So when when Butler asks the rhetorical question
Why should we conceive of universality as an empty ‘place’ which awaits its content in an anterior and subsequent event? Is it empty only because it has already disavowed or suppressed the content from which it emerges, and where is the trace of the disavowed in the formal structure that emerges? (JB, 34)
I fully endorse her implicit stance. My answer … is: Lacan’s ‘primoridal repression’ of das Ding (of the pre-symbolic incestuous Real Thing) is precisely that which creates universality as an empty place … This very necessity of the primordial repression shows clearly why one should distinguish between the exclusion of the Real that opens up the empty place of the universal and the subsequent hegemonic struggles of different particular contents to occupy this empty place. … And here I am even tempted to read Butler against herself — say, against her sympathetic recapitulation of Laclau
Inevitable as it is that a political organization will posit the possible filling of that [empty place of the universal] as an ideal, it is equally inevitable that it will fail to do so (JB 32).
It is in endorsing this logic of the ideal to be endlessly approximated that I see the underlying Kantianism of both Butler and Laclau (257).
Here I think it is crucial to defend the key Hegelian insight directed against the Kantian position of the universal a priori frame distorted by empirical ‘pathological’ conditions … it is not enough to posit a universal formal criterion and then to agree that, owing to contingent empirical distortions, reality will never fully rise to its level. The question is rather
how, through what violent operation of exclusion/repression, does this universal frame itself emerge? With regard to the notion of hegemony, this means that it is not enough to assert the gap between the empty universal signifier and the particular signifiers that endeavour to fill its void — the question to be raised is, again, how, through what operation of exclusion, does this void itself emerge?
For Lacan, this preceding loss (the loss of das Ding, what Freud called ‘primary repression’), is not the loss of a determinate object (say, the renunciation of the same-sex libidinal partner), but the loss which paradoxically precedes any lost object, so that each positive object that is elevated to the place of the Thing (Lacan’s definition of sublimation) in a way gives body to this loss. What this means is that the Lacanian Real, the bar of impossibility it stands for, does not primarily cross the subject, but the big Other itself, the socio-symbolic ‘substance’ that confronts the subject and in which the subject is embedded.
In other words, far from signalling any kind of closure which constrains the scope of the subject’s intervention in advance, the bar of the Real is Lacan’s way of asserting the terrifying abyss of the subject’s ultimate and radical freedom, the freedom whose space is sustained by the Other’s inconsistency and lack.
So — to conclude with Kierkegaard, to whom Laclau refers: ‘the moment of decision is the moment of madness’ precisely in so far as there is no big Other to provide the ultimate guarantee, the ontological cover for the subject’s decision (258).