Botting, Relations of the Real in Lacan, Bataille and Blanchot

Relations of the Real in Lacan, Bataille and BlanchotAuthor(s): Fred BottingSource: SubStance, Vol. 23, No. 1, Issue 73 (1994), pp. 24-40Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3684791 .

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Relations of the Real in Lacan, Bataille and Blanchot

Fred Botting

THE REAL IS A SLIPPERY THING. That is, if it "is" in the first place, and if it "is" a "thing" in the second. Lacan's "Real" is no less slippery. Frequent- ly discussed as the Real, or elevated to the status of concept-"the Real Order," its definite place or theoretical definition rather goes against its elusive and apparently indeterminable nature. Indeed, the irony of using the definitive article with a capitalized noun for something that seems so utterly indefinite and undefinable broaches the paradoxical situation of the real and the slides into paradox that mark encounters with writings about the real.

Encounters with the real itself, that is if there is a real "itself," or if those encounters were not always affected by the language in which the subject is necessarily constructed, would not be paradoxical since the real is just there, "there" not functioning as a demonstrative but representing the unrepresentable beyond of systems of reference, designation and signification. Quite simply, the real remains what is, an unspeakable is, an impossible, inexpressible, ineffable and undifferentiated space outside language. The real, then, lies beyond systems of signification; it ex-ists outside Lacan's symbolic order. It is defined as that which cannot be defined, that which is alien to or resists signification, that which exceeds symbolization. Utterly Other, the real is Other to subjects of language but has immense effects in its unpresentable in/difference. In psychoanalysis, the missed encounter with the real recalls the effects of trauma, a trauma inassimilable to consciousness, forming the lost origin of neurosis and the basis of neurotic repetition. Every day the real exceeds systems of signification, generating an excess or a remainder in relation to which desire inscribes its object. Irrupting into and from within symbolic boundaries, the real evin- ces the "extimacy," the "intimate exteriority" that Lacan associates with the Thing (1992: 139). Exceeding symbolic boundaries, the real intimates an alterity that is simultaneously absolute difference and total indifference, a doubleness echoed in Freud's account of the unconscious's disrespect for

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Relations of the Real 25

oppositions (1949: 31). The real remains more than the law, making possible the reinscription of law.

Irrupting within and into everyday symbolic universes, the real engenders repetitions and reinscriptions: it is addressed not only in psychoanalytic theory and practice, but elsewhere-an elsewhere spanning the texts of literature, science and philosophy as well as what might be called everyday speech. It is spoken and written about in repetitions that separate it from reality. For it is only reality that has a visible existence (albeit limited and uncertain) in language. It is a cultural construction. But the real, of course, exceeds language. Reality, in the shapes it is known and loved, is not the real. Conventionally, reality is what lies outside the private, mental world of the individual; it denotes the external universe of objects and Others in opposition to the interiority of the subject's consciousness: reality is exterior, the "out there" to the subject's "in here". The relationship of inside and outside, on which the stable meanings of subject and reality depend, begins to shift with the advent of language. Difference, rather than the concrete materiality of substance, becomes the ground, firm or otherwise, on which reality is founded.

Language-social, exterior and material-becomes the condition for subjectivity. Other and yet constitutive of inner being, language disturbs- even as it constructs-the relationship of subject and object. And what of the body? That, too, is a thing, a material object. What is the relation of the subject (whether Cartesian Cogito or not) to that intimate and basic posses- sion which remains, nonetheless, outside, other and unknown? What of the body's place in reality or in the real? Moreover, what of psychoanalysis's primary object-the unconscious? A conglomeration of psychic drives and energies, it articulates, at some impenetrable level, the pleasures of the flesh with the most secret and hidden wishes of the subject. Other to subjectivity, the unconscious is not, however, exterior to it in a conventional sense-if anything, it is too interior to be accessible to consciousness. Yet, "structured like a language," the unconscious is partially composed of the grammar, assumptions and necessary differences which locate, orientate and enable the subject to exist as a desiring being. "The Outside is [under erasure] the Inside," to use Derrida's phrase (44).

