far as suggesting that, according to Lacan, death “in reality” is, following a Leib-
nizian legacy, a mere “diminishing” of the body,^39 a loss of man’s bodily height
that prevents the Other from bringing about any new form of imaginary individ-
uation. In fact, we know that Lacan undoubtedly considers man’s erectile shape (his
being a biped, as well as the stiffness of his penis) to be the natural “reservoir”^40
of his capacity to carry out specular identifications which are later symbolically
united in a retroactive way. In other words, a subject can properly be individuated
in reality only inasmuch as the three orders of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the
Real maintain an extremely precarious reciprocal balance.^41
( 2 ) Real death,as distinct from death “in reality.” This will coincide with the cessa-
tion of the subject’s post mortemsurvival as an object of the Other’s jouissance,and must
logically be equated with his symbolic death.The latter is nothing but the total dele-
tion of the subject from the field of the Other, the complete obliteration of “the
dead from [the Other’s unconscious] historical memory.”^42 Once again, we wit-
ness here the strict interdependence between the Real, which is always a Real-of-
the-Symbolic (as object of jouissance), and the Symbolic, which is always a Symbolic
holed or supplemented by the Real.
( 3 ) The symbolic death of the individual can logically occur only in concomitance
with the death of the Symbolic tout court,which, following Sade, Lacan usually names
the “second death.” Yet these two interrelated notions, which are often confused
by commentators, should be kept separate. In order to provide a credible example
of the “death of the Symbolic,” a permanent derailment of nature that will forever
extinguish human life as (the registration of ) the symbolic life of the being of lan-
guage, Lacan repeatedly hints at the nuclear holocaust.^43 On the other hand, sym-
bolic death is a strictly speaking unattainable state: Lacan exclusively refers to it by
means of mythical examples which portray certain paradigmatic ethical figures.
Symbolic death denotes the (im)possibility of leaving the Symbolic as an individ-
ual: this is certainly the case with Antigone who, in being placed alive in a tomb
for her transgression of the law of the polis,should be regarded as a “still living
corpse,”^44 as someone who is symbolically dead for the Other before being dead
“in reality.” As we can conclude from our analysis of psychosis and suicide, Lacan
believes that, until there is a symbolic order, no-body (whether “alive” or “dead”)
can ever completely be “separated” from it. This last point is easy to grasp if we
consider the Symbolic in terms of what Zˇizˇek pertinently defines as the (uncon-
scious) “timelessness and spacelessness of the synchronous universal symbolic
network of registration”^45 which will be operative until the end of time. Although
the subject’s symbolic death is achieved stricto sensuexclusively through the death
of the symbolic order, what, on the other hand, Lacan deems possible on the in-the subject of the fantasy... and beyond