TheDebate – Page 2

Žižek concrete universality

I’m interested in this Hegelian concept because I believe now that it is the key that will help me unlock how Žižek will explain Lacanian critique of Laclau (Populism) and Butler (Performativity)

Go here to get the extended critique of Laclau, but I think this is also in his book Parallax View

Book on Žižek by Rex Butler

From Žižek’s article on Lacan.com

The Universal is not the encompassing container of the particular content, the peaceful medium-background of the conflict of particularities; the Universal “as such” is the site of an unbearable antagonism, self-contradiction, and (the multitude of) its particular species are ultimately nothing but so many attempts to obfuscate/reconcile/master this antagonism. In other words, the Universal names the site of a Problem-Deadlock, of a burning Question, and the Particulars are the attempted but failed Answers to this Problem. The concept of State, for instance, names a certain problem: how to contain the class antagonism of a society? All particular forms of State are so many (failed) attempts to propose a solution to this problem.

Parallax View 34-35, Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic 49, Less Than Nothing 782

constitutive outside

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

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

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

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

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

ziarek on Žižek real

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

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

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

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

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

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

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).

butler continued on sexual d

When the claim is made that sexual difference at this most fundamental level is merely formal (Sheperdson) or empty (Žižek), we are in the same quandary as we were in with ostensibly formal concepts such as universality: is it fundamentally formal, or does it become formal, become available to a formalization on the condition that certain kinds of exclusions are performed which enable that very formalization in its putatively transcendental mode? (144)

The formal character of this originary, pre-social sexual difference in its ostensible emptiness is accomplished precisely through the reification by which a certain idealized and necessary dimorphism takes hold. The trace or remainder which formalism needs to erase, but which is the sign of its foundation in that which is anterior to itself, often operates as the clue to its unravelling. the fact that claims such as ‘cultural intelligibility requires sexual difference’ or ‘there is no culture without sexual difference’ circulate within the Lacanian discourse intimates something of the constraining normativity that fuels this transcendental turn, a normativity secured from criticism precisely because it officially announces itself as prior to and untainted by any given social operation of sexual difference (145).

Butler disses Žižek’s sexual d Žižek responds

Tada: JB is critical of the way in which Žižek makes sexual d. ahistorical Real, traumatic and thus outside the struggle for hegemony, JB asks how it can both occasion the chain and is also a link in the chain. How’s that. Žižek replies by accepting this paradox. Further according to the Hegelian concrete universality and also JB’s own work Žižek argues that sexual d is a ‘concrete universality’ in that it attempt to be universal gets overdetermined by its very particular contents. Žižek uses the example of religion, I wish he just used sexual d as an example. But he’s saying I guess the universal difference male/female though universal, will be overtaken by its particular content that tries to fill out this universal. Žižek here cites JB and says that each particularity asserts its own mode of universality (JB’s ‘competing universalities’) Does Žižek’s response satisfy JB? I think not. The very frame male/female is still a sticking point for JB. Even though she understands fully Žižek’s point about how that universality gets differentially articulated. (Man I’m getting good at this eh?)

This problem … is related to the ‘quasi-transcendental’ status that Žižek attributes to sexual difference. If he is right, then sexual difference, in it most fundamental aspect, is outside the struggle for hegemony even as he claims with great clarity that its traumatic and non-symbolizable status occasions the concrete struggles over what its meaning should be. I gather that sexual difference is distinguished from other struggles within hegemony precisely because those other struggles — ‘class’ and ‘nation’, for instance — do not simultaneously name a fundamental and traumatic difference and a concrete, contingent historical identity. Both ‘class’ and ‘nation’ appear within the field of the symbolizable horizon on the occasion of this more fundamental lack, but one would not be tempted, as one is with the example of sexual difference, to call that fundamental lack ‘class’ or ‘nation’ (143).

Thus, sexual difference occupies a distinctive position within the chain of signifiers, one that both occasions the chain and is one link in the chain. How are we to think the vacillation between these two meanings, and are they always distinct, given that the transcendental is the ground, and occasions a sustaining condition for what is called the historical?

Žižek replies:

I fully assume this paradox … This overdetermination of universality by part of its content, this short circuit between the universal and particular, is the key feature of Hegelian ‘concrete universality’, and I am in total agreement with Butler who, it seems to me, also aims at this legacy of ‘concrete universality’ in her central notion of ‘competing universalities’: in her insistence on how each particular position, in order to articulate itself, involves the (implicit or explicit) assertion of its own mode of universality, she develops a point which I aslo try repeatedly to make in my own work (314-315).

… it is not enough to say that the genus Religion is divided into a multitude of species … the point, rather, is that each of these particular species involves its own universal notion of what religion is ‘as such’, as well as its own view on (how it differs from) other religions. Christianity is not simply different from Judaism and Islam; within its horizon, the very difference that separates it from the other two ‘religions of the Book’ appears in a way which is unacceptable for the other two. In other words when a Christian debates with a Muslim, they do not simply disagree — they disagree about their very disagreement: about what makes the difference between their religions … This is Hegel’s ‘concrete universality‘: since each particularity involves its own universality, its own notion of the Whole and its own part within it, there is no ‘neutral’ universality that would serve as the medium for these particular positions.

Thus Hegelian ‘dialectical development’ is not a deployment of a particular content within universality but the process by which, in the passage from one particularity to another, the very universality that encompasses both also changes: ‘concrete universality’ designates precisely this ‘inner life’ of universality itself, this process of passage in the course of which the very universality that aims at encompassing it is caught in it, submitted to transformations (316).

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).

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).