“We Must Be Able to Get Used to the Real”Author(s): Jaco Barnard-Naudé

Source: Philosophy & Rhetoric , Vol. 53, No. 3, SPECIAL ISSUE: IN THE MIDST OF COVID-
19 (2020), pp. 217-224
Published by: Penn State University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/philrhet.53.3.0217

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Penn State University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to Philosophy & Rhetoric

This content downloaded from

81.43.23.199 on Fri, 11 Dec 2020 10:24:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 “We Must Be Able to Get Used
to the Real”

Jaco Barnard-Naudé

a b s t r ac t

The names “COVID-19” and “Sars-CoV-2” signify an impoverished Symbolic

Order attempting to come to terms with “a great disorder in the Real.” Our con-
temporary defense against the Real has proceeded by way of the insistence of the
Imaginary, and at the same time, the Symbolic has become enslaved to this very
same Imaginary. The article ends with a plea for a revitalized mode of significa-
tion—a correspondence—between the Real and the Symbolic.

Keywords: psychoanalysis, Lacan, real, imaginary, symbolic

Language can influence how we relate to this pandemic.

—Rupiah 2020

We have to take the fight to the virus.

—Reuters 2020

Perhaps it would be prudent to begin at the beginning, that is, with

the name: COVID-19 or Sars-CoV-2. As Andreas Philippopoulos-
Mihalopoulos (2020) has indicated, the proliferation of hyphens in the
names of the virus indicates a series of “glottal stop”: “Co-STOP-Vi-
STOP-D-STOP-19. Swallow in between: COrona VIrus Disease 2019.”
These glottal stops signify a difficulty in articulation, the Lacanian “bone
in the throat.” It is as if the enunciation of the threat teeters on the brink
of the abyss of the Unsayable, as if, at any moment, the symbolic order, in
its effort to bring this outbreak under the control of its empire of signs,

doi: 10.5325/philrhet.53.3.0217
Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 53, No. 3, 2020
Copyright © 2020 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

This content downloaded from

81.43.23.199 on Fri, 11 Dec 2020 10:24:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
PR 53.3_02_Barnard-Naude.indd  Page 217 12/06/20 8:44 PM
 philosophy & rhetoric

will lose its ordinary capacity for putting signifier and signified together;
as if there is much more that can and should be said but that cannot,
at the present moment, be said; as if we are at a loss—and that is surely
where we are now.
But at what kind of loss? In these short remarks I want to venture an
answer underpinned by the impression that the Symbolic Order of lan-
guage has been in crisis and at a loss for some time now. “COVID-19”
and/or “Sars-CoV-2” are presently the most prominent signifiers globally
by way of which this loss is being communicated. The crisis of the Symbolic
Order to which I am referring is not a crisis in isolation, not solely a crisis of
the Symbolic Order as such. More precisely, the crisis today resides in the
relationship of the Symbolic with the Real. As such, the crisis is as much
a crisis of the Real (the one that it instigates as well as the one that it is
suffering) as it is a crisis that belongs to the Symbolic. The stoppage of the
hyphen is the shorthand for the articulation of this crisis in the relation-
ship between the Symbolic and the Real. For as we know very well from
the work of Appadurai and others, the hyphen(s), although it/they mark(s)
a glottal stop—a caesura in the Symbolic—it is a caesura that nonetheless
occurs on what Lacan (1988, 102) called “the symbolic plane of speech,” and
as such, it cannot be doubted that the hyphen communicates.
For one thing, the repetition of the hyphen in the names of the virus
can be read as part of the fairly desperate attempt of an impoverished
Symbolic to come to terms with—by covering over—the crisis that it is
experiencing in relation to the Real. However, instead of simply taking it
as given that the hyphen communicates only in this way, I want to suggest
that we read it as an opening, an opening through which something can be
said of the bone that remains today stuck in the throat of the Symbolic.
My starting point is the impression that we have been, for some time
now, resisting, defending against, the Real. It is not that we have not been
fascinated by and fixated upon the Real, quite the contrary. But we have
most certainly not been able to “get used to the real” (Lacan 2013, 77). We
are not like Plato’s Leontius who encountered an enormous pile of dead
bodies at the walls of Athens that had been dumped there after a series
of public executions (Plato 2003, 147–48). The tale of Leontius has it that
once he could no longer resist looking at the corpses, he became very angry,
cursed his eyes, and exclaimed, “Shameful eyes, fill yourselves, if that’s what
you desire” (Kronman 1996, 55).
Today, our disposition in relation to the Real is highly dissimilar. Far
from being ashamed at being unable to resist our desire to look at dead

