Category: gender

transgender

Carlson, Shanna T. “Transgender Subjectivity and the Logic of Sexual Difference” Volume 21, Number 2, 2010 d i f f e r e n c e s: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies

What do gender studies and Lacanian psychoanalysis have to offer one another? Is it possible to integrate the two domains, or do they, as Copjec charges and as Butler herself seems to worry in Antigone’s Claim, represent fundamentally incompatible approaches?

🙂 this article iprovides a missing link to my disertation.+

Footnote 3: quoting Butler from AC:
It is why, for instance, it would be difficult to find a fruitful engagement at the present time between the new Lacanian formalisms and the radical queer politics of, for example, Michael Warner and friends. The former insists on fundamental notions of sexual difference, which are based on rules that prohibit and regulate sexual exchange, rules we can break only to find ourselves ordered by them anew. The latter calls into question forms of sexual foundationalism that cast viable forms of queer sexual alliance as illegitimate or, indeed, impossible and unlivable. At its extreme, the radical sexual politics turns against psychoanalysis or, rather, its implicit normativity, and the neoformalists turn against queer studies as a “tragically” utopian enterprise. (Antigone’s 75)

Objet a

Lacan tells us that object a is introduced from the fact that nothing, no thing—no food, no breast, no person—will ever satisfy the drive. Object a as “cause of desire” (Encore 92) is not the object that the subject seizes, nor is it the aim of desire, but rather, “It is either pre-subjective, or the foundation of an identification of the subject, or the foundation of an identification disavowed by the subject” (Four 186). It is, indeed, the foundation of a subject, but a contingent foundation: as Dean explains, “[T]his object counterintuitively (ungrammatically?) appears to precede the subject, to found the subject [. . .]. Yet the apparent foundationalism of object a betokens a radically contingent foundation, since as Ellie Ragland points out, ‘[w]e humans are grounded in objects that are not themselves grounded’” (Beyond 194). In insisting that “any object” can stand in as a representative for object a and that object a is only a further representative of “the eternally lacking object,” Lacan distances himself from a reading of Freud that would see a sexual developmental progression or “maturation” from the oral to the anal to the genital drives. Instead, Lacan emphasizes the essential groundlessness of object a and its voidlike role in the circuitous motion of the drive (Four 181).

There are two sexual positions available to human subjects because, as Lacan asserts in Encore using the language of logic and mathematical formalization, subjects are positioned differently with respect to one term: the phallic function. There are two sexual positions insofar as every subject is either “all” or “not-all” under the phallic function. Before falling too quickly into the abyss that can follow from the explication of the phallic function, a few preliminary words are in order on sexual difference as it relates to signification itself: Copjec notes that “[s]ex is the stumbling block of sense” (204), citing Lacan’s own comment that

“[e]verything implied by the analytic engagement with human behavior indicates not that meaning reflects the sexual, but that it makes up for it” (qtd. on 204).

Lacan’s account of object a seems to pose no threat to any range of queer theories of sexuality insofar as it does not presuppose, for
example, that a particular type of object should or in fact ever could satisfy the drive. Indeed, Lacan repeatedly mocks the institution of so-called genital primacy (Ethics 88).

And yet none of this talk of objects, lamellas, and libido speaks directly to Lacan’s assertion that there are two possible subject positions, masculine or feminine. Left only with a story of a-sexual asexuality, we might be halfway to a Lacanian narration of transgender ontology—not such a radical thought when we recall that Freud was the one who pointed out the constitutive bisexual perversion of the human unconscious. From whence, then, the feminine and masculine subject positions?

Sexuation

Similarly, Renata Salecl writes in her introduction to Sexuation that sexual difference “is first and above all the name for a certain fundamental deadlock inherent in the symbolic order” (2).

In fact, it is impossible to signify sex, and the phallus serves as “an empty signifier that stands for” that impossibility (Barnard, Introduction 10).

Feminine and masculine subjects, then, relate to that failure, or are that failure, differently,

As Lacan recounts, the formulas consist of the following: the right side of the formula, is the Feminine side which reads

There is not one x that is not subject to the phallic function
*
*

Not every x is subject to the phallic function

figures the “feminine” side and can be translated to state that there is not one x that is not subject to the phallic function and that not every x is subject to the phallic function.

The feminine subject finds “herself” “not-all” by way of negation insofar as “she” forms part of an open set, open and thereby infinite because it is not constituted by an exceptional figure. No shared trait—aside from the absence of any such shared trait—serves to define the set; no constitutive outside functions close her set. Exceptionally lacking exception, though, and being only loosely linked by virtue of an absence offers/burdens the feminine subject (with) a particular perspective on the phallic function and thus on what grounds the masculine subject, which Barnard describes as “a view to the contingency of the signifier of the Other in its anchoring function [. . .] [S]he ‘knows’ that the signifier of phallic power merely lends a certain mysterious presence to the Law that veils its real impotence” (“Tongues” 178). One of the logical consequences of such a position, of “being in the symbolic ‘without exception’” (178), is that she has a different relation than the masculine subject, not only to the symbolic but also to the lack in the Other.

The “anchoring function” lacking to the feminine subject is located on the “masculine” side of Lacan’s formula:

It is through the phallic function that man as whole acquires his inscription

*  All x’s are (every x is) submitted to the phallic function

*

*  There is at least one x which is not submitted to the phallic function.

*

This exception also immediately takes on a truly exceptional status, from the standpoint of the masculine subject who is established by it, for the exception proffers the outside that closes “his” set and the limit that grounds “his” being; it thereby proffers a sort of support not afforded the feminine subject.

One figure of this exception would be at of the mythical primal father, he who evades castration and thereby enjoys unlimited jouissance. In other words, the masculine subject is only “whole” or “all” as a result of the fact that he is permitted (permits himself?) the fantasy of one who escapes the very same set that grounds his being

… castration/sexual difference is something that fundamentally, if incompletely, makes up for the absence of the sexual relationship.

By this logic, the sexual positions borne of sexual difference figure as solutions, no doubt principally unsatisfying ones, for the loss of a sort of relation that was in fact never possible, a relation of One-ness or complementarity, or for the loss of that missing half that Plato tells us, somewhat cruelly, we once had.

Importantly, though, nothing in this account specifies that the lost/nonexistent sexual relation was a heterosexual one. As Tracy McNulty has noted, “If the ‘relation’ that is lost is really the relation to the One, to unity or wholeness, then this would be true regardless of sex or sexual ‘orientation’”

carlson pt 2 on tim dean

Carlson, Shanna T. “Transgender Subjectivity and the Logic of Sexual Difference” Volume 21, Number 2, 2010 d i f f e r e n c e s: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies

Footnote 7:  Dean goes on to explain, however, that “[a]ll desire entails the presence of the symbolic Other, but since this Other has no gender— there is no ‘Other sex’—desire involves a relation to otherness independent of sexual difference”(137).

In this shift, from questions of Lacan’s theory of desire to questions of sexual difference,
Dean attempts to clarify desire’s independence from the regime of “gender” but obscures the insight of the formulas of sexuation that “gender” and “sexual difference” are not one and the same thing.

Too closely linking gender and sexual difference, Dean runs the risk of mandating “gendered” readings of Lacan, which could in turn result in a theory at times illogically heterosexist. At various moments in his narrations of the formulas, Lacan, too, can be read as too closely linking gender and sexual difference, which is why I have based my meditation primarily on the formulas.

[Quotoing Tim Dean in Beyond Sexuality] takes exception to Butler’s account of sexuality as outlined in Bodies That Matter, for, as he argues, Butler’s is a rhetoricalist approach. According to Dean, “rhetoricalist theories of sexuality effectively evacuate the category of desire from their accounts” by failing to take account of “what in rhetoric or discourse exceeds language” (178). Desire will prove essential to Dean’s own account of sexuality; in his project to deheterosexualize desire, Dean develops the notion of object a in order to theorize sexuality “outside the terms of gender and identity” (222).

According to Dean, the limitation of situating the phallus at the center of a theoretical account of desire is not only that the phallus has such a problematic history but that it is a single term; object a, on the other hand, “implies multiple, heterogeneous possibilities for desire” (250).  Dean wishes to figure desire within “terms of multiplicity” (249) rather than principally according to an “ideology of lack” (247).

He cites Lacan’s assertion that “[d]esire is a relation of being to lack” (qtd. in Beyond 247) but emphasizes, too, that “the question of conceptualizing desire in terms of lack remains a stubborn problem” for a variety of queer- and feminist-minded projects (248). Dean identifies the latter resistance as having precisely to do with the way that the ideology of lack intersects with castration in psychoanalytic theory (248). In favor of such a scene, Dean turns instead to polymorphous perversion as a site of multiplicity, contending that theorizing desire from the point of excess instead of from the point of lack “makes desire essentially pluralistic, with all the inclusive implications of pluralism” (249).

For Dean, one of the advantages of theorizing desire from the starting point of polymorphous perversion arises from Freud’s understanding of polymorphous perversion as preceding normative—that is, genital—sexuality; in this way, perversion comes to represent a sort of “paradise lost” that “normal sexuality” will try, but never completely manage, to supplant (235).

In rehearsing Freud’s decision to classify perversion in terms not of content but rather of “exclusiveness and fixation” (236),

Dean will go so far as to suggest that “the process of normalization itself is what’s pathological, since normalization ‘fixes’ desire and generates the exclusiveness of sexual orientation [heterosexual or homosexual] as its symptom” (237).

