Substance as Subject

How do we reconcile the vexing status of the Real spoken about in two different or even contradictory senses by Lacan and Zizek? Lacan in his 1974 televised interview, Lacan describes (Imaginary-Symbolic) reality as “a grimace of the real.” Zizek reverses this description: the Real is a grimace of reality. To begin with, Is this just the conceptual oscillation of the Kantian reading of the Real or a Hegelian? The Kantian version of the Real entails the existence of the positive substantial thing-in-itself independent of the encapsulation of the Imaginary-Symbolic reality. Correlatively, the Hegelian version of the Real would entail the thing-in-itself that escapes Imaginary-Symbolic reality is always already posited from within the representational reality itself.

Here, I will borrow the term used by Zizek along this line to distinguish the Kantian Real as Real-as-presupposed and the Hegelian Real-as-posed.

“The Real-as-presupposed is associated with the recurrent motifs in Lacan’s texts evoking the plentitude of the pre-Symbolic flesh, the brute, raw immediacy of the body prior to its being colonized and overwritten by the signifiers of the big Other. The Real-as-posed, by contrast, is associated with an insubstantial, ephemeral nothingness, a fleeting non- presence haunting the constituted field of reality and rendering it “not whole.””- (Adrian-Johnston-zizeks-ontology-a-transcendental-materialist-theory-of-subjectivity)

Zizek seems to endorse more on the Hegelian understanding of the Real:

Lacan’s whole point is that the Real is nothing but this impossibility of its inscription: the Real is not a transcendent positive entity, persisting somewhere beyond the symbolic order like a hard kernel inaccessible to it, some kind of Kantian “Thing-in-itself” — in itself it is nothing at all, just a void, an emptiness in a symbolic structure marking some central impossibility. (Zizek 1989,173)

This impossibility an X beyond the symbolic order hints that there is indeed an X that isn’t entirely immanent to representational reality. One thing to keep in mind is the this X is not the Kantian noumenal Ding an sich. The impossible X is not necessarily the ideational constructs internal to subjective cognition, but it is the very nature of being to be not-all. The Hegelian Real is, infact, Barred.

One is still more uncertain here when reading another certain articulations of the Real as:

“ A certain fundamental ambi­guity pertains to the notion of the Real in Lacan: the Real designates a substantial hard kernel that precedes and resists symbolization and, simultaneously, it designates the left-over, which is posited or ‘produced’ by symbolization itself” (Zizek 1993, 36).

Is the Real substantial or insubstantial? Is Zizek contradicting himself? Are there two versions of the Real? In his 1993 interview, Zizek explicitly express the tension between these two version. As Adrian Johnston notes with reference to the interview : “Zizek designates this as a “paradox” that must be accepted and embraced:

“The real does not refer to some sub- stantial, positive entity beyond the symbolic, resisting symbolization . . . what Lacan calls ‘the real* is nothing beyond the symbolic, it’s merely the inherent inconsistency of the symbolic order itself (Zizek and Salecl 1996, 41). He goes on to stipulate: “Still, not everything is cultural, that’s the paradox. Although you cannot pinpoint a moment which is pure nature, which is not yet mediated by culture, in spite of this you must not draw the conclusion that everything is culture. Otherwise you fall into ‘discursive idealism’” (Zizek and Salecl 1996, 41).

Is the Real both the excess(before) and the lack(after) at the same time? Subjectivity is always already immersed in Imaginary-Symbolic reality, for-closed the pre-reality (Real) through primal repression via the entry into representation.Subjectivity is later grazed by the impossibility of this pre for-closed Real through another sort of impossibility, that is, the irresolvable impasses and paradoxes in which the foreclosed Real indirectly returns due to the inconsistency (short-circuits) of the big Other. Hence, the Real always returns to the same place.

Now does the noumenal Real arises from the phenomenal reality? It is not that noumena emerges from the phenomena. Instead, both noumena and phenomena emerge from something else, an ontological X this is neither of noumena and phenomena per se. But how? We have to remind ourselves that for Hegel and of course Zizek, the Real is barred. Being as such is ‘not-all’. Zizek describes that Hegelian Absolute is not a universal all, on the contrary, it is in war with itself, internally inconsistent and antagonist with itself. Gaps inhere within the Real itself. Zizek names this crack of the Real as the Subject:

“The Hegelian ‘subject’ is ultimately nothing but a name for the externality of the Substance to itself, for the ‘crack’ by way of which the Substance becomes ‘alien’ to itself, (mis)perceiving itself through human eyes as the inaccessible reified Otherness” (Zizek 1993, 30).

When the Subject gaze upon substance (for instance, the act of perceiving the external world), this reflection is not confined merely to an epistemological field separated from the perceived reality of being. Rather than being separated off, this reflection is inscribed within the reality of being upon which it reflects as an internal inflection, an immanent folding-back of substance upon itself:

“The external gaze of the Subject upon the inscrutable Substance is from the very beginning included in the Substance itself as an index of its disparity with itself’ (Zizek 2002a, 106). Zizek adds that “this is what escapes the position of ‘external reflection’ (the position which perceives the Substance as an unattainable Thing-in-itself): how its externality to the Substance is a self-alienation of this Substance itself; the way Substance is external to itself’ (Zizek 2002a, 106). Or, as he words it later elsewhere, “Hegel’s motto ‘one should conceive the Absolute not only as Substance, but also as Subject’ means: ‘subject’ is the name for a crack in the edifice of Being” (Zizek 2004c, 45).