/edu/ - Education

I vaguely recall Zizek calling science a means to interrogate the real

“For Lacan, the Real is what any ‘reality’ must suppress; indeed, reality constitutes itself through just this repression. The Real is an unrepresentable X, a traumatic void that can only be glimpsed in the fractures and inconsistencies in the field of apparent reality. So one strategy against capitalist realism could involve invoking the Real(s) underlying the reality that capitalism presents to us.

Environmental catastrophe is one such Real. At one level, to be sure, it might look as if Green issues are very far from being ‘unrepresentable voids’ for capitalist culture. Climate change and the threat of resource-depletion are not being repressed so much as incorporated into advertising and marketing. What this treatment of environmental catastrophe illustrates is the fantasy structure on which capitalist realism depends: a presupposition that resources are infinite, that the earth itself is merely a husk which capital can at a certain point slough off like a used skin, and that any problem can be solved by the market ”
This is what i got from capitalist realism.

so in this case science could "interrogate the real". But is class struggle the real or is it itself just a part of an ideology suppresses the real?

>>5411
>the “real”, a primordial element that can not be discovered through any scientific analysis
what are you talking about? the Real is just the surface level presentation of things, it’s the same thing as Sense-Certainty in phenomonelogy. he basically says this in his Hegel lectures.

>>5415

"One may wonder why it should be the case that the subject only attains ‘full’ subjectivity by means of the ‘universal’ aspect of language – wouldn’t that clash with his contention, that the mirror stage, which lays the basis for the subject eventually acquiring language, teaches one to oppose any universalistic philosophy based on the Cogito, that is, any philosophy which claims unity and transparency for the subject? The reason is to be sought in the signifying function oflanguage or the symbolic order which enables the subject to be a subject, that is, to surpass the muteness and inertia of what Lacan terms the ‘real’ – for instance the body in its pure (‘unintelligible’, ‘unsymbolizable’) organic state"

"Quite simply, the real remains what is, an unspeakable is, an impossible, inexpressible, ineffable and undifferentiated space outside lan- guage. The real, then, lies beyond systems of signification; it exists 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" I found this in secondary literature talking about Lacan's conception of the real, Im I missing something?

The real is not some "primordial element", just like Freud says that an object is never found but always refound, it is first constructed as lacking and only then sought.
As others have said the real is that which resists symbolization, however this means that the real ultimately depends on the symbolic order: you can't have this resistance without something (symbolic order) to resist against. You can also think of it as a residue and remainder - something that can exist only due to some operation being performed without being integrated into this operation, it's the product of the incompleteness of that operation. Bruce Fink even likes to mention Gödel's incompleteness theorem as analogous to Lacan.

>>5422
What you're saying here sounds more like the imaginary.

>>5437
Which secondary literature is that from?

>Zizek’s conception of ideology is based Lacan’s idea of the “real”, a primordial element that can not be discovered through any scientific analysis.
Real positivist hours.

>>5534
Lacan's subject: the imaginary, language, the real and philosophy - Bert Olivier

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

Some academic articles I looked up

Check out plastic pills

>>5534
> What you're saying here sounds more like the imaginary.
I don’t think so

Zizek is a materialist (this makes him a valid enough Marxist in my eyes in this context), as in he believes the world actually exists outside of humans. He doesn't believe in the existence of objective reality in the sense that "truth" doesn't exist, >>5412 like this post said science isn't "fact", it is this interrogation process. He realises that our conception of material reality is warped by ideology and that this is inescapable in its entirety.
>They don't know it but they are doing it

>What is lack in the symbolic Other
This shit I find incomprehensible without context, just read Zizek and these ideas will slowly reveal themselves. (however some other intro Lacan/Freud reading seems like it would help you a lot).
>>5534
Good post.