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<b>Some beginning definitions</b></h3><p><b><br>
</b>[[Imaginary]], [[symbolic]], [[real]]: [[three]] "[[registers]]", aspects or quasi-functions by which [[speech]] and thereby [[perception]], actions and the [[body]] are influenced or dominated by different [[structures]] of [[language]]. As an analogy [[think]] of the way in which the respiratory, circulatory and neurological systems interact with one [[another]] to influence or determine the [[state]] of the body. A crucial [[difference]], as we see in the [[Seminar]] on "the Purloined [[Letter]]", is that these structures must be [[understood]] intersubjectively, that is, between persons, not as mere structures of [[individual]] persons. </p><p>
The <u>imaginary</u> [[register]] of speech, the signifying [[chain]] broadly understood so as to include [[objects]] as [[signifiers]], is an eroticizing of the relation between [[subjects]] or, more broadly, between the [[subject]] and the [[object]]. [[Erotic]] sex is a [[metaphor]], <u>not the [[essence]] of</u>, for the [[logic]] of this eroticization. (Sex itself may be either deeroticized or eroticized.) [[The imaginary]] constitutes the ways in which relations which at the level of [[consciousness]] appear to be relations between <i>detached</i> things are, at the level of the poetics of the [[unconscious]], projected as relations of <i>belonging to, [[being]] part of, even fused with</i>, one another. But crucially, for [[Lacan]], this is an effect of "speech [[acts]]," involving a distinctive [[rhetoric]] of [[metonymy]] and feint. (This is a point at which to appreciate the important of Kristeva's [[work]], for in her [[sense]], the semiotic has to do with the way in which [[desire]] may be carried in more "[[primitive]]," less [[structural]] dimensions of speech, albeit not without being related to more [[symbolically]] defined aspects. Thus, one may perceive desire in what might be called certain quasi-musical features of speech, pace, tone, rhythm, phonematic anomalies of various sorts, etc.) </p><p>
The <u>symbolic </u>register of speech is its <i>bearing [[witness]] to</i> and <i>submitting itself to</i> an [[order]] of law, of pact and of contract. This includes the rules and conventions of language as well as the use of [[words]] to formulate laws, [[legal]] relations more specifically, and tacitly accepted taboos, etc. . [[The symbolic]] order is what a [[photograph]] of these laws at a [[particular]] point in [[time]] would look like (like <i>[[langue]]</i> for [[Saussure]], the <u>[[system]]</u> of language defined by phonematic, syntactic and semantic rules, in contrast to <i>[[parole]],</i> the [[active]] use of <i>langue</i> in speech). It is important that in order for the [[symbolic order]] to be fully realized, we must in our speech bear witness to its [[authority]] (if only by acting as if we accept it) and submit to its laws. Where Lacan calls speech dominated by the imaginary, <i>feint</i>, he calls speech dominated by the symbolic, <i>fides. </i>The two are typically blended together which is a bearer of much of our [[self]][[deception]]. As far as consciousness goes, one may suppose oneself to be simply acting straightforwardly according to what the rules and practices of some part of the symbolic order recognize. But this speech may actually be eroticized, be a feint designed to purloin the letter in the [[situation]] in behalf of one's desire. On the [[other]] hand, speech and relations with [[others]] which we feel to be most charged with our [[desire,]] may be strongly dominated by submission to the symbolic order. </p><p>
The <u>real </u>register of speech, in, roughly, the Lacan of the mid-fifties to the mid-sixties, is speech which, perhaps very painfully, manifests or occasionally recognizes the [[split]] between the imaginary and the symbolic. That is, it is speech which more or less mutely registers the illusions of both the symbolic and the imaginary for giving [[meaning]] to [[human]] being. It is speech which in some way registers a deeper sense of what human [[freedom]] and unfreedom is than what is projected by symbolic and imaginary illusions of freedom. Thus, the real is not what we take for common or even [[scientific]] [[reality]]. Reality is a <i>symbolic</i> [[construction]]. Within the register of the real, there is access to the real [[power]] of the [[signifier]] which extends to matters or questions of [[significance]] which lie beyond the consideration of reality--though which [[affect]] what reality is considered to be.</p>
