lack – Page 8 – objet (a)

Pluth the act part 2 subject as thing and not as agent

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

Lacan seems to have favored a certain kind of subject, one that is engaged in maintaining an inconsistency in the Other, one that signifies in such a way that the order of the Other itself gets scrambled. Instead of merely seeking a signification for an event in terms already available in the Other, an act puts a resistance to signification into words. … A pun creates a new signifier that resist signification without being completely nonsensical. It is a signifier that is not simply “the Other’s” but forces a new place for itself in the Other (115).

While it is fairly easy to see how acts use signifiers in a way that is different from other signifying practices, the position of the subject in an act, and whether this subject differs, structurally, from the subject as meaning, remains to be explored.

One attractive aspect of the subject-as-meaning was that such a subject seemed more or less thinglike and substantial: a knot of signifiers, if you will. This can be thought of as a “subject as substance”: not the thinking substance that characterized the Cartesian cogito but substancelike nonetheless. The view of the subject as a thing, however, and not as an agent, although it does insist and repeat.

pluth puns and the act

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

pluth fort-da

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

pluth subject as meaning junction disjunction

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

I described the subject as meaning. What I am saying here adds an important supplement to this notion of a subject represent in and for the Other.

First, there is meaning: I am something for the Other, an object that satisfies the Other’s demands, or a significant, desirable object of the Other (like Xenophon). Then, either because of bodily experiences that cannot be signified or an encounter with the Other’s desire, or both, this position as a meaning is called into question. In the wake of these encounters, there are two major possibilities.

1. My position as a satisfying object or meaning for the Other can be reaffirmed. Fantasy is Lacan’s account of how this happens. In fantasy I try to reassert my position as the object of the Other’s desire, and my own desire is to remain such an object.

2. Another way is possible, and Lacan’s theory of the act discusses this. An act involves a different reaction to both the Other’s desire and the meaning constructed for us in the Other (78).

On my reading, Lacan does not come up with a unique and rigorous theory of the subject until his fourteenth and fifteenth seminars (79).

This subject can still be thought of as an “organized system of symbols,” but it is not something that gives this order meaning. Rather, the subject is identified with a meaning. This corresponds to what I spoke of in chapter 3 as the “subject-as-meaning,” a subject represented in the Other, and part of the Other’s discourse. But I have been claiming that Lacan was not satisfied with this version of the subject either. Again, the subject is always something like a consistency of signifiers in Lacan’s opinion, but this is actually only one aspect of the subject.

Lacan’s ultimate vision of the subject is achieved when the subject is portrayed as something between an organized system of symbols and what motivates that organization in the first place — events such as sexuality, jouissance, and the Other’s desire, all of which can be correlated with the real (79-80).

The definition of the subject that I want ot focus on now comes from Lacan’s fourteenth seminar.

A SUBJECT IS SITUATED AT THE JUNCTION AND DISJUNCTION OF THE BODY AND JOUISSANCE

It is not so much of a stretch then, to suggest that when Lacan says “body” here, we could also just as well say language. So not only does this definition reaffirm that a subject is neither language nor jouissance, it also tells us more about the structure of the subject. … in his ninth seminar Lacan was content with saying that the subject is between the two poles of language and the real. In this definition, the subject’s position is given more elaboration. The subject is situated at a junction and disjunction of the two with each other (80).

pluth jouissance

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007. Print.
excessive unbearable tension, a tension that does not go away a tension that cannot be “relieved” by means of signifiers, because there is no signifier for it

for which the language of pleasure and displeasure is not adequate.

There is thus a radical tension between this jouissance beyond the pleasure principle and the order of signifiers (75).

For this reason, jouissance should be thought of in terms of real2 — something that is not prior to and outside of signifiers but that appears within signifiers as an impasse in signification (77).

Jouissance is an impasse in the fabric of meaning, but in neurosis it is at least put into a relation with that fabric. In psychosis, this relation is missing, and there is a radical gulf between the symbolic and the real. In neurosis, there is also a gulf, but here is also a project to build a bridge across the gulf, an attempt to elaborate on a relation between the two.

This study has at least given an indication now of how the body plays a role in Lacan’s theory of the subject. The body is the site and origin of a signifying impasse. Now this is not what Lacan usually calls the body in his theory. As we have seen the body is usually for Lacan something “overwritten” with signifiers. For this reason, Lacan was not inclined to say that the “stirring” in Little Han’s genitals was something that involved his body. Little Hans already had a body image prior to this stirring. The emergence of genital sexuality introduced something that did not fit into this image — and so, Han’s penis, when it started acting up, was not something he experience as “his.” Nevertheless, from another point of view, this jouissance was indeed coming from Han’s body. What needs to be explained now is how this impasse originating in the body — an impasse that can be abbreviated under the heading of sexuality — plays a role in the production of the subject (78).

glynos on logic of desire logic of capital

Glynos, Jason. “‘There is no Other of the Other’ Symptoms of a Decline in Symbolic Faith, or, Žižek’s Anti-capitalism” Paragraph vol 24, no. 2, July 2001 (78-110).

The subject of capitalism is empty
The subject of desire is empty

Lacan’s logic of desire and the logic of capitalism share a deep homology in structuring contemporary subjectivity (87).

In both cases the logics are purely formal and independent of the particular concrete contexts wherein they function.
Fetishism of the new keeps desire alive
- Insatiable desire for new products
- In order to sustain itself it must prevent itself from satisfaction
Subject of desire constant never-ending desire after desire
Fantasy covers over the necessary dissatisfaction of the subject
- Dissatisfied are we? Blame immigrants, jews etc.

The depoliticized economy is the disavowed “fundamental fantasy” of postmodern politics

Slavoj Žižek The Ticklish Subject. 1999, 355.

