AT Anti-Realism 18.The claim that Lacan is anti-real is a misidentification of the way that rhetoric structures reality
Lundberg ’12 (Christian, Associate Prof. of Rhetoric @ UNC Chapel Hill, “Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric,” University of Alabama Press, November, 2012, pp. 105)
Many of Lacan’s critics take proclamations such as “the universe is a flower of rhetoric” as evidence of Lacan’s antirealism, therein identifying him with the most radical versions of the discursive turn. The danger of this dispensation for understanding rhetoric is, as Dana Cloud puts it, that under the dispensation of an extreme version of the rhetorical construction of reality, “discourse not only influences reality, it is . . . reality.”17 Admittedly, Lacan’s declaration that “it is the world of words that creates the world of things. . . . Man speaks, then, but it is because the symbol has made2 him man” seems to confirm the instinct that Lacan reduces the world to discourse.18 But despite this nod to the radical discursive turn, there are other possibilities in Lacan’s work for framing of the relationship between the world of words and the world of things.
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