butler – Page 30 – objet (a)

copjec comment on jb

Copjec, Joan. Imagine There’s No Woman. MIT 2002.

One must be careful not to mistake this indivisble and invincible remainder of the process of erasure — this “hard kernel” that Lacan would come to call the real — for some essence or quasi-transcendental a priori that manages to escape the contingent processes of history. Judith Butler, in her continuing argument with the real, seems not to want to let go of this misunderstanding, but I see no reason for this. The fact is that the real is what guarantees that nothing escapes history. What is it that motivates erasure as a privileged modern practice? What does it wish to accomplish? Erasure is intended precisely to foreground historical contingency, to demonstrate that the accretion of particular features by this or that subject, that the cumulate deposits of ego identifications, are the result of historical circumstances that could have been otherwise and that these particular features are therefore inessential. They could easily be stripped away, effaced, by subsequent or alternative circumstances. And yet this process of eradication, as practiced by modernists, culminates in the production of its own limit or exception. Despite its self-presentation, erasure encounters its limit when it reaches the empty page or blank slate, not evidence that the process has been fully accomplished. As long as this empty support — an uninflected, neutral humanity; Being as One, as uniform — remains behind, we can be sure that something has survived untouched by the processes of historical contingency. The notion of a universal humanity stands outside and domesticates history, making the latter the agent of merely minor variations on its already decided script (93).

butler on laclau

We might ask: what form of identification mobilizes the bid for marriage, and what form mobilizes its opposition, and are they radically distinct?

Those who seek marriage identify not only with those who have gained the blessing of the state, but with the state itself. Thus the petition not only augments state power, but accepts the state as the necessary venue for democratization itself.

Indeed, the task will be not to assimilate the unspeakable into the domain of speakability in order to house it there, within the existing norms of dominance, but to shatter the confidence of dominance, to show how equivocal its claims to universality are, and, from that equivocation, track the break-up of its regime, an opening towards alternative versions of universality that are wrought from the work of translation itself. Such an opening will not only relieve the state of its privileged status as the primary medium through which the universal is articulated, but re-establish as the conditions of articulation itself the human trace that formalism has left behind, the left that is Left (179).

butler continued on sexual d

When the claim is made that sexual difference at this most fundamental level is merely formal (Sheperdson) or empty (Žižek), we are in the same quandary as we were in with ostensibly formal concepts such as universality: is it fundamentally formal, or does it become formal, become available to a formalization on the condition that certain kinds of exclusions are performed which enable that very formalization in its putatively transcendental mode? (144)

The formal character of this originary, pre-social sexual difference in its ostensible emptiness is accomplished precisely through the reification by which a certain idealized and necessary dimorphism takes hold. The trace or remainder which formalism needs to erase, but which is the sign of its foundation in that which is anterior to itself, often operates as the clue to its unravelling. the fact that claims such as ‘cultural intelligibility requires sexual difference’ or ‘there is no culture without sexual difference’ circulate within the Lacanian discourse intimates something of the constraining normativity that fuels this transcendental turn, a normativity secured from criticism precisely because it officially announces itself as prior to and untainted by any given social operation of sexual difference (145).

Butler disses Žižek’s sexual d Žižek responds

Tada: JB is critical of the way in which Žižek makes sexual d. ahistorical Real, traumatic and thus outside the struggle for hegemony, JB asks how it can both occasion the chain and is also a link in the chain. How’s that. Žižek replies by accepting this paradox. Further according to the Hegelian concrete universality and also JB’s own work Žižek argues that sexual d is a ‘concrete universality’ in that it attempt to be universal gets overdetermined by its very particular contents. Žižek uses the example of religion, I wish he just used sexual d as an example. But he’s saying I guess the universal difference male/female though universal, will be overtaken by its particular content that tries to fill out this universal. Žižek here cites JB and says that each particularity asserts its own mode of universality (JB’s ‘competing universalities’) Does Žižek’s response satisfy JB? I think not. The very frame male/female is still a sticking point for JB. Even though she understands fully Žižek’s point about how that universality gets differentially articulated. (Man I’m getting good at this eh?)

This problem … is related to the ‘quasi-transcendental’ status that Žižek attributes to sexual difference. If he is right, then sexual difference, in it most fundamental aspect, is outside the struggle for hegemony even as he claims with great clarity that its traumatic and non-symbolizable status occasions the concrete struggles over what its meaning should be. I gather that sexual difference is distinguished from other struggles within hegemony precisely because those other struggles — ‘class’ and ‘nation’, for instance — do not simultaneously name a fundamental and traumatic difference and a concrete, contingent historical identity. Both ‘class’ and ‘nation’ appear within the field of the symbolizable horizon on the occasion of this more fundamental lack, but one would not be tempted, as one is with the example of sexual difference, to call that fundamental lack ‘class’ or ‘nation’ (143).

Thus, sexual difference occupies a distinctive position within the chain of signifiers, one that both occasions the chain and is one link in the chain. How are we to think the vacillation between these two meanings, and are they always distinct, given that the transcendental is the ground, and occasions a sustaining condition for what is called the historical?

Žižek replies:

I fully assume this paradox … This overdetermination of universality by part of its content, this short circuit between the universal and particular, is the key feature of Hegelian ‘concrete universality’, and I am in total agreement with Butler who, it seems to me, also aims at this legacy of ‘concrete universality’ in her central notion of ‘competing universalities’: in her insistence on how each particular position, in order to articulate itself, involves the (implicit or explicit) assertion of its own mode of universality, she develops a point which I aslo try repeatedly to make in my own work (314-315).

… it is not enough to say that the genus Religion is divided into a multitude of species … the point, rather, is that each of these particular species involves its own universal notion of what religion is ‘as such’, as well as its own view on (how it differs from) other religions. Christianity is not simply different from Judaism and Islam; within its horizon, the very difference that separates it from the other two ‘religions of the Book’ appears in a way which is unacceptable for the other two. In other words when a Christian debates with a Muslim, they do not simply disagree — they disagree about their very disagreement: about what makes the difference between their religions … This is Hegel’s ‘concrete universality‘: since each particularity involves its own universality, its own notion of the Whole and its own part within it, there is no ‘neutral’ universality that would serve as the medium for these particular positions.

Thus Hegelian ‘dialectical development’ is not a deployment of a particular content within universality but the process by which, in the passage from one particularity to another, the very universality that encompasses both also changes: ‘concrete universality’ designates precisely this ‘inner life’ of universality itself, this process of passage in the course of which the very universality that aims at encompassing it is caught in it, submitted to transformations (316).

butler on the historical frame Žižek

Tada: Here JB. is making the point that Žižek’s discussion of 2 levels of EL’s theory of hegemony. One level is at the level of the battle over content, over establishing a universal out of particularized contents, which one will emerge and so on. But then there is also the level of the very frame within which that content appears. And this Z. insists is what is taken for granted. So JB. says:

And yet, if hegemony consists in part in challenging the frame to permit intelligible political formations previously foreclosed, and if its futural promise depends precisely on the revisability of that frame, then it makes no sense to safeguard that frame from the realm of the historical. Moreover, if we construe the historical in terms of the contingent and political formations in question, then we restrict the very meaning of the historical to a form of positivism. That the frame of intelligibility has its own historicity requires not only that we rethink the frame as historical, but that we rethink the meaning of history beyond both positivism and teleology, and towards a notion of a politically salient and shifting set of epistemes (138).

Tada: Z. argues that this very frame is CAPITALISM! Damn you Žižek! Butler rejects the Lacanian category of lack. As she states here about Žižek’s use of the term:

Butler states:

His resistance to what he calls ‘historicism’ consists in refusing any account given by social construction that might render this fundamental lack as an effect of certain social conditions, an effect which is misnamed through metalepsis by those who would understand it as the cause or ground of any and all sociality. So it would also refuse any sort of critical view which maintains that the lack which a certain kind of psychoanalysis understands as ‘fundamental’ to the subject is, in fact, rendered fundamental and constitutive as a way of obscuring its historically contingent origins (140).

As I hope to make clear, I agree with the notion that every subject emerges on the condition of foreclosure, but do not share the conviction that these foreclosures are prior to the social, or explicable through recourse to anachronistic structuralist accounts of kinship. Whereas I believe that the Lacanian view and my own would agree on the point that such foreclosures can be considered ‘internal’ to the social as its founding moment of exclusion or preemption, the disagreement would emerge over whether either castration or the incest taboo can or ought to operate as the name that designates these various operations (140).

Tada: JB. construes this particular Žižekian intervention as one of ‘levels of analysis’, a topography which she says makes no sense, ‘falls apart’.

