Author: logocentric

butler catachresis

Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim. New York: Columbia UP, 2000.

Hegel has clearly identified the law for which Antigone speaks as the unwritten law of the ancient gods, one that appears only by way of an active trace.  Indeed, what kind of law would it be? A law for which no origin can be found, a law whose trace can take no form, whose authority is not directly communicable though written language.

If it is communicable, this law would emerge through speech, but a speech that cannot be spoken from script and, so, certainly not the speech of a play, unless the play calls upon a legality, as it were, prior to its own scene of enunciation, unless the play commits a crime against this legality precisely by speaking it.  Thus the figure of this other law calls into question the literalism of the play, Antigone: no words in this play will give us this law, no words in this play will recite the strictures of this law. How, then, will it be discerned?

The laws of which she speaks are, strictly speaking, before writing, not yet registered or registerable at the level of writing. They are not fully knowable; but the state knows enough about them to oppose them violently.  Although these laws are unwritten, she nevertheless speaks in their name, and so they emerge only in the form of CATACHRESIS that serves as the prior condition and limt to written codification. 39

… the limit for which she stands, a limit for which no standing, no translatable representation is possible, is not precisely the trace of an alternate legality that haunts the conscious, public sphere as its scandalous future. 40

🙂 This law is also called the ‘unconscious’ of the public law.

Žižek deconstitution of subject

Žižek, Slavoj. “Schelling-for-Hegel: The ‘Vanishing Mediator’” The Indivisible Remainder. London: Verso, 1996, 92-186.

Hegel’s whole point is the subject does NOT survive the ordeal of negativity: he effectively loses his very essence, and passes over into his Other. One is tempted to evoke here the science-fiction theme of changed identity, when a subject biologically survives, but is no longer the same person – this is what the Hegelian transubstantiation is about, and of course, it is this very transubstantiation which distinguishes Subject from Substance: ‘subject’ designates that X which is able to survive the loss of its very substantial identity, and to continue to live as the ‘empty shell of its former self’.

[T]he symbolic order (the big Other) is organized around a hole in its very heart, around the traumatic Thing which makes it ‘non-all’; it is defined by the impossibility of attaining the Thing; however, it is this very reference to the void of the Thing that opens up the space for symbolization, since without it the symbolic order would immediately ‘collapse’ into the designated reality – this is to say, the distance that separates ‘words’ from ‘things’ would disappear.

The void of the Thing is therefore both things at the same time: the inaccessible ‘hard kernel’ around which the symbolization turns, which eludes it, the cause of its failure, and the very space of symbolization, its condition of possibility.

That is the ‘loop’ of symbolization: the very failure of symbolization opens up the void within which the process of symbolization takes place. 145

daly on Žižek

Daly, Glyn. “The Materialism of Spirit – Žižek and the Logics of the Political” International Journal of Žižek Studies. Vol1.4

Class has little/no analytical content and will not play the role that classical Marxism intended for it. Laclau and Mouffe consequently reject the Marxist view of class because it presents a closed and necessitarian picture of identity that does not reflect the true nature of contingent undecidable identities and their basic materialism.

But it is precisely this distinction that is under question. To affirm the authenticityof contingent-plural identities against the falsity of class necessity is perhaps already to adopt a certain infra-political gaze and to stand inside the reflexive economy of modern spirit (Žižek in Butler et al, 2000: 319-320; Žižek, 2004: 99-102; Žižek, 2006: 55-56).

Viewed from the negative, class does not appear as a positive position (endowed with a historic destiny etc.) but rather as a non-position: the impoverished, the destitute, the ‘wretched of the earth’ and all those who do not ‘count’ — a vanishing-point of value in order for the system of socio-economic valuation to function. Along the lines of Badiou, class stands for the void that is constitutive of multiplicity. It is the alchemical caput mortuum (death’s head) of Lacan: i.e. something which is itself empty of value but which, like a catalyst, is essential for the substance of value to be produced.

So while postmarxism is right to critique the positivistic status of class, what it overlooks is a view of class as an inherent and fundamental symptom of a systemic process in which capitalism tries to realize itself as a necessity – a kind of underlying dark matter that supports and stabilizes the positive forms of the capitalist universe. And it is precisely in its condition of symptom, of necessary anomaly, that the contingent nature of capitalist necessity is shown.

This also indicates a central problem with the idea of radical democracy: that is, it does not provide any real or systematic account of today’s symptoms or of those who are in a position to hold up the mirror to, to show the truth of, today’s cosmopolitan capitalism. In arguing for equivalences to be established between all disaffected groups within the terms of the democratic imaginary, the propensity exists for radical democracy to become removed from the more basic and constitutive forms of exclusion and to become increasingly entangled in endless cycles of infra-political networking. Political subjectivity would consequently become hyper-active – endlessly fascinated by its own positions, continually refining itself and so forth – but incapable of acting as such. So the danger exists that radical democracy could devolve into a rather empty proceduralism: regulating the provisional character of all political engagement, repeatedly marking the empty place of the universal, always reinforcing its own prohibition concerning the privileging of one democratic struggle over another and so on. It is on this basis that Norval (2004) draws direct, and rather uncomfortable, parallels between radical democracy and a Habermasian deliberative democracy (7-8).

gayle rubin’s essay, 35 years later

Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women” Toward Anthropology of Women.  Ed. Rayna R. Reiter. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975, pp. 157-210.

🙂 To what extent is Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble the natural heir to Gayle Rubin’s landmark 1975 essay?  Butler wrote her book 15 years later and in it she gave explicit recognition to Rubin’s crucial and innovative theory of the sex/gender system.  That is before Butler then proceeds to ‘jump off’ from where Rubin leaves off.  But perhaps this metaphor is misplaced.  Butler did not jump off from Rubin’s end point and proceed to enlarge upon her argument.  Butler’s early theoretical intervention owes much to Rubin in that it allows Butler a clear platform to articulate a deconstructive strategy that enables her to expose the clear lines of an argument regarding ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ that she would go on then to dismantle and that would produce the concept of “performativity” which gave a generation of social and political theorists a way out of a post-Althusserian quandary of thinking the materiality of subjectivity and ideology in a innovative and theoretically productive ways.

But now Butler herself, 15 or so years on after her landmark intervention is facing a number of challenges of her own.  Are Rubin’s roots in a Marxist problematic that Butler exorcised returning, as ziz would say, in the real, to haunt Butler?  This is not to argue an argument maintaining that Butler’s straying from a Marxist paradigm is coming back to haunt her.  Such calls for orthodoxy are not what is needed given what is required in political theory in the 21st C.

She starts with what is ‘the’ cause of women’s oppression, doesn’t dismiss a sole cause out of hand but states, ‘Instead, I want to sketch some elements of an alternate explanation of the problem.” 158 She begins with Claude Lévi-Strauss and Sigmund Freud. Because reading these works enables one to begin to understand within their social apparatus how it takes females as ‘raw materials and fashions domesticated women as products.”   She mentions the necessity of women in the sphere of reproduction of labor, domestic duties in order to maintain the health of the workers. But makes the important point that “Capitalism has taken over, and rewired, notions of male and female which predate it by centuries. No analysis of the reproduction of labour power under capitalism can explain foot-binding, chastity belts … … the analysis of reproduction of labor power does not even explain why it is usually women who do domestic work in the home rather than men. 163   Rubin quotes Marx regarding the fact that along with human biology and physical conditions, what also factors into the equation with regards to a clear understanding of what is required to reproduce the working class is a historical and moral element.  And finishes her part on Marx by stating, “Only be subjecting this “historical and moral element” to analysis can the structure of sex oppression be delineated (164).

