Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real The topic of the “other” is to be submitted to a kind of spectral analysis that renders visible its imaginary, symbolic, and real aspects—it provides perhaps the ultimate case of the Lacanian notion of the “Borromean knot” that unites these three dimensions. First, there is the imaginary other—other people “like me,” my fellow human beings with whom I am engaged in the mirrorlike relationships of competition, mutual recognition, and so forth. Then, there is the symbolic “big Other”— the “substance” of our social existence, the impersonal set of rules that coordinate our coexistence. Finally, there is the Other qua Real, the impossible Thing, the “inhuman partner,” the Other with whom no symmetrical dialogue, mediated by the symbolic Order, is possible. … If the functioning of the big Other is suspended, the friendly neighbor coincides with the monstrous Thing (Antigone); if there is no neighbor to whom I can relate as a human partner, the symbolic Order itself turns into the monstrous Thing which directly parasitizes upon me (like Daniel Paul Schreber’s God who directly controls me, penetrating me with the rays of jouissance). If there is no Thing to underpin our everyday symbolically regulated exchange with others, we find ourselves in a Habermasian “flat,” aseptic universe in which subjects are deprived of their hubris of excessive passion, reduced to lifeless pawns in the regulated game of communication. Zizek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence”, in The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, Slavoj Zizek, Eric L. Santner, Kenneth Reinhard, The University of Chicago Press, 2005, pp.143-4
Posted on: Wed, 24 Dec 2014 18:47:36 +0000
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