Rex Butler basically from his book Žižek Live Theory of which a portion is available here
But what exactly is wrong with the empirical refutation of anti-Semitism? Why do we have the feeling that it does not effectively oppose its logic, and in a way even repeats it (just as earlier we saw the cultural studies-style rejection of competing interpretations of the shark – ‘It is not really like that!’ – far from breaking our fascination with the shark, in fact continuing or even constituting it)?
Why are we always too late with regard to the master-signifier, only able to play its interpretation against the object or the object against its interpretation, when it is the very circularity between them that we should be trying to grasp?
Undoubtedly, Zizek’s most detailed attempt to describe how the master-signifier works with regard to the Jew is the chapter “Does the Subject Have a Cause?” in Metastases of Enjoyment.
As he outlines it there, in a first moment in the construction of anti-Semitic ideology, a series of markers that apparently speak of certain ‘real’ qualities is seen to designate the Jew, or the Jew appears as a signifier summarizing – Zizek’s term is ‘immediating, abbreviating’ – a cluster of supposedly effective properties. Thus:
(1) (avaricious, profiteering, plotting, dirty . . .) is called Jewish.
Then, in a second moment, we reverse this process and ‘explicate’ the Jew with the same series of qualities. Thus:
(2) X is called Jewish because they are (avaricious, profiteering, plotting, dirty . . .).
Finally, we reverse the order again and posit the Jew as what Zizek calls the ‘reflexive abbreviation’ of the entire series. Thus:
(3) X is (avaricious, profiteering, plotting, dirty . . .) because they are Jewish (ME, 48-9).
In this third and final stage, as Zizek says, Jew ‘explicates’ the very preceding series it ‘immediates’ or ‘abbreviates’. In it, ‘abbreviation and explication dialectically coincide’ (ME, 48).
That is, within the discursive space of anti-Semitism, Jews are not simply Jews because they display that set of qualities (profiteering, plotting . . .) previously attributed to them. Rather, they have this set of qualities because they are Jewish.
What is the difference? As Zizek emphasizes, even though stage (3) appears tautological, or seems merely to confirm the circularity between (1) and (2), this is not true at all. For what is produced by this circularity is a certain supplement ‘X’, what is ‘in Jew more than Jew’: Jew not just as master-signifier but as objet (a).
As Zizek says, with stage (3) we are not just thrown back on to our original starting point, for now Jew is ‘no longer a simple abbreviation that designates a series of markers but the name of the hidden ground of this series of markers that act as so many expression-effects of this ground’ (ME, 49).
Jew is not merely a series of qualities, but what these qualities stand in for.
Jew is no longer a series of differences, but different even from itself.
But, again, what exactly is meant by this?
How is the Jew able to move from a series of specific qualities, no matter how diverse or even contradictory, to a master-signifier covering the entire ideological field without exception?
How is it that we are able to pass, to use an analogy with Marx’s analysis of the commodity form that Zizek often plays on, from an expanded to a ‘general’ or even ‘universal’ form of anti-Semitism (ME, 49)?
The first thing to note here is that stages (1) and (2) are not simply symmetrical opposites.
In (1), corresponding perhaps to that first moment of ideological critique we looked at with Jaws, a number of qualities are attributed to the Jew in an apparently immediate, unreflexive way: (profiteering, plotting . . .) is Jew.
In (2), corresponding to that second moment of ideological critique, these same qualities are then attributed to the Jew in a mediated, reflexive fashion: Jew is (profiteering, plotting . . .). In other words, as with the shark in Jaws, we do not so much speak directly about the Jew, but about others’ attempts to speak of the Jew.
Each description before all else seeks to dispute, displace, contest others’ attempts to speak of the Jew. Each description is revealed as a meta-description, an attempt to say what the Jew and all those others have in common.
Each description in (1) is revealed to be an implicit explication in (2). Each attempts to name that difference – that ‘Jew’ – that is left out by others’ attempts to speak of the Jew. Each attempts to be the master-signifier of the others.
And yet – this is how (3) ‘returns’ us to (1); this is how the Jew is not just a master-signifier but also an objet (a) – to the very extent that the Jew is only the relationship between discourses, what allows us to speak of others’ relationship to the Jew, there is always necessarily another that comes after us that speaks of our relationship to the Jew.
Jew in this sense is that ‘difference’ behind any attempt to speak of difference, that ‘conspiracy’ behind any named conspiracy. That is, each description of the Jew can be understood as the very failure to adopt a meta-position vis-à-vis the Jew.
Each attempt to take up a meta-position in (2) is revealed to be merely another in an endless series of qualities in (1).
That master-signifier in (2) that tries to name what all these different descriptions have in common fails precisely because we can always name another; the series is always open to that difference that allows it to be named.
And ‘Jew’, we might say, is the name for this very difference itself: objet (a)