The Real

In continental philosophy, the Real refers to the demarcation of reality that is correlated with subjectivity and intentionality.[1][2] In Lacanianism, it is an "impossible" category because of its opposition to expression and inconceivability.[3][4] The Real Order is a topological ring (lalangue) and ex-sists as an infinite homonym.[5][6]

[T]he real in itself is meaningless: it has no truth for human existence. In Lacan's terms, it is speech that "introduces the dimension of truth into the real."[7]

— James DiCenso
  1. ^ Shaviro, Steven (2014). "Noncorrelational Thought". The Universe of Things: on Speculative Realism. University of Minnesota Press. p. 109. ISBN 978-0-8166-8926-2. [E]ven when correlationism does posit some sort of 'exteriority' to thought—the Kantian thing in itself, the phenomenological intentional object, or the Lacanian Real—this exteriority still remains 'relative to us...this space of exteriority is merely the space of what faces us, of what exists only as a correlate of our own existence'
  2. ^ Dor, Joël (1999). Gurewich, Judith (ed.). The Clinical Lacan. Other Press. p. 23. ISBN 978-1-892746-05-4. Editor's note: [...] The Real is reality in its unmediated form. It is what disrupts the subject's received notions about himself and the world around him [...] as a shattering enigma, because in order to make sense of it he or she will have to [...] find signifiers that can ensure its control.
  3. ^ Zupančič, Alenka (2000). Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan. Verso. pp. 235–237. ISBN 1-85984-218-6.
  4. ^ Hurst, Andrea (2008). "7 The Lacanian Real". Derrida Vis-à-vis Lacan: Interweaving Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis. Fordham University Press. pp. 213–236. ISBN 9780823228744. JSTOR j.ctt13x0dc2.14. The desire for an 'impossible' immortality ('impossible,' in the sense of ineradicably aporetic), he claims, 'is the real that governs our activities more than any other and it is psychoanalysis that designates it for us.'
  5. ^ Bristow, Daniel (2022). Schizostructuralism: Divisions in Structure, Surface, Temporality, Class. Routledge. p. 37. ISBN 978-1-03-205872-6. On the infinity of the rings, it becomes clear here that it is only the Real that is truly infinite, in its homonomy.
  6. ^ Kristeva, Julia (1983). "Within the Microcosm of 'The Talking Cure'". In Smith, Joseph H.; Kerrigan, William (eds.). Interpreting Lacan. Psychiatry and the Humanities. Vol. 6. Yale University Press. p. 35. ISBN 978-0-300-13581-7. No matter how impossible the real might be, once it is made homogenous with lalangue, it finally becomes part of a topology with the imaginary and the symbolic, a part of that trinary hold from which nothing escapes, not even the 'hole,' since it too is part of the structure.
  7. ^ DiCenso, James (1994). "Symbolism and Subjectivity: A Lacanian Approach to Religion". The Journal of Religion. 74 (1): 45–64. doi:10.1086/489286. JSTOR 1203614. S2CID 144297576. Retrieved 2022-12-11.

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