butler – Page 31 – objet (a)

zizek the real is the limit to resignification

how Z. understands JB’s concept of resignification:

… her notion is that since ideological universality (the space of interpellation), in order to reproduce itself and retain its hold, has to rely on its repeated assumption by the subject, this repetition is not only the passive assuming of the same mandate, but opens up the space of re-formation, resignification, displacement — it is possible to resignify/displace the ‘symbolic substance’ which redetermines my identity, but not totally to overhaul it, since a total exit would involve the psychotic loss of my symbolic identity. This resignification can work even in the extreme case of injurious interpellations: they determine me, I cannot get rid of them, they are the condition of my symbolic being/identity; rejecting them tout court would bring about psychosis; but what I can do is resignify/displace them, mockingly assume them: the possibilities of resignification will rework and unsettle the passionate attachment to subjection without which subject-formation — and re-formation — cannot succeed’ (222).

There is however, a limit to this process of resignification, and the Lacanian name for this limit, of course, is precisely the Real. How does this Real operate in language? … this collapse of the distinction between pretending and being is the unmistakable signal that my speech act has touched some Real … hate speech, aggressive humiliation … In such cases, no amount of disguising it with the semblance of a joke or irony can prevent it from having a hurtful effect — we touch the Real when the efficiency of such symbolic markers of distance is suspended.

[I]n so far as we conceive of the politico-ideological resignification in the terms of struggle for hegemony, today’s Real which sets a limit to resignification is Capital: the smooth functioning of Capital is that which remains the same, that which ‘always returns to its place’, in the unconstrained struggle for hegemony.

Is this not demonstrated by the fact that Butler, as well as Laclau, in their criticism of the old ‘essentialist’ Marxism, none the less silently accept a set of premisses: they never question the fundamentals of the capitalist market economy and the liberal-democratic political regime; they never envisage the possiblity of a completely different economico-political regime. In this way, they fully participate in the abandonment of these questions by the ‘postmodern’ Left: all the changes they propose are changes within this economico-political regime (223).

Butler responds:

I think this is a peculiar way to use the notion of the ‘Real’, unless of course he is claiming that ‘Capital’ has become unspeakable within the discourses that Laclau and I use. But if he is saying that ‘Capital’ represents the limit of our discourse: then he is —forgive the ‘logical’ point here — confirming my very theory about the absences that structure discourse, that they are defined in relation to the discourse itself, and that they are not derivable in every instance from an ahistorical ‘bar’ that gives us every historicized field. Setting his use of the Butlerian ‘Real’ aside, however, Zizek makes a good point: that a critique of the market economy is not found in these pages. But he himself does not provide one. Why is this? (277).

My sense is that our work is commonly motivated by a desire for a more radically restructured world, one which would have economic equality and political enfranchisement imagined in much more radical ways than they currently are. The question, though, that remains to be posed for us, I believe, is how we will make the translations between the philosophical commentary on the field of politics and the reimagining of political life.

This is surely the kind of question which will render productive and dynamic the opposition between formalism and historicism, between the ostensibly a priori and the a posteriori. One might reply that any notion of economic equality will rely on a more generalized understanding of equality, and that that is part of what is interrogated by this kind of work. … For what happens to the notion of equality when it becomes economic equality? And what happens to the notion of the future when it becomes an economic future? we ought not simply to ‘plug in’ the economic as the particular field whose conditions of possiblity can be thought out on an a priori level. It my also be that the very sphere of the economic needs to be rethought genealogically. Its separation from the cultural, for instance, by structuralist legacies within anthropology might need to be rethought against those who claim that the very separation of those spheres is a consequence of capital itself (277-278).

Laclau responds:

According to Zizek, capitalism is the Real of present-day societies for it is that which always returns. Now, he knows as well as I do what the Lacanian Real is; so he should also be aware that capitalism cannot be the Lacanian Real. The Lacanian Real is that which resists symbolization, and shows itself only through its disruptive effects. [:) Ž would disagree] But capitalism as a set of institutions, practices, and so on can operate only in so far as it is part of the symbolic order. And if, on top of that one thinks —as Ž does — that capitalism is a self-generated framework proceeding out of an elementary conceptual matrix, it has to be — conceptually — fully graspable and, as a result, a symbolic totality without holes. (The fact that it can cause, like any area of the symbolic, distortitive — and so Real — effects over other areas — does not mean that it is as such, the Real.) But, as Zizek knows, there are no symbolic totalities without holes. In that case, capitalism as such is dislocated by the Real, and it is open to contingent hegemonic retotalizations.
Ergo, it cannot be the fundamentum inconcussum, the framework within which hegemonic struggles take place, because — as a totality — it is itself only the result of partial hegemonic stabilizations. So the totality can never be internally generated, for the interior will be essentially contaminated by an ineradicable exteriority. This means that the Hegelian retroactive reversal of contingency into necessity is a totally inadequate conceptual tool to think the logic of a hegemonic retotalization (291-292).

Butler’s question

Is the incompleteness of subject-formation that hegemony requires one in which the subject-in-process is incomplete precisely because it is constituted through exclusions that are politically salient, not structurally static or foundational? And if this distinction is wrong-headed, how are we to think those constituting exclusions that are structural and foundational together with those we take to be politically salient to the movement of hegemony? … Can the ahistorical recourse to the Lacanian bar be reconciled with the strategic question that hegemony poses, or does it stand as a quasi-transcendental limitation on all possible subject-formation and, hence, as fundamentally indifferent to the political field it is said to condition? (JB. BuLaZi. 12-13)

Laclau’s response

I have just said that the sleight of hand on which Butler’s argument is based consists in a hypostasis by which a purely negative condition is turned into a positive one — only at that price can one assert the non-historicity of the structural limit (184).

