The Three Peirce’s Categories and the Three Lacan’s Registers.

Abstract

The first part of this paper proposes a general comparison between Peirce’s three universal phenomenological categories of firstness, secondness, and thirdness on one hand and Lacan’s three registers, also called the conceptual categories of human reality, the categories of the imaginary, the real, and the symbolic on the other hand. The second part develops the comparative analysis between Peirce and Lacan even further, showing that the logic of the third category, which is the logic of the sign, can function as a guiding map towards the understanding of the complex interactions that the three registers, the imaginary, the real, and the simbolic, have with each other.