Night of the World by Frank Smecker

Author:Frank Smecker [Smecker Frank]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78279-179-9
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2014-05-29T16:00:00+00:00

Part III: Impossibility: The Real

§24. The three modalities of the Real

Without the phenomena of differentiation and “codification”—which are specific to the Imaginary and the Symbolic, respectively (albeit operating together, in tandem)—the distinction of singularities—what Franciscan philosopher and theologian John Duns Scotus called haecceity, that individuating essence that makes an object or subject become this particular object or this particular subject—would be plunged back into that which is structureless, formless; into the indeterminacy of a nameless and non-realizable life force: an amorphous mass of innumerable particulars that eludes any truly rational grasp; effects isolated from any context as such. This is why it’s often claimed that, if the Symbolic fictions that structure our realities for us were to be removed, our realities would disintegrate, and thus we’d be swept away by the constant torrent of a raw reality that bears no structure and meaning whatsoever.

Therein we have hit upon an aspect of the third signification of objectivity, what we can liken to the Lacanian notion of the (objective) Real. A simple and naïve conceptualization of Lacan’s Real would be to describe it solely as a non-realizable dimension that eludes full inscription into the Symbolic, as a dimension that incorporates everything that ex-sists outside of language, outside of ideology, outside form of thought, and so on. In Derridean terms, “what is outside that which is outside what is inside”; that which bears no mark; that which has no name, and thus no meaning.

But the Real is a bit more complex than this. We should think of the Real as having “three modalities“:131 The “real Real“: that which denotes the impenetrable, enigmatic core of reality itself, including the impossible, non-realizable “No-Thing”—e.g., the primordial object, like the black obelisk depicted at the beginning of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, or The Horror! of Kurtz’s voice in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. As such, the “real Real” is the infinitely vast and enigmatical field of particular effects isolated from any consistent context whatsoever, it is, as Lacan put it, the “unschematized Real.” Then there is the “imaginary Real“: an enigmatic “something,” an object experienced at the level of the sublime, e.g., the time-honored oracular crystal ball, or the spiritual/religious object-figure that can effectuate miracles, and so on. And last, though surely not least, we have the “symbolic Real“: the “consistent” Real, e.g., what Žižek explains as scientific formulae and theories that are not translated into, or related to, our everyday experiences,132 like, e.g., the mathematical codes in Darren Aronofsky’s film Pi, or Badiou’s set theory qua metaontology. The “symbolic Real” deals primarily with “how to schematize” the “unschematized Real.”

In effect, the Lacanian Real designates all three dimensions at once: (i) the “abyssal vortex” that disrupts every consistent structure; (ii) ‘the mathematized consistent structure of reality; [and] (iii) the fragile pure appearance.’133

And can we not, to spell out a little more these three modalities of the Real, draw another set of examples around the Lacanian notion that, from within our structured place of the Symbolic, one

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.