butler – Page 11 – objet (a)

Loizidou ethics antigone

Loizidou, Elena. Judith Butler: Ethics, Law, Politics. New York: Routledge Cavendish, 2007.

a de-struktion of the way philosophy, since Plato, constituted the subject, Levinas’s critique of western metaphysics offered us an important lesson. We have learned that if we are not to regress into morality, if we are to have an ethical relationship with the Other, we are required to establish ethics as a first philosophy.

The requires a reconception of how we understand ourselves. It necessitates the deconstruction of the ego or knowing self when the Other, the one that is external to me, calls upon me. 72

In some respects, the call for this type of ethics could also be a description of moments when my ego, my self-knowledge, is reconstituted via the call of the Other, where I fail to reduce the Other to myself. … It becomes paramount that if we talk of ethics, bereft of moralisation, we need to think of the subject as, unreflexive, not-knowing, a surprise, non-identical and particular. As is by now apparent, Levinas’s critique of western metaphysical philosophy could be comfortably directed towards Descartes and Kant.

quoting Antigone

I’d never have taken this ordeal upon myself, never defied our people’s will. What law, you ask, do I satisfy with what I say? A husband dead, there might have been another. A child by another too, if I had lost the first. But mother and father both lost in the halls of Death, no brother could ever spring to light again. (Robert Fagles Trans.)

burying her brother … was done in honour or celebration of the particularity of her brother. Her brother, unlike a child or a husband, is irreplaceable, especially since both her parents are dead. She stresses that she would not have acted the same in other circumstances, turning her act into a singular act. Ethical subjects — subjects that act responsibly … are the ones that celebrate the singularity of the other, without reducing the other to the universal and the laws that govern this universality. It is not difficult to see how Antigone is made into an ethical heroine, given this. 81

Žižek

Zizek, The Most Sublime of Hysterics: Hegel with Lacan
This essay was originally published in French in Le plus sublime des hystériques – Hegel passe, Broché, Paris, 1999. It appears in Interrogating the Real, London: Continuum, 2005, Rex Butler and Scott Stephens editors.

The idea that one is able from the outset to account for error, to take it under consideration as error, and therefore to take one’s distance from it, is precisely the supreme error of the existence of metalanguage, the illusion that while taking part in illusion, one is somehow also able to observe the process from an ‘objective’ distance. By avoiding identifying oneself with error, we commit the supreme error and miss the truth, because the place of truth itself is only constituted through error. To put this another way, we could recall the Hegelian proposition which can be paraphrased as ‘the fear of error is error itself: the true evil is not the evil object but the one who perceives evil as such.

One already finds this logic of the error interior to truth in Rosa Luxemburg’s description of the dialectic of the revolutionary process. When Eduard Bernstein raised objections apropos of the revisionist fear of taking power ‘too soon’, prematurely, before the ‘objective conditions’ have reached their maturity, she responded that the first seizures of power are necessarily ‘premature’: for the proletariat, the only way of arriving at ‘maturity’, of waiting for the ‘opportune’ moment to seize power, is to form themselves, prepare themselves for this seizure; and the only way of forming themselves is, of course, these ‘premature’ attempts … If we wait for the ‘opportune moment’, we will never attain it, because this ‘opportune moment’ – that which never occurs without fulfilling the subjective conditions for the ‘maturity’ of the revolutionary subject – can only occur through a series of ‘premature’ attempts. Thus the opposition to the ‘premature’ seizure of power is exposed as an opposition to the seizure of power in general, as such: to repeat the celebrated phrase of Robespierre, the revisionists want ‘revolution without revolution’.

Once we examine things more closely, we see that Luxemburg’s fundamental wager is precisely the impossibility of a metalanguage in the revolutionary process:

the revolutionary subject does not ‘conduct’ the process from an objective distance, he is himself constituted through this process; and it is because the time of revolution occurs by means of subjectivity that no one is able to ‘achieve revolution on time’, following ‘premature’, insufficient efforts.

