Queering Žižek

Chris Coffman

Postmodern Culture, Volume 23, Number 1, September 2012, (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/pmc.2013.0024

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/513308

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Queering Žižek

Chris Coffman

University of Alaska Fairbanks

[email protected]

Abstract: This essay tracks Slavoj Žižek’s reading of Jacques Lacan in order to expose
and critique Žižek’s continued investment in a heterosexist account of sexual difference.
Attending to Žižek’s politicized recasting of Lacan’s argument that one can traverse—
and thereby alter—the fundamental fantasy that structures subjectivity, this essay argues
that despite Žižek’s protestations to the contrary, sexual difference is not inalterable.
Rather, sexual difference is the fundamental fantasy that Lacanian psychoanalytic theory
needs to traverse in order to fully register the many possible configurations of desiring
subjectivities.

Queer theorists have long had a vexed relationship to Slavoj Žižek, and for good reason.

Notorious for the sexist and homophobic statements that pepper his writings, he has

understandably attracted considerable criticism from prominent queer theorists for the last 20

years, from Judith Butler in Bodies That Matter (1993) to Judith Halberstam in The Queer Art of

Failure (2011).1 Despite these critiques, a revised version of Žižek's theoretical framework could

be useful for queer theory because his politically-oriented reinflection of Lacanian

psychoanalysis offers strategies for altering existing social structures. One of the most

compelling features of Jacques Lacan's rereading of Sigmund Freud is the way in which his

theory of the interlocking of the imaginary, symbolic, and Real orders accounts for the way in

which desiring subjectivity arises through engagement with existing social formations. Žižek

brings the French psychoanalyst's account of subjectivity and the social to bear on cultural and

political concerns by asking how existing ideological formations are constituted and how they

might be changed. One strategy Žižek proposes is a politicized twist on Lacan's argument that

the goal of analysis is for the analysand to “traverse” and thereby go beyond the fantasies that

structure his or her subjectivity. Whereas the point of traversing the fantasy in the clinical setting
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is to open up alternative ways of structuring experience, for Žižek its objective is to reconfigure

the symbolic by intervening in the idea of the Real. Rather than a technique for individual

transformation, then, for Žižek traversing the fantasy is a strategy for social change.

Despite the appeal of this approach, Žižek's 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 can apprehend the workings of desire across the full range of genders

and sexualities. However, Žižek's argument for the intransigence of sexual difference—which I

will also call “(hetero)sexual difference”—contains the seeds of its own undoing. I use the

phrase “(hetero)sexual difference” to describe the way in which certain uses of Lacanian

psychoanalysis—including Žižek’s—rest on a circular ideology in which sex, gender, and

sexuality are mutually constituted in heterogendered terms through the inscription of a putatively

foundational antagonism between masculine and feminine. It is important, however, to

understand that Žižek’s iteration of this ideology takes place in the context of a body of writing

that has a different aim than that of other Lacanians, for he does not seek to explicate the “true”

meaning of Lacan’s texts. Instead, he grafts the psychoanalyst’s work into new philosophical and

political contexts, seeking possibilities for altering existing social formations. This essay, too, is

not a return to a “true” or “pure” Lacan, but rather a critical reworking of Žižek's ideas in the

service of queer theory. I turn his political version of Lacan's theory of traversing the fantasy

against itself to argue that, despite Žižek's protestations to the contrary, (hetero)sexual difference

is the fantasy that Lacanian psychoanalytic theory needs to traverse in order to fully register the

many possible configurations of desiring subjectivities.

I. (Hetero)sexual Difference and the Real

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I emphasize the need to traverse the fantasy of (hetero)sexual difference because such a

move dislodges the point de capiton that quilts together the imaginary, symbolic, and Real

orders. In Lacanian theory, these three orders are inextricable. Though the imaginary order 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 the “symbolic matrix in which the I

is precipitated in primordial form,” imaginary identification “situates” yet also alienates the ego

through the subject's misrecognition of his or her image in the mirror (Écrits 2). The symbolic—

the realm of the signifier, the big Other, and the law—is, in turn, linked to the Real, a concept

that has been the site of frequent conceptual misprisions in debates over the status of sexual

difference. The Real takes on two distinct but related meanings in Lacan, one “presymbolic,” and

the other “postsymbolic” (Shepherdson, “Intimate Alterity” 27, and see the discussion of Ernesto

Laclau’s use of Bruce Fink’s formulation below). As Charles Shepherdson observes, the process

of “symbolic retroaction”—which Freud describes as Nachträglichkeit—produces the former as

a mythological effect of the latter (37, 47). I use the term “Real” in its postsymbolic sense. This

Real is not radically unreachable by the symbolic (as would be the presymbolic version), but

rather, as Joan Copjec points out, is the site at which the failures of symbolic mandates are

inscribed (Read My Desire 201-236).

Žižek’s inflection of Lacan’s theory turns not only on the three orders’ inextricability, but

also on the possibility of transforming their coordinates by altering the point de capiton. As Mari

Ruti explains, in Lacanian theory the fundamental fantasy—that is, the unconscious fantasy that

structures the subject’s experience—drives psychical life and “perpetuate[s] unconscious

patterns of behavior” that constrict the subject; the objective of analysis is to traverse this fantasy

and thereby loosen its grip on the psyche (“The Fall of Fantasies” 498). Grafting this theory into
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the realm of politics, Žižek argues that by targeting the quilting point, traversing the fantasy

seeks not to undo the subject’s surface-level “symbolic identification,” but rather to gain

“distance towards”—and ultimately undo—the underlying, “fundamental fantasy that serves as

the ultimate support of the subject’s being” (Ticklish Subject 266). This involves an intervention

in the postsymbolic Real that prompts a radical disinvestiture in the terms that govern the

symbolic order and that clears ground for them to be supplanted by a new paradigm. I explain the

technical workings of this process further as my argument proceeds. But at this point, it is most

important to note that traversing the fantasy offers a more trenchant challenge to the symbolic's

coordinates than Butler's argument (first put forth in Gender Trouble [1990] and refined in

Bodies That Matter [1993]) that it is possible to change the symbolic order simply by

resignifying its phallogocentric terms.2 As Žižek and others have pointed out, a central problem

with Butler’s strategy of symbolic resignification—as well as with her readings of Lacan—is that

it engages only the symbolic and imaginary orders without targeting the Real. By contrast,

traversing the fantasy has the potential to unsettle the symbolic, imaginary, and the postsymbolic

Real by dislodging the point de capiton.