However, what is not of interest to Dean, at least in this text, is Lacan’s assertion that masculine and feminine subjects relate differently to object a. According to Lacan, it is the masculine subject that is principally occupied with object a. Queer as it is, could Dean’s account of desire be lacking the feminine?

Lacan writes that “the object—from at least one pole of sexual identification, the male pole—the object [. . .] puts itself in the place of what cannot be glimpsed of the Other” (Encore 63). By contrast, for the feminine subject, “something other than object a is at stake in what comes to make up for the sexual relationship that does not exist” (63). Here again, we see Lacan specifying that via sexual difference, something tries to make up for the absence of the sexual relation. However, there is a fundamental asymmetry at play in the making up for lost/fantasized complementarity, for feminine and masculine subjects make up for the loss, in part, with recourse to different types of others.

In both Bodies That Matter and Antigone’s Claim, Butler performs readings of the subject’s entry into the symbolic via sexual differentiation, and two of her principal charges are that Lacan’s symbolic is normative and that the assumption of a sexed position enjoins compulsory heterosexuality. In Antigone’s Claim, Butler turns from matters of discourse and materiality to the scene of kinship in order to explore how psychoanalysis might both/either compel and/or inhibit the forging of new kinds of community ties, ties that Butler subsumes under the promising header “radical kinship.”

Butler’s investment in the possibility of imagining new forms of kinship ties has a strong affective and political attraction, which she wields to good end, for example, in her listing of the ways that “kinship
has become fragile, porous, and expansive” (Antigone’s 22). Butler cites the mobility of children who, because of migration, exile, refugee status, or situations of divorce or remarriage, “move from one family to another, move from a family to no family, move from no family to a family, or live, psychically, at the crossroads of the family, or in multiply layered family situations” (22). She points to the blending of straight and gay families, to gay nuclear families, and to straight or gay families where a child may have no mother or no father, or two mothers or two fathers, or half-brothers as friends (22–23), asking: “What has Oedipus engendered? [. . .] What will the legacy of Oedipus be for those who are formed in these situations, where positions are hardly clear, where the place of the father is dispersed, where the place of the mother is multiply occupied or displaced, where the symbolic in its stasis no longer holds?” (22–23). No doubt this is a time of potentially unprecedented familial mobility. Some would evaluate these realities as the sign of a crisis in “family values”; others would celebrate the more positive effects of the new types of ties and encounters. In this text, though, Butler is also taking aim at a particular strain of psychoanalysis that would seem unexpectedly to ally itself on some levels with defenders of the heterosexual nuclear family. Butler  references such positions as she has encountered them, including psychoanalysts opposed to or at least worried about gay adoption as a possible source of psychosis for the adopted children, Jacques-Alain Miller’s alleged opposition to male homosexual marriage on account of its likely infidelity, and others’ suggestion that autism can be traceable to lesbian parenting (70). Butler concludes,“These views commonly maintain that alternative kinship arrangements attempt to revise psychic structures in ways that lead to tragedy again, figured incessantly as the tragedy of and for the child.”

I would like to join Butler in imagining sexuation otherwise than as a scene of compulsory heterosexuality. However, I do not think that doing so requires locating a loophole in the Oedipal narrative, as Butler does in her interpretation of the Antigone story.

For while Butler is quite right to lament and fear the compulsory heterosexuality that provides a potent backdrop to many societal norms and ideals, no one knew better than Lacan that, as he put it, “[i]deals are
society’s slaves” (qtd. in Dean, Beyond 229).

In her argument, Butler seems to cast the Oedipal scene as the only available solution within psychoanalysis to the failure of the sexual relation, as in her observation that, for Lacan, the symbolic is “the realm of the Law that regulates desire in the Oedipus complex” (Antigone’s 18).

… the Oedipal drama is a principally “masculine” (and indeed a principally “obsessional,” if not a principally heterosexual) solution to the failure of the sexual relation, one that hallucinates an object as prohibited. But as we have seen, there is not only one solution to the failure of the sexual relation: there are two! In this way, Butler is quite right to turn to Antigone as an alternative to the Oedipal solution. 60

carlson butler Antigone pt. 3

Carlson, Shanna T. “Transgender Subjectivity and the Logic of Sexual Difference” Volume 21, Number 2, 2010 d i f f e r e n c e s: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies

Butler is quite right to turn to Antigone as an alternative to the Oedipal solution. In Butler’s reading, Antigone helps us envisage new forms of kinship and, correspondingly, the “possibility of social transformation” (24).

Butler indicates that Antigone’s own position in her family represents one of kinship incoherence (22), insofar as Antigone could be read to love her brother incestuously (6), and insofar as her father is also her brother. Butler notes that she is not advocating incest per se as a new, radical form of kinship (24); rather, in reflecting on the end of Sophocles’ play, she writes, “In this light, then, it is perhaps interesting to note that Antigone, who concludes the oedipal drama, fails to produce heterosexual closure for that drama, and that this may intimate the direction for a psychoanalytic theory that takes Antigone as its point of departure” (76).Perhaps Butler is exactly right on this count as well.

Perhaps psychoanalysis should take Antigone as its point of departure. Through the figure of Antigone, Butler explores a non-Oedipal solution to the failure of the sexual relation, one that in Lacan’s reading entails a specifically feminine encounter with the signifier. However, she does so without avowing that this solution was available to subjects from the start, that it was not the Oedipal drama that engendered it. (61)

Lacan is more explicit: the form the nonworking of the incest prohibition takes is femininity. Feminine figures testify precisely to the failure of the prohibition, for, as Copjec eloquently plots out, “Lacan answers that the woman is not-all because she lacks a limit, by which he means she is not susceptible to the threat of castration; the ‘no’ embodied by this threat does not function for her” (226).

While the “universal” incest prohibition does not “work” for the feminine subject, this does not necessarily mean that she has incestuous relations with or desires toward someone in her family (which may be
composed as radically or as porously as permitted by the limits of our imaginations)—though she very well may, and I see no reason to shy away from Butler’s suggestion that Antigone’s desire for her brother Polynices is incestuous: “Is it perhaps the unlivable desire with which she lives, incest itself, that makes of her life a living death, that has no place within the terms that confer intelligibility on life?” (Antigone’s 23).

Nonetheless, I would emphasize that incest as one possible disruptive form of radical kinship is not the only stake here. Rather, according to Lacan, no object— mother, father, brother, sister—is marked as prohibited for the feminine subject. Not only is incest not prohibited; no one thing is prohibited.

Thus, for the masculine subject, the point is not that he need necessarily be a heterosexual, ostensibly “biological” boy barred access to his heterosexual, “biologically” female mother, but that he be a subject who has fallen under the blow of some prohibition and by consequence takes up a position as unconsciously masculine.

And as McNulty has noted, “To believe that [the prohibited object is] the mother is a specific symptom, a particular way of resolving castration [. . .] by attributing it to the father and thereby making it ‘avoidable’ through obedience or submission to norms. [In other words,] it also reveals the ideology of norms as a way of avoiding castration”.

On the other hand, for the feminine subject, the point is perhaps even more radical: regardless of her “gender,” the feminine subject is she to whom no prohibition is addressed. No universal can be made of or for her. The relief given the masculine subject, composing prohibitions as limits, does not transpire for the feminine subject. Instead, the nonworking of the prohibition is what ushers the feminine subject toward . . . maybe (who knows?) her brother/half-sister/stepmother/adoptive cousin/grandfather, and definitely toward a contingent encounter with the symbolic.

With this in mind, I would suggest that Antigone’s claim on a future for kinship, or a future for relationality, as well as a future for psychoanalysis, has just as much, if not more, to offer by way of what she does as a feminine figure confronting a symbolic that she is “totally, that is, limitlessly inscribed within” (Copjec 227) as with what she does as a would-be incestuous figure that “represents not kinship in its ideal form but its deformation and displacement” (Butler, Antigone’s 24).

Curiously, then, if we attempt a still more fragile point of contact between Lacanian psychoanalysis and gender studies, a contact on the question of femininity, we open onto the sort of radical clearing wished
for and envisaged by gender theorists’ calls for a safer, more just world for queer and transgender subjectivities and relations.

What has been overlooked in Dean’s narration of desire and disavowed in Butler’s reading of kinship is the possibility and exploration of a feminine perspective. The feminine perspective brings with it a relation both to the radically contingent and to intractability, or the real, precisely by virtue of the fact that the feminine subject is not afforded the same sort of support and limits by the phallic function spared the masculine subject. (63)

Where psychoanalysis may appear limited resides in part in what I interpret as the too easy capitulation of the terms feminine and masculine to “gendered” readings.