If language upsets the relationship between subjectivity and reality by blurring, entwining, constructing and expanding the distinction between interiority and exteriority, the real disrupts the symbolic order of language, entangling the already complex array of links and differences on which subjectivity, reality, inside and outside hinge. The real mocks discourse, taunts it with the impossibility of an end or closure, teases it with an excess

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26 Fred Botting

that can never be recovered for meaning. An unaccountable surplus to most attempts to theorize the world, the real proclaims theory's inadequacy and insufficiency, and thus necessitates theory's continual displacements. How can one write or speak about the unspeakable? How can the effects of the real, indeterminable and resistant to symbolization, be determined by positions constituted in the symbolic order? The real remains outside, but it is an outside that eludes symbolic capture, an insubordinate outside that refuses to offer a reflection of itself, and instead reflects the instability of symbolic chains. The outside, indeed, may also occupy a space within language, a differential space at the indeterminable core of systems of difference.

A slippery thing, then, the real. Slippery as much in the effects it engenders as it is in and of its impossible self. Refusing to remain purely and simply "out there," either in the objective form given to reality or as something too real to be experienced directly by the senses that see, hear and feel with language, the real haunts the limits of language and percep- tion. Any engagement with this undefinable and elusive real confronts an impossibility at the heart of language, an impossibility that takes sense, meaning and reason to their limits and, from that space of transgression and contestation, folds back on the very terms that are employed. This engagement with the real is no exception.

In reading the real in relation to writings by Bataille, Blanchot and others, this essay is drawn into an entangled network of connections and differences which obscure as much as they reveal. Writing enters a labyrin- thine space of elusive signification in which terms overlap and disperse, a complex meshwork woven of a multiplicity of strands whose knots often appear un-untiable. Nonetheless, Blanchot's difficult notion of the "Out- side" and Bataille's account of heterogeneity seem to have a significant bearing on what Lacan calls "the Real." Moreover, they highlight, in their separate encounters with the limits of writing and subjectivity, the diverse powers that disseminate in the many-splendored fabrics of language.

Language, Subjectivity and Reality

"It is the world of words that creates the world of things ..."(Ecrits: 65). These days, Lacan's statement is all-too familiar. Many writers have commented upon the social construction of reality and discussed the manner in which different languages and cultures produce different versions of what passes for the external world. What is termed the real world is, Lacan

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casually observes, "only a humanized, symbolized world," a world of signs rather than one filled with immediately perceptible material objects (Seminar I: 87). Language maps out the nature and extent of reality, defin- ing its form:

One can only think of language as a network, a net over the entirety of things, over the totality of the real. It inscribes on the plane of the real this other plane, which we here call the plane of the symbolic. (Seminar I: 262)

In the symbolic, reality is subject to the rules of discourse and reason: "the exact sciences do nothing other than tie the real to a syntax" (Seminar II: 305).

As subjects positioned in and by the symbolic order, what we see is what language allows us to see; where we are is where language has situated us. In this world of words, reality is what is allowed to exist by the intersubjective symbolic community: "Language has... a sort of retrospective effect in determining what is ultimately decided to be real" (1953: 11). Unlimited and indefinite, constructions of reality are effects of power relations. Althusser, for example, extended Lacanian formulations to the analysis of ideology. In Althusser's words,

What is represented in ideology is therefore not the system of the real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real conditions in which they live. (39)

Though reality, as it is lived and worked in, may be an effect of culturally determined linguistic systems, the real appears to be something else, something that escapes the processes of constructing reality: "the real, or what is perceived as such, is what resists symbolization absolutely" (Seminar I: 66). The nature of this resistance, of course, remains obscure, but in placing the real beyond the symbolic order and, in varying degrees, in

opposition to it, Lacan acknowledges a different dimension. This dimension is apparent in the statements that extend to language a power in the

shaping of reality. To say that language has "a sort of retrospective effect in

determining what is ultimately decided to be real," or to describe the

symbolic order as a net cast over the "totality of the real" suggests that something, no matter how indefinable or inaccessible it may be, precedes the symbolic construction of reality. Before symbolization, unknowable and indefinite, this ineffable "something" defines, in part, the real. In describing this "something" as something that precedes symbolization, a certain proximity emerges to Kristeva's "chora," a rhythmic space, an "indefinable totality" of movement and maternal bodies, to coincide with aspects of the inaccessible real (25). Indeed, the chora, while it precedes and

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28 Fred Botting

proves resistant to the symbolic order, shadows that order on another plane that occasionally bursts through symbolic limits (69, 79).