Butler, like Žižek, is concerned with the interplay between psychical and social

resistance, and with the way in which—as they and Ernesto Laclau put it in the introduction to

their dialogues in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality—“new social movements often rely on

identity-claims, but ‘identity’ itself is never fully constituted; in fact, since identification is not

reducible to identity, it is important to consider the incommensurability or gap between them”

(1). My own argument for the queering of Žižek’s writings carries forward this joint project of

undercutting categories of identity, a project that the Contingency volume shares with queer

theory more generally, which initially emerged as a challenge to identity-based formations of gay
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and lesbian studies. While sometimes uneven in their grasp of the particulars of Lacan's thought,

queer theorists align themselves with Lacan in this persistent refusal of the notion of a stable

identity. If Butler, Laclau, and Žižek agree that social movements cannot remain “democratic”

without engaging “the negativity at the heart of identity,” however, they disagree in significant

ways about the form and consequences of that negativity (2).

Butler often presents negativity as the result of the imaginary undercutting of symbolic

law. She focuses on those two orders in her critique of Lacanian arguments that the psyche is

capable of resistance, and rightfully notes that the mere failure of symbolic mandates does not

necessarily ensure their transformation. However, her argument depends on the assumption that

“Lacan restricts the notion of social power to the symbolic domain and delegates resistance to

the imaginary” (Psychic Life 98). Arguing that the domain of the imaginary "thwarts the efficacy

of the symbolic law, but cannot turn back upon the law, demanding or effecting its

reformulation," she concludes that "psychic resistance thwarts the law in its effects, but cannot

redirect the law or its effects" (Psychic Life 98). She thereby downplays the potential for

transformation via the Real, which is quilted to the other two orders and which in several bodies

of queer theory is understood to be the deepest source of resistance.3

When Butler addresses the negativity at play in Laclau’s and Žižek’s accounts of the

Lacanian Real, she emphasizes that order’s role as “the limit-point of all subject-formation”—

that is, as “the point where self-representation founders and fails” (Contingency 29-30).4 Reading

the Real in Žižek as “that which resists symbolization” (Bodies 21) and as the “limit-point of

sociality” (Contingency 152), she asks,

why are we then compelled to give a technical name to this limit, “the Real,” and

to make the further claim that the subject is constituted by this foreclosure? The
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use of the technical nomenclature opens up more problems than it solves. On the

one hand, we are to accept that “the Real” 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 “in the name of the Father,” if you will? (Contingency 152)

While Butler is right to question the tautology through which Žižek and many other Lacanians

often prop up the law of the Father and its corollary, sexual difference, through appeals to the

“foreclosure” of “the Real,” the questions of terminology at stake in their disagreement are more

significant than she suggests. In the above passage, she misinterprets Lacan’s concept of

foreclosure, a term that—as I argue in Insane Passions (18-22)—she sometimes misuses in her

work on the Real. In Seminar III: The Psychoses, Lacan uses the term “foreclosure” to refer to a

psychotic’s rejection of the primal signifier that anchors the symbolic order and grounds

“normal” subjectivity. In Bodies That Matter, Butler correctly notes that foreclosure happens to

signifiers: she writes that “what is foreclosed is a signifier, namely, that which has been

symbolized” (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 “takes place

within the symbolic order as a policing of the borders of intelligibility” (204). But she misses the

way Lacan’s Seminar III presents foreclosure as the governing mechanism of psychosis alone—

not 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 Real.5 This

difficulty leads Butler erroneously to conceptualize the Real as itself foreclosed. Similar
7

misprisions inform her claim, in an interview in Radical Philosophy, that Žižek’s work relegates

those who do not conform to hegemonic definitions of gender to the “permanent outside” of the

social and figures “a whole domain of social life that does not fully conform to prevalent gender

norms as psychotic and unlivable” (“Gender as Performance” 37).6 But to claim—as Lacanians

such as Žižek often do—that 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. And to argue that

foreclosed signifiers return in the Real or that the symbolic fails there is not the same as to say

that the Real is reducible to these phenomena.

These difficulties lead Butler to overlook the potential role of the Real in transformative

resistance, even though she is right to argue that it is problematic to insist—as Žižek often

does—that the Name of the Father must always be the primal signifier. Moreover, she is well

justified in criticizing the circularity at work in the claim that sexual difference is unalterably

inscribed in the Real because of the presumed inalterability of paternal law. These assertions do

have pernicious consequences for the theorization of same-sex desire and transgender

subjectivities alike. But as I will go on to show, the central problem that Žižek’s work poses for

queer theory is not that he situates negativity in the Real or that the Real is radically

unchangeable. Rather, the central problem is that he resists the possibility that the Name of the

Father might be supplanted by another master signifier and that sexual difference, too, might be

ideologically contingent.

Whereas Butler sees little prospect for a politics of the Real, Žižek offers an account of

the Real as the site of both resistance to and possible rearticulation of the terms of the symbolic.

For him, traversing the fantasy is crucial to such a transformation. Yet, despite the potential that

his work holds for queer theory, Žižek (and similarly-minded Lacanians such as Copjec) insists
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that sexual difference is transhistorical and unchangeable because it is located in the Real.7 This

brings us to a key difference in the significance that the term “contingency” takes on in

Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. Whether explicitly (in Laclau’s case) or implicitly (in

Žižek’s), Laclau and Žižek distinguish between contingencies and universalities, whereas Butler

considers that everything—including sexual difference—is historically contingent and subject to

change. Thus over and against Butler, who assumes that sexual difference is an effect of social

and cultural structures, Žižek argues that a fundamental antinomy in the Real provides a negative

structure for a diverse field of contingent empirical possibilities. Criticizing Butler for

interpreting sexual difference as a contingent opposition between two positive terms that she

views as subject to displacement through resignification within the symbolic, he asserts that both

sexual difference and the Real are instead transhistorical and unchangeable. He further claims

that it is unfair to charge Lacan and Lacanians with heterosexism because the “masculine” and

“feminine” subject positions can be occupied by persons of any sex. Indeed, Lacan claims in

“The Signification of the Phallus” that the “relation of the subject to the phallus is . . . established

without regard to the anatomical difference between the sexes” (Écrits 282).8 The assertion that

these aspects of Lacanian theory obviate critiques of the ideology of (hetero)sexual difference is

at the very least insufficient, however, for the false naturalization of sexual difference poses

significant problems for theorizations of gender and desire.

