how Z. understands JB’s concept of resignification:
… her notion is that since ideological universality (the space of interpellation), in order to reproduce itself and retain its hold, has to rely on its repeated assumption by the subject, this repetition is not only the passive assuming of the same mandate, but opens up the space of re-formation, resignification, displacement — it is possible to resignify/displace the ‘symbolic substance’ which redetermines my identity, but not totally to overhaul it, since a total exit would involve the psychotic loss of my symbolic identity. This resignification can work even in the extreme case of injurious interpellations: they determine me, I cannot get rid of them, they are the condition of my symbolic being/identity; rejecting them tout court would bring about psychosis; but what I can do is resignify/displace them, mockingly assume them: the possibilities of resignification will rework and unsettle the passionate attachment to subjection without which subject-formation — and re-formation — cannot succeed’ (222).
There is however, a limit to this process of resignification, and the Lacanian name for this limit, of course, is precisely the Real. How does this Real operate in language? … this collapse of the distinction between pretending and being is the unmistakable signal that my speech act has touched some Real … hate speech, aggressive humiliation … In such cases, no amount of disguising it with the semblance of a joke or irony can prevent it from having a hurtful effect — we touch the Real when the efficiency of such symbolic markers of distance is suspended.
[I]n so far as we conceive of the politico-ideological resignification in the terms of struggle for hegemony, today’s Real which sets a limit to resignification is Capital: the smooth functioning of Capital is that which remains the same, that which ‘always returns to its place’, in the unconstrained struggle for hegemony.
Is this not demonstrated by the fact that Butler, as well as Laclau, in their criticism of the old ‘essentialist’ Marxism, none the less silently accept a set of premisses: they never question the fundamentals of the capitalist market economy and the liberal-democratic political regime; they never envisage the possiblity of a completely different economico-political regime. In this way, they fully participate in the abandonment of these questions by the ‘postmodern’ Left: all the changes they propose are changes within this economico-political regime (223).
Butler responds:
I think this is a peculiar way to use the notion of the ‘Real’, unless of course he is claiming that ‘Capital’ has become unspeakable within the discourses that Laclau and I use. But if he is saying that ‘Capital’ represents the limit of our discourse: then he is —forgive the ‘logical’ point here — confirming my very theory about the absences that structure discourse, that they are defined in relation to the discourse itself, and that they are not derivable in every instance from an ahistorical ‘bar’ that gives us every historicized field. Setting his use of the Butlerian ‘Real’ aside, however, Zizek makes a good point: that a critique of the market economy is not found in these pages. But he himself does not provide one. Why is this? (277).
My sense is that our work is commonly motivated by a desire for a more radically restructured world, one which would have economic equality and political enfranchisement imagined in much more radical ways than they currently are. The question, though, that remains to be posed for us, I believe, is how we will make the translations between the philosophical commentary on the field of politics and the reimagining of political life.
This is surely the kind of question which will render productive and dynamic the opposition between formalism and historicism, between the ostensibly a priori and the a posteriori. One might reply that any notion of economic equality will rely on a more generalized understanding of equality, and that that is part of what is interrogated by this kind of work. … For what happens to the notion of equality when it becomes economic equality? And what happens to the notion of the future when it becomes an economic future? we ought not simply to ‘plug in’ the economic as the particular field whose conditions of possiblity can be thought out on an a priori level. It my also be that the very sphere of the economic needs to be rethought genealogically. Its separation from the cultural, for instance, by structuralist legacies within anthropology might need to be rethought against those who claim that the very separation of those spheres is a consequence of capital itself (277-278).
Laclau responds:
According to Zizek, capitalism is the Real of present-day societies for it is that which always returns. Now, he knows as well as I do what the Lacanian Real is; so he should also be aware that capitalism cannot be the Lacanian Real. The Lacanian Real is that which resists symbolization, and shows itself only through its disruptive effects. [:) Ž would disagree] But capitalism as a set of institutions, practices, and so on can operate only in so far as it is part of the symbolic order. And if, on top of that one thinks —as Ž does — that capitalism is a self-generated framework proceeding out of an elementary conceptual matrix, it has to be — conceptually — fully graspable and, as a result, a symbolic totality without holes. (The fact that it can cause, like any area of the symbolic, distortitive — and so Real — effects over other areas — does not mean that it is as such, the Real.) But, as Zizek knows, there are no symbolic totalities without holes. In that case, capitalism as such is dislocated by the Real, and it is open to contingent hegemonic retotalizations.
Ergo, it cannot be the fundamentum inconcussum, the framework within which hegemonic struggles take place, because — as a totality — it is itself only the result of partial hegemonic stabilizations. So the totality can never be internally generated, for the interior will be essentially contaminated by an ineradicable exteriority. This means that the Hegelian retroactive reversal of contingency into necessity is a totally inadequate conceptual tool to think the logic of a hegemonic retotalization (291-292).