samuels makes this additional development quite clear in his discussion of Totem and Taboo: we not only have an opposition between the “symbolic” subject (who enters into “lawful” kinship relations, governed by exogamy and “symbolic exchange”) and what Samuels calls “the Real subject of the unconscious who rejects the law of the father” (82); we must also develop a conception of the “object,” the “prohibited” object that somehow “returns” in spite of the symbolic law. As Samuels puts it: “Implied by this dialectic between incest and exogamy is the persistence of an incestuous object in the unconscious of the subject” (82). Such is the relation, not simply between the “real” and “symbolic” subject, but between the Other (symbolic law) and the “object a.” As the “prohibited” object, the “lost” object, the “taboo” object, or the object of “lack” (and these may not be identical), the object a allows us to locate “the Real subject of the unconscious who rejects the law of the father and presents the existence of incest within the structure” (82). The “polymorphous perversity” of infantile sexuality is thus designated as a “real” that is lost with the advent of the imaginary body, “renounced” when the subject passes through the mediating structure of the symbolic law, and yet a “trace” or “remnant” of this lost world remains, and is embodied in the form of the “object a.”
Thus far Samuels’s account appears to coincide with our first version of the real: in speaking of an “existential subject” (S) that is distinguished from the ego and the “split subject” of the symbolic order ($), he seems to rely on the idea of a prediscursive “real,” prior to its having been filtered and organized by representation. This is the “real” of “infantile sexuality” and “immediate existence” that is always already lost, “repressed” or “mediated” by the imaginary, and by the symbolic order. The problem arises, however, as to the possible resurgence of the real, which is “lost,” but nevertheless able to “return” within the symbolic order, and somehow “present itself” — as a traumatic “return of the repressed,” as a momentary breakdown of representation that is due to a sort of “direct contact” with an unfamiliar “reality,” or in some other form of “presentation” that remains to be clarified. According to Samuels, the “object a” in Lacan designates precisely this element, a “real” that is not represented in symbolic or imaginary form, but is nevertheless presented somehow. It is not a “past”that has been lost, but something that “presents itself” in the present:
The object (a) represents the presence of an unsymbolized Real element within the structure of the symbolic order itself. (81)
Obviously other writers have taken up this “disruptive” presentation, a certain “concrete” remainder that exceeds symbolization — as Kristeva does for example with the “Semiotic,” and as Kant does with the sublime, which is the “experience” of an excess that disrupts both sensory and conceptual presentation, that cannot be contained by images or concepts, that disrupts the very faculty of presentation (the imagination), and yet somehow “presents” itself. At this point, the real is no longer a domain of “immediate existence,” a “reality” that is “always already lost,” but a peculiar “presence” within the symbolic order itself.
This is where matters become complicated, and we are confronted with a certain “paradox.” For one thing (to put the point in a logical or structural way), it is difficult to say that the object a is a “presence,” or that (in Samuels’s words) it “represents” something like infantile sexuality, if we have claimed that all “presence” and all “representation” are imaginary or symbolic, and that the real is inaccessible, always already lost, impossible or absent. If the symbolic “law” means that all of the subject’s experience and desire is organized through representation — if the most concrete content of our bodily experience is given to us through an imaginary unity that is in turn filtered through the symbolic order — then the “object a” would be an element that does not fit within the imaginary or symbolic structure, that is “abjected” from the order of images and words, but nevertheless persists in “presenting itself.” This is the “structural” aspect of the problem: the “object a” is a “presence” that does not belong to the system of presentation, an element that appears without “appearing,” emerging “inside” the structure, without belonging to the structure. As Samuels points out, we thus face “the paradox of the analytic attempt to Symbolize that which cannot be Symbolized” (83-4).
