May 14, 2026 03:52 PM
Just recently I have been studying Lacan's notion of the Real as "that which resists symbolization absolutely." It is in this impossible in terms of the symbolic dimension that frames our experience (the so-called "reality" we conceive of 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.
A similar case can be made for Kant's concept of the noumena, 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:
A similar case can be made for Kant's concept of the noumena, 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: