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Queering ĆœiĆŸek
Queer theorists have long had a vexed relationship to Slavoj ĆœiĆŸek, whose work has attracted considerable criticism from Judith Butlerâs Bodies That Matter (1993) to Jack Halberstamâs The Queer Art of Failure (2011) and othersâ writings.1 Despite these critiques, a revised version of ĆœiĆŸekâs theoretical framework would be useful for queer theory because his politically oriented psychoanalysis offers strategies for altering existing social structures. Bringing Jacques Lacanâs account of subjectivity and the social to bear on cultural and political concerns, ĆœiĆŸek asks how existing ideological formations are constituted and how they might be transformed. He adapts Lacanâs theory of the interlocking imaginary, symbolic, and Real orders to account for the way fantasies and desiring subjectivities arise through engagement with existing social formations. Within the Lacanian triad, the Real is the deepest source of psychical resistance and therefore, for ĆœiĆŸek, the order in which intervention must happen for change to succeed. He proposes a politicized twist on Lacanâs argument that the goal of analysis is for the analysand to traverse and thereby go beyond the fantasies animating subjectivity. Whereas the point of traversing the fantasy in the clinic is to open up alternative ways of structuring individual experience, for ĆœiĆŸek its objective is to reconfigure the symbolic by intervening in the Real and prompting social change.
The argument that traversing the fantasy can rearticulate the Real can be reframed as useful to queer theoryâs goal of fundamentally transforming the social, despite ĆœiĆŸekâs hostility to poststructural queer theory. Queer people stand among those ĆœiĆŸek has ânot deemed useful enough to be preserved or retainedââalbeit not, as Butler claims, as the unsymbolizable Real (Ahmed 2019: 20). I nonetheless contend that his work remains useful for queer theory, in Sara Ahmedâs sense of âqueer use as reuse . . . for a purpose that is âvery differentâ from that which was âoriginally intendedââ (Ahmed 2019: 198â9). Arguing for uses of Lacan that ĆœiĆŸek would likely refuse, this chapter rearticulates the latterâs ideas in queer-positive terms, clearing one of psychoanalysisâ âfainter trailsâ that adapts Lacanâs thinking for queer and trans-affirmative ends (Ahmed 2019: 20).
ĆœiĆŸekâs insistence that sexual difference is Real and thus intractable has been a stumbling block for queer theorists interested in developing an account of subjectivity that apprehends desireâs workings across the full range of genders and sexualities. This position has animated a longstanding dispute with Butler. Whereas she interprets Lacanian sexual difference as a binary opposition located in the symbolic and therefore available for resignification, ĆœiĆŸek insists that it is instead an antagonism in the Real, and therefore immovable.2 ĆœiĆŸek also notes that its inevitable failure produces myriad sexual possibilities, including queer ones. Although James Penney rightfully asserts that ĆœiĆŸek âdecisively âwonââ the debate with Butler, this chapter pushes past it by turning ĆœiĆŸek against himself in the service ofârather than in opposition toâthe aims of queer theory he and Penney critique (Penney 2014: 47).
ĆœiĆŸekâs interpretations of sexual differenceâs intractability are problematic. Notwithstanding the potentially queer effects of its failure, its underpinnings are defined heterosexually, according to the logic I describe in the Introduction as (hetero)sexual difference. Joan Copjec similarly promulgates this account of (hetero)sexual difference in Read My Desire (1994), whichâas Adrian Johnston notesâquestionably argues that Kantâs âantinomiesâ anticipate Lacanâs theory of sexuation despite not making any âexplicit references to . . . sexuality or gender identityâ (Johnston 2008: 28). Nonetheless, in Sex and the Failed Absolute, ĆœiĆŸek repeats and expands upon Copjecâs argument (ĆœiĆŸek 2019a: 107â18). However, their interpretation of sexual difference as an antinomy resulting in âthe deadlock of sexed beingâ mobilizes a circular logic conflating sex with gender and conceiving of desire in heterosexual terms, even ifâas Copjec and ĆœiĆŸek claimâsexual differenceâs failures animate sexual diversity (Johnston 2008: 28).
