Myth and the Real

In Boothby's reading, "Myth and the Real" names the structural relationship between mythological discourse and the Lacanian Real — not as a failure of myth to achieve scientific or rational explanation, but as myth's deliberate vocation: to hold open a gap in the order of knowledge that no narrative resolution is permitted to close. Drawing on Lacan's own gloss on mythos in the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Boothby argues that myth's constitutive move is not the production of credible cosmological accounts but the aesthetic and ethical preservation of the inexplicable kernel at the heart of existence. Every myth, in this account, circles around das Ding — the Thing that resists symbolization — and its success is measured not by explanatory adequacy but by the fidelity with which it keeps the encounter with the unknowable alive. This is myth understood as a form of sublimation: it "raises" the divine to the dignity of the Thing without domesticating it into a positive object of knowledge.

The concept thus inverts the standard anthropological or rationalist reading of myth (as proto-science, as etiological narrative, as wish-fulfillment). Instead, myth belongs to the register of the Real precisely because it functions through what it refuses to resolve. Its irreducible ambiguity, its narrative incompleteness, its gods that exceed moral comprehension — all of these are not deficiencies but structural achievements. Myth protects the Real from the imaginary closure that would reduce it to a knowable, manipulable image, and from the symbolic closure that would absorb it into the chain of signification as just another signified. The Lacanian formulation that "every myth is related to the inexplicable nature of reality [réel]" thus positions myth not alongside Knowledge (savoir) but in deliberate, productive tension with it.

This concept appears in diaeresis-richard-boothby-embracing-the-void-rethinking-the-origin-of-the-sacred (p.93) and sits at the intersection of several canonical Lacanian coordinates. Its most direct anchor is das Ding: if sublimation means raising an object to the dignity of the Thing without collapsing the structural gap that the Thing names, then myth accomplishes precisely this operation at the level of collective, cultural discourse — the divine figure in myth occupies the place of das Ding, radiating inexplicability. The concept is simultaneously an extension of the Real, specifying one domain — mythological narrative — in which the Real's resistance to symbolization is not an accident or a failure but the intended product. Myth, on this account, is one of the few symbolic practices that succeeds by preserving its own impossibility.

The relationship to Knowledge is equally central: Boothby's argument is explicitly polemical against readings that assimilate myth to the imaginary register of proto-scientific connaissance. By insisting that myth's function is to leave reality inexplicable — to block rather than fill in the gap — Boothby aligns myth with what Lacanian ethics would call fidelity to das Ding, or, in terms of the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, refusal of the "service of goods" (here, the service of cognitive reassurance). The Imaginary functions as the foil: it is the imaginary register that demands coherent, believable narrative; myth's genuine achievement is to resist that demand. Finally, Sublimation is the operative mechanism: myth does not eliminate the void around the Thing but gives it aesthetic and cultural form — a form that, precisely, preserves rather than resolves the void. The concept is best understood as a specification of sublimation applied to the domain of sacred narrative, with the Real as the structural condition of possibility for that operation.

Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the SacredRichard Boothby · 2023 (p.93)

Myth was intentionally meant to leave open a dimension of reality beyond understanding. Lacan clearly perceived this other function of mythos: 'Every myth,' he says, 'is related to the inexplicable nature of reality [réel].'

The phrase "intentionally meant to leave open" is theoretically decisive because it converts what positivist readings treat as a cognitive deficiency — myth's failure to explain — into a deliberate structural achievement, aligning myth's function with the Lacanian Real as that which "resists symbolisation absolutely." The citation of Lacan's "inexplicable nature of reality [réel]" then locks the argument into the register of the Real rather than the Imaginary or Symbolic, making myth's inexplicability not a gap to be filled by knowledge but the very condition that myth is designed to sustain.