First, Butler introduces her usual war machines — the ‘cultural’ and the ‘social’— without the slightest attempt at defining their meanings, so it is impossible to understand what she is talking about except through some conjecture. My own guess is that if she is opposing the ‘cultural’ and the ‘social’ to something which is on the one hand ‘universal’ and on the other ‘structural’, one has to conclude that structural determinations are universal, and that they are incommensurable with social and culture specificity. From this it is not difficult to conclude that Butler is advocating, form the point of view of theoretical analysis, some sort of sociological nihilism. Taken at face value, her assertions would mean that the use of ANY social category describing forms of structural effectivity would be a betrayal of cultural and social specificity. If that were so, the only game in town would be journalistic descriptivism. Of course, she can say that this was not her intention, and that she wanted only to speak out against essentialist, aprioristic notions of structural determination. In that case case however, she would have to answer two questions:

1. where is her own approach to a more differentiated analysis of levels of structural limitation and determination to be found.

2. where does she find that I have EVER advocated in my work a theory of ahistorical aprioristic structural determination?

On the second point there can be NO ANSWER.

Tada: my comment: I like this, Laclau’s point is that Butler has no theory of structural determination. She hates anything structural. Because remember Derrida, what constitutes the structurality of the sturucture, where does the structure get its beating heart? From an essentialst centre no doubt? But no. Laclau does not believe structural determination means essentialism. Nor does JB. She just doesn’t like how LaZi bring in this notion of the Real, and the Symbolic. The Symbolic is overwritten by the law of the Father. Uh uh, like waving a red flag in front of a bull.

On the first point the answer is more nuanced — in fact, there COULD be an answer if Butler managed to go beyond her rigid opposition structural determination /cultural specificity. Any social theory worth the name tries to isolate forms of structural determination which are context-specific in their variations and relative weight, but tries also, however, to build its concepts in such a way that they make social, and historical comparisons possible. Butler’s own approach to society at it best moments — her innovative and insightful approach to performativity, where (and I agree with her) there are several points of coincidence with the theory of hegemony — proceeds in that way. I only have to add, in this respect, that one finds it difficult not to turn Butler’s weapons against herself, and ask the insidious question: is performativity an empty place to be variously filled in different contexts, or is it context-dependent, so that there were societies where there were not performative actions? (188-189).

zizek fundamental exclusion

Regarding JB’s charge of ‘ahistorical’ status of sexual difference, Z. points out Levi-Strauss’s notion of the ‘zero institution’ in Structural Anthropology. Here a tribe divided into two groups: those ‘above’ and those ‘below’. Each was asked to draw “the ground plan of his or her village (the spatial disposition of cottages)” (112). What they found was that two different answers, Both perceive the “village as a circle” but for the ‘above’ group, there is “within this circle another circle of central houses, so that we have two concentric circles”. The group ‘below’ drew a “circle split into two by a clear dividing line.”

In other words, a member of the first subgroup (let us call it ‘conservative-corporatist’) perceives the ground plan of the village as a ring of houses more or less symmetrically disposed around the central temple; whereas a member of the second (‘revolutionary-antagonistic’) subgroup perceives his or her village as two distinct heaps of houses separated by an invisible frontier …

This does not mean we fall into the postmodernist flux, cultural relativism “according to which the perception of social space depends on the observer’s group membership”

the very splitting into the two ‘relative’ perceptions implies a hidden reference to a constant — not the objective, ‘actual’ disposition of buildings but a traumatic kernel, a fundamental antagonism the inhabitants of the village were unable to symbolize, to account for, to ‘internalize’ to come to terms with — an imbalance in social relations that prevented the community from stabilizing itself into a harmonious whole. The two perceptions of the ground plan are simply two mutually exclusive endeavours to cope with this traumatic antagonism, to heal its wound via the imposition of a balanced symbolic structure. Is it necessary to add that it is exactly the same with respect to sexual difference: ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are like the two configurations of houses in the … village?

However, Lévi Strauss makes a further crucial point here: since the two subgroups none the less form one and the same tribe, living in the same village, this identity somehow has to be symbolically inscribed — how, if the entire symbolic articulation, all social institutions, of the tribe are not neutral, but are overdetermined by the fundamental and constitutive antagonistic split?

Answer: By what Levi Strauss … calls the ‘zero institution’ … the empty signifier with no determinate meaning, since it signifies only the presence of meaning as such, in opposition to its absence: a specific institution which has no positive, determinate function — its only function is the purely negative one of signalling the presence and actuality of social institution as such, in opposition to its absence, to pre-social chaos. It is the reference to such a zero-institution that enables all members of the tribe to experience themselves as such, as members of the same tribe.

