THE WORLD DOES NOT EXIST (2004)
In Le triomphe de la religion, a press conference held on 29 October 1974, Lacan comes to speak of the difference between the real and the world:"That is the difference between what works and what does not work. What works is the world [le monde]. The real [le réel] is what doesn't work. The world runs, it turns, that is its function as world."
The real marks an interruption. It interrupts the course of the world, runs up against it. What works or functions is the world, i.e. what is worldly. The world as world of pure functions and processes is the factual world.
The real marks the limit of this world and its logic. It is the name for an absolute resistance which pushes the subject out of its worldliness, its being-in-the-world. Nevertheless, this resistance, this absolute limit, the condition of impossibility of the course of the world is at the same time the condition of possibility of the world-functions. "Starting here, there is room for play." The condition of impossibility of the pure processes of the world is recognized by Lacan as the condition of possibility of the world- or reality-system. Because the real exists, i.e. the necessarily singular experience that ‘it’ doesn't work, ‘it’ works in general on the level of factual reality. Factual reality is the functional level that constitutes itself as the exclusion of the real, as resistance against the (absolute) resistance of the real.
The experience of the real is the experience of the limit of pure world processes. It is the experience of what can scarcely still be called an object of experience, of what drives the experiential system beyond its possibilities, experience of what is heterogeneous or impure. One could say that there is experience only as experience of the unexperienceable. The subject of this experience come into contact with an absolute incommensurability, with the uncanniness of what is nameless. As Bataille, Blanchot, Sartre and Lacan have shown, the experience of what is heterogeneous, of the exterior, of nausea, the experience of the real is a border-line experience that catapults the subject of this experience out of its supposed interior security. The subject loses itself as the subject of self-control. It plunges out of its 'essence'. It experiences the terror of an absolute alienation and disintegration.
At the session of the seminar in Le Thors held on 9 September 1966, Heidegger turned to Fragment 30 of Heraclitus:
"This world order [kósmos] here was not created by one of the gods or a human being, but was always and is and will be: an ever-living fire, flaring up according to its measure and extinguishing according to its measure."
Heidegger touches upon the sense of kósmos as ‘ornament’ which, he says, was known in particular to Homer and Pindar. The world is of the order of ornamentation. This means that it is of the order of that which is order, of that which is radiant and even. "The verb kosméo, to which kósmos belongs, means 'to bring into order'." What is in opposition to this order, to the pure radiance of what is ordered, to the world (le monde) is not "another world" but "that which is expressed by the French adjective 'immonde', the dirty and impure".
The kósmos, the world, resists the disorder and impurity of the acosmic. What is acosmic is chaotic. It does not fit into any order or world-function like that which is ordered. It is of the order of the disordered, of chaos. The experience of chaos is the experience of what is impure, heterogeneous or real. The subject of this experience already belongs to another order than that of the world. Its world is the world of the real, of that which irreconcilably resists the pure world-function. The experience of acosmic impurity is at the same time the experience of impossibility, of non-existence, i.e. of merely phantasmagoric identity of the cosmic world. The world does not exist. That is the truth which the subject of the real traverses the moment it touches chaos.