Rickert, Thomas. Acts of Enjoyment.
However as Torfing explains in New Theories of Discourse, there is a difference between conceiving the social as a totality that always falls short of closure and conceiving it as something already fundamentally split or fissured that we try and fail to conceive as a totality (Torfing 52)(45).
This is the point at which Žižek parts company with Laclau and Mouffe. While he retains notions such as chains of signifiers and a discursive field open to rearticulations, he theorizes the discursive field in terms of a fundamental fissure, not simply as something nontotalizable.
From Žižek’s perspective, the social is better understood in terms of a fundamental antagonism that prevents any closure, rather than as a Derridean field of signifiers whose incompleteness stems from the signifier’s free play in the absence of any organizing, totalizing center. It is thus a question of whether substitution or antagonism is primary in the operations of discourse. (45)