The capitalists erosion of the big Other’s efficiency, therefore, throws the subject of desire into a panic. When symbolic authority qua prohibition gives way to a more permissive society, when object of desire are more readily available and less subject to social prohibition (you are free to invent your own marital and/or sexual arrangements, however perverse these might appear; others will tolerate your actions and opinions), the social subject comes that much closer to realizing its desire. But … this proximity to fulfilment simply arouses anxiety. Why? Because it threatens to extinguish the subject as a subject of desire: a subject of desire sustains itself only on condition that its ultimate object of desire remains inaccessible. Thus, the structural consequence of the growing collapse of symbolic efficiency is not a healthy burgeoning of pleasurable experiences and increased well-being. Instead, it is a desperate attempt to cling to this kind of subjectivity by making the big Other exist. And in a situation of generalized cynicism, in the absence of symbolic faith, we witness ‘the proliferation of different versions of a big Other that actually exists, in the Real, not merely as a symbolic fiction (90).

This is precisely the role that ethical committees, sex guides, and manuals of political correctness play; or the role that various moral, political and religious fundamentalisms play. They do not so much succeed in establishing some unitary empty prohibition characteristic of past subjectivities. Instead they are characterized more by a proliferation of rules and regulations that provide a whole host of imaginary ideals (about what to say, about what to eat, etc.). In the absence of symbolic faith, we attempt to recoup certainty with even greater urgency by means of the decentred sprouting of bureaucratic apparatuses (90).

What unites these otherwise disparate phenomena is our contemporary subjective stance. The disintegration of our faith in the big Other, then, creates anxiety in subjects of desire and it becomes imperative that new obstacles are introduced to regain a sense of balance. In other words, the logic of desire reproduces exactly the logic of capital which requires for its survival new frontiers, new enemies (91).

When symbolic Other doesn’t meet expectations, what comes to forefront is (void-) cause of our desire which is misperceived as an obstacle: soft permissive liberal, Jew, immigrant, paedophile
Making the Other exist
- Returning to basic morals in various fundamentalisms
- Complaining to the Other (complaint culture)
- Provoking the Other by cutting into the real of the body (body piercing, self-inflicted harm, suicde, s&m)
- Accusing the Other for allowing others to steal our way of life (discourses targeting immigrants)
- Bypassing the Other through direct reference to real of science (expert committees)
- Positing an Other of the Other (conspiracy theories) (91)

Fantasy provides a rationale that premists us to avoid confronting the Other’s inconsistency and incompleteness, thereby generating an Other of the Other, a real Other of the symbolic Other.

A properly authentic, ethical act, is one that manages to effect a traversing of the social fantasy, thereby exposing the lack in the big Other, the ultimate impotence of the dominant politico-economic discourse.

What sustains [capitalism] are the social subject’s disavowed social fantasies and their constitutive ‘threats – those, in other words, who take advantage of our present system, like single mothers, immigrants, … It is precisely there that the battle against capitalism should properly be fought (as opposed to engaging only in rational-deliberative political sarugument which is sustained by these social fantasies).

[W]hat is most traumatic is not that I am subject to the rule of the big Other, to the Master. Far more traumatic is the possibility that the big Other does not exist. This is ultimately what we cannot accept as subjects of desire and this is ultimately the reason for our ready recourse to fantasies of the ‘Other of the Other’ who ‘steal’ our enjoyment. This is why, for Žižek, the aim of ideological critique is to create the conditions in which we can ‘experience how there is nothing “behind” it, and how fantasy masks precisely this “nothing”. … this ‘crossing of the fantasy’ ushers in a distinctively novel ethical horizon and a corresponding mode of subjectivity (97).

Crossing [Traversing] the Fantasy

1. Devaluing the object of desire we think the Other has stolen (or threatens to steal) from us:

Deflate publicly supported imaginary ideals, our precious treasures that appear to be threatened by the intrusion of an evil menace
- Jew, Freud attempted just such a strategic move by portraying the Jew as someone who does not in fact possess the precious treasure that anti-Semites insist on imputing to him
Paedophiles by demonizing them and stressing the innocence of our children, no, do not exacerbate the problem by heightening the privileged status of the victim, “making their torture and rape all that harder to resist.
Instead the equivalent strategy would be to emphasise how children are in fact not as innocent as we might imagine them, to highlight their already polymorphously perverse sexuality, etc.

Of course this strategy (regarding both the Jew and the Paedophile) does not mean that their offences should go unpunished. The point, however, is that without intervening with an eye on the fantasy structuring the social symptoms, not only do we miss an opportunity to sap the jouissance invested in them, we often in fact simply reinforce it (note 75, 109).

2. Confronting the social subject with the obstacle qua cause of desire. This obstacle is often perceived in terms of a threat, as is the case in UFO conspiracy theories.

The crucial, hitherto underestimated ideological impact of the coming ecological crisis will be precisely to make the ‘collapse of the big Other’ part of our everyday experience, i.e., to sap this unconscious belief in the ‘big Other’ of power … exposing the power’s ultimate impotence. Our ‘spontaneous’ ideological reaction to it, of course, is to have recourse to the fake premodern forms of reliance on the ‘big Other’ (‘New Age consciousness’; the balanced circuit of Nature, etc.). Perhaps, however, our very physical survival hinges on our ability to consummate the act of assuming fully the ‘nonexistence of the Other,’ [of abandoning our attempts to find another Other behind the big Other] (99).

The passage from premodern subjectivity to modern subjectivity (and the accompanying shifts in socio-political arrangements) was made possible by the emergence of monotheistic religions; while the passage modern to postmodern (and the accompanying shifts in socio-political arrangements) was made possible by the scientific revolution and the birth of capitalism. In this view, monotheistic Prohibition marks the primordial repression that gives birth to a whole series of fantasies that support socio-political discourse; and the subsequent modern and postmodern eras presuppose a subjectivity that operations within this fantasmatic framework (100).

Žižek’s anti-capitalism, then, amounts to nothing short of a call to another fundamental mutation in human subjectivity corresponding to the passage through fantasy and entailing an ethical stance that is adequate to this task.