Against, and at the unspeakable limits of symbolization, the real exerts immense influence on the direction of desire in the psychic economy of the subject. In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, the real is re- lated to the trauma as tuchi, translated from Aristotle by Lacan as "the encounter with the real" (53). This encounter, as trauma, is described as the "missed encounter" since, inadmissable to discourse, it marks a moment when the real "presented itself in the form of that which is inassimilable in it," irrupting into the symbolic domain of the subject without being deter- minable or identifiable in symbolic terms (55). The result is the neurotic symptom which insists, repeats itself in relation to the blanked-out scene of the trauma. Thus, argues Lacan, "the real is beyond the automaton, the return, the coming-back, the insistence of signs, by which we see ourselves governed by the pleasure principle" (53-4). Not contained in the network of signifiers, the real, as tuchF, corresponds to an uncontrollable dimension of accidents and chance.

Chance and Heterogeneity: Beyond Reason's Totalizations

Chance is linked to the real that exceeds and resists symbolization. Chance, at the limit and arbitrary core of the symbolic, also threatens its stability. For Bataille, chance manifests an element of the play of uncertain- ty and the unknown that throws rationality into question:

All philosophy (all of knowledge makes chance into an exception) is reflection on a lifeless residue, on a regular process that allows neither chance nor mischance. To recognize chance is a suicide of knowledge, and chance, concealed in a philosopher's despair, bursts out in the frothings of the demented. (1988: 76)

Beyond the control of rational order, chance is linked to the elements, forces and movements that exist indeterminably outside conventional forms of thought and social organization. These undesirable and excluded elements are loosely grouped together by Bataille as "heterogeneous." In opposition to and expelled by homogeneous structures, heterogeneity signifies everything that they cannot contain. Defined as the commensurability (and awareness of that commensurability) of elements within a regulated system, homogeneity, much like Lacan's symbolic order, signifies rational thought and bourgeois modes of social and economic organization (1985: 137-8). Heterogeneity alludes to elements and

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combinations that are more disparate and which not even science, which

produces useful and homogeneous representations of the world, can know. These elements are excluded even if-like waste products, excrement, desire, violence and madness-they are produced by homogeneous systems. As an excess, an expenditure that is unproductive in that it cannot be consumed again within economies of use and rationality, heterogeneity coalesces the diverse energies, movements and elements that exist at the limit of homogeneous structures.

In terms of philosophy-particularly Hegelian idealism-heterogeneity signifies the realm where chance, love, desire, ecstasy and laughter exceed the constraints of reason and refuse to be assimilated by homogeneous forms of representation. Instead, they open up a dialectic in which negativity questions and contests the closed resolution of rational idealism and the unity of the subject. Among these heterogeneous con-

figurations lies what Bataille calls "base matter":

Base matter is external and foreign to ideal human aspirations, and it refuses to allow itself to be reduced to the great ontological machines result- ing from those aspirations. (1985: 51)

Like the real, base matter remains utterly external to all forms of thought and order. Its exteriority is not passive since it refuses to be assimilated, thus disrupting the projected totalizations of reason's project.

Base matter and the real exist in an insubordinate manner in relation to rational and symbolic systems and participate in the movements of excess Bataille associates with heterogeneity. Lacan makes use of Bataillean terms when discussing the real in The Four Fundamental Concepts:

The real is distinguished ... by its separation from the field of the pleasure principle, by its desexualization, by the fact that its economy, later, admits something new, which is precisely the impossible. (167)

The impossible lies at the extreme limit of thought and reason, being linked to movements of contestation and loss. It is, moreover, a point at which the

question of reality can be posed since Bataille defines it as an "indefinite

reality" before describing it further as

... what can't be grasped (begreift in any way, what we can't reach without dissolving ourselves, what's slavishly called God). If we need to we can define this reality (provisionally associating it with a finite element) at a higher (higher than the individual on the scale of composition of beings) social level as the sacred, God or created reality. Or else it can remain in an undefined state (in ordinary laughter, infinite laughter, or ecstasy in which the divine form melts like sugar in water). (1988: 139)

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30 Fred Botting

As God or the sacred, the real is utterly incomprehensible and completely beyond the grasp of human subjects.