218

This content downloaded from

81.43.23.199 on Fri, 11 Dec 2020 10:24:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
PR 53.3_02_Barnard-Naude.indd  Page 218 12/06/20 8:44 PM
 special issue | in the midst of covid-19

bodies, we are shamelessly exalting it. We are also unlike Leontius in the
sense that our fascinated gaze at the dead body has not been a regard of
and for the Real at all. Rather, we indulge in looking only at the images of
the Real. Each image proffering to be more real, more authentic than the
other, it can rightly be said that we are utterly in the thrall of real images or
of the imaged real. The horrific photograph of the bodies of Óscar Alberto
Martínez Ramírez and his 23-month-old daughter, Valeria, found in the
Rio Grande in June 2019 is a case in point (Ahmed and Semple 2019). Like
Leontius, we cannot resist looking at this photograph, but unlike Leontius,
we no longer find the words to curse our shameful eyes.
In the face of our stunned voyeurism, the image leaves us, the con-
sumers of this photograph, at a loss, precisely, for words. I have been using
the “we” and the “us” as if it should be clear who this “we” and this “us” is,
because it should be clear that the “we” and the “us” to which I am referring
is the “we” and the “us” of advanced late capitalist consumer society. It is the
“we” and the “us” who are not the “them” of that photograph, the oligarchi-
cal “we” safely at home behind the fortified walls of our cities.
“We” have preferred, indeed insisted, that the Real must come to us in
mediated and mediatized form exclusively and thus as necessarily sanitized,
digestible in its very indigestibility, not only so that we can wash our hands
of the Real but also so that we won’t have to get our hands dirty with the
Real in the first place. Our obsessive imaging and imagining of the Real
has, however, become increasingly incapable of symbolizing the Real. Take,
for instance, this example from the New York Times (Ahmed and Semple
2019) report that accompanied the photograph: “The image represents a
poignant distillation of the perilous journey migrants face on their pas-
sage north to the United States, and the tragic consequences that often go
unseen in the loud and caustic debate over border policy.” To say nothing of
the invocation of “distillation” in relation to this image, the trope of “trag-
edy” is once again invoked here to displace the question of culpability so
that the extract itself becomes caught in the very “loud and caustic” debate
that it claims to problematize.
It is, however, not simply the case that we have con-fused the
Imaginary with the Real, it is also that the Symbolic itself has by and large
been placed in the exclusive service of the Imaginary. This has resulted
in a situation to which Bernard Stiegler (2014, 10) has referred as “sym-
bolic misery.” Jacques-Alain Miller (Laurent and Miller 1998, 21, emphasis
added) points to this situation in precise terms: “The contemporary sym-
bolic, where it is lively, where it is productive, intense, where it concerns

