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Upon reflecting on the relation between theory and experience it is impossible to miss a constitutive and paradoxical tension marking this whole domain. Since Lacan was so fond of paradoxes, a Lacanian approach to the theory/experience dyad seems pertinent and justified; moreover it might prove revealing. Let's start, then, with mapping the contours of this paradox or tension, a tension that is neither epiphenomenal nor accidental. On a fairly simple level the main purpose of theory seems to be to approach and account for experience and then direct our praxis, that is to say guide and “canalise” experience and action in ethically sound and “legitimate” chanells. This is a very simple and almost “neutral” statement. It is a widely shared belief that “the main reason for believing scientific theories is that they explain the coherence of our experience.” This is, in fact, a quotation from Alan Sokal's now infamous book (Sokal and Bricmont 55). The problem is, however, that theoretical inquiry and theory construction continuously fail to account for and understand the totality of experience, let alone to predict and direct human praxis. Even in Sokal's text, where the “holy” integrity of science is defended at all cost, the aforementioned statement is true only if we reduce experience to scientific experiments and scientific theories to the “best-verified ones”; this is again a quotation (Sokal and Bricmont 55). The problem here is, however, that scientific experiments constitute an already domesticated field of experience, a field of measurements that are already paradigm-determined—that is to say, contaminated by the same theory they are called to verify (Kuhn 126). Nevertheless, the verification they provide usually seems enough to sustain the fantasy “that the scientific community knows what the world is like,” the fantasy that “verified” theories adequately represent the field of raw experience (Kuhn 5).
It is this circularity of an already symbolized experience su