{"id":2113,"date":"2009-02-27T23:18:55","date_gmt":"2009-02-28T04:18:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=2113"},"modified":"2011-09-27T18:50:31","modified_gmt":"2011-09-27T23:50:31","slug":"butler-on-the-historical-frame-zizek","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2009\/02\/27\/butler-on-the-historical-frame-zizek\/","title":{"rendered":"butler on the historical frame \u017di\u017eek"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tada<\/span>: Here JB. is making the point that \u017di\u017eek’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:<\/p>\n

And yet, if hegemony<\/strong> consists in part in challenging the frame to permit intelligible political formations previously foreclosed<\/strong>, and if its futural promise depends precisely on the revisability of that frame<\/strong>, 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<\/strong> 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).<\/p>\n

Tada<\/span>: Z. argues that this very frame is CAPITALISM! Damn you \u017di\u017eek! Butler rejects the Lacanian category of lack<\/strong>. As she states here about \u017di\u017eek’s use of the term:<\/p>\n

Butler states:<\/span><\/p>\n

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<\/strong>, 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).<\/p>\n

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<\/strong>, the disagreement would emerge over whether either castration or the incest taboo <\/strong>can or ought to operate as the name that designates these various operations (140).<\/p>\n

Tada<\/span>: JB. construes this particular \u017di\u017eekian intervention as one of ‘levels of analysis’, a topography which she says makes no sense, ‘falls apart’.<\/p>\n

(140-141) \u017di\u017eek proposes that we distinguish between levels of analysis, claiming that one level \u2014 one that appears to be closer to the surface, if not superficial \u2014 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). …<\/p>\n

The other level \u2014 which, he claims is ‘more fundamental’ \u2014 is an ‘exclusion\/foreclosure’ that grounds this very horizon (SZ 108). <\/em>He warns both L and me against conflating two levels,<\/p>\n

1. the endless political struggle of\/for inclusions\/exclusions WITHIN a given field<\/p>\n

2. a more fundamental exclusion which sustains this very field (Z 108).<\/p>\n

Tada<\/span>: But this ‘levels of analysis falls apart, JB argues that the distinctions do not hold up:<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

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<\/em> to the Symbolic’ (Z 120).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tada: Here JB. is making the point that \u017di\u017eek’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 … Continue reading “butler on the historical frame \u017di\u017eek”<\/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":[78,40,69,96,97,41,103,20],"tags":[105],"class_list":["post-2113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-butler","category-lack","category-laclau","category-phallus-butler","category-psyche","category-the-real","category-universal","category-zizek","tag-thedebate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2113","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=2113"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2128,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2113\/revisions\/2128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}