The Real: Beyond Symbolic Differentiation

"The lack of the lack makes the real," states Lacan in an obtuse com- ment that characterizes a paradoxical definitive attitude (1977: ix). "There is no absence in the real," he states elsewhere (Seminar II: 303).

For the real does not wait, and specifically not for the subject, since it expects nothing from the word. But it is there, identical to its existence, a noise in which everything can be heard, and ready to submerge in its outbursts what the "reality principle" constructs within it under the name of external world. (1966: 388. Trans. Bowie: 95)

While Freud's "reality principle" is based on a conventional distinction between inside and out, Lacan's real is not. Lacking lack and absence, identical to itself, the real occupies an undifferentiated and total space of continuous being analogous to the indifference of God. Indeed, the differences on which the reality constructed in the symbolic order is based have no bearing on the real. "Remember this, regarding externality and

internality-this distinction makes no sense at all at the level of the real. The real is without fissure ..." (Seminar II: 97). The oppositions of lack and fullness, identity and difference, presence and absence, being and nothingness, interior and exterior are all symbolic constructions. The outside, the

exteriority of the real, is an unimaginable outside beyond symbolic dif- ferentiations.

This beyond of symbolic differentiation which marks the absolute limit-the final difference that distinguishes symbolic and imaginary orders from the real-also acknowledges the importance of the real in

psychoanalytical theory. As the place where lack is lacking and absence is absent, the real forms the impossible condition for the symbolic order which is based on lack. In relation to the real, at its limit-the limit of

language-the symbolic comes into being and being appears, wanting, in the symbolic. Words, according to Lacan, introduce a hollow, a hole in the real. The hole is called being or nothingness and is linked to the dimension of speech, of the symbolic (Seminar I: 270-71). Being, of course, is intrinsic to lack, as the manque d ?tre, the "want to be" or "lack of being" of the subject. Lack thus emerges in relation to the non-lack of the real, by means of a hollowing out of the real. This difference, marking the limit of the

symbolic, becomes the space over which meanings range and other dif-

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ferences are produced, differences that perhaps are both constitutive and disruptive of the language of the symbolic.

While for Lacan it is the symbolic that actively hollows out the real, the relationship seems reversible, if not reciprocal. Indeed, when Lacan describes the real as that which does not wait for the subject, expecting nothing from the word, he goes on to say that the real is "identical to its existence, a noise in which everything can be heard." Though the outbursts of this noise are submerged in the construction of the external world, they are outbursts nonetheless. Inaudible to the ears of the symbolic, the noise of the real shadows its speech, hollowing out its language and opening it up to the indifference, the silence at its unutterable core, a silence, an abyss of impossible signification into which fixed symbolic differences and meanings tumble and flounder. The noise of the real haunts language with a silence that it cannot recover, and differences that it cannot express. These abysmal paradoxes and aporia are examined in Blanchot's interrogations of the limits of writing and identity, exteriority and interiority:

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot stop talking-and because of this, in order to become its echo, I must to a certain extent impose silence on it. To this incessant speech I bring the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence. Through my silent meditation, I make perceptible the uninterrupted affirmation, the giant murmur in which language, by opening, becomes image, becomes imaginary, an eloquent depth, an indistinct fullness that is empty. The source of this silence is the self-effacement to which the person who writes is invited. (1981: 69)

The noise of the real, the giant murmur opening up language to its unknown Other, marks the point where distinctions of fullness or emptiness, of inside and outside begin to blur. In the movements of a language different from the symbolic order, the real signals the accession to the intimate otherness of the outside, Blanchot's outside:

the "outside"(the attractive force of a presence that is always there--not close, not distant, not familiar, not strange, it has no center, it is a kind of space that assimilates everything and retains nothing). (1981: 87)

Blanchot's outside is a perplexing, indeterminate, paradoxical space of

appearance and disappearance, of presence and absence, interiority and exteriority. It confounds knowledge with a play of antithetical definitions and yet inhabits language as a silence constantly traversed by sound, im- pelling speech and drawing the subject into writing's dissolution.

