On the Lacanian Real

Because of the irresoluble split or antagonism inherent to subjectivity, what we ordinarily consider to be “reality” is in fact a juxtaposition of the symbolic register and the imaginary register. The Lacanian Real, however, is precisely that which is not experienced as part of everyday reality.

The register of the Real involves a dimension of anxiety and loss; the Real disrupts from within all signification through the symbolic and the imaginary registers, and thereby forecloses the possibility of any harmonious synthesis of human existence and human knowledge. The imaginary and the symbolic registers are bound together with the Real like the three loops of a single knot. Consequently, although the Real is that which is in a sense impossible to say (it resists incorporation into shared, symbolic practices and intersubjective linguistic systems), nonetheless—as Žižek shows—what is foreclosed from the symbolic returns in the Real of the symptom.

Moreover, fantasy (like the symptom) serves as a support for the consistency of experience. This means that the register of the imaginary is not simply a realm of illusion, for it is primarily in dreams that we approach the hard kernel of the Real: the Real of our desire announces itself in dreams.