The Real, the Ground, the Remainder
p. 74: The paradox one must sustain, however, is that the universe of 'spiritual' products is none the less rooted in its Ground. The present threat of global ecological catastrophe provides the ultimate proof [....]
p. 75: The Ground is rather like the figure of woman in David Lynch's films: the traumatic Thing, the point of simultaneous attraction and repulsion, which stands for the vortex of Life itself threatening to draw us into its depressive abyss. And does not this pre-predicative vortex of the Real point directly towards the Lacanian jouissance? Does not Schelling himself determine the Real [das Reale] as the circular movement of 'irrational' (i.e. pre-logical, pre-symbolic) drives which find satisfaction in the very 'meaningless' repetition of their circular path? For Schelling (as well as for Lacan) this Real is the Limit, the ultimate obstacle on account of which every 'semantic idealism', every attempt to deploy the Absolute as a self-enclosed matrix generating all possible significations of Being, is destined to fail.
pp. 76-7: Every Organization of Sense, every universal conceptual scheme by means of which we endeavor to comprehend reality, is in itself--at its most fundamental, for structural reasons and not merely due to contingent circumstances--biased, out of balance, 'crazy', minimally 'paranoiac' (as the early Lacan would have put it): its imposition disturbs the 'natural order of things' and throws the universe off balance. In other words, there is no neutral Universality: every Universality, every attempt at All, at a global comprehension, bears the indelible mark of a 'pathological' exclusiveness of One--that is, it hinges on the 'partiality' of its position of enunciation. So, again, it is not sufficient to say that no conceptual structure is perfectly neutral, that it fails to comprehend reality in a truly impartial way; the point is, rather, that the status of this 'bias' is a priori, structural.
We are dealing here with the inherent constituent of the emergence of a formal structure--in short, with the condition of the structure's consistency: but for this exclusive base in a One--but for this partiality and distortion sustained by a minimum of Egotism--the structure disintegrates, loses its consistency in the dispersed plurality. When we repeat after Schelling that every Order arises on the basis of and has its roots in a general Disorder, we are therefore not making the usual relativist point that man's ordering activity is limited to local attempts to introduce a minimum of Order into the wide ocean of primordial chaos--to attempts which, as such, are ultimately doomed to fail; our point is, rather, that the very imposition of an Order is an act of supreme violence--Order is a violent imposition which throws the universe out of joint. Disorder is the condition of possibility of Order not only in the sense that the very notion of Order is conceivable only against the background of general Disorder, as a series of local attempts to limit the Disorder--the highest Disorder, the highest violation of 'natural balance', is the very imposition of a (biased) Order. So we are back at our starting point: the 'unconscious' is not primarily the Real in its opposition to the Ideal; in its most radical dimension, the 'unconscious' is, rather, the very act of decision/differentiation by means of which the Ideal establishes itself in its opposition to the Real and imposes its Order on to the Real, the act by means of which the rotary motion of drives is 'repressed' into the eternal past.
p. 77: In other words, the elementary idealist illusion resides in belief in the possibility of a purely neutral Universal, a Universal which is not 'anchored' to a particular material locus (or, with regard to language, the belief in a pure enunciated which does not involve a particular/partial subjective position of enunciation).
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