As we saw earlier, some Lacanians participate in a logic of sexual difference whereby it magically turns out again and again that subjects with apparently female genitalia “are” “women,” and so on. Butler damningly maps out the consequences of such readings with respect to family relations:

And when there are two men or two women who parent, are we to assume that some primary division of gendered roles organizes their psychic places within the scene, so that the empirical contingency of two same-gendered parents is nevertheless straightened out by the presocial psychic place of the Mother and
the Father into which they enter? Does it make sense on these occasions to insist that there are symbolic positions of Mother and Father that every psyche must accept regardless of the social form that kinship takes? (Antigone’s 69)

It seems important to imagine a queerer future for Lacanian psychoanalysis wherein terms like “the desire of the mother” and “the law of the father,” still very much in currency, might be replaced (not, of course, without haunting remainders) by some new terminology that would better reference the psychical functions these terms index. But terminology shifts alone will not a queer theory make of contemporary deployments of psychoanalysis; we must also bear in mind Dean’s rigorous reminder that

objects a emerge outside of and in excess to the frame of gender. And with respect to sexual difference, we must insist on the ways in which, for Lacan, the terms masculine and feminine signal two different logics, two different modes of ex-sistence in the symbolic, two different approaches to the Other, two different stances with respect to desire, and (at least) two different types of jouissance. Nothing here indicates “gender” as we might more conventionally conceive of it. 64

Žižek 2001

Hanlon,Christopher. “Psychoanalysis and the Post-Political: An Interview with Slavoj .” New Literary History, 32 (2001): 1-21. PDF

Žižek: My idea is the old marxist idea that this immediate reference to experience, practice, struggle, etcetera, really relies on the most abstract and pure theory, and as an old philosopher I would say, as you said before, that we simply cannot escape theory.

I fanatically oppose this turn which has taken place in social theory, this idea that there is no longer time for great theoretical projects, that all we can do is narrativize the experience of our suffering, that all various ethnic or sexual groups can ultimately do is to narrate their painful, traumatic experience.

I think this is a catastrophe. I think that this fits perfectly the existing capitalist order, that there is nothing subversive in it. I think that this fits perfectly today’s ideology of victimization, where in order to legitimize, to gain power politically, you must present yourself, somehow, as the victim.

An anecdote of Richard Rorty’s is of some interest to me here. You know Rorty’s thesis—and you know, incidentally, I like Rorty, because he openly says what others won’t. But Rorty once pointed out—I forget where—how if you take big opponents, such as Habermas and Derrida, and ask them how they would react to a concrete social problem, whether to support this measure or that measure . . . . Are there any concrete political divisions between Habermas and Derrida, although they cannot stand each other? There are none! The same general left-ofcenter, not-too-liberal but basically democratic vision . . . practically, their positions are indistinguishable. Now, Rorty draws from this the conclusion that philosophy doesn’t matter. I am tempted to draw a more aggressive, opposite conclusion: that philosophy does matter, but that this political indifference signals the fact that although they appear opposed, they actually share a set of presuppositions at the level of their respective philosophies. Besides, not all philosophers would adopt the same position; someone like Heidegger definitely would not, and a leftwinger like [Alain] Badiou definitely would not. The big question for me today concerns this new consensus—in England it’s the “third way,” in Germany it’s the “new middle”—this idea that capitalism is here to stay, we can maybe just smooth it out a little with multiculturalism, and so on . . . . Is this a new horizon or not? What I appreciate in someone like Rorty is that at least he openly makes this point. What annoys me about some deconstructionists is that they adopt as their rhetorical post the idea that what they are doing is somehow incredibly subversive, radical, and so on. But they do not render thematic their own deep political resignation.

CH: You’ve been a long-time opponent of what you call postmodern identity politics, and especially the subversive hope some intellectuals attach to them. But with your newest book, this critique acquires a more honed feel. Now, you suggest that partisans of the identity-politics struggle have had a “depoliticizing” effect in some way. Could you hone your comments even further? Do you mean that identity politics have come to supersede what for you are more important antagonisms (such as that between capital and democracy, for instance), or do you mean something more fundamental, that politics itself has been altered for the worse?

Žižek: Definitely that it has been altered. Let me put it this way: if one were to make this reproach directly, they would explode. They would say, “My God, isn’t it the exact opposite? Isn’t it that identity politics politicized, opened up, a new domain, spheres of life that were previously not perceived as the province of politics?” But first, this form of politicization nonetheless involves a transformation of “politics” into “cultural politics,” where certain questions are simply no longer asked. Now, I’m not saying that we should simply return to some marxist fundamentalist essentialism, or whatever. I’m just saying that . . . my God, let’s at least just take note of this, that certain questions—like those concerning the nature of relationships of production, whether political democracy is really the ultimate horizon, and so on—these questions are simply no longer asked. And what I claim is that this is the necessary consequence of postmodern identity politics. You cannot claim, as they usually do, that “No, we don’t abandon those other aspects, we just add to politics proper.” No, the abandonment is always implicit. Why? Take a concrete example, like the multitude of studies on the exploitation of either African Americans or more usually illegal Mexican immigrants who work as harvesters here in the U.S. I appreciate such studies very much, but in most of them—to a point at least—silently, implicitly, economic exploitation is read as the result of intolerance, racism. In Germany, they don’t even speak of the working class; they speak of immigrants . . .

CH: “Visiting workers.”

Žižek: Right. But the point is that we now seem to believe that the economic aspect of power is an expression of intolerance. The fundamental problem then becomes “How can we tolerate the other?” Here, psychoanalysis and the post-political we are dealing with a false psychologization. The problem is not that of intrapsychic tolerance, and so I’m opposed to this way in which all problems are translated into problems of racism, intolerance, etcetera. In this sense, I claim that with so-called postmodern identity politics, the whole concept of politics has changed, because it’s not only that certain questions aren’t any longer asked. The moment you begin to talk about . . . what’s the usual triad? “Gender . . .”

CH: “Gender/Race/Class”?

Žižek: Yes. The moment you start to talk this way, this “class” becomes just one aspect within an overall picture which already mystifies the true social antagonisms. Here I disagree with Ernesto Laclau’s more optimistic picture of the postmodern age, where there are multiple antagonisms coexisting, etcetera . . .

CH: . . . But aren’t you then subordinating what is “merely cultural” to a set of “authentically” political problems?

Žižek: No, no. I’m well aware, for example, that the whole problematic of political economy also had its own symbolic dimension. . . . I’m not playing “merely cultural” problems against “real” problems. What I’m saying is that with this new proliferation of political subjects, certain questions are no longer asked. Is the state our ultimate horizon? Is capitalism our ultimate horizon? I just take note that certain concerns have disappeared.

CH: Let’s talk about another aspect of this critique you lay out. Part of your polemic against this “post-political” sphere concerns the great premium you place on the “Lacanian act,” the gesture that resituates everything, creates its own condition of possibility, and so on. Could you specify this further by way of pointing to an example of such an act? In culture or politics, is there some instance of an authentic Lacanian act that we can turn toward?

Žižek: […] You’ve got me here, in that sense. But I’m not mystifying the notion of act into some big event . . . . What I’m saying is that the way the political space is structured today more and more prevents the emergence of the act. But I’m not thinking of some metaphysical event— once I was even accused of conceiving of some protofascist, out-of nowhere intervention. For me, an act is simply something that changes the very horizon in which it takes place, and I claim that the present situation closes the space for such acts. We could even draw the pessimist conclusion—and though he doesn’t say so publicly, I know privately that Alain Badiou tends to this conclusion—that maybe politics, for some foreseeable time, is no longer a domain where acts are possible. That is, there were times during which acts did happen—the French Revolution, the October Revolution, maybe the ’68 uprisings. I can only say what will have been an act: something which would break this liberal consensus, though of course not in a fascist way. But otherwise, there are examples from culture, from individuals’ experiences; there are acts all around in this sense. The problem for me is that in politics, again, the space for an act is closing viciously.

CH: Let’s move on to another topic. I have to ask you about your reaction to what may be Derrida’s last word on his whole conflict with Lacan, published in Resistances to Psychoanalysis. Without retracting any of his original theses concerning Lacan’s seminar on “The Purloined Letter,” Derrida now insists that“ I loved him and admired him a lot,” and also that “Not only was I not criticizing Lacan, but I was not even writing a sort of overseeing or objectifying metadiscourse on Lacan,” that it was all part of a mutual dialogue . . . . What is your response to this?

Žižek: I would just like to make two points. First, I still think, as I first developed in Enjoy Your Symptom!, that “resistance” is the appropriate term here. In deconstructionist circles, you can almost feel it, this strong embarrassment about Lacan. So they can buy Lacan only, as it were, conditionally, only insofar as they can say he didn’t go far enough. I claim that the truth is the exact opposite; the only way they can appropriate Lacan is to submit him to a radical misreading. You know, all the time we hear about the “phallic signifier,” and so on, and so on, but the figure of Lacan they construct is precisely what Lacan was trying to undermine. For example, one of the standard criticisms of some deconstructionists here in the States is that Lacan elevates the “Big Other” into some kind of non-historical, a priori symbolic order … My only, perhaps naïve answer to this is that the big Lacanian thesis from the mid-fifties is that “The Big Other doesn’t exist.” He repeats this again and again, and the point of this is precisely that there is no symbolic order that would serve as a kind of prototranscendental guarantor. My second point would be a very materialist, Althusserian one. Without reducing the theoretical aspects of this conflict, let’s not forget that academia is itself an “Ideological State Apparatus,” and that all these orientations are not simply theoretical orientations, but what’s in question is thousands of posts, departmental politics, and so on. Lacanians are excluded from this. That is to say, we are not a field. You know, Derrida has his own empire, Habermasians have their own empire—dozens of departments, all connected—but with Lacanians, it’s not like this. It’s maybe a person here, a person there, usually marginal positions. So I think we should never underestimate this aspect. I think it would be much nicer, in a way, if Derrida said the opposite: not that “I really hated him,” but “there is a tension; we are irreducible to each other.” This statement you point out is the kiss of death. What’s the message in this apparently nice statement from Derrida? The message is that “the difference is really not so strong, so that our field, deconstruction, can swallow all of this; it’s really an internal discussion.” I think it is not. I’m not even saying who’s right; I’m just claiming—and I think this is more important than ever to emphasize—the tension between Derrida and Lacan and their followers is not an interfamilial struggle. It’s a struggle between two radically different global perceptions. Even when they appear to use approximately the same terms, refer to the same orders, they do it in a totally different way, and this is why all attempts to mediate between them ultimately fall short. Once, I was at a conference at Cardozo Law School where Drucilla Cornell maintained that the Lacanian Real was a good “first attempt” at penetrating beyond this ahistorical Symbolic order, but that it also retains this dimension of otherness that is still defined through the Symbolic order, and that the Derridean notion of writing incorporates this otherness into the Symbolic order itself more effectively, much more radically, so that the “real Real” lies with Derrida’s écriture, Lacan’s “Real” is still under the dimension of the metaphysical-logocentric order, and so on. This is typical of what I’m talking about. We should simply accept that there is no common language here, that Lacan is no closer to Derrida than to Hegel, than to Heidegger, than to whomever you want.

[…]   Žižek: Yeah, yeah—you know what I’m aiming at. What I’m aiming at is . . . aren’t racist, anti-Semitic pogroms also Bakhtinian carnival? That’s to say that what interests me is not so much the progressive other whom the power is controlling, but the way in which power has to disavow its own operation, has to rely on its own obscenity. The split is in the power itself. So that . . . when Butler argues very convincingly against—at least she points to the problematic aspects of—legal initiatives that would legalize gay marriages, claiming that in this way, you accept state authority, you become part of the “visible,” you lose solidarity with all those whose identity is not publicly acknowledged . . . I would say, “Wait a minute! Is there a subject in America today who defines himself as marginalized, repressed, trampled by state authority?” Yes! They are called survivalists! The extreme right! In the United States, this opposition between public state authority and local, marginalized resistances is more and more an opposition between civil society and radical rightwing groups. I’m not saying we should simply accept the state. I’m just saying that I am suspicious of the political pertinence of this opposition between the “public” system of power which wants to control, proscribe everything, and forms of resistance to subvert it. What I’m more interested in are the obscene supplements that are inherent to power itself.

CH: Has this relatively pro-State position played a role in your decision to support the ruling party in Slovenia?

Žižek: No, no . . . that was a more specific phenomenon, a very naïve one. What happened was that, ten years ago, the danger in Slovenia was the same as in all the post-Communist countries. Would there emerge one big, hegemonic, nationalist movement that would then colonize practically the entire political space, or not? That was the choice. And by making some compromises, we succeeded. In Slovenia, the scene is totally different than in other post-Communist countries, in the sense that we don’t have—as in Poland, as in Hungary—the big opposition is not between radical, right-wing, nationalist movements and ex-Communists. The strongest political party in Slovenia is neither nationalistic, nor ex-Communist . . . it was worth it. I’m far from idealizing Slovenia, but the whole scene is nonetheless much more pluralistic, much more open. It wasn’t a Big Decision; it was just a very modest, particular gesture with a specific aim: how to prevent Slovenia from falling into the Serb or Croat trap, with one big nationalist movement that controls the space? How also to avoid the oppositions I mention that define the political space of Hungary and Poland?

CH: Could we talk about Kosovo? In The Metastases of Enjoyment, when the Bosnian conflict was still raging, you insisted that the West’s inability to act was rooted in its fixation with the “Balkan victim”—-that is, with its secret desire to maintain the Balkan subject as victim. More recently, when the NATO bombings were under way, you claimed that the act came much too late. Now, the West seems to have descended into a period of waiting for a “democratic transformation” of Serbia . . .

Žižek: . . . which will not happen, I think. Let me end up with a nice provocation: the problem for me is this abstract pacifism of the West, which renders publicly its own inability to act. What do I mean by this? For the West, practically everything that happens in the Balkans is bad. When the Serbs began their dirty work in Kosovo, that was of course bad.
When the Albanians tried to strike back, it was also bad. The possibility of Western intervention was also bad, and so on and so on. This abstract moralism bothers me, in which you deplore everything on account of . . . what? I claim that we are dealing here with the worst kind of Nietzschean ressentiment. And again, we encounter here the logic of victimization at its worst, exemplified by a New York Times piece by Steven Erlanger. He presented the crisis in terms of a “truly human perspective” on the war, and picked up an ordinary [Kosovar] Albanian woman who said, “I don’t care who wins or who loses; I just want the nightmare to end; I just want peace; I want to feel good again. . . .” This, I claim, is the West’s ideal subject—not a conscious political fighter, but this anonymous victim, reduced to this almost animal craving . . . as if the ultimate political project is to “feel good again.”

CH: In other words, a subject who has no stake in whether Kosovo gains independence or not . . .

Žižek: No stake, just this abstract suffering . . . and this is the fundamental logic, that the [Kosovar] Albanians were good so long as they were suffering. Remember the images during the war, of the Albanians coming across the mountains, fleeing Kosovo? The moment they started to strike back—and of course there are Albanian excesses; I’m not idealizing them in this sense—they become the “Muslim danger,” and so on. So it’s clear that the humanitarian interventions of the West are formulated in terms of this atmosphere of the protectorate—the underlying idea is that these people are somehow not mature enough to run their lives. The West should come and organize things for them, and of course the West is surprised if the local population doesn’t find such an arrangement acceptable. Let me tell you a story that condenses what I truly believe here. About a year and a half ago, there was an Austrian TV debate, apropos of Kosovo, between three different parties: a Green pacifist, a Serb nationalist, and an Albanian nationalist. Now, the Serb and the Albanian talked—of course within the horizon of their political projects—in pretty rational terms: you know, the Serb making the claim that Kosovo was, for many centuries, the seat of the Serbian nation, blah, blah, blah; the Albanian was also pretty rational, pointing out that since they constitute the majority, they should be allowed self-determination, etcetera. . . . Then the stupid Green pacifist said, “OK, OK, but it doesn’t matter what you think politically—just promise me that when you leave here, you will not shoot at each other, that you will tolerate each other, that you will love each other.” And then for a brief moment—that was the magic moment—I noticed how, although they were officially enemies, the Albanian and the Serb exchanged glances, as if to ask, “What’s this idiot saying? Doesn’t he get it?”

My idea is that the only hope in Kosovo is for the two of them to come together and say something like the following: “Let’s shoot the stupid pacifist!”

I think that this kind of abstract pacifism, which reformulates the problem in the terms of tolerance . . . My God, it’s not tolerance which is the problem! This is what I hate so much apropos of Western interventionism: that the problem is always rephrased in terms of tolerance/intolerance. The moment you translate it into this abstract proposition which—again, my old story—depoliticizes the situation, it’s over. Another aspect I want to emphasize apropos of Serbia: here, my friend/enemy, a Serb journalist called Alexander Tijanic, wrote a wonderful essay examining the appeal of Milosevic; for the Serb people. It was practically—I wondered if I could have paid him to make my point better. He said that the West which perceives Milosevic; as a kind of tyrant doesn’t see the perverse, liberating aspect of Milosevic;. What Milosevic; did was to open up what even Tijanic calls a “permanent carnival”: nothing functions in Serbia! Everyone can steal! Everyone can cheat! You can go on TV and spit on Western leaders! You can kill! You can smuggle! Again, we are back at Bakhtin. All Serbia is an eternal carnival now. This is the crucial thing people do not get here; it’s not simply some kind of “dark terror,” but a kind of false, explosive liberation.

CH: Do you see a viable political entity in Serbia that might alter this?

Žižek: I can give you a precise answer in the guise of a triple analysis. I am afraid the answer is no. There are three options for Serbia: one possibility is that Milosevic;’s regime will survive, but the country will be isolated, ignored, floating in its own shit, a pariah. That’s one option. Another option that we dream about is that, through mass demonstrations or whatever, there will be “a new beginning,” a new opening in the sense of a Western-style democratic upheaval. But I think, unfortunately, that what will probably happen if Milosevic; falls will be what I am tempted to call the “Russia-fication” of Serbia. That is to say, if Milosevic; falls, a new regime will take over, which will consist of basically the same nationalists who are now in power, but which will present itself to the West—like Yeltsin in Russia—as open, and so on.  Within Serbia, they will play the same corrupt games that Yeltsin is now playing, so that the same mobsters, maybe even another faction of the mafia, will take over, but they will then blackmail the West, saying that “If you don’t give us economic help, all of these nationalists will take over . . . .”

CH: The “democratic resistance” in Serbia, in fact, is also deeply nationalistic, right?

Žižek: Of course! What you don’t get often through the Western media is this hypocritical . . . for instance, when there was a clash between the police and anti-Milosevic; demonstrators, you know what the demonstrators were shouting? “Why are you beating us? Go to Kosovo and beat the Albanians!” So much for the “Serb Democratic Opposition”! Their accusation against Milosevic; is not that he is un-democratic, though it’s also that: it’s “You lost Bosnia! You lost Kosovo!” So I fear the advent of a regime that would present itself to the West as open and democratic, but will play this covert game. When pressed by the West to go further with democratic reforms, they will claim that they are under pressure from radical right-wing groups. So I don’t think there will be any great transformation. Now that the Serbs have lost Kosovo, I don’t think there will be another great conflict, but neither do I think there will be any true solution. It will just drag on—it’s very sad.

tuhkanen critique of butler

Tuhkanen, Mikko. “Performativity and Becoming” Cultural Critique. 72, Spring (2009): 1-35.