Such interpretations of Lacanian theory can only conceive of desire as heterogendered—

as a matter of an antinomy between “the masculine” and “the feminine”—and so fail to capture

the multiplicity of possibilities for genderings and erotic investments. Certainly some progressive

Lacanians have pushed beyond this reading by observing that in Lacan’s account of desire in The

Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, the objet a—the object-cause of desire—

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“conceptually precedes gender” and is only subsequently subject to inscription by a symbolic

order whose terms and effects are far from consistent (Dean, Beyond Sexuality 194-7). However,

work still needs to be done to separate what Tim Dean calls the “scaffolding” of Lacanian

theory—the claim to the primacy of the phallic signifier that has rightly caused much feminist

and queer suspicion—from the structural elements of Lacan’s account of desire that open up

possibilities for queer theorizing (Beyond Sexuality 47).9 For instance, Laclau argues that the

“‘Phallus,’ as the signifier of desire, has largely been replaced in Lacan’s later teaching by the

‘objet petit a’” (Contingency 72). However, during this period, what Lacan claims to be

“something symbolic of the function of the lack, of the appearance of the phallic ghost” haunts

his texts (Four Fundamental Concepts 87-8). The survival of the phallus can be seen, for

example, when he uses the distortions of a tattoo on an erect penis to explain the effects of the

shifting gaze. Lacan mentions this tattoo as an example of “[t]he objet a in the field of the

visible” in anamorphic painting (Four Fundamental Concepts 105). While Lacan’s invocation of

the spectrality of the phallus points to its status as a second-order symbolic inscription, that

signifier’s persistence in The Four Fundamental Concepts demonstrates the residual

phallogocentrism of his discourse.

Žižek and others’ insistence that sexual difference is the fundamental antagonism that

prompts varied symbolic inscriptions is even more pernicious than Lacan’s lingering

phallogocentrism. Such arguments fallaciously assume that (hetero)sexual difference is a

motivating fantasy for all people across place and time. They uphold a discourse that supports

the hegemony of such a fantasy by presenting an antagonism between the “masculine” and the

“feminine” as the only possibility. Indeed, as Butler has observed, the very positing of sexual

difference as a transcendent structure is theological, as the claim to the universal status of sexual
10

difference rests on the assertion of belief rather than on evidence and argumentation (Undoing

Gender 46; The Psychic Life of Power 120-131). Such claims create problems for theorizing

same-sex desire as anything other than a permutation of (hetero)sexual difference. Moreover, this

reasoning also leads to an account of the body that elides the existence of intersexed persons and

renders transsexuality pathological.10 While intersexed and transsexed subjectivities are distinct

from lesbian and gay male subjectivities—and while all identities, these included, are undercut

by the gap between identity and identification—the inability of current accounts of Lacanian

psychoanalysis to theorize them adequately is a consequence of the hegemony of the fantasy of

(hetero)sexual difference.

The tenuous nature of the ideology of (hetero)sexual difference suggests that it operates

within certain Lacanian circles as a fundamental fantasy. I view the most important task of

psychoanalytically informed queer theory as that of traversing this fantasy, given its potentially

oppressive consequences for queer persons. While Frances Restuccia has suggested that queer

theorists such as Leo Bersani, Butler, Dean, Lee Edelman, and David Halperin have challenged

the “fundamental fantasy” that she—following Edelman—describes as that of “reproductive

heterosexual normality,” existing work in queer theory has yet to dislodge the ideological kernel

that keeps this fantasy in place (“Queer Love” 94).11 That kernel is the doctrine of sexual

difference. Despite Žižek’s claims to the contrary, his politicization of Lacan’s theory of

traversing the fantasy offers a means of rearticulating the terms of the Real and of grafting

Lacanian theory into contexts other than those governed by (hetero)sexual difference. It thereby

creates the possibility of reworking Lacanian theory to revise and expand psychoanalytic

accounts of gender and sexuality.

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Edelman’s 2006 No Future, the most Žižekian work of queer theory to date, takes a

promising but incomplete step in that direction. Edelman argues that queers are called to

traverse the fantasy of reproductive futurism by embracing the role of the sinthomosexual, who

rejects the politics of the symbolic and its orientation toward a better future in favor of

embracing the jouissance of the drive in the Real. Edelman thus goes well beyond the strain of

Lacanian queer theory that focuses on the implications for queer representation of Lacan and

Žižek’s insistence that the Real remains unsymbolizable. In her influential but misguided critique

of Žižek in Bodies That Matter, for example, Butler argues that Žižek presents the Real as the

realm to which queerness is consigned as unsymbolizable and psychotically incomprehensible.

Similarly, for Lynda Hart, the Real is the site at which the lesbian is rendered unrepresentable by

the “dominant discourse” of a heterosexist society (Fatal Women). Hart asserts that "in the

psychoanalytic symbolic,” and in society more generally, “lesbians are only possible in/as the

'Real,' since they are foreclosed from the Symbolic order" (Between the Body and the Flesh

91).12 Whereas Butler and Hart both err by locating queers in the symbolic idea of the Real,

despite or because of its lack of positive content, for Valerie Rohy, lesbianism works

analogously to the Real by functioning as “the limit of symbolization, the ‘rock’ on which

figurality founders” (23). And for George Haggerty, Žižek’s work demonstrates that “[i]f ‘what

was foreclosed from the Symbolic returns in the Real of the symptom,’ then . . . woman returns

as the symptom of man . . . [and] the predatory homosexual, foreclosed from the symbolic . . .

return[s] as the symptom of a culture so caught up in its own sexuality that it cannot see its

sexual obsessions for what they are” (189). In these formulations, the Real is construed at worst

as inimical to queer theorizing (Butler) or at best as a means of elucidating the structural

mechanisms and effects of homophobic discourse (Hart, Rohy, Haggerty). Edelman’s emphasis
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on traversing the fantasy, by contrast, appeals to the Real not only to elucidate homophobia’s

mechanisms but also to undermine their force. No Future repudiates both Butler’s erroneous

interpretation of Žižek and what Edelman views as her overly optimistic emphasis on

resignifying the symbolic order.

However, as I argue elsewhere, Edelman’s book overlooks the way in which not only

reproductive futurism but also (hetero)sexual difference itself might be a fantasy that queer

theory needs to traverse (“The Sinthomosexual’s Failed Challenge”). The book’s reception—

which has focused discussion on its exemplification of what Robert Caserio calls queer theory’s

“anti-social thesis”—has obscured other problems with Edelman’s argument.13 One of these is

that the relentlessly nihilistic No Future overlooks Žižek’s highly political orientation and the

ambivalent mix of pessimism and optimism in play in his reworking of Lacan’s theory of

traversing the fantasy.14 Both Ruti and Michael Snediker have criticized No Future for its

excessively negative interpretation of Lacan.15 Though Ed Pluth makes a similar assertion about

Žižek, I find more cause for optimism in Žižek’s theories than in the use to which Edelman puts

them in No Future.16 However, the optimism in Žižek’s work is not to be found in a naïve vision

of a better future—an attitude that Edelman rightfully skewers—but rather in what Snediker

identifies as “immanence.” Whereas for Snediker, optimism can be found in the immanence of

brief moments of “positive” affect, in Žižek’s theory, this immanence lies in the unpredictable,

ground-clearing process of fantasy’s traversal (Snediker 3). Žižek’s commitment to politics

animates his argument that, in traversing the fantasy, an act in the Real can prompt changes in

the symbolic by altering the point de capiton. Edelman ignores this aspect of Žižek’s theory. In

the close reading of Žižek’s texts that follows, I offer an alternative to Edelman’s interpretation
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in order to create an opening for a different mode of Žižekian queer politics—one focused on the

possibility of altering the symbolic through intervention in the Real.

II. The Radical Contingency of (Hetero)sexual Difference

In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek considers how the symbolic’s failures in the

Real create the potential for social change. He explains that a "tautological, performative

operation" halts and fixes "free floating...ideological elements" into a "network of meaning"

structured around the lack that is the point de capiton (99, 87). In The Ticklish Subject, he

concurs with Butler that imaginary resistance to such a congealed network of meaning is a "false

transgression that reasserts the symbolic status quo and even serves as a positive condition of its

functioning" (262). He distinguishes imaginary resistance, which manifests clinically in the

transference, from the socio-political resistance available at the intersection of the symbolic and

the Real. Žižek claims that the latter can take place through an "actual symbolic rearticulation via

the intervention of the Real of an act," through which a "new point de capiton emerges" to

displace the socio-symbolic field and to change its structuring principle (Ticklish Subject 262).

Žižek's claim is useful in opening up the possibility of the wholesale transformation of the

symbolic.

In Sublime Object, Žižek explicitly identifies the point de capiton with the Name of the

Father. However, his insistence in The Ticklish Subject on the possible supplantation of the point

de capiton by a new master signifier holds out the possibility of the radical abandonment of

foundationally paternal law. If we understand Lacan’s assertion that law is paternal as a gesture

that contingently installs the Name of the Father and its corollaries, we open up new, potentially

non-phallogocentric ways of thinking of the law that grounds the symbolic.17 Kaja Silverman
14

argues that, in Lacan’s seminar on The Four Fundamental Concepts, the Name of the Father

appears as "one of the signifiers that impart a retroactive significance to the lack introduced by

language, rather than as a timeless Law that will always preside over the operations of desire"

(112). If we understand Lacan’s assertions about paternal law in this fashion, Žižek’s argument

that the symbolic can wholly be rearticulated through the “Real of an act” suggests that the Name

of the Father could be supplanted by another signifier. The symbolic would thereby be

restructured according to a law that would not necessarily be paternal.

While Žižek’s allowance for possible rearticulations of the point de capiton makes the

prospect of supplanting the Name of the Father thinkable, other aspects of his work resist that

very possibility. His logic, both in Ticklish Subject and in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality,

is characterized by a contradictory movement that both reinscribes sexual difference as a

foundational doctrine and contests the priority of the Law of the Father. As Butler persuasively

argues in Bodies That Matter, Lacan's argument in "The Signification of the Phallus" both opens

up and precludes the transferability of the phallus. Similarly, Žižek's reasoning in Contingency,

Hegemony, Universality both opens up and precludes the possibility of revoking the privilege

given to the phallic signifier. Yet any attempt to enlist his work for queer theory must first work

through the resistances within his texts to the project of contesting the priority of sexual

difference.

Even though he argues that it is possible to rearticulate the point de capiton and

completely overhaul the symbolic, Žižek strangely continues to insist on the primacy of the

paradigm of sexual difference, falsely elevating its status to what Butler calls an unchangeable,

phallogocentric "'law' prior to all ideological formations" (Bodies That Matter 196).18 In The

Ticklish Subject, for example, he insists on the intractability of (an always already failed) sexual
15

difference over and against the possibility of more progressive readings that his own theory of

symbolic rearticulation enables. Assuming the heterosexual dyad to be paradigmatic, he asserts

that what Lacan calls the “impossibility of the sexual relationship” lies “in the fact that the

identity of each of the two sexes is hampered from within by the antagonistic relationship to the

other sex which prevents its full actualization” (Ticklish Subject 272). This formulation of sexual

difference as "the Real of an antagonism, not the Symbolic of a differential opposition" continues

to privilege binary sexual difference, if only through its negation (Ticklish Subject 272). The

heterosexism of this formulation is evident in Žižek’s framing of “the sexual relationship” as an

antagonism between “the two sexes.”

However, in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, Žižek positions the Real as site of the

failure of sexual difference, and claims that,

for Lacan, sexual difference is not a firm set of “static” symbolic oppositions and

inclusions/exclusions (heterosexual normativity which relegates homosexuality

and other “perversions” to some secondary role), but the name of a deadlock, of a

trauma, of an open question, of something that resists every attempt at its

symbolization. Every translation of sexual difference into a set of symbolic

opposition(s) is doomed to fail, and it is this very “impossibility” that opens up

the terrain of the hegemonic struggle for what “sexual difference” will mean.

(110-11)

Because every attempt to symbolize the fundamental antagonism as a simplistic opposition

between “masculine” and “feminine” inevitably fails, Žižek allows that positive manifestations

of sexual difference could be the site of hegemonic struggles—struggles that feasibly could

include opposition to heterosexual dominance. In the above formulation, he both sidesteps binary
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formulations of sexual difference—which he characterizes as merely “a deadlock, a trauma . . .

an open question”—and allows for contestation over its positive meaning. He still misses,

however, that his insistence upon calling this antagonism “sexual difference”—rather than

merely “difference,” for example—is misleading.

Similarly, in Tarrying with the Negative, he draws on Lacan’s sexuation diagrams to

conceive of sexual difference as a Kantian antinomy. Rather than allowing “us to imagine in a

consistent way the universe as a Whole,” as does the binary logic of all-encompassing

oppositions, viewing sexual difference as an antinomy presents us with the simultaneous and

contradictory presence of two “mutually exclusive versions of the universe as a Whole”

(Tarrying 83). For Žižek, the value of considering sexual difference in this fashion is that it

allows us to view it not as “the polar opposition of two cosmic forces (yin/yang, etc.)” but as “a

certain crack which prevents us from even consistently imagining the universe as a Whole”

(Tarrying 83). In The Indivisible Remainder, he further argues that

What the Lacanian “formulas of sexuation” endeavor to formulate, however, . . .

is not yet another positive formulation of the sexual difference but the underlying

impasse that generates the multitude of positive formulations as so many (failed)

attempts to symbolize the traumatic real of the sexual difference. What all epochs

have in common is not some universal positive feature, some transhistorical

constant; what they all share, rather, is the same deadlock, the same antinomy.

