So in what sense does Lacan mention “the future of the real”?
For Lacan, a true interpretation is not just another symbolic semblance but a discourse which is not of a semblance (the title of one of Lacan’s late seminars): it has effects in the real, it transforms the real of the patient’s subjectivity.
Interpretation is not just a different symbolization of the unconscious real, it changes the basic coordinates of the real core of its subjectivity—if it is formulated at the right moment of the analytic process.
Here time enters again: an interpretation has effects in the real only if it is formulated at the right moment, otherwise it remains a symbolic bla-bla, a semblance which leaves the real unaffected—so no wonder that the patient as a rule easily agrees with it.
A direct acceptance of an interpretation is a proof that it has no effects in the real, that it leaves the core of the patient indifferent.
So in what sense does Lacan mention “the future of the real”? For Lacan, a true interpretation is not just another symbolic semblance but a discourse which is not of a semblance (the title of one of Lacan’s late seminars): it has effects in the real, it transforms the real of the patient’s subjectivity. Interpretation is not just a different symbolization of the unconscious real, it changes the basic coordinates of the real core of its subjectivity—if it is formulated at the right moment of the analytic process. Here time enters again: an interpretation has effects in the real only if it is formulated at the right moment, otherwise it remains a symbolic bla-bla, a semblance which leaves the real unaffected—so no wonder that the patient as a rule easily agrees with it. A direct acceptance of an interpretation is a proof that it has no effects in the real, that it leaves the core of the patient indifferent.
Dupuy uses the example of seduction.
Especially today, in our Politically Correct times, a seduction process always involves the risky move of “making a pass”—at this potentially dangerous moment, one exposes oneself, one intrudes into another person’s intimate space.
The danger resides in the fact that, if my pass is rejected, it will appear as a Politically Incorrect act of harassment; so there is an obstacle I have to overcome.
Here, however, a subtle asymmetry enters: if my pass is accepted, it is not that I have successfully overcome the obstacle—what happens is that, retroactively, I learn that there never was an obstacle to be overcome.
Do we not find a homologous paradox of asymmetrical choice in the Gospel according to John, when Christ says he did not come to judge but to save, rejecting the very practice of judgment— don’t judge (others) for you will yourself be judged? The text then goes on:
Whoever believes in him is not judged [ou krinetai], but whoever does not believe is judged [kekritai] already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil.
(John 3:18–19 ESV)
The temporality is here crucial: there is no present moment of judgment when you are judged—you either are not judged or you have already been judged.
What is excluded is the possibility of being judged and found innocent, the same as in Dupuy’s example of seduction: either you fail and the obstacle remains in force (you are rejected as a harassing intruder) or there was no obstacle—there is no room in this formulation for the possibility of successfully overcoming the obstacle.
And, incidentally, exactly the same asymmetry is at work in the Hegelian dialectical process: the subject either stumbles upon an insurmountable obstacle or he realizes that there is no obstacle at all, that what appeared to him as an obstacle is the very condition of his success.
However, there is a dark obverse of this case. On September 2, 1998, the Swissair flight 111 from JFK to Geneva crashed into the Atlantic Ocean southwest of Halifax, and all 229 people on board died.
The investigation took over four years, and it disclosed that the inflammable material used in the aircraft’s structure allowed a fire to spread beyond the control of the crew, resulting in a loss of control and the crash of the aircraft.
After exposing a series of mistakes made by the pilots and the ground control, a report in the National Geographic Air Crash Investigation series ends by raising the question: if the pilots had avoided all mistakes, what then?
The sad answer is: the flight was doomed from the beginning, no correct moves would have made a difference.
So it is not that “if the pilots had acted differently, the tragedy would have been avoided”—the counterfactual past possibility is retroactively canceled.
This is how the past can be changed counterfactually: when we learn that the flight was doomed from the beginning, nothing changes at the level of (past) facts, what changes are just counterfactual possibilities . . .
Let’s finish this series of cases with the highest one from theology: the sin and the Fall. Is this case also noncommutative?
Recall Hegel’s characterization of rational consideration itself as evil:
Abstractly, being evil means singularizing myself in a way that cuts me off from the universal (which is the rational, the laws, the determinations of spirit). But along with this separation there arises being-for-itself and for the first time the universally spiritual, laws—what ought to be. So it is not the case that rational consideration has an external relationship to evil: it is itself what is evil.
The serpent says that by eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve will become like God; and after the two do it, God comments: “Behold, Adam has become like one of us.”(Genesis 3:22)
Hegel’s comment is: “So the serpent did not lie, for God confirms what it said.”
Then Hegel goes on to reject the claim that what God says is meant with irony: “Cognition is the principle of spirituality, and this … is also the principle by which the injury of the separation is healed.
It is in this principle of cognition that the principle of ‘divinity’ is also posited.”
Subjective freedom is not just the possibility to choose evil or good,
it is the consideration or the cognition that makes people evil, so that consideration and cognition themselves are what is evil, and that therefore such cognition is what ought not to exist because it is the source of evil.
Quantum History
Slavoj Zizek