Le réel comme matière dans le premier enseignement de Jacques Lacan

Abstract

Jacques Lacan’s first Seminars (1953-1959) offer a systematic elaboration of the notions of the Imaginary and the Symbolic, but only sporadic references to the notion of the Real. Despite the scarcity of references, the conception of the Real that can be deduced from them is precise and coherent, and confirmed by the subsequent seminars – at least until Seminar XI (1964). The Real is to be understood as an indeterminate matter that, while it suffers from the signifier, resists it. This constitutes an innovation, on Lacan’s part, with respect to the classical philosophical concept of matter (at least as it is to be found in Aristotle, for whom matter offers no resistance to its own formation) and prepares the basis for the theory of the object a as the signifier of the subject’s castration operated by language, as it is elaborated at the end of Seminar VI (1958-1959) and in Seminar X (1962-1963).

Keywords

• jacques lacan
• matter
• real
• object
• castration