butler – Page 17 – objet (a)

Žižek aims at butler

Žižek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy Then as Farce. New York: Verso, 2009. Print.

It is as if the three components of the production process — intellectual planning and marketing, material production, the provision of material resources — are increasingly autonomized, emerging as separate spheres. In its social consequences, this separation appears in the guise of the “three main classes” in today’s developed societies, which are precisely not classes but three fractions of the working class:

– intellectual laborers,

– the old manual working class,

– and the outcasts (the unemployed, those living in slums and other interstices of public space) .

The working class is thus split into three, each fraction with its own “way of life” and ideology: the enlightened hedonism and liberal multiculturalism of the intellectual class; the populist fundamentalism of the old working class; more extreme and Singular forms of the outcast fraction.

In Hegelese, this triad is clearly the triad of the universal (intellectual workers), the particular (manual workers), and the Singular (outcasts).

The outcome of this process is the gradual disintegration of social life proper, of a public space in which all three fractions could meet, and “identity” politics in all its forms is a supplement for this loss.

Identity politics acquires a specific form within each fraction: multicultural identity politics among the intellectual class; regressive populist fundamentalism among the working class; semi-illegal groupings (criminal gangs, religious sects, etc.) among the outcasts.

What they all share is recourse to a particular identity as a substitute for the missing universal public space. The proletariat is thus divided into three, each part being played off against the others : intellectual laborers full of cultural prejudices against “redneck” workers; workers who display a populist hatred of intellectuals and outcasts; outcasts who are antagonistic to society as such.

The old cry “Proletarians, unite !” is thus more pertinent than ever: in the new conditions of “postindustrial” capitalism, the unity of the three fractions of the working class is already their victory. This unity, however, will not be guaranteed by any figure of the “big Other” prescribing it as the “objective tendency” of the historical process itself — the situation is thoroughly open, divided between the two versions of Hegelianism.

Žižek butler critique commie hypothesis pt 5

So what about the standard critique of “formal freedom’: namely that it is in a way even worse than direct servitude, since the former i s a mask that deludes one into thinking that one i s free? The reply to this critical point is provided by Herbert Marcuse’s old motto that “freedom is the condition of liberation” : in order to demand “actual freedom;’ I have to have already experienced myself as basically and essentially free-only as such can I experience my actual servitude as a corruption of my human condition. In order to experience this antagonism between my freedom and the actuality of my servitude, however, I have to be recognized as formally free: the demand for my actual freedom can only arise out of my “formal” freedom. In other words, in exactly the same way as, in the development of capitalism, the formal subsumption of the production process under Capital precedes its material subsumption, formal freedom precedes actual freedom, creating the latter’s conditions. The very force of abstraction which dissolves organic life-worlds is simultaneously the resource of emancipatory politics.

The philosophical consequences of this real status of abstraction are crucial: they compel us to reject the historicist relativization and contextualization of different modes of subjectivity, and to assert the “abstract” Cartesian subject (cogito) as something which today corrodes from within all different forms of cultural self-experience —

no matter how far we perceive ourselves as being embedded in a particular culture, the moment we participate in global capitalism, this culture is always already de-naturalized, effectively functioning as one specific and contingent “way of life” of abstract Cartesian subjectivity. (144)

How did we reach this new phase of the reign of abstraction? The 1968 protests focused their struggles against (what was perceived as) the three pillars of capitalism: the factory, the school, the family. As a result, each domain was subsequently submitted to postindustrial transformation: factory work is increasingly outsourced or, in the developed world at least, reorganized on a post-Fordist non-hierarchical interactive team-work basis; permanent and flexible privatized education is increasingly replacing universal public education; multiple forms of variegated sexual arrangements are replacing the traditional family. The Left lost in the very moment of victory: the immediate enemy was defeated, but was replaced by a new form of even more direct capitalist domination. In “postmodern” capitalism, the market has invaded new spheres which were hitherto considered the privileged domain of the state, from education to prisons and law and order. When ” immaterial work ” (education, therapy, etc.) is celebrated as the kind of work which directly produces social relations, one should not forget what this means within a commodity economy: namely, that new domains, hitherto excluded from the market, are now commodified. When in trouble, we no longer talk to a friend but pay a psychiatrist or counselor to take care of the problem; children are increasingly cared for not by parents but by paid nurseries or child-minders, and so on. We are thus in the midst of a new process of the privatization of the social, of establishing new enclosures. (144)

Žižek communist fidelity

Žižek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy Then as Farce. New York: Verso, 2009. Print.