It is important to understand that ĆœiĆŸek reiterates this ideology within a body of writing that has a different aim than that of other Lacanian work, for he does not seek to explicate the âtrueâ meaning of Lacanâs texts. Instead, he grafts the psychoanalystâs ideas into new philosophical and political contexts to alter existing social formations. This chapter, too, is not a return to a âtrueâ or âpureâ Lacan but rather a queer reworking of ĆœiĆŸek. By exploiting ways ĆœiĆŸekâs argument for sexual differenceâs intransigence undoes itself, I turn his political version of Lacanâs theory of traversing the fantasy against itself to argue that it is possible to go beyond (hetero)sexual difference. Despite ĆœiĆŸekâs protestations to the contrary, (hetero)sexual difference is a fantasy Lacanian psychoanalytic theory needs to traverse to fully register the many possible configurations of desiring subjectivities. Doing so also opens up possibilities for understanding other axes of identityâsuch as gender, race, ethnicity, and nationalityâas operating âbesideâ or even independently of (hetero)sexual difference in subjective formation (Sedgwick 2003: 8).
(Hetero)sexual Difference and the Real
I emphasize the need to traverse the fantasy of (hetero)sexual difference because such a move dislodges the point de capiton quilting the imaginary, symbolic, and Real. In Lacanian theory, these three orders are inextricable. Though the imaginary can be roughly described as the realm of the specular image and the symbolic as that of the signifier, they are bound up in one another. Lacan explains that within âthe symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form,â imaginary identification âsituatesâ yet alienates the ego through the subjectâs misrecognition of his or her mirror image (Lacan 2006e: 76). The symbolicâthe realm of the signifier, the big Other, and the lawâis linked to the Real, a concept that has been the site of frequent conceptual misprisions in debates over sexual difference. As Charles Shepherdson and Bruce Fink observe, the Real has two distinct but related meanings for Lacan, one âpresymbolicâ and the other âpostsymbolicâ (Shepherdson 2008: 27). Shepherdson explains that the process of âsymbolic retroactionââFreudian NachtrĂ€glichkeitâproduces the former as a mythological effect of the latter (Shepherdson 2008: 37, 47). Whereas the presymbolic Real is a âhypothesisâ formulated in the symbolicâs terms, the postsymbolic Real âis characterized by impasses and impossibilities due to the relations among the elements of the symbolic order itselfâ (Fink 1995: 27). My own use of the term âRealâ references its postsymbolic sense. This Real is not radically unreachable by the symbolic but rather, as Copjec points out, the site at which the failures of symbolic mandates are inscribed (Copjec 1994: 201â36).
ĆœiĆŸekâs own inflection of Lacan turns on the three ordersâ inextricability but also on the possibility of transforming their coordinates by altering the point de capiton. As Mari Ruti explains, for Lacan the fundamental fantasyâthe unconscious fantasy structuring experienceâdrives psychical life and âperpetuate[s] unconscious patterns of behaviorâ constricting the subject (Ruti 2008a: 498). Psychoanalysisâs objective is to traverse this fantasy and attenuate its grip on the psyche. Grafting this theory into the realm of politics, ĆœiĆŸek argues that by targeting the quilting point, traversing the fantasy seeks not to undo the subjectâs surface-level âsymbolic identification,â but to gain âdistance towardsââand ultimately go beyondâthe underlying, âfundamental fantasy that serves as the ultimate support of the subjectâs beingâ (ĆœiĆŸek 1999: 266). This involves an intervention in the Real that prompts a radical divestiture in the terms governing the symbolic order and that clears ground for them to be supplanted by a new paradigm. I will explain the technical workings of this process further as my argument proceeds.