Broaching the outside, Blanchot, like Bataille, frequently has recourse to images of night and day, images which, like life and death, invoke

oppositions of cosmic proportions. But these oppositions are not dualities

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32 Fred Botting

that remain fixed within a conventional order of symbolism. The poles conflate, become their own mirrors and diverge in a complex play of differentiation. For Blanchot, there are two nights:

In the night, everything has disappeared. This is the first night. Here absence approaches-silence, repose, night. Here death blots out Alexander's picture; here the sleeper does not know he sleeps, and he who dies goes to meet real dying. Here language completes and fulfills itself in the silent profundity which vouches for it as its meaning. (1982: 163)

Night is opposed to day, the realm of life, appearance, wakefulness and speech. Both are defined in their difference from the other; they are sus- tained in a symbolic economy where difference functions as opposition.

This closed and self-preserving order is upset by the appearance of what Blanchot calls an "other night":

But when everything has disappeared in the night, "everything has disappeared" appears. This is the other night. It is what we sense when dreams replace sleep, when the dead pass into the deep of the night, when night's sleep appears in those who have disappeared. Apparitions, phantoms and dreams are an allusion to this empty night. (163)

The "first night" is welcoming. It is part of a dialectic that closes with a renewal of meaning and affirmation of subjectivity: it returns one to day.

But the other night does not welcome, does not open. In it one is still outside. It does not close either; it is not the great Castle, near but unapproachable, impenetrable because the door is guarded. Night is inaccessible because to have access to it is to accede to the outside, to remain outside the night and to lose forever the possibility of emerging from it. (164)

Neither night nor day, the other night occupies an indeterminate space between them, an impossible space that is also outside, absolutely Other to the dialectic of affirmation and negation contained in the quotidian image.

The Outside: Unknowably "There"

The outside, then, emerges in the space between symbolic oppositions. Its emergence confounds and exceeds their limited distinctions. Neither presence nor absence, real or imaginary, day or night, the outside is all and none at once. Nevertheless, it is there, unknowably and disruptively, but there. In psychoanalysis this "there" is linked to language and the unconscious. Indeed, for Blanchot, Lacan's major interventions in psychoanalysis broach the outside by way of the subject's exteriority in relation to him or herself, an exteriority of others and the Other of language which, as it

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brings lack and desire into play, opens up the radical alterity of the unconscious. In an essay as much concerned with Lacan as it is with Freud, Blanchot charts the exteriority that informs issues of language, lack, desire and the unconscious in psychoanalysis. Describing the situation of the child in psychoanalysis, Blanchot states:

Everything is exterior to him: the outside, radical exteriority without unity, dispersion without anything which disperses; absence which is not the absence of anything is already the only presence of the child. And every time that he believes he has won a certain balanced rapport with the en- vironment, every time he rediscovers a little bit of life in its immediacy, he is deprived of it anew (weaning, for example). It is always in the bosom of lack and through the exigency of this lack which constitutes itself as the presentiment of what he will be, his history. But this lack, is the unconscious: the negation which is not only lack, but connected to that which causes it to be lack--desire. (1956: 487)

Through the effects of exteriority, the outside appears. It appears, moreover, within the subject, within the language that constitutes the subject in relations of lack and desire, in that these relations do not necessarily fix, for all time, either the subject or the symbolic order. In the gaps that

emerge between the subject and his or her reflection and in relation to others and the Other, distinctions between interiority and exteriority, language, subjectivity and the world of objects, are thrown into disarray. Commenting on the implications of the imaginary in psychoanalysis, Blanchot outlines the confusion of inside and outside:

Thus psychoanalysis says that the image, far from leaving us outside of things and making us live in the mode of gratuitous fantasy, seems to surrender us profoundly to ourselves. The image is intimate, because it makes our intimacy an exterior power that we passively submit to: outside of us, in the backward motion of the world that the image provokes, the depth of our passion trails along, astray and brilliant.