In spite of this apparent “paradox,” we should not be too quick to dismiss the question on “logical” grounds: we should perhaps be prepared to consider the possibility of a “real” that is “beyond” representation, an aspect of the subject that is “outside” the symbolic order, but would somehow present itself, or have an “effect” on the system of representation. Freud appears to have something like this in mind when he speaks of unconscious “residues,” which remain present without the subject being aware of them, residues which have an effect on the subject’s life, even when they are excluded from the field of representation. Butler appears to have something similar in mind when she writes that we must not reduce the “subject” to a purely “symbolic effect,” or regard the subject as a “discursive construction”:
Zizek is surely right that the subject is not the unilateral effect of prior discourses, and that the process of subjectivation outlined by Foucault is in need of psychoanalytic rethinking. (189)
But if the concept of the real is indispensable, we cannot ignore the problem of its “presentation.” As I have indicated, Jacques-Alain Miller’s approach to this difficulty is a “logical” one, insofar as he does not take an “ontic” approach to the “object,” but claims that the “object” is a construction, a concept that arises as a way of addressing the structural “impasses” of the symbolic order. As an “object,” moreover, it is not simply a “logical” issue, but should allow us to give concrete, bodily specificity to this “aporia,” without appealing to a “prediscursive” conception of the object. Obviously, the relation between Lacanian theory and object-relations theory is extremely complex at this point. It is clear, however, that we can no longer sustain the first version of the real as a domain of immediacy that is always already lost, and that we must instead consider the “object” as “an unsymbolized Real element within the structure of the Symbolic order itself.
If we stress the temporal aspects of the “return” of the real, we can put the “paradox” in a slightly different form. In this case, it is not simply a matter of “representing” what is beyond representation, or of “presenting” the unpresentable. It is rather a question of the “return” of an “original” state within a structure that was supposed to reconfigure, prohibit, or transcend it. The example of “infantile sexuality” is particularly important here, for if we begin by characterizing the “real” as a “primitive” domain of disorganized “polymorphous” experience — if we claim that the ego and narcissism are imposed (together with the structure of language) upon the original chaos of the “real” body, in such a way that this “original experience” is lost — then the question concerns the return, in the “present,” of a lost origin. At this point, a temporal twist is given to our “paradox,” for it is clear that what returns is not the same as this supposedly original state. What returns, “within” the system of representation (as a “rupture” or “unsymbolized element”), is not in fact an initial condition of infantile sexuality — the memory of a past that is somehow preserved in all its archaeological purity — but rather a “trait” that emerges from the symbolic order, and yet — this is the crucial point — presents itself as the remnant of a past that has been lost. We now see more clearly why the “object a” can only be understood in terms of our “second version” of the real, but also why it appears to be conceivable in terms of the “first version”: this trace, designated as the object a, is not the origin, a “left-over” that remains from the past, or the “return” of an original state, but the temporal paradox in which we find the “return” of something that did not originally exist, but only emerged “after the fact,” as an effect of symbolization. Its apparently “original” status is thus strictly mythical. For the “thing” only came into being for the first time when it “returned,” hiding itself or disguising itself as an “origin,” while it is in fact a product of the symbolic order, an “effect” of the law itself.
We are thus brought to our final observation: the importance of this second, temporal formulation is that it obliges us to recognize a split between the “object a” and the “real” as an initial, presymbolic condition. Samuels puts the point as follows. Speaking of unconscious “fixations” — what Freud calls “the incestuous fixations of libido” (SE 1913, 17) — Samuels writes:
The fixation is not the existence of infantile sexuality (jouissance) itself, but rather a rem(a)inder of the primitive Real within the structure of the symbolic order. (83, emphasis added)
The conclusion is clear: we now have a split between the “primitive” real of an original infantile sexuality, and the “rem(a)inder” that appears in the present, “within” the symbolic order. As Samuels puts it,
There must be a separation between what Lacan calls the primitive Real of jouissance [infantile sexuality], which is placed logically before the Symbolic order of language and law, and the post-Symbolic form of the Real, which is embodied by the object (a). (83)
That remainder, the object (a), is no longer identical with the “original” jouissance it is said to embody or represent. The “object a” is rather a “product,” the concrete materialization of an element of transgression or jouissance that does not submit to the symbolic law, but that, far from being an original state, a moment of natural immediacy, is precisely a “product” of the law, a surplus-effect of the symbolic order, which disguises itself as an “origin.” Where the first version of the real allows us to maintain the illusion of a “lost immediacy” (together with the hope of its possible return, through “affect,” or “transgression,” or “liberation,” or in some other way), the second account, based on the “object a,” recognizes this “state of immediacy” not only as a “myth,” a retroactive construction, but also as a peculiar “materialization,” a product of the symbolic order itself.