Is not this zero-institution, then, ideology at its purest, that is, the direct embodiment of the ideological function of providing a neutral all-encompassing space in which social antagonism is obliterated, in which all members of society can recognize themselves? And is not the struggle for hegemony precisely the struggle over how this zero-institution will be overdetermined, coloured by some particular signification? (113)

… perhaps the same logic of zero-institution should be applied not only to the unity of a society, but also to its antagonistic split. What if sexual difference is ultimately a kind of zero-institution of the social split of humankind, the naturalized minimal zero-difference, a split which, prior to signalling any determinate social difference, signals this difference as such? The struggle for hegemony is then, again, the struggle over how this zero-difference will be overdetermined by other particular social differences (114).

zizek the act

An act does not simply occur within the given horizon of what appears to be ‘possible’ — it redefines the very contours of what is possible (an act accomplishes what, within the given symbolic universe, appears to be ‘impossible’, yet it changes its conditions so that it creates retroactively the conditions of its own possibility). So when we are reproached by an opponent for doing something unacceptable, an act occurs when we no longer defend ourselves by accepting the underlying premiss that we hitherto shared with the opponent; in contrast, we fully accept the reproach, changing the very terrain that made it unacceptable — an act occurs when our answer to the reproach is ‘Yes, that is precisely what I am doing!’ (121).

… 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 inelcutable background of the process of resignification (220).

it is the very focus on the notion of Real as impossible that reveals the ultimate contingency, fragilty (and thus changeability) of every symbolic constellation that pretends to serve as the a priori horizon of the process of symbolization.

So lacan’s point in unearthing the ‘ahistorical’ limit of historicization/redignification is thus not that we have to accept this limit in a resigned way, but that every historical figuration of this limit is itself contingent and, as such, susceptible to a radical overhaul.

… with all the talk about Lacan’s clinging to an ahistorical bar, and so on, it is Butler herself who, on a more radical level, is not historicist enough: it is Butler who limits the subjet’s intervention to multiple resignifications/displacements of the basic ‘passionate attachment’, which therefore persists at the very limit/condition of subjectivity. Consequently, I am tempted to supplement Butler’s series in her rhetorical question quoted above: ‘How would the new be produced from an analysis of the social field that remains restricted to inversions, aporias, reversals, and performative displacements or resignifications …? (221)

Žižek Butler 2000 CHU historicism sexual difference

Žižek

[According to Butler] Lacan gets stuck in a negative-transcendental gesture. That is to say: while Butler acknowledges that, for Lacan, the subject never achieves full identity, that the process of subject-formation is always incomplete, condemned to ultimate failure, her criticism is that Lacan elevates the very obstacle that prevents the subject’s complete realization into a transcendental a priori ‘bar’ (of symbolic castration’). So, instead of acknowledging the thorough contingency and openness of the historical process, Lacan posits it under the sign of a fundamental, ahistorical Bar or Prohibition. 108-109

Underlying Butler’s criticism, therefore, is the thesis that Lacanian theory, at least in its predominant ‘orthodox’ form, limits radical historical contingency: it underpins the historical process by evoking some quasi-transcendental limitation, some quasi-transcendental a priori that is not itself caught in the contingent historical process. Lacanian theory thus ultimately leads to the Kantian distinction between some formal a priori framework and its contingent shifting historical examples. She evokes the Lacanian notion of the ‘barred subject’: while she recognizes that this notion implies the constitutive, necessary, unavoidable incompletion and ultimate failure of every process of interpellation, identification, subject-constitution, she none the less claims that Lacan elevates the bar into an ahistorical a priori Prohibition or Limitation which circumscribes every political struggle in advance.

My first, almost automatic reaction to this is: is Butler herself relying here on a silent proto-Kantian distinction between form and content? In so far as she claims that ‘the subject-in-process is incomplete precisely because it is constituted through exclusions that are politically salient, not structurally static’, is not her criticism of Lacan that Lacan ultimately confounds the FORM of exclusion (there will always be exclusions; some form of exclusion is the necessary condition of subjective identity …) with some specific particular specific CONTENT that is excluded? Butler’s reproach to Lacan is thus, rather , that he is not ‘FORMALIST’ enough: his ‘bar’ is too obviously branded by the particular historical content — in an illegitimate short circuit, he elevates into a quasi-transcendental a priori a certain ‘bar’ that emerged only within specific ultimately contingent historical conditions (the Oedipus complex, sexual difference). This is especially clear apropos of sexual difference: Butler reads Lacan’s thesis that sexual difference is ‘real’ as the assertion that it is an ahistorical frozen opposition, fixed as a non-negotiable framework that has no place in hegemonic struggles (109)

I claim that this criticism of Lacan involves a misrepresentation of his position, which here is much closer to Hegel. That is to say the crucial point is that the very FORM, in its universality, is always rooted, like an umbilical cord, in a particular content — not only in the sense of hegemony (universality is never empty; it is always coloured by some particular content), but in the more radical sense that the very FORM of universality emerges through a radical dislocation, through some more radical impossibility or ‘primordial repression’.