What the communist fidelity to the proletarian position involves is thus an unambiguous rejection of any ideology implying a return to any kind of prelapsarian substantial unity, On November 28, 2008, Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, issued a public letter on the subject “Climate Change: Save the Planet from Capitalism:’ Here are its opening statements:

Sisters and brothers: Today, our Mother Earth is ill . . . . Everything began with the industrial revolution in 1750, which gave birth to the capitalist system, In two and a half centuries, the so called “developed” countries have consumed a large part of the fossil fuels created over five million centuries . . . . Competition and the thirst for profit without limits of the capitalist system are destroying the planet. Under Capitalism we are not human beings but consumers. Under Capitalism Mother Earth does not exist, instead there are raw materials. Capitalism is the source of the asymmetries and imbalances in the world.

The politics pursued by the Morales government in Bolivia is on the very cutting edge of contemporary progressive struggle. Nonetheless, the lines just quoted demonstrate with painful clarity its ideological limitations (for which one always pays a practical price). Morales relies in a simplistic way on the narrative of the Fall which took place at a precise historical moment: “Everything began with the industrial revolution in 1750 . . .” —and, predictably, this Fall consists in losing our roots in mother earth: “Under Capitalism mother earth does not exist.”

(To this, one is tempted to add that, if there is one good thing about capitalism, it is that, precisely, mother earth now no longer exists.) “Capitalism is the source of the asymmetries and imbalances in the world” —meaning that our goal should be to restore a “natural” balance and symmetry. What is thereby attacked and rejected is the very process that gave rise to modern subjectivity and that obliterates the traditional sexualized cosmology of mother earth (and father heaven), along with the idea that our roots lie in the substantial “maternal” order of nature.

Fidelity to the communist Idea thus means that, to repeat Arthur Rimbaud, il faut etre absolument moderne —we should remain resolutely modern and reject the all too glib generalization whereby the critique of capitalism morphs into the critique of “instrumental reason” or “modern technological civilization.”

This is why we should insist on the qualitative difference between the fourth antagonism —the gap that separates the Excluded from the Included— and the other three: it is only this reference to the Excluded that justifies the use of the term communism. There is nothing more “private” than a state community which perceives the excluded as a threat and worries how to keep them at a proper distance. (97)

In the series of the four antagonisms then, that between the Included and the Excluded is the crucial one. Without it, all others lose their subversive edge —ecology turns into a problem of sustainable development, intellectual property into a complex legal challenge, biogenetics into an ethical issue. One can sincerely fight to preserve the environment, defend a broader notion of intellectual property, or oppose the copyrighting of genes, without ever confronting the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded.

🙂 Judy Butler smile (click)

Furthermore, one can even formulate certain aspects of these struggles in the terms of the Included being threatened by the polluting Excluded. In this way, we get no true universality, only “private” concerns in the Kantian sense of the term. Corporations such as Whole Foods and Starbucks continue to enjoy favor among liberals even though they both engage in anti-union activities; the trick is that they sell their products with a progressive spin. One buys coffee made with beans bought at above fair-market value, one drives a hybrid vehicle, one buys from companies that ensure good benefits for their staff and customers (according to the corporation’s own standards), and so on. In short, without the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded, we may well find ourselves in a world in which Bill Gates is the greatest humanitarian battling against poverty and disease, and Rupert Murdoch the greatest environmentalist mobilizing hundreds of millions through his media empire (98).