The prospect of a fundamental mutation, however, evokes horror. Just as the demand to replace polytheism with monotheism, or secularism with monotheism could not but be perceived as idealist, even terroristic, so too will the anti-capitalist demand to move beyond fantasy. Why? Because it implies a complete revamping of our economic, social, and political institutional arrangements, and the standards of evaluation they presuppose. This, ultimately, is why it is not possible to give concrete content to the new ethics of the drive. What will emerge on the Other side of fantasy cannot be predicted in advance, much less judged on the basis of contemporary standards of evaluation. Any such attempt to predict outcomes can only rely on current standards and ideals, reducing reformist cautionary projects to a consequentialist calculus that seeks foundational guarantees rooted in our current ethico-political horizon. It would simply reiterate through other means the thesis that there is an ‘Other of the Other’.

This, indeed, gives some rationale to Žižek’s ‘returns’ to the Stalinist terror, the Nazi horror, or the various ethnic wars. When he subjects these phenomena to analytical treatment, his aim is not directly to propose a new concrete socio-political framework which would prevent such atrocities in the future. He does not argue that we need more human rights, more political will, more sophisticated legal systems, etc. Instead, his aim is to show that what is responsible for such ‘extraordinary’ outbursts is nothing Other than the very ‘ordinary’ and normal contemporary subject, with all his or her foibles (i.e., the subject of desire) and that we must find a way out, a way through fantasy, a way to fully assume that ‘there is no Other of the Other’ and thus no longer to be ‘bothered’ by the lack in the Other. Žižek effectively implies that the modality of such outbursts is simply unavailable under the regime of an ethics of the drive; that the kind of subjectivity which makes them possible is absent. Thus, his aim is a purely negative one: he cannot offer up a concrete vision of what such a regime would look like, only what it would not look like. In this view, our passage through the fundamental fantasy of capitalism will await the spontaneous invention of new models of socio-political arrangement, just as the spontaneous formation of the Paris commune can be seen as a model for Marx’s communism. This is, perhaps, one way to read Žižek’s call to the ‘socialization of productive forces’. This empty signifier is one that has been foreclosed by current capitalist discourse. His recourse to it, therefore, invests it with a dimension of impossibility, a radical emptiness that new forms of post-capitalist socio-economic arrangements will attempt to fill with concrete meaning (102).

[C]rossing the fundamental fantasy would involve, in some sense, leaving behind the whole fantasy structure installed by the Prohibition of monotheistic religions. What is required here, is not so much an account of what will follow in concrete and predictive detail, but a precise, even if speculative, theoretical account of what the possible modalities of a subject of the drive might be a the social level. In Other words, what kind of community is (even theoretically) possible for subject s of the drive? What insights can Lacanian clinical theory offer us? Since a Lacanian conception of community eschews ideas of shared values or common symbolic identification; and since it suggests that our social bond should also not be based on a common fantasmatic transgression (which makes possible a community of subjects of desire), what others ways of there of thinking a community of subjects? Indeed, is a social subject of the drive possible? (103)

Žižek on Butler

Žižek, Slavoj. “Passionate (Dis)Attachments, or, Judith Butler as a Reader of Freud” The Ticklish Subject. London: Verso, 1999, 247-312.

247 – 248 opposition between hysteria and perversion

🙂 Žižek argues the pervert sidesteps the unconscious in his direct acting out of his fantasies directly. Whereas the hysteric is always questioning, the pervert knows exactly what the other wants.

This opposition of perversion and hysteria is especially pertinent today, in our era of the ‘decline of Oedipus’, when the paradigmatic mode of subjectivity is no longer the subject integrated into the paternal Law through the symbolic castration, but the ‘polymorphously perverse’ subject following the superego injunction to enjoy. The question of how we are to hystericize the subject caught in the closed loop of perversion (how we are to inculcate the dimension of lack and questioning in him) becomes more urgent in view of today’s political scene: the subject of late capitalist market relations is perverse, while the ‘democratic subject’ (the mode of subjectivity implied by the modern democracy) is inherently hysterical (the abstract citizen correlative to the empty place of Power). In other words, the relationship between the bourgeois caught up in the market mechanisms and the citoyen engaged in the universal political sphere is, in its subjective economy, the relationship between perversion and hysteria. So when Rancière calls our age ‘post-political’, he is aiming precisely at this shift in political discourse (the social link) from hysteria to perversion: ‘post-politics’ is the perverse mode of administering social affairs, the mode deprived of the ‘hystericized’ universal/out-of-joint dimension (248).

🙂 I think Žižek is pulling Butler’s chain. 249 he cites coprophagy (eating shit) and breaks it down into its hysterical (if I eat shit will the other still love me? Will he leave me? What am I to the Other’s desire?) Žižek is implying that her form of theory is ‘perverse’ to the core. Calling Foucault (and Deleuze and Guttari’s Anti-Oedipus) a perverse philosopher. Why?

… the pervert bravely goes to the limit in undermining the very foundations of symbolic authority and fully endorsing the multiple productivity of pre-symbolic libidinal flux … the model of false subversive radicalization that fits the existing power constellation perfectly … the model of the false transgressive radicality (250-251).

It is not enough to say as Foucault does, that power in invoking its law engenders a flourishing of objects it itself was set up to legislate and control, they “set in motion a wild proliferation of what they endeavour to suppress and regulate: the very ‘repression’ of sexuality gives rise to new forms of sexual pleasure. But what Foucault misses according to Žižek, is the erotic, libidinal element that comes about in the subject as they are getting the whip. In other words subjection is kind of sexy for the subjected, in that, for example, the confessional activity “itself becomes sexualized” (253). Žižek cites political correct attitude of not calling stupid people ‘retarded’ but instead ‘mentally challenged.’ For Žižek the guy that self-flagellates himself in an attempt to prevent himself falling prey to sexual thoughts, is itself getting off, getting a sexual charge from the act of flagellation.

255 Žižek makes the interesting point that resisting colonial domination was inherent to colonial domination itself. “anti-colonialist national liberation movements are strict sensu generated by colonialist oppression” (255). The native moves from his passive identity in traditions and culture, to an identity spurred on by the event of colonial domination. “it is this oppression which brings about the shift from passive ethnic self-awareness grounded in mythical tradition tot he eminently modern will to assert one’s ethnic identity in the form of a national-state” (255).