“Sex is sex, but what counts as sex is equally culturally determined and obtained.  Every society also has a sex/gender system – a set of arrangements by which the biological raw material of human sex and procreation is shaped by human, social intervention … ”

It is this sex/gender system that Rubin targets as ripe for analysis, like the mode of production was for Marx.  In fact Rubin’s analysis so far draws many analogies and even a homology to Marxist analysis.  Just as Marxists begin with the an understanding of how material life of society is reproduced, Rubin looks at the way in which all societies “will have some systematic ways to deal with sex, gender, and babies.”  But she states, “it is important … to maintain a distinction between the human capacity and necessity to create a sexual world, and the empirically oppressive ways in which sexual worlds have been organized.”  In order for Rubin to properly study sex/gender system she must turn to the study of kinship systems.  To this end Rubin sees herself as taking up where Engels left off in his study “The Origins of Family, Private Property and the State.”  And she starts with Claude Lévi-Strauss whose The Elementary Structures of Kinship in Rubin’s mind is a bold attempt to conceive of kinships as “an imposition of cultural organization upon the facts of biological procreation.” 170-171

[T]he incest taboo imposes the social aim of exogamy and alliance upon the biological events of sex and procreation.  The incest taboo divides the universe of sexual choice into categories of permitted and prohibited sexual partners.  Specifically, by forbidding unions within a group it enjoins marital exchange between groups. … [T]he taboo on incest results in a wide network of relations, a set of people whose connections with one another are a kinship structure 174.

But here Rubin drills down a bit further and asks, if it is women, along with yams, pigs, mats and shells etc. that are being exchanged, and these exchanges create and organization.  Who is being organized.  It is the men who exchange the women, who give and take the women who are linked, “the women being a conduit of a relationship rather than a partner to it.” 174

“Exchange of women” is a shorthand for expressing that the social relations of a kinship system specify that men have certain rights in their female kin, and that women do not have the same rights either to themselves or to their male kin.  In this sense, the exchange of women is a profound perception of a system in which women do not have full rights to themselves. 177

“Gender is a socially imposed division of the sexes” 179  “Far from being an expression of natural differences, exclusive gender identity is the suppression of natural similarities” 180

“Moreover the incest taboo presupposes a prior, less articulate taboo on homosexuality. 180

In summary, some basic generalities about the organization of human sexuality can be derived from an exegesis of Lévi-Strauss’s theories of kinship. These are the incest taboo, obligatory heterosexuality, and an asymmetric division of the sexes.  The asymmetry of gender -the difference between exchanger and exchanged-entails the constraint of female sexuality. 183

But there is an “economics” of sex and gender, and what we need is a political economy of sexual systems.  We need to study each society to determine the exact mechanisms by which particular conventions of sexuality are produced and maintained.  The “exchange of women” is an initial step toward building an arsenal of concepts with which sexual systems can be described. 177

butler interview

Nina Power’s Interview in New Stateman, Aug 2009 EDITED VERSION

Reproduced below: Nina Power’s Interview, Aug 2009 UNCUT VERSION

NP: You’ve just been awarded $1.5 million to found a “Thinking Critically About War” centre at Berkeley. Tell me what kind of work you hope to do there.

JB: I hope to be able to help organize faculty and students to think together about the changing character of war and conflict and what that implies about critical intellectual positions. Wars no longer take the same form and do not always rely, for instance, on the integrity of nation-states. The methods and tactics have also changed. How does one formulate a politically responsible criticism of war in the midst of this changing terrain. My hope to is to fund some conferences and fellowships dedicated to these sorts of questions.

NP: In your recent Frames of War you continue some of the work you did in Precarious Life (2004) concerning the representability of life and death. How do you see the link between the two books?

Well, I think that even though “life” was in the title of Precarious Life, I did not think about it as carefully as I should have. The first book considers questions of public culture and censorship in the aftermath of 9/11, but the second is more concerned with questions of torture and how we conceive of the human body as injurable. I think the second text goes further in trying to think about the kinds of obligations we might have on the basis of our anonymous exposure to others. I hope that it also spells out some ethical and political implications of what it means to be “precarious.”

NP: One of the first things a child learns about death, it seems to me, is that the death of a countryman or woman is more important in media terms than the death of someone elsewhere, which we might not even get to hear about. How do you understand the relationship between nationalism, death and the media?

JB: Yes, I suppose some children do learn this. But it may be possible to learn death first through the media as the death of strangers. I am wondering, for instance, about some of us who were young children during the war in Vietnam. Our first exposure to death may have been from photojournalism. Still, there is a question about whether we regard as valuable and grievable those lives that are closest to us or which readily conform to local and national norms of recognition. In other words, lives that are more readily “recognizable” tend to be regarded as more worthy and more “grievable.” I don’t think we have to have a personal relation to a life lost to understand that something terrible has taken place, especially in the context of war. In order to become open to offering that sort of acknowledgement, however, we have to come up against the limit of the cultural frames in which we live. In a way, we have to let those frames get interrupted by other frames.

NP: The notion of ‘frames’ is a very useful one for understanding how lives come to count or be represented, and in Frames of War you do interesting work on the question of photography. The US government has recently lifted a ban on showing photographs of coffins at the same time as the Obama administration has vetoed the release of more torture photographs from Iraq. What do you think these two rulings indicate about how we ‘frame’ war, or how war is allowed to be understood?

I think that even in the Obama administration there is the fear that explicit photographs of torture or death will portray the nation in a bad light or possibly turn national or international sentiment against the US. I find this a very peculiar kind of argument since it values how we are seen more highly than whether we are seen in a truthful way. Obama basically claims that it is his job to present a likable picture of the US, but I think that the responsiblity to the national and global public actually is more important than this rather weak imperative. The rulings do confirm that frames are powerful. We saw that already in embedded reporting, and we continue to see it in the censorship of war photography and even poetry from Guantanamo.

NP: You touch upon the question of abortion in your discussion of how we value ‘precarious’ or ‘greivable’ lives. ‘Life’ is an extremely contested term, as you say. How do you understand some of the difficulties attached to this word in the context of the way it has been mobilised, for example by the Christian right in America?

JB: Yes, of course. But my sense is that the Left has to “reclaim” the discourse of life, especially if we hope to come up with significant analyses of biopolitics, and if we are to be able to clarify under what conditions the loss of life is unjustifiable. These means arguing against those who oppose abortion and making clear in what sense the “life” we defend against war is not the same as the “life” of the foetus. I don’t know whether one can be a nominalist about life, since there are so many instances of living processes and beings. We have to enter into this complex array of problems, which means as well that social theory has to become more knowledgeable about debates in the life sciences.

NP: To the horror of many on the left, feminism and (to a lesser extent) gay rights were invoked as democratic values in the case for war in Afghanistan and Iraq (‘freeing’ women from the burka, for example). How do you understand the contemporary relationship between feminism (and gay rights) and war?