(140-141) Žižek proposes that we distinguish between levels of analysis, claiming that one level — one that appears to be closer to the surface, if not superficial — finds contingency and substitutability within a certain historical horizon (here, importantly, history carries at least two meanings: contingency and the enabling horizon within which it appears). …

The other level — which, he claims is ‘more fundamental’ — is an ‘exclusion/foreclosure’ that grounds this very horizon (SZ 108). He warns both L and me against conflating two levels,

1. the endless political struggle of/for inclusions/exclusions WITHIN a given field

2. a more fundamental exclusion which sustains this very field (Z 108).

Tada: But this ‘levels of analysis falls apart, JB argues that the distinctions do not hold up:

On the one hand, it is clear that this second level, the more fundamental one is tied to the first by being both its ground and its limit. Thus, the second level is not exactly exterior to the first, which means that they cannot, strictly speaking, be conceived as separable ‘levels’ at all, for the historical horizon surely ‘is’ its ground, whether or not that ground appears within the horizon that it occasions and ‘sustains’ (141).

Elsewhere he cautions against understanding this fundamental level, the level at which the subject’s lack is operative, as external to social reality: ‘the Lacanian Real is strictly internal to the Symbolic’ (Z 120).

laclau on laclau articulating logics

I have dealt extensively with the rhetorical and discursive devices through which contingently articulated social relations become ‘naturalilzed’ in order to legitimize relations of power (288).

If I have called the general equivalent unifying an undisturbed equivalential chain the empty signifier, I will call the one whose emptiness results from the unfixity introduced by a plurality of discourses interupting each other the floating signifier. In practice, both processes overdetermine each other, but it is important to keep the analytical distinction between them.
(305).

Žižek explains Real to Butler

Butler’s critique relies on the opposition between

1.the (hypostasized, proto-transcendental, pre-historical and pre-social) ‘symbolic order’, that is, the ‘big Other’, and

2. ‘society’ as the field of contingent socio-symbolic struggles.

… all her main points against Laclau or me can be reduced to this matrix:

– to the basic criticism that we hypostasize some historically contingent formation (even if it is the Lack itself) into a proto-transcendental pre-social formal a priori.

For example, when I write ‘on the lack that inaugurates and defines, negatively, human social reality’, I allegedly posit ‘a transcultural structure to social reality that presupposes a sociality based in fictive and idealized kinship positions that presume the heterosexual family as constituting the defining social bond for all humans’ (JB, 141-142).

Butler further states:

the disagreement seems inevitable. Do we want to affirm that there is an ideal big Other, or an ideal small other, which is more fundamental than any of its social formulations? Or do we want to question whether any ideality that pertains to sexual difference is ever not constituted by actively reproduced gender norms that pass their ideality off as essential to a pre-social and ineffable sexual difference (JB, 144).

(309).

Far from constraining the variety of sexual arrangements in advance, the Real of sexual difference is the traumatic cause which sets their contingent proliferation in motion.

The gap between symbolic a priori FORM and history/sociality is utterly foreign to Lacan — that is to say, the ‘duality’ with which Lacan operates is not the duality of the [a priori form]/[norm], the symbolic Order, and its imperfect historical realization: For Lacan, as well as for Butler, there is NOTHING outside contingent, partial, inconsistent symbolic practices, no ‘big Other’ that guarantees their ultimate consistency. In contrast to Butler and the historicists, however, Lacan grounds historicity in a different way: not in the simple empirical excess of ‘society’ over symbolic schemata … but in the resistant kernel within the symbolic process itself.

… the Real is neither pre-social nor a social effect — the point is, rather, that the Social itself is CONSTITUTED by the exclusion of some traumatic Real. What is ‘outside the Social’ is not some positive a priori symbolic form/norm, merely its negative founding gesture itself.

Tada: comment by me: I get it. Ok so it’s the Real that, within the symbolic, is what kick starts the process of historicity. That is, it is after Z, “the cause which sets their contingent proliferation in motion”. This means that yes there is contingency, but not because we have a normative sedimented order on one hand, and then, empirical or discursive untamed excess that is, the not-normativized, on the other. Historicity begins, contingency happens because there is a REAL (capitalism) caught within the symbolic that is unsymbolizable, that prevents things from sticking and becoming stone. Am I making sense

zizek reply to butler criticism of symbolic

So when when Butler asks the rhetorical question

Why should we conceive of universality as an empty ‘place’ which awaits its content in an anterior and subsequent event? Is it empty only because it has already disavowed or suppressed the content from which it emerges, and where is the trace of the disavowed in the formal structure that emerges? (JB, 34)

I fully endorse her implicit stance. My answer … is: Lacan’s ‘primoridal repression’ of das Ding (of the pre-symbolic incestuous Real Thing) is precisely that which creates universality as an empty place … This very necessity of the primordial repression shows clearly why one should distinguish between the exclusion of the Real that opens up the empty place of the universal and the subsequent hegemonic struggles of different particular contents to occupy this empty place. … And here I am even tempted to read Butler against herself — say, against her sympathetic recapitulation of Laclau

Inevitable as it is that a political organization will posit the possible filling of that [empty place of the universal] as an ideal, it is equally inevitable that it will fail to do so (JB 32).

