The symbolic register introduces lack and alterity against imaginary flatness

Evidence

Ordinarily—or, in less image-abundant times—the imaginary’s one-to-one equation is complicated in the symbolic, the realm of the signifier. The symbolic spans spoken and written language, with all their detours, confusions, and metaphors; language as a system; institutions, laws, norms not of the individual’s making. The symbolic stopples the dyadic mirror liquidity of body and ego / I and other-I, introducing instead lack, inconsistency, and negation. Signifiers extrude flatness into volume, scaffolding the space of the social in greater amplitude than the plane of the image. The symbolic girds more than the identities of the imaginary: it is the terrain of alterity. Such alterity might assert itself as a kind of thirdness that disrupts the imaginary duo, auguring not just self and other but the other of the other. It might inscribe itself as the grammar or norms that structure the exchange between I and image, belying the nonverbal fluidity of one-to-one infantile relay. And it might make itself legible, in parapraxes and other symptoms, as the unconscious, the other side of imaginary self-consciousness. With its alterizing activation of the unconscious, contradiction, and lack, the symbolic evokes absence in contrast to imaginary presence, unpleasure in contrast to pleasure, death in contrast to life. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 87

Categorization

• DEFINE: Her key theoretical move for the whole book: symbolic=detour, lack, thirdness versus imaginary=immediacy — this is the load-bearing definition of mediation she defends.
• XREF: This imaginary/symbolic dyad is the theoretical core she will map onto immediacy(depthless imaginary) vs mediation(symbolic detour); central for arguing with her Antitheory chapter and appraising her Jameson debt.
• DEEPTHINKING: The passage packs her entire normative architecture — imaginary (mirror, immediacy, no lack) versus symbolic (signifier, alterity, absence, the social). It grounds what she means by political necessity of mediation.