At this point, I will note that traversing the fantasy offers a more trenchant challenge to the symbolicâs coordinates than Butlerâs argument (first put forth in Gender Trouble [Butler 1990] and refined in Bodies That Matter [Butler 1993]) that it is possible to change the symbolic order by resignifying its phallogocentric terms.3 As ĆœiĆŸek, Penney, and others observe, a central problem with Butlerâs strategyâand reading of Lacanâis that it engages only the symbolic and imaginary but not the Real.4 By contrast, traversing the fantasy unsettles the symbolic, imaginary, and Real by dislodging the point de capiton.
Like ĆœiĆŸek, Butler is concerned with the interplay between psychical and social resistance, and with the wayâas they and Ernesto Laclau put it in the introduction to Contingency, Hegemony, Universalityâânew social movements often rely on identity-claims, but âidentityâ itself is never fully constituted; in fact, since identification is not reducible to identity, it is important to consider the incommensurability or gap between themâ (Butler, Laclau, and ĆœiĆŸek 2000: 1). My argument for queering ĆœiĆŸek carries forward this joint project of undercutting categories of identity that Contingency shares with queer theory, which initially emerged as a challenge to identity-based formations of âgay and lesbian studies.â While uneven in its grasp of the particulars of Lacanâs thought, queer theory aligns with his work in this persistent refusal of stable identity. If Butler, Laclau, and ĆœiĆŸek agree that social movements cannot remain âdemocraticâ without engaging âthe negativity at the heart of identity,â however, they disagree significantly about that negativityâs form and consequences (Butler, Laclau, and ĆœiĆŸek 2000: 2).
Butler often presents negativity as the result of the imaginary undercutting of symbolic law. She focuses on those two orders in critiquing Lacanian arguments that the psyche is capable of resistance, and rightfully notes that symbolic mandatesâ failure does not ensure their transformation. However, she assumes that âLacan restricts the notion of social power to the symbolic domain and delegates resistance to the imaginaryâ (Butler 1997: 98). Arguing that the imaginary âthwarts the efficacy of the symbolic law, but cannot turn back upon the law, demanding or effecting its reformulation,â she concludes that âpsychic resistance thwarts the law in its effects, but cannot redirect the law or its effectsâ (Butler 1997: 98). She thereby downplays the potential for transformation via the Real, which is quilted to the other two orders and is the deepest source of resistance.5
When Butler addresses the negativity at play in Laclauâs and ĆœiĆŸekâs accounts of the Real, she emphasizes that orderâs role as âthe limit-point of all subject-formationââas âthe point where self-representation founders and failsâ (Butler 2000c: 29â30).6 Reading the Real in ĆœiĆŸek as âthat which resists symbolizationâ (Butler 1993: 21) and as the âlimit-point of socialityâ (Butler 2000a: 152), she asks,
why are we compelled to give a technical name to this limit, âthe Realâ, and to make the further claim that the subject is constituted by its foreclosure? The use of the technical nomenclature opens up more problems than it solves. On the one hand, we are to accept that âthe Realâ means nothing other than the constitutive limit of the subject; yet on the other hand, why is it that any effort to refer to the constitutive limit of the subject in ways that do not use that nomenclature are considered a failure to understand its proper operation? Are we using the categories to understand the phenomena, or marshaling the phenomena to shore up categories âin the name of the Fatherâ, if you will?
(Butler 2000a: 152)
While Butler is right to question the tautological logic through which ĆœiĆŸek and other Lacanians prop up the law of the Father and its corollary, (hetero)sexual difference, through appeals to the Real, the questions of terminology at stake in their disagreement are more significant than she suggests. In the above passage, she misinterprets and misuses Lacanâs concept of âforeclosure,â as I argue in Insane Passions (Coffman 2006: 18â22). In Seminar III, Lacan uses the term âforeclosureâ to refer to a psychoticâs rejection of the primal signifier anchoring the symbolic and grounding ânormalâ subjectivity. In Bodies That Matter, Butler correctly notes that foreclosure happens to signifiers: she writes that âwhat is foreclosed is a signifier, namely, that which has been symbolizedâ (Butler 1993: 204). However, she goes on to generalize that mechanism as foundational to all forms of subjectivity rather than as specific to psychosis: she writes that foreclosure âtakes place within the symbolic order as a policing of the borders of intelligibilityâ (Butler 1993: 204). This claim misses Seminar IIIâs presentation of foreclosure as the governing mechanism of psychosisânot necessarily of all forms of subjectivity. Upon this error Butler builds a case that the symbolic order itself is capable of effecting foreclosures that consign queer bodies to the unsymbolizable Real (Coffman 2006: 18â22).7 In the above passage from Contingency, this difficulty leads Butler erroneously to conceptualize the Real as itself foreclosed.