For example, her description of Antigone as “the limit without which the symbolic cannot be thought” or the “unthinkable within the symbolic” might seem to be referring to the real, yet she goes on to identify Antigone’s position as possibly embodying an “alternative symbolic or imaginary” (Antigone’s Claim, 40) and, immediately afterward, turns to Lacan’s second seminar to criticize his totalizing theory of the symbolic law (41–42; see also 47). Arguably, this conflation of different stages in Lacan’s work forces (or allows) her to ignore Lacan’s divergence from a structuralist understanding of a system (see also Penney, 19).

Relevant here is Shepherdson’s suggestion that “the ‘real’ can be understood as a concept that was developed in order to define in a clear way how there is always an element that ‘does not belong’ within the structure, an ‘excluded’ element which escapes the law, but which can nevertheless be approached in a precise theoretical fashion.” Consequently, “psychoanalysis is not in fact committed to the ‘law’ in the manner of classical structuralist thought” (“Intimate Alterity,” paras. 13, 24).

In No Future, Lee Edelman argues that, rather than making good on its claim to conjure up from the tragic heroine’s tomb a radical challenge to the protocols of symbolic legitimation, Butler’s rendering of Antigone “returns us, instead, to familiar forms of a durable liberal humanism whose rallying cry has always been, and here remains,‘the future’” (105–6). For Edelman, such seamless domestication of the real to symbolic meaning is symptomatic of the inherent failure of futurity to be evoked in terms of anything but what he calls “reproductive futurism” (2 and passim). In the figure of the Child, politics premised on futurism “generates generational succession, temporality, and narrative sequence, not toward the end of enabling change, but, instead, of perpetuating sameness, of turning back time to assure repetition” (60). In this schema of enabling the future to unfold as a reassuringly recognizable continuation of the present, queers are “stigmatized as threatening an end to the future itself” (113). Given the unquestioned reflex of seeing “every political vision as a vision of futurity” (13), Edelman’s exhilaratingly counterintuitive argument that queer respond to its stigmatization with a kind of an answer of the real, with an embrace of its status as an embodiment of “the arbitrary, future-negating force of a brutal and mindless drive” (127), has a strong appeal. If there are reasons to resist this appeal, they must come from the fact that queer theory may not yet have come to grips with the specificity of the consequences of its paradigmatic groundings.

I would propose that, because of the Butlerian paradigm on which much of queer theory has developed, the question of becoming, of futurity’s claim on our thinking, may not yet have been adequately posed.

With Deleuze, for example, we must ask whether futurity as becoming is reducible to breeding, in the sense in which fag slang uses the term to signal the mindless, mechanic, and (in Foucault’s terms) docile reproduction of the same. Edelman writes:

“the true oppositional politics implicit in the practice of queer sexualities lies not in the liberal discourse and patient negotiation of tolerances and rights, important as these undoubtedly are to all of us still denied them, but in the capacity of queer sexualities to figure the radical dissolution of the contract, in every sense social and Symbolic, on which the future as putative assurance against the jouissance of the Real depends” (16).

While not precisely disagreeing with Edelman, I would ask whether we have quite exhausted the question of futurity before we abandon it. To do this, we may want to shift our paradigmatic perspective such that our grounding assumptions are defamiliarized and our concepts—here the question of becoming—are necessarily rethought.  Such a shift, I propose, would allow us to see that the futurity of performative politics may constitute only a partial understanding of what Deleuze, for example, sees as becoming.

decline of paternal function

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004.  155

However, this identificatory process also fails to properly secure and maintain the paternal function. In Lacan’s account of the modern family, the paternal figure is subject to constant attack. For this reason, he perceives ‘the social decline of the paternal imago’ (1938a: 200, FC: 72).

Lacan’s argument in his later seminar Le sinthome (1975– 1976) (S23) (1975d) echoes this claim that the father is a position which must continually be upheld, as there is no support for the paternal function, no Other of the Other. Roudinesco argues that ‘[t]he story is that of modern man, man in our modern civilization, marked by the ineluctable decline of the ideals of the paternalistic family’ (1997: 215). Accordingly, the mark of modernity is not a normative, integrating Oedipus complex that succeeds; but rather one that fails.

The decline of the paternal function structures the modern subject in a failure to surmount its Oedipus complex. The failure of this complex should be understood as the failure of its resolution. A ‘successful’ resolution of this complex involves a repression of the desire for the mother, and the concomitant formation of the ego-ideal and super-ego in paternal identification.

When Lacan describes a ‘failure’ of the Oedipus complex, his argument is not that the complex itself fails, but rather that there is a failure of its paternal resolution. Lacan argues that in the failed modern Oedipus complex the structure of subjective identification shifts from that of traditional patriarchy to its modern form.

In making this argument, Lacan develops the otherwise blurred distinction in Freud’s work between the super-ego and the ego-ideal (Borch-Jacobsen 1991: 37). Lacan draws out two aspects of the paternal function, one that forms the imaginary ego-ideal – ‘be like me, the father’ – and the other which forms the repressive super-ego – ‘do not be like me, because you cannot have the mother’. 155

Lacan’s description of the ‘failed’ Oedipus complex posits a successful sublimation of the imaginary ego-ideal with its injunction ‘be like me’, but also a failure of the formation of the repressive super-ego with its categorical imperative of ‘do not be like me’. The subject does not repudiate maternal desire because the father says ‘no’, but rather because the subject gives up that desire in order to be like the father.154

identification with the socially privileged paternal figure rather than the repressive patriarchal father produces the modern subject.
… the subject sacrifices the mother for paternal identification, and receives in return the power and prestige that the father offers.

In the modern social world, the father represents (and has) social power and prestige in the parental relationship (Brennan 1993: 58). This symbolic and material economy privileges the bearer of the phallus, which the father claims or is given. For this reason, the child perceives the father as having power, prestige and privilege.

Teresa Brennan describes this operation of paternal identification as a process of the recognition of power, where the masculine subject recognizes the father ‘as a shaper and acknowledged recognizer, a namer, into whose dominating kingdom he will one day come’ (1993: 53). With paternal identification, the masculine subject accepts the Law of the Father – ‘I cannot have the mother’ – in return for the power of the father and access to other women.

… that ‘the modern form of the Oedipus, characterized by an ambivalent and “devouring” identification with the real father’, produces a subject that engages in aggressive rivalry with the father (1991: 40). This father is the symbolic father, the paternal legislator whose position the son usurps in his incorporating identification, as he cannot do in reality. With that identification, the son commits a symbolic murder of the father. The symbolic father comes to represent the real father of the subject, who can then incorporate the paternal figure as ego-ideal.

This process is an identification of the order of ‘wanting to be like’. That identification incorporates what Lacan describes as the single mark (trait unaire), the unifying trait of the phallus of the father, which functions as a representative of the Law of the Father and of a cultural order which privileges him.

phallic signifier

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 122.

Social fictions are not seamless and unitary, but multiple and contradictory. For example, Gloria Anzaldúa argues that for the Hispanic lesbian markers of ‘identity’ often conflict, and that ‘self’ is negotiated in those conflictual identificatory demands (1987: 77– 91). Anzaldúa describes a process in which master signifiers of the subject – those markers of ‘self’ – produce a subject with multiple discursive interpellations.

Anzaldúa’s account is in clear contrast to the white bourgeois and heterosexual masculine subject whose markers of identity seem to ‘match’ the master signifiers of social fictions of modern Western society. The subject is produced in both personal and social histories that are fundamentally imbricated. In this way, social fictions are discourses of both the subjective and the social, because an imaginary and symbolic relation to other subjects always produces the subject.

This description of the subject draws on the Lacanian psychoanalytic insight that the psychic and the social are moments of each other, produced in the basic ‘nature’ of humans not to be natural.

However, the concept of the social fiction does not imply the liberal idea of the social contract in which individual subjects of consciousness agree at a mythical moment of origin to enter rational social arrangements. Rather, it retains the Lacanian insistence that there is no pre-discursive reality since the world is always already inscribed in discourse (S20: 32).

The subject does not therefore emerge into a neutral social world but is inserted into already existing social relations. Social fictions exist prior to the subject and its very existence is contingent upon them. Social fictions are discursive relations between subjects that have material effect because they are ‘lived’ by subjects. This material effect can be seen in the operations of fictions of gender.

For example, while the Symbolic order is a symbolic relation between subjects, the phallic signifier orders that relation, positing some subjects as having the phallus and others as not having it.

At this symbolic level, the possession or absence of the phallus defines subjects. However, at a discursive level, the symbolic relation is filled with content as to the ‘nature’ of sexed identity. The social fictions of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ attach respectively to a subject with or without the phallus. The fictions of gender interpellate male and female bodies as masculine and feminine subjects, so that it fixes the contingency of the relation between phallus and penis. The fictions of gender render penis, phallus and masculinity as male subjectivity. In the Western social world, the phallus is a signifier that proliferates in a multitude of discourses of masculinity, which in turn produce a number of recognizably ‘masculine’ subjects.

Male subjects can recognize themselves as ‘masculine’, and equally importantly, other subjects are able to recognize them as ‘masculine’. Social fictions are symbolic relations that have material effects, and those material effects give substance, reality and existence to these symbolic relations between subjects.

Jane Gallop points out that it is not just the referentiality of phallus/penis that produces ‘masculinity’ but also the social arrangements that attach power of many forms to the masculine subject (1988: 53). The social world of the fictions of gender is still riven with material and structural inequality for women.

… The social fiction of gender operates such that even if a female subject were to want to take up a ‘masculine’ position, she would find innumerable difficulties in doing so. These difficulties arise not only because she may not identify with the social fiction of masculinity, but also because other subjects may insist on her insertion into the social discourses of femininity, regardless of her identificatory position.

In this sense, the subject is not its own creation, for it must always contend with the realities of social life. The world of the social fiction has facticity, in the sense that it is prior to the subject and has a material and psychic reality for the subject.

Positing the subject
Social fictions produce a subjective position of social identity, in which ‘position’ describes a temporal and spatial moment of subjectivation rather than an ontological foundation. The true subject of the social fiction, like the subject of the Lacanian account it draws upon, is empty.

Fraser claims that ‘Lacan’s account of identity construction cannot account for identity shifts over time’ (1992: 183). However, the Lacanian subject is never an ‘essence’, not even an Oedipal essence. Identity is fictional, for otherwise psychoanalysis could not have as its aim ‘identity shifts’. The Lacanian account fundamentally engages with the spatial and temporal formation of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, and my model of the subject of social fictions takes up the Lacanian emphasis upon its continual production.

In this model of the social fiction, two key and ongoing processes of interpellation produce a speaking position of the subject. The first key process is the personal history of the subject, that is, its production within familial networks. However, these familial relationships are not ‘outside’ the symbolic networks of social fictions, so that a personal history describes a position formed at the intersection of both psychic and social histories.

In this first process of interpellation, the subject comes into existence as a ‘being’ which possesses a ‘self’. These imaginary relations to self and others make discursive relations lived or ‘real’. That child becomes an adult, a social being that lives in and through its formative social fictions.

In this second key process of interpellation, the subject ‘mis/recognizes’ itself in discourse, in terms of its already given ‘identity’ and ‘self’. In this sense, identification with the master signifiers of social fictions reproduces the subject, because it reiterates the imaginary and symbolic relations which were formative of the subject and which capture the subject in social fictions. That capture is a process both of an experience of ‘identity’ and of an enactment of an ‘identity’ for others. This subject does not simply reflect existing social identities, because it also has agency. It can ‘read’ social fictions for their representation of dominant identities and act on that reading, such that the subject can represent itself through different master signifiers of social identity and come to occupy a different position of identity.

An example of this process can be seen in class mobility, in which the subject takes on the cultural markers of its aspirant class.

‘Identity’ in social fictions is not a social construct imposed upon a passive subject. The subject itself acts to produce its identity by reproducing or resisting fictive identities. Nevertheless, it is not necessarily easy to attain subjective mobility, particularly in relation to sexualized and racialized bodies, since sexuality and race are read on to and mark the body itself.

Transsexuals recognize that social fact in their desire to be bodily ‘men’ or ‘women’, rather than only presenting the signs of ‘masculinity’ or ‘femininity’. The desire for surgical intervention shows how immobile gender ‘mobility’ can be. In transsexuality, the subject represents itself to others through master signifiers of ‘masculinity’ or ‘femininity’. In this example, the subject is concerned with its representation of its ‘self’ to others. However, those others may insist that the subject embody particular and ‘fixed’ master signifiers of sexual difference, and it is this insistence that the transsexual often seeks to evade. In its relations to others, the subject engages with the imaginary and symbolic relations of social fictions that others seek to impose upon it. Because of sexist or racist others, it may not be possible to evade another’s signification of our ‘selves’ in discourses of social fictions.

Subjective engagement with social fictions is performative in Butler’s sense and is therefore open to change. However, others will constrain the mobility of that performance of identity. The subject has agency in relation to social fictions because of their contingency. The relation of subject to social fictions is a contingent one, as it is fixed by imaginary and symbolic relations. For example, the relation between the female body and ‘femininity’ is conditional upon the fixing of cultural difference to bodily difference (Chanter 1997: 59). However, to argue that this relation is contingent is not to argue within a sex/gender model that has generally dominated feminist thinking.

The psychoanalytic inflection of the social fiction emphasizes the production of sexed subjectivity within imaginary and symbolic relations. If the subject is always already sexed, then feminist resistance is not merely a matter of reinscribing the female body (although this may be a strategy of that resistance), but also requires intervention in the symbolic and imaginary orders that produce our relation to ourselves and others.

For this reason, my account of the social fiction should not be misread as a social constructivist account of the imposition of a social order upon a passive being, with an additional psychoanalytic emphasis on the psychic mechanisms that produce social identity. … Joan Copjec points out that if the constructivist model was an accurate description of the production of subjects, the social world would create content and happy beings whose pleasures were commensurate with its normative roles (1994: 53– 54). This clearly is not the case. 125

My account of the social fiction is distinguishable from that influential sociological account by its Lacanian insistence that social integration is neither ‘successful’ nor complete. As a psychoanalytic social theory, the social fiction emphasizes the cost and failure of production of the subject in social (re)production.

Psychoanalysis posits a moment of failure of and excess to the social that is produced in the social order itself: the unconscious. The unconscious marks the failure of the social order to complete and fix the subject. The unconscious marks that failure of the social order to integrate the subject fully or satisfactorily into its discursive demands. However, the unconscious also marks an excess to the social. Unconscious desires, fantasy and identification interpellate the subject in discursive formations, but they also mark subjective demands that exceed those social discourses, as the unconscious describes culturally repudiated desires of the subject.

For this reason, Jacqueline Rose is right to argue that a political project which is also psychoanalytically inflected cannot reify the unconscious – for the unconscious represents what we (and the social order) do not want as much as that which we do (1986: 8).

For example, the hysteric’s dilemma is an outcome of that repudiation of desire. In this sense, the unconscious marks that which the social order repudiates and represses, and so represents its excess. Psychoanalysis recognizes the anti-social, aggressive and solipsistic nature of an unconscious for which there is no negation.

In my psychoanalytic model of intersubjective relations, the subject is fictional and the signifier ambiguous. The subject and meaning are never determined; where they are fixed in a monologic symbolic economy, it is always at some cost to the subject.

The psychoanalytic insight of the cost of civilization concerns the suffering of the subject that the fixity of repetition causes. This failure of complete interpellation not only reveals the cost of securing social identity, but also creates the possibility of its contestation. If social integration is never complete, then the dominant fictions of our social order cannot ever entirely succeed, and where they are secured, it is only at a cost to the subject itself. Most importantly, in this account a moment of failure founds social relations themselves.

Social relations as symbolic relations fail because they are structured by an order which itself suffers a limit and concomitant failure in its symbolic logic. The Symbolic order is structured in an absence – a lack that founds and produces that order. Rose argues that both psychoanalysis and feminism share the position that a limit and a failure of the social order is sexual difference – specifically, the sexual difference of women (1986: 91).

In the modern socio-symbolic order, the social stumbles upon ‘Woman’ which functions as an unstable ‘break’ upon which it is founded and founders. If the cost of sociality is borne by all subjects, that cost is borne differently by sexuated subjects. Subjects may exchange a common loss which is the price of sociality, but the bearer of that loss is the female subject who represents all subjects’ lackin-being. For this reason, Freud is correct to see ‘women’ as a problem of the social, since ‘women’ represent its limit as well as its ground (1930: 293). Yet this position of women can also be reread as possibility – for the possibility that the phallic social order fails to define all that women are produces feminist knowledge. In this reading, women do not represent the ‘problem’ of sociality, but rather that ‘problem’ is a symbolic and social order that would posit women as a defining limit. This political shift is made by feminism. While social fictions of gender may constitute female subjectivity, feminist discourse articulates their inability to symbolize the ‘not all’ of women. It represents the possibility that a social fiction is fictional, and as such it is possible to contest and change it. 126-127

Oedipal complex reformulated using mirror stage

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 120.

Discourses of the subject

How do discourses produce subjective identity? In his later work on the four discourses, Lacan suggests that symbolic identification with a master signifier produces the subject. As I discussed in Chapter 3, the master signifier is a symbolic element that represents the subject to itself and to other subjects. It is the ‘unifying’ trait which constitutes the subject and which functions as the signifiant-m’être, that signifier which masters the subject. This represents, in Lacan’s account, the signifier of my ‘being’ (S17: 178).

Identification with that master signifier which ‘names’ the subject produces it within discourse, and so produces its speaking position.

In this reformulation of the Oedipus complex, the imaginary I becomes the social I of identity in its identificatory attachment to those master signifiers which structure the signifying chains of discourse. This account of subject formation explains how the Freudian bodily ego becomes a social identity.

In Lacanian theory, a symbolic representation of the imaginary morphology of the ego of the mirror stage produces the subject as a ‘self’. This symbolic representation is articulated through the master signifiers of the Symbolic order that enable the subject to experience itself as a self – as an I of identity. Identification with the master signifiers of social fictions produces that experience of self.

Social fictions are both imaginary and symbolic. In social fictions, the Symbolic order is given content by the imaginary: ‘at the level of the Imaginary, the subject believes in the transparency of the Symbolic; it does not recognize the lack of reality in the Symbolic . . . in effect, the Imaginary is where the subject mis-recognises (méconnait) the nature of the Symbolic’ (Lechte 1994: 68– 69).

