laclau – Page 3 – objet (a)

butler on laclau

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

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

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

ontic ontological

Marchart, Oliver. “The absence at the heart of presence: radical democracy and the ‘ontology of lack”. Tonder, Lars. Lasse Thomassen. Radical Democracy: Politics between abundance and lack. Manchester UP. 2005.

Tada: Ontology was originally the study of being-qua-being starting with Aristotle. Then with Descartes and culminating in the work of Berkeley and Kant and heirs it turned increasingly to epistemology shifting from being-qua-being to questions of being-qua-understanding. Thus starting to look for the ‘grounds and conditions of of understanding and bypassing all the stuff about the nature of being. Then comes Heidegger but prepped by Hegel, Schelling and Nietzsche, there is a return to ontology.

However, ontology did not re-emerge in full glory, as a return to the pre-critical ‘pre-modern’ stable ground of being. By the time of its return, the ccategory of being had turned into something intrinsically precarious, something haunted by the spectre of its own absent ground. For this reason, today’s ontology must not be understood in terms of, to use Derrida’s words, traditional onto-theology, in which the role of being was to provide us with a stable ground, rather it must be conceived of as hauntology, where being is always out-of-joint, never fully present (18).

Heidegger work points out … He pointed out that metaphysical thought

whenever the traditional difference between the general (that is, ONTOLOGICAL) realm of being-qua-being and the particular (that is, ONTIC) realm of beings was established
has always taken this ontological difference for granted and never inquired into the difference as différance.
Hence being in the most radical Heideggerian sense does not reside on the ontological level, nor does it reside on the ontic plane.

Rather it is the play which simultaneously unites AND separates the ONTIC and the ONTOLOGICAL, thus introducing an irresolvable difference into being that amounts to a constitutive deferral of every stable ground of being — a move later taken up by Derrida with his concept of différance …

immanence antagonism

Laclau, Ernesto. “Can Immanence Explain Social Struggles?” Diacritics. 31:4. 2001. pp. 3-10.

What is important, however, in reference to these theological debates are the alternatives that remain in case the immanent route is not followed. For in that case evil is not the appearance of a rationality underlying and explaining it but a brute and irreducible fact. As the chasm separating good and evil is strictly constitutive and there is no ground reducing to its immanent development the totality of what exists, there is an element of negativity which cannot be eliminated either through dialectical mediation or through Nietzschean assertiveness (5).

In the same way that, with modernity, immanence ceased to be a theological concept and became fully secularized, the religious notion of evil becomes, with the modern turn, the kernel of what we can call “social antagonism.” What the latter retains from the former is the notion of a radical disjuncture — radical in the sense that it cannot be reabsorbed by any deeper objectivity which would reduce the terms of the antagonism to moments of its own internal movement — for example, the development of productive forces or any other form of immanence. Now, I would contend that it is only by accepting such a notion of antagonism — and its corollary, which is radical social division — that we are confronted with forms of social action that can truly be called political (5).

In the words of Marx: “By proclaiming the dissolution of the hitherto world order the proletariat merely states the secret of its own existence, for it is in fact the dissolution of that world order.” To put it in terms close to Hardt and Negri’s: the universality of the proletariat fully depends on its immanence within an objective social order which is entirely the product of capitalism—which is, in turn, a moment in the universal development of the productive forces. But, precisely for that reason, the universality of the revolutionary subject entails the end of politics—that is, the beginning of the withering away of the State and the transition (according to the Saint-Simonian motto adopted by Marxism) from the government of men to the administration of things.

As for the second revolution—the political one—its distinctive feature is, for Marx, an essential asymmetry: that between the universality of the task and the particularism of the agent carrying it out. Marx describes this asymmetry in nonequivocal terms: a certain regime is felt as universal oppression, and that allows the particular social force able to lead the struggle against it to present itself as a universal liberator — universalizing, thus, its particular objectives.

Here we find the real theoretical watershed in contemporary discussions: either we assert the possibility of a universality which is not politically constructed and mediated, or we assert that all universality is precarious and depends on a historical construction out of heterogeneous elements. Hardt and Negri accept the first alternative without hesitation. If, conversely, we accept the second, we are on the threshold of the Gramscian conception of hegemony. (Gramsci is another thinker for whom—understandably, given their premises—Hardt and Negri show little sympathy.) (5)

Laclau, Ernesto.”The Future of Radical Democracy.” Tonder, Lars. Lasse Thomassen. Radical Democracy: Politics between abundance and lack. Manchester UP. 2005. pp. 256-262).

