In a sense, it’s what keeps us alive. It’s our reality. It’s how our fiction is structured. It’s from Lacan we learn ‘reality is structured like a fiction’. The Triad of the Lacanian registers shows us that our reality is structured by the symbolic and the imaginary both oppose and connect with the real. Lacan refers to this as the Borromean Knot as each register has a dialectical relationship to the other registers.
Reality is essentially the symbolic and the imaginary whilst the real is thrless than nothing of Žižek’s This revolutionary process of the abolition of identity, we should keep in mind, is monstrous, violent, and traumatic.
It is contradictory, it can only be experienced as the breaks or gaps in reality. The real is a trauma, which impacts our very subjectivity. As the pure negation of being.
With every experience we have with the real, we construct a new fiction, a new fantasy to make sense of what happened. We symbolize the unsymbolizable.
We construct a narrative and place ourselves at the centre of it. We become subject to ourselves, we cannot ‘throw-away’ ourselves; Heidegger describes one of the raw phenomenological qualities of being as verfallen (thrown-ness). Being is thrown into the world, it never seems to slowly become itself, It is immediate.
In the West, I believe we call this acceptance of the real and verfallen, to calmly escape the world of being, ‘Ego-Death’.
But this ‘calm escape’ isn’t into just nothing, but Into becoming.
Into a nothingness that negates itself. This is why the Buddhist texts don’t refer to an ‘ego death’ as such, but to a Nirvana. To escape the self and desire. An affirmation rather than a negation. Śūnyatā.