Avatar combines the hyper-reality of a fantasmic “natural” life on a distant planet with the ordinary reality of military, imperialist neocolonism. The film reproduces several Hollywood genres: history is the stage for the Oedipal narrative of the production of the couple; a full thrust in a digitally enhanced fantasy is enacted; the white man marries the princess of the aborigins and becomes their leader. Rather than changing reality, the filmic fantasy supports existing power, in contrast to contemporary revolution movements, such as the Maoist Naxalite campaign in India on behalf of tribal peoples.

The author examines some recent sci-fi films – J. Cameron’s Avatar, N. Blomkamp’s District 9, the animated film Wall-E – insofar as they evoke how the dominant (American) mass culture of today thematizes our relation with the Other. Here, while the Other takes the form of “good” extra- terrestrials, it also picks up on the Western movies’ tradition, where the Other was usually the Red Indians. In Wall-E otherness is thematized as robotic, thus illustrating a new type of relationship between humans and machines, according to the leading conceptions of today. Through these movies, American mass culture sends the world the universalistic message by which every otherness is repossessed. The idea is that, basically, the Other is never really alien, but always some-one I could or will be. But this repossessing colonization of the Other misses the real otherness of the Other. The whole Rousseauian and liberal elegy of the repossession of the Other through the cinema is an effort to free us from the horror of this alien “who or which is coming”, what Derrida called “l’arrivance”.

The author examines some features of the work of the Italo-Chilean film director Marco Bechis, in their relation to the Real. His peculiar talent for grasping and expressing the Real – antithetical to any form of spectacularization – makes use of a cinematographic language that could be regarded as a ‘degree zero’ of fiction.

The notion of the Real in Lacan is often very confusing, joining together the most intuitive and the most elusive characteristics. The paper offers to untie the knot of the Real by comparing it to irrational numbers. Like the Real, irrational numbers defy traditional notions. They are many and appear everywhere. Indeed, without them there is no continuity at all, anywhere in the numerical axis. Yet, there are two strategies of approximating irrational numbers, one by infinite series of rational numbers and one by cutting the real continuum. These strategies represent the manner in which the Real is approximated by Symbolic and Imaginary means respectively. As with the irrational numbers – e.g., Pi and Ln – we can give names to the places that mark the Real. These are the objet petit ‘a’. Their main characteristic is that, despite being clearly ‘not it’, they generate powerful affects, much like irrational numbers. Some consequences of the mathematical metaphor are illustrated in clinical vignettes.

A brief reconstruction of Lacan’s intellectual path in psychoanalysis. After an early phase, predominantly philosophical and centering on the problem of the subject of the unconscious, there followed a later one, potentially scientific, centered on the nature of the object of desire.