Social fictions reproduce the Symbolic order because the production of the subject in identification with its master signifiers gives the fictional Symbolic order ‘flesh’ and so ‘life’. The discourses of social fictions produce subjects through a process of introjection of their master signifiers. If discourse produces the subject, it cannot be separate from the subject but must be integral to subjective formation.

Through that formation, the subject comes to have imaginary relations of phantasy and identification to its symbolic master signifiers and hence to discourse. Psychic mechanisms operate to produce the subject in relation to discursive master signifiers and, in particular, to the social fictions of identity that they represent. Identification with the master signifiers of discourse constitutes subjects, since that is how the subject becomes a subject.

While the Lacanian model addresses the sexuation of the subject, this conception of the social fiction includes other master signifiers of identity, such as sexuality, ethnicity or class. Butler points out that it is necessary to recognize that ‘the order of sexual difference is not prior to that of race or class in the constitution of the subjects; indeed that the symbolic is also at and at once a racializing set of norms, and that norms of realness by which the subject is produced are racially informed conceptions of “sex”’ (1993b: 130).

Social fictions represent discourses of social identity that intersect in overdetermined master signifiers. The theory of social fictions enables us to understand how discourses reproduce the racialized and sexualized subject and intersubjective relations of the Symbolic order. As a discourse, social fictions rest on a foundational and excluded term a. This excluded term is a discursive construct, since it is produced by the operations of social fictions. Social fictions of identity rest on the positing of difference – ‘I am a man (because I am not a woman).’

The assertion of difference is itself filled with imaginary content: ‘If I am a man (because I am not a woman), then I must possess this set of associated masculine qualities.’ In this way, the positing of identity in social discourses is productive because those discourses describe practices which signify how ‘to be’ a subject. At the same time, that ‘being’ rests on the production of a repudiated other – ‘I am not a woman’ – for social fictions rest on symbolic relations of identity and non-identity. The repudiated other functions as the foundational and excluded term a.

Social fictions themselves produce the repudiated term – for that repudiation founds their signifying structure. For example, the social fictions of masculinity rest on the excluded and foundational term of the feminine – a masculine subject defines itself in terms of another which is castrated. The ‘castrated’ ‘feminine’ functions as the excluded a. We can see other examples of the operation of social fictions in Drucilla Cornell’s description of the production of ‘white’ identity that is founded on its repudiated other of ‘black’ identity (1992: 67), and Butler’s description of a ‘heterosexual’ identity that rests on a repudiated ‘homosexual identification’ (1993b: 111).

social fictions symbolic

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 119.

Social fictions are culturally dominant representations of how to be a subject and how to exist as a subject in relation to other subjects.

… Lacan links what he describes as the dominant discourse of our age – the Discourse of the Master – to the rise of capitalism and the modern ego (S17: 207), indicating that discourses are historically and culturally specific. Accordingly, social fictions can be understood as historically and culturally specific forms of the Symbolic order, which articulate particular historical and cultural discourses.

Judith Butler offers a useful reading of the Symbolic order as ‘a register of regulatory ideality’, which includes not only sexualized but racialized interpellations (1993b: 18). For Butler, the Symbolic produces ‘regulatory norms’ which demarcate and delimit forms of family, identity and love (1997b: 66). It represents ‘reigning epistemes of cultural intelligibility’ (1997b: 24), suggesting that it is a set of cultural rules which constitute social norms.

However, in this formulation, the Symbolic remains a closed and monolithic structure that produces a single normative subject. Such a conception of the Symbolic does not explain the many discourses of identity, or their historical specificity – which are precisely the grounds of Butler’s critique of the Lacanian notion of the Symbolic.

‘Social fictions’ help us to understand the ‘register of regulatory ideality’ as a discursive register of social fictions, as discourses of identity that produce it through the identification with master signifiers of sexualized and racialized subjectivity. The Symbolic order also produces racialized and sexualized relations between subjects, operating as a register of regulatory relations. While the Symbolic order structures discourses in terms of the production of sexualized and racialized subjects and intersubjective relations, the ‘content’ of those identities and social relations will be historically and culturally articulated as social fictions. Social fictions are therefore specific to a historical moment of that social order. In this way, social fictions are contingent in the sense that they represent particular cultural and historical forms of the discursive production of identity. If social fictions are contingent and mobile, then they are open to political contestation and change.

campbell symbolic

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 116.

In Lacanian theory, contestatory knowledge is psychoanalytic and subversion emerges from each individual’s psychoanalysis. If we follow Lacan to the letter, then it seems a critical or collective politics outside psychoanalysis will fail. In contrast, feminism is a collective politics that contends that it is possible to create knowledges that do not reproduce the Discourse of the Master.

Lacan does not intend his psychoanalytic theory to be a social theory. Nevertheless, his work presents a series of explicit and implicit claims as to the nature of the social in its account of the Symbolic order. .. While Lacanian knowledge is by definition a social practice, his work presents an unelaborated concept of sociality. For this reason, Lacan does not develop the radical implications of his epistemological theory. Rather, this theory of knowledge removes the knowing subject and knowledge from their social frame and so fails to address their social and political production, a central contemporary epistemological concern (Doyle McCarthy 1996).  Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter argue that ‘to be adequate, an epistemology must attend to the complex ways in which social values influence knowledge’ (1993a: 13) … A theory of feminist knowledge requires a more complex account of the social than Lacan’s unelaborated notion of the Symbolic order. … In the next section, I address these problems in the theory of the Symbolic order, using two strategies. The first elaborates the theory of the Symbolic order through Lacan’s later concept of discursive intersubjectivity. The second develops this Lacanian theory of the social relation through a feminist theory of social relations. These two strategies represent the first part of a rereading of the Symbolic order as a social order. 114

The Lacanian account of subjectivity contains within it a theory of intersubjectivity because it provides an account of the production of relation between subjects. However, in his later work Lacan characterizes ‘intersubjectivity’ as an imaginary relation between subjects. By the 1960s, the concept of intersubjectivity acquires negative connotations, as Lacan associates it with the imaginary and dual relation of two selves trapped in the méconnaissance of their egos (Evans 1996: 90).

Lacan develops his critique of this imaginary intersubjectivity from the Hegelian account of the battle for recognition between the master and the slave. Žižek points out that ‘[w]hat the late Lacan does with intersubjectivity is to be opposed to the early Lacan’s Hegelo-Kojèvian motifs of the struggle for recognition’ (1998 Seven Veils of Fantasy in Nobus Key Concepts: 194).

Žižek counterposes the intersubjective character of fantasy – the imaginary relation to the other as object – and the field of intersubjectivity of the symbolic Other (1998b: 195– 196). This later account of the symbolic field of intersubjectivity differs from the Hegelian model of imaginary recognition. An example of Lacan’s concept of symbolic intersubjectivity is found in his description of the transference between analyst and analysand. In the relation between analyst and analysand, there is always a third party – that of language as the order of culture which intervenes in the imaginary relation. This third party is the Symbolic order, a symbolic relation between subjects. 115

Symbolic Order

The Symbolic order represents a symbolic rather than an imaginary relation between subjects. The Symbolic is ‘a point beyond the specular oscillation of intersubjective rivalry – a purely symbolic point’ (Lechte 1996: 12). The Symbolic order forms the subject and its relations to others. In this formulation, Lacan presents a model of intersubjectivity in which language constructs the relation between subjects. In this sense, intersubjectivity implies a symbolic relation between subjects that makes possible their social relation. The theory of the four discourses is an example of such a model of intersubjectivity, as the four discourses describe the foundational discursive bonds between subjects. This formulation reflects a classical concept of intersubjectivity in critical theory, drawing upon its most minimal formulation as a relation between subjects. 116

The concept of symbolic intersubjectivity offers a means of rereading the Symbolic order through the later theory of discourse. The later theory shifts its emphasis from the Symbolic as a monolithic and closed structure to the open and incomplete nature of both discourse and the Symbolic order.

For Lacan, discourse always produces a remainder, which represents its foundational and excluded term, as ‘[n]o matter how many signifiers one adds to the signifying chain, the chain is always incomplete; it lacks the signifier which could complete it’ (Evans 1996: 96).

An excluded term structures discourse because there is a lack in its foundation, the Symbolic order. With this poststructuralist inflection, we can use Lacan’s later work on discourse to reformulate a concept of the Symbolic order that does not imply that it is a singular or total structure of language, and so to develop from it a feminist and psychoanalytic social theory.

The theory of the four discourses reconceives the Symbolic order as producing different discursive structures, giving more complexity to the account of the symbolic relations between subjects. It permits us to reformulate the concept of the Symbolic order as a mobile system of signifying chains – or discourses – which produce social relations and subjects.

This model of the Symbolic order accepts Lacan’s proposition that it founds the stable structures of discourse. However, it also proposes that these stable structures take different discursive forms, which in turn produce different symbolic forms of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. In this way, I develop the concept of the Symbolic order to describe the structure and operation of social discourses; and their production of subjects and social relations.

My reformulation of the notion of the Symbolic order retains the later Lacanian conception of discourse as constructing possible subjective positions and discursive acts. However, it emphasizes the productivity of discourses, in the sense that it emphasizes their production and reproduction in subjective and intersubjective discursive practices, rather than being fixed or frozen structures that are imposed upon the subject. In this way, it understands discourse as constitutive of, and articulated in, subjectivity and intersubjectivity; as producing and being reproduced by subjects and the relations between them.

group psychology identification

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004.

