Butler’s critique relies on the opposition between<\/p>\n
1.the (hypostasized, proto-transcendental, pre-historical and pre-social) ‘symbolic order’, that is, the ‘big Other’, and<\/p>\n
2. ‘society’ as the field of contingent socio-symbolic struggles.<\/p>\n
… all her main points against Laclau or me can be reduced to this matrix:<\/p>\n
– to the basic criticism that we hypostasize some historically contingent formation (even if it is the Lack itself) into a proto-transcendental pre-social<\/strong> formal a priori.<\/p>\n 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).<\/p>\n Butler further states:<\/p>\n 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).<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n (309).<\/p>\n 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n The gap between symbolic a priori FORM<\/span> and history\/sociality<\/span> is utterly foreign to Lacan \u2014 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<\/em> the symbolic process itself.<\/strong><\/p>\n … the Real is neither pre-social nor a social effect \u2014 the point is, rather, that the Social itself is CONSTITUTED by the exclusion of some traumatic Real. <\/strong>What is ‘outside the Social’ is not some positive a priori symbolic form\/norm, merely its negative founding gesture itself.<\/p>\n Tada<\/span>: <\/strong>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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Continue reading “\u017di\u017eek explains Real to Butler”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,41,20],"tags":[105],"class_list":["post-2086","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-butler","category-the-real","category-zizek","tag-thedebate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2086","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2086"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2086\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2091,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2086\/revisions\/2091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2086"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2086"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2086"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}