Magic takes its power from this transformation. Through a methodical technique, it induces things to awaken as reflections, and consciousness to thicken into a thing. From the moment we are outside ourselves-in that ecstasy which is the image--the "real" enters an equivocal realm where there is no longer any limit, nor any interval, nor moments, and where each thing, absorbed in the void of its reflection, draws near the consciousness, which has allowed itself to be filled up by an anonymous fullness. (1988: 87)

As an indeterminable and intimate outside, the place of the real becomes indefinite. Beyond the lack constitutive of subjectivity, the real inhabits an inner sphere in which language and the unconscious are articulated.

Moreover, the real, like the outside, in blurring conventional symbolic distinctions, confronts language with its own lack, an inadequacy in

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34 Fred Botting

respect of what it can signify, a lack, not in relation to representations of an external world, but in the radical dispersion, the inner waywardness, that forms the condition of symbolic language. For Blanchot, another language shadows symbolic speech, a language that remains Other, heterogeneous and yet intrinsic to modes of symbolization and signification. Blanchot proposes an answer to Flaubert's question about this Other of speech:

Now, ever since Mallarm6, we have felt that the other of language is always posed by the language itself as that in which it looks for a way out, in order to disappear into it, or for an Outside, in which to be reflected. Which means not simply that the Other is already part of this language, but that as soon as this language turns around to respond to its Other, it is turning towards another language, and we must be aware that this other language is other, and also that it, too, has its Other. (1988: 130)

Language opens on to a play of heterogeneity that not only exists at its limits but changes them. Language is no longer thinkable solely as a symbolic order of hierarchies and differences, but as a network of relationships in which others and the Other shift.

Having extended and enfolded the limits of language, Blanchot is quick to note that "what is inexpressible is inexpressible in relation to a certain system of expression" (1988: 130). The Other shifts in relation to the speech of a particular subject and a particular mode of symbolic expression:

The Other of all speech is never anything but the Other of a given speech or else the infinite movement through which one mode of expression--always prepared to extend itself in the multiple requirements of simultaneous series--fights itself, exalts itself, challenges itself or obliterates itself in some other mode. (1988: 130-31)

The Other that constitutes particular instances of speech is shadowed by an Other that manifests the force of the Outside within language, the excessive energy of heterogeneity and difference that forms the basis of linguistic possibility. In Kristeva's writing, this "outside" (an outside that is also inside) is composed of rhythms, energies and changes that precede symbolization, the "semiotic." As the space glimpsed in the intonations of literature, the semiotic chora distinguishes the enigmatic, fluctuating and affective movements that remain heterogeneous to symbolic signification and meaning (29). This space, Kristeva acknowledges, is in part described by the tracery of Derridean diffdrance (40-41).

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The Real and Psychoanalysis

The radical heterogeneity with which the outside displays its effects on and in language offers a different reading of the real in psychoanalysis. Indeed, the overflow of difference that both constitutes and disrupts sig- nifying practices situates language in relation to an Other which incessant-

ly slips away, causing language to also lose its hold. In psychoanalysis, the real seems to function as that infinite field of alterity in which

heterogeneous elements are yoked loosely together. These elements-the unconscious, the Id, the body, language, female difference and difference itself-remain knowable, insofar as they are knowable at all, only in the

entangled relationships in which they make an appearance. The connections between them are often distant, partial and fragmentary, extending throughout Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Only occasionally made explicit in somewhat obtuse statements, the connections that coalesce in a dense network of associations sketch the

space of the real as a wide and mysterious realm within psychoanalysis. In one statement Lacan explicitly links the mysterious real with the subject, body and unconscious: "The real, I would say, is the mystery of the speaking body, it's the mystery of the unconscious" (1975: 118. Trans. Jardine: 122). Linking body and unconscious, Lacan's statement also heavily alludes to the mystery of language that enables the speech of the subject. Another dimension begins to appear within these associations, the dimension occupied by the Other of language. While the unconscious, Lacan

repeatedly states, is structured like a language, it is also Other, utterly inassimilable to forms of rationality and knowledge made possible by the

symbolic order. The unconscious remains a mystery, its inner workings, even as they

exert tremendous effects upon subjectivity, eluding, like body and lan-

guage, the grasp of the subject. Unknown, Other, and yet structurally analogous to language, the unconscious manifests the heterogeneity of the outside and the real. Another crucial (and for psychoanalysis, hetero-

geneous) element that figures in the unconscious and the assemblage of the real is female difference:

The Lacanian concept of the Real, then, partakes of both the Id's disconcert- ing and unpredictable powers--always ahead of its time--and the terrifying archaic images associated with the Mother.(169)

Catherine Clement's account of Lacan's real associates it not only with the inassimilable power of the unconscious, but also with the resistance of

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femininity, a resistance, a difference, that has disturbed psychoanalysis since its inception.

