symbolic – Page 9

subject of enunciation enunciated

Sean Homer, Critical Thinkers : Jacques Lacan, New York: Routledge, 2004. p 44.

The unconscious is a process of signification that is beyond our control; it is the language that speaks through us rather than the language we speak. In this sense, Lacan defines the unconscious as the discourse of the Other. The big Other is language, the symbolic order; this Other can never be fully assimilated to the subject; it is a radical otherness which, nevertheless, forms the core of our unconscious. We will see how this works in the following chapter, but first let us look at Lacan’s conception of the subject and how it is determined by the signifier. Lacan conceived of the symbolic order as a totalizing concept in the sense that it marks the limit of the human universe. We are born into language – the language through which the desires of others are articulated and through which we are forced to articulate our own desire. We are locked within what Lacan calls a circuit of discourse …

The ego is an ‘imaginary function’ formed primarily through the subject’s relationship to their own body. The subject, on the other hand, is constituted in the symbolic order and is determined by language. There is always a disjunction, according to Lacan, between the subject of enunciation and the subject of the utterance; in other words, the subject who speaks and the subject who is spoken. Following the linguist Emile Benveniste’s (1902– 76) conception of ‘I’ as a shifter – as having no specific referent but in the act of speech designating the person who says ‘I’ – Lacan argued that the ‘I’ in speech does not refer to anything stable in language at all.

To become a subject one must take a position in relation to the desire of the Other. The infant must differentiate itself from the desire of the Other. 74.

What is there beyond language and the symbolic that makes the subject more than the subject of the signifier?

homer signification Saussure

Sean Homer, Critical Thinkers : Jacques Lacan, New York: Routledge, 2004.

Signifier

________________

signified

The capitalized Signifier takes precedence over the signified and the ‘bar’ between the two elements symbolizes, for Lacan, not the inseparability of the sign but its fundamental division. The bar functions as a barrier to meaning. What a signifier refers to is not a signified, as there is always a barrier between them, but to another signifier. In short, a signifier refers us to another signifier, which in turn refers us to another signifier in an almost endless chain of signification. If we try to define the meaning of a specific word or concept, for example, we can only do so through other words; we are caught in a continual process of producing signs.

Meaning is not fixed, or as Lacan puts it, there is ‘an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier’ (1977c [1957]: 154).

Lacan, however, is not suggesting that there is no ‘fixed’ meaning at all. There are what he called ‘anchoring points’ or ‘points de caption’, where this incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier stops and allows for moments of stable signification. The point de caption literally designates an upholstery button of the kind one finds on sofas and mattresses and which are used to hold the stuffing in place. Saussure’s ‘scientific’, as opposed to historical, analysis of language provided Lacan with a model to study Freud’s ‘talking-cure’. Saussure revealed how there was a ‘structure’ within us that governed what we say; for Lacan that structure is the unconscious. The unconscious is at once produced through language and governed by the rules of language. The precise mechanism through which this takes place was provided by Roman Jakobson.

ROMAN JAKOBSON (1896– 1982) Jakobson took up Saussure’s distinction between the two axes of language – the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic – and proposed a correspondence between these axes and the rhetorical figures of metaphor and metonymy.

Metaphor is the use of a word or expression to describe something else without stating a direct comparison.

Metonymy, on the other hand, is the use of a term for one thing applied to something else with which it is usually associated, for example, when one says ‘crown’ for the position of the monarch, or ‘sail’ to imply a boat. Jakobson pointed out that metaphor is an act of substitution of one term for another and thus corresponded to the paradigmatic axis, or the axis of selection. Metonymy is a relation of contiguity, in that one term refers to another because it is associated or adjacent to it, and therefore it corresponds to the syntagmatic axis, or the axis of combination.

Lacan saw in Jakobson’s structural model of metaphor and metonymy a direct correspondence with Freud’s processes of dream work: condensation and displacement. Condensation designates the process whereby two or more signs or images in a dream are combined to form a composite image that is then invested with the meaning of both its constitutive elements.