(217)

The notion that empirical data are mere covers for a more fundamental fissure in the universe

presents an alternative to the more common claim that the universe is organized through binary

oppositions that produce a false sense of totality. This approach accounts for much of the appeal
17

of Žižek’s political thought. However, questions remain about the way in which Žižek conceives

of the fundamental antagonism he believes to provide a negative, structural backdrop for

empirical reality.

Though in the above passage from Indivisible Remainder Žižek acknowledges the

multiplicity of past and present genders, his references to “the sexual difference” are

symptomatic of the blockage in his own thinking about it (217, emphasis added). The singular

“the” implies that the fundamental antagonism is mobilized by a singular split rather than by

multiple fractures. His insistence on this point is particularly peculiar given his openness in other

strands of his work to considering forms of antagonism—nationalism and ethnic hatred, for

example—that can be driven by more than two divergent points of view.19 In Contingency, for

instance, he presents both sexual difference and national difference as divisions that are falsely

naturalized as causes for what he views as a more “fundamental antagonism” that cannot itself be

symbolized (112-114).

At other points, Žižek takes the antinomy of sexual difference as a model for other forms

of fundamental antagonism that he conceives as sites of ideological struggle and transformation.

In Contingency, for example, he uses ideological differences as examples of the fundamental

antagonism’s effects, explaining that “the notion of antagonism involves a kind of

metadifference: the two antagonistic poles differ in the very way in which they define or

perceive the difference that separates them (for a Leftist, the gap that separates him from a

Rightist is not the same as this same gap perceived from the Rightist’s point of view)” (215).

Jodi Dean observes that for Žižek, one of these antinomies underpins class struggle (57-60). Yet

Žižek curiously resists considering sexual difference as subject to the same kinds of

transformations he would allow for similarly positioned political struggles. Though he rightly
18

observes that theorists such as Butler mistake the negative space of antagonism for a positive

terrain of social contestation by viewing sexual difference as a potential site of ideological

struggle and transformation of the terms of the symbolic, he refuses to consider that a change in

point de capiton could radically overhaul the symbolic. Though Žižek’s emphasis on the

negativity of antagonism is a useful correction to Butler’s reading of Lacan, he errs in staging

sexual difference as an antinomy that is entirely exempt from transformation. This is in direct

contradiction to his claims about the potential for radical overhauls of other sorts of political

antagonisms. While he views the fundamental antagonisms underpinning other sorts of political

struggles as available for wholesale transformation, he does not question the presupposition of

paternal law through which he inscribes the antagonism of sexual difference as fundamentally

inalterable. Nor does he openly acknowledge the possibility that this antagonism might be

subject to challenge. To pose the fundamental antagonism as a matter of the inevitable failure of

the “masculine” and the “feminine” to understand each other is still to present the problem of

sexual difference in heterosexual terms, even though they are not ideals but sites of failure. Most

importantly, this formulation continues to ignore the complicity of Žižek’s own arguments in

upholding the Name of the Father and the reign of paternal law by insisting on the primacy of

sexual difference.

Yet what displacement could Žižek possibly be referring to besides that of the phallus—

which Lacan famously designates “the privileged signifier of that mark in which the role of the

logos is joined with the advent of desire”— when he emphasizes the possibility of rearticulating

the structuring principle of the symbolic through a change in the point de capiton

(“Signification" 287, emphasis added)? Even though they are inconsistent, the overall arguments

of Ticklish Subject and Žižek’s contributions to Contingency, Hegemony, Universality

19

background castration in such a way that the substitution of another point de capiton for the

Name of the Father becomes thinkable. In Ticklish Subject, Žižek drops the language he used in

Sublime Object to describe the Real as an unsymbolizable "rock" or "kernel,” and instead

foregrounds the position of the Real as the site at which symbolic mandates fail. This suggests

that we need not read his emphasis on the structuring role of negativity as an affirmation of a

timeless doctrine of castration. Instead, following Silverman’s reading of Lacan, we might read

Žižek’s presupposition of the role of castration in structuring sexual difference as the result of his

installment of the Name of the Father as master signifier in the first place (Sublime Object 112).

In The Metastases of Enjoyment, Žižek comes close to acknowledging the tenuousness of

sexual difference, but ultimately falls short of doing so. He writes,

Apropos of the two asymmetrical antinomies of symbolization (the “masculine”

side that involves the universality of phallic function grounded in an exception;

the “feminine” side that involves a “non-all” field which, for that very reason,

contains no exception to the phallic function) a question imposes itself with a kind

of self-evidence: what constitutes the link that connects these two purely logical

antinomies with the opposition of female and male, which, however symbolically

mediated and culturally conditioned, remains an obvious biological fact? The

answer to this question is: there is no link. What we experience as “sexuality” is

precisely the effect of the contingent act of “grafting” the fundamental deadlock

of symbolization on to the biological opposition of male and female. (155)

Žižek acknowledges that this grafting makes the link between sexual difference and biological

sex contingent, but he does not press this observation far enough to recognize that this process of

grafting makes sexual difference itself contingent. This impasse in Žižek’s reasoning comes from
20

his continued reiteration of the false notion of binary sex, an ideology that facilitates the

parallelism involved in “grafting” the antinomy of sexual difference (itself questionably

formulated in terms of masculinity and femininity) onto an idea of sex that he misrecognizes as

natural rather than cultural. His unqualified assertion that “the opposition of female and male” is

“an obvious biological fact” ignores a long history of feminist work concerned with intersexed

persons and living species. This work demonstrates that the idea of a binary sex distinction

between male and female is a social construct, one maintained not only discursively (through the

dominance of the false idea that there are only two sexes) but also surgically (through the

performance of surgery on intersexed children to align their genitals’ appearance with dominant

expectations for “males” and “females”).20 That Žižek has not assimilated this information is

especially surprising given his sustained engagement with Butler’s work, which raises this very

problem and observes that American feminism draws a false distinction between “sex” as natural

and “gender” as cultural even though it can be demonstrated that the concept of “sex,” too, is

cultural.21 The false naturalization of “sex” in Žižek’s language continues in his assertion that the

“parasitic ‘grafting’ of the symbolic deadlock on to animal coupling undermines the instinctual

rhythm of animal coupling and confers on it an indelible brand of failure: ‘there is no sexual

relationship’; every relationship between the sexes can take place only against the background of

a fundamental impossibility” (Metastases 155).