The attitude of Luxemburg is exactly that of the hysteric faced with the obsessional metalanguage of revisionism:

strive to act, even if prematurely, in order to arrive at the correct act through this very error. One must be duped in one’s desire, though it is ultimately impossible, in order that something real comes about.

The propositions of ‘grasping substance as subject’ and ‘there is no metalanguage’ are merely variations on the same theme. It is therefore impossible to say: ‘Although there must be premature attempts at revolution, have no illusions and remain conscious that they are doomed in advance to failure.’ The idea that we are able to act and yet retain some distance with regard to the ‘objective’ – making possible some consideration of the act’s ‘objective signification’ (namely, its destiny to fail) during the act itself – misperceives the way that the ‘subjective illusion’ of the agents is part of the ‘objective’ process itself. This is why the revolution must be repeated: the ‘meaning’ of those premature attempts is literally to be found in their failure – or rather, as one says with Hegel, ‘a political revolution is, in general, only sanctioned by popular opinion after it has been repeated’.

sari roman-lagerspetz

Also Moya Lloyd (2007) sees that the Hegelian themes of dialectics and of Lordship and Bondage are important to Butler, and that these themes run through all of Butler´s work. … the Butlerian ek-static subjectivity does not engage with the whole logic of Hegel´s dialectical system. In short, whereas in Hegel the encounter between the subject and the Other leads into a “higher” knowledge of oneself and the world, in Butler any new knowledge constitutes a new form of error. Butler´s ek-static subject is a subject who constantly engages in a “selfloss”. Lloyd writes, importantly, that this is due to Butler´s suspending the narrative in PhS before the journeying consciousness encounters reason or spirit. Lloyd writes that this “suspension of the narrative” is important … Lloyd writes that Butler rejects the idea of full dialectical synthesis and that, in this sense, her work is much closer to that of Foucault and Derrida. “For she, like them, holds on to the idea of the critical force of negativity but refuses to link that force to the idea of a dialectic that retains the “power of synthesis”, in other words, she subscribes…to what what might be called a non-synthetic dialectic. (Lloyd 2007, 19) Lloyd writes that in non-synthetic dialectic, difference cannot be incorporated into identity, as, she says, Hegel had assumed. Instead, particular differences, whether historical or linguistic, are insuperable.

Kojève recognition risking life

🙂 But they can’t kill each other, or even if one is killed off, recognition is denied then in both these cases. In the first because both have died, and the second, there is only one party, the other having died, can no longer grant recogntion, so it’s the sound of one hand clapping.

“He must give up his desire and satisfy the desire of the other, must refuse to risk his life for the satisfaction of his desire for “recognition.” He must give up his desire and satisfy the desire of the other: he must “recognize” the other without being “recognized” by him. Now, “to recognize”him thus is “to recognize” him as his Master and to recognize himself and to be recognized as the Master’s Slave. 8

🙂 Kojève’s ontological gesture: “In other words, in his nascent state, man is never simply man. He is always, necessarily, and essentially, either Master or Slave. … society is human —at least in its origin— only on the basis of its implying an element of Mastery and an element of Slavery, of “autonomous” existences and “dependent” existences.” 8

When the “first” two men confront one another for the first time, the one sees in the other ony an animal (and a dangerous and hostile one at that) that is to be destroyed, and not a self-conscious being representing an autonomous value. Each of these two human-individuals is, to be sure, subjectively-certain of himself; but he is not certain of the other. 10

🙂 But this certainty of oneself is purely subjective, it could be inflated, deceptive, downright wrong. What is needed in order to achieve proper Self-Consciousness he must “make himself recognized by the other, he must have in himself the certainty of being recognized by another.”

