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Leonardo Peskin's book is a commendable, intelligent, thorough, and generous attempt to bring together and clarify—in a manner both simple and profound—such thorny, complex issues as reality, the subject, and the object. He addresses such a large number of issues that it is nearly impossible to dwell on all of them. Also, what is so strikingly interesting is the collection of highly complex and refined Lacanian developments, narrated in his own language and from his own perspective, and always informed by the infallible compass of Freudian thought. As such, I would define Peskin's text as a model of Freudo-Lacanianism, in the best sense of the term. Perhaps this is why the title itself does not mention the Real, but speaks instead of reality, the subject, and the object. In a way, he draws on a particular moment and reading of Lacan himself, wherein the Real is not taken as a particular Point de capiton, but as one of the dit-mensions of the signifier in its particular relation to lack. It is in this sense that I would like to emphasise that the real is not what cannot be spoken, but rather what cannot be spoken because it is spoken, with all of the implications this entails.
In the introduction, the author states that reality, whatever it may be, is fantasmatic, and that, from a Lacanian perspective, the fantasm is what helps to conceptualise and sustain Freudian reality, basically considered in its development as psychic reality. This, Peskin adds, brings us to discuss if multiple realities, such as historical and material reality, are also subject to the same fantasmatic configuration, although he notes that, in order to organise these multiple realities, the work of subjectivity is required, which is basically constituted as the symbolic fulfils its function of separating the imaginary from the real. Peskin is clearly committed to abolishing any flat or plain dimensions of objectivity.
As we are dealing with a homonym, it is important to clarify what type of reali