It is in endorsing this logic of the ideal to be endlessly approximated that I see the underlying Kantianism of both Butler and Laclau (257).

Here I think it is crucial to defend the key Hegelian insight directed against the Kantian position of the universal a priori frame distorted by empirical ‘pathological’ conditions … it is not enough to posit a universal formal criterion and then to agree that, owing to contingent empirical distortions, reality will never fully rise to its level. The question is rather

how, through what violent operation of exclusion/repression, does this universal frame itself emerge? With regard to the notion of hegemony, this means that it is not enough to assert the gap between the empty universal signifier and the particular signifiers that endeavour to fill its void — the question to be raised is, again, how, through what operation of exclusion, does this void itself emerge?

For Lacan, this preceding loss (the loss of das Ding, what Freud called ‘primary repression’), is not the loss of a determinate object (say, the renunciation of the same-sex libidinal partner), but the loss which paradoxically precedes any lost object, so that each positive object that is elevated to the place of the Thing (Lacan’s definition of sublimation) in a way gives body to this loss. What this means is that the Lacanian Real, the bar of impossibility it stands for, does not primarily cross the subject, but the big Other itself, the socio-symbolic ‘substance’ that confronts the subject and in which the subject is embedded.

In other words, far from signalling any kind of closure which constrains the scope of the subject’s intervention in advance, the bar of the Real is Lacan’s way of asserting the terrifying abyss of the subject’s ultimate and radical freedom, the freedom whose space is sustained by the Other’s inconsistency and lack.

So — to conclude with Kierkegaard, to whom Laclau refers: ‘the moment of decision is the moment of madness’ precisely in so far as there is no big Other to provide the ultimate guarantee, the ontological cover for the subject’s decision (258).

zizek sexual d

… to be sure, sexual difference is not a fact of biology, but neither is it a social construction — rather it designates a traumatic cut which disturbs the smooth functioning of the body. What makes it traumatic is not the violent imposition of the heterosexual norm, but the very violence of the cultural ‘transubstantiation’ of the biological body through its sexuation (259).

butler affirmative deconstruction

Žižek defines deconstruction in the light of its own ostensible prohibitions, as if the concepts it interrogates become unspeakable by virtue of their deconstruction. Here, it seems, he overlooks the now prevalent circulation of ‘affirmative deconstruction’, elaborated in different ways by Derrida, Spivak and Agamben. There are conditions of discourse under which certain concepts emerge, and their capacity for iteration across contexts is itself the condition for an affirmative reinscription. Thus, we can ask: what can the ‘human’ mean within a theory that is ostensibly anti-humanist? Indeed, we can — and must — ask: what can the human mean with post-humanism? And surely Derrida would not cease to ask the question of truth, though whatever ‘truth’ is to be will not be separable from the ‘question’ by which it appears. This is not to say that there is no truth, but only that whatever it will be, it will be presented in some way, perhaps, through elision or silence, but there precisely as something to be read (279).

butler last reply to laclau Žižek

Laclau seems to think I have fallen asleep at the job … To insist upon the term [social] is not to engage in a sociologism that presumes the foundational status of social causalities. On the contrary, I insist upon it here because it seems that the term now signifies something of a superseded past. The formalist account of the a priori structures of political articulation tend either to figure the ‘social’ as its prehistory or to deploy the ‘social’ as anecdote and example for the pre-social structure it articulates (270).

Indeed, if one is interested in understanding the politics of gender the embodied performativity of social norms will emerge as one of the central sites of political contestation. This is not a view of the social that is settled, but it does represent a series of politically consequential sites of analysis that no purely formalist account of the empty sign [jab at Laclau] will be able to address in adequate terms.