JB: There are at least two problems here. The one has to do with the sudden instrumentalization of “gay rights” or “women’s rights” to fight the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a move that suggests that we are actually fighting a culture, a religion, or an entire social structure rather than a particular state or its government. The notions of emancipation instrumentalized for such purposes are clearly imperialist, and assume that liberation means adopting certain kinds of cultural norms as the most valuable. But this argument is really treacherous in my view, since it overrides the actual political movements already underway in such countries that are working out specific political vocabularies and claims for rethinking gender, sexuality, and domination.

The second problem is that lesbian/gay rights, and the rights of sexual minorities, need to join with feminist, anti-racist, and anti-war movements and are, in many instances, already joined together. There is no bonafide feminism, for instance, that is not also anti-racist. Similarly, there is no struggle for the rights of sexual minorities that is worthy of the name that does not affirm the cultural diversity of sexual minorities. Further, it is important to understand “minoritization” strategies as effecting both sexual and religious minorities – another reason why complex alliances are crucial.

NP: Sometimes, as in the case of the recent Iranian protests, a particular death (that of Neda Agha-Soltan) is captured, disseminated and comes to stand in for a larger horror. Can we separate popular use of media channels (Twitter, YouTube, blogs) from more entrenched, hierarchical forms (state media, newspapers)? How might these new kinds of ‘frames’ transform our understanding of conflict in the future?

JB: Of course, this is the key question. I think it is probably inevitable that certain iconic images emerge in the midst of these conflicts, and they can, as we saw, be very powerful in mobilizing popular resistance to a regime. But what was most interesting to me here was the way that mainstream media became dependent on twitter and on hand-held phones to relay video from street demonstrations. It was not that “twitter” and cell phone videos were “alternative” media that showed a different picture from what appeared in dominant media venues. On the contrary, these internet based media became the basis for the dominant media image, and there was no other alternative under conditions when foreign media was barred, as it still is, from Iran. So are we actually seeing the emergence of hybrid media and, as a result, a certain wild region of “source material” and “corroboration.” Perhaps this fragmentation and hybrdization will allow for different perspectives – at least until some corporation figures out how best to “own” it all.

Žižek the act

Žižek, Slavoj. Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle. New York: Verso, 2004.

‘Acts’ in Lacan’s sense … are ‘impossible’ not in the sense of ‘it is impossible that they might happen’, but in the sense of the impossible that did happen. This is why Antigone was of interest to me: her act is not a strategic intervention which maintains the gap towards the impossible Void; rather, it tends to enact the impossible ‘absolutely’.  I am well aware of the ‘lure’ of such an act — but I claim that, in Lacan’s later versions of the act, this moment of ‘madness’ beyond strategic intervention remains.  In this precise sense, the notion of the act not only does not contradict the ‘lack in the “other’ which, according to Stavrakakis, I overlook — it directly presupposes it: it is only through an act that I effectively assume the big Other’s nonexistence, that is, I enact the impossible: namely, what appears as impossible within the co-ordinates of the existing socio-symbolic order (80).

There are (also) political acts, for politics cannot be reduced to the level of strategic-pragmatic interventions.  In a radical political act, the opposition between ‘crazy’ destructive gesture and a strategic political decision momentarily breaks down — which is why it is theoretically and politically wrong to oppose strategic political acts, risky as they may be, to radical ‘suicidal’ gestures  á la Antigone: gestures of pure self-destructive ethical insistence with, apparently, no political goal. The point is not simply that, once we are thoroughly engaged in a political project, we are ready to put everything at stake for it, including our lives; but, more precisely, that only such an ‘impossilble’ gesture of pure expenditure can change the very co-ordinates of what is strategically possible within a historical constellation. This is the key point: an act is neither a strategic intervention in the existing order, nor its ‘crazy’ destructive negation; an act is an ‘excessive’, transstrategic intervention which redefines the rules and contours of the existing order (80-81).

… the utopia of a harmonious society is a kind of fantasy which conceals the structural ‘lack in the Other’ (irreducible social antagonism), and in so far as the aim of psychoanalytic treatment is to traverse the fantasy — that is to say, to make the analysand accept the nonexistence of the big Other — is the radical democratic politics whose premises is that ‘society doesn’t exist’ (Laclau) not eo ipso a post-fantasmatic politics? (108-109) … There is a whole series of problems with this line (Stavrakakis and Laclau) of reasoning.  First, in its rapid rejection of utopia, it leaves out of the picture the main utopia of today, which is the utopia of capitalism itself … (109)

🙂 Note to Stavrakakis and his article on fantasy and the EU:

The democratic subject, which emerges through a violent abstraction from all its particular roots and determinations, is the Lacanian barred subject, $, which is as such foreign to — incompatible with — enjoyment (111).

So when Laclau and Mouffe complain that only the Right has the requisite passion, is able to propose a new mobilizing Imaginary, while the Left merely administers, what they fail to see is the structural necessity of what they perceive as a mere tactical weakness of the Left. … The only passion is the rightist defence of Europe — al the leftist attempts to infuse the notion of united Europe with political passion (like the Habermas-Derrida initiative) fail to gain momentum.  The reason for this failure is precisely the absence of the ‘critique of political economy’: the only way to account for the shifts described by Stavrakakis (the recent crisis of democracy, etc.) is to relate them to what goes on in contemporary capitalism.

The fundamentalist’ attachment to jouissance is the obverse, the fantasmatic supplement, of democracy itself (113).

Žižek

Today we have two global models: American-style capitalism and Asian-style capitalism. I don’t want to live in a world where these are the only choices. So Europe interests me more in a negative way. I don’t have such a great trust in underdeveloped countries. I think that many of them desire to enter some kind of exploitative symbiosis with the super developed countries. I think that if something new emerges, it will be from post-industrial countries that were once the centre of industrial production but are now still living in the shadows. I am thinking of the ones that haven’t yet found a way to fit into the newly emerging global constellation. This is for me the interesting thing about Europe. Obviously, with the way globalization is progressing at the moment, Europe is the loser. But I think that all historical progress goes like this. The loser has to be reinvented in order to redefine the global coordinates.

Democracy today works like a fetish that prevents us from seeing something. In this sense, democracy does not need to be rejected but questioned instead. What does democracy mean How does it function today It’s crucial to somehow confront and question this pseudo post-modern ideology of “emerging properties” and “spontaneous self-organization.” It is more than obvious that this functions as ideology. But this is only one side of it. The other side is the unheard-of strengthening of state apparatuses. The United States has emerged as an extremely strong organized state apparatus which is engaged in a very global project of war and terror. It is necessary for us to break this pseudo postmodern spell of self-organization and instead rehabilitate the logic of large collective actions. Why not even collective discipline I think we are all too infected with this postmodern liberal ideology that posits collective discipline as proto-fascist.

My only optimism comes from my pessimism. What I am saying is that capitalism is generating tensions and catastrophic potentials within its own field. It will not be able to maintain control indefinitely. As a result, we will be forced to act in a utopian way. True utopia is not: “Oh, we’re doing well but why don’t we dream of doing even better” For me, true utopia is born out of being in a totally desperate situation where you simply cannot survive within the existing coordinates and it becomes a matter of survival to invent something new. I think that we will be forced into this. But, of course, that’s no guarantee that the result will be positive.

