defending the idea of a Real-of-the-Symbolic, Lacan also unintentionally falls back
into a quasi-mystical understanding of the pure Real by promoting the notion of a
transcendent real “Thing” understood as a positive absence. If my argument is cor-
rect, then Lacan is holding a profoundly contradictory view here, since the barring
of the Other should categorically exclude any transcendence whatsoever.Before embarking on an analysis of the status of the Real in Seminar VII, let us now
take a step back and briefly examine the various meanings that were assigned to
this notion up to the mid-195 0s—when there was still an Other of the Other. In
his early work, Lacan associates the Real with both ( 1 ) objects as they are given to
us in everyday reality; and ( 2 ) a rather vague notion of undifferentiated matter as
it is in itself before the advent of the Symbolic—or beyond the latter’s domain.^73
This inevitably gives rise to blatant contradictions insofar as the superimposition
of the Symbolic onto the Imaginary is, according to Lacan, precisely what accounts
for the filtering of our perception of everyday reality. Furthermore, as we saw in
our investigation of Lacan’s description of psychosis, the term “Real” is also un-
derstood in a third sense as a nonsymbolized Symbolic which should be located
within language.
Although such a terminological confusion will persist even in later years—it
still complicates any accurate discussion of the Real in Seminar VII—it is never-
theless the case that around 1955 Lacan commences sporadically to clarify several
different acceptations of the Real. One might well argue that his efforts are indeed
oriented toward distinguishing the Real from objects of everyday reality as well as
from primordial matter. As early as Seminar III, Lacan claims that “the real in ques-
tion [in psychoanalysis] is no doubt not to be taken in the sense in which we nor-
mally understand it, which implies objectivity.”^74 Both Seminar IV and Seminar VI
dedicate some significant pages to this issue, and both conclude that a better eval-
uation of the Real might entail the formulation of a number of different concepts.
It is only by closely examining these passages that we shall then be able to grasp ap-
propriately the subtle distinctions of Seminar VII.
In Seminar IV, Lacan opens by clearly stating that “the real has more than one
sense.”^75 The Real that psychoanalysis deals with is to be located “at the limits of
our experience,” at the limits of reality. Why? Because our perception of everyday
reality is filtered through a “screen” which makes its “conditions very artificial.”^76
As a consequence, “we can refer to the real only by theorizing.” More specifically,
the Real should be understood as the “whole of what effectively happens,” that
which “involves in itself any possibility of effect”: this “function,” this “effectiv-
ity” of the Real, can better be “distinguished in [everyday] reality” by the German
term Wirklichkeit.^77 I believe that Lacan proposes here to distinguish Wirklichkeitthe subject of the real (other)