Tada: JB is critical of the way in which Žižek makes sexual d. ahistorical Real, traumatic and thus outside the struggle for hegemony, JB asks how it can both occasion the chain and is also a link in the chain. How’s that. Žižek replies by accepting this paradox. Further according to the Hegelian concrete universality and also JB’s own work Žižek argues that sexual d is a ‘concrete universality’ in that it attempt to be universal gets overdetermined by its very particular contents. Žižek uses the example of religion, I wish he just used sexual d as an example. But he’s saying I guess the universal difference male/female though universal, will be overtaken by its particular content that tries to fill out this universal. Žižek here cites JB and says that each particularity asserts its own mode of universality (JB’s ‘competing universalities’) Does Žižek’s response satisfy JB? I think not. The very frame male/female is still a sticking point for JB. Even though she understands fully Žižek’s point about how that universality gets differentially articulated. (Man I’m getting good at this eh?)
This problem … is related to the ‘quasi-transcendental’ status that Žižek attributes to sexual difference. If he is right, then sexual difference, in it most fundamental aspect, is outside the struggle for hegemony even as he claims with great clarity that its traumatic and non-symbolizable status occasions the concrete struggles over what its meaning should be. I gather that sexual difference is distinguished from other struggles within hegemony precisely because those other struggles — ‘class’ and ‘nation’, for instance — do not simultaneously name a fundamental and traumatic difference and a concrete, contingent historical identity. Both ‘class’ and ‘nation’ appear within the field of the symbolizable horizon on the occasion of this more fundamental lack, but one would not be tempted, as one is with the example of sexual difference, to call that fundamental lack ‘class’ or ‘nation’ (143).
Thus, sexual difference occupies a distinctive position within the chain of signifiers, one that both occasions the chain and is one link in the chain. How are we to think the vacillation between these two meanings, and are they always distinct, given that the transcendental is the ground, and occasions a sustaining condition for what is called the historical?
Žižek replies:
I fully assume this paradox … This overdetermination of universality by part of its content, this short circuit between the universal and particular, is the key feature of Hegelian ‘concrete universality’, and I am in total agreement with Butler who, it seems to me, also aims at this legacy of ‘concrete universality’ in her central notion of ‘competing universalities’: in her insistence on how each particular position, in order to articulate itself, involves the (implicit or explicit) assertion of its own mode of universality, she develops a point which I aslo try repeatedly to make in my own work (314-315).
… it is not enough to say that the genus Religion is divided into a multitude of species … the point, rather, is that each of these particular species involves its own universal notion of what religion is ‘as such’, as well as its own view on (how it differs from) other religions. Christianity is not simply different from Judaism and Islam; within its horizon, the very difference that separates it from the other two ‘religions of the Book’ appears in a way which is unacceptable for the other two. In other words when a Christian debates with a Muslim, they do not simply disagree — they disagree about their very disagreement: about what makes the difference between their religions … This is Hegel’s ‘concrete universality‘: since each particularity involves its own universality, its own notion of the Whole and its own part within it, there is no ‘neutral’ universality that would serve as the medium for these particular positions.
Thus Hegelian ‘dialectical development’ is not a deployment of a particular content within universality but the process by which, in the passage from one particularity to another, the very universality that encompasses both also changes: ‘concrete universality’ designates precisely this ‘inner life’ of universality itself, this process of passage in the course of which the very universality that aims at encompassing it is caught in it, submitted to transformations (316).