Reading the Real: Zizek's Literary Materialism

Anna Kornbluh

How does Zizek read Lacan, and where does this reading practice meet contemporary literary criticism? This essay suggests that Zizek's work, in all its theoretical virtuosity and interpretative velocity, comprises an absolute but variable practice of reading the Real. In the vein of Lacan's return to Freud, which countermanded the assimilation of Freud's radical insights to ego psychology in favor of reading the enigmas of symbolization that inspired Freud, Zizek returns to Lacan to read his staging of enigmas, paradoxes, topological puzzles, and impasses of formalization, countermanding the assimilation of Lacan to the diverse theoretical traditions that, in the Anglo-American world, are commonly united under the banner of "poststructuralism." Zizek has observed that "Lacan did not understand this return as a return to what Freud said, but to the core of the Freudian revolution of which Freud himself was not fully aware," and it seems that a parallel holds for Zizek, who turns to Lacan not as a master but as an adherent, loyal to the Freudian event and to the advent of psychoanalysis as a radically novel discursive formation. The repetitious yet unsystematizable process of reading that comes into relief via Zizek's reading of Lacan's reading of Freud is one whose promise for literary criticism continues to be open. It is the speculative wager of this essay that reading the Real with Zizek can inspire something like a contemporary materialist literary criticism, a criticism whose essential posture, not unlike that of the analyst, entails curiosity about the Real, perspicuity about form, renunciation of mastery, and enthusiasm for the ironies of metadiscourse.

To begin to appreciate Zizek's technique of reading the Real, we should first make a provisional indication of what "the Real" performatively signifies in his thought. The Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary are the three interdependent registers of psychic experience that Lacan uses to organize his work. Zizek's own work emphasizes the paradoxical priority of the Real within this interdependence. As pictured by Lacan's favored image of the Borromean knot, the Real is inextricably intertwined with the Symbolic and the Imaginary, yet its status as the least elaborated of the three registers, irruptive of Lacan's discourse rather than systematically presented within it, reveals a certain exceptionality or singularity, a certain demand for continued returns. Zizek has long endeavored to think this singularity, this opacity that preserves a place of nonmastery. While other readers of Lacan often make recourse to a theory of phases in order to track his thought (the infantile Lacan of the Imaginary, the adolescent Lacan of the Symbolic, the senescent Lacan of the Real), Zizek almost always attends to the persistent figurations of the Real legible throughout Lacan's oeuvre. Although there are moments at which Zizek succumbs to the temptation to historicize Lacan in this way, on the whole Zizek's Lacan is the Real Lacan, the Lacan of the Real, the Lacan with whom it is possible to advance that earlier tarrying with the Real that Zizek finds in Schelling and Hegel.

This fleeting priority of the Real perhaps derives from its multifacetedness; its three prevalent dynamics are materiality, a limit to symbolization, and antagonism. The materiality of the Real is that which is irreducible, indivisible, unshakeable. To quote Lacan, "the real, whatever upheaval we subject it to, is always and in every case in its place; it carries its place stuck to the sole of its shoe, there being nothing that can exile it from it"; "the real is absolutely without fissure." Such obdurate matter also encompasses the objectal dimension of the subject, the disturbingly animated matter of the body at the sites of the drives (ocular, oral, aural, anal, and navel orifices). Furthermore, the materiality of the Real materializes in language — its own kind of "something material" — in the form of the "letter," "the material medium [support] that concrete discourse borrows from language." Like the letter, other figures at times avail themselves as marks of the Real throughout Lacan's oeuvre: objet petit a, Master Signifier, lamella, and sinthome. This very figurative proliferation is a sign of the Real's generativity vis-à-vis the Symbolic and of the motion of energetic positing that it inertly embodies. The Real is ever present as a limit of the Symbolic, not external but extimate to the Symbolic. As Zizek frames it in The Sublime Object of Ideology, extimacy here indicates the Real as "posed" (i.e., immanently produced, as an internally generated chimera, in and by the Symbolic), which is strictly opposed to the Real as "presupposed" (wholly and completely external, as an anterior ground). The Real as posed rather than presupposed suggests both that the Symbolic is internally riven and that whatever might be external to it is also inconsistent or ungrounded. This inconsistency/negativity/self-division of the material, including the materiality of language, culminates in the specter of "antagonism." Antagonism is central to Lacanian political discourse; while its Marxian complement might prefer "class struggle," one of Zizek's unique fusions of the two projects is to affirm precisely that the Real is class struggle. In this vein, Zizek powerfully defines the Real as a convergence of "contradictory determinations," and he elaborates a series of antinomies of the Real: pre-Symbolic/residue of the Symbolic; fullness/gap; positivity without properties/negativity with only properties. To perceive the antinomies of the Real, it is necessary to countenance contradictory determinations neither as complementary (Imaginary) nor as differential (Symbolic), but as vertiginous (Real): "the Real is defined as a point of immediate coincidence of the opposite poles: each pole passes immediately into its opposite; each is already in itself its own opposite." The Real as...