Now, the human reality is created, is constituted, only in the fight for recognition and by the risk of life that it implies. The truth of man, or the revelation of his reality, therefore, presupposes the fight to the death. And that is why human-individuals are obliged to start this fight. For each must raise his subjective-certainty of existing for self to the level of truth, both in the other and in himself. 12

The human-individual that has not dared-to-risk his life can, to be sure, be recognized as a human-person; but he has not attained the truth of this fact of being recognized as an autonomous Self-Consciousness. Hence, each of the two human-individuals must have the death of the other as his goal, just as he risks his own life. 12-13

[I]t does the man of the Fight no good to kill his adversary, He must overcome him “dialectically.” That is, he must leave him life and consciousness, and destroy only his autonomy. he must overcome the adversary only insofar as the adversary is opposed to him and acts against him. In other words, he must enslave him. 15

This Slave is the defeated adversary, who has not gone all the way in risking his life, who has not adopted the principle of the Masters: to conquer or to die. He has accepted life granted him by another. Hence, he depends on that other. He has preferred slavery to death, and that is why, by remaining alive, he lives as a Slave. 16

According to Aristotle (who did not see the dialecticity of human existence), this will always be the case: Man is born with a slavish or free “nature,” and he will never be able to overcome or modify it; … According to Hegel, on the other hand, the radical difference between Master and Slave exists only at the beginning, and it can be overcome in the course of time; because for him, Mastery and Slavery are not given or innate characteristics. 224

🙂 Here is where Kojève’s bourgeois alter-ego gets the better him: In the beginning at least, Man is not born slave or free, but creates himself as one or the other through free or voluntary Action. The Master is the one who went all the way in the Fight, being ready to die if he was not recognized; whereas the Slave was afraid of death and voluntarily submitted, by recognizing the Master without being recognized by him. But it was one and the same innate animal nature that was transformed by the free Action of the Fight into slavish or free human “nature”: the Master could have created himself as Slave, and the Slave as Master. There was no “reason” for one of the two animals (of the species Homo sapiens) to become Master rather than Slave. Mastery and Slavery have no “cause”; they are not “determined” by any given; … they result from a free Act. That is why Man can “overcome” his slavish “nature” and become free, or better, (freely) create himself as free; even if he is born in Slavery, he can negate his innate slavish “nature.” And all of History — that is, the whole “movement” of human existence in the natural World— is nothing bu the progressive negation of Slavery by the Slave, the series of his successive “conversions” to Freedom … 224-225

Stavrakakis Lacan and the Political pt 4

Sinthome

an identification with the symptom, a recognition in the real of our symptom of the only support of our being (Stav citing Žižek 1989) 133

Wo es war soll Ich werden: the subject must identify with the place where the syumptom already was: ‘In its pathological particularity [it] … must recognise the element which gives consistency to [its] being’ (Žižek 1989) 133

By saying ‘We are all Jews’, ‘We all live in Chernobyl!’ or ‘We are all boat people!’ — … we elevate the symptom, the excluded truth of the social field (which has been stigmatised as an alien particularity) to the place of the universal — to the point of our common identification which was up to now, sustained by its exclusion or elimination. The same happens when we say ‘We are all gypsies!’ — … What is promoted here is an attitude consistent with identifying with the symptom of the social and traversing social fantasy.

It is only by accepting such an impossible representation, by making this declaration of impossibility, that it is possible to ‘represent’ the impossible or rather to identify with the impossibility of its representation. Identification with the symptom is thus related to the traversing of the fantasy. Going through fantasy entails the realisation of the lack or inconsistency in the Other which is masked by fantasy, the separation between objet petit a and the Other, a separation which is not only ethically sound but also ‘liberating’ for our political imagination. 134

What is clearly at stake here is the possibility of enacting symbolic gestures that institutionalise social lack, that is to say incorporate the ethical recognition of the impossibility of social closure.

Critique of Judith Butler, Will Connolly, Simon Critchley

Critchley’s Levinaisan ethics of the Other [and probably Butler’ s too]. ‘The community remains an open community in so far as it is based on the recognition of difference, of the difference of the Other’ (citing Critchley 1992).