219

This content downloaded from

81.43.23.199 on Fri, 11 Dec 2020 10:24:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
PR 53.3_02_Barnard-Naude.indd  Page 219 12/06/20 8:44 PM
 philosophy & rhetoric

the subject and its affects, seems to be enslaved to the imaginary, or to be in

continuity with it.” Miller goes on to say that this Symbolic is incapable of
puncturing the Imaginary as it is supposed to do, at least according to the
way Lacan conceived of it. “One might even believe that the symbolic is
dedicated to the image when one sees how, in our computers, it is concealed
as hardware behind the screen on which it shimmers as semblant,” says
Miller (21, emphasis added).
In the meantime, as Miller (2012) also suggests, there is “a great dis-
order in the real.” “COVID-19” or “Sars-CoV-2” are the present signifiers
of this disorder, as much an “illness as metaphor” as it is a symptom of this
literal “disorder in the Real” at both the individual and the trans-individual
level, across the planet. However, this naming of the Real by way of the use
of hyphenated abbreviation—thus, as code—fails to impose order on the
Real. As Veronique Voruz (2013, 7) has argued in reply to Miller, these codes
“are of science, but they do not operate as a fixion of the real.” The disorder
in the Real is a function of the extent to which the subject has become
unmoored from the signifier and this unmooring is the effect of the prolif-
eration of semblants that is set off when the Symbolic is fused to/with the
Imaginary. From such an Imaginary Symbolic one can indeed expect only
semblants and from the con-fusion of the Imaginary with the Real one can
expect only the chaos of “disorder in the Real.”
To say that there is “a great disorder in the Real” is to say that it now
exists in a state of exception or, to (still) say it with Agamben (1998, 10), that
the normal and the abnormal (the exception) have collapsed into a “real
zone of indistinction.” Indistinction (for instance, indistinction between
Imaginary and Real, between Symbolic and Imaginary)—that is, the zone
of the Real’s disorder today—and psychoanalysis have even been forced to
invent a name for it: ordinary psychosis, which is the name given precisely
to the “unclassifiable,” “unusual, rare cases” that are “in fact becoming the
norm” of clinical practice (Voruz 2013, 5).
Are we prepared today to encounter COVID-19 not as yet another
semblant? Are we prepared to encounter it as the “real real” (Voruz 2013, 7)?
Or is it that we have already diagnosed and are thus treating it as just
another semblant, yet another viral virtuality that—spectacular as it is—
does not fundamentally call into question the present mode of our global-
ized existence? For Miller (Laurent and Miller 1998, 22) encountering the
real real undoubtedly means that we must be prepared “to place the real
in an explicit relation to civilisation.” In this regard, Voruz (2013, 7) asks
whether the name of the “real real” could not in the end and after all still be

220

This content downloaded from

81.4ff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff on Thu, 01 Jan 1976 12:34:56 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
PR 53.3_02_Barnard-Naude.indd  Page 220 12/06/20 8:44 PM
 special issue | in the midst of covid-19

“nature” given the “primary disorder” we are facing in climate change—with

“climate change” as the rather dull signifier of the “great disorder” in nature
of which the virus is now the most visible consequence.
Are the names, COVID-19, Sars-CoV-2, then, the elements of a code
loudly signifying that which cannot at present, in fact, be coded, the return
of “nature” but this time as the disordered nature of the Real, for which
we do not as yet have a proper language? And is this then what we are,
ultimately, in the midst of ? In the midst of the necessity and yet the impos-
sibility of finding the symbols that would allow us to impose an emancipa-
tory form of order on the very disorder in which we have had a defining
hand? Are we, then, in the midst of one of the greatest impasses that our
world has ever known?
In order to begin to come to terms with these questions, we need today
a relationship of revitalized signification—correspondence—between the
Real and the Symbolic. We would do well here to begin again from that
part of Lacan’s work in which it is insisted that the Symbolic is “the only
go-between able to apprehend the real” (Libbrecht 2001, 154). That is what
it means to place the real in an explicit relation to civilization. As Miller
(2012, emphasis added) argues, “In order to enter into the 21st Century, our
clinic will have to be centred on dismantling the defence, disordering the
defence against the real.” That is what it means to “take the fight to the virus,”
as WHO emergency expert Mike Ryan (Reuters 2020) has suggested.
Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (2020) is right that COVID-19
demands from us an ethics of withdrawal: “a withdrawal from standard
preconceptions of how the capitalist world should look like, what progress
is, where our responsibilities lie.” The psychoanalytic version of this can-
not but be an ethics of withdrawal from the “standard preconception,” a
double preconception, in fact, of a Symbolic enslaved to the Imaginary and
an Imaginary con-fused with the Real. It thus cannot but be an ethics of
double withdrawal: of the Symbolic from its dedication to the Imaginary
and of the Imaginary from its insistence upon the Real.
Such an ethics demands the invention of new metaphors and new
metonymies—a language no longer shorthanded in the limited charac-
ters of the Twitter machine and perennially shortchanged by the neolib-
eral Imaginary. In short, “we” have been caught up in our very ordinary
psychoses for far too long. COVID-19 demands another “ethics of the
Real” (Zupančič 2000), another kind of madness, one that is “perhaps
not so mad” (Derrida 2001, 60). As Raza Saeed (2020) has written, one
of the greatest challenges we face now relates to the continuation of the