Although Chechens evoke their hundred-year-old struggle against Russian domination, today’s form of this struggle is clearly the outcome of the modernizing effect of the Russian colonization of traditional Chechen society (255).

🙂 For Žižek active resistance is inherent to the forces of domination itself, by producing an excess the forces of domination thereby produce a resistance that goes beyond, an excess of resistance. So just because resistance is generated by the very power that it opposes, doesn’t mean its co-opted in advance.

… the key point is that through the effect of proliferation, of producing an excess of resistance, the very inherent antagonism of a system may well set in motion a process which leads to its own ultimate downfall (256).

The Effect Can ‘Outdo’ Its Cause

[Foucault] precludes the possibility that the system itself, on account of its inherent inconsistency, may give birth to a force whose excess it is no longer able to master and which thus detonates its unity, its capacity to reproduce itself. In short, Foucault does not consider the possibility of an effect escaping, outgrowing its cause, so that although it emerges as a form of resistance to power and is as such absolutely inherent to it, it can outgrow and explode it. … (the effect can ‘outdo’ its cause) (256).

And this is why Foucault lacks the appropriate notion of the subject: the subject is by definition in excess over its cause, and as such it emerges with the reversal of the repression of sexuality into the sexualisation of the repressive measures themselves (257).

From Resistance to the Act

For Lacan, radical rearticulation of the predominant symbolic Order is altogether possible – this is what his notion of point de capiton (the ‘quilting point’ or the Master-Signifier) is about: when a new point de capiton emerges, the socio-symbolic field is not only displaced, its very structuring principle changes. One is thus tempted to reverse the opposition between and Lacan and Foucault as elaborated by Butler (Lacan constrains resistance to imaginary thwarting, while Foucault, who has a more pluralistic notion of discourse as a heterogeneous field of multiple practices, allows for a more thorough symbolic subversion and rearticulation): it is Foucault who insists on the immanence of resistance to Power, while Lacan leaves open the possibility of a radical rearticulation of the entire symbolic field by means of an act proper, a passage through ‘symbolic death’. In short, it is Lacan who allows us to conceptualize the distinction between imaginary resistance (false transgression that reasserts the symbolic status quo and even serves as a positive condition of its functioning) and actual symbolic rearticulation via the intervention of the Real of an act (262).

ONLY ON THIS LEVEL – IF WE TAKE INTO ACCOUNT THE LACANIAN NOTIONS OF POINT DE CAPITON AND THE ACT AS REAL – DOES A MEANINGFUL DIALOGUE WITH BUTLER BECOME POSSIBLE.

🙂 Have to hand it to him, Žižek finds the crucial Butler quote, here it is:

What would it mean for the subject to desire something other than its continued ‘social existence’? If such an existence cannot be undone without falling into some kind of death, can existence nevertheless be risked, death courted or pursued, in order to expose and open to transformation the hold of social power on the conditions of life’s persistence? The subject is compelled to repeat the norms by which it is produced, but the repetition establishes a domain of risk, for if one fails to reinstate the norm ‘in the right way,’ one becomes subject to further sanction, one feels the prevailing conditions of existence threatened. And yet, without a repetition that risks life – in its current organization – how might we begin to imagine the contingency of that organization, and performatively reconfigure the contours of the conditions of life?

One should criticize Butler for conflating this act in its radical dimension with the performative reconfiguration of one’s symbolic condition via its repetitive displacements: the two are not the same – that is to say, one should maintain the crucial distinction between a mere ‘performative reconfiguration’, a subversive displacement which remains within the hegemonic field and, as it were, conducts an internal guerrilla war of turning the terms of the hegemonic field against itself, and the much more radical act of a thorough reconfiguration of the entire field which redefines the very conditions of socially sustained performativity. It is thus Butler herself who ends up in a position of allowing precisely for marginal ‘reconfigurations’ of the predominant discourse – who remains constrained to a position of ‘inherent transgression’, which needs as a point of reference the Other in the guise of a predominant discourse that can only be marginally displaced or transgressed (264).

From the Lacanian standpoint, Butler is thus simultaneously too optimistic and too pessimistic. On the one hand she overestimates the subversive potential of disturbing the functioning of the big Other through the practices of performative reconfiguration/displacement: such practices ultimately support what they intend to subvert, since the very field of such ‘transgressions’ is already taken into account, even engendered, by the hegemonic form of the big Other – what Lacan calls ‘the big Other’ are symbolic norms and their codified transgression. The Oedipal order, this gargantuan symbolic matrix embodied in a vast set of ideological institutions, rituals and practices, is a much too deeply rooted and ‘substantial’ entity to be effectively undermined by the marginal gestures of performative displacement. On the other hand, Butler does not allow for the radical gesture of the thorough restructuring of the hegemonic symbolic order in its totality (264).

🙂 And Slavoj, what, pray tell, is that ‘radical gesture’?

Butler Bodies that Matter

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter New York: Routledge, 1993.

Performativity definition

… that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains (2)

Sex is no longer construed as a bodily given on which the construct of gender is artificially imposed, but as a cultural norm which governs the materialization of bodies (3)

Abject definition

JHeterosexual imperative, is an “exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed” thus requiring “a simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet “subjects,” but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject” 3

The abject designates here precisely those “unlivable” and “unthinkable” zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living under the sing of the “unlivable” is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject. This zone of uninhabitability will constitute the defining limit of the subject’s domain; it will constitute that site of dreaded identification against which – and by virtue of which – the domain of the subject will circumscribe its own claim to autonomy and to life. In this sense, then, the subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection, one which produces a constitutive outside to the subject, an abjected outside, which is, after all “inside” the subject as its own founding repudiation (3).