Žižek on Butler

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).

glynos on logic of desire logic of capital

Glynos, Jason. “‘There is no Other of the Other’ Symptoms of a Decline in Symbolic Faith, or, Žižek’s Anti-capitalism” Paragraph vol 24, no. 2, July 2001 (78-110).

  • The subject of capitalism is empty
  • The subject of desire is empty

Lacan’s logic of desire and the logic of capitalism share a deep homology in structuring contemporary subjectivity (87).

  • In both cases the logics are purely formal and independent of the particular concrete contexts wherein they function.
  • Fetishism of the new keeps desire alive
    • Insatiable desire for new products
    • In order to sustain itself it must prevent itself from satisfaction
  • Subject of desire constant never-ending desire after desire
  • Fantasy covers over the necessary dissatisfaction of the subject
    • Dissatisfied are we? Blame immigrants, jews etc.

The depoliticized economy is the disavowed “fundamental fantasy” of postmodern politics

Slavoj Žižek The Ticklish Subject. 1999, 355.

The capitalists erosion of the big Other’s efficiency, therefore, throws the subject of desire into a panic. When symbolic authority qua prohibition gives way to a more permissive society, when object of desire are more readily available and less subject to social prohibition (you are free to invent your own marital and/or sexual arrangements, however perverse these might appear; others will tolerate your actions and opinions), the social subject comes that much closer to realizing its desire. But … this proximity to fulfilment simply arouses anxiety. Why? Because it threatens to extinguish the subject as a subject of desire: a subject of desire sustains itself only on condition that its ultimate object of desire remains inaccessible. Thus, the structural consequence of the growing collapse of symbolic efficiency is not a healthy burgeoning of pleasurable experiences and increased well-being. Instead, it is a desperate attempt to cling to this kind of subjectivity by making the big Other exist.  And in a situation of generalized cynicism, in the absence of symbolic faith, we witness ‘the proliferation of different versions of a big Other that actually exists, in the Real, not merely as a symbolic fiction (90).

This is precisely the role that ethical committees, sex guides, and manuals of political correctness play; or the role that various moral, political and religious fundamentalisms play.  They do not so much succeed in establishing some unitary empty prohibition characteristic of past subjectivities. Instead they are characterized more by a proliferation of rules and regulations that provide a whole host of imaginary ideals (about what to say, about what to eat, etc.).  In the absence of symbolic faith, we attempt to recoup certainty with even greater urgency by means of the decentred sprouting of bureaucratic apparatuses (90).

What unites these otherwise disparate phenomena is our contemporary subjective stance. The disintegration of our faith in the big Other, then, creates anxiety in subjects of desire and it becomes imperative that new obstacles are introduced to regain a sense of balance. In other words, the logic of desire reproduces exactly the logic of capital which requires for its survival new frontiers, new enemies (91).

  • When symbolic Other doesn’t meet expectations, what comes to forefront is (void-) cause of our desire which is misperceived as an obstacle: soft permissive liberal, Jew, immigrant, paedophile
  • Making the Other exist
    • Returning to basic morals in various fundamentalisms
    • Complaining to the Other (complaint culture)
    • Provoking the Other by cutting into the real of the body (body piercing, self-inflicted harm, suicde, s&m)
    • Accusing the Other for allowing others to steal our way of life (discourses targeting immigrants)
    • Bypassing the Other through direct reference to real of science (expert committees)
    • Positing an Other of the Other (conspiracy theories) (91)

Fantasy provides a rationale that premists us to avoid confronting the Other’s inconsistency and incompleteness, thereby generating an Other of the Other, a real Other of the symbolic Other.

A properly authentic, ethical act, is one that manages to effect a traversing of the social fantasy, thereby exposing the lack in the big Other, the ultimate impotence of the dominant politico-economic discourse.

What sustains [capitalism] are the social subject’s disavowed social fantasies and their constitutive ‘threats – those, in other words, who take advantage of our present system, like single mothers, immigrants, … It is precisely there that the battle against capitalism should properly be fought (as opposed to engaging only in rational-deliberative political sarugument which is sustained by these social fantasies).

[W]hat is most traumatic is not that I am subject to the rule of the big Other, to the Master.  Far more traumatic is the possibility that the big Other does not exist.  This is ultimately what we cannot accept as subjects of desire and this is ultimately the reason for our ready recourse to fantasies of the ‘Other of the Other’ who ‘steal’ our enjoyment.  This is why, for Žižek, the aim of ideological critique is to create the conditions in which we can ‘experience how there is nothing “behind” it, and how fantasy masks precisely this “nothing”.  … this ‘crossing of the fantasy’ ushers in a distinctively novel ethical horizon and a corresponding mode of subjectivity (97).

Crossing [Traversing] the Fantasy

1.      Devaluing the object of desire we think the Other has stolen (or threatens to steal) from us:

  • Deflate publicly supported imaginary ideals, our precious treasures that appear to be threatened by the intrusion of an evil menace
    • Jew, Freud attempted just such a strategic move by portraying the Jew as someone who does not in fact possess the precious treasure that anti-Semites insist on imputing to him
  • Paedophiles by demonizing them and stressing the innocence of our children, no, do not exacerbate the problem by heightening the privileged status of the victim, “making their torture and rape all that harder to resist.
  • Instead the equivalent strategy would be to emphasise how children are in fact not as innocent as we might imagine them, to highlight their already polymorphously perverse sexuality, etc.

Of course this strategy (regarding both the Jew and the Paedophile) does not mean that their offences should go unpunished. The point, however, is that without intervening with an eye on the fantasy structuring the social symptoms, not only do we miss an opportunity to sap the jouissance invested in them, we often in fact simply reinforce it (note 75, 109).

2.      Confronting the social subject with the obstacle qua cause of desire. This obstacle is often perceived in terms of a threat, as is the case in UFO conspiracy theories.

  • The crucial, hitherto underestimated ideological impact of the coming ecological crisis will be precisely to make the ‘collapse of the big Other’ part of our everyday experience, i.e., to sap this unconscious belief in the ‘big Other’ of power … exposing the power’s ultimate impotence. Our ‘spontaneous’ ideological reaction to it, of course, is to have recourse to the fake premodern forms of reliance on the ‘big Other’ (‘New Age consciousness’; the balanced circuit of Nature, etc.). Perhaps, however, our very physical survival hinges on our ability to consummate the act of assuming fully the ‘nonexistence of the Other,’ [of abandoning our attempts to find another Other behind the big Other] (99).

The passage from premodern subjectivity to modern subjectivity (and the accompanying shifts in socio-political arrangements) was made possible by the emergence of monotheistic religions; while the passage modern to postmodern (and the accompanying shifts in socio-political arrangements) was made possible by the scientific revolution and the birth of capitalism.  In this view, monotheistic Prohibition marks the primordial repression that gives birth to a whole series of fantasies that support socio-political discourse; and the subsequent modern and postmodern eras presuppose a subjectivity that operations within this fantasmatic framework (100).

Žižek’s anti-capitalism, then, amounts to nothing short of a call to another fundamental mutation in human subjectivity corresponding to the passage through fantasy and entailing an ethical stance that is adequate to this task.