221

This content downloaded from

81.43.23.199 on Fri, 11 Dec 2020 10:24:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
PR 53.3_02_Barnard-Naude.indd  Page 221 12/06/20 8:44 PM
 philosophy & rhetoric

banal: “The continuity of our trends largely remains hidden because we

tend to gaze upon the extraordinary nature of the beast, rather than the
ordinariness with which we seek to tame it. And it is this continuity, the
ordinariness, the banality, which we have to identify and counter.”
Yet an ethically renovated signification/correspondence between the
Real and the Symbolic would depend on a prior moment of liberation.
From what? Precisely from “the organised distress, directed towards the
foundations of the imperative of profit” (Laurent and Miller 1998, 25). From
this point of view, it is clear that COVID-19 is calling our comfortable and
organized distress into question by way of a new discomfort and a novel
distress and such discomfort and distress could very well be the basis of a
new Symbolic ethics of the Real. Perhaps this is part of what the president
of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa (2020), meant when in a classically rhe-
torical blend of ethos and pathos he wrote that “this is the most definitive
Thuma Mina moment for our country” (“Thuma Mina” means “send me”
in the vernacular languages of South Africa and is derived from Isaiah 6:8:
“And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who
will go for us?’ Then I said, ‘Here am I! Send me’” [Maluleke 2018]).
There are those who will say that this is impossible, that it is not us
resisting the Real but that the Real is resisting us, that the Real is by defi-
nition Unsayable and that it can only ever remain on the verge of lan-
guage (like the signifier COVID-19 or Sars-CoV-2). If that is so, we will
be washing our hands not only of the Real but also of the Symbolic. In
such an instance, COVID-19 or Sars-CoV-2 spells the name of a gigantic
­irresponsibility, perhaps even an inability, to “get used to the Real.” That
irresponsibility and that inability if it is one, however, in the present state
of affairs, cannot be factored without a sense of our renewed precarity, for
COVID-19 raises a spectre from the future, one that reveals to us the very
real possibility that the omniscient and imagistic “we” that we have so clev-
erly conjured up might very well be next, that “we” may all become the dead
bodies left unconsecrated outside the walls of the city, for no one to find.

Free State Centre for Human Rights

University of the Free State

note
The title of this essay comes from Lacan 2013, 77.

222

This content downloaded from

81.43.23.199 on Fri, 11 Dec 2020 10:24:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
PR 53.3_02_Barnard-Naude.indd  Page 222 12/06/20 8:44 PM
 special issue | in the midst of covid-19