The problem with such an analysis is that it presupposes the Other as a unifed totality or, even if this is not always the case, it seems to be offering a positive point of identification remaining thus within the limits of traditional ethical strategies or, in any case, not undermining them in a radical way. What has to be highlighted is that it is precisely this relation — the identification with the Other — that attempts to bring closure to the social.

In order to have a non-totalisable relation to the Other we must relate — identify — with the lack in the Other and not with the Other per se. This is the radical innovation of Lacanian ethics. And this is what democracy needs today. 139

butler on bracha ettinger matrixial

Butler, Judith. “Bracha’s Eurydice” (2002) Theory, Culture & Society, 21: 1, (2004) 95-100.

So we do not know what we have lost in her, or whom we have lost. But there is more. We are not speaking only of the loss of childhood, or the loss of a maternal connection that the child must undergo, but also of

an enigmatic loss that is communicated from the mother to the child, from the parents to the child, from the adult world to the child who is given this loss to handle when the child cannot handle it, when it is too large for the child, when it is too large for the adult, when the loss is trauma, and cannot be handled by anyone, anywhere, where the loss signifies what we cannot master.

When we turned, looking for Eurydice, we thought perhaps we could know she was there by seeing, and so we thought that looking would be a way of knowing and capturing.

But it turned out that she was uncapturable in this way, and that, in general, she is uncapturable, that capture will not be the way in which we might experience her. Bracha writes, ‘failure is the measure of what has been recognized’.

This means that we cannot hope to establish a sure way of knowing what loss it is that we negotiate here. So we have to ask about historical losses, the ones that are transmitted to us without our knowing, at a level where we cannot hope to piece it together, where we are, at a psychic level, left in pieces, pieces that might be linked together in some way, but will not fully ‘bind’ the affect.

This is part of the work of borderlinking that Bracha writes about, and it is, in her view, prior to identity, prior to any question of construction, a psychic landscape that gives itself as partial object, as grains and crumbs, as she puts it, as remnants that are, on the one hand, the result, the scattered effects of an unknowable history of trauma, the trauma that others who precede us have lived through and, on the other hand, the very sites in which a new possibility for visual experience emerges, one which establishes a temporality in which the past is not past, but is not present, in which the present emerges, but from the scattered and animated remains of a continuing, though not continuous, trauma. 3-4

But who are we? Are we really intact before these images? Or do they also look back at us and banish us to a realm that is prior to the speakability of the ‘I’? Do these images not imperil a certain self-recognition precisely through linking us to a psychic and cultural prehistory that we cannot think, cannot know?

Does Bracha mock the philosopher? Or does she expose the philosopher to a scene of emergence at once traumatic, scattered, partial, multiple, non-unified and non-unifiable, the scene which is closed over again and again by our talk of identity and our presumption that what we most need is recognition for what we distinctly are?

If failure is the measure of recognition, then we will be recognized for what fails the terms of recognition, for what goes beneath, before or beyond the terms of self-definition or, indeed, cultural identification. Identification itself will be understood to emerge from a space in which we unknowingly inherit the trauma and desires of others, and find that they are indistinguishable from our own, that we are transitively instated by the other, and that the speaking of the ‘we’ or of the ‘I’ is not really possible in this domain.

And it may be that language cedes to vision here, to the particular kind of frozen motion that the pre-narrative understanding of identity requires.

Bracha calls this non-unifiable and linked space of a primary psychic relation the feminine, the matrixial. She uses words here to designate the space from which her theory and her painting and her analytic experience emerge.

But we would be incautious if we were to understand that she is simply giving new definition to ‘the feminine’, or producing a new version of feminine identity. We would be equally precipitous if we were to assume that ‘the feminine’ has a monopoly on non-identity.

But we have to hear this word if we are to understand the way in which she is displacing the ‘phallus’ from its position as the original signifier for Lacan. For she is opening up the landscape in another direction through this word, ‘the feminine’ or this word, ‘the matrixial’.

She is, I think, asking us to reformulate the very relation between the subject and its other, and to ask what precedes this encounter in which the phallus seeks to confirm its status, where the feminine acts only as a faulty mirror in the circuitry of that narcissism? What form of relationality troubles the distinctness of these terms?