The prospect of a fundamental mutation, however, evokes horror. Just as the demand to replace polytheism with monotheism, or secularism with monotheism could not but be perceived as idealist, even terroristic, so too will the anti-capitalist demand to move beyond fantasy. Why? Because it implies a complete revamping of our economic, social, and political institutional arrangements, and the standards of evaluation they presuppose. This, ultimately, is why it is not possible to give concrete content to the new ethics of the drive.  What will emerge on the Other side of fantasy cannot be predicted in advance, much less judged on the basis of contemporary standards of evaluation. Any such attempt to predict outcomes can only rely on current standards and ideals, reducing reformist cautionary projects to a consequentialist calculus that seeks foundational guarantees rooted in our current ethico-political horizon. It would simply reiterate through other means the thesis that there is an ‘Other of the Other’.

This, indeed, gives some rationale to Žižek’s ‘returns’ to the Stalinist terror, the Nazi horror, or the various ethnic wars.  When he subjects these phenomena to analytical treatment, his aim is not directly to propose a new concrete socio-political framework which would prevent such atrocities in the future. He does not argue that we need more human rights, more political will, more sophisticated legal systems, etc. Instead, his aim is to show that what is responsible for such ‘extraordinary’ outbursts is nothing Other than the very ‘ordinary’ and normal contemporary subject, with all his or her foibles (i.e., the subject of desire) and that we must find a way out, a way through fantasy, a way to fully assume that ‘there is no Other of the Other’ and thus no longer to be ‘bothered’ by the lack in the Other. Žižek effectively implies that the modality of such outbursts is simply unavailable under the regime of an ethics of the drive; that the kind of subjectivity which makes them possible is absent. Thus, his aim is a purely negative one: he cannot offer up a concrete vision of what such a regime would look like, only what it would not look like. In this view, our passage through the fundamental fantasy of capitalism will await the spontaneous invention of new models of socio-political arrangement, just as the spontaneous formation of the Paris commune can be seen as a model for Marx’s communism.  This is, perhaps, one way to read Žižek’s call to the ‘socialization of productive forces’. This empty signifier is one that has been foreclosed by current capitalist discourse. His recourse to it, therefore, invests it with a dimension of impossibility, a radical emptiness that new forms of post-capitalist socio-economic arrangements will attempt to fill with concrete meaning (102).

[C]rossing the fundamental fantasy would involve, in some sense, leaving behind the whole fantasy structure installed by the Prohibition of monotheistic religions. What is required here, is not so much an account of what will follow in concrete and predictive detail, but a precise, even if speculative, theoretical account of what the possible modalities of a subject of the drive might be a the social level. In Other words, what kind of community is (even theoretically) possible for subject s of the drive? What insights can Lacanian clinical theory offer us? Since a Lacanian conception of community eschews ideas of shared values or common symbolic identification; and since it suggests that our social bond should also not be based on a common fantasmatic transgression (which makes possible a community of subjects of desire), what others ways of there of thinking a community of subjects? Indeed, is a social subject of the drive possible? (103)

Žižek on Butler

Žižek, Slavoj.  “Passionate (Dis)Attachments, or, Judith Butler as a Reader of Freud” The Ticklish Subject. London: Verso, 1999, 247-312.

247 – 248 opposition between hysteria and perversion

🙂 Žižek argues the pervert sidesteps the unconscious in his direct acting out of his fantasies directly. Whereas the hysteric is always questioning, the pervert knows exactly what the other wants.

This opposition of perversion and hysteria is especially pertinent today, in our era of the ‘decline of Oedipus’, when the paradigmatic mode of subjectivity is no longer the subject integrated into the paternal Law through the symbolic castration, but the ‘polymorphously perverse’ subject following the superego injunction to enjoy.  The question of how we are to hystericize the subject caught in the closed loop of perversion (how we are to inculcate the dimension of lack and questioning in him) becomes more urgent in view of today’s political scene: the subject of late capitalist market relations is perverse, while the ‘democratic subject’ (the mode of subjectivity implied by the modern democracy) is inherently hysterical (the abstract citizen correlative to the empty place of Power). In other words, the relationship between the bourgeois caught up in the market mechanisms and the citoyen engaged in the universal political sphere is, in its subjective economy, the relationship between perversion and hysteria.  So when Rancière calls our age ‘post-political’, he is aiming precisely at this shift in political discourse (the social link) from hysteria to perversion: ‘post-politics’ is the perverse mode of administering social affairs, the mode deprived of the ‘hystericized’ universal/out-of-joint dimension (248).

🙂 I think Žižek is pulling Butler’s chain. 249 he cites coprophagy (eating shit) and breaks it down into its hysterical (if I eat shit will the other still love me? Will he leave me? What am I to the Other’s desire?)  Žižek is implying that her form of theory is ‘perverse’ to the core.  Calling Foucault (and Deleuze and Guttari’s Anti-Oedipus) a perverse philosopher.  Why?

… the pervert bravely goes to the limit in undermining the very foundations of symbolic authority and fully endorsing the multiple productivity of pre-symbolic libidinal flux … the model of false subversive radicalization that fits the existing power constellation perfectly … the model of the false transgressive radicality (250-251).

It is not enough to say as Foucault does, that power in invoking its law engenders a flourishing of objects it itself was set up to legislate and control, they “set in motion a wild proliferation of what they endeavour to suppress and regulate: the very ‘repression’ of sexuality gives rise to new forms of sexual pleasure.  But what Foucault misses according to Žižek, is the erotic, libidinal element that comes about in the subject as they are getting the whip.  In other words subjection is kind of sexy for the subjected, in that, for example, the confessional activity “itself becomes sexualized” (253).  Žižek cites political correct attitude of not calling stupid people ‘retarded’ but instead ‘mentally challenged.’  For Žižek the guy that self-flagellates himself in an attempt to prevent himself falling prey to sexual thoughts, is itself getting off, getting a sexual charge from the act of flagellation.

255 Žižek makes the interesting point that resisting colonial domination was inherent to colonial domination itself.  “anti-colonialist national liberation movements are strict sensu generated by colonialist oppression” (255).  The native moves from his passive identity in traditions and culture, to an identity spurred on by the event of colonial domination.  “it is this oppression which brings about the shift from passive ethnic self-awareness grounded in mythical tradition tot he eminently modern will to assert one’s ethnic identity in the form of a national-state” (255).

Although Chechens evoke their hundred-year-old struggle against Russian domination, today’s form of this struggle is clearly the outcome of the modernizing effect of the Russian colonization of traditional Chechen society (255).

🙂  For Žižek active resistance is inherent to the forces of domination itself, by producing an excess the forces of domination thereby produce a resistance that goes beyond, an excess of resistance.  So just because resistance is generated by the very power that it opposes, doesn’t mean its co-opted in advance.

… the key point is that through the effect of proliferation, of producing an excess of resistance, the very inherent antagonism of a system may well set in motion a process which leads to its own ultimate downfall (256).

The Effect Can ‘Outdo’ Its Cause

[Foucault] precludes the possibility that the system itself, on account of its inherent inconsistency, may give birth to a force whose excess it is no longer able to master and which thus detonates its unity, its capacity to reproduce itself. In short, Foucault does not consider the possibility of an effect escaping, outgrowing its cause, so that although it emerges as a form of resistance to power and is as such absolutely inherent to it, it can outgrow and explode it. … (the effect can ‘outdo’ its cause) (256).

