Laclau seems to think I have fallen asleep at the job … To insist upon the term [social] is not to engage in a sociologism that presumes the foundational status of social causalities. On the contrary, I insist upon it here because it seems that the term now signifies something of a superseded past. The formalist account of the a priori structures of political articulation tend either to figure the ‘social’ as its prehistory or to deploy the ‘social’ as anecdote and example for the pre-social structure it articulates (270).
Indeed, if one is interested in understanding the politics of gender the embodied performativity of social norms will emerge as one of the central sites of political contestation. This is not a view of the social that is settled, but it does represent a series of politically consequential sites of analysis that no purely formalist account of the empty sign [jab at Laclau] will be able to address in adequate terms.
Moreover if we take the point proffered by Wittgenstein that ‘logic’ is not mimetically reproduced in the language we use — that the logically enumerated picture of the world does not correspond to the grammar of language, but, on the contrary, that grammar induces logic itself — it becomes necessary to return logical relations to the linguistic practices by which they are engendered. Thus, even if Laclau is able to establish something logically contradictory about my position, he remains within the unexamined sphere of logical relations, separating logic from linguistic practice, and so failing to engage the fundamental terms of disagreement between us (270-271).
I take the point — put forward by Zizek and Laclau alike — that it does not do justice to thier positions to contrast an ahistorical account of the symbolic to a historicized notion of discourse; but I am not fully convinced that the way to undermine that opposition is through positing the ahistorical as the internal condition of the historical. Zizek writes
The opposition between the ahistorical bar of the Real and thoroughly contingent historicity is … a false one: it is the very “ahistorical” bar as the internal limit of the process of symbolization that sustains the space of historicty (214)
it does seem striking that the figure [the bar] selected to present temporality would be one that contains and denies it. … Thus in this view, at the heart or in the kernel of all historicity is the ahistorical (274-275).
Significantly, when he later claims that I am ‘caught in the game of power that [I] oppose’ (SZ 220), he does not consider that such complicity is, for me, the condition of agency rather than its destruction (277).