temple; whereas a member of the second ('revolutionary-antagonistic') subgroup perceives his or her village as two distinct clusters of houses separated by an invisible frontier . . . . Where is the homology with Einstein here? Lévi-Strauss's central point is that this example should in no way entice us into a cultural relativism according to which the perception of social space depends on the observer's group membership: the very splitting into the two 'relative' perceptions implies the hidden reference to a constant -- not the objective, 'actual' arrangement of buildings but a traumatic kernel, a fundamental antagonism the inhabitants of the village were not able to symbolize, to account for, to 'internalize', to come to terms with: an imbalance in social relations that prevented the community from stabilizing itself into a harmonious whole. The two perceptions of the ground-plan are simply two mutually exclusive endeavours to cope with this traumatic antagonism, to heal its wound via the imposition of a balanced symbolic structure. (And it is hardly necessary to add that things are exactly the same with respect to sexual difference: 'masculine' and 'feminine' are like the two configurations of houses in the Lévi-Straussian village. . . .)

Common sense tells us that it is easy to rectify the bias of subjective perceptions and ascertain the 'true state of things': we hire a helicopter and photograph the village directly from above . . . . In this way we obtain an undistorted view of reality, yet we completely miss the real of social antagonism, the non-symbolizable traumatic kernel that found expression in the very distortions of reality, in the fantasized displacements of the 'actual' arrangement of houses. This is what Lacan has in mind when he claims that distortion and/or dissimulation is in itself revealing: what emerges via distortions of the accurate representation of reality is the real -- that is, the trauma around which social reality is structured. In other words, if all the inhabitants of the village were to draw the same accurate ground-plan, we would be dealing with a non-antagonistic, harmonious community. If we are to arrive at the fundamental paradox implied by the notion of commodity fetishism, however, we have to go one step further and imagine, say, two different 'actual' villages each of which realizes, in the arrangement of its dwellings, one of the two fantasized ground-plans evoked by Lévi-Strauss: in this case, the structure of social reality itself materializes an attempt to cope with the real of antagonism. 'Reality' itself, in so far as it is regulated by a symbolic fiction, conceals the real of an antagonism -- and it is this real, foreclosed from the symbolic fiction, that returns in the guise of spectral apparitions.

Such a reading of spectrality as that which fills out the unrepresentable abyss of antagonism, of the non-symbolized real, also enables us to assume a precise distance from Derrida, for whom spectrality, the

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