And this is why Foucault lacks the appropriate notion of the subject: the subject is by definition in excess over its cause, and as such it emerges with the reversal of the repression of sexuality into the sexualisation of the repressive measures themselves (257).

From Resistance to the Act

For Lacan, radical rearticulation of the predominant symbolic Order is altogether possible – this is what his notion of point de capiton (the ‘quilting point’ or the Master-Signifier) is about: when a new point de capiton emerges, the socio-symbolic field is not only displaced, its very structuring principle changes. One is thus tempted to reverse the opposition between and Lacan and Foucault as elaborated by Butler (Lacan constrains resistance to imaginary thwarting, while Foucault, who has a more pluralistic notion of discourse as a heterogeneous field of multiple practices, allows for a more thorough symbolic subversion and rearticulation): it is Foucault who insists on the immanence of resistance to Power, while Lacan leaves open the possibility of a radical rearticulation of the entire symbolic field by means of an act proper, a passage through ‘symbolic death’. In short, it is Lacan who allows us to conceptualize the distinction between imaginary resistance (false transgression that reasserts the symbolic status quo and even serves as a positive condition of its functioning) and actual symbolic rearticulation via the intervention of the Real of an act (262).

ONLY ON THIS LEVEL – IF WE TAKE INTO ACCOUNT THE LACANIAN NOTIONS OF POINT DE CAPITON AND THE ACT AS REAL – DOES A MEANINGFUL DIALOGUE WITH BUTLER BECOME POSSIBLE.

🙂 Have to hand it to him, Žižek finds the crucial Butler quote, here it is:

What would it mean for the subject to desire something other than its continued ‘social existence’?  If such an existence cannot be undone without falling into some kind of death, can existence nevertheless be risked, death courted or pursued, in order to expose and open to transformation the hold of social power on the conditions of life’s persistence?  The subject is compelled to repeat the norms by which it is produced, but the repetition establishes a domain of risk, for if one fails to reinstate the norm ‘in the right way,’ one becomes subject to further sanction, one feels the prevailing conditions of existence threatened.  And yet, without a repetition that risks life – in its current organization – how might we begin to imagine the contingency of that organization, and performatively reconfigure the contours of the conditions of life?

One should criticize Butler for conflating this act in its radical dimension with the performative reconfiguration of one’s symbolic condition via its repetitive displacements: the two are not the same – that is to say, one should maintain the crucial distinction between a mere ‘performative reconfiguration’, a subversive displacement which remains within the hegemonic field and, as it were, conducts an internal guerrilla war of turning the terms of the hegemonic field against itself, and the much more radical act of a thorough reconfiguration of the entire field which redefines the very conditions of socially sustained performativity.  It is thus Butler herself who ends up in a position of allowing precisely for marginal ‘reconfigurations’ of the predominant discourse – who remains constrained to a position of ‘inherent transgression’, which needs as a point of reference the Other in the guise of a predominant discourse that can only be marginally displaced or transgressed (264).

From the Lacanian standpoint, Butler is thus simultaneously too optimistic and too pessimistic. On the one hand she overestimates the subversive potential of disturbing the functioning of the big Other through the practices of performative reconfiguration/displacement: such practices ultimately support what they intend to subvert, since the very field of such ‘transgressions’ is already taken into account, even engendered, by the hegemonic form of the big Other – what Lacan calls ‘the big Other’ are symbolic norms and their codified transgression. The Oedipal order, this gargantuan symbolic matrix embodied in a vast set of ideological institutions, rituals and practices, is a much too deeply rooted and ‘substantial’ entity to be effectively undermined by the marginal gestures of performative displacement.  On the other hand, Butler does not allow for the radical gesture of the thorough restructuring of the hegemonic symbolic order in its totality (264).

🙂 And Slavoj, what, pray tell, is that ‘radical gesture’?

Butler Bodies that Matter

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter New York: Routledge, 1993.

Performativity definition

… that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains (2)

Sex is no longer construed as a bodily given on which the construct of gender is artificially imposed, but as a cultural norm which governs the materialization of bodies (3)

Abject definition

JHeterosexual imperative, is an “exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed” thus requiring “a simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet “subjects,” but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject” 3

The abject designates here precisely those “unlivable” and “unthinkable” zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living under the sing of the “unlivable” is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject.  This zone of uninhabitability will constitute the defining limit of the subject’s domain; it will constitute that site of dreaded identification against which – and by virtue of which – the domain of the subject will circumscribe its own claim to autonomy and to life. In this sense, then, the subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection, one which produces a constitutive outside to the subject, an abjected outside, which is, after all “inside” the subject as its own founding repudiation (3).

The forming of a subject requires an identification with the normative phantasm of “sex,” and this identification takes place through a repudiation which produces a domain of abjection, a repudiation without which the subject cannot emerge.  This is a repudiation which creates the valence of “abjection” and its status for the subject as a threatening spectre.  Further, the materialization of a given sex will centrally concern the regulation of identifcatory practices such that the identification with the abjection of sex will be persistently disavowed.  And yet, this disavowed abjection will threaten to expose the self-grounding presumptions of the sexed subject, grounded as that subject is in a repudiation whose consequences it cannot fully control.

The task will be to consider this threat and disruption not as a permanent contestation of social norms condemned to the pathos of perpetual failure, but rather as a critical resource in the struggle to rearticulate the very terms of symbolic legitimacy and intelligibility.

Indeed, it may be precisely through practices which underscore disidentification with those regulatory norms by which sexual difference is materialized that both feminist and queer politics are mobilized.  Such collective disidentification can facilitate a reconceptualization of which bodies matter, and which bodies are yet to emerge as critical matters of concern.

Crucially then, construction is neither a single act nor a causal process initiated by a subject and culminating in a set of fixed effects. Construction not only takes place in time, but is itself a temporal process which operates through the reiteration of norms, sex is both produced and destabilized in the course of this reiteration.*  As a sedimented effect of a reiterative or ritual practice, sex acquires its naturalized effect, and, yet, it is also by virtue of this reiteration that gaps and fissures are opened up as the constitutive instabilities in such constructions, as that which escapes or exceeds the norm, as that which cannot be wholly defined or fixed by the repetitive labor of that norm. This instability is the deconstituting possibility in the very process of repetition, the power that undoes the very effects by which “sex” is stabilized, the possibility to put the consolidation of the norms of “sex” in a potentially productive crisis (10).

*Note 7 page 244

It is not simply a matter of construing performativity as a repetition of acts, as if “acts” remain intact and self-identical as they are repeated in terms, and where “time” is understood as external to the “acts” themselves.  On the contrary, an act is itself a repetition, a sedimentation, and congealment of the past which is precisely foreclosed in its act-like status. In this sense an “act” is always a provisional failure of memory.  In what follows, I make use of the Lacanian notion that every act is to be construed as a repetition, the repetition of what cannot be recollected, of the irrecoverable, and is thus the haunting spectre of the subject’s deconstitution.