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 spectre. Further, the materialization of a given sex will centrally concern the regulation of identifcatory practices such that the identification with the abjection of sex will be persistently disavowed. And yet, this disavowed abjection will threaten to expose the self-grounding presumptions of the sexed subject, grounded as that subject is in a repudiation whose consequences it cannot fully control.

The task will be to consider this threat and disruption not as a permanent contestation of social norms condemned to the pathos of perpetual failure, but rather as a critical resource in the struggle to rearticulate the very terms of symbolic legitimacy and intelligibility.

Indeed, it may be precisely through practices which underscore disidentification with those regulatory norms by which sexual difference is materialized that both feminist and queer politics are mobilized. Such collective disidentification can facilitate a reconceptualization of which bodies matter, and which bodies are yet to emerge as critical matters of concern.

Crucially then, construction is neither a single act nor a causal process initiated by a subject and culminating in a set of fixed effects. Construction not only takes place in time, but is itself a temporal process which operates through the reiteration of norms, sex is both produced and destabilized in the course of this reiteration.* As a sedimented effect of a reiterative or ritual practice, sex acquires its naturalized effect, and, yet, it is also by virtue of this reiteration that gaps and fissures are opened up as the constitutive instabilities in such constructions, as that which escapes or exceeds the norm, as that which cannot be wholly defined or fixed by the repetitive labor of that norm. This instability is the deconstituting possibility in the very process of repetition, the power that undoes the very effects by which “sex” is stabilized, the possibility to put the consolidation of the norms of “sex” in a potentially productive crisis (10).

*Note 7 page 244

It is not simply a matter of construing performativity as a repetition of acts, as if “acts” remain intact and self-identical as they are repeated in terms, and where “time” is understood as external to the “acts” themselves. On the contrary, an act is itself a repetition, a sedimentation, and congealment of the past which is precisely foreclosed in its act-like status. In this sense an “act” is always a provisional failure of memory. In what follows, I make use of the Lacanian notion that every act is to be construed as a repetition, the repetition of what cannot be recollected, of the irrecoverable, and is thus the haunting spectre of the subject’s deconstitution.

One might read this prohibition that secures the impenetrability of the masculine as a kind of panic, a panic over becoming “like” her, effeminized, or a panic over what might happen if a masculine penetration of the masculine were authorized, or a feminine penetration of the feminine, or a feminine penetration of the masculine or a reversibility of those positions – not to mention a full-scale confusion over what qualifies as “penetration” anyway. Would the terms “masculine” and “feminine” still signify in stable ways, or would the relaxing of the taboos against stray penetration destabilize these gendered positions in serious ways? (51)

And whereas this can appear as the necessary and founding violence of any truth regime (construction of a constitutive outside) … it is important to resist that theoretical gesture of pathos in which exclusions are simply affirmed as sad necessities of signification. The task is to reconfigure this necessary “outside” as a future horizon, one in which the violence of exclusion is perpetually in the process of being overcome. But of equal importance is the preservation of the outside, the site where discourse meets its limits, where the opacity of what is not included in a given regime of truth acts as a disruptive site of linguistic impropriety and unrepresentability, illuminating the violent and contingent boundaries of the normative regime precisely through the inability of that regime to represent that which might pose a fundamental threat to its continuity. In this sense, radical and inclusive representability is not precisely the goal: to include, to speak as, to bring in every marginal and excluded position within a given discourse is to claim that a singular discourse meets its limits nowhere, that it can and will domesticate all signs of difference. If there is a violence necessary to the language of politics, then the risk of that violation might well be followed by another in which we begin, without ending, without mastering, to own-and yet never fully to own-the exclusions by which we proceed (53).

Judy Butler “Arguing with the Real” Bodies That Matter New York: Routledge 1993.

🙂 Abject definition

The normative force of performativity – its power to establish what qualifies as “being” – works not only though reiteration, but through exclusion as well. And in the case of bodies, those exclusions haunt signification as its abject borders or as that which is strictly foreclosed: the unlivable, the nonnarrativizable, the traumatic (188).

🙂 Here are JB’s guiding questions, and they are good.

1. How might those ostensibly constitutive exclusions be rendered less permanent, more dynamic?

2. How might the excluded return, not as psychosis or the figure of the psychotic within politics, but as that which has been rendered mute, foreclosed from the domain of political signification?

3. How and where is social content attributed to the site of the “real,” and then positioned as the unspeakable?

4. Is there not a difference between a theory that asserts that, in principle, every discourse operates through exclusion and a theory that attributes to that “outside” specific social and sexual positions?

5. To the extent that a specific use of psychoanalysis works to foreclose certain social and sexual positions from the domain of intelligibility – and for all time – psychoanalysis appears to work in the service of the normativizing law that it interrogates.

6. How might such socially saturated domains of exclusion be recast from their status as “constitutive” to beings who might be said to matter? (189)

🙂 And JB comes out swinging right away

The production of the unsymbolizable, the unspeakable, the illegible is also always a strategy of social abjection (190).

Paradoxically, the failure of such signifiers -“women” is the one that comes to mind -fully to describe the constituency they name is precisely what constitutes these signifiers as sites of phantasmatic investment and discursive rearticulation. It is what opens the signifier to new meanings and new possibilities for political resignification. It is this open-ended and performative function of the signifier that seems to me to be crucial to a radical democratic notion of futurity (191).

If the “outside” is, as Laclau insists, linked to the Derridean logic of the supplement (Laclau NRRT, 84 n.5), then it is unclear what moves must be taken to make it compatible with the Lacanian notion of the “lack”, indeed … I will attempt to read the Lacanian “lack” within Žižek’s text according to the logic of the supplement, one which also entails a rethinking of the social specificity of taboo, loss, and sexuality (194).

The “Law of the Father” induces trauma and foreclosure through the threat of castration, thereby producing the “lack” against which all symbolization occurs. And yet, this very symbolization of the law as the law of castration is not taken as a contingent ideological formulation.

🙂 And here’s my favourite line:

As the fixing of contingency in relation to the law of castration, the trauma and “substantial identity” of the real, Žižeks theory thus evacuates the “contingency” of contingency.

