THE core philosophical question is not “how can we break through the veil of illusions and reach true reality?” but exactly the opposite one: “why do illusions arise within reality?” It is a sign of Lacan’s philosophical preoccupation (and of his fateful limitation) that he also remained stuck in the quagmire of this question. After decades of struggle to penetrate through the Imaginary/Symbolic cobweb of fictions to the pure Real, he conceded defeat. Adrian Johnston[1] brought out the intricacies and ambiguities of the “pessimist” turn which occurs at the very end of Lacan’s teaching and which culminates in his new formula of the end of psychoanalytic treatment as identification with a symptom, not its dissolution: [...]
There is a fourth solution, though: the Real is not external, outside the Imaginary/Symbolic texture of fictions; it is the immanent impossibility of this texture. Illusions circulate around an impossible Real which has no substantial status outside the texture of illusions. In other words, the Real is not a hard inaccessible core of reality around which symbolic/imaginary fictions float protecting us from the direct touch of the Real; the Real is a purely virtual (and in this sense fictitious) point of reference around which we construct difference versions of reality. Once we fully endorse this notion of the Real, we no longer need the cynical recourse to the cobweb of illusions to sustain our desire: the tension that defines desire is already operative in the “pure” Real which is not pure chaos outside the Symbolic but the immanent impossibility of the Symbolic. This is why Lacan’s notion of the Borromean knot that inextricably links the three dimension of the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary cannot be the ultimate answer to the question of how reality is structured: the Symbolic and the Imaginary are not parts of the ultimate ontological reality. The question to be addressed here is how the pre-human Real “in itself” has to be structured so that the Symbolic and the Imaginary can arise in it. [...]
Why does Neo not propose exiting from the Matrix altogether and entering the ordinary reality in which we are miserable creatures living on the destroyed surface of the earth? Because, as he learned from Morpheus, this miserable reality is not the Real. The matrix is, of course, a metaphor for what Lacan called the “big Other,” the virtual symbolic order, the network that structures reality for us. This dimension of the “big Other” is that of the constitutive alienation of the subject in the symbolic order. The big Other pulls the strings; the subject doesn’t speak, he “is spoken” by the symbolic structure. The paradox, the “infinite judgement” of The Matrix, is the co-dependence of the two aspects: the total artificiality (the constructed nature) of reality and the triumphant return of the body in the sense of the ballet-like quality of fights with slow motions and defiance of the laws of ordinary physical reality.
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