Psychoanalysis holds that a direct unmediated real is an impossibility

Evidence

But for psychoanalysis, a real real is an “impossibility.” The mundane manifestations of this impossibility are contradictory: the real can seem exterior to language—putative solidities like the body; indescribable enigmas like death; unspeakable gaps like trauma; the unthought unthinkables; the anti-negation of the unconscious—but can also seem interior to language, as with the evasive chain of metonymy or the disturbing parapraxis of symptoms and desire. These semblances endow imaginary reals: ineffable experiences struggling for expression, signifiers that mean exactly what we want them to mean. Immediatism demands these imaginary reals, grasping encounters with what circumvents or precedes mediation—but its aesthetic and political effects propagate infinite, individualized, phenomenalized attempts that perpetually, repetitively circle, multiplying into a hall of mirrors. Trapped in the reflective one-to-one chamber, images eclipse signifiers, presence fore-closes absence, and plenitude averts lack. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 97

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the Lacanian distinction between imaginary real and Real, showing why immediatism’s ‘real’ is necessarily a constructed semblance.
• XREF: connects to: The psychoanalytic encounter with the real is an appointment that always misses — Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain…, 2899; The Freudian unconscious cannot explain bad faith because it fragments psychic unity. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 289; Any stable reality is built by repressing an unrepresentable traumatic Real — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 40