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at the age of seventeen, met James Joyce.
He calls the real, the symbolic and the imaginary the “three registers of human reality”.
Thus, what we ordinarily speak of as “reality” would best be defined as an amalgam of symbolic and imaginary: imaginary to the extent that we are situated in the specular register and the ego offers us rationalizations of our actions; and symbolic to the extent that most things around us have meaning.
The real would represent precisely what is excluded from our reality, the margin of what is without meaning and which we fail to situate or explore.
What you write is different from you. It may represent you, but in being so represented, you have to confront the fact that words are not there to help you. They have not been designed for you, and yet you have to find your way around in the world of language in order to survive.
The early work referred to alienation in the register of the image, and now alienation is situated in the register of language.