The Lacanian Review: Issue 7: Get Real

In our Post-Truth era, reality is under attack. The contemporary moment is disoriented by fake new, chatbots, conspiracy theories and a digital flood of leaks, lies and revelations. On hold with automated phone answering services, one pleads just to talk to a real person. But we are also complicit, enjoying online avatars, virtual reality, augmented reality and cryptocurrency fueled binges.

Over a century ago, psychoanalysis learned from psychotic subjects that cahsing after reality is folly. Reality is just another delusion in the service of fantasy. To find an orientation amidst the proliferating loss of belief in reality experienced today, psychoanalysis must shift the question to find an exit from the reality trap. In its 7th issue The Lacanian Rewiew interrogates what is real in psychoanalysis.

TLR 7 introduces a landmark translation by Philip Dravers of the late Lacan's momentus and polyphonic address, “The Third,” followed by texts exploring the Borromean clinic. Marie-Hélène Brousse curates a dossier that approaches the subject of the real through dialogue with quantum physics and new work by Philippe de Georges and Clotilde Leguil. Interviews with Matteo Barsuglia, astrophysicist at the Institute of Theoretical Physics (IPhT) of the Atomic Energy Center at Saclay (France), advance a critical conversation between two discourses that delineates what we call reality and real.

Three new translations of Jacques-Alain Miller, published for the first time in English, examine truth, fiction and science in relation to the real as the impossible, but also the contingent. These lessons question whether we are in a Post-Truth era of the Lying-Truth.

Attesting to the singular experience of the real in psychoanalysis, TLR 7 presents three testimonies of the pass of current Analysts of the School. Clinical cases, the politics of the real, biotechnology, and Lady Gaga with Hamlet are all assembled in this issue of The Lacanian Review, a journal which might not be semblant. Get Real!