If symbolization is itself circumscribed through the exclusion and/or abjection of the feminine, and if this exclusion and/or abjection is secured through Žižek’s specific appropriation f the Lacanian doctrine of the real, then how is it that what qualifies as “symbolizable” is itself constituted through the desymbolization of the feminine as originary trauma?

What limits are placed on “women” as a political signifier by a theory that installs its version of signification through the abjection/exclusion of the feminine? And what is the ideological status of a theory that identifies the contingency in all ideological formulations as the “lack” produced by the threat of castration, where the threat and the sexual differential that it institutes are not subject ot the discursive rearticulation proper to hegemony?

If this law is a necessity, and it is that which secures all contingency in discursive and ideological formulations, then that contingency is legislated in advance as a nonideological necessity and is, therefore, no contingency at all. Indeed, the insistence on the preideological status of the symbolic law constitutes a foreclosure of a contingency in the name of that law, one which, if admitted into discourse and the domain of the symbolizable, might call into question or, at least, occasion a rearticulation of the oedipal scenario and the status of castration (196).

Can Žižekian psychoanalysis respond to the pressure to theorize the historical specificity of trauma, to provide texture for the specific exclusions, annihilations, and unthinkable losses that structure the social phenomena mentioned above [family, concentration camps, the Gulag]?

(202).

Michael Walsh [in] “Reading the Real,” … the process of … foreclosure that institutes the real is described as a matter of “the exclusion of fundamental signifiers from the Symbolic order of the subject” In other words, these are signifiers that have been part of symbolization and could be again, but have been separated off from symbolization to avert the trauma with which they are invested. … These are not signifiers that are merely repressed but could be worked through, they are signifiers whose re-entry into symbolization would unravel the subject itself.

The notion of foreclosure offered here implies that what is foreclosed is a signifier, namely, that which has been symbolized, and that the mechanism of that repudiation takes place within the symbolic order as a policing of the borders of intelligibility. What signifiers qualify to unravel the subject and to threaten psychosis remains unfixed in this analysis, suggesting that what constitutes the domain of what the subject can never speak or know and still remain a subject remains variable, that is, remains a domain variably structured by contingent relations of power (204-205).

Žižek’s rendition of the real presupposes that there is an invariant law that operates uniformly in all discursive regimes to produce through prohibition this “lack” that is the trauma induced by the threat of castration, the threat itself. But if we concur that every discursive formation proceeds through constituting an “outside,” we are not thereby committed to the invariant production of that outside as the trauma of castration (nor the generalization of castration as the model for all historical trauma). … (a) there may be several mechanisms of foreclosure that work to produce the unsymbolizable in any given discursive regime, and (b) the mechanisms of that production are – however inevitable -still and always the historical workings of specific modalities of discourse and power (205).

To claim that there is an “outside” to the socially intelligible and that this “outside” will always be that which negatively defines the social is, I think, a point on which we can concur. To delimit that outside through the invocation of a preideological “law” that works invariantly throughout all history, and further, to make that law function to secure a sexual differential that ontologizes subordination, is an “ideological” move in a more ancient sense, one that might only by understood through a rethinking of ideology as “reification.” That there is always an “outside” and, indeed, a “constitutive antagonism” seems right, but to supply the character and content to a law that secures the borders between the “inside” and the “outside” of symbolic intelligibility is to pre-empt the specific social and historical analysis that is required, to conflate into “one” law the effect of a convergence of many, and to preclude the very possibility of a future rearticulation that boundary which is central to the democratic project that Žižek, Laclau, and Mouffe promote (206-207).

As resistance to symbolization, the “real” functions in an exterior relation to language, as the inverse of mimetic representationalism, that is, as the site where all efforts to represent must founder. The problem here is that there is no way within this framework to politicize the relation between language and the real. What counts as the “real,” in the sense of the unsymbolizable, is always relative to a linguistic domain that authorizes and produces the foreclosure and achieves that effect through producing and policing a set of constitutive exclusions. Even, if every discursive formation is produced through exclusion, that is not to claim that all exclusions are equivalent: what is needed is a way to assess politically how the production of cultural unintelligibility is mobilized variably to regulate the political field, i.e., who will count as a “subject,” who will be required not to count. To freeze the real as the impossible “outside” to discourse is to institute a permanently unsatisfiable desire for an ever elusive referent: sublime object of ideology. The fixity and universality of this relation between language and the real produces, however, a prepolitical pathos that precludes the kind of analysis that would take the real/reality distinction as the instrument and effect of contingent relations of power (207).

Is not the defilement of sovereignty, divine and paternal, performed by calling the aardvark “Napoleon” precisely the catachresis by which hegemony ought to proceed? (214)

If referentiality is itself the effect of a policing of the linguistic constraints on proper usage, then the possibility of referentiality is contested by the catachrestic use of speech that insists on using proper names improperly, that expands or defiles the very domain of the proper by calling the aardvark ‘Napoleon’ (218).

If “women” within political discourse can never fully describe that which it names, that is neither because the category simply refers without describing nor because “women” are the lost referent, that which “does not exist,” but because the term marks a dense intersection of social relations that cannot be summarized through the terms of identity. The term will gain and lose its stability to the extent that it remains differentiated and that differentiation serves political goals. To the degree that that differentiation produces the effect of a radical essentialism of gender, the term will work to sever its constitutive connections with other discursive sites of political investment and undercut its own capacity to compel and produce the constituency it names. The constitutive instability of the term, its incapacity every fully to describe what it names, is produced precisely by what is excluded in order for the determination to take place. That there are always constitutive exclusions that condition the possibility of provisionally fixing a name does not entail a necessary collapse of that constitutive outside with a notion of a lost referent, that “bar” which is the law of castration, emblematized by the woman who does not exist. Such a view not only reifies women as the lost referent, that which cannot exist, and feminism, as the vain effort to resist that particular proclamation of the law (a form of psychosis in speech, a resistance to penis envy). To call into question women as the privileged figure for “the lost referent,” however, is precisely to recast that description as a possible signification, and to open the term as a site for a more expansive rearticulation (218).