I would even claim that, in her view, it is not possible to say ‘I am feminine’, or that ‘you are feminine’. Since the very ontological designations, ‘I am’ and ‘you are’, post-date the space of the matrixial.

The matrixial is what we guard against when we shore up the claims of identity, when we presume that to recognize each other is to know, to name, to distinguish according to the logic of identity. 5

What is the agency of the one who registers the imprints from the other? This is not the agency of the ego, and neither is it the agency of one who is presumed to know. It is a registering and a transmutation that takes place in a largely, though not fully, preverbal sphere, an autistic relay of loss and desire received from elsewhere, and only and always ambiguously made one’s own. Indeed, they are never fully made one’s own, for the claim of autonomy would involve the losing of the trace. And the trace, the sign of loss, the remnant of loss, is understood as the link, the occasional and nearly impossible connection, between trauma and beauty itself.

So much works against this encounter, the possibility of this transmutation, since to lose the trace is to lose the connection with the matrixial space itself, and to articulate the trace through a history or a conceptual representation that is too masterful is to lose the trace again, this time through seeking to know it too fully and too well.

We lost Eurydice because we sought too quickly to know that she was behind us, and the look which seeks to know, to verify, banished her yet more fully into the past. And yet, in Bracha’s tableaux, the image is still there, coming toward us, fading away, a moment that is frozen in its doubleness, layered, fractured, filtered. The suspension of time conditions the emergence of a space that suspends the sequential ordering of time.

We cannot tell our story here, nor offer a recognition in which a gaze seeks to become commensurate with what it sees. We are invited into the space in which we are not one, cannot be, and yet we are not without the capacity to see. We see here, as a child or, perhaps, an infant, whose body is given as the remnants of another’s trauma and desires. What is it we seek to recognize here? That she is gone, that she is staying? Eurydice cannot be captured, cannot be had. She appears only in the moment in which we are dispossessed of her.

There is something of our dispossession in her, the one by which we come into being, through another, as another, that links us not only with this or that maternal origin, but perhaps more emphatically, with her history, the one she cannot tell.

That history emerges not only as a tableau, as a frozen landscape, but as one whose motion and beauty is precisely derived from its traumatic character. This is not to make the ‘I’ any less absolute than it is, but it is to suggest that trauma stages its encounters, has its own illuminations, and that the work of art registers this radical and originary dispossession of the ‘I’, the subject, and its gaze that constitutes the condition for a certain work and even a kind of agency prior to the subject itself.

We see Eurydice, but she does not belong to us at the moment that we see her. And because she does not belong to us, she comes forth, delineating a field of appearance and of art, beyond foreclosure and redemption. But it is only on the condition that she is not fully banished, and that she still does not belong to us that she appears, and that trauma finds its rare encounter with appearance itself.(6-7)

Note: This article originally appeared as the catalogue essay for The Eurydice Series:
Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, Drawing Papers 24 (New York: The Drawing Center
Publications, 2002).

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

carlson pt 4

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 would it look like to consider transgender identity as an expression of the logic of sexual difference?

I would like to define the transsexual subject as a person who identifies with a gender that is not consonant with the gender assigned at birth. In some cases, but certainly not all, the transsexual subject will go to whatever efforts possible (hormone therapy, sex or genital reassignment surgery, etc.) to “pass” as that gender. Inasmuch as the transsexual subject strives to pass and/or (for not all transsexuals strive to pass) identifies with one gender or another with an apparent degree of certainty, he or she is psychically no different than any other subject who lines up under one banner or the other.