The ultimate question is not which particular content hegemonizes the empty universality (and thus, in the struggle for hegemony, excludes other particular contents); the ultimate question is: which specific content has to be excluded so that the very empty form of universality emerges as the ‘battlefield’ for hegemony? (110)

Let us take the notion of ‘democracy’: of course the content of this notion is not predetermined — what ‘democracy’ will mean, what this term will include and what it will exclude (that is, the extent to which and the way women, gays, minorities, non-white races, etc., are included/excluded), is always the result of contingent hegemonic struggle. However, this very open struggle presupposes not some fixed content as its ultimate referent, but ITS VERY TERRAIN, delimited by the ’empty signifiers’ that designates it (‘democracy’ in this case). Of course, in the democratic struggle for hegemony, each position accuses the other of being ‘not really democratic’: for a conservative liberal, social democratic interventionism is already potentially ‘totalitarian’; for a social democrat, the traditional liberal’s neglect of social solidarity is nondemocratic … so each position tries to impose its own logic of inclusion/exclusion, and all these exclusions are ‘politically salient, not structurally static’; in order for this very struggle to take place, however, its TERRAIN must constitute itself by means of a more fundamental exclusion (‘primordial repression’) that is not simply historical-contingent, a stake in the present constellation of the hegemonic struggle, since it SUSTAINS THE VERY TERRAIN OF HISTORICITY. 110

Take the case of sexual difference itself: Lacan’s claim that sexual difference is ‘real-impossible’ is strictly synonymous with his claim that ‘there is no such thing as a sexual relationship’. For Lacan, sexual difference is not a firm set of ‘static’ symbolic oppositions and inclusions/exclusions (heterosexual normativity which relegates homosexuality and other ‘perversions’ to some secondary role), but the name of a deadloc, of a trauma, of an open question, of something that RESISTS every attempt at its symbolization. Every translation of sexual difference into a set of symbolic opposition(s) is doomed to fail, and it is this very ‘impossibility’ that opens up the terrain of the hegemonic struggle for what ‘sexual difference’ will mean. What is barred is NOT what is excluded under the present hegemonic regime.

The political struggle for hegemony whose outcome is contingent, and the ‘non-historical’ bar or impossibility are thus strictly correlative: there is a struggle for hegemony precisely because some preceding ‘bar’ of impossibility sustains the void at stake in the hegemonic struggle. So Lacan is the very opposite of Kantian formalism (if by this we understand the imposition of some formal frame that serves as the a priori of its contingent content): Lacan forces us to make thematic the exclusion of some traumatic ‘content’ that is constitutive of the empty universal form. There is historical space only in so far as this space is sustained by some more radical exclusion (or as Lacan would have it forclusion).

So one should distinguish between two levels

1. the hegemonic struggle for which particular content will hegemonize the empty universal notion;

2. and the more fundamental impossibility that renders the Universal empty, and thus a terrain for hegemonic struggle.

So with regard to the criticism of Kantianism, my answer is that it is Butler and Laclau who are secret Kantians: they both propose an abstract a priori formal model (of hegemony, of gender performativity …) which allows, within its frame, for the full contingency (no guarantee of what the outcome of the fight for hegemony will be, no last reference to the sexual constitution …) they both involve a logic of ‘spurious infinity’: no final resolution, just the endless process of complex partial displacements. Is not Laclau’s theory of hegemony ‘formalist’ in the sense of proffering a certain a priori formal matrix of social space? There will always be some hegemonic empty signifier; it is only its content that shifts … My ultimate point is thus that Kantian formalism and radical historicism are not really opposites, but two sides of the same coin: every version of historicism relies on a minimal ‘ahistorical’ formal framework defining the terrain within which the open and endless game of contingent inclusions/exclusions, substitutions, renegotiations, displacements, and so on, takes place. The truly radical assertion of historical contingency has to include the dialectical tension between the domain of historical change itself and its traumatic ‘ahistorical’ kernel qua its condition of (im)possibility. Here we have the difference between historicity proper and historicism: historicism deals with the endless play of substitutions within the same fundamental field of (im)possibility, while historicity proper makes thematic different structural principles of this very (im)possibility. In other words, the historicist theme of the endless open play of substitutions is the very form of ahistorical ideological closure: by focusing on the simply dyad essentialism-contingency, on the passage from the one to the other, it obfuscates concrete historicity qua the change of the very gloval structuring principle of the Social. 112

Butler Replies:

If Žižek can writes as he does: “the ultimate question is: which specific content has to be excluded so that the very empty form of universality emerges as the “battlefield” for hegemony?” (110), then he can certainly entertain the question: ‘which specific content has to be excluded so that the very empty form of sexual difference emerges as a battlefield for hegemony?”

… who posits the original and final ineffability of sexual difference, and what aims does such a positing achieve? This most unverifiable of concepts is offered as the condition of verifiability itself, and we are faced with a choice between an uncritical theological affirmation or a critical social inquiry: do we accept this description of the fundamental ground of intelligibility, or do we begin to ask what kinds of foreclosures such a positing achieves, and at what expense? (145)

It is supposed to be (quasi-)transcendental, belonging to a ‘level’ other than the social and symbolizable, yet if it grounds and sustains the historical and social formulations of sexual difference, it is their very condition and part of their very definition. Indeed, it is the non-symbolizable condition of symbolizability, according to those who accept this view.

My point, however, is that to be the transcendental condition of possibility for any given formulation of sexual difference is also to be, precisely, the sine qua non of all those formulations, the condition without which they cannot come into intelligibility. The ‘quasi-‘ that precedes the transcendental is meant to ameliorate the harshness of this effect, but it also sidesteps the question: what sense of transcendental is in use here? … it can also mean: the regulatory and constitutive conditions of the appearance of any given object. The latter sense is the one in which the condition is not external to the object it occasions, but is its constitutive condition and the principle of its development and appearance. The transcendental thus offers the criterial conditions that constrain the emergence of the thematizable.

And if this transcendental field is not considered to have a historicity — that is, is not considered to be a shifting episteme which might be altered and revised over time — it is unclear to me what place it can fruitfully have for an account of hegemony that seeks to sustain and promote a more radically democratic formulation of sex and sexual difference (147).