In persecutory dreams, for example, the dreamer may dream that they are being punished by an unknown authority figure and try to identify that figure with someone in their life. This figure may well in fact not be a single person, however, but a composite, or condensation, of a number of different persons – parental figures, employer or partner. All of the ambivalent feelings that the dreamer has around these figures combine into a single persecutor in the dream.

Displacement describes the process through which meaning is transferred from one sign to another. Let us take the example of anxiety dreams. In anxiety dreams the dreamer may become anxious about some very minor incident in their lives, but this functions as simply a way of avoiding, or displacing, a much more serious problem that they are facing. These two processes are what Freud called primary processes in contrast to the secondary processes of conscious thought. By mapping Jakobson’s distinction between metaphor and metonymy on to Freud’s primary processes Lacan was finally able to demonstrate how the unconscious was structured like a language. The unconscious, he argued, operates according to the rules of metaphor and metonymy.

homer signification 1

Sean Homer, Critical Thinkers : Jacques Lacan. New York: Routledge, 2004. p 40.

There are three essential lessons to be drawn from Saussure’s theory of language:

Language precedes consciousness; as speaking subjects we are born into language.
Language does not reflect reality but rather one produces one’s experience within the constraints of the given language system and that language system, to some extent, conditions the nature of one’s experience.
Language is not an absolute and fixed system within which a singular meaning can be located, but it is rather a set of differential relations.

Saussure’s conception of language as a total system provided the model for Lévi-Strauss’s concept of structure and in turn Lacan’s symbolic order. But there is an important difference between Lacan and Saussure. For Saussure, the two halves of the sign are always inextricably bound together – like two sides of a sheet of paper – and cannot be separated. Taking his cue from Lévi-Strauss’s reflection on the autonomy of the symbolic function, it was precisely the indivisibility of the sign that Lacan brought into question.

THE PRIMACY OF THE SIGNIFIER

Lacan accepted the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign but questioned two of the fundamental premises of Saussurean linguistics: the indivisibility of the sign and the prioritization of the signified over the signifier. (40)

homer signification 2

Sean Homer, Critical Thinkers : Jacques Lacan. New York: Routledge, 2004.

The relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary and is determined by social convention. But if language does not correspond to objects in the world then how does it become meaningful? According to Saussure, meaning does not reside in individual signs but in the relationship between signs in the language system itself. Language creates a differential system whereby any given sign acquires its meaning by virtue of its difference from other signs. When we speak we choose to use certain words and exclude others. For example, I may say ‘chair’ rather than ‘throne’ or ‘armchair’. Each word designates a piece of furniture I can sit upon but they all have very different meanings. This element of selection is called the paradigmatic axis of language.

But I cannot select and use any word I want. I must combine them in a syntactically correct way for them to make sense and this is referred to as the syntagmatic axis. The meaning of each word, each sign, also depends on the words that come before and after it in a sentence.

Let us take, for example, the sentence:

We will leave Paris tomorrow.

Each term in this sentence acquires its meaning on the one hand through its differentiation from other possible terms we could use in the same context and on the other through its place in the overall sentence structure. Thus, ‘We’ could be substituted by ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘he’ or ‘she’, or ‘tomorrow’ could be substituted by ‘today’. The sentence will still make sense if we substitute these terms but it will have a very different meaning. These alternatives are absent from the immediate situation of language use but are present as a background against which we understand specific terms.

Second, the meaning of a sentence arises from a specific combination of terms rather than its individual elements in isolation. Thus, if we rearranged this sentence we can still understand the individual terms but it does not make sense overall:

Paris leave will tomorrow we.

This is the function of syntax and grammar or the syntagmatic axis. Language works by combining these two functions; the meaning of what a person says depends not only upon the words they use and those they exclude but also upon the place of those words within an overall structure. Language exists as a complex network of signs. A given sign is defined not by virtue of an intrinsic value or meaning, but rather through its relative position within the overall system of signification and through its difference from all the other signs in that system.