Ostensibly “nontranssexual” subjects also strive to pass; they also identify with an apparent degree of certainty with one gender or another. In other words, “transsexuality” is not in and of itself any more extreme a type of symptom than is “man” or “woman.” Where transsexual subjects’ experiences may be different from those of ostensibly nontranssexual subjects, of course, arises in part from the fact that the latter have not, so far, proven particularly welcoming: from under the meager protection of their banners, they have not yet realized that they have no monopoly on the psychic experience of the semblance of “gender certainty.” Oftentimes, the upshot of this false monopoly on a piecemeal “certainty” is that transsexual subjects—particularly those who do not rigorously fit the demands of the public’s “incessant need to gender every person they see as female or male” (Serano 117)—are excluded, objectified, exploited, scapegoated, and silenced. 65

Transgenderism presents a slightly different situation, and this is the one with which this article has been occupied. For it could be argued that the
transgender subject—as someone who is not necessarily or only very strategically invested in “passing” as one gender or another (e.g., someone who could be described as “bigendered” or “gender-fluid” [Serano 27]), as someone who may be invested in embodying a gender that would attest to what he or she may define as the constructedness of gender (e.g., “genderqueer” [Serano 27])—would be the human subject as such, the unconsciously bisexual subject for whom sexual difference is only ever an incomplete, unsatisfactory solution to the failure of the sexual relation. In this way, transgenderism would figure as a solutionless solution to the impasses of sexual difference, a sort of unconscious scene of undecideability, but an undecideability fundamentally shared by all human subjects, no matter their seeming “gender.” 65

But there is another way of reading transgenderism, or another transgenderism available to subjects, wherein transgenderism figures not as a solutionless solution to the impasses of sexual difference, but rather as an expression of the logic of sexual difference: a feminine solution. Hysteria as it is defined by Lacan is a profoundly feminine phenomenon and is characterized by the question, “Am I a man, or am I woman, and what does that mean?” The hysteric tends to interrogate societal norms at large, oftentimes embodying a subversive attitude that arises in part from a profound suspicion that her own sexed and sexual body is incommensurate to cultural injunctions regarding gender identities.

As Ellie Ragland- Sullivan writes, “Lacan saw the hysteric as embodying the quintessence of the human subject because she speaks, as agent, from the lack and gaps in knowledge, language and being” (164).

The hysteric is, in some senses, interested in nothing but the lack that, for example, Dean may be read to circumvent by focusing on the apparent multiplicity of object a.

The failure, deadlock, and trauma of sexual difference returns for the hysterical/feminine transgender subject, irreducibly, in her insistent interrogation of the phallic function and in her very queer relation to the lacking Other. 66

Our question, then, might read as follows: what will the feminine/transgender subject do confronting a symbolic that she is “totally, that is, limitlessly inscribed within” (Copjec 227)?

For this, we do not have to look far—we might consider Antigone, or, if we wish to be more timely, we might pay attention to art, writings, memoirs, and scholarship by various present-day transgender or, sometimes, transsexual-identified subjects.

If part of the point this essay is trying to make, though, is that there is something transgendered about the human subject, and that this transgenderism transcends notions of gender, it follows that we need not be restricted by rigid definitions of gender identities to encounter the question, “Am I a man, or am I woman, and what does that mean?” Feminine subjects identify in multiple directions. More importantly, they demonstrate another sort of agility as well: “[Lacan] implied that for all the difficulties woman had with speech and the signifier, mistrusting its promises because they de facto fail her, a certain freedom to play was available to woman [. . .]

[A]ccording to Lacan, ‘Women are less enclosed by discourse than their partners in the cycle of discourse’” (MacCannell 198–99). When we recall that discourses are “forms of the social tie” (Lacan qtd. in MacCannell
235) and that discourses as social ties move to cover over the lack of the sexual relation, we could argue by extension that

the hysteric feminine subject in particular is structurally well situated to cycle through and fall between the cracks of discourses. Preoccupied as the hysteric is with the very question that discourse wishes to mask, she may be particularly well situated to “do something” to the social tie itself.

And yet, despite (but also because of) her “freedom to play,” the feminine/transgender subject’s speech does not stop insisting that discursive flexibility, lest it be mistaken for a merry-go-round of liberating multiplicity, is a flexibility borne of and about at least two overlapping lacks: castration and a certain exclusion.