The Navel: Severed Link to the Beyond

At this point, the point where the unconscious, female difference and language meet, there appears a figure which acknowledges their coin- cidence and opens onto, without being able to enter, the realm of the real. Freud calls this figure the navel of the dream. In his first attempt at dream analysis, Freud reaches a detail that cannot be explained conveniently within the existing framework of interpretation, and which would take it off its track if it were pursued, opening up an enormous detour that would make analysis interminable. Wanting to draw the analysis to a close, Freud decides, in his analysis of the dream of Irma's injection, not to follow the connections between the women who play a part. Instead, he incorporates the difficulty of achieving a final and resolved analysis of all the details into the framework of dream interpretation:

If I had pursued my comparison between the three women, it would have taken me far afield.-There is at least one spot in every dream at which it is unplumbable--a navel, as it were, that is its point of contact with the unknown. (1953: IV, 111 n.)

By way of the metaphor of the navel, the body uncomfortably intrudes, "as it were," into the work of dream interpretation. The silence of the women, both in the dream and under analysis, as well as the impenetrability of their physical symptoms, testifies, Shoshana Felman argues, to the power of differences that resist Freud's authority. Marking the boundary between known and unknown, the navel takes analysis to its limit and leaves it with an uncertain closure, a closure which acknowledges the incompleteness of analytic interpretation.

Freud nevertheless accepts this limit to psychoanalysis, though with a rather duplicitous gesture. While the navel is included in the process of dream interpretation as the limit point, the point beyond which analysis cannot venture and thus the point at which it must be drawn to a close, it also offers a glimpse of unknown territory. It remains an attractive land. There lingers, in Freud's writing, a wish to enter this beyond, a wish to unravel the knot of the navel and, forsaking the meaning that analysis produces when confronted with this limit, become entangled in the ex- panse of the unknown. This desire on the part of the master of psychoanalysis produces, on the threshold of the absolute difference of the

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navel, an attempt to chart the unknown beyond. This appears much later in The Interpretation of Dreams:

There is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted dream which has to be left obscure; this is because we become aware during the work of interpretation that at that point there is a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unravelled and which moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of the content of the dream. This is the dream's navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown. The dream-thoughts to which we are led by interpretation cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite endings; they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought. It is at some point where this meshwork is particularly close that the dream wish grows up, like the mushroom out of its mycelium. (1953: V, 525)

Knots--of the navel and the unconscious meshwork of dream thoughts- mushroom, mycelium, are woven into a dense web of metaphors that extend indefinitely. And while Freud, on the one hand, closes off a diverse

range of options by picking the mushroom, the dream wish, from its complex origin, thereby furnishing a meaning for the dream and an end to its interpretation, the desire to enter the unknown and complex tangle of dream thoughts remains strong.

The implications that appear, however, in the image of the dreaming unconscious and in the array of metaphors which attempt to chart this unknown field, not only question the mastery psychoanalysis assumes for itself, but also, as Felman argues, acknowledge the importance and creativity of differences, particularly female, that resist and thus transform the discourse in which they are located. For Felman, the navel forms a figure of female difference since it signifies a point of connection with another body, the body of a mother. However, as the mark, the scar, of a connection with another, the navel is also a point of disconnection, the result of the cutting of the cord that establishes separate identities for mother and child. Both link and cut, the navel distinguishes the discrete and isolated condition of the subject from the immense network of others: being, emerging from continuity, is established in a discontinuous state. Nonetheless, the others from which the subject is differentiated are also the condition for his or her emergence, like the mycelium is the condition for the production of the mushroom, the meaning of the dream.

