This article may lack focus or may be about more than one topic.(January 2023) |
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
[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'
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.
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.'
On the infinity of the rings, it becomes clear here that it is only the Real that is truly infinite, in its homonomy.
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.