This is from Žižek’s 1993 interview with Peter Osborne
Žižek, Slavoj. “Postscript” (1993) A Critical Sense: Interviews with Intellectuals ed. Peter Osborne, New York: Routledge, 1996
- These Foucauldian practices of inventing new strategies, new identities, are ways of playing the late capitalist game of subjectivity (40)
- [Lacan’s point] is that there is a certain fundamental deadlock – the Lacanian real, why not call it ‘gender trouble’? – and the putative subject formulates different symbolic constructs to avoid this deadlock.
- Let’s not forget the famous problem of feminine enjoyment. The real does not refer to some substantial, positive entity beyond the symbolic, resisting symbolization. … So what Lacan calls ‘the real’ is nothing beyond the symbolic, it’s merely the inherent inconsistency of the symbolic order itself.
- It is the Lacanian notion of the real that I miss in Gender Trouble which produces its political problems. It is because of this that Butler’s political project remains entirely within a liberal-democratic frame (41).
- The kernel that resists historicization is not a positive one, it is not notions like father, authority, Oedipus. The kernel that resists historicization can be defined only in the terms of a certain impossibility, a deadlock, in purely negative ways. … When the classical repressive patriarchal sexual ideology was breaking down, there was a certain opening, but as soon as these new forms of sexuality were integrated, this deadlock became invisible again (42).