the real

Lacan’s notion of the real, which is not synonymous with reality, is the fundamental basis of life and as he posits, it is where we begin our existence in the world. Within the domain of the Real, one’s existence is fused with the environment and in particular its mother’s existence. There is no separation between the individual and the world in which he inhabits and this is where basic needs are manifest. The real, Lacan declares, ‘is the mystery of the speaking body, the mystery of the unconscious’ (1975: 71). Lacan further identifies a second domain, that of the Imaginary whereby we become separated from the real and lose our connection and unification with our Mother. This sequestration induces the identification of ‘I’. This Ideal-I is a fabricated wholeness that is created in an attempt to regain a sense of unification and develops as a reflection of those around him and thus masks the multitude of the subject under a falsely unified ideal. It is within the Imaginary order where our needs within the real are recognised as demands and it is between the realm of the real and the imaginary where we experience reality (Lacan 1975). Lastly, we inhabit a Symbolic domain where language becomes a paramount aspect of our existence and relation to the world. Here language matures our demands into desires. Symbols in the form of language, but not limited to it, dictate our perceptions and experiences of the world. Thus language takes over to make up for the loss with the real (Lacan 1975) as we impose a symbolic order onto our world.
Badiou departs from the notion of the One, in terms of the existence of an overarching unified truth and existence. Instead, he contends that existence is comprised as multiplicity. What we may know as one, is only nominal. Rather, being is designated as pure multiple, like the numbers within a set which are infinite but are designated as one set alongside a multiplicity of other sets. Thus Badiou’s ontology is solely mathematical and multiple in its foundation and rejects the use of rhetoric to understand being. Secondly, Badiou fundamentally contests the postmodern conceptualizations of a multitude of truths. For him, truth does not exist in the divine transcendent manner; conversely it does not exist in the postmodern sense of fragmentation and multitudes. Rather for Badiou, truth exists as a universal-singular. This refers to the notion that truth begins in the subjective singular form and has the capacity to develop into a universal truth particular to the situation in which it arises. Or as Badiou concisely puts it: ‘a truth procedure is only universal insofar as it is supported, at the point through which it indexes the real, by an immediate subjective recognition of its singularity’ (2003: 22). For Badiou, life is made up of a multiplicity of situations that carry within them no inherent truth. Rather truth emerges from the Void of a situation which he terms the Event. The Void, as described in Badiou’s (2003) Being and Event, is particular to situations and beings, which exist as multiplicity of multiples. Thus, in rejecting the notion of the One, we are thrust into an infinite ambiguity of origin. Hence for Badiou, this multiplicity of multiplicity is has its origins only in multiplicity. Hence any endeavour at an origin only can retrieve a multiplicity of void. And it is here that we can observe ontology as conceptualised within the situation rather than external or omnipotent. Consequently, truth emerges out of nothing so-to-speak and becomes an Event through predication by a subject. In this regard ‘the truth is always the truth of a specific situation (Žižek 1999: 130).
Badiou and Lacan’s theories converge at the notion of truth. For both theorists the conceptualisation of truth is removed from its omnipotence on par with knowledge and is instead located in the realm of the subject. Badiou’s subject is what emerges upon naming or predicating the Truth-Event and by declaring its fidelity to the Event. In this respect, truth is not subjective, as it emerges from the Void of the situation, but rather the subject is a subject to the Truth of the Event (Žižek 1999). In the same vein, Lacan posits that the subject ‘retains an irreducible relation to truth’ which is singular and unique to the subject (Hallward 2003: 12). Another point of convergence, Hallward continues, is the adherence that both Lacan and Badiou retain to the undeniable relation of mathematics to the real. It is here that both theorists conceptualise the real as not encompassing any inherent structure, but rather that it emerges through the subject and its encounter with the truth. For Badiou, the real is a static element embedded within the unpredictable framework of the situation, and as Žižek (1999: 141) rightly puts it, ‘an event is the traumatic encounter with the real’. For Lacan, on the other hand, the real is dynamic and can be expressed through the suspension of the Imaginary and Symbolic order. The real is precisely which shatters the Symbolic order and inhabits the space between them. Thus it is the inconsistency between Badiou’s pure multiple that equates to Lacan’s real (Žižek 1999). In this sense, the real is the formless space or existence which is manifest in the excess of the Symbolic order and that of the Truth-Event.
Lastly, the real for Baudrillard, is that which has been precisely fragmented in the postmodern condition. The real endures a transition in which it becomes subject to representation and signification in modernity. With postmodernity, however, the sign and the symbol mature from representation of the real to the real or hyperreal. Thus what emerges is the simulation of the real by the imaginary or the symbolic, to which we become engrossed in a world of hyperreality where the ‘real from which all meaning and charm, all depth and energy of representation have vanished in a hallucinatory resemblance’ (Baudrillard 1981; 15). Baudrillard’s real is that which is always manifest in the reflection of an image. That is to say, the real is never experienced first-hand but undergoes attenuation through representation.
Comparing Baudrillard with Lacan and Badiou, we can see how the real is always theorised as that which is below the surface, which is never directly perceptible. In the case of Lacan, the real order is that which emerges as a sort of neurosis, a trauma so to speak. The real can be regarded in the same fashion for Badiou, whose Truth-Event represents ‘the intrusion of the traumatic real that shatters the predominant symbolic texture’ (Žižek 1991: 147). Thus to conclude, the symbolic and simulation are what appear to cushion us from the profundity of the real that manifests itself at the foundation of our existences but which we must be continuously shielded from.

References
Badiou, A., 2003. St. Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Badiou, A., 2005. Being and Event. London: Continuum.
Baudrillard, J., 1981. Simulacra and Simulations. Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan University Press.
Hallward, P., 2003. Badiou: A Subject to Truth. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Lacan, J., 1975. On Feminine Sexuality the Limits of Love and Knowledge. London: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Žižek, S., 1999. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso.