Category: Žižek

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).