We thus see more clearly what the status of the “prohibition” is in psychoanalysis. It is not an interdiction that prohibits a possible “pleasure,” compelling us to accept the standards of civilized behavior, but rather a “no” that veils an impossibility. It does not banish us from a state of nature, but rather erects (the word is used advisedly) a barrier to cover what is originally lacking. The object a is therefore not so much a piece of “infantile sexuality” that remains “latent” in the subject in spite of the laws of civilization, a piece of “libido” that refused to sign on to the social contact, a biological “Id” that resists the “symbolic law,” but rather a “construction” that accompanies the law itself — the trace of a “past that was never present” as such, but only comes into being for the first time when it “returns.” Lacan touched on this difficulty in the “Rome Discourse” when he observed that the traumatic “event” is not an original “reality” (the “brute aspect of the trauma”) that might be located in the past, but a later condensation or “precipitation” of the subject, and that psychoanalysis is a science of “conjecture” in this precise sense, since it has to “construct” the object rather than simply “discover” it. Freud drew a similar conclusion about the peculiar, “conjectural” status of the prohibited object, when he observed that when primitive tribes are asked about their “taboos” and “prohibitions,” it is difficult to get a clear grasp on the “object” that is prohibited, since every account “always already” falls back on symbolic “rituals” and other presentations that amount to misrepresentation. As Freud remarks in his brilliantly offhand way, these “primitive” cultures are in fact “already very ancient civilizations.”
The “taboo object” is not a thing that is itself dangerous or contaminating, but a representation, a symbolic form, a ritualized displacement of a terror that, in itself, remains “unknown” and “obscure,” like the nodal point of the dream. Thus, when we ask about the “reason” for the prohibition — why this particular thing has been chosen as the forbidden act or object — we reach what we might call an “original displacement.” In Lacanian terms, the taboo object is a veil thrown over a void. This brings us to the strictest definition of the prohibition: what is “prohibited” is actually “impossible” or “originally lost,” but the prohibition produces the illusion of a possible possession — either in a mythical past, or in a promised future. The prohibition (and perhaps morality as well) thus reveals its status as a veil: we pretend to “restrict ourselves,” or to elaborate ethical standards of “civilization,” in order to “refuse” what is in fact unavailable — the very structure of the veil that Zizek sees in Wittgenstein’s famous conclusion to the Tractatus: “what we cannot speak of, we must leave in silence.” Why, it might be asked, is it necessary to prohibit what in fact cannot be said? Because “that is the law.” As Freud observes, the so-called “primitive” tribes make this “original displacement” especially clear: “even primitive people have not retained the original forms of those institutions nor the conditions which gave rise to them; so that we have nothing whatever but hypotheses to fall back upon, as a substitute for the observation which we are without” (SE 109). The prohibited “object” thus acquires a strictly mythical status: it is not a thing that was once possessed (in infancy or pre-history), but a thing that came into “existence” through the law, but as the lost object. The idea that this object was once possessed is strictly a retroactive fantasy — but an illusion that is inseparable from the symbolic order itself, and does not cease to have effects, even when its “non-existence” has been demonstrated. We must therefore recognize its “post-symbolic” status, but also do justice to its ability to create the “illusion” that this object derives from an “origin,” that it somehow “represents” a past which was once possessed (not only in the patient’s past, but also in the past that always haunts theoretical work as well, including psychoanalytic theories of “infancy,” “maternity,” and other “origins”).
Notes
1. Elsewhere in this issue, see Chris Semansky’s satirical allusion to this problem in “Youngest Brother of Brothers.” — Editor.
Abbreviations
SE: Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. and ed. James Strachey et. al. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953). 24 volumes. References will be by volume and page number.
SZ: Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). References follow the pagination of the seventh (and subsequent) German editions, Sein und Zeit (Tubingen: Neomarius Verlag, 1953), given marginally in the English text.
E: Lacan, Jacques. Écrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966). A portion of this volume has been translated as Écrits: A Selection, by Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977). References will be to the English edition.
SVII: Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-60, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992).
SVIII: Lacan, Jacques. Le Seminaire, livre VIII: Le transfert, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1991).