Moreover if we take the point proffered by Wittgenstein that ‘logic’ is not mimetically reproduced in the language we use — that the logically enumerated picture of the world does not correspond to the grammar of language, but, on the contrary, that grammar induces logic itself — it becomes necessary to return logical relations to the linguistic practices by which they are engendered. Thus, even if Laclau is able to establish something logically contradictory about my position, he remains within the unexamined sphere of logical relations, separating logic from linguistic practice, and so failing to engage the fundamental terms of disagreement between us (270-271).

I take the point — put forward by Zizek and Laclau alike — that it does not do justice to thier positions to contrast an ahistorical account of the symbolic to a historicized notion of discourse; but I am not fully convinced that the way to undermine that opposition is through positing the ahistorical as the internal condition of the historical. Zizek writes

The opposition between the ahistorical bar of the Real and thoroughly contingent historicity is … a false one: it is the very “ahistorical” bar as the internal limit of the process of symbolization that sustains the space of historicty (214)

it does seem striking that the figure [the bar] selected to present temporality would be one that contains and denies it. … Thus in this view, at the heart or in the kernel of all historicity is the ahistorical (274-275).

Significantly, when he later claims that I am ‘caught in the game of power that [I] oppose’ (SZ 220), he does not consider that such complicity is, for me, the condition of agency rather than its destruction (277).

Žižek on butler

Slavoj Žižek, from Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 219-220

In what, then, does our difference consist? Let me approach this key point via another key criticism from Butler: her point that I describe only the paradoxical mechanisms of ideology, the way an ideological edifice reproduces itself (the reversal that characterizes the effect of point de capiton, the ‘inherent transgression’, etc.), without elaborating how one can ‘disturb’ (resignify, displace, turn against themselves) these mechanisms;

[Žižek shows] how power compels us to consent to that which constrains us, and how our very sense of freedom or resistance can be the dissimulated instrument of dominance. But what remains less clear to me is how one moves beyond such a dialectical reversal or impasse to something new. How would the new be produced from an analysis of the social field that remains restricted to inversions, aporias and reversals that work regardless of time and place? (Butler CHU 29)

In The Psychic Life of Power, Butler makes the same point apropos of Lacan himself:

The [Lacanian] imaginary [resistance] thwarts the efficacy of the symbolic law but cannot turn back upon the law, demanding or effecting its reformulation. In this sense, psychic resistance thwarts the law in its effects, but cannot redirect the law or its effects. Resistance is thus located in a domain that is virtually powerless to alter the law that it opposes. Hence, psychic resistance presumes the continuation of the law in its anterior, symbolic form and, in that sense, contributes to its status quo. In such a view, resistance appears doomed to perpetual defeat. In contrast, Foucault formulates resistance as an effect of the very power that it is said to oppose….For Foucault, the symbolic produces the possibility of its own subversion, and these subversions are unanticipated effects of symbolic interpellations. (Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 98-9).

My response to this is triple. First, on the level of exegesis, Foucault is much more ambivalent on this point: his thesis on the immanence of resistance to power can also be read as asserting that every resistance is caught in advance in the game of power that it opposes. Second, my notion of ‘inherent transgression’, far from playing another variation on this theme (resistance reproduces that to which it resists), makes the power edifice even more vulnerable: in so far as power relies on its ‘inherent transgression’, then–sometimes, at least–overidentifying with the explicit power discourse–ignoring this inherent obscene underside and simply taking the power discourse at its (public) word, acting as if it really means what it explicitly says (and promises)–can be the most effective way of disturbing its smooth functioning.

Third, and most important: far from constraining the subject to a resistance doomed to perpetual defeat, Lacan allows for a much more radical subjective intervention than Butler:

what the Lacanian notion of ‘act’ aims at is not a mere displacement/resignification of the symbolic coordinates that confer on the subject his or her identity, but the radical transformation of the very universal structuring ‘principle’ of the existing symbolic order.

Or–to put it in more psychoanalytic terms — the Lacanian act, in its dimension of ‘traversing the fundamental fantasy’ aims radically to disturb the very ‘passionate attachment’ that forms, for Butler, the ultimately ineluctable background of the process of resignification.

So, far from being more ‘radical’ in the sense of thorough historicization, Butler is in fact very close to the Lacan of the early 1950’s, who found his ultimate expression in the rapport de Rome on ‘The Function and the Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’ (1953)–to the Lacan of the permanent process of retroactive historicization or resymbolization of social reality; to the Lacan who emphasized again and again how there is no directly accessible ‘raw’ reality, how what we perceive as ‘reality’ is overdetermined by the symbolic texture within which it appears.