One might read this prohibition that secures the impenetrability of the masculine as a kind of panic, a panic over becoming “like” her, effeminized, or a panic over what might happen if a masculine penetration of the masculine were authorized, or a feminine penetration of the feminine, or a feminine penetration of the masculine or a reversibility of those positions – not to mention a full-scale confusion over what qualifies as “penetration” anyway.  Would the terms “masculine” and “feminine” still signify in stable ways, or would the relaxing of the taboos against stray penetration destabilize these gendered positions in serious ways? (51)

And whereas this can appear as the necessary and founding violence of any truth regime (construction of a constitutive outside) … it is important to resist that theoretical gesture of pathos in which exclusions are simply affirmed as sad necessities of signification. The task is to reconfigure this necessary “outside” as a future horizon, one in which the violence of exclusion is perpetually in the process of being overcome.  But of equal importance is the preservation of the outside, the site where discourse meets its limits, where the opacity of what is not included in a given regime of truth acts as a disruptive site of linguistic impropriety and unrepresentability, illuminating the violent and contingent boundaries of the normative regime precisely through the inability of that regime to represent that which might pose a fundamental threat to its continuity.  In this sense, radical and inclusive representability is not precisely the goal: to include, to speak as, to bring in every marginal and excluded position within a given discourse is to claim that a singular discourse meets its limits nowhere, that it can and will domesticate all signs of difference.  If there is a violence necessary to the language of politics, then the risk of that violation might well be followed by another in which we begin, without ending, without mastering, to own-and yet never fully to own-the exclusions by which we proceed (53).

Judy Butler “Arguing with the Real” Bodies That Matter New York: Routledge 1993.

🙂 Abject definition

The normative force of performativity – its power to establish what qualifies as “being” – works not only though reiteration, but through exclusion as well. And in the case of bodies, those exclusions haunt signification as its abject borders or as that which is strictly foreclosed: the unlivable, the nonnarrativizable, the traumatic (188).

🙂 Here are JB’s guiding questions, and they are good.

1.      How might those ostensibly constitutive exclusions be rendered less permanent, more dynamic?

2.      How might the excluded return, not as psychosis or the figure of the psychotic within politics, but as that which has been rendered mute, foreclosed from the domain of political signification?

3.      How and where is social content attributed to the site of the “real,” and then positioned as the unspeakable?

4.      Is there not a difference between a theory that asserts that, in principle, every discourse operates through exclusion and a theory that attributes to that “outside” specific social and sexual positions?

5.      To the extent that a specific use of psychoanalysis works to foreclose certain social and sexual positions from the domain of intelligibility – and for all time – psychoanalysis appears to work in the service of the normativizing law that it interrogates.

6.      How might such socially saturated domains of exclusion be recast from their status as “constitutive” to beings who might be said to matter? (189)

🙂  And JB comes out swinging right away

The production of the unsymbolizable, the unspeakable, the illegible is also always a strategy of social abjection (190).

Paradoxically, the failure of such signifiers -“women” is the one that comes to mind -fully to describe the constituency they name is precisely what constitutes these signifiers as sites of phantasmatic investment and discursive rearticulation.  It is what opens the signifier to new meanings and new possibilities for political resignification. It is this open-ended and performative function of the signifier that seems to me to be crucial to a radical democratic notion of futurity (191).

If the “outside” is, as Laclau insists, linked to the Derridean logic of the supplement (Laclau NRRT, 84 n.5), then it is unclear what moves must be taken to make it compatible with the Lacanian notion of the “lack”, indeed … I will attempt to read the Lacanian “lack” within Žižek’s text according to the logic of the supplement, one which also entails a rethinking of the social specificity of taboo, loss, and sexuality (194).

The “Law of the Father” induces trauma and foreclosure through the threat of castration, thereby producing the “lack” against which all symbolization occurs. And yet, this very symbolization of the law as the law of castration is not taken as a contingent ideological formulation.

🙂 And here’s my favourite line:

As the fixing of contingency in relation to the law of castration, the trauma and “substantial identity” of the real, Žižeks theory thus evacuates the “contingency” of contingency.

If symbolization is itself circumscribed through the exclusion and/or abjection of the feminine, and if this exclusion and/or abjection is secured through Žižek’s specific appropriation f the Lacanian doctrine of the real, then how is it that what qualifies as “symbolizable” is itself constituted through the desymbolization of the feminine as originary trauma?

What limits are placed on “women” as a political signifier by a theory that installs its version of signification through the abjection/exclusion of the feminine?  And what is the ideological status of a theory that identifies the contingency in all ideological formulations as the “lack” produced by the threat of castration, where the threat and the sexual differential that it institutes are not subject ot the discursive rearticulation proper to hegemony?

If this law is a necessity, and it is that which secures all contingency in discursive and ideological formulations, then that contingency is legislated in advance as a nonideological necessity and is, therefore, no contingency at all.  Indeed, the insistence on the preideological status of the symbolic law constitutes a foreclosure of a contingency in the name of that law, one which, if admitted into discourse and the domain of the symbolizable, might call into question or, at least, occasion a rearticulation of the oedipal scenario and the status of castration (196).

Can Žižekian psychoanalysis respond to the pressure to theorize the historical specificity of trauma, to provide texture for the specific exclusions, annihilations, and unthinkable losses that structure the social phenomena mentioned above [family, concentration camps, the Gulag]?

(202).

Michael Walsh [in] “Reading the Real,” … the process of … foreclosure that institutes the real is described as a matter of “the exclusion of fundamental signifiers from the Symbolic order of the subject”  In other words, these are signifiers that have been part of symbolization and could be again, but have been separated off from symbolization to avert the trauma with which they are invested.  … These are not signifiers that are merely repressed but could be worked through, they are signifiers whose re-entry into symbolization would unravel the subject itself.

The notion of foreclosure offered here implies that what is foreclosed is a signifier, namely, that which has been symbolized, and that the mechanism of that repudiation takes place within the symbolic order as a policing of the borders of intelligibility. What signifiers qualify to unravel the subject and to threaten psychosis remains unfixed in this analysis, suggesting that what constitutes the domain of what the subject can never speak or know and still remain a subject remains variable, that is, remains a domain variably structured by contingent relations of power (204-205).

Žižek’s rendition of the real presupposes that there is an invariant law that operates uniformly in all discursive regimes to produce through prohibition this “lack” that is the trauma induced by the threat of castration, the threat itself.   But if we concur that every discursive formation proceeds through constituting an “outside,” we are not thereby committed to the invariant production of that outside as the trauma of castration (nor the generalization of castration as the model for all historical trauma). … (a) there may be several mechanisms of foreclosure that work to produce the unsymbolizable in any given discursive regime, and (b) the mechanisms of that production are – however inevitable -still and always the historical workings of specific modalities of discourse and power (205).

To claim that there is an “outside” to the socially intelligible and that this “outside” will always be that which negatively defines the social is, I think, a point on which we can concur. To delimit that outside through the invocation of a preideological “law” that works invariantly throughout all history, and further, to make that law function to secure a sexual differential that ontologizes subordination, is an “ideological” move in a more ancient sense, one that might only by understood through a rethinking of ideology as “reification.”  That there is always an “outside” and, indeed, a “constitutive antagonism” seems right, but to supply the character and content to a law that secures the borders between the “inside” and the “outside” of symbolic intelligibility is to pre-empt the specific social and historical analysis that is required, to conflate into “one” law the effect of a convergence of many, and to preclude the very possibility of a future rearticulation that boundary which is central to the democratic project that Žižek, Laclau, and Mouffe promote (206-207).

