La relation entre le Réel et le Symbolique, du Lacan structuraliste au Lacan “immanentiste”

This article proposes a theoretical reconstruction of Jacques Lacan’s path from his early structuralist season to his controversial last years, marked by immanentism and a biologicist philosophy of the living. First, I investigate why Lacan is not a structuralist in the classical sense and why his notion of ‘real unconscious’ differs from both ‘trans-individual’ and ‘structured real’; so I present Lacan as not particularly indebted to Saussure and Lévi-Strauss. Detaching myself from contemporary post-structuralist readings, such as those of Zafiropoulos and Basualdo, I rather choose to ‘show’ the Lacanian Real through deconstruction, in particular through the Derridean metaphors of heliotrope and crypt. Finally, after expounding the theoretical reasons that justify the negative relationality between the Real and the Symbolic, I deny the presence of a ‘late Lacan turn’.