The navel-a scar, the trace of a cut, a wound-that bears witness to the traces of Otherness, of lost and irrecuperable origins, of founding but indeterminate histories, forms the figure of difference that opens onto the Other, be it the mother, the unconscious, language or history. As a knot, the navel mirrors the knots, the entangled meshwork of intricate connec-

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38 Fred Botting

tions and divisions, that occupy the unknown space from whence it, and the subject, came: its difference reflects the vast and intricate network of differences that compose the unconscious.

Knots appear throughout Lacan's writings and not just in accounts of the real. They form a significant metaphorical basis for Lacanian discourse. Knots are employed most obviously in the frequent descriptions of the relationship between real, symbolic and imaginary orders where the figure of the Borromean knot is used to suggest both their difference and inter- dependence. Elsewhere, the unconscious is described as the "knot of our being" (1982: 171). The navel is also linked to the real: it is, according to Lacan, the gap that the unconscious shows us and "through which neurosis recreates a harmony with the real-a real that may well not be determined" (1977: 22). While this account seems to follow Freud's mode of dream interpretation as it produces meaning at the limit of the navel by excluding, cutting off what cannot be known or interpreted in the dream, a more disturbing aspect of the real is also acknowledged. In Lacan's reading of Freud's Irma dream, the resistance of the symptoms is linked, not only to female Otherness, but to the real:

Hence there's an anxiety-provoking apparition of an image which sum- marizes what we can call the revelation of that which is least penetrable in the real, of the real lacking any possible mediation, of the ultimate real, of the essential object which isn't an object any longer, but this something faced with which all words cease and all categories fail, the object of anxiety par excellence. (Seminar II: 164)

Even as it establishes the uncanny condition for subjectivity, the real retains the capacity to threaten the subject's security with a glimpse of the unknown and unspeakably intimate otherness at its heart. In the unconscious and beyond the navel, the real offers the subject a glimpse of impossible and indeterminable origins, origins that can only dissolve or disperse its unity.

For Lacan, this real remains utterly heterogeneous, beyond symbolization and thus terrifying to the speaking subject that knows not how or why he or she speaks. But the irruption of the real demands silence--wherein speech, and thus the subject, dissolves-or endless speech, speech which, in the face of the real, can do no more than repeat the anxiety provoked by the real's impossible Otherness and which, in the process, produces interminable chains of signification that echo the unknowable meshwork of the real, the "other language" of the unconscious. The real's indifference, impenetrable though it may be, becomes less the indifference of a totalizing antithesis, an unknown that stays in its place on the other side of the navel,

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and more an in-difference necessary to the work of language as symbolization. In-difference thus discloses a multiplicity of differences, the very threads and strands without definite endings that compose the unconscious meshworks beyond the navel, the entangled knots that weave a language other to the restricted economy of the symbolic order.

Beyond the fixity of symbolic frames, the real, like the outside, arche- writing and the semiotic chora, discloses the heterogeneity of language, a heterogeneity doubled in relation to and in the relations of language, outside and within, intimate and disturbing. It is a spatial-temporal dimension where the powers and differences of heterogeneity shadow symbolic representations and meanings with a language that folds back on itself, trans- gressing its own limits and causing displacements, movements and transformations within any order of discourse.

University of Wales, College of Cardiff

WORKS CITED

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--. Guilty. Trans. Bruce Boone. San Francisco: Lapis P, 1988. Blanchot, Maurice. "Freud." La Nouvelle Revue Franraise Sept.-Oct. (1956): 484-496.

. The Gaze of Orpheus. Trans. Lydia Davis. New York: Station Hill P, 1981.

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Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.

Felman, Shoshana. "Postal Survival, or the Question of the Navel." Yale French Studies 69 (1985): 49-72.

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Jardine, Alice. Gynesis. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1985.

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40 Fred Botting

Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.

Lacan, Jacques. "Some Reflections on the Ego." International Journal of Psychoanalysis 34 (1953): 11-17.

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--. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book VII The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960. Trans. Dennis Potter. London: Routledge, 1992.

Lemaire, Anika. Jacques Lacan. Trans. David Macey. London, Boston and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977.

Mitchell, Juliet and Jacqueline Rose. Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1982. Schneidermann, Stuart. Ed. Returning to Freud. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1980.

Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso: 1989.

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Documents

Botting, Relations of the Real in Lacan, Bataille and Blanchot