If sexual difference enjoys this quasi-transcendental status, then all the concrete formulations of sexual difference (second-order forms of sexual difference) not only implicitly refer back to the more originary formulation but are, in their very expression, constrained by this non-thematizable normative condition. Thus, sexual difference in the more originary sense operates as a radically incontestable principle or criterion that establishes intelligibility through foreclosure or, indeed, through pathologization or indeed, through active political disenfranchisement. As non-thematizable, it is immune from critical examination, yet it is necessary and essential: a truly felicitous instrument of power. If it is a condition of intelligibility, then there will be certain forms that threaten intelligibility, threaten the possibility of a viable life within the social historical world. Sexual difference thus functions not merely as a ground but as a defining condition that must be instituted and safeguarded against attempts to undermine it (intersexuality, transexuality, lesbian and gay partnership, to name but a few) (148-9).

Precisely because the transcendental does not and cannot keep its separate place as a more fundamental ‘level’, precisely because sexual difference as a transcendental ground must not only take shape within the horizon of intelligibility but structure and limit that horizon as well, it functions actively and normatively to constrain what will and will not count as an intelligible alternative within culture. Thus, as a transcendental claim, sexual difference, should be rigorously opposed by anyone who wants to guard against a theory that would prescribe in advance what kinds of sexual arrangements will and will not be permitted in intelligible culture. The inevitable vacillation between the transcendental and social functioning of the term makes its prescriptive function inevitable (148).

Žižek responds 309

Butler is, of course, aware how Lacan’s il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel means that, precisely, any ‘actual’ sexual relationship is always tainted by failure; however, she interprets this failure as the failure of the contingent historical reality of sexual life fully to actualize the symbolic norm.

Butler says that for Lacanians: sexual difference has a transcendental status even when sexed bodies emerge that do not fit squarely within ideal gender dimorphism.

Žižek alters her statement: sexual difference has a transcendental status because sexed bodies emerge that do not fit squarely within ideal gender dimorphism.

That is to say: far from serving as an implicit symbolic norm that reality can never reach, sexual difference as real/impossible means precisely that there is no such norm: sexual difference is that ‘rock of impossibility’ on which every ‘formalization’ of sexual difference founders.

… This notion of Real also enable me to answer Butler’s criticism that Lacan hypostasizes the ‘big Other’ into a kind of pre-historical transcendental a priori: when Lacan emphatically asserts that ‘there is no big Other [il n’y a pas de grand Autre]’, his point is precisely that there is no a priori formal structural schema exempt from historical contingencies — there are only contingent, fragile, inconsistent configurations. (Furthermore, far from clinging to paternal symbolic authority, the ‘Name-of-the-Father’ is for Lacan a fake, a semblance which conceals this structural inconsistency.)

In other words, the claim that the Real is inherent to the Symbolic is strictly equal to the claim that ‘there is no big Other’: the Lacanian Real is that traumatic ‘bone in the throat’ that contaminates every ideality of the symbolic, rendering it contingent and inconsistent. For this reason, far from being opposed to historicity, the Real is its very ‘ahistorical’ ground, the a priori of historicity itself.

We can thus see how the entire topology changes from Butler’s description of the Real and the ‘big Other’ as the pre-historical a priori to their actual functioning in Lacan’s edifice: in her critical portrait, Butler describes an ideal ‘big Other’ which persists as a norm, although it is never fully actualized, although the contingencies of history thwart its full imposition; while Lacan’s edifice is, rather, centred on the tension between some traumatic ‘particular absolute’, some kernel which resists symbolization, and the ‘competing universalities’ (to use Butler’s appropriate term) that endeavour in vain to symbolize/normalize it.

Zizek is capitalism the only game in town

… while this standard postmodern Leftist narrative of the passage from ‘essentialist’ Marxism, with the proletariat as the unique Historical Subject, the privileging of economic class struggle, an so on, to the postmodern irreducible plurality of struggles undoubtedly describes an actual historical process, its proponents, as a rule, leave out the resignation at its heart — the acceptance of capitalism as ‘the only game in town’, the renunciation of any real attempt to overcome the existing capitalist liberal regime (95).

postmodern politics definitely has the great merit that it ‘repoliticizes’ a series of domains previously considered ‘apolitical’ or ‘private’; the fact remains, however, that it does NOT in fact repoliticize capitalism, because the very notion and form of the ‘political’ within which it operates is grounded in the ‘depoliticization’ of the economy.

Regarding JB:

[Butler] is well aware that universality is unavoidable, and her point is that — while, of course, each determinate historical figure of universality involves a set of inclusions/exclusions — universality simultaneously opens up and sustains the space for questioning these inclusions/exclusions, for ‘renegotiating’ the limits of inclusion/exclusion as part of the ongoing ideologico-political struggle for hegemony. The predominant notion of ‘universal human rights’, for instance, precludes — or, at least reduces to a secondary status — a set of sexual practices and orientations; and it would be too simplistic to accept the standard liberal game of simply insisting that one should redefine and broaden our notion of human rights to include also all these ‘aberrant’ practices — what standard liberal humanism underestimates is the extent to which such exclusions are constitutive of the ‘neutral’ universality of human rights, so that their actual inclusion in ‘human rights’ would radically rearticulate, even undermine, our notion of what ‘humanity’ in ‘human rights’ means (101-102).