A sign does not refer us to a specific object in the real material world, but rather to another sign which in turn refers us to another sign and so on. (39)

homer lacan symbolic

Sean Homer, Critical Thinkers: Jacques Lacan, New York: Routledge, 2004.

Lévi-Strauss argued that what was significant in this process was not so much the exchange of real people – of actual women – but the way in which women were transformed into signs and operated within a system of symbolic exchange. The exchange of women operated like a language – a formal system with its own rules and regulations which could not be infringed but at the same time remained unconscious to the individual system users. In other words, there is an unconscious structure that determines people’s social position and regulates their relationships without their being aware of it. Lacan drew two important lessons from Lévi Strauss:

1. That there is an elementary structure – a single ‘unconscious’ structure – which can be seen to underlie all other kinship and social relations.

2. That what takes place within kinship systems is not the giving and taking of real persons in marriage but a process of symbolic exchange.

From the structural anthropology of Lévi-Strauss, therefore, Lacan derives the idea that what characterises the human world is the symbolic function – a function that intervenes in all aspects of our lives.

lacan’s symbolic logic of sexuation

Male ………………. Female

∃x : ‘There is at least one x.’
__
∃x : ‘There is not a single x which …’

Φx : ‘x is subject to the phallic function.’
__
Φx : ‘x is not subject to the phallic function’

∀x : ‘ All x‘s’
__
∀x : ‘Not all x‘s.’

x : jouissance
a : The object (a), Desire’s cause remains beyond signification, unsignifiable. Signifies the Other’s desire insofar as it serves as cause of the subject’s desire; but object (a), considered to play a role “outside of theory,” that is, as REAL, does not signify anything: it IS the Other’s desire, it is desirousness as REAL, not signified.

Φ : The phallic function: the function that institutes lack, that is, the alienating function of language. The phallic function plays a crucial role in the definition of masculine and feminine structure, for the latter are defined differently in terms of that loss, that lack instituted by alienation, by the splitting brought on by our use of —or rather use by— language (TLS Fink 103). The phallus is the signifier of lack. The phallus is never anything but a signfier, it is the signifier of desire. Insofar as desire is always correlated with lack, the phallus is THE signifier of lack.

La: Indicates Woman‘ who does not fall into a set, as she is not completely defined by the phallic function. “Woman does not exist”: there is no signifier for, or essence of, Woman as such. Woman can thus only be written under erasure: Woman.

-image deleted- signifier of the barred Other, feminine jouissance, Other jouissance (TLS 115).

***********

It is precisely because masculinity and femininity represent two non-complementary structures, defined by different relationships to the Other, that there can be no such thing as a sexual relationship. What we do in any relationship is either try to turn the other into what we think we desire or turn ourselves into that which we think the other desires, but this can never exactly map onto the other’s desire. In other words, the ‘major problem of male and female subjects is that they do not relate to what their partners relate to in them’ (citing Salecl 2002:93, in Homer 106). In a sense, we always miss what we aim at in the other and our desire remains unsatisfied. It is this very asymmetry of masculinity and femininity in relation to the phallus and the objet a that means that there can be no such thing as a sexual relationship (Homer 106).

copjec ethics of psychoanalysis

The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

44:”Do not give way on your desire.” … In short the ethics of psychoanalysis filiates itself with Kant’s argument that ethical progress has nothing to do with that form of progress promoted by modern industry, or the “service of good,” but is rather a matter of personal conversion, of the subjective necessity of going beyond oneself.

GAP BETWEEN INDIVIDUAL AND SPECIES: Freud argues that this gap can never be reabsorbed; moreover, it is the very maintenance of this gap that permits the individual subject from being annihilated by the history she inherits.

46: Creon is driven by his superego, which is that psychic agency which fosters in the subject a distaste for mundane, compromised pleasures and maintains us in a state of dissatisfaction. Creon’s fixation on the lost object causes him to be relatively indfferent to all others available to him. He remains glued to an ideal he will never attain, since it is derived from his nostalgia for something he never possessed.

47: When she covers the exposed body of her brother, Antigone raises herself out of the conditions of naked existence to which Creon remains bound.

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.

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.