In this lecture, Slavoj Zizek associates the Real with
the notion
of trauma. He states that the three components of Lacanian
triad (the Real,
the Symbolic, and the Imaginary) are inherently intertwined,
and each of
them manifests itself in its turn through three different
modes.
Reduced to the traumatic real of the horrifying Thing,
the primordial
object, the Real is a deceptive lure. At first, our
symbolic space is full of gaps,
inconsistencies and splits; the trauma turns to be a
mask hiding those
incongruities.
Zizek exemplifies this understanding with regard to
several questions,
such as the following: masochism, on which he quotes
Deleuze; the Oedipal
unconscious of individual hysteria according to Jung;
Thanatic activity
following Lear; Nietzsche’s opposition between
appearance and reality, with
examples taken from Lévi-Strauss; the so much
searched for “missing link”
between animals and civilized man as posed by Konrad
Lorenz, leading to
Nietzsche’s concepts of the Overman and the Eternal
Recurrence of the
Same, and illustrated by the Holocaust as a historical
trauma; the digital
transformation of our lives on the virtual space; Bill
McKibben’s view of
nanotechnologies and genetic engineering; and so forth.
To conclude, he imagines a world in which the gap between
mind and
reality would be closed, such as the one anticipated
from the field of
philosophy by Kant’s “intellectual intuition”
or from the field of literature by
George Orwell’s “thought control”.
He wonders whether this vision of a world
without trauma or stress may not be in fact the ultimate
trauma.
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