Ethics Not Happiness: A House Is Not a Holmes Stacy Thompson (bio) Ethics or Happiness? To grasp the difference between the Imaginary and Symbolic registers in Jacques Lacan’s thought, consider the joke that Mr. White makes in the opening scene of the film Reservoir Dogs (1992). In an instance of tough guy bravura, he warns Mr. Blonde, a fellow thief who has just joked about shooting him, “You shoot me in a dream, you better wake up and apologize.” The humor hinges on the blurring of the line between the Imaginary and the Symbolic, on the possibility that Mr. Blonde’s hypothetical dream of shooting Mr. White has consequences not only within the Imaginary register of the dream but within the Symbolic Order of language and social meaning. To assume seriously that one’s dreams were merely extensions of the Symbolic Order, or that the latter was merely an extension of one’s dream life, would signify a type of pathology, an inability to differentiate between largely individual, Imaginary phenomena and the more social phenomena of the Symbolic Order. To some extent, this blurring always occurs, as Lacan makes clear when he draws his three registers—the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real—as interlocking Borromean rings (1998, 111). Hence, if I love someone romantically, I cannot help but wonder why my amorous attachment, which seems to occur not in a dream but still in the Imaginary register, does not reappear, unchanged, in the Symbolic Order. Why is it that everyone who knows the object of my affections is not as enamored with her as I am? To the extent that this question disturbs me within the bounds of normal jealousy, the Imaginary and Symbolic registers overlap for me in the usual way. In this overlapping zone, I might wonder that only a handful of people who know my beloved react to her as I do. But, simultaneously, I recognize that the symbolic network in which I live does not reduplicate all aspects of my “inner life.” In short, for me, the Imaginary and Symbolic retain their necessary differentiation from one another. The point is not that my Imaginary experience of [End Page 269] the world is ever entirely separate from the reality of the Symbolic Order, or vice versa, but rather that, as Lacan explains, “in so far as one part of reality [the Symbolic Order] is imagined, the other is real and inversely, in so far as one part is reality, the other becomes imaginary” (1991, 82). The Imaginary supports the Symbolic Order for me; it is another name for my process of investing my libido in the Symbolic Order, or distributing my interests across it. Inversely, the Symbolic Order carves up the Imaginary for me; it assigns names/language to the objects and, more importantly, the relations between objects, in the Imaginary. The example of a chess game that Slavoj Žižek proffers is useful here. My opponent and I share the rules of chess, analogous to the Symbolic Order, which dictate the possible moves and their meanings (gambit, victory, defeat, stalemate). However, we might employ different strategies within the Imaginary for libidinally investing in—or cathecting—the game. For me, perhaps, the traditional medieval ranks and relations for the chess pieces suffice; my pawns advance in the defense of their king, who is limited to a narrow range of movements; the queen, conversely, is the most powerful piece on the table, moving with relative ease in all directions. But my opponent might prefer a Lord of the Rings theme and imagine, instead, that a small army of amicable hobbits on one side and an army of vicious orcs on the other stand on the front lines of an imminent battle. The point is that it makes no difference whether my opponent and I share the same Imaginary register as we play, so long as we share the same rules, the same language or Symbolic Order. The latter remains constant in spite of the different ways in which we cathect objects. This is not to say that the Symbolic Order is an “objective” reality that exists apart from any Imaginary grasping of it. Rather, the two...
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