Horner's Corner

Z and I: A True Story

by on Aug.12, 2009, under Chris, photography, psychoanalysis

 

IMG_24611
Zizek (Photo by CH)

Earlier this summer I was making my way home on the Piccadilly line, reading something by Zizek. I got off at Russell Square, thinking about some dialectical reversal or dirty joke of his I’d just read, and picturing the man himself, baggy T-shirt, beard etc.

 

Leaving the tube, I cut through the little lane that connects Bernard Street to Guilford street, looked up and saw: Zizek, in baggy T shirt etc, stood outside the President hotel, waving goodbye to someone in a car. I’d gone from reading, thinking about and now suddenly encountering him in the street.

So, Lacanians: we have the Symbolic (reading his stuff), the Imaginary (me picturing him as I’d seen him last on Youtube or at a conference), and then the encounter. If I understand it correctly the Real wasn’t the empirical Zizek stood in my street there, it was the disorientation/mild trauma  experienced in the disruption of the other modes of representation when I suddenly saw him, big and hairy, looming right in front of me.

jacques-lacan3More on Lacan’s Borromean knot here.


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4 Comments for this entry

  • ken edwards
    August 13th, 2009 on 5:53 am

    you sure it was him? there must be numberless legions of baggy bearded middle-aged men in zizek tee-shirts, and think of the proximity of birkbeck, ucl etc.

    which is not to say that your anecdote is not apposite.

    is the real, then, the equivalent of the kantian sublime?

  • Chris
    Chris
    August 13th, 2009 on 6:21 am

    It was him – I was too close to make a mistake. He is based at Birkbeck so it isn’t too surprising.

  • Chris
    Chris
    August 13th, 2009 on 6:38 am

    The Real clearly reminds us of the Sublime; this is no surprise as the whole Lacanian project can be traced back in part to the German idealists/romantics. The Real is the inherent failure of symbolisation (through dislocation, trauma, aversion etc); it is apparently ‘outside’ symbolisation yet it this outside can only be expressed THROUGH symbolisation. The Real is thus experienced through the dislocations/failures of the symbolising process – not as another thing altogether (when it is so “experienced” that usually means that it is being re-presented to us as eg the Alien in Alien).

    On the other hand one would not be safe in claiming a direct equivalence of the Real = Kantian Sublime kind. Kant’s account isn’t directly commensurate with Lacan (or Zizek). It’s in another register, and Kant’s intentions aren’t Lacan’s, exactly! (think of the connection to morality, or the Divine for instance…)

  • Anonymous
    January 22nd, 2012 on 3:21 am

    The Alien in Alien reminds us that we saw the film together in Derby when it came out Chris. Sublime.

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