{"id":4526,"date":"2009-02-24T13:30:32","date_gmt":"2009-02-24T17:30:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=4526"},"modified":"2011-09-27T18:22:42","modified_gmt":"2011-09-27T23:22:42","slug":"zizek-on-butler-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2009\/02\/24\/zizek-on-butler-3\/","title":{"rendered":"\u017di\u017eek on butler"},"content":{"rendered":"

Slavoj \u017di\u017eek, from Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left<\/em>, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj \u017di\u017eek (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 219-220<\/p>\n

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 <\/em>of ideology, the way an ideological edifice reproduces <\/em>itself (the reversal that characterizes the effect of point de capiton<\/em>, the ‘inherent transgression’, etc.), without elaborating how one can ‘disturb’ (resignify, displace, turn against themselves) these mechanisms;<\/p>\n

[\u017di\u017eek 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)<\/p>\n

In The Psychic Life of Power<\/em>, Butler makes the same point apropos of Lacan himself:<\/p>\n

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.<\/strong> (Butler, The Psychic Life of Power<\/em>, 98-9).<\/p>\n

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 <\/em>vulnerable: in so far as power relies on its ‘inherent transgression’, then–sometimes, at least–overidentifying <\/span>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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

what the Lacanian notion of ‘act’<\/span> 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Or–to put it in more psychoanalytic terms \u2014 the Lacanian act<\/span>, 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/strong>, who found his ultimate expression in the rapport de Rome <\/em>on ‘The Function and the Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’<\/em> (1953)–to the Lacan of the permanent process of retroactive historicization or resymbolization of social reality;<\/span> 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Slavoj \u017di\u017eek, from Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj \u017di\u017eek (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 … Continue reading “\u017di\u017eek on butler”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,24,15,118,106,41,20],"tags":[105,109],"class_list":["post-4526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-butler","category-lacan","category-subjectivity","category-symbolic","category-the-act","category-the-real","category-zizek","tag-thedebate","tag-whoa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4526","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=4526"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4526\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4529,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4526\/revisions\/4529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}