The Lacanian Real as a Productive Supplement to Rhetorical Critique

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to advance the importance of the Lacanian registers for rhetorical scholarship by focusing (paradoxically) on the register of the Real. We argue that the Real functions as a condition of (im)possibility of critical invention for rhetorical critique. We advance five varieties of the Real that disrupt the coherence of rhetorical method/perspective and rhetorical formations: (1) the Real as Void, (2) The Real as Return, (3) The Real as Enjoyment, (4) The Real as Recalcitrance, and (5) The Real as Materiality.

Notes

¹Christian Lundberg described the phrase “labor of trope” in at least two ways. First, he explained that, “the labor of trope is the condition of possibility for the object serving as a metaphorical stand-in for an inaccessible other” (Lacan in Public 14). Second, he noted, “The resonance between ‘turning’ and tropos should not escape our attention: the signifier is not simply the domain of referential meanings but is instead constituted by the labor of trope in turning signifiers toward their signifieds” (Lacan in Public 82).

²Our reading of Lacan's “demonstration” as it applies to rhetorical criticism is the idea that while one is “demonstrating” the applicability of a particular register in a rhetorical critique, the other registers may be simultaneously part of the “trick” of criticism, even while they are not immediately the topic under discussion by the analyst/critic.

³Our description of (im)possibility pertains to the function of rhetoric as an always already non-all—the Real both prevents the rhetorical symbol from becoming itself and functions as a condition of possibility for rhetorically contingent symbolic formations.

⁴The conjunction of the Imaginary and the Symbolic may explain the idea of “suture” as the fundamental rhetorical concept/function at issue in the exchange between Gunn and Lundberg—a sort of permutation of the two registers as they pertain to the study of rhetoric.

⁵This is very similar to Martin Heidegger's occupation in Being and Time—Being as the state of void. The difference is that the Real persists and sustains the gap between the two.

⁶As another example, see Joshua Gunn and Mirko Hall, “Stick it in Your Ear: The Psychodynamics of iPod Enjoyment,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 5 (2008): 135–157.

⁷Many people experience anxiety with seeing a doctor because their “subject” status is lost—they become an “object” from the doctor's perspective. Also, Hooke's audience's belief in “divine bodies” is intricately tied to an inability to endure the materialist experience. See Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do, p. xxix.

⁸Efforts to define rhetoric have been contested by scholars such as Richard Weaver, Kenneth Burke, I.A. Richards, George Kennedy, Lloyd Bitzer, Walter Fisher, Douglas Ehninger, Robert Scott, Michael Hyde and Craig Smith, Samuel Edelman, Richard Cherwitz and James Hikins, Andrew King and Jim Kuypers, and Richard Vatz.