This passage from ‘essentialist’ marxism to postmodern contingent politics (in Laclau), or the passage from sexual essentialism to contingent gender-formation (in Bulter), or — a further example — the passage from metaphysician to ironist in Richard Rorty, is not a simple epistemological progress but part of the global change in the very nature of capitalist society. It is not that before, people were ‘stupid essentialists’ and believed in naturalized sexuality, while now they know that genders are performatively enacted; one needs a kind of metanarrative that explains this very passage from essentialism to the awareness of contingency: the Heideggerian notion of the epochs of Being, or the Foucauldian notion of the shift in the predominant épistème, or the standard sociological notion of modernization, or a more Marxist account in which this passage follows the dynamic of capitalism

So, again, crucial in Laclau’s theoretical edifice is the paradigmatically Kantian co-dependency between the ‘timeless’ existential a priori of the logic of hegemony and the historical narrative of the gradual passage from the ‘essentialist’ traditional Marxist class politics to the full assertion of the contingency of the struggle for hegemony … The role of this evolutionary narrative is precisely to resolve the above-mentioned ambiguity of the formal universal frame (of the logic of hegemony) — implicitly to answer the question: is this frame really a non-historical universal, or simply the formal structure of the specific ideologico-political constellation of western late capitalism? The evolutionary narrative mediates between these two options, telling the story of how the universal frame was ‘posited as such’, become the explicit structuring principle of ideologico-political life. The question none the less persists: is this evolutionary passage a simple passage from error to true insight? Is it that each stance fits its own epoch, so that in Marx’s time ‘class essentialism’ was adequate, while today we need the assertion of contingency? Or should we combine the two in a proto-Hegelian way, so that the very passage from the essentialist ‘error’ to the ‘true’ insight into radical contingency is historically conditioned (in Marx’s time, the ‘essentialist illusion’ was ‘objectively necessary’, while our epoch enables the insight into contingency)? This proto-Hegelian solution would allow us to combine the ‘universal’ scope of ‘validity’ of the concept of hegemony with the obvious fact that its recent emergence is clearly linked to today’s specific social constellation: although socio-political life and its structure were always-already the outcome of hegemonic struggles, it is none the less only today, on our specific historical constellation — that is to say, in the ‘postmodern’ universe of globalized contingency — that the radically contingent-hegemonic nature of the political processes is finally allowed to ‘come/return to itself’, to free itself of the ‘essentialist’ baggage … (106-107).

This solution, however, is problematic for at least two reasons. [1. it’s Hegelian, Laclau hates Hegel]

2. … from my perspective, today’s postmodern politics of multiple subjectivities is precisely not political enough, in so far as it silently presupposes a non-thematized, ‘naturalized’ framework of economic relations. … One should assert the plural contingency of postmodern political struggles and the totality of Capital are not opposed … today’s capitalism, rather, provides the very background and terrain for the emergence of shifting-dispersed-contingent-ironic-and so on, political subjectivities. Was it not Deleuze who in a way made this point when he emphasized how capitalism is a force of ‘deterritorialization’? And was he not following Marx’s old thesis on how, with capitalism, ‘all that is solid melts into air’?

… MY KEY POINT … the need to distinguish more explicitly between contingency/substitutibility within a certain historical horizon and the more fundamental exclusion/foreclosure that grounds this very horizon. When Laclau claims that ‘if the fullness of society is unachievable, the attempts at reaching it will necessarily fail, although they will be able, in the search for that impossible object, to solve a variety of partial problems’, does he not — potentially at least — conflate two levels,

the struggle for hegemony within a certain horizon
and the more fundamental exclusion that sustains this very horizon?

And when Butler claims, against the Lacanian notion of constitutive bar or lack, that ‘the subject-in-process is incomplete precisely because it is constituted thorugh exclusions that are politically salient, not structurally static’, does she not – potentially at least – conflate two levels,

the endless political struggle of/for inclusions/exclusions within a given field (say, of today’s late capitalist society)
and a more fundamental exclusion which sustains this very field.

(107-108)

Laclau responds to JB lacanian bar

The ‘liberation’ of the signifier vis-á-vis the signified — the very precondition of hegemony — is what the Lacanian bar attempts to express. The other side of the coin, the contingent imposition of limits or partial fixations — without which we would be living in a psychotic universe — is what the notion of ‘point de capiton‘ brings about (66).

The Lacanian real resists symbolization.

This double condition of necessity and impossibility makes possible, among other things,three endeavours:

to understand the logics by which each of the two dimensions subverts the other
to look at the political productivity of this mutual subversion — that is, what it makes possible to understand about the workings of our societies which goes beyond what is achievable by unilateralizing either of the two poles;
to trace the genealogy of this undecidable logic, the way it was ALREADY subverting the central texts of our political and philosophical tradition (75).

Any normative order is nothing but the sedimented form of an initial ethical event (82).

The subject who takes the decision is only a PARTIALLY a subject; he is also a background of sedimented practices organizing a normative framework which operates as a limitation on the horizon of options (83).

laclau on sexual d and hegemony

Laclau, Ernesto. “Identity and Hegemony: The Role of Universality in the Constitution of Political Logics.” Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. JB, EL and SZ. New York: Verso, 2000. 44-89.

It is precisely because I fully appreciate the potentialities of the notion of ‘parodic performances’ for a theory of hegemony, that I find some of Butler’s questions rather perplexing. She asks: “If sexual difference is “real” in the Lacanian sense, does that mean that it has no place in hegemonic struggles?’ I would argue that exactly BECAUSE sexual difference is real and not symbolic, because it is not necessarily linked to any aprioristic pattern of symbolic positions, that the way is open to the kind of historicist variation that Butler asserts — and that a hegemonic game becomes possible. The same goes for some of Butler’s other questions: ‘Does a logic that invariably results in aporias produce a kind of stasis that is inimical to the project of hegemony?’ If there were no aporia, there would be no possibility of hegemony, for a necessary logic inimical to hegemonic variations would impose itself, entirely unchallenged. We have here the same mutually subverting relationship between necessity and impossibility to which we have been referring from the beginning (note 39, 88).

If the representation was total — if the representative moment was entirely transparent to what it represents — the ‘concept’ would have an unchallenged primacy over the ‘name’ (in Saussurean terms: the signified would entirely subordinate to itself the order of the signifier). But in that case there would be no hegemony, for its very requisite, which is the production of tendentially empty signifiers, would not obtain. In order to have hegemony we need the sectorial aims of a group to operate as the name for a universality transcending them — this is the synecdoche constitutive of the hegemonic link. But if the name (the signifier) is so attached to the concept (signified) that no displacement in the relation between the two is possible, we cannot have any hegemonic rearticulation. The idea of a totally emancipated and transparent society, from which all tropological movement between its constitutive parts would have been elmininated, involves the end of all hegemonic relation (and also, as we will see later, of all democratic politics).

universality

Butler, Judith. “Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism.” Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. JB, EL and SZ. New York: Verso, 2000. 11-43.

A recent resurgence of Anglo-feminism in the academy has sought to restate the importance of making universal claims about the conditions and rights of women (Okin, Nussbaum) without regard to the prevailing norms in local cultures, and without taking up the task of cultural translation. This effort to override the problem that local cultures pose for international feminism does not understand the parochial character of its own norms, and does not consider the way in which feminism works in full complicity with US colonial aims in imposing its norms of civility through an effacement and a decimation of local Second and Third World cultures. Of course, translation by itself can also working full complicity with the logic of colonial expansion, when translation becomes the instrument through which dominant values are transposed into the language of the subordinated, and the subordinated run the risk of coming to know and understand them as tokens of their “liberation” (35).

The universal announces, as it were, its ‘non-place’, its fundamentally temporal modality, precisely when challenges to its EXISTING formulation emerge from those who are not covered by it, who have no entitlement to occupy the place of the ‘who’, but nevertheless demand that the universal as such ought to be inclusive of them. At stake here is the exclusionary function of certain NORMS of universality which, in a way, transcend the cultural locations from which they emerge. Although they often appear as transcultural or formal criteria by which existing cultural conventions are to be judged, they are precisely cultural conventions which have, through a process of abstraction, come to appear as post-conventional principles. The task, then, is to refer these formal conceptions of universality back to the contaminating trace of their ‘content’, to eschew the form/content distinction as it furthers that ideological obfuscation, and to consider the cultural form that this struggle over the meaning and scope of norms takes (39).

When one has no right to speak under the auspicies of the universal, and speaks none the less, laying claim to universal rights, and doing so in a way that preserves the particularity of one’s struggle, one speaks in a way that may be readily dismissed as nonsensical or impossible. When we hear about ‘lesbian and gay human rights’, or even ‘women’s human rights’, we are confronted with a strange neighbouring of the universal and the particular which neither synthesizes the two, nor keeps them apart. The nouns function adjectivally, and although they are identities and grammatical ‘substances’, they are also in the act of qualifying and being qualified by one another. Clearly, however, the ‘human’ as previously defined has not readily included lesbians, gays and women, and the current mobilization seeks to expose the conventional limitations of the human, the terms that sets the limits on the universal reach of international law. But the exclusionary character of those conventional norms of universality does not preclude further recourse to the term, although it does mean entering into that situation in which the conventional meaning becomes unconventional (or catachrestic). This does not mean that we have a priori recourse to a truer criterion of universality.

It does suggest, however, that conventional and exclusionary norms of universality can, through perverse reiterations, produce unconventional formulations of universality that expose the limited and exclusionary features of the former one at the same time that they mobilize a new set of demands (40).

status and formation of the subject

Butler, Judith. “Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism.” Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek. New York: Verso, 2000. 11-43.

[S]hould not the incompletion of subject-formation be linked to the democratic contestation over signifiers? Can the ahistorical recourse to the Lacanian bar be reconciled with the strategic question that hegemony poses, or does it stand as a quasi-transcendental limitation on all possible subject-formations and strategies and, hence, as fundamentally indifferent to the political field it is said to condition (12-13).

Moreover, if we accept the notion that all historical struggle is nothing other than a vain effort to displace a founding limit that is structural in status …

If hegemony denotes the historical possibilities for articulation that emerge within a given political horizon, then it will make a significant difference whether we understand that field as historically revisable and transformable, or whether it is given as a field whose integrity is secured by certain structurally identifiable limits and exclusions (13).

Power is not stable or static, but is remade at various junctures within everyday life; it constitutes our tenuous sense of common sense, and is ensconced as the prevailing epistemes of a culture. Morevover, social transformation occurs not merely by rallying mass numbers in favour of a cause, but precisely through the ways in which daily social relations are rearticulated, and new conceptual horizons opened up by anomalous or subversive practices (13).