Paradoxically, the assertion of the real as the constitutive outside to symbolization is meant to support anti-essentialism, for if all symbolization is predicated on a lack, then there can be no complete or self-identical articulation of a given social identity. And yet, if women are positioned as that which cannot exist, as that which is barred from existence by the law of the father, then there is a conflation of women with that foreclosed existence, that lost referent, that is surely as pernicious as any form of ontological essentialism (218-219).

Žižek persuasively describes how once the political signifier has termporarity constituted the unity that it promises, that promise proves impossible to fulfill and a disidentification ensues, one that can produce factionalization to the point of political immobilization. But does politicization always need to overcome disidentification? What are the possibilities of politicizing disidentification, this experience of misrecognition, this uneasy sense of standing under a sign to which one does and does not belong? And how are to to interpret this disidentification produced by and through the very signifier that holds out the promise of solidarity?

Lauren Berlant writes that “feminists must embrace a policy of female disidentification at the level of female essence.” … But if the term cannot offer ultimate recognition -and here Žižek is very right to claim that all such terms rest on a necessary méconnaisance-it may be that the affirmation of that slippage, that failure of identification is itself the point of departure for a more democratizing affirmation of internal difference (219).

To take up the political signifier (which is always a matter of taking up a signifier by which one is oneself already taken up, constituted, initiated) is to be taken into a chain of prior usages, to be installed in the midst of signification that cannot be situated in terms of clear origins or ultimate goals. This means that what is called agency can never be understood as a controlling or original authorship over that signifying chain, and it cannot be the power, once installed and constituted in and by that chain, to set a sure course for its future. But what is here called a “chain” of signification operates through a certain insistent citing of the signifier, an iterable practice whereby the political signifier is perpetually resignified, a repetition compulsion at the level of signification, indeed, an iterable practice that shows that what one takes to be a political signifier is itself the sedimentation of prior signifiers, the effect of their reworking, such that a signifier is political to the extent that it implicitly cites the prior instances of itself, drawing the phantasmatic promise of those prior signifiers, reworking them into the production and promise of “the new,” a “new” that is itself only established through recourse to those embedded conventions, past conventions, that have conventionally been invested with the political power to signify the future.

It is in this sense, then, that political signifiers might be avowed as performative, but that performativity might be rethought as the force of citationality. “Agency” would then be the double-movement of being constituted in and by a signifier, where “to be constituted” means “to be compelled to cite or repeat or mime” the signifier itself. Enabled by the very signifier that depends for its continuation on the future of that citational chain, agency is the hiatus in iterability, the compulsion to install an identity through repetition, which requires the very contingency, the undetermined interval, that identity insistently seeks to foreclose. The more insistent the foreclosure, the more exacerbated the temporal non-identity of that which is heralded by the signifier of identity. And yet, the future of the signifier of identity can only be secured through a repetition that fails to repeat loyally, a reciting of the signifier that must commit a disloyalty against identity -a catachresis- in order to secure its future, a disloyalty that works the iterabilty of the signifier for what remains non-self-identical in any invocation of identity, namely the iterable or temporal condition of its own possibility (220).

For the purposes of political solidarity, however provisional, Žižek calls for a political performative that will halt the disunity and discontinuity of the signified and produce a temporary linguistic unity. The failure of every such unity can be reduced to a “lack” with no historicity, the consequence of a transhistorical “law,” but such a reduction will miss the failure and discontinuities produced by social relations that invariably exceed the signifier and whose exclusions are necessary for the stabilization of the signifier. The “failure” of the signifier to produce the unity it appears to name is not the result of an existential void, but the result of that term’s incapacity to include the social relations that it provisionally stabilizes through a set of contingent exclusions. This incompleteness will be the result of a specific set of social exclusions that return to haunt the claims of identity defined through negation: these exclusions need to be read and used in the reformulation and expansion of a democratizing reiteration of the term. That there can be no final or complete inclusivity is thus a function of the complexity and historicity of a social field that can never by summarized by any given description, and that, for democratic reasons, ought never to be (220-221).

To understand “women” as a permanent site of content, or as a feminist site of agonistic struggle, is to presume that there can be no closure on the category and that, for politically significant reasons, there ought never to be. That the category can never be descriptive is the very condition of its political efficacy.

Here the numerous refusals on the part of “women” to accept the descriptions offered in the name of “women” not only attest to the specific violences that a partial concept enforces, but to the constitutive impossibility of an impartial or comprehensive concept or category. …. To ameliorate and rework this violence, it is necessary to learn a double movement: to invoke the category and, hence, provisionally to institute an identity and at the same time to open the category as a site of permanent political contest. That the term is questionable does not mean that we ought not to use it, but neither does the necessity to use it mean that we ought not perpetually to interrogate the exclusions by which it proceeds, and to do this precisely in order to learn how to live the contingency of the political signifier in a culture of democratic contestation (222).

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.

constitutive outside

Ziarek, Ewa Ponowska. “From Euthanasia to the Other of Reason: Performativity and the Deconstruction of Sexual Difference” in Derrida and Feminism. eds. Feder, Ellen K. et al. New York: Routledge. 1997, 115-140.

If Butler draws on the Derridian theory of performativity in order to underscore the historicity and impurity of the law, she also supplements this theory in order to stress the compulsory character of heterosexuality. According to Butler, the normative power of heterosexuality requires not only the force effecting subjective identifications with its norms but also the force of dis-identifications, the force of exclusions, in particular, the exclusion of homosexuality: “the normative force of performativity — its power to establish what qualifies as ‘being’ — works not only through reiteration, but through exclusion as well.” (Butler Bodies 188) Thus, the compulsory force of “spectral” figures of abject homosexuality: “the feminized fag and the phallicized dyke” (Butler Bodies, 96) (129)

It is precisely because iterability fails to perpetuate the identical and pure from of the law that any identity claims have to be reinforced by exclusions — they require“a constitutive outside.” In other words, Butler, like Žižek, concedes that the normativity of the law works by producing a certain outside to the symbolic universe. Yet, to avoid the ahistorical production of the REAL, Butler proposes to rethink the “constitutive outside” as a social abject, the exclusion of which secures the domain of social intelligibility.

