Anti-Social Turn as an Intersection of Lacan’s Real Order and Kierkegaard’s Religious Sphere

Abstract
The present study aims to identify and highlight the points of commonality between Jacques Lacan’s and Søren Kierkegaard’s views on the deconstruction of the social issue. To this end, Kierkegaard’s three spheres of existence, especially the religious sphere, are analyzed and studied via a descriptive-analytical research method. Then, Lacan’s three orders are analyzed by focusing on the real order. Then, using a comparative study and examining the opinions of these two thinkers, the research fundamental finding emphasizes that although Lacan and Kierkegaard belong to two different schools of thought, Lacan’s real order, implying opposition to social norms and symbolic order, is very similar to Kierkegaard’s religious sphere, also denoting opposition to social and ethical norms. The study demonstrated that the dialectic of the real order and the symbolic order (society) in Lacanian thought is a psychoanalytical interpretation of Kierkegaard’s paradoxical faith, involving synthesis and reconciliation between the infinite and the finite.
Keywords: religious stage, Kierkegaard, Lacan, real order
 
 
 

Kierkegaard’s three spheres of existence

The experience of demonic boredom; characteristics of the aesthetic sphere



 
An aesthete never refers to his behavior and does not have any review of his actions, and is only in pursuit of unlimited and insatiable pleasure. The aesthete’s life is the life of a person seeking to free himself from the shackles of limitations. Such a person suffers from despair due to not reaching the unlimited. Of course, this unlimitedness has no roots in reality; like Sisyphus, he tries to become unlimited, and this is an unsuccessful attempt because it is impossible for a human being to become unlimited, a kind of desire to be magical and become a god that ends in despair. If life in the ideal stage is the most pointless futility, the despair resulting from it is the best refuge; this despair can create a brilliant moment, the moment when a person turns from an ethical and passing time to the state of eternal time. This moment is the absolute limit of the ideal stage, leading to the ascension to a higher stage, i.e., an ethical stage.
 

loss of self-discipline; the distinctive feature of the ethical sphere

The purpose of the ethical sphere is to remove the human being from the state of isolation and isolation and turn his life to the other and the general rules of society, and the problem arises precisely in this sphere. An ethical person prefers the general rules of society, and a person who devotes himself to ethical life wastes his time and loses the opportunity to experience individuality, singularity, and self-discipline. A person in the moral sphere is often forced to adjust to a society that often does not agree with his taste.
 

Religious sphere; manifestation of paradoxical faith

According to Kierkegaard, having hope and gambling for faith is essential. Faith is not an organized and pre-determined program, and faith is somewhat like a romantic relationship between two people in which risk-taking is seen, and the person is uncertain. Diving involves danger when the space is dark and ambiguous, faith is also of the same kind, and it is at the same risk that a religious sphere occurs. The path of faith requires the deterrence of ethics and condemns the faithful to absolute silence and solitude. The awe and anxiety of the faithful knight also originate from here. Who can assure him that he did not make a mistake? Faith is not seeking wellness and is accompanied by inflammation.
 

A reflection on Lacan’s three orders

imaginary order



In the imaginary order, a baby has a broken and fragmented inference of its existence, and his body at this time is a shapeless mass without wholeness or unity. This multi-part and disjointed inference of the baby from its own body ends when it enters the mirror stage (six to eighteen months). In the mirror stage, the child faces his image in the mirror, and the image of the disjointness of the body parts and the surrounding world disappears for him, and he sees his body independently of the surrounding world; he realizes that his existence is independent of his mother’s existence, contrary to his imaginary world, and he realizes that the mother is different. The child is fascinated by the monolithic figure in the mirror, identifies with it, and moves toward what Lacan calls the “ideal ego,” which is apparently stable, complete, and unified.
 

Symbolic order

The symbolic order is when a person enters by accepting the father’s name and the law forbidding adultery. Unlike the imaginary field, which has a pre-linguistic nature and comes from individual images, and the mother plays an important role, the symbolic field has a linguistic nature; it follows the dominant social culture, and the “the name of the father” dominates it.
 

Real order

Experiencing reality requires removing the barrier called language and reflecting on existence without the mediation of discourse. The periods when a person realizes the loss of dominant social values or official belief systems due to depression, but cannot express his feelings about those values and systems, are rare moments when a person comes in contact with the real order. These moments and periods are terse and transitory, but they always create and cause anxiety in a person. In the real order, the fakeness of accepted meanings in society is revealed to the person who realizes that the truth is hidden behind the discourse.
 

Traces of Lacan’s real order in Kierkegaard’s religious stage

The return of Isaac from death to Abraham in this earthly world is a return from Lacan’s real order to the symbolic order. If we accept that Kierkegaard’s contradictory belief is a dialectic and exchange between the infinite and the finite, this dialectic and exchange between the symbolic order and the real order can also be observed in Lacan’s psychoanalysis. Abraham’s insane decision to accept the slaughter of Isaac by divine command is a clear example of stepping into the field of ethics and law and a kind of Lacanian symbolic veil tearing. But on the other hand, the return of Isaac to Abraham in this finite world and the earth is a kind of movement from the real order to the Lacanian symbolic order.
 

Conclusion

It can be mentioned that Abraham’s crazy and fearful decision and action to sacrifice Isaac is a kind of deconstruction of the symbolic order and throwing it into the unknown and indefinable under the concept of real order. However, Abraham believes in his heart that God will not take Isaac from him and will return Isaac to him in this limited and perishable world is a kind of return from real order to the symbolic order. Simply put, in Kierkegaard’s paradoxical faith, a dialectic and going back and forth between the infinite and the finite, or in Lacanian psychoanalysis, standing on the border between the real order and the symbolic (modern) order can be observed.