works cited
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-
Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Ahmed, Azam, and Kirk Semple. 2019. “Photo of Drowned Migrants Captures Pathos of
Those Who Risk It All.” New York Times, 25 June. www.nytimes.com/2019/06/25/
us/father-daughter-border-drowning-picture-mexico.html.
Derrida, Jacques. 2001. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Trans. Mark Dooley and
Michael Hughes. London: Routledge.
Kronman, Anthony. 1996. “Leontius’ Tale.” In Law’s Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in
the Law, ed. Peter Brooks and Paul Gewirtz, 54–56. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Lacan, Jacques. 1988. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique
1953–1954. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester. New York: Norton.
———. 2013. The Triumph of Religion Preceded by Discourse to Catholics. Trans. Bruce Fink.
Cambridge: Polity.
Laurent, Eric, and Jacques-Alain Miller. 1998. “The Other Who Does Not Exist and
His Ethical Committees.” In Almanac of Psychoanalysis: Psychoanalytic Stories
after Freud and Lacan, ed. Ruth Golan, Gabriel Dahan, Shlomo Lieber, and
Rivka Warshawsky, trans. Michele Julien, Richard Klein, Kevin Polley, Mischa
Twitchin, and Veronique Voruz. Tel Aviv: Groupe Israelienne de l’Ecole
Européene.
Libbrecht, Katrien. 2001. “The Real.” In A Compendium of Lacanian Terms, ed. Huguette
Glowinski, Zita M. Marks, and Sara Murphy, 154–59. London: Free Association
Books.
Maluleke, Tinyiko. 2018. “Op-Ed: The Deep Roots of Ramaphosa’s ‘Thuma Mina.’”
Daily Maverick, 22 Feb. www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2018-02-22-op-ed-
the-deep-roots-of-ramaphosas-thuma-mina.
Miller, Jacques-Alain. 2012. “The Real in the 21st Century.” Lacan Quotidien, 30 May. www
.lacanquotidien.fr/blog/2012/05/the-real-in-the-21st-century-by-jacques-alain-
miller.
Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Andreas. 2020. “Covid: The Ethical Disease.” Critical
Legal Thinking: Law and the Political, 13 Mar. https://criticallegalthinking.
com/2020/03/13/covid-the-ethical-disease.
Plato. 2003. The Republic. Trans. Desmond Lee. London: Penguin.
Ramaphosa, Cyril. 2020. “‘The Most Definitive Thuma Mina Moment’ for SA: Ramaphosa’s
Plan for Covid-19.” News 24, 15 Mar. www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/
read-in-full-the-most-definitive-thuma-mina-moment-for-sa-ramaphosas-
plan-for-covid-19-20200315.
Reuters. 2020. “Lockdown Not Enough to Defeat Coronavirus—WHO’s Ryan.” Daily
Maverick, 23 Mar. www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2020-03-23-lockdowns-
not-enough-to-defeat-coronavirus-whos-ryan.
Rupiah, Kiri. 2020. “Your Daily Briefing.” Mail & Guardian, 23 Mar. http://m2.
digitalnewspaper.co.za/nl/jsp/m.jsp?c=%403X%2FFuny7U11JkzYq7iD%2F1cc3
G%2BKMbqNMZfRz31NOkaM%3D.

223

This content downloaded from

81.43.23.199 on Fri, 11 Dec 2020 10:24:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
PR 53.3_02_Barnard-Naude.indd  Page 223 12/06/20 8:44 PM
 philosophy & rhetoric

Saeed, Raza. 2020. “Covid-19 and the Continuity of the Familiar.” Critical Legal Thinking:
Law and the Political, 21 Mar. https://criticallegalthinking.com/2020/03/21/
covid-19-and-the-continuity-of-the-familiar.
Stiegler, Bernard. 2014. Symbolic Misery Volume 1: The Hyperindustrial Epoch. Trans. Barnaby
Norman. Cambridge: Polity.
Voruz, Veronique. 2013. “Disorder in the Real and Inexistence of the Other: What
Subjective Effects?” ICLO, 12 Oct. www.iclo-nls.org/wp-content/uploads/Pdf/
ICLO2013-VeroniqueVoruz.pdf.
Zupančič, Alenka. 2000. Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan. London: Verso.

224

This content downloaded from

81.43.23.199 on Fri, 11 Dec 2020 10:24:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
PR 53.3_02_Barnard-Naude.indd  Page 224 12/06/20 8:44 PM