In this formulation, the process of exclusion is never neutral but performs a normative and normalizing social function:

“the abject designates here precisely those “unlivable” and “uninhabitable” zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject… This zone of uninhabitability will constitute the defining limit of the subject’s domain; it will constitute that site of dreaded identification against which —and by virtue of which— the domain of the subject will circumscribe its own claim to autonomy and to life.” (Butler Bodies 3) (129).

ziarek on Žižek real

Butler, in the process of deconstructing sexual difference, contests nothing less than the Real itself. … The Lacanian Real, central to Copjec’s and Žižek’s reading of sexual difference, is the realm of being that is radically unsymbolizable, that remains foreclosed from the symbolic order. In this formulation, the Real constitutes a necessary outside of any symbolization — a limit to the totalization of the social or discursive filed. Like Copjec, Žižek suggests that any attempt to define the Real leads to paradoxical formulations … the Real is the starting point, the “impossible kernel” of symbolization and, at the same time, an effect of the symbolic order, an excess, or left-over of symbolization (124)

At stake in the argument about the Real is, on the one hand, a renegotiation of the relations between contingency and compulsion in social and discursive formations, and, on the other, the status of the concept of the outside of history and symbolization.

On the basis of the conceptualization of the Real as the necessary outside of the symbolic order, Žižek condemns both the universalization of the symbolic and its obverse side, its “rapid historicization,” which treats the subject merely as the effect or the actualization of its historical conditions. Both of these gestures … ignore that which is foreclosed from historicization. In order to take into account the incompleteness and contingency of the historical process, the critical accounts of history, Žižek argues, have to presuppose an empty place, an non-historical kernel, that which cannot be symbolized and yet is produced by symbolization itself (Žižek Sublime 135) (Ziarek 125).

Butler’s argument with the Real neither disputes the contingency of social formations nor denies the constitutive outside to symbolization. On the contrary, through her reading of Laclau and Mouffe, she links such contingency and incompleteness to the promise of radical democracy: “The incompleteness of every ideological formulation is central to the radical democratic project’s notion of political futurity. The subjection of every ideological formation to REarticulation … constitutes the temporal order of democracy as an incalculable future, leaving open the production of new subject-positions, new political signifiers …” (Butler, Bodies 193)

What she does contest … is the fixity of the Real (or rather, to articulate it more cautiously, the invariable failure of its inscription) and the permanent structure of its exclusion.

Even though the foreclosure of the Real “guarantees” contingency and incompleteness of all social relations, the process of this foreclosure is not marked by the contingency or historicity, and therefore is not open to redescription. We are confronted here, Butler argues, with the unchangeable production of the outside, even though the ‘production’ in question is marked by the instability of cause and effect. As Butler points out, “if we concur that every discursive formation proceeds through constituting an ‘outside’, we are not thereby committed to the invariant production of that outside as the trauma of castration (nor to the generalization of castration as the model for all historical trauma) (Butler Bodies, 205) (125).

Campbell critique sexual d Ziarek Outside

Campbell, Kirsten. “The Plague of the Subject: Subjects, Politics, and the Power of Psychic Life” in Butler Matters: Judith Butler’s Impact on Feminist and Queer Studies. eds. Sönser Breen, Margaret and Warren J. Blumenfeld. Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. 2005, (81-94).

Foreclosure: Freud never uses the term “foreclosure”, he used “repression” and “disavowal” to describe the ego’s refusal of an incompatible idea together with its affect. Instead she uses Lacan’s use of foreclosure as “A foundational psychic exclusion that cannot be represented within the subject’s symbolic economy”. This deployment of Lacan in the name of Freud allows Butler to evade certain theoretical difficulties posed by Lacanian theory to her conception of foreclosure.

Butler’s account implies that the prohibition against the homosexual object is pre-oedipal, because it is prior to the constitution of the subject. This prohibition, however, CANNOT be pre-oedipal. If it is pre-oedipal, then it must be prior to sexual difference. If the prohibition is prior to sexual difference, then the object that is prohibited cannot be a homosexual object, because a homosexual object is defined by sexual difference. The definition of a same-sex object relies upon a notion of sexual difference because such a concept would be meaningless without an already established distinction between the sexes. In order for Butler’s prohibition to operate against desire for same-sex objects, those objects must already be defined by sexual difference and, so, the prohibition described by Butler must be an oedipal prohibition in the register of sexual difference. The failure to address this problem of sexual difference entails that there is a lack of coherence in this theory of the formation of heterosexual identity (89).

In Butler’s interpretation, what is thus foreclosed from the symbolic is not the prediscursive “empty” kernel but those possibilities of signification that threaten the purity and permanence of the law instituting sexual difference. With such a concept of the outside, Butler articulates the main task of her inquiry iin a very diffferent way from Žižek’s. She does not intend to affirm the exclusion of the Real as a guarantee of social contingency but questions the stability and ahistorical character of this exclusion.

“How might those ostensibly constitutive exclusions be rendered less permanent, more dynamic? How might the excluded return, not as psychosis or the figure of the psychotic within politics, but as that which has been rendered mute, foreclosed from the domain of political signification?” (Butler Bodies 189).

By rethinking the historicity and contingency of the law as the sedimentation of subjective approximations through time, Butler can argue that the mechanisms of exclusion are also, … historical workings of specific modalities of discourse and power. … the “constitutive outside” is an inevitable effect of any identity claims, including the claims of queer identities, but the forms of these exclusions are neither invariant nor ahistorical. Undercutting the political neutrality and ahistorical permanence of “the constitutive outside,” Butler’s emphasis on the historicity of exclusion removes the threat of psychosis associated with it and opens the borders of intelligibility to political contestation (Ziarek 130).