I have dealt extensively with the rhetorical and discursive devices through which contingently articulated social relations become ‘naturalilzed’ in order to legitimize relations of power (288).
If I have called the general equivalent unifying an undisturbed equivalential chain the empty signifier, I will call the one whose emptiness results from the unfixity introduced by a plurality of discourses interupting each other the floating signifier. In practice, both processes overdetermine each other, but it is important to keep the analytical distinction between them.
(305).