Similar misprisions inform Butlerâs claim that ĆœiĆŸek renders those who do not conform to hegemonic definitions of gender the unlivable, âpermanent outsideâ of the social and figures âa whole domain of social life that does not fully conform to prevalent gender norms as psychotic and unlivableâ (Butler 1994: 37). She justifiably questions the presuppositions through which Lacanâs Seminar III defines the symbolic as the realm of paternal law in which the subject is constituted by taking the Name of the Father as a metaphor for his own being, subjecting himself to phallic signification and the law of castration. This account implies that to âforecloseâ the Name of the Father, rejecting phallic primacy and sidestepping (hetero)sexual difference, is to court psychosis characterized by the delusional return in the Real of inversions of normative genders and sexualities. Butlerâs critique of this theory fuels her argument that ĆœiĆŸek, in The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), rigidifies sexual difference as the ârock of the realâ consigning queers to the socialâs âpermanent outsideâ (Butler 1993: 197; Butler 1994: 37).
Although Butlerâs concerns about ĆœiĆŸekâs account of sexual difference are well justified, problems arise in her construal of the Real as the realm of psychosis. First, by equating the Real with âabjectâ queer bodies, she attempts to symbolize the unsymbolizable. As Tim Dean points out, â[t]he theory that attributes to the real specific social and sexual positions is Butlerâs own, since Lacan characterizes the real as asubstantial, unsexed, and ungenderedâ (Dean 2000a: 210). Second, Butler misreads Lacanâs account of psychotic âforeclosureâ; her conflation of the Real with psychosis results from this error (Coffman 2006: 18â22). Though in psychosis, the Real is the realm in which the foreclosed signifier returns, the Real is not equivalent to psychosis. To the contrary: for Lacan, even ânormalâ subjectivity is anchored by interlocking the imaginary, symbolic, and Real. As Malcolm Bowie notes, the principal difference between the psychotic and the ânormalâ subject is that for the former, the relationship between the three orders becomes incoherent as the result of a âmispositioning of Subject and Otherâ in which the âimaginary becomes real . . . by passing through the symbolic dimension without being submitted to its exactions and obliquitiesâ (Bowie 1991: 109). In this account, the queer appears as psychotic only if the Name of the Father remains the anchor of the symbolic order and the signifier the psychotic forecloses.
Yet to stateâas Lacanians such as ĆœiĆŸek often doâthat the Real is the site at which the symbolic fails is not the same as to say that the Real is constituted through foreclosure in the technical sense. Moreover, to argue that foreclosed signifiers return in the Real or that the symbolic fails there is not to say that the Real is reducible to those phenomena. As Penney notes, Butlerâs critique reflects âa misapprehension of the relation between the symbolic and the real,â the latter of which âmanifests the symbolic lawâs own externality to itself, its self-differenceâ (Penney 2014: 60). Because â[t]he real imposes as the symbolic orderâs destiny the ceaseless repetition of its failure to totalize itself in such a way that it might impose a normative matrix for both sexual identity and kinship relations,â it does not necessarily shut down theorizations of diverse sexualities; instead, it actively facilitates âthe subversion of normativity,â sexual or otherwise (Penney 2014: 60).
Butler also overlooks the Realâs potential for facilitating transformative resistance, even though she is r...