Feminine/transgender speech materializes (sometimes, painfully silently) hollowed out by the deafening significance of what it “is” to “be” a (divided) (feminine) subject, a truth that echoes across gender divides and blurs.

Ragland cautions as well: “Given that the hysteric’s fundamental question in the signifier is ‘Am I a woman or a man?’ she is at risk of being overtaken by the real in both the symbolic and the imaginary” (69). She later adds more pointedly:

How, then, does the hysteric reveal a truth worth noting? Subversion for its own sake or acting out is not admirable […]. It is rather, this, that the subject, any subject except a psychotic, is divided. In varying ways, all individuals who are divided suffer from this. The master represses it in the place of truth. The academic puts it inthe place of repressed knowledge. The analyst interrogates it. Bu tthe hysteric lives it; it is her bade of honor that she lives castration at the surface of her life and discourse […]. The hysteric does not say, as poststructuralists would claim, I am man and woman, the difference makes no difference [. . .]. For her it is an either/or question. This is the heart of Lacanianism: either/or. Either one is masculine or one is feminine. One is not both, except in the suffering of hysteria. Both is the position of suffering, not liberation. It is this truth of the hysteric to which Lacan pays heed. (85)

If we are to dream of some liberatory remainder to this suffering subversion, it may — as Butler suggests from from a different perspective — be locatable precisely there where Antigone speaks her “aberrant” words (Psychic 58) — yes, where, sometimes, “gender is displaced” (82), but sexual difference is not. As Slavoj Žižek writes in response to Butler’s Psychic Life of Power:

“The Lacanian answer to this is clear — “to desire something other than its continued ‘social existence'” and thus to fall “into some kind of death,” that is, to risk a gesture by means of which death is “courted and pursued,” points precisely towards the way Lacan reconceptualized the Freudian death-drive as the elementary form of the ethical act. Note that the act, insofar as it is irreducible to a “speech act,” relies for its performative power on the preestablished set of symbolic rules and/or norms. Is this not the whole point of Lacan’s reading of Antigone?”

At the beginning of this essay, I asked what gender studies and Lacanian psychoanalysis have to offer one another and whether it might be possible to integrate the two domains. To answer quite simply,

Lacanian psychoanalysis offers gender studies what I read as a richly malleable framework for thinking through matters of sex, subjectivity, desire, and sexuality. Likewise, gender studies offers Lacanian psychoanalysis readers who are deeply, productively mistrustful and whose compelling perspectives on diverse social issues are driven by passionate commitment.

Integration of the two domains can only ever be a scene of fruitful contestation, but it could also go further if contemporary psychoanalytic thinkers were willing to listen to their compatriots’ desires and to redefine some of their more exclusionary “shibboleths” (Dean, Beyond 226), and if gender theorists were willing to reread psychoanalysis, again.

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.

Non/Nom-du-Père

Rothenberg, Molly Ann. The Excessive Subject. Malden M.A. : Polity Press, 2010.

the Non/Nom-du-Père has no content, much less normative content. the addition of the negation, the Non/Nom-du-Père, makes the subject a signifier, which means that the subject does not control what s/he means to others any more than s/he can know for certain what others mean. In effect, the “paternal metaphor” places a “minus sign,” so to speak, on the immediacy of the presence f the individual, raising the question as to the meaning of the individual, and in this way makes of the individual a signifier, bringing the individual into the realm of signification from the realm of the Real. That is, the Non/Nom-du-Père is a metaphor for the process by which anything, including the child, ceases to simply be and comes to mean, which is to say that it enters into the defiles of linguistic mediation and social appropriation. No object simply means what it is; every object becomes a site of excessive meaning. To be a signifier —and a subject— is to be stuck to an irreducible excess of meaning. In other words, … at its core is the social dimension of language, an unsymbolizable excess (not an unsymbolizable exclusion) produced by the conditions in which meaning arises as perpetually ungovernable (Rothenberg, 111).