The echo of an existence is “mere echo”; it’s irrelevant with respect to the existing thing, like the world of religion is a mere “echo chamber” that emanates from the only Thing in existence: God.

But if you lend existence to the echo itself, it is altered in kind and extent: It becomes an ex-sistence that always has “more echo” in store [1].

An echo that ex-sists is no longer irrelevant; it deserves recognition, interpretation and analysis although it still feels uncanny and strange since it can only belong to an inexistence: The echo has become surrelevant.

The ex-sistence of more echo adorns reality with a surreal quality. Two consecutive steps take place:
1) Possibility breaks down into impossibility; this gives the merely unreal quality.
2) One tunes into the surrelevant echo that emanates from that impossibility; this gives the properly surreal quality.

But when reality is constituted and authorized, all unreal-surreal traces “will have been” erased and sacrificed. Lacanian real is irreducible to reality precisely because it still bears the unreal-surreal traces on its body (corporeal); it is non-identical, disparate, symptomatic [2].

We can now easily describe the neurotic dialectic between the obsessional and the hysteric:

1) The obsessional insists on erasing and sacrificing the irrelevant traces of “mere echo” in order to reach the “original existence” that it belongs to, so that he can “understand” what exists; that is, “stand under” the rock of existence and “lift it up again” (re-levo) like Sisyphus.

2) The hysteric persists in resurrecting surrelevant “more echo” and reanimating its unreal-surreal traces by lending her ex-sistence to it. The persistence of hysteric desire does not truly intend to challenge the obsessional insistence to “understand”, but it is inevitably perceived as such.

Notice that obsessional insistence belongs to “the” definite article whereas hysteric persistence belongs to “an” indefinite article. They thereby make up two forms of the famous “one one”:
1) “a the” (Master-Signifier)
2) “the a” (objet petit a)

The obsessional appears to the hysteric like Master-Signifier, whereas the hysteric appears to the obsessional like objet petit a.

There are two further forms of “one one”:
3) “the the”
4) “an a”

The double definition “the the” can only be sustained by a perverse disavowal to resolve the “cognitive dissonance” that it implies, as in Orwellian doublethink or hypo-critical doublespeak.

In contrast, the double indefinition “an a” can unhinge itself from reality (without “the”) and support a psychotic structure.

Işık Barış Fidaner is a computer scientist with a PhD from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. Admin of Yersiz Şeyler, Editor of Žižekian Analysis, Curator of Görce Writings. Twitter: @BarisFidaner

Notes:

[1] See “Ego is Echocide before Ecocide”

[2] See “Identity and Disparity of Same and Different”