Žižek – Page 50

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).

Žižek explains Real to Butler

Butler’s critique relies on the opposition between

1.the (hypostasized, proto-transcendental, pre-historical and pre-social) ‘symbolic order’, that is, the ‘big Other’, and

2. ‘society’ as the field of contingent socio-symbolic struggles.

… all her main points against Laclau or me can be reduced to this matrix:

– to the basic criticism that we hypostasize some historically contingent formation (even if it is the Lack itself) into a proto-transcendental pre-social formal a priori.

For example, when I write ‘on the lack that inaugurates and defines, negatively, human social reality’, I allegedly posit ‘a transcultural structure to social reality that presupposes a sociality based in fictive and idealized kinship positions that presume the heterosexual family as constituting the defining social bond for all humans’ (JB, 141-142).

Butler further states:

the disagreement seems inevitable. Do we want to affirm that there is an ideal big Other, or an ideal small other, which is more fundamental than any of its social formulations? Or do we want to question whether any ideality that pertains to sexual difference is ever not constituted by actively reproduced gender norms that pass their ideality off as essential to a pre-social and ineffable sexual difference (JB, 144).

(309).

Far from constraining the variety of sexual arrangements in advance, the Real of sexual difference is the traumatic cause which sets their contingent proliferation in motion.

The gap between symbolic a priori FORM and history/sociality is utterly foreign to Lacan — that is to say, the ‘duality’ with which Lacan operates is not the duality of the [a priori form]/[norm], the symbolic Order, and its imperfect historical realization: For Lacan, as well as for Butler, there is NOTHING outside contingent, partial, inconsistent symbolic practices, no ‘big Other’ that guarantees their ultimate consistency. In contrast to Butler and the historicists, however, Lacan grounds historicity in a different way: not in the simple empirical excess of ‘society’ over symbolic schemata … but in the resistant kernel within the symbolic process itself.

… the Real is neither pre-social nor a social effect — the point is, rather, that the Social itself is CONSTITUTED by the exclusion of some traumatic Real. What is ‘outside the Social’ is not some positive a priori symbolic form/norm, merely its negative founding gesture itself.

Tada: comment by me: I get it. Ok so it’s the Real that, within the symbolic, is what kick starts the process of historicity. That is, it is after Z, “the cause which sets their contingent proliferation in motion”. This means that yes there is contingency, but not because we have a normative sedimented order on one hand, and then, empirical or discursive untamed excess that is, the not-normativized, on the other. Historicity begins, contingency happens because there is a REAL (capitalism) caught within the symbolic that is unsymbolizable, that prevents things from sticking and becoming stone. Am I making sense

zizek reply to butler criticism of symbolic

So when when Butler asks the rhetorical question

Why should we conceive of universality as an empty ‘place’ which awaits its content in an anterior and subsequent event? Is it empty only because it has already disavowed or suppressed the content from which it emerges, and where is the trace of the disavowed in the formal structure that emerges? (JB, 34)

I fully endorse her implicit stance. My answer … is: Lacan’s ‘primoridal repression’ of das Ding (of the pre-symbolic incestuous Real Thing) is precisely that which creates universality as an empty place … This very necessity of the primordial repression shows clearly why one should distinguish between the exclusion of the Real that opens up the empty place of the universal and the subsequent hegemonic struggles of different particular contents to occupy this empty place. … And here I am even tempted to read Butler against herself — say, against her sympathetic recapitulation of Laclau

Inevitable as it is that a political organization will posit the possible filling of that [empty place of the universal] as an ideal, it is equally inevitable that it will fail to do so (JB 32).

It is in endorsing this logic of the ideal to be endlessly approximated that I see the underlying Kantianism of both Butler and Laclau (257).

Here I think it is crucial to defend the key Hegelian insight directed against the Kantian position of the universal a priori frame distorted by empirical ‘pathological’ conditions … it is not enough to posit a universal formal criterion and then to agree that, owing to contingent empirical distortions, reality will never fully rise to its level. The question is rather

how, through what violent operation of exclusion/repression, does this universal frame itself emerge? With regard to the notion of hegemony, this means that it is not enough to assert the gap between the empty universal signifier and the particular signifiers that endeavour to fill its void — the question to be raised is, again, how, through what operation of exclusion, does this void itself emerge?

For Lacan, this preceding loss (the loss of das Ding, what Freud called ‘primary repression’), is not the loss of a determinate object (say, the renunciation of the same-sex libidinal partner), but the loss which paradoxically precedes any lost object, so that each positive object that is elevated to the place of the Thing (Lacan’s definition of sublimation) in a way gives body to this loss. What this means is that the Lacanian Real, the bar of impossibility it stands for, does not primarily cross the subject, but the big Other itself, the socio-symbolic ‘substance’ that confronts the subject and in which the subject is embedded.

In other words, far from signalling any kind of closure which constrains the scope of the subject’s intervention in advance, the bar of the Real is Lacan’s way of asserting the terrifying abyss of the subject’s ultimate and radical freedom, the freedom whose space is sustained by the Other’s inconsistency and lack.

So — to conclude with Kierkegaard, to whom Laclau refers: ‘the moment of decision is the moment of madness’ precisely in so far as there is no big Other to provide the ultimate guarantee, the ontological cover for the subject’s decision (258).

zizek sexual d

… to be sure, sexual difference is not a fact of biology, but neither is it a social construction — rather it designates a traumatic cut which disturbs the smooth functioning of the body. What makes it traumatic is not the violent imposition of the heterosexual norm, but the very violence of the cultural ‘transubstantiation’ of the biological body through its sexuation (259).

butler affirmative deconstruction

Žižek defines deconstruction in the light of its own ostensible prohibitions, as if the concepts it interrogates become unspeakable by virtue of their deconstruction. Here, it seems, he overlooks the now prevalent circulation of ‘affirmative deconstruction’, elaborated in different ways by Derrida, Spivak and Agamben. There are conditions of discourse under which certain concepts emerge, and their capacity for iteration across contexts is itself the condition for an affirmative reinscription. Thus, we can ask: what can the ‘human’ mean within a theory that is ostensibly anti-humanist? Indeed, we can — and must — ask: what can the human mean with post-humanism? And surely Derrida would not cease to ask the question of truth, though whatever ‘truth’ is to be will not be separable from the ‘question’ by which it appears. This is not to say that there is no truth, but only that whatever it will be, it will be presented in some way, perhaps, through elision or silence, but there precisely as something to be read (279).

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).

Žižek on butler

Slavoj Žižek, from Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 219-220

In what, then, does our difference consist? Let me approach this key point via another key criticism from Butler: her point that I describe only the paradoxical mechanisms of ideology, the way an ideological edifice reproduces itself (the reversal that characterizes the effect of point de capiton, the ‘inherent transgression’, etc.), without elaborating how one can ‘disturb’ (resignify, displace, turn against themselves) these mechanisms;

[Žižek shows] how power compels us to consent to that which constrains us, and how our very sense of freedom or resistance can be the dissimulated instrument of dominance. But what remains less clear to me is how one moves beyond such a dialectical reversal or impasse to something new. How would the new be produced from an analysis of the social field that remains restricted to inversions, aporias and reversals that work regardless of time and place? (Butler CHU 29)

In The Psychic Life of Power, Butler makes the same point apropos of Lacan himself:

The [Lacanian] imaginary [resistance] thwarts the efficacy of the symbolic law but cannot turn back upon the law, demanding or effecting its reformulation. In this sense, psychic resistance thwarts the law in its effects, but cannot redirect the law or its effects. Resistance is thus located in a domain that is virtually powerless to alter the law that it opposes. Hence, psychic resistance presumes the continuation of the law in its anterior, symbolic form and, in that sense, contributes to its status quo. In such a view, resistance appears doomed to perpetual defeat. In contrast, Foucault formulates resistance as an effect of the very power that it is said to oppose….For Foucault, the symbolic produces the possibility of its own subversion, and these subversions are unanticipated effects of symbolic interpellations. (Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 98-9).

My response to this is triple. First, on the level of exegesis, Foucault is much more ambivalent on this point: his thesis on the immanence of resistance to power can also be read as asserting that every resistance is caught in advance in the game of power that it opposes. Second, my notion of ‘inherent transgression’, far from playing another variation on this theme (resistance reproduces that to which it resists), makes the power edifice even more vulnerable: in so far as power relies on its ‘inherent transgression’, then–sometimes, at least–overidentifying with the explicit power discourse–ignoring this inherent obscene underside and simply taking the power discourse at its (public) word, acting as if it really means what it explicitly says (and promises)–can be the most effective way of disturbing its smooth functioning.

Third, and most important: far from constraining the subject to a resistance doomed to perpetual defeat, Lacan allows for a much more radical subjective intervention than Butler:

what the Lacanian notion of ‘act’ aims at is not a mere displacement/resignification of the symbolic coordinates that confer on the subject his or her identity, but the radical transformation of the very universal structuring ‘principle’ of the existing symbolic order.

Or–to put it in more psychoanalytic terms — the Lacanian act, in its dimension of ‘traversing the fundamental fantasy’ aims radically to disturb the very ‘passionate attachment’ that forms, for Butler, the ultimately ineluctable background of the process of resignification.

So, far from being more ‘radical’ in the sense of thorough historicization, Butler is in fact very close to the Lacan of the early 1950’s, who found his ultimate expression in the rapport de Rome on ‘The Function and the Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’ (1953)–to the Lacan of the permanent process of retroactive historicization or resymbolization of social reality; to the Lacan who emphasized again and again how there is no directly accessible ‘raw’ reality, how what we perceive as ‘reality’ is overdetermined by the symbolic texture within which it appears.

zizek the real is the limit to resignification

how Z. understands JB’s concept of resignification:

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

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

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

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

Butler responds:

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

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

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

Laclau responds:

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

zizek fundamental exclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

zizek the act

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

… far from constraining the subject to a resistance doomed to perpetual defeat, Lacan allows for a much more radical subjective intervention than Butler: what the Lacanian notion of ‘act’ aims at is not a mere displacement/resignification of the symbolic coordinates that confer on the subject his or her identity, but the radical transformation of the very universal structuring ‘principle’ of the existing symbolic order. Or — to put it in more psychoanalytic terms — the Lacanian act, in its dimension of ‘traversing the fundamental fantasy’ aims radically to disturb the very ‘passionate attachment’ that forms, for Butler, the ultimately inelcutable background of the process of resignification (220).

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

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

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

Žižek Butler 2000 CHU historicism sexual difference

Žižek

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So one should distinguish between two levels

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

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

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

Butler Replies:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Žižek responds 309

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zizek is capitalism the only game in town

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

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

Regarding JB:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(107-108)