As Lacanians are quick to point out, because sexual difference is merely structural, a

person of any sex can occupy the “masculine” and “feminine” positions. And Lacan himself

writes in “The Signification of the Phallus” that the “relation of the subject to the phallus is . . .

established without regard to the anatomical difference between the sexes” (282, emphasis

added). Moreover, he writes in The Four Fundamental Concepts that “[i]n the psyche, there is
21

nothing by which the subject may situate himself as a male or female being” (204). I observe

elsewhere that this passage conceives of the psyche as asexed but that Lacan continues to refer

only to the genders “man” and “woman” in The Four Fundamental Concepts

(“Sinthomosexual’s Failed Challenge” 7-8). Žižek and similarly-minded contemporary

Lacanians seize upon this language and formulate sexual difference as an antinomy that drives

the “relationship between the sexes” (Metastases 154-55). Through this maneuver, Žižek’s

conception of sex as the “biological opposition of male and female” becomes particularly

insidious once it is aufgehoben into a difference that is neither material nor phenomenal but

rather a differential opposition between the masculine and the feminine (Metastases 155). Žižek

is right that this is not quite a gender difference, for it takes negative rather than positive form.22

Given its role as that which sets phenomenal reality into motion, we might think of Žižekian

sexual difference as that which prompts positive manifestations of gender and sexuality.

Nonetheless, within his thought, sexual difference—however Real—is the dialecticized

consequence of his false assumptions about binary sex.

Laclau’s intervention in Žižek’s debate with Butler over the status of the Real offers

another way of approaching this problem. Like Žižek, Laclau argues that Butler misses the way

in which “the Real becomes a name for the very failure of the Symbolic in achieving its own

fullness. The Real would be, in that sense, a retroactive effect of the failure of the Symbolic”

(68). Laclau further clarifies, however, that the name of the Real thus becomes “both the name of

an empty place and the attempt to fill it through that very naming of what, in de Man’s words, is

nameless, innommable. This means that the presence of that name within the system has the

status of a suturing topos” (68). Drawing on Bruce Fink’s formulation of the distinction between

the presymbolic real (R1) and the postsymbolic Real—the latter “characterized by impasses and
22

impossibilities due to the relations among elements of the symbolic order itself (R2), that is,

which is generated by the symbolic”—Laclau argues that the postsymbolic Real effects a

“hegemonic operation” of suture that “involves both the presence of a Real which subverts

signification and the representation of Real through tropological substitution” (68). In my view,

what Žižek describes as “the contingent act of ‘grafting’ the fundamental deadlock of

symbolization on to the biological opposition of male and female” can be seen as the kind of

“suture” that Laclau describes (Metastases 155). Laclau’s explanation is crucial to understanding

the ideological character of Žižek’s claim. The “grafting” Žižek describes is, in Laclau’s terms, a

“hegemonic operation” that uses substitution to represent R2 as R1—that is, to suggest that R2

(the aporias produced by the symbolic order’s failures) is somehow connected to R1 (“the

biological opposition of male and female”).

Curiously, though, when Laclau concurs with Žižek that sexual difference is that which

“is linked not to particular sexual roles but to a real/impossible kernel which can enter the field

of representation only through tropological displacements/incarnations,” he does not point to the

suturing effects of this operation or to its role in consolidating hegemony (72). Instead, he claims

that “[i]n terms of the theory of hegemony, this presents a strict homology with the notion of

‘antagonism’ as a real kernel preventing the closure of the symbolic order . . . antagonisms are

not objective relations but the point where the limit of all objectivity is shown. Something at

least comparable is involved in Lacan’s assertion that there is no such thing as a sexual

relationship” (71). I have no quarrel with Žižek and Laclau’s insistence that a fundamental

antagonism mobilizes the symbolic order’s failed attempts at coherence. However, they both fail

to consider the ideological character of their characterization of desire as driven by difference

that is consistently brought back—through what Laclau calls the “hegemonic operation” of
23

suture—to the failures of what Žižek repeatedly terms the “relationship between the sexes.” To

choose different diction—to say, for example, that desire emerges from a fundamental

antagonism, negativity, or trauma—would avoid this suturing of the effects of the antagonism to

heterosexist conceptions of sex. But to call this operation sexual difference introduces confusion

by recalling a polarity that invokes the bodily materialities that appear within Žižek’s discourse

even as he tries to get past them.

Because Žižek does not see the ideological character of the effects of this suture, the

heterosexism at play in his appeals to the supposed unchangeability of sexual difference remains

a significant problem in his work. In his diction, relationships are “between the sexes,” and this

wording matters, because it sets up a parallelism between “female” and “male” sexes and Kant’s

mathematical (“feminine,” to Lacanians) and dynamic (“masculine”) antinomies that Žižek then

uses to render (hetero)sexual difference’s status as Real as beyond dispute. This creates the false

impression that as an antinomy, sexual difference—rather than other kinds of difference—must

be the motivating force behind all forms of desire, and in turn, desire’s manifestation in

sexuality.23 I use this diction to describe the consequences of Žižek’s assumptions and to mark

the difference between, on the one hand, Lacanian psychoanalysis’s theorization of sexual

difference as a negative antagonism that motivates desire, and on the other hand, the resulting

experience of sexuality as it could be described in positivist terms. The presence of these

different vocabularies in the ongoing dialogue between Žižek and queer theorists has muddied

the issues considerably. What has been lost in the resultant fractiousness is that Žižek’s suturing

of the “masculine” and “feminine” antinomies to binary categories of sex causes his account of

desire to render many contemporary sexual practices and sexed embodiments untheorizable, for

they cannot be accounted for as consequences of the failure of sexual difference. Žižek’s
24

oversights call into question the presumed universality of his theory. What might it mean to think

of the fundamental antagonism itself as motivated by multiple differences rather than by the

difference between “masculine” and “feminine”?

Moreover, an even larger question lies behind Žižek’s narrow reasoning about sexual

difference: why does symbolization have to be about sex at all? Such an assumption is evident in

his explication of the difference between Foucauldian and Lacanian perspectives on sex:

It is here that Foucauldian “constructionists” and Lacan part company: for the

“constructionists,” sex is not a natural given but a bricolage, an artificial

unification of heterogeneous discursive practices; whereas Lacan rejects this view

without returning to naïve substantialism. For him, sexual difference is not a

discursive, symbolic construction; instead, it emerges at the very point where

symbolization fails: we are sexed beings because symbolization always comes up

against its inherent impossibility. What is at stake here is not that “actual,”

“concrete” sexual beings can never fully fit the symbolic construction of “man” or

“woman”: the point is, rather, that this symbolic construction itself supplements a

certain fundamental deadlock. (Metastases 160)

Although it is quite plausible that sexual difference might be one of the differences that could

emerge “at the very point where symbolization fails” and that it “supplements a certain

fundamental deadlock,” there is nonetheless a logical problem with the assertion that “we are

sexed beings because symbolization always comes up against its inherent impossibility.” Žižek

offers no proof for this circular claim about causality. The same problem besets his assertion that

“sexual difference has a transcendental status because sexed bodies emerge that do not fit

squarely within ideal gender dimorphism” (Contingency 309). For this, too, he offers no proof of
25

causality, and falls back upon the circular assertion that “sexual difference is that ‘rock of

impossibility’ on which every ‘formalization’ of sexual difference founders” (309). Elided here

is what is at stake in calling the fundamental antagonism “sexual difference” at all. Moreover,

many of Žižek’s writings graft the notion of the fundamental antagonism into political contexts

that have nothing to do with sexual difference. If symbolization’s failure could have

consequences other than that of making us sexed beings, then his claim that failures of

symbolization are its cause is far too strong.

