Category: butler

pluth on butler her lack of act

Pluth, Ed. Signifers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.

Blog post originally published on May 14, 2009 at 15:16

Even attempts to avoid alienation by coming up with our own identities (say, in a project of aesthetic self-creation, or … in a Butlerian politics that affirms the openness of identity) are still always going to be geared toward getting recognition from the Other.

If we are interested in identity, in determining or asserting what we are (or even what we want to be), then we are interested in being objects of the Other’s desire.  This interest relies upon an Other construed as a subject-supposed-to-know.  No pursuit of the self, no matter how apparently subversive it may be, can avoid making an implicit appeal to this kind of Other. Both Butler and Lacan pursue the implications of this impasse, yet despite these similarities, there is an important difference in their results. (140)

Žižek points out (CHU: 124), that the dimension of the act is missing from Butler’s work … and that this is the real flaw … While Butler argues that the subject has no core, unchangeable identity, she does argue that the subject has an unchangeable fixation to identity as such. Her characterization of this fixation leads me to claim that despite her attempts to include a notion of agency in her work, her theory possesses a deterministic streak.  The inclusion of a consideration of how acts use signifiers in a way THAT IS NOT BOUND UP WITH IDENTIFICATION AND RECOGNITION would remedy this. (141)

Butler’s accounts of agency and the subject do not require any notion of something external to or other than discourse. She can account for subjects and agents as well as transformations within the “matrix of intelligibility” from a perspective that only considers the discursively constructed nature of identity.   Nevertheless Butler wants to avoid giving the impression that she adheres to an extreme “linguisticism.” … Butler wants to include some notion of the body in her account of identification while avoiding two things:

– On the one hand, she wants avoid making the body into a purely linguistic construct

– she also wants to avoid making the body into something simply outside of discourse. 144

In the Psychic Life of Power, the paradox of having to be subjected to power in order to be a subject comes under further scrutiny: “If the terms by which we gain social recognition for ourselves are those by which we are regulated and gain social existence then to affirm one’s existence is to capitulate to one’s subordination a sorry bind” (Butler Psychic 79, quoted in Pluth 147).

Butler reiterates here that it is only by being subjected to a signifier that identifies us that we can be subjects capable of resisting that identification, resisting a reduction to that signifier, and acting as agents. Once again, the preservation of some kind of relation to identity is absolutely crucial for Butler. Without a relation to an alienating identification, the kind of subversive activity she wants to affirm would not be possible. In fact, there would be no “subject” at all, and thus no chance for agency, without both an identity and the preservation of a frustrated relationship to this identity. 147

Because of being wed to the real in a different fashion, an act involves the realization that there is no Other of the Other, nothing behind the Other, as it were, acting as a ground.

Consequently an act transforms the subject (of fantasy) and consists of a signifying practice that does not rely on the Other as a guarantee of meaning and recognition.  As … the Fort-Da game .. showed, an act is not for the Other.

Is Lacan’s idea of a desiring Other just like Butler’s idea of identity as a conflicted cultural field?  They sound alike insofar as both involve a rejection of the fiction of an Other who is a subject-supposed-to-know.  But the resemblance does not go much father. Butler’s “matrix of intelligibility,” out of which identity is forged, contains a multiplicity of signifiers whose interrelations can lead to unpredictable possibilities for identity.

But in Lacan’s work, an encounter with the Other’s desire is not an encounter with a multiplicity of signifiers offering various possibilities for identity. Rather, an encounter with the Other’s desire is an encounter with the absence of any signifier offering a support, guarantee, and recognition point for identity. It is such an absence that makes an encounter with the Other’s desire into an encounter with an impasse in symbolization, which is the mode in which the real appears in an act.  Thus the encounter with the Other’s desire can be thought of as an encounter with the real. (148)

The difference between Lacan’s notion of a split, desiring Other and Butler’s notion of a multiple, conflicted social order is the difference between not having a signifier and having a cornucopia of signifiers, which is one way to figure the difference between a theory that includes the real in the symbolic, and a theory that overemphasizes the symbolic (although Butler would not use this term to describe her theory). While her discussion of the body as an impasse is an attempt to resolve this issue, it does not lead Butler to focus on how the subject may have a relation to something other than identity, and how the subject may be doing something other than performing identity —at least sometimes (148).

pluth butler the real2

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: New York, 2007.

On Butler’s conception of the body

As she describes it, the body presents language with a problem and is certainly not reducible to language, but the body is also not radically distinct from language, otherwise we would never be able to account for the body as a resistance to signification. Butler is trying to think of the materiality of the body as something experienced within language, and this actually sounds very much like the Lacanian understanding of the real as an impasse in signification (real2).

Only whenever Butler comes across the term real she systematically understands it to be a domain radically distinct from language and does not seem willing to acknowledge that there is another approach to the real in Lacan’s work, one where the real is just an “impasse in formalization.” 145

In Lacan’s work, the real is an “impasse in formalization” that can be handled in two different ways —

1. it can be covered up by creating a signified for it, or

2. it can be preserved in a particular type of signifying practice.

Badiou argued that Lacan’s theory embraced a covering up of, or a distancing of the subject from, the real, and I countered with the claim that Lacan actually embraced the alternative position in his theory of the act.

Butler’s notions of the body and passionate attachments to identity do not lead her to develop a theory of the act, which would be in part about renewing and rewriting our very attachment to identity itself. In other words, Butler does not seem to consider the possibility that certain signifying practices may be entirely outside the domain of identification. According to Butler, we remain committed to subjection, and thus identification, at the psychic or unconscious level.  In fact, [for Butler] this is the very condition for us to be subjects at all. 146

pluth for butler is the subject anything other than language

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: New York, 2007.

Butler does not, as far as I am aware, ever say anything like “the subject is language,” and I do not believe her theory ever suggests such an equation. In fact, at some points Butler seems to suggest that a subject is not identical to its identity. If identity is discursively constructed, then this might lead one to think that the subject is also something other than discourse. One could have an identity constituted by language and a subject who is not entirely absorbed by this identity (142).

I have been arguing that when Lacan makes the subject something separate from identity, he also means that  the subject is not reducible to language or discourse. This is because he also takes the event of sexuality into account when describing the subject’s genesis. Lacan’s theory is an example of a nontranscendental view of the subject that does not reduce the subject to language or any other of its elements (the real, or jouissance). Neither transcendental to the field that constitutes it, nor immanent in that field, the subject according to Lacan is a function that results from language’s effects on the body.

Instead of understanding the subject in terms of a function or effect, Butler opts for an immanent view of the subject. 142

But equally essential to Lacan’s theory is the idea that the subject is neither reducible to nor immanent in language.  This means that an outside of discourse, an outside found in the body, the real, or jouissance, is a necessary component of Lacan’s theory of the subject (143).

Pluth acts do not make a demand on Other for recognition

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: New York, 2007.

True, an act does not produce a subject who is identified with any particular signifier, but it does not produce a subject separate from signifiers altogether either. How can signifiers be used such that they avoid making a demand on the Other for recognition? If an act uses signifiers in a punlike way, and if it does not make a demand on the Other, then what does it do? Is it simply incomprehensible? A meaningless blah blah blah? (139)

Signifiers must be employed in some way in an act, but this does not mean that an act has to fall on either side of an unsatisfactory division: on the one hand, a meaningless, onanistic blah blah blah, in which what is enjoyed is nothing but the sound of one’s own voice; or on the other hand, an either latent or manifest attempt to get recognized by the Other by means of what is being said.  As Lacan puts it in one of his late seminars, what he is aiming at is a kind of signifying activity that can be found in “some artistic practices,” one that could be said to be “beyond the symbolic” (XXIV, Ornicar?, 15:12).  This does not mean it would be preverbal or nonverbal, however. Lacan says instead that it should be seen as “hyper-verbal,” “a verbal to the second power” (XXIV, Ornicar?, 15:12) (139)

pluth on the act

Pluth, Ed. Signifers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.

Originally published on: May 12, 2009 @ 13:53

the act does not depend on gaining recognition from the Other

involves doing something with signifiers

not far from Austin’s performative speech act but Lacan is not interested on acts that change the situation of the world or the set of facts within it . Lacan focuses on acts that change the structure of the subject If Austinian speech acts change the state of affairs in the world —making meetings closed, bachelors married, and so on— then Lacanian speech acts change the subject (101).

The act means crossing a certain threshold

Pluth goes on, “Notice that Austinian speech acts, in contrast, are not at all transgressive but are in fact highly ritualized and codified. The conditions for the success of an Austinian speech act largely depend upon the existence of social guarantees and rituals. Marriages, for example, are only successfully accomplished when performed under very specfic circumstances, and by the proper authorities. According to Lacan’s conception, however, an act transforms a subject, and even though it occurs with signifiers, it does not happen by following a preestablished ritual or code. Also, of course, there is no authority that can ensure the legitimacy of such an act. 101

It is not the case that someone is simply changed by an act: he or she is reinaugurated as a subject. Where there was a certain structure or law operative for a subject prior to an act —imagine this to be an unconscious law, the kind of meaning and determination constructed by the fantasy— an act brings about a transformation in this structure and thereby inaugurates a new subject. In this way, an act situates one outside such a law, and for this reason it is appropriate to consider acts to be transgressive. 102

pluth puns and the act

Pluth, Ed. Signifers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.

Blog post originally published May 13, 2009 at 13:10

  • A bicycle can’t stand alone because it is two-tired.
  • What’s the definition of a will? (It’s a dead giveaway).
  • Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
  • A backward poet writes inverse.
  • In democracy it’s your vote that counts; in feudalism it’s your count that votes.
  • She had a boyfriend with a wooden leg, but broke it off.
  • A chicken crossing the road is poultry in motion.
  • If you don’t pay your exorcist you get repossessed.
  • With her marriage she got a new name and a dress.
  • Show me a piano falling down a mineshaft and I’ll show you A-flat minor.

While inventing a new signifier is hard, “It is not that one doesn’t try. This is just what a witticism is. It consists of making use of a word for another use than that for which it is made. One crumples it up a bit, and it is in this crumpling that its operative effect lies” (Lacan)

Puns distort words, crumpling them up and making them take on another function, thereby shaking up the linguistic meanings and values already present in the Other as a subject-supposed-to-know.

Should acts be seen in the same light? Perhaps they fail to invent totally new signifiers, signifiers that would not have any meaning at all (“like the real”), but they may at least distort a conventional use of signifiers, thereby marking the presence of the real in the symbolic. In this distortion acts would manifest a tendency toward non-meaning, and, because of the effect this has on the Other, acts might thus also go beyond fantasmatic attempts to get oneself recognized by the Other. Such a signifying distortion seems to be just what is found in the social movements Lacan mentions: Christianity and the Russian Revolution.

Christianity did not seek recogntion by what could be considered the Other of its time (Roman law), and the Russian Revolution of 1917 was not about seeking recognition for the Communist Party in the existing Russion state. Yet such social movements seem very unlike puns and witticisms. What do acts have to do with puns anyway? In what way, if at all, can puns be models for acts? Or are puns just to be seen as primitive acts, formally resembling them, without the resemblance going much farther? 107

  • It is as if a pun is saying to the Other, alright, what do you make of this? In this way puns emphasize a lack in the Other.

A pun creates a new signifier that resists signification without being completely nonsensical. It is a signifier that is not simply “the Other’s” but forces a new place for itself in the Other (115).

pluth fort-da

Pluth, Ed. Signifers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.

This blog entry was originally published on May 10, 2009 14:17

Fort-Da game is a repeated, attempt to exorcise a traumatic event.  Yet instead of leading to a simple release of libidinal tension, and perhaps a dissolution of the traumatic event, the Fort-Da game sublates that tension into a signifying activity —canceling the event out as an affective tension, yet preserving it as a signifying tension in the form of a compulsive linguistic repetition.

… in the Fort-Da game, where the traumatic event is also simply being said, or named, by being taken up into signifiers. Yet there is no production of meaning by these signifiers, and the game does not use signifiers as part of an attempt to obtain a recognition of the trauma from the Other.

In other words, the game is not making a demand on the mother to satisfy the child’s needs. It merely repeats a trauma or signifying impasse that causes the subject and is an act in which the subject is disjoined from an Other who can bestow and guarantee recognition. 104

The signifying activity involved in the act achieves something fundamentally different from what fantasy achieves.

In an act, a subject does not constitute itself as a satisfying object of the Other’s desire, and in it a subject is not demanding recognition of its own desire by the Other either. Rather, a subject is simply using signifiers autonomously, as it were, in a signifying repetition of a libidinal event. Perhaps this gives us a further hint as to why Lacan calls an act transgressive: an act uses the Other’s language against, despite, and without, the Other, in what could be called a profound indifference to the Other (104).

pluth subject signifiers

Pluth, Ed. Signifers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007.

Is the unconscious an eternally existing, deep nether-region that contains the true intentions and meanings of the subject? Lacan is vehemently opposed to such an interpretation of the unconscious, such that, according to his view, the unconscious cannot even be said to express itself.  It does NOT consist of a region of intentions that can only achieve expression between the lines, as it were, of a conscious, spoken discourse. The unconscious “consists” of nothing but interruptions, bursts, and gaps in signifying practices: “Discontinuity, then, is the essential form in which the unconscious first appears to us as a phenomenon — discontinuity, in which something is manifested as a vacillation” (XI, 34/25).  If this is the case for the unconscious, then what must we think about the subject of the unconscious?

I have been saying that the subject is a product of signifiers. This still needs to be explained. For now, it should be noted that if it is a product of signifiers, then we have no reason to suppose that this subject has any intentions whatsoever, or that it is a subject that uses signifiers in an attempt to communicate something (44).

If a subject is something like a signified effect, then this means that it never has a hard and fast place in a signifying chain and is not reducible to any  point, any signifier, of a signifying chain.  But a subject is also represented nonetheless, and there are certain signifiers to which a subject gets fixated. Certain signifiers are more important for the subject than others, and these are the signifiers involved in the identity of the subject (45-6)

The subject in Lacan’s theory is a function of signifiers. In order to gain clarity on what this means, the structures involved in using signifiers have to be studied. What structures are involved in using signifiers? …

The subject is indeed represented by a signifier. But it is not its intentions that are represented. Rather, its mere existence as a desired subject is what gets represented. So representation and identity are closely related (46).

What does it mean to say that subjects are produced by signifiers?  According to Lacan’s theory, a flesh-and-blood individual is not the same as a subject. Certainly a subject is not possible without flesh and blood. But, curiously, there can be an individual without this individual being a subject. This a least is one consequence of Lacan’s theory of the subject. The subject is a particular kind of effect of signifiers on a real individual.

I am saying that a subject is a particular kind of effect of signifiers on a real individual because it is possible for signifiers to have effects on an individual that do not bring about a subject. According to Lacan, psychosis is an example of such a phenomenon.  One of the limitations for my study is that what is being said about the subject does not hold for the psychoses, and probably not for perversions either. This study is restricted to neuroses (Note 1, 168).

pluth ego ideal

Pluth, Ed. Signifers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.

Blog post originally published on May 15, 2009 at 9:56

The ego ideal is the symbolic or linguistic foundation of identification.  It plays, in the symbolic order, roughly the same role that the mirror image plays in the imaginary order —it is something the ego strives to be but is not. 52

Driving around in a sports car to “piss daddy off.”  What is at stake here is the signifier “father.”  That is, even though they set themselves up in a defiant relation to the ego ideal, the ego ideal is still for them the point of view from which they have a place and are “seen” by the Other, and this is still, whether they are seen by the Other as good or bad, narcissistically satisfying.  Defiant or not, the common factor here is that in these examples they remain seen by the Other, and their actions occur entirely within the Other’s scope.  Indeed, their actions are for the Other, even when they appear to be against the Other (53).

What is important here is the notion that the ego ideal is a signifier in the Other from whose “point of view” the individual is given meaning and a place.  … In Lacan’s revision of the mirror stage, the child is compelled or encourged to identify its mirror image (ideal ego) as itself by a parent (or someone else) saying something like “That’s you Jimmy! Yes it is!”

The child finds that it has a place ein this symbolic Other by means of the Other’s affirmation of a place for the child. The child is told by the Other what he or she is (54).

pluth unary trait

Unary trait: a signifier that represents a subject to another signifier. (54)

Blog post originally published May 15, 2009. at 10:11

Proper Name as unary trait: When there is a subject that is constituted as the bearer of this trait, there is a subject-as-meaning, despite the fact that the name itself is meaningless. My name precedes me, and to this extent my place in the linguistic and social Other is given before my birth. This is all my name does —it gives me a place. This meaningless signifer, however, is also the bearer of a string of meanings provided that other signifiers enter into the picture, bringing about an operation similar to what happens in metaphor. Here again, the other signifier at work would be the place in the Other from which I am looked at and possibly desired, for example, the Other’s affirmation of the signifier that gives me a place.  So to the extent that I am talked about and desired (or not) by means of this meaningless “trait” existing in most cases before I am born, a discursive place is already carved out for me in this Other.  My name functions as the representative point of this “talk,” this knot of signifiers whose consistency makes up the stuff of the subject-as-meaning. Once again, we see that the construction of the subject-as-meaning may thus precede the actual birth of the individual.

copjec butler sexuation

Dyess, Cynthia and Tim Dean, “Gender: The Impossibility of Meaning.” Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 10:5 (2000): 735 – 56.  Web. Oct 5, 2009.

For Lacan, as for Freud, the unconscious has no understanding of sexual difference. This is still a radical notion; it must count among the central insights of psychoanalysis most frequently in danger of disappearing when psychoanalytic theory discards Freud’s earliest discoveries. It is also a tremendously difficult idea, and there are different ways of grasping it. One way would be to hypothesize that the first sight of anatomical, genital difference is traumatic for a child in that this difference cannot be fully assimilated by the ego — assimilated, that is, to one’s sense of his or her own bodily self. Although we would not want to suggest that this moment is an empirically verifiable event in every subject’s history, nevertheless each person’s first encounter with the morphological difference of the other sex presents him or her with a failure of recognition. It is this inaugural collapse of sense with respect to sexual difference that makes gender traumatic and justifies aligning it with the Lacanian real (752).

This point raises an issue on which we part company with Copjec’s account. Attempting to specify the distinctness of sexual difference vis-à-vis other categories of difference, Copjec (1994) argued that “sexual difference is unlike racial, class, or ethnic differences. Whereas these differences are inscribed in the symbolic, sexual difference is not: only the failure of its inscription is marked in the symbolic. Sexual difference, in other words, is a real and not a symbolic difference” (p. 207). Yet once sexual difference is understood as real in the sense that it is experienced originally as traumatic, then we can start to appreciate how racial difference also operates as a real, not merely a symbolic, difference. One’s first encounter with another human whose skin is colored very differently than his or her own also prompts a failure of recognition; to the extent that one cannot make sense of this difference, racial difference too remains in the real. The distinction between sexual difference and racial difference lies in the fact that every human encounters the trauma of sexual difference very early in life, whereas an encounter with racial difference may be deferred far longer, especially in racially homogeneous cultures. (note 4: 752)

There is a certain driven quality to these projects—to Freud’s essentialist stories as well as to the current dogma of gender’s plasticity. This may reflect the inevitable downfall of narrative, its failure to let itself fail in making sense. Perhaps the most obvious way in which Butler’s theory of gender attempts to make too much sense is in its concept of gender identification as loss resolved by melancholic identification (Butler, 1995a). Butler and Copjec agree that the symbolic order is founded on what exceeds its grasp. But Butler takes the additional step of theorizing this absence of meaning as a set of culturally foreclosed identifications. By presuming she knows what is already missing, Butler follows in Freud’s footsteps when he set about providing us with his infamous developmental narratives of gender. In this respect, the resolutely abstract quality of Copjec’s argument is particularly refreshing. She offers no account of why sexual difference should be traumatic for the individual, but only attempts to show us in logical terms how this is necessarily so. Culturally contingent explanations of gender will inevitably vary, but, as she puts it, “sex does not budge” (Copjec, 1994, p. 211) (753).

Gender is the prime example not only of the impossibility of meaning, but also of the structural impossibility of full relationality. This implies that our theory of gender must describe not only the limit conditions of signification, but also those of relationality. The essentialist, heterosexist alternative refuses to admit any such limitations. In this view, gender is something substantial that one acquires and that lends meaning to one’s relations. Men and women find their counterpart in each other. The social constructivist alternative also eschews limits; as discourse determines subjectivity, subjectivity can be manipulated via the rhetorical device of deconstruction. In other words, it’s all in our hands, and a potentially endless number of possibilities for full relationship may prevail. Yet no analysis of external limits, be they biological or social, ultimately accounts for the impossibility of completely knowing ourselves or one another. Psychoanalysis, when it attempts to theorize this internally imposed impossibility, positions itself to address how the connection between the individual subject and the social is continually mediated by factors outside our awareness. In so doing, it can help us fail better.

critique of butler from copjec perspective using real

Dyess, Cynthia and Tim Dean, “Gender: The Impossibility of Meaning.” Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 10:5 (2000): 735 – 56.  Web. Oct 5, 2009.

So when Lacan points out that “the signifier can’t signify itself,” he is drawing our attention not only to what has yet to be signified, but more fundamentally to the negative effects of the real, to what is outside the symbolic. Furthermore, once we agree with Lacan that the formal properties of discourse are determined by factors outside our grasp, we can consider a dimension of subjectivity that cannot be placed in the harness of language, that is not manipulable in rhetorical terms.  … Lacan’s concept of the real is intended to designate just this impossibility, the internal fissure or constraint that we are constitutively unable to grasp. (743).

Like Butler, Copjec is also aware of gender’s radical contingency, but whereas for Butler this is an effect of its social construction, for Copjec it is an effect of its location in the real. Although Butler leaves herself open to the charge of voluntarism, the idea that gender can be performed at will, Copjec emphasizes that, by virtue of its position in the Lacanian real, gender is no more subject to our manipulation than is the unconscious itself.

Another way of putting this is to say that, at the most basic level, Butler’s account of gender doesn’t leave room for the unconscious. Butler’s theory encourages us to rethink gender in terms of its possibilities; Copjec responds by pointing to a fundamental impossibility that inheres to gender. This doesn’t mean that Copjec is defeatist, but rather that she is familiar with the limit conditions imposed upon us by the unconscious and believes that a psychoanalytic theory of gender should account for these (745-6).

However, by locating gender in the real, Copjec is insisting that sexual difference resists meaning, rather than gives rise to competing meanings. …

For Butler … there is no viable distinction between the concept or discourse of gender and gender itself. On this point, Copjec lays bare the core difficulty in Butler’s argument. Referring to Butler’s conflation of concept and thing, Copjec (1994) wrote, “To speak of the deconstruction of sex makes about as much sense as speaking about foreclosing a door; action and object do not belong to the same discursive space”(p. 210). And this is precisely the position Butler occupies when, after noting that signification is always in process, she assumes that there is no stability of gender.

Deconstruction applies only to discourse, or in this case to the concept of gender. Although agreeing with Butler that the conceptual dimension of gender (i.e., its meaning) is always unstable, Copjec aims to argue further. Indeed, Copjec allows us to take the desubstantialization of gender one radical step further by describing how gender’s meaning is necessarily incomplete, not because of its unstable linguistic properties, but rather because it involves an inherent impossibility that arises as a consequence of its nonlinguistic dimension (746).

Copjec’s interpretation of the impossibility that Lacan presents us with nonetheless encourages us to think about the nonsymbolic, nonimaginary aspect of gender—in other words, she helps us to think gender in the real. Copjec’s use of Lacan’s sexuation graphs has some intuitive appeal. In talking about the limits of reason and about the real as a limit internal to language, Copjec shifts our attention away from what is imposed from the outside, whether it be the effects of an oppressive social regime, on one hand, or of brute materiality, on the other. Copjec is interested less in the external limits proffered by social constructivism or biological determinism than in a limit internal to language itself — the Lacanian real and the impasse in meaning that it creates. Being situated in the real, which is itself a negative instance, gender has no positive content. In this schema, gender is not an incomplete entity, but a totally empty one. Facing off with Butler, who by joining gender and signification makes gender something which communicates itself to others, Copjec (1994) argued:

When, on the contrary, sex is disjoined from the signifier, it becomes that which does not communicate itself, that which marks the subject as unknowable. To say that the subject is sexed is to say that it is no longer possible to have any knowledge of him or her. Sex serves no other function than to limit reason, to remove the subject from the realm of possible experience or pure understanding. This is the meaning, when all is said and done, of Lacan’s notorious assertion that “there is no sexual relation”: sex, in opposing itself to sense, is also, by definition, opposed to relation, to communication [p. 207].

Copjec is taking us much further than perhaps Lacan himself intended. It’s not merely that “there is no relation” (i.e., no symmetrical or complementary relation between men and women), but that sexual difference itself has no signifier, that it is not fully representable. Imaginary constructions of the difference between the sexes are fantasies—ways in which we provide ourselves with answers to impossible questions. In aligning sexual difference with the structural incompleteness of language—the impossibility of articulating this difference — Copjec puts her finger on its traumatic dimension, and this component of experience is something for which deconstruction has no vocabulary. According to Copjec, this is fundamentally what sexual difference is—a difference that cannot be determined. From this perspective, essentialism and social constructivism are efforts to negate this impossibility, this impasse of reason.