As resistance to symbolization, the “real” functions in an exterior relation to language, as the inverse of mimetic representationalism, that is, as the site where all efforts to represent must founder.  The problem here is that there is no way within this framework to politicize the relation between language and the real. What counts as the “real,” in the sense of the unsymbolizable, is always relative to a linguistic domain that authorizes and produces the foreclosure and achieves that effect through producing and policing a set of constitutive exclusions. Even, if every discursive formation is produced through exclusion, that is not to claim that all exclusions are equivalent: what is needed is a way to assess politically how the production of cultural unintelligibility is mobilized variably to regulate the political field, i.e., who will count as a “subject,” who will be required not to count.  To freeze the real as the impossible “outside” to discourse is to institute a permanently unsatisfiable desire for an ever elusive referent: sublime object of ideology. The fixity and universality of this relation between language and the real produces, however, a prepolitical pathos that precludes the kind of analysis that would take the real/reality distinction as the instrument and effect of contingent relations of power (207).

Is not the defilement of sovereignty, divine and paternal, performed by calling the aardvark “Napoleon” precisely the catachresis by which hegemony ought to proceed? (214)

If referentiality is itself the effect of a policing of the linguistic constraints on proper usage, then the possibility of referentiality is contested by the catachrestic use of speech that insists on using proper names improperly, that expands or defiles the very domain of the proper by calling the aardvark ‘Napoleon’ (218).

If “women” within political discourse can never fully describe that which it names, that is neither because the category simply refers without describing nor because “women” are the lost referent, that which “does not exist,” but because the term marks a dense intersection of social relations that cannot be summarized through the terms of identity.  The term will gain and lose its stability to the extent that it remains differentiated and that differentiation serves political goals.  To the degree that that differentiation produces the effect of a radical essentialism of gender, the term will work to sever its constitutive connections with other discursive sites of political investment and undercut its own capacity to compel and produce the constituency it names. The constitutive instability of the term, its incapacity every fully to describe what it names, is produced precisely by what is excluded in order for the determination to take place.  That there are always constitutive exclusions that condition the possibility of provisionally fixing a name does not entail a necessary collapse of that constitutive outside with a notion of a lost referent, that “bar” which is the law of castration, emblematized by the woman who does not exist. Such a view not only reifies women as the lost referent, that which cannot exist, and feminism, as the vain effort to resist that particular proclamation of the law (a form of psychosis in speech, a resistance to penis envy).  To call into question women as the privileged figure for “the lost referent,” however, is precisely to recast that description as a possible signification, and to open the term as a site for a more expansive rearticulation (218).

Paradoxically, the assertion of the real as the constitutive outside to symbolization is meant to support anti-essentialism, for if all symbolization is predicated on a lack, then there can be no complete or self-identical articulation of a given social identity.  And yet, if women are positioned as that which cannot exist, as that which is barred from existence by the law of the father, then there is a conflation of women with that foreclosed existence, that lost referent, that is surely as pernicious as any form of ontological essentialism (218-219).

Žižek persuasively describes how once the political signifier has termporarity constituted the unity that it promises, that promise proves impossible to fulfill and a disidentification ensues, one that can produce factionalization to the point of political immobilization. But does politicization always need to overcome disidentification? What are the possibilities of politicizing disidentification, this experience of misrecognition, this uneasy sense of standing under a sign to which one does and does not belong?  And how are to to interpret this disidentification produced by and through the very signifier that holds out the promise of solidarity?

Lauren Berlant writes that “feminists must embrace a policy of female disidentification at the level of female essence.”  … But if the term cannot offer ultimate recognition -and here Žižek is very right to claim that all such terms rest on a necessary méconnaisance-it may be that the affirmation of that slippage, that failure of identification is itself the point of departure for a more democratizing affirmation of internal difference (219).

To take up the political signifier (which is always a matter of taking up a signifier by which one is oneself already taken up, constituted, initiated) is to be taken into a chain of prior usages, to be installed in the midst of signification that cannot be situated in terms of clear origins or ultimate goals. This means that what is called agency can never be understood as a controlling or original authorship over that signifying chain, and it cannot be the power, once installed and constituted in and by that chain, to set a sure course for its future.  But what is here called a “chain” of signification operates through a certain insistent citing of the signifier, an iterable practice whereby the political signifier is perpetually resignified, a repetition compulsion at the level of signification, indeed, an iterable practice that shows that what one takes to be a political signifier is itself the sedimentation of prior signifiers, the effect of their reworking, such that a signifier is political to the extent that it implicitly cites the prior instances of itself, drawing the phantasmatic promise of those prior signifiers, reworking them into the production and promise of “the new,” a “new” that is itself only established through recourse to those embedded conventions, past conventions, that have conventionally been invested with the political power to signify the future.

It is in this sense, then, that political signifiers might be avowed as performative, but that performativity might be rethought as the force of citationality.  “Agency” would then be the double-movement of being constituted in and by a signifier, where “to be constituted” means “to be compelled to cite or repeat or mime” the signifier itself.  Enabled by the very signifier that depends for its continuation on the future of that citational chain, agency is the hiatus in iterability, the compulsion to install an identity through repetition, which requires the very contingency, the undetermined interval, that identity insistently seeks to foreclose.  The more insistent the foreclosure, the more exacerbated the temporal non-identity of that which is heralded by the signifier of identity.  And yet, the future of the signifier of identity can only be secured through a repetition that fails to repeat loyally, a reciting of the signifier that must commit a disloyalty against identity -a catachresis- in order to secure its future, a disloyalty that works the iterabilty of the signifier for what remains non-self-identical in any invocation of identity, namely the iterable or temporal condition of its own possibility (220).

For the purposes of political solidarity, however provisional, Žižek calls for a political performative that will halt the disunity and discontinuity of the signified and produce a temporary linguistic unity. The failure of every such unity can be reduced to a “lack” with no historicity, the consequence of a transhistorical “law,” but such a reduction will miss the failure and discontinuities produced by social relations that invariably exceed the signifier and whose exclusions are necessary for the stabilization of the signifier.  The “failure” of the signifier to produce the unity it appears to name is not the result of an existential void, but the result of that term’s incapacity to include the social relations that it provisionally stabilizes through a set of contingent exclusions. This incompleteness will be the result of a specific set of social exclusions that return to haunt the claims of identity defined through negation: these exclusions need to be read and used in the reformulation and expansion of a democratizing reiteration of the term.  That there can be no final or complete inclusivity is thus a function of the complexity and historicity of a social field that can never by summarized by any given description, and that, for democratic reasons, ought never to be (220-221).

To understand “women” as a permanent site of content, or as a feminist site of agonistic struggle, is to presume that there can be no closure on the category and that, for politically significant reasons, there ought never to be. That the category can never be descriptive is the very condition of its political efficacy.

Here the numerous refusals on the part of “women” to accept the descriptions offered in the name of “women” not only attest to the specific violences that a partial concept enforces, but to the constitutive impossibility of an impartial or comprehensive concept or category.  …. To ameliorate and rework this violence, it is necessary to learn a double movement: to invoke the category and, hence, provisionally to institute an identity and at the same time to open the category as a site of permanent political contest. That the term is questionable does not mean that we ought not to use it, but neither does the necessity to use it mean that we ought not perpetually to interrogate the exclusions by which it proceeds, and to do this precisely in order to learn how to live the contingency of the political signifier in a culture of democratic contestation (222).