Givenness is Always in its Place (another brief note)

In a previous post, I asserted that 'givenness is the Real.' To carry the synthesis further, givenness is always in its place. Many disciplines have appropriated Lacan's register theory (RSI), perhaps most recently, Levi Bryant's onticology, in a lecture on speculative realism and Borromean critical theory (2013). Perhaps givenness, then, is recognized not for its existence, but for its insistence, which would suggest a folding of the Real upon the Symbolic; for it is the unconscious that insists as Lacan has famously noted and DeLay has explained in his God is Unconscious.

If I might be as bold, I would suggest that the Real, Symbolic and Imaginary registers of Lacanian psychoanalysis have application to Marion's new phenomenology. It could turn out, of course, that my appropriation does little more than provide a helpful analogy; but I offer it as a means to understand the structure of the phenomenological moment. If givenness unfolds in the register of the Real, perhaps, phenomenality does so in the Symbolic, and counter-experience in the Imaginary.

The relationship between the phenomenon and phenomenality is structured like a language, and unfolds in the Symbolic register as a play between noesis (receiving) and noema (giving).

Counter-experience is already locked into language and representation; it therefore belongs to the refolding within the register of the Imaginary. The imaginary already 'knows' that something has occurred within the Real, and through the opening called 'lack' lets something escape from the Symbolic order into some kind of locution.

The provisional quality here is quite obvious. Time will tell if register theory opens phenomenology to greater comprehensibility.