The limits of social construction - Commentary on paper by Cynthia Dyess and Tim Dean

The insufficiencies that Joan Copjec finds in the work of Judith Butler are the same kind Dyess and Dean want to alert us to in relational psychoanaly sis. Two dangers of this nature are reification (that is, the relational po sition's becoming "the Book") and a flirtation with superficiality (a poten tial outcome of believing that all experience can be understood in the term s of social relatedness). Theorizing "the impossibility of meaning" may be a first step in addressing these problems without having to limit the terms of the discussion to nature and nurture, or essence and social constructio n. But the idea of the Real is inextricably interrelated with, and mutually defined by, other parts of Lacan's theory. And so, if we simply import int o relational psychoanalysis Lacan's conception of the Real, we are mixing a pples and oranges and thereby risking conceptual confusion. We should inste ad use Lacan's idea as inspiration for the construction of a conception of "the impossibility of meaning" that can be used in theorizing the particula r kind of problems relational psychoanalysis sets itself.