May 14, 2026 04:09 PM
Just recently I have been studying Lacan's notion of the Real as "that which resists symbolization absolutely." It is in this sense impossible in terms of the symbolic dimension that frames our experience (the structure of so-called "reality" we conceive of and relate to as our world). And yet it exerts an influence and has bearing on the nature of our experience in terms of negativities such as contradictions and trauma and absolute otherness. It is an example of what I call a "boundary concept"--of an entity or property not manifesting positively either empirically or rationally but asserting itself negatively as the limit of what is possible and what can be experienced or understood:
"The Real: very unlike our conventional conception of objective/collective experience, in Lacanian theory the real becomes that which resists representation, what is pre-mirror, pre-imaginary, pre-symbolic – what cannot be symbolized – what loses it’s “reality” once it is symbolized (made conscious) through language. It is “the aspect where words fail” (Vogler, 2), what Miller describes as, “the ineliminable residue of all articulation, the foreclosed element, which may be approached, but never grasped: the umbilical cord of the symbolic” (280). This is perhaps the source of the most contention within theories of media in that media itself can only point at the real but never embody it, never be it. For Peirce, this can be described as the “index” – the “real” traces left behind; […] In a sense, the real is everything that is not media, but that informs all media."---- https://melaniemenardarts.wordpress.com/...-the-real/
A similar case can be made for Kant's concept of the noumenon, which is defined as that object that lies beyond experience and thought and yet negatively informs them as the absolute limit of their possibility. Here's one author's elaboration of this idea: https://ucupr.wordpress.com/2018/09/13/a...tive-idea/ Here the noumenon is conceived as a regulatory concept that restrains thinking from overabstraction while preserving its openness to and freedom for the transcendent as precisely that which is NOT thinkable:
"The notion of the noumenon serves to remind us that it's not the kind of thing we have, or can even meaningfully conceive... [It] mark[s] the boundary of what human cognition can legitimately claim".---Reddit quote
Another example of a boundary concept is Derrida's notion differance, which he describes in negative terms as the trace or horizon of what cannot be said:
"Crucial to an understanding of Derrida’s philosophy is the term différance. Created by Derrida, all signs constitute différance in that signs are not the thing to which they refer. What then is différance? Derrida proffers the following “definition” (my quotes) of the term: “Différance as temporization, différance as spacing.” [8] In order to understand this definition, one must refer to the origin (Derrida would shudder at my word choice) of différance, which comes from the French verb différer, which means both to defer and to differ. All signs defer (meaning they have temporality) and all signs differ (creating a gap, or space, between the sign and what it means). For example, you might tell a friend “I like your new sweater.” At the point of saying “new” your friend does not know what you are referring to – because meaning is deferred. The meaning conferred by “new” comes from “old” and that of “sweater” comes from an understanding of other possible tops (blouses, jackets, sweatshirts…) – because all signs differ. Even within a term, meaning is inherently unstable. In this example, “new” could mean “newly acquired,” “newly made,” or “of a new style.” Like all of Derrida’s terms, différance has multiple layers of meaning. In spoken French/English, difference and différance are homophones, marking the distinction between speech and writing. According to Derrida, différance is “no longer simply a concept, but rather the possibility of conceptuality, of a conceptual process and system in general.”
Différance rejects the oppositions we have unquestioningly accepted as the basis for language. As such, Derrida realizes this “makes the thinking of it [différance] uneasy and uncomfortable.” [10] Derrida contends that signs do not convey meaning in the way intended by the original author. What is missing from a text becomes as important as what is there. As Derrida clarifies in “Différance:”
Thus one could reconsider all of the pairs of opposites on which philosophy is constructed and on which our discourse lives, not in order to see opposition erase itself but to see what indicates that each of the terms must appear as the différance of the other, as the other different and deferred in the economy of the same (the intelligent as differing-deferring the sensible, as the sensible different and deferred; the concept as different and deferred, differing-deferring intuition; culture as nature different and deferred, differing-deferring;…"-- https://ucupr.wordpress.com/2018/09/13/a...tive-idea/
Even Heidegger employed a boundary concept in his idea of Being and understanding, which is Time or temporality:
"Understanding is a project thrust forth and ecstatic, which means that it stands in the sphere of the open. The sphere which opens up as we project, in order that something (Being in this case) may prove itself as something (in this case, Being as itself in its unconcealedness), is called the sense. (Cf. B.&T., p. 151) "The sense of Being" and "the truth of Being" mean the same.
Let us suppose that Time belongs to the truth of Being in a way that is still concealed: then every project that holds open the truth of Being, representing a way of understanding Being, must look out into Time as the horizon of any possible understanding of Being. (Cf. B.&T., §§31-34 and 68.)
The preface to Being and Time, on the first page of the treatise, ends with these sentences: "To furnish a concrete elaboration of the question concerning the sense of 'Being' is the intention of the following treatise. The interpretation of Time as the horizon of every possible attempt to understand Being is its provisional goal."--- https://www.marxists.org/reference/subje...idegg2.htm
All these examples of boundary concepts imo share this same meaning of a domain that both limits our experience negatively as an impassable perimeter or gap while at the same time providing freedom as the very threshold of our horizon. Think of the frame of a picture which simultaneously contains and limits what the picture portrays while also delineating the picture AS itself--as THIS picture. We are basically reduced to metaphors and poetry at this point, striving to articulate the very nature of what cannot be experienced or thought or even metaphorized! It goes to the nature of metaphorization itself, as to how it is possible and how it dialectically preordains the degree of intelligibility and relevance of whatever can be thought or said or signified.
Quotes:
"Thinking is trying to think the unthinkable: thinking the thinkable is not worth the effort."---Helene Cixous
"The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo."---Soren Kierkegaard
“But now you will ask me, ‘How am I to think of God himself, and what is he?’ and I cannot answer you except to say, ‘I do not know.’ For with this question you have brought me into the same darkness, the same kind of unknowing where I want you to be! For though we through the grace of God can know fully about all other matters, and think about him – yes, even the very works of God himself – yet of God himself can no man think.
Therefore I will leave on one side everything I can think and choose for my love for that thing which I cannot think! Why? Because God may well be loved, but not thought. By love God can be caught and held, but by thinking never.
Therefore, though it may be good sometimes to think particularly about God’s kindness and worth, and though it may be enlightening too, and part of contemplation, yet in the work now before us it must be put down and covered with a cloud of forgetting. And you are to step over it resolutely and eagerly, with a devout and kindling love, and try to penetrate that darkness above you.
Strike that thick cloud of unknowing with the sharp dart of longing love, and on no account whatever think of giving up…A naked intention directed to God, and himself, alone, is wholly sufficient…"--- "Cloud Of Unknowing", author anonymous.
"God is this, a third person.”[xv] A common conception of the third person is a narrator who does not directly take part in the being of the story at hand but is nonetheless still in the story. This third person is not confronted with but still indirectly takes part in the being at hand. However, God is not exactly a third person, the third person is simply a useful tool for understanding as “God distances himself in the guise of the third person.”[xvi] In truth God is the most other, absolutely other.."--Emmanuel Levinas
"The Real: very unlike our conventional conception of objective/collective experience, in Lacanian theory the real becomes that which resists representation, what is pre-mirror, pre-imaginary, pre-symbolic – what cannot be symbolized – what loses it’s “reality” once it is symbolized (made conscious) through language. It is “the aspect where words fail” (Vogler, 2), what Miller describes as, “the ineliminable residue of all articulation, the foreclosed element, which may be approached, but never grasped: the umbilical cord of the symbolic” (280). This is perhaps the source of the most contention within theories of media in that media itself can only point at the real but never embody it, never be it. For Peirce, this can be described as the “index” – the “real” traces left behind; […] In a sense, the real is everything that is not media, but that informs all media."---- https://melaniemenardarts.wordpress.com/...-the-real/
A similar case can be made for Kant's concept of the noumenon, which is defined as that object that lies beyond experience and thought and yet negatively informs them as the absolute limit of their possibility. Here's one author's elaboration of this idea: https://ucupr.wordpress.com/2018/09/13/a...tive-idea/ Here the noumenon is conceived as a regulatory concept that restrains thinking from overabstraction while preserving its openness to and freedom for the transcendent as precisely that which is NOT thinkable:
"The notion of the noumenon serves to remind us that it's not the kind of thing we have, or can even meaningfully conceive... [It] mark[s] the boundary of what human cognition can legitimately claim".---Reddit quote
Another example of a boundary concept is Derrida's notion differance, which he describes in negative terms as the trace or horizon of what cannot be said:
"Crucial to an understanding of Derrida’s philosophy is the term différance. Created by Derrida, all signs constitute différance in that signs are not the thing to which they refer. What then is différance? Derrida proffers the following “definition” (my quotes) of the term: “Différance as temporization, différance as spacing.” [8] In order to understand this definition, one must refer to the origin (Derrida would shudder at my word choice) of différance, which comes from the French verb différer, which means both to defer and to differ. All signs defer (meaning they have temporality) and all signs differ (creating a gap, or space, between the sign and what it means). For example, you might tell a friend “I like your new sweater.” At the point of saying “new” your friend does not know what you are referring to – because meaning is deferred. The meaning conferred by “new” comes from “old” and that of “sweater” comes from an understanding of other possible tops (blouses, jackets, sweatshirts…) – because all signs differ. Even within a term, meaning is inherently unstable. In this example, “new” could mean “newly acquired,” “newly made,” or “of a new style.” Like all of Derrida’s terms, différance has multiple layers of meaning. In spoken French/English, difference and différance are homophones, marking the distinction between speech and writing. According to Derrida, différance is “no longer simply a concept, but rather the possibility of conceptuality, of a conceptual process and system in general.”
Différance rejects the oppositions we have unquestioningly accepted as the basis for language. As such, Derrida realizes this “makes the thinking of it [différance] uneasy and uncomfortable.” [10] Derrida contends that signs do not convey meaning in the way intended by the original author. What is missing from a text becomes as important as what is there. As Derrida clarifies in “Différance:”
Thus one could reconsider all of the pairs of opposites on which philosophy is constructed and on which our discourse lives, not in order to see opposition erase itself but to see what indicates that each of the terms must appear as the différance of the other, as the other different and deferred in the economy of the same (the intelligent as differing-deferring the sensible, as the sensible different and deferred; the concept as different and deferred, differing-deferring intuition; culture as nature different and deferred, differing-deferring;…"-- https://ucupr.wordpress.com/2018/09/13/a...tive-idea/
Even Heidegger employed a boundary concept in his idea of Being and understanding, which is Time or temporality:
"Understanding is a project thrust forth and ecstatic, which means that it stands in the sphere of the open. The sphere which opens up as we project, in order that something (Being in this case) may prove itself as something (in this case, Being as itself in its unconcealedness), is called the sense. (Cf. B.&T., p. 151) "The sense of Being" and "the truth of Being" mean the same.
Let us suppose that Time belongs to the truth of Being in a way that is still concealed: then every project that holds open the truth of Being, representing a way of understanding Being, must look out into Time as the horizon of any possible understanding of Being. (Cf. B.&T., §§31-34 and 68.)
The preface to Being and Time, on the first page of the treatise, ends with these sentences: "To furnish a concrete elaboration of the question concerning the sense of 'Being' is the intention of the following treatise. The interpretation of Time as the horizon of every possible attempt to understand Being is its provisional goal."--- https://www.marxists.org/reference/subje...idegg2.htm
All these examples of boundary concepts imo share this same meaning of a domain that both limits our experience negatively as an impassable perimeter or gap while at the same time providing freedom as the very threshold of our horizon. Think of the frame of a picture which simultaneously contains and limits what the picture portrays while also delineating the picture AS itself--as THIS picture. We are basically reduced to metaphors and poetry at this point, striving to articulate the very nature of what cannot be experienced or thought or even metaphorized! It goes to the nature of metaphorization itself, as to how it is possible and how it dialectically preordains the degree of intelligibility and relevance of whatever can be thought or said or signified.
Quotes:
"Thinking is trying to think the unthinkable: thinking the thinkable is not worth the effort."---Helene Cixous
"The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo."---Soren Kierkegaard
“But now you will ask me, ‘How am I to think of God himself, and what is he?’ and I cannot answer you except to say, ‘I do not know.’ For with this question you have brought me into the same darkness, the same kind of unknowing where I want you to be! For though we through the grace of God can know fully about all other matters, and think about him – yes, even the very works of God himself – yet of God himself can no man think.
Therefore I will leave on one side everything I can think and choose for my love for that thing which I cannot think! Why? Because God may well be loved, but not thought. By love God can be caught and held, but by thinking never.
Therefore, though it may be good sometimes to think particularly about God’s kindness and worth, and though it may be enlightening too, and part of contemplation, yet in the work now before us it must be put down and covered with a cloud of forgetting. And you are to step over it resolutely and eagerly, with a devout and kindling love, and try to penetrate that darkness above you.
Strike that thick cloud of unknowing with the sharp dart of longing love, and on no account whatever think of giving up…A naked intention directed to God, and himself, alone, is wholly sufficient…"--- "Cloud Of Unknowing", author anonymous.
"God is this, a third person.”[xv] A common conception of the third person is a narrator who does not directly take part in the being of the story at hand but is nonetheless still in the story. This third person is not confronted with but still indirectly takes part in the being at hand. However, God is not exactly a third person, the third person is simply a useful tool for understanding as “God distances himself in the guise of the third person.”[xvi] In truth God is the most other, absolutely other.."--Emmanuel Levinas