when he attempts to question the Real directly. As soon as the Real is more openly
tackled, the idea of a pure Real soon becomes manifestly untenable and, as a result,
the notion of a transcendent Name-of-the-Father is itself dismantled. In parallel,
such an explicit thematization of the Real brings Lacan inextricably to intertwine
this notion with that of jouissance.
4 4 What Is the “Real”?
I have already pointed out how the passage from “There is an Other of the Other”
to “There is no Other of the Other” should be regarded as a gradual one in Lacan-
ian theory. Although only a very short span of time separates these two formulas
in the Seminars, it would be wrong to assume that there is an abrupt break between
them. Lacan clearly preserves some notions that are consistent with the idea of a
transcendent Other even after he begins to maintain that there is no Other of the
Other; similarly, one can detect the anticipation of some of the notions that derive
from the barring of the Other right at the heart of Lacan’s most “structuralist” pe-
riod. For instance, the introduction of the notion of jouissancein Seminar V already
implicitly involves the universal validity of the fundamental fantasy as a basic an-
chor of the unconscious that lies at the crossroads of the Symbolic, the Imaginary,
and the Real, and thus negates the self-sufficiency of the Symbolic—to obviate this
potential contradiction, Lacan has naïvely to relegate jouissanceand the fundamen-
tal fantasy to the domain of the perversions. On the other hand, it is also the case
that in Seminar VII the real hole in the Symbolic is at the same time contradicto-
rily considered to be some-thing in itself—a patent legacy of the Other of the
Other....
With regard to these issues, it is my intention in this section to focus on the way
in which Lacan engages in a thorough, and often tortuous, reassessment of his no-
tion of the Real. Of particular importance in this context is Seminar VII (1959 ‒
196 0) which, according to many commentators, represents the most tangible
proof of a turning point in Lacanian theory; although I do not disagree with such
a pronouncement, I nevertheless prefer to highlight the fact that, despite being un-
doubtedly the first Seminar in which Lacan openly tackles the notion of the Real,
Seminar VII at the same time presents clear evidence in favor of the gradual nature
of the passage from “There is an Other of the Other” to “There is no Other of the
Other.” Why is this the case? We have seen that the Other of the Other is what al-
lows a neat demarcation between the Real and the Symbolic; conversely, the bar-
ring of the Other causes their mutual dependency—that is, there is no “pure” Real
any longer, and all we are left with is the Real-of-the-Symbolic and a mythical ex-
trasymbolic “undead.” I will attempt to demonstrate that, in Seminar VII, while