There is another key difference between the first three antagonisms and the fourth: the first three effectively concern questions of the (economic, anthropological, even physical) survival of humanity, but the fourth is ultimately a question of justice. If humanity does not resolve its ecological predicament, we may all vanish; but one can well imagine a society which somehow resolves the first three antagonisms through authoritarian measures which not only maintain but in fact strengthen existing social hierarchies, divisions and exclusions.

In Lacanese, we are dealing here with the gap that separates the series of ordinary signifiers (S2) from the Master-Signifier (S1), that is, with a struggle for hegemony: which pole in the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded will “hegemonize” the other three? One can no longer rely on the old Marxist logic of “historical necessity” which claims that the first three problems will only be solved if one wins the key “class” struggle between the Excluded and the Included-the logic of “only the overcoming of class distinctions can really resolve our ecological predicament.”

There is a common feature shared by all four antagonisms: the process of proletarianization, of the reduction of human agents to pure subjects deprived of their substance; this proletarianization, however, works in different ways. In the first three cases, it deprives agents of their substantial content; in the fourth case, it is the formal fact of excluding certain figures from socio-political space.

We should underline this structure of 3 + 1, namely the reflection of the external tension between subject and substance (“man” deprived of its substance) within the human collective. There are subjects who, within the human collective, directly embody the proletarian position of substanceless subjectivity. Which is why the Communist wager is that the only way to solve the “external” problem (the re-appropriation of alienated substance) is to radically transform the inner-subjective (social) relations.

It is thus crucial to insist on the communist-egalitarian emancipatory Idea, and insist on it in a very precise Marxian sense: there are social groups which, on account of their lacking a determinate place in the “private” order of the social hierarchy, stand directly for universality; they are what Ranciere calls the “part of no-part” of the social body.

All truly emancipatory politics is generated by the short-circuit between the universality of the “public use of reason” and the universality of the “part of no-part” —this was already the communist dream of the young Marx: to bring together the universality of philosophy with the universality of the proletariat. From Ancient Greece, we have a name for the intrusion of the Excluded into the socio-political space: democracy. Our question today is whether democracy is still an appropriate name for this egalitarian explosion.

stavrakakis Žižek antigone the act

Stavrakakis, Yannis. “The Lure of Antigone: Aporias of an Ethics of the Political” Boucher, Geoff, and Jason Glynos and Matthew Sharpe, eds. Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Responses to Žižek. Great Britain: Ashgate. 2005. Print.

It is difficult to see, however, how the “inhuman” position of Antigone could point to an alternative formulation of the socio-political structure. … Antigone’s intransigence, her deadly passion, may thus be what creates her tragic appeal, but even by Žižek’s 1998 standards, one has to conclude that this makes her unsuitable as a model for transformative ethico-political action (173).

Unless of course, one reinterprets her in a substantial way. But then a certain paradox emerges: Antigone can only function as a model for radical political action on the condition that she is stripped of her radically inhuman (anti-social and anti-political) desire.

🙂 Stavrakakis isn’t clear on just exactly what it is in Žižek’s argument that he finds disagreeable. He thinks that Žižek has to ‘tame’ Antigone first in order to find her suitable for politics, that is ‘give way’ on her radical desire, which means, in this case, retreat or withdraw from her radical desire. For Stavrakakis: Wouldn’t the truly radical act be to traverse the lure of Antigone altogether? (174)

🙂 Stavrakakis points out that Lacan himself moved from this position on ethics outlined in this Book 7, to a different position in the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, where the idea of pure desire is questioned. “This shift needs to be taken into account when discussing the function of Antigone.

Desire not only loses its value as a pure force of transgression, but is also revealed as the ultimate support of power and the order of goods. As soon as jouissance acquires its central place in Lacan’s theoretical universe, desire is revealed as a defense against enjoyment, as a compromise formation, while drive emerges as the nodal point of his ethical thought (cites Zupančič, 2000:235) In that sense, desire can never be a pure transgressive force (175).

… desire also has precise limits. It [desire] is always conditioned by the structures of fantasy sustaining “hegemonic” regimes —regimes of power, consumption, and even resistance and transgression. It is always stimulated by the imaginary lure of attaining jouissance, but it is also sustained by the constitutive inability to realise such a goal. In that sense, desire”succeeds,” reproduces itself, through its own failure. This reproduction is not politically innocent. For example, consumer culture is partly sustained by the continuous displacement of final satisfaction from advertisement to advertisement, from product to product, from fantasy to fantasy (176)

The important “by-product” of this play is a specific structuration of desire which guarantees, through its cumulative metonymic effect, the reproduction of the market economy within a distinct “promotional culture“.

It is Lacan himself then who points the way to traversing the lure of Antigone by shifting his understanding of desire. This shift needs to be acknowledged as the radical break it truly represents. Any attempt to reconcile the “pure” desire of Antigone with the later conceptualisation and the critique of illusory desire and/or the ethics of desire with the ethics of drive —what Zupančič seems to attempt in the last pages of her Ethics of the Real — needs to be re-examined and further debated

*Undoubtedly desire and drive are related, but their relation seems to me to escape any logic of reconciliation or supplementation, which is how Zupančič ultimately views their relation. Her aim seems to be to “reconcile” desire with drive (Zupančič, 2000:238), something attempted through presenting drive as a “supplement” of desire (Zupančič, 2000:239): at the heart of desire a possible passage opens up towards the drive; one might therefore come to drive if one follows the ‘logic’ of desire to its limit (Zupančič, 2000: 243).

What is not given appropriate attention here is that reaching this limit entails a crossing which radically transforms our relation to desire. In other words, the limit of desire does not connote the automatic passage into a supplementary field of reconciliation; it primarily signifies a rupture, precisely because “desire never goes beyond a certain point” (Miller, 1996: 423).

Whereas Lacan’s early work and his conceptualisation of desire as something “always in violation, always rebellious and diabolical” —a position informing his reading of Antigone— leads to “the confusion between the drive and desire,” as soon as desire is reconceptualised as ultimately submissive to a law, a shift of almost “gigantic” proportions is insituted, and this shift needs to be acknowledged thoroughly (Miller, 1996: 422-423)

Miller, Jacques-Alain (1996). “Commentary on Lacan’s Text.” Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Return to Freud. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink and Maire Jaanus (Eds). Albany: SUNY Press.

As Žižek himself has pointed out in another text, “[t]here is ethics —that is to say, an injunction which cannot be grounded in ontology— in so far as there is a crack in the ontological edifice of the universe: at its most elementary, ethics designates fidelity to this crack” (Žižek, 1997c:214).

In order for a truly ethical fidelity to an event ot become possible another fidelity is presupposed, a fidelity that cannot be reduced to the event itself or to particular symbolisations of the event and has to retain a certain distance from them: a fidelity to event-ness as distinct from particular events, a “fidelity to the Real qua impossible” (Žižek, 1997c:215).

Such a standpoint not only presents the necessary symbolic prepartions for the proper ethical reception of the act/event, but also offers our best defense against the ever-present risk of being lured by a false event, a satanic miracle, against the ever-present risk of terror and absolutisation of an event, to use Badiou’s vocabulary (Badiou, 2001:85).

Of course, one should be aware that fidelity to event-ness, to what ultimately permits the emergence of the new and makes possible the assumption of an act, presupposes a certain betrayal, not of the act itself, but of a certain rendering of the act as an absolute and divine positivity.

In that sense, fidelity to an event can flourish and avoid absolutisation only as an infidel fidelity, only within the framework of another fidelity — fidelity to the openness of the political space and to the awareness of the constitutive impossibility of a final suture of the social — within the framework of a commitment to the continuous political re-inscription of the irreducible lack in the Other (180).

The transformative potential of a Lacanian ethics of the political is a crucial issue that is far from settled.