To read the Real not as “the rock of castration,” as Žižek does in Sublime Object, but as

the space of excess produced through the failure of symbolization, as he does elsewhere, is to

understand it as a site of possible rearticulation. As Jodi Dean argues, Žižek theorizes the means

through which “one can intervene in, touch, and change the Real” by engaging the symbolic

order (181). While Žižek’s claim that sexual difference is “real”—that it is “that which,

precisely, resists symbolization”—may appear on the surface to be a stubborn insistence on

essentialist doctrine, he nonetheless acknowledges that the contours of the Real can change

(Contingency 214). He concedes in Contingency that “Butler is, in a way, right” to insist that the

Real is “internal/inherent to the symbolic,” stipulating that the Real “is nothing but [the

symbolic’s] inherent limitation, the impossibility of the symbolic fully to ‘become itself,’” and

that therefore the Real “cannot be symbolized” (120-1). The insight that the Real is

unsymbolizable yet circumscribed as such by the symbolic suggests that the Real can serve as a

site of radical ideological struggle. If the Real is the site of the symbolic’s failures, it is

consistent throughout time only in its structural function—that is, only in its position as the realm

in which whatever is in the symbolic fails. To the extent that the terms of the symbolic can

change, the ideological material that fails in the Real can change as well: Žižek asserts that
26

“There will always be some hegemonic empty signifier; it is only the content that shifts”

(Contingency 111). If what he calls the point de capiton changes, then a different set of failures

could be inscribed at and as the Real.

Elsewhere in Contingency, Žižek points out that to focus on the Lacanian order of the

Real is to open up a means of understanding the regime of the father as an imposture. He notes

that “the very focus on the notion of the Real as impossible . . . reveals the ultimate contingency,

fragility (and thus changeability) of every symbolic constellation that pretends to serve as the a

priori horizon of the process of symbolization” (221). Noting that “Lacan’s shift of focus

towards the Real is strictly correlative to the devaluation of the paternal function (and of the

central place of the Oedipus complex itself),” Žižek explicitly names paternal law as one

“contingent” formation that is “susceptible to a radical overhaul” (Contingency 221). Observing

that Lacan’s “constant effort from the 1960’s onwards . . . is . . . to expose the fraud of paternal

authority,” Žižek asserts that the “‘Name-of-the-Father’ is for Lacan a fake, a semblance which

conceals [the] structural inconsistency of the symbolic” (Contingency 255, 310). As a

consequence, he asserts, “paternal authority is ultimately an imposture, one among the possible

‘sinthoms’ which allow us temporarily to stabilize and co-ordinate the inconsistent/nonexistent

‘big Other’” (Contingency 221). Žižek does not, however, reconcile this insight with his

continued insistence on the relevance of the paradigm of sexual difference. In failing fully to

dislodge the regime of the father and the logic of (hetero)sexual difference, Žižek fails to pursue

the most radical implication of his work for queer theory: the possibility that the Name of the

Father could be supplanted and the terrain of ideological struggle remapped through a change in

the point de capiton.

27

III. The Real of the Act

Even though Žižek disavows the possibility of such a remapping, his work clears

theoretical ground for it when he argues that by traversing the fantasy, we can completely

overhaul the terms of the symbolic order (Indivisible Remainder 166). He elaborates this idea

through a revision of Althusser. In so doing, he offers an account of the processes through which

ideological contents pass themselves off as natural through reification in the “kernel” of the

“Self,” and holds out the possibility of radically altering those false naturalizations (166). He

argues that “the crucial dimension of the ideological effet-sujet” lies “not in my direct

identification with the symbolic mandate . . . but in my experience of the kernel of my Self as

something which pre-exists the process of interpellation, as subjectivity prior to interpellation”

(166). Traversing the fantasy brings about “subjective destitution” by “induc[ing] . . . the subject

to renounce the ‘secret treasure’ which forms the kernel of” subjectivity (166). Traversing the

fantasy is thus “[t]he anti-ideological gesture par excellence,” the means by

which I renounce the treasure in myself and fully admit my dependence on the

externality of symbolic apparatuses—fully assume the fact that my very self-

experience of a subject who was already here prior to the external process of

interpellation is a retroactive misrecognition brought about by that very process of

interpellation. (166)

This process of gaining distance from the fantasy that supports subjectivity undoes its power as

“the ultimate ‘passionate attachment’ that guarantees the consistency of . . . being” (Ticklish

Subject 266).

What is sexual difference in Lacanian and Žižekian theory if not an ideology that passes

itself off as natural, as the true “kernel” of the “Self”, and that can only be dislodged through a
28

traversal of the fantasy? Sexual difference is the fundamental fantasy structuring Lacanian and

Žižekian theory, and that which it needs to traverse in order to be fully useful to queer theory.

The vehement resistance manifested across all of Žižek’s texts to queer theorists’ assertions of

the contingency of sexual difference is an indication of how trenchantly this fantasy is lodged

within his texts. Here, it is crucial to read Žižek’s (and also Lacan’s) texts with an eye to their

manifestations of “resistance” in the psychoanalytic sense. Read in this fashion, Žižek’s and

other Lacanians’ assertions of the fundamental intractability of sexual difference are

unpersuasive, and all the more so because of their proponents’ increasingly desperate insistence

in the face of challenge. This resistance points to the status of sexual difference not as an outside

to ideology that pertains to all persons across place and time, but rather as an ideology that has

falsely installed itself as natural and as subsisting prior to interpellation.