For Freud, vertical identification secures the relation of the leader to the members of the group. Each member of the group adopts the perceived attributes of its leader, and in so doing replaces his or her ego-ideal with that of an idealized model of the leader. In this way, each member of the group comes to possess the same ego-ideal. Horizontal identification secures the relation between members of the group, as each member of the group identifies with the ego-ideal of other members. However, the feminist movement cannot be said to have a leader of the type that Freud describes (that is, the prescribed, fixed status of a Pope of the Church or a General of the Army). Rather, it generally rejects ‘leaders’ because it insists upon an anti-hierarchical politics, in which ‘groups’ attempt to organize themselves within models of co-operative and collective decision-making.

In this sense, feminism attempts to resist the vertical tie of group member to leader while emphasizing the horizontal tie between members of its communities. How then is it possible to account for the operation of identifications within the feminist movement? Freud suggests that what he calls ‘leading ideas’ can serve in the place of the ego-ideal provided by the leader of a group, and as such can secure the intersubjective relations of the members of a group (1921: 125).

Drawing on Freud, Teresa Brennan suggests that a feminist ‘body of writing’ can serve as an ego-ideal (1986: 10). In terms of the subject, then, the ‘leading ideas’ of feminism can serve as the ego-ideal of the vertical tie of identification. The identification is with the political ideas of feminism. For example, bell hooks (1981) argues that many women of colour identify with and enact feminist ideas, even while disidentifying with second-wave feminism because of their perception of its racism. More recently, Rebecca Walker (1995a) put forward a similar argument in relation to her third-wave generation. Despite the complexity of naming them, there is a set of commitments or ‘leading ideas’ that the term ‘feminism’ represents. According to this model, each subject identifies with, and thus incorporates, these ‘leading ideas’ of feminist politics. In this way, the body of ideas that forms ‘feminist politics’ serves as the ego-ideal for the subject. They function as the object that the subject identifies with and ‘wants to be like’. For example, Veronica Chambers offers a typical third-wave description of her encounter with feminist ideas, in which she discovers ‘a context for my political existence. A vocabulary for my situation. An agenda to empower myself and others’ (1995: 21). However, Brennan suggests that this process is more complex than the assimilation of the abstraction called ‘feminist politics’. Brennan perceives not only a body of ideas but also ‘a person, people’ as objects of feminist identifications (1986: 10). For example, third-wave feminist Rebecca Walker describes how ‘[l]inked with my desire to be a good feminist was a deep desire to be accepted, claimed and loved by a feminist community that included my mother, godmother, aunts and close friends’ (1995a: xxx). 97

… However, the feminist movement is not simply constituted by a series of identificatory ties of each member to an ‘ideal’. The collective nature of a political movement implies more than each individual’s commitment to a set of ideas or role model. It also implies that these individuals perceive themselves as members of a political movement and that these individuals identify with each other as members of that movement. This relation is an identification with the other members of the movement, as well as with the ideals that produce political engagement. There is, it seems, another ‘emotional tie’ at work in the feminist movement. How do we understand that emotional tie? In his discussion of the psychology of the group, Freud argues that, in addition to the vertical tie of identification to the ‘ideal’, there is also a tie between group members. Freud argues that in this relation between group members, each member has ‘put one and the same object in the place of their ego-ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego’ (1921: 147). This horizontal tie between members of a group can be seen within the feminist movement. Members recognize others as ‘feminists’ because of a shared commitment to a political project. Each member identifies in others a shared ego-ideal of ‘feminist politics’. In this sense, each subject has put ‘one and the same object’ – feminism – in the place of their ego-ideal and ‘have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego’. That identification creates a relation between subjects as members of a collective movement. For example, in the introduction to the anthology, To Be Real, Walker argues that ‘these thinkers stake out an inclusive terrain from which to actively seek the goals of social equality and individual freedom they all share’ (1995a: xxxv). These ego-ideal identifications construct both a feminist subject and its relation to other feminist subjects, forming a feminist ‘we’. Brennan suggests that the ego-ideal identification of feminists offsets the categorical imperatives of the patriarchal super-ego, which permits an evasion of the commands of the Father, and makes it possible to think ‘outside’ patriarchy (1986: 10). Certainly, it appears that a feminist ego-ideal displaces the patriarch’s. However, the possibility of such a process also suggests that the Father’s intervention may not be as effective as he would wish.

If, as I have argued, the paternal super-ego is not necessarily effectively secured in, or does not secure, the formation of the female subject, its failure permits an evasion of its normative injunctions and hence creates a possibility of feminist ego-ideal identification.

In this model, feminist identifications take three forms. The first is an affective primary relation with other women. The second and third involve ego-ideal identifications with the ‘ideals’ of feminist politics and with others as members of a political movement. In Freudian terms, both horizontal and vertical ties form feminist subjects. An example of this process can be seen in Elissa Marder’s description of the label ‘feminist’ as ‘seemingly personally conferred (I declare myself a feminist) and collectively confirmed (I am acknowledged by others as participating in feminism)’ (1992: 149). This personal conferral – ‘I identify myself as’ – and that collective confirmation – ‘I identify myself with others and others identify me as’ – produce feminist subjects and the relation between them.

If identification is ‘the detour through the other that defines a self’, then that process forms a feminist ‘self’. Primary identification enables a feminist subject to engage with other women. It institutes a relation between female subjects, and enables a recognition of, as well as a relation to, other women. In this way, it enables feminists to identify with other women and to imagine a relation to them.

Fuss describes how Fanon’s psychoanalytic theory repeatedly calls for ‘“an ethics of mutual identifications”…a world of reciprocal recognitions’ (1995: 144). The construction of an affective relation to other women provides the possibility of an ethics of mutual identifications with, and reciprocal recognitions of, other women. The operations of ego-ideal identifications enable feminist subjects to recognize and imagine themselves as a political movement. After all, feminism is a movement of people, an imagined community that coheres in demonstrations, writing, meetings, actions, projects, conferences, and other forms of activism. The mechanism of ego-ideal identifications enables feminists to perceive themselves as members of a movement. The identifications of its members form this collectivity, both with the ideals of feminist politics and with other subjects identifying with those ideals. This political relation enables feminist conversations to take place, because it forms a feminist ‘I’ and a feminist ‘we’. Therefore feminist subjects are not ‘autonomous, self-making, self-determining subject[s]’ (Alarcón 1994: 141). Rather, a relation to other subjects and to feminist politics produces feminist subjects. 99

Loving the self as other: imaginary identification

This description of identificatory relations between political subjects should not be mistaken for a second-wave ‘sisterhood’ of women united by their identity. Identificatory ties are a means of establishing both commonality and difference, which work to produce both unity with, and differentiation from, others. Lacanian theory provides a means of further understanding this complicated process. While drawing on the Freudian theory, Lacan’s account provides a more complex distinction between imaginary and symbolic identification. This distinction enables us to understand the different identificatory processes at work in the production of feminist subjects, and to draw out the politics of feminist identifications. Like Freud, Lacan recognizes the importance of identification in the formation of the subject, but inflects the Freudian theory through his own theory of the mirror stage. Malcolm Bowie points out that Lacan understands primary identification as being formed in the mirror stage, and accordingly emphasizes its narcissistic and egoistic aspects (1991: 33– 34). For Lacan, the mirror stage can be understood ‘as an identification’ which forms the ego-ideal and hence precipitates the ego (É: 2). For Lacan, identifications are always situated in the imaginary order because they reflect the ego’s narcissistic perceptions.

This Lacanian theory is crucial to understanding feminist identifications because it describes the other side of identification – the desire of the ego that the other mirror the self. 10

Lacan argues that in imaginary identifications, the object is caught in the ego’s méconnaissance or misrecognition of the other as self. The ego misrecognizes the other in its specular reflections, perceiving the other as identical to itself. The identificatory object is known only as the same as self, and with that misrecognition comes a refusal of difference.

In a desire for sameness, the ego perceives only those qualities that are identical to it, so that it refuses difference in the object. The identificatory object functions not as an Other but as an imaginary counterpart, an other that the self imagines to reflect it.

Those imaginary misrecognitions can be seen at work in the feminist movement when a knower, while identifying with other women, does not perceive another woman’s difference, but instead only her similarity. An example of a literal méconnaissance can be seen in Veronica Chambers’s critique of Naomi Wolf’s failure to ‘see’ the colour of her beauty myth (1995: 27). Such an imaginary identification produces the effect of a refusal to recognize the differences between women. In refusing the differences between women, imaginary relations do not recognize other identifications that women may themselves have.

Rightly or wrongly, the third wave emerges from a perception of second wave refusal of difference. It contends that feminism cannot reflect only the concerns of white, middle-class women, but must recognize ‘the multiple, interpenetrating axes of identity’ (Drake and Heywood 1997a: 3). This refusal of the difference between women is symptomatic of the relation of aggressivity to, and mastery of, others of imaginary identification. In this relation to others, the self appropriates the other in an act of violence, reducing the other to an imaginary counterpart whose difference has been mastered. If the other insists upon her difference, the egoistic self greets her with hostility arising from an anxiety of difference. Such an identificatory operation ‘is itself an imperial process, a form of violent appropriation in which the Other is deposed and assimilated into the lordly domain of self’ (Fuss 1995: 145). 100