The revolution related to capitalism is none other than this: It founds the means of making the waste count. Surplus value is nothing else but the waste or loss that counts, and the value of which is constantly being added to or included in the mass of capital.

fraternal order

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology.

imaginary identification with the father facilitates ‘the spreading’ of the Discourse of the Master, rather than the repressive formation of the super-ego. In this way, we can see the link between the modern form of paternal identification and the modern predominance of the Discourse of the Master. Lacan proposes that the modern Oedipal form inaugurates a new form of the social tie. This social tie takes the form of a fraternal relationship, in which a relationship between brothers founds the social order. Lacan argues that an analysis of the Oedipal myth reveals the phantasy of the brothers of the primal horde and of the fraternal social relation (S17: 131). He suggests that this symbolic murder of the father founds modern fraternal social forms (S17: 131– 132). For Lacan, the Oedipus complex is contingent on the murder of the father, because it establishes the interdict against the jouissance of the mother. The brothers are the murderous sons, who after killing their father enter into the pact between them that will constitute the Symbolic order. In Family Complexes, Lacan argues that the fraternal complex (the imaginary relation between siblings) involves the subject’s recognition of the other as another with whom he will either fight or contract (FC: 46). In his later seminar, L’envers, Lacan describes the Discourse of the Master as a founding myth of Western (capitalist) culture (S17: 207). Lacan suggests that the fraternal social relation is a social and symbolic tie between brothers, forming the modern social bond with its founding discourse of equality, liberty and brotherhood (S17: 131– 132). The sons of the primal father inaugurate a new cultural form – that of fraternity. They are no longer the sons of the father, but brothers. Lacan’s work does not provide a theory of fraternal sociality. However, his account of the fraternal tie permits us to trace the relationship between the fraternal social bond and the pact of the Symbolic order. It enables us to understand how paternal identification produces the fraternal tie. In the fraternal order, the brothers imagine a relation to each other through their relation to the murdered father. They represent this relationship through the symbolic father, so that they imagine the dead, primal father to be the symbolic father – the father that does not know that he is dead. The paternal identification of each of the sons and their recognition of each other as brothers through the paternal line produces the fraternal bond. This relationship between paternal and fraternal identification thereby founds the Symbolic order and the Law of the Father. Unlike the primal horde, the Law of the Father is not a law of brute force, but a symbolic law that describes a cultural order of the exchange of women between men. The pact of the Symbolic order founds the fraternal tie. It represents a symbolic law that forms the fraternal social bond. The Symbolic order is the social pact between subjects that forms their relationship as social subjects. 2 This Symbolic structures the social order, because it produces subjects and the relation between them. In this sense, the Lacanian Symbolic order, and its later reconception as ‘discourse’, describes the pact that founds the social tie between

Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 158.
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/oculryerson/Doc?id=10098962&ppg=171

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.

totem and taboo

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. 152-

Lacan regards the Freudian myth of Totem and Taboo as a phantasy of origin, reading it as a cultural narrative that is both anterior and interior to modern social forms. In that narrative, patriarchy exists as a powerful cultural form. This cultural form posits the father as the bearer of social power, such that the father functions as the figure of the social ideal and of repressive authority (FC: 67– 68). For Lacan, that cultural phantasy continues in modern social forms.

Lacan’s reading of Totem and Taboo centres on the Father of pre-history, the father of the primal horde. Unlike Freud, Lacan does not perceive the primal Father as a real being whose existence continues in phylogenetic memory. Rather, he argues that the primal father is an imaginary figure that exists as part of a collective myth or social phantasy. In this narrative of a ‘traditional’ patriarchy, the father rules the social world. This ‘collective myth’ of the prehistory of modernity describes a social order that the Father’s Will founds. The primal father forbids his sons jouissance, while claiming its pleasure for himself(S17: 143). This myth imagines the father of pre-history as claiming and enjoying an unlimited pleasure of the mother, and hence as being an uncastrated father (S17: 115). He is the forbidding father who has all pleasure and who suffers no lack, while commanding his sons: ‘do not enjoy’.