In the Greater Logic, Hegel gives the example of the person who thinks that he might learn how to swim by learning what is required before entering the water. The person does not realize tht one learns to swim only by entering the water and practising one’s strokes in the midst of the activity itself. Hegel implicitly likens the Kantian to one who seeks to know how to swim before actually swimming, and he counters this model of a self-possessed cognition with one that gives itself over to the activity itself, a form of knowing that is given over to the world it seeks to know. Although Hegel is often dubbed a philospher of ‘mastery’, we can see here … that the ek-static disposition of the self towards its world undoes cognitive mastery. Hegel’s own persistent references to ‘losing oneself’ and ‘giving oneself over’ only confirm the point that the knowing subject cannot be understood as one who imposes ready-made categories on a pre-given world. The categories are shaped by the world it seeks to know, just as the world is not known without the prior action of those categories. And just as Hegel insists on revising serveral times his very definition of ‘universality’, so he makes plain that the categories by which the world becomes available to us are continually remade by the encounter with the world that they facilitate.

We do not remain the same, and neither do our cognitive categories, as we enter into a knowing encounter with the world. Both the knowing subject and the world are undone and redone by the act of knowledge (19-20).

Butler ontological commitments

Eliz Grosz: … you buy into ontological commitments whenever you make certain political commitments.

D Cornell: You inevitably buy into ontological commitments when you advocate programs of reform. I don’t think you can avoid it, which is why anytime you use an aesthetic idea to make sense to reason, you paradoxically try to show that what reason has made sense of is not fully adequate to its promise. I was very influenced by Reiner Schurmann in seeing the paradox in my representation of political ideals, even as aesthetic ideas. But buying into them and knowing that you buy into them and knowing that any representational device you use in this sense of aesthetic idea carries
within it that buying into them is very different from actually thinking that you are doing something more philosophical by turning gender, engendering, or sexual difference into a way of thinking about the truth of Being in a particular historical era.

JB: Indeed, I would want to know from Liz and Pheng if it’s the case that the institutionalization of one’s feminist goals involves making ontological commitments about what women are or what the feminine is and how, at the same time, the perspective of the future anterior is maintained.

Butler Sexual D

DC: I agree, but I think she [Irigaray] does this where she is not willing to challenge the divide of the human race into two sexes. The state both expresses and reinforces the truth of how we should be actualized in our sexual identities, male/female. The law so conceived inevitably closes the domain of other sexual possibilities. Judith has beautifully argued in The Psychic Life of Power that this foreclosure is achieved only at enormous psychic cost.

The forming of a subject requires an identification with the normative phantasm of “sex,” and this identification takes place through a repudiation which produces a domain of abjection, a repudiation without which the subject cannot emerge. This is a repudiation which creates the “valence of abjection,” and its status for the subject as a threatening specter. Further, the materialization of given sex will centrally concern the regulation of identificatory practices such that the identification with the abjection of sex will be persistently disavowed.

[…] JB: That’s a different question. There are a number of different ways of tracing it in Irigaray’s work. But it’s clear to me that sexual difference does not denote a simple opposition, a binary opposition. What it denotes is something like the relationship of a presumed masculine symbolic order to what it must exclude and how that same presumed masculine order requires this excluded feminine to augment and reproduce itself. And I think that what she’s given us is a quite brilliant rendition of a certain economy in which there are not two sexes: there is the sex that is one and then the feminine which is necessary for the reproduction of that masculinity but is always figured as its outside.That has been an enormously influential way of thinking. I think that there are a number questions that are raised by it, and one of them is, Is this symbolic order that we are talking about primarily or paradigmatically masculine?

P Cheah: What you have just described, i.e. sexual difference as the negative but constitutive of substratum phallogocentrism, the early Irigaray Speculum and This Sex Which Is Not One. Is the same notion of sexual difference still operative after An Ethics of Sexual Difference? It seems to me that there, Irigaray’s idea of sexual difference changes dramatically, and it is formulated as a generative interval that exists between the two sexes. She calls sexual difference a sensible transcendental. This reformulation partly is grounded in a rereading of Heidegger in which the copula of Being, that which gives Being, is rewritten as the fecundity of the couple. She argues that this interval should be affirmed as a source for the ethical transfiguration cultural and sociopolitical life. Sexual difference would then be the dimension of the new as such.

JB: What happened is that a certain heterosexual notion of ethical exchange emerged in An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Clearly there is a presumptive heterosexuality in all that reading,which allows us to go back and see some of that really aggressive early reading as part of a certain heterosexual trauma well. “Commodities among Themselves” was never truly convincing to me as a lesbian text in any case — imagining that abundance where there would be no pain associated with pleasure. [Laughs.] No, that has never been lesbianism.That’s to put lesbianism in the permanently unrealizable. So that was not, I think, a friendly text. But the intense overt heterosexuality of An Ethics of Sexual Difference and indeed of the sexuate rights discourse, which is all about mom and motherhood not at all about postfamily arrangements alternative family arrangements, not only brought to the fore a kind of presumptive heterosexuality, but actually made heterosexuality into the privileged locus of ethics, as if heterosexual relations, because they putatively crossed this alterity, which is the alterity of sexual difference, were somehow more ethical, more other-directed, narcissistic than anything else. It was, in some sense, compelling men out of what she used to call their hom(m)osexualite into this encounter with alterity, where that alterity would in fact be the feminine, and what would emerge from that exchange would be a certain kind of heterosexual love which would come to capture the domain of the ethical.