SXI: Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978).
FS: Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York: Norton, 1985).
T: “Television,” trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson in Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, ed. Joan Copjec (New York: Norton, 1990).
Works Cited
- Attridge, Derek. “Language as History/History as Language: Saussure and the Romance of Etymology,” Post-Structuralism and the Question of History, ed. Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington, and Robert Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 183-211.
- Boothby, Richard. Death and Desire: Psychoanalytic Theory in Lacan’s Return to Freud (New York: Routledge, 1991).
- Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel. Lacan: The Absolute Master, trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).
- Brousse, Marie-Hélène. “La formule du fantasme?” Lacan, ed. Gérard. Miller (Paris: Bordas, 1987).
- Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993).
- Dean, Tim. “Transsexual Identification, Gender Performance Theory, and the Politics of the Real,” literature and psychology, 39:4 (1993), pp. 1-27.
- Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 278-93.
- Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Science (New York: Vintage, 1970).
- Granon-Lafont, Jeanne. La topologie ordinaire de Jacques Lacan (Paris: Point Hors Ligne, 1985).
- Grigg, Russell. “Signifier, Object, and the Transference,” Lacan and the Subject of Language ed. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan and Mark Bracher (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 100-15.
- Heidegger, Martin. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. with introduction and lexicon by Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982), 27-76.
- —. “Kant’s Thesis About Being,” Thinking About Being: Aspects of Heidegger’s Thought, ed. Robert W. Shahan and J. N. Mohanty (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984), pp. 7-33.
- —. “The Thing,” On the Way to Language, trans. P. Hertz and J. Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 165-86.
- Irigaray, Luce. “Le Lieu, L’intervalle: Lecture d’Aristote, Physique IV, 2, 3, 4, 5,” Éthique de la différence sexuelle (Paris: Minuit, 1984), 41-59. “Place, Interval: A Reading of Aristotle, Physics IV,” An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1993), pp. 34-55.
- Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: Macmillan, 1973).
- Laplanche, Jean. Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1976).
- Lee, Jonathan Scott. Jacques Lacan (New York: G. K. Hall, 1990).
- Miller, Jacques-Alain. “Extimité,” Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure, and Society, ed. Mark Bracher, Marshall Alcorn, Jr., Ronald J. Cortell, and Franĉoise Massardier-Kenney (New York: New York UP, 1994), pp. 74-87.
- Montrelay, Michèle. “The Story of Louise,” Returning to Freud: Clinical Psychoanalysis in the School of Lacan, ed. Stuart Schneiderman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980).
- Nasio, Juan-David. Les Yeux de Laure (Paris: Aubier, 1987).
- Piaget, Jean. Structuralism, ed. and trans. Chaninah Maschler (New York: Harper and Row, 1970).
- Safouan, Moustafa. Pleasure and Being: Hedonism from a Psychoanalytic Point of View, trans. Martin Thom (New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1983).
- Samuels, Robert. Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis: Lacan’s Reconstruction of Freud (New York: Routledge, 1993).
- Shepherdson, Charles. “Vital Signs: The Place of Memory in Psychoanalysis,” Research in Phenomenology [special issue, “Spaces of Memory”], vol. 23 (1993), 22-72.
- —. “The Role of Gender and the Imperative of Sex,” Supposing the Subject, ed. Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1994), 158-84.
- —. “Adaequatio Sexualis: Is There a Measure of Sexual Difference?” From Phenomenology to Thought, Errancy, and Desire, ed. Babette Babich (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer, 1995), pp. 447-73.
- —. “History and the Real: Foucault with Lacan,” Postmodern Culture, 5:2 (January, 1995).
- —. “The Epoch of the Body: Need, Demand and the Drive in Kojève and Lacan,” Perspectives on Embodiment: Essays from the NEH Institute at Santa Cruz, ed. Honi Haber and Gail Weiss, (New York: Routledge, 1996).
- Silverman, Kaja, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996).
- Weber, Samuel. Return to Freud: Jacques Lacan’s Dislocation of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991).
- Zizek, Slavoj. For They Know Not What They Do (New York: Verso, 1991).
- —. Tarrying with the Negative (Durham: Duke UP, 1993).