From his earliest work, such as the Family Complexes, to the later L’envers, Lacan explicitly links the mythical murder of the primal father of the horde to a new social order and form of ‘family complex’. Lacan takes Freud’s myth of traditional patriarchy, and rereads it as a mythical narrative of the emergence of a new and different socio-symbolic order. In this cultural phantasy, the sons unite against the fearful primal father, murdering him in order to establish their access to sexual objects (namely the bodies of women) that were previously reserved for the father’s enjoyment, and in doing so establish a new form of sexual exchange and social order. For Lacan, the murder of the father is a narrative of the emergence of the modern Oedipal structure of the subject. Lacan argues that the Oedipus complex is contingent on the symbolic murder of the father because it establishes the interdict against the desire for the mother (S17: 139). Lacan describes the familial structure that produces this subjective complex as the conjugal patriarchal family. He characterizes this familial order as the structure of the modern family. The structure of familial desire is classically Oedipal (and Freudian) insofar as the child desires the mother, while facing the father as the rival for, and bar to, that desire. The modern family remains a patriarchal family because of the primacy of the paternal figure, where the figure of the father represents a rival for the mother’s affection as well as being a representative of the social world. That father must be symbolically murdered for the resolution of the Oedipus complex. While the paternal figure is the pivot of the modern family complex, Lacan repeatedly insists that the decline of the paternal function and the failure of the Oedipus complex characterize modernity. From his early work of Family Complexes to L’envers thirty years later,

Lacan argues that the rise of modernity coincides with the increasing failure of the Oedipus complex. In 1938, Lacan describes the father as having both sexually repressive and identificatory functions in the paternal family.

For Lacan, because the real father acts as the agent of the paternal function, the real father is too often inadequate to his function as Father. Lacan argues that the personality of the father is ‘always in some way deficient – absent, humiliated, divided or false’ (1938a: 200, FC: 73).

Lacan echoes this description of the failing father in his later paper, ‘On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis’ (1958), where he argues that the father’s position as legislator often reveals him to be a hypocrite or a fraud (É: 242).

Lacan claims that the modern father is inadequate to his paternal function because he occupies the dual position of being a figure of repression and sublimation. In the Lacanian account, modern society suffers a decline in the paternal function because of the failure of the modern father. Because the father fails to secure the paternal law, the subject fails to identify with the father’s interdict. The subject does not identify with the father as the agent of repression, and so does not properly form the paternal super-ego.

As part of that formation, ‘the paternal imago is invested by repression [and] it projects its original force in the very sublimations which should overcome it’ (1938a: 197, FC: 66). Lacan claims that this process is the source of the creativity of modern Western culture because it does not accept paternal authority but instead constantly subjects it to ‘creative subversion’ (1938a: 199, FC: 70).

different speaking position

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004.133

Feminist discourses do not negate social fictions, since feminism cannot stand outside them. Instead, feminist discourses restage and resignify those existing social discourses and hence produce a new signifying chain.

The symbolization of the otherwise repudiated real of women, and the reinsertion of that signifier into existing symbolic structures, produces a new discourse. Feminist discourses disrupt the established possibilities for signifying acts, and, by producing new discourses, open new possibilities for discursive acts. With these new possibilities, feminist discourses create the potential for different speaking subjects and new forms of relations between them.

Like the ego-psychology of which Lacan is so critical, feminist knowledge often relies on empiricist (‘in my experience’) or positivist (‘studies have shown’) justifications for its knowledge claims. As both these forms of justification rely on a conscious knower, feminist knowledge exposes itself to the operation of the misrecognitions of the conscious, and hence to its radical error. The second and related problem emerges from the formulation of feminist knowledge as a discourse. … By conceiving knowledge as a discursive practice, there is no criterion or position ‘outside’ discourse to appeal to, … How, then, is it possible to justify feminist knowledge-claims?

In my model, feminist discourse evades the méconnaissance of the Master because it undertakes an act of symbolization of the ‘laws’ of discourse. Similarly to analytic discourse, it is situated in the field of the signifier because it is a practice of the symbolization of the real of women. In the Lacanian sense, it is a symbolic knowledge. Its undertaking of the symbolization of the a of social fictions situates feminist knowledge within the field of signification. In its disruption of the Discourse of the Master, feminist discourse produces a different speaking position for the knowing subject … feminist discursive practice can produce a different speaking position of a knowing subject from that of the Master of consciousness. Occupying a speaking position analogous to that of the analysand, a feminist knower accepts her ‘split and contradictory’ subjectivity and the finitude of her knowledge, and so repudiates mastery (Haraway 1991: 193). In this way, a knowing subject refuses the speaking position of the Master through her epistemic practices. 135-136

real of woman

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 127-131

The production of the excluded ‘reality’ of women is evident in, for example, the case of sexual harassment.

Before feminist activism in this area, social discourses did not represent the ‘experience’ of sexual harassment. Sexual harassment existed as a social practice, but it was not possible to articulate that experience as such within the symbolic economy of existing social discourses. These experiences were literally ‘not spoken of’.

Yet at the same time, the sexual harassment of women is a social practice that is produced by gendered social relations. The social discourse produces both the practice and its disavowal. The exclusions of social fictions can be traced to the operation of a phallic Symbolic order that produces discourse as discourse and subject as subject.

In Lacanian terms, the production of the real of women as an excluded term of discourse is linked to the impossibility of symbolically rendering women in a phallocentric Symbolic order. The Lacanian position links the excluded real of women to the symbolically repudiated female body of the Mother in a phallic Symbolic order. In feminist terms, this symbolic economy renders ‘women’ as either the phantasy of The Woman or as an excluded term. In this formulation, feminist discourses articulate the founding symbolic repudiation of the excluded real of women.

Unlike social fictions, feminist discourses render the real of women not as lack but symbolize and reinscribe it into the signifying chain. This reinscription shifts the relation of symbolic elements within the chain, producing a new chain of signifiers. This reinscription produces a new discourse and thus a different representation of women.

Instead, the a should be understood as analogous to the Lacanian concept of the Real. This concept is one of Lacan’s most difficult and complex, as he uses it in many linked senses and its meaning changes over the course of his work. … Lacan posits the Real as excess, impossibility and lack. In Lacan’s earlier work, it is a material plenitude which exceeds the Symbolic order, and in which nothing is lacking … In Lacan’s later work, the real is impossible (‘le réel, c’est impossible’) (S17: 143). It is a logical obstacle that cannot be represented within the symbolic (S17: 143). For this reason, the Real is also lack in language, because it marks that which the Symbolic cannot symbolize. No signifying chain can represent it in its totality – hence its impossibility. Something must always fall out of discourse, which is its excluded a. 131

In this way, the Real can also be understood as the hole in the Symbolic order, the impossibility on which that order is predicated and the absence that it encircles. 131

It is not the matching of a signifier to its correlative signified, because there is no metalanguage able to tell the truth about truth and no transcendental signifier that can fix meaning as a correlate of reality (Lacan 1965: 16, Éc: 867– 868). Knowledge is a discourse of the Real, diffracting it through the prism of discursive structures. The production of a new signifying chain represents a different relation to the Real, and with it a new ‘real’.

My account of feminist knowledge does not understand the Real as a fixed entity that the act of knowing passively uncovers. Rather, it is the constitutive ‘outside’ of the existing limits of discourse. An effect of the excess plenitude of the Real is theoretical and political possibility.

If the Symbolic order does not represent the totality of being, then language can take a different form, can represent a different relationship to the Real, and can represent a different Real. It becomes possible to signify the Real differently. Such a conception grants a utopian dimension to knowledge, for if it is not immutable, then the world that it represents is not given, and it can describe a different Real.

Accordingly, knowledge exists in both a present and a future signifying relation to the Real. If the Real is an impossible plenitude, it becomes possible to accept that we can never fully know or represent it, while also accepting that it offers a multiplicity of possibilities.

There can be other symbolic exclusions from discourse, such that the operations of discourse are less costly to those excluded others of the Symbolic order.

