Slavoj Žižek, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The Real is not pre-symbolic primordial chaos or noumenal beyond. It is the internal limit, the impossibility, the gap within the symbolic that prevents it from becoming a closed totality. Drive is not biological instinct but the structure of repetition that exceeds the pleasure principle — the death-drive is the formal name for this structure. Jouissance is the surplus generated by the very prohibition that promises to contain it.123
The patient says this, but there is no liberation, no truth-effect, no shift in his subjective position—why? Again, what remains "repressed" even when the barriers preventing access to the repressed content come down?Less Than Nothing, p. 307
This means that the Real is not external to the Symbolic: the Real is the Symbolic itself in the modality of non-All, lacking an external Limit/Exception.In this precise sense,the line of separation between the Symbolic and the Real is not only a symbolic gesture par excellence, but the very founding gesture of the Symbolic and to step into the Real does not entail abandoning language, throwing oneself into the…The Puppet and the Dwarf, p. 70
In other words, the desire of the analyst is Lacan's tentative answer to the question: after we have traversed the fantasy, and accepted the 'nonexistence of the big Other', how do we none the less return to some (new) form of the big Other that again makes collective coexistence possible?The Ticklish Subject, pp. 296–297
Defended consistently across the entire corpus. Foundational to The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) and elaborated through every subsequent systematic work. The cultural-pedagogical books (Looking Awry, Enjoy Your Symptom!, The Plague of Fantasies) work out the position through cinema and popular culture; the late systematic works deepen its ontological stakes.