… antagonism is irreducible, in which case social objectivity cannot be fully constituted. This explains why antagonisms cannot be conceived as dialectical contradictions. For the latter, negativity is only present to be superseded by a higher form of objectivity. Hegel’s Absolute Spirit and Marx’s classless society are the names of a fullness which makes it possible to detect the ultimate meaning of all previous stages and thus, to transform negativity in the apparential form of a deeper objectivity. What happens if, instead, we avoid this reductionist operation and take antagonisms at face value. In that case … what cannot be fully constituted is objectivity as such (257).

Every identity is a threatened identity … If an identity was not threatened by an antagonistic relation, it would be what it is as a pure objective datum. Between what it ontically is and the ontological fact that it is, there would be no distance. It would be mere positivity, closed in itself. Antagonism is what creates a gap between these two dimensions.

This distance between fullness of being and actual being is what we call lack. Representation of that distance, however, requires not only the discursive presence of actual being but also of the fullness of being.

But this creates an immediate problem, for fullness of being is that which is constitutively absent. The difficulty can be summarised in the following terms: the distance between full and actual being needs to be represented — which involves the two poles being somehow present in such representation — but one of the two cannot have a DIRECT representation because it operates through its very absence. Actual beings are the only means of representation. In such conditions, representation of the fullness of being can only take place if there is an essential unevenness among actual beings — that is, if an ontic particularity becomes the body through which an incommensurable fullness ‘positivises’ itself. This means that one element assumes an ontolgical function, which far exceeds, its ontic content. This is the moment of EXCESS. As we see, we are not dealing with an excess which is opposed to lack, but with one which directly results from the latter.

butler on the historical frame Žižek

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

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

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

Butler states:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

zizek rejects logic of equivalence

On should not forget that in spite of some occasional ‘objectivist’ formulations, the reduction of individuals to embodied economic categories (terms of the relation of production) is for Marx not a simple fact, but the result of the process of ‘reification’, that is, an aspect of the ideological ‘mystification’ inherent to capitalism. As for Laclau’s second point about class struggle being ‘just one species of identity politics, one which is becoming less and less important in the world in which we live’, one should counter it by the already-mentioned paradox of ‘oppositional determination’, of the part of the chain that sustains its horizon itself; class antagonism certainly appears as one in the series of social antagonisms, but it is simultaneously the specific antagonism which ‘predominates over the rest whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the others. It is a general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity‘.

[M]y point of contention with Laclau here is that I do not accept that all elements which enter into hegemonic struggle are in principle equal: in the series of struggles (economic, political, feminist, ecological, ethnic, etc.) there is always ONE which, while it is part of the chain, secretly overdetermines its very horizon (320).

laclau on laclau articulating logics

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

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

butler last reply to laclau Žižek

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Butler’s question

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

Laclau’s response

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

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

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

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

On the second point there can be NO ANSWER.

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

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

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.

Laclau responds to JB lacanian bar

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

The Lacanian real resists symbolization.

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

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

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

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

labuzi debate

Butler, Judith. “Competing Universalities” The Judith Butler Reader. 2003. page 263.

This essay is also in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality

In the Kantian vein, “transcendental” can mean: the condition without which nothing can appear. But 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, 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 or an account of hegemony that seeks to sustain and promote a more radically democratic formulation of sex and sexual difference. 263

Psychoanalysis enters Foucauldian analysis precisely at the point where one wishes to understand the phantasmatic dimension of social norms. 264

Thus unconscious is also an ongoing psychic condition in which norms are registered in both normalizing and non-normalizing ways, the postulated site of their foritification, their undoing and their perversion, the

Ideology and Discourse Analysis at the University of Essex

INTELLECTUAL STRATEGIES
There are two misconceptions that have to be carefully avoided when writing a PhD thesis in the IDA programme. These I will call: (a) the myth of the case study; (b) the myth of “methodology”.

The myth of the case study

This consists of the assumption that there is something such as a “theoretical framework” that one applies to some particular empirical material. In actual fact, such an application is not an entirely invalid exercise: it is what one expects from a good MA dissertation, in which the student has to show that he/she has understood a theoretical approach and knows how to relate it, in a preliminary fashion, to the analysis of a concrete situation. But this is totally insufficient in a PhD thesis, which is only successful if it manages to overcome the relation of exteriority between “theoretical approach” and “case study”.

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