We need not conflate the lack in the symbolic with a Symbolic that represents femininity as lack. To claim that it is possible to change a signifying relation to the Real (and with it the signifying relation to object, self and others) is not to claim that it is possible to obtain a mystical fusion with the plenitude of the Real, in which language is adequate to its all and the speaking being suffers no loss. My conception of feminist discourse assumes that there is no knowledge that can ever provide a full and adequate representation of the world. Rather, knowledge is necessarily incomplete, situated and partial, such that it cannot ever represent all, or be a transcendental Truth.

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology.
Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 132.
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/oculryerson/Doc?id=10098962&ppg=145

discourse social fictions excluded objet a

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 127-128

In my earlier model of feminist discourse, I propose that feminist knowledges articulate what a phallocentric Symbolic order does not represent. In this model, these knowledges articulate the symbolic a of discourse. By linking this model to the theory of social fictions, it becomes possible to include an account of intersubjective relations. The theory of social fictions gives social content to the concept of ‘discourse’, which otherwise functions as an abstract term.

Social fictions produce imaginary identities. These identities collapse fantasies of self and the ‘idealizing capital I of identification’ (S11: 272), so that they operate as the phantasy that ‘I am a woman’ or ‘I am a man’ and so on. We can therefore understand social fictions as producing the self as imaginary a – an imaginary object filled with phantasmic content (the objet petit a):

Social fictions: s-s-s-s-s-s identity (imaginary a)

However, Zizek points out that the a ‘stands simultaneously for the imaginary fantasmic lure/screen and for that which this lure is obfuscating, for the void behind the lure’ (1998a: 80). Social fictions therefore have imaginary and symbolic registers:

Social fictions: s-s-s-s-s-s identity | symbolic a

That ‘void behind the lure’ is the symbolic a, that which marks the excluded term of discourse, the gap in or void of its symbolic structure.

Feminism traverses the phantasies of identities that social fictions produce, insisting that those social discourses found themselves upon a repudiated term. This recognition of the symbolic a of social fictions symbolizes it, so that it no longer functions as a term which social discourse excludes. Like psychoanalytic discourse, feminist discourse seeks to sustain the distance between the imaginary object and identity so that it becomes possible to articulate the repudiated a of discourse. Unlike psychoanalytic discourse, feminism seeks to interrogate social discourses. Feminist discourse symbolizes the excluded a in relation to social fictions as descriptions of social relations. A feminist politics permits recognition of this founding lack or excluded a term of social fictions. This repudiated other is the a, the excluded and necessary term of that discourse. Feminist knowledges link that excluded a to women.

For example, two classical themes of feminist analysis concern the exclusion of particular realities of gendered identity from the social representation of women, whether the unequal distribution of wealth between men and women, or the cost of a normative ‘feminine’ identity. In each case, feminist discourses identify the social discourses of gender and the reality of the social experience of women that those discourses exclude. Social fictions represent a fictional identity that excludes from that representation the complex and specific social experiences of women.

An example of this operation can be seen in sexual difference. The operation of social fictions substitutes an imaginary and fictional myth of ‘The Woman’ for the complexity of social experience of women. In their operation, social fictions repudiate that reality and put in its place certain fictional ways to be a female subject. For example, those fictional representations of ‘The Woman’ render her as ‘sexuality’. Yet at the same time, those representations refuse the real bodies of women that have physical existence and functions, a refusal that manifests itself in an array of social taboos that surround the female body. This conception of social fictions does not claim that ‘women’ do not exist (either as fact or in discourse). However, social fictions produce their social experiences as the excluded of discourse, namely as its repudiated a term.

This excluded a of social fictions is the ‘real’ of women. Social fictions do not represent the ‘reality’ of women’s experience – an experience of oppression and domination as well as pleasure and desire …

That excluded term, the symbolic a, is an effect of discourse, just as much as the social fiction is. Social discourses produce it as a term that is excluded from a hegemonic ordering of representation.

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