Lacan’s Three Registers

I am grateful to Darian Leader for his interesting remarks, which serve as a useful reminder of some of the complexities of the thought of Jacques Lacan, particularly regarding the three registers of imaginary, symbolic, and real. Because I understand Leader’s remarks as essentially congruent with my own views, I respond briefly here, mainly to underscore some of the features of Lacan’s perspective that Leader rightly emphasizes.

In my essay, I argue that each of Lacan’s three registers can be understood as constituting something like a Heideggerian mode of being. I go on to say, however, that this is not the only way the registers could or should be understood; and that, although Lacan can be read as contributing to phenomenology, he is certainly not ‘entirely or solely a phenomenologist.’ In line with this, I can certainly agree that, as Leader puts it, the imaginary and symbolic can be understood as something like Kantian grounds of experience. To my mind, however, this does not prevent us from recognizing the sense in which the registers are also associated with characteristic modes of experience and, especially, with encompassing or ontological modes of being in the Heideggerian sense.

Another important point that Leader underscores concerns the complex nature of the relationship between the registers. The registers are indeed, as Leader remarks, in a kind of ‘diacritical’ relationship with each other, in the sense of being mutually defining and thus mutually interdependent precisely through their relationships of mutual opposition. Elsewhere, in a longer treatment of Lacan (Sass, in press), I discuss these features in some detail, associating them with the emphasis on paradoxical relationships that I see as one of the two crucial features of Lacan’s essentially modernist position (using ‘modernist’ in the esthetic sense, pertaining primarily to early twentieth century artistic and intellectual movements). Leader is, in my view, perfectly correct to remind us, for instance, of the fact (perhaps not sufficiently emphasized in my contribution to this special issue) that the experience of a more authentic and vital realm, sometimes associated with the Real, is not sui generis, but largely generated by its presumed opposition to the realm of the Symbolic.