Judith Butler, in her 1993 book Bodies That Matter begins her discussion of Zizek thus:
On the notion of the Lacanian Real, she says:
To the extent that the law or regulatory mechanism of foreclosure … this law is exempted from the discursive and social rearticulation that it initiates. This exemption is, I would argue, highly consequential insofar as this law is understood to be that which produces and normativizes sexed positionalities in their intelligibility. To the extent that this law engages the traumatic production of a sexual antagonism in its symbolic normativity, it can do this only by barring from cultural intelligibility — and rendering culturally abject — cultural organizations of sexuality that exceed the structuring purview of that law. The risk, of course, is that contingent regulatory mechanisms of subject-production may be reified as universal laws, exempted from the very process of discursive rearticulation that they occasion (190).
Paradoxically the failure of such signifiers —”women” is the one that comes to mind — fully to describe the constituency they name is precisely what constitutes these signifiers as sites of phantasmatic investment and discursive rearticulation. It is what opens the signifier to new meaning and new possibilities for political resignification. It is this open-ended and performative function of the signifier that seems to me to be crucial to a radical democratic notion of futurity (191)