ABSTRACT
The real is one of Lacan’s most difficult and at the same time most interesting concepts. The difficulty of understanding the real is partly due to the fact that it is not a ‘thing’; it is not a material object in the world or the human body or even ‘reality’. For Lacan, our reality consists of symbols and the process of signification. Therefore, what we call reality is associated with the symbolic order or ‘social reality’. The real is the unknown that exists at the limit of this socio-symbolic universe and is in constant tension with it. The real is also a very paradoxical concept; it supports our social reality – the social world cannot exist without it – but it also undermines that reality. A further difficulty with understanding the real is that Lacan’s conception of it changed radically throughout his career. We will follow the development of the real from the 1950s, when it remained a relatively underdeveloped concept, through the crucial period from 1964 to the early 1970s, when Lacan used the concept to reformulate his understanding of the relationship between the imaginary and the symbolic, to his late work, where the real is elevated to the central category of his thought. Through each phase of his teaching Lacan placed a different emphasis upon the real, although he also carried over the preceding definitions and functions. Hence, like many of Lacan’s concepts, a consideration of the real forces us to reappraise and reformulate our previous understanding of his work. The real in late Lacan is 82inseparable from an understanding of the role of fantasy, the objet petit a and jouissance. We will look at each of these important concepts in turn before illustrating the function of the real through Roland Barthes’ exquisite final book Camera Lucida.
