Lacan and Repetition

…Where do we meet this real? For what we have in the discovery of psycho-analysis is an encounter, an essential encounter—an appointment to which we are always called with a real that eludes us. That is why I have put on the blackboard a few words that are for us, today, a reference point of what we wish to propose.

First, the tuché, which we have borrowed, as I told you last time, from Aristotle, who uses it in his search for cause. We have translated it as the encounter with the real. The real is beyond the automaton, the return, the coming-back, the insistence of the signs, by which we see ourselves governed by the pleasure principle. The real always lies behind the automaton, and it is quite obvious, throughout Freud’s research, that it is this [process] that is his concern…
-"Tuche and Automaton," in Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis

The encounter with the real (tuché) is beyond the process of returning (the automaton), or, put a little more clearly (for the names tuché, automaton, etc. are not important), the real is something that is encountered in a space that opens up once returning is no longer the way in which something comes back to the subject.

Let us bring in the passage from the previous session on “The Unconscious and Repetition” (which would have been fresh in the minds of his listeners) to explain what returning is, so that we can see what Lacan is getting at here. Reproduction is returning—Lacan uses both terms synonymously. So both reproduction and returning are, if we heed this last seminar, different from repetition: “Repetition is not reproduction,” Lacan asserts. Both repetition and reproduction, however, are ways that the subject can comport himself towards the past: in each case what is repeated or reproduced is something that for the subject was and now is again. But, as is evident by Lacan’s linking up of returning and reproducing, the past, when it returns, is also reproduced, in the sense that it is re-presented—it is present somehow again. Thus, we do not yet know that this is the case with repetition: indeed, “repetition appears in a form that is not clear, that is not self-evident, like a reproduction.” So we’ll let it go for now, noting this key distinction.

What in the past we are comporting ourselves towards that comes back again in such a way that it returns—this “what” is reproduced, is re-presented. Freud calls what gets re-presented a memory—indeed, something that comes back from the past in such a way that it gets re-presented to us (in images, words, feelings, etc.) is what we normally think of as a memory. The key, though, is to link up re-presentation with “presentation” itself—this will show us what memory and what returning really are.

The word “presentation” only designates something that occurs to us, something that our minds and bodies perceive or grasp or comport ourselves towards—and it is what “presents” itself in both the spatial and the temporal sense: what comes before us—the presented—and the time in which it comes before us—the present. Thus, if what is present is somehow re-presented, it will have to be what was in the past: if it is no longer present in the temporal sense, such that it has to be brought before us again, it will be present again in a different form—the form of present-become-past, or in the form of now-is-that-which-once-was. Thus, a representation (i.e. this form) is never a past that is unable to be present itself once more: all of that-which-once-was can be again now. Moreover, all that is now is something that can be that-which-once-was. This means that what returns will always be something that could be present again—the past. Memory is not merely a representation of the past, then: memory is only that form which can adequately represent the past as something that once-was-present. Any other form will not reveal the past to us in such a way that we can recognize it as something that was once present.

So, if the real is the something that is encountered in the space that opens up once returning is no longer a factor, we can conclude that this space is no longer the space of the past. Repetition steps in here: it is the form of returning beyond returning, the form of bringing something before us in such a way that it is not revealed as something that once was present. The space that opens up once returning is no longer the form in which something comes before us, the space of the real, is the space of repetition. How, then, does repetition bring something before us? Obviously not in the manner of representation/reproduction. And this means, not in the manner in which it renders something that comes back as past. Repetition, unlike reproduction, does not bring back the past. Rather, it brings back the real.

But what is the real? What is that which is brought back in repetition? If there is no past in repetition, is there any time at all? Indeed, Freud said that the unconscious does not participate in the temporality of everyday life we are used to: if the unconscious is the seat of the real somehow, does it not experience a past or time more generally? These are questions for another time.