To view the subjective kernel not as ideology’s outside but as the most deeply seated

space of its entrenchment is to re-open the questions of how it becomes lodged as such, and of

how its terms can be rearticulated. Countering Butler, who is suspicious of the Lacanian Real

and seeks transformation in acts of linguistic performativity that resignify the symbolic order,

Žižek asserts that only an act of the Real can radically reconfigure “the field which redefines the

very conditions of a socially sustained performativity” (Ticklish Subject 264). He opposes the

“Real of an act” to the psychotic’s passage à l’acte. The latter is a “false” act, a mere acting-out

that does not “confront the real kernel of the trauma (the social antagonism)” to prompt a

traversal of “the fantasy towards the Real” (Contingency 126-7). According to Lacan’s argument

in the Third Seminar, the experience of psychosis is structured by the permanent foreclosure, or

repudiation, of a privileged signifier, causing language to be distorted and hallucinations to

appear in the Real as if it were radically external to the symbolic. Psychotic foreclosure pre-
29

empts the establishment of a point de capiton, and, consequently, renders impossible an act that

would intervene in both the symbolic and the Real. “[H]ysterical ‘acting out,’” too, takes place in

the imaginary and cannot effect change (Kay 155). From Hitler’s initiation of the Holocaust to

psychosis, hysteria, and obsession, any action that disavows or avoids—rather than directly

confronts—the fundamental “social antagonism” is for Žižek a “false act” (Contingency 124-

6).24 By contrast, the “act” is a form of “symbolic suicide,” of “withdrawing from symbolic

reality, that enables us to begin anew from the ‘zero point,’ from that point of absolute freedom

called by Hegel ‘abstract negativity’” (Žižek, Enjoy 49). This gesture temporarily voids symbolic

mandates to open up the possibility of adopting different ones and assuming a new symbolic

identity.

For Žižek, only such an act provides the resistance that enables symbolic rearticulation.

For him “the act proper”—with its capacity to intervene in the Real—“is the only one which

restructures the very symbolic co-ordinates of the agent’s situation: it is an intervention in the

course of which the agent’s identity itself is radically changed” (Žižek qtd. in Kay 155). As

Sarah Kay puts it, this kind of act allows us to “‘treat the symbolic by means of the real’—that is,

allow us to reboot in the real so as to start up our relationship with the symbolic afresh” (155).

Such a “reboot” could change the point de capiton, thereby supplanting the Name of the Father

with another master signifier and opening ground for a regime unlimited by the parameters of

sexual difference.

Such a transformation involves not the psychotic foreclosure of the Name of the Father

but instead the traversal of the fantasy that structures our experience. For Žižek,

What the Lacanian notion of “act” aims at is not a mere

displacement/resignification of the symbolic coordinates that confer on the

30

subject his or her identity, but the radical transformation of the very universal

structuring “principle” of the existing symbolic order . . . the Lacanian act, 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. (Contingency 220)

He further explains that this “act disturbs the underlying fantasy” that traps us in restrictive

patterns while disavowing the fundamental kernel of our being (Contingency 124). The proper

act

does not only shift the limit that divides our identity into the acknowledged and

the disavowed part more in the direction of the disavowed part, it does not only

make us to accept as “possible” our innermost disavowed “impossible” fantasies:

it transforms the very coordinates of the disavowed phantasmatic foundation of

our being. An act does not merely redraw the contours of our public symbolic

identity, it also transforms the spectral dimension that sustains this identity, the

undead ghosts that haunt the living subject, the secret history of traumatic

fantasies transmitted “between the lines,” through the lacks and distortions of the

explicit symbolic texture of his or her identity. (Contingency 124)

As an example of an “authentic act,” Žižek points to the moment in the film In and Out at which

closeted schoolteacher Howard Brackett says “I’m gay” instead of “Yes!” at his wedding after

having been outed several days earlier by a former student, Cameron Drake, during the Academy

Awards ceremony (Contingency 122). It’s worth noting that this act takes place in language—in

the symbolic—yet successfully intervenes in the Real. It not only rejects the symbolic

apparatus—heterosexual marriage—that would have sustained Brackett’s public identity as a

31

person presumed to be straight, but also blasts away the “disavowed phantasmatic foundation”

that had supported his own and others’ fantasy that he was heterosexual. Brackett’s change is

both internal, in that he recognizes and accepts that he is gay, and external, in that he changes

how he identifies publicly.

As Žižek argues in Sublime Object, this kind of change rearticulates the point de capiton

that quilts the symbolic and the Real. He understands the symbolically transformative act as the

installation of a new point de capiton through the traversal of the fantasy, and he implies that this

act, while "irreducible to a 'speech act'" and distinct from Butler’s performative resignification,

produces that new point de capiton by engaging all the Lacanian orders (Ticklish Subject 263,

emphasis added).25 Writing about the theory from which Žižek‘s account is derived, Pluth

clarifies that while “Lacan’s notion of an act is . . . not far removed from what Austin called a

performative speech act,” the former’s theory importantly differs from the latter’s in its

consequences: “Lacan shares with Austin the idea that [speech] acts are transformative, and such

acts are clearly ‘signifying,’ but Lacan’s focus is not on acts that change the situation of the

world or the set of facts within it. Instead he focuses on acts that change the structure of a

subject” (101). These acts are “transgressive” because “[i]t is not the case that someone is simply

changed by an act: he or she is reinaugurated as a subject” through a change in point de capiton

that touches both the symbolic and the Real (Pluth 102).26 Somewhat differently than Lacan,

Žižek also addresses acts that challenge the fundamental structure of a political terrain.

Restructuring this landscape through a change in point de capiton would be analogous to the

reinauguration of the subject that Pluth describes.

Žižek offers neither a promise that change will be for the better nor a clear picture of the

future that will emerge through traversing the fantasy. As Lorenzo Chiesa observes, not all
32

individual traversals of the fantasy lead to structural change. He notes that during traversal of the

fantasy, “the subject’s encounter with the real lack beneath his ideologized fundamental fantasy

forces him to assume the lack in the universal” (191). After that point, “the resymbolization of

lack is . . . always carried out at the level of the particular” (191). That is to say that it may or

may not lead to the symbolic order’s rearticulation. That is only a possibility if the subject that

traverses the fantasy goes on to “name a movement, promote a new Symbolic . . . and struggle

politically to establish its hegemony” (191). Thus if, as Edelman argues in No Future, queer

theory should work to implode homophobic culture from within by traversing the fantasy, a close

examination of Žižek’s work shows us that this does not require Edelman’s refusal of politics,

futurity, and the symbolic order.27

Here we encounter the limit of Žižek’s reading of In and Out. This film demonstrates that

not all traversals of the fantasy at the individual level immediately lead to broader

transformations. After Brackett comes out, the principal fires him despite his record of acclaimed

teaching. However, at the students’ graduation ceremony, Drake appears to support Brackett,

inspiring large numbers of graduating students—and eventually his parents—to a show of

solidarity in which they all declare themselves to be gay. While this scene mobilizes a radical

transformation within the community that affirms Brackett’s coming out, the film eventually

rehabilitates him for paternal law. The closing sequence teases the viewer with the possibility

that he and the reporter whose kiss caused him to recognize his own desires might be heading to

the church for their own wedding. However, the film quickly cuts to their arrival as guests at the

service in which Brackett’s mother and father renew their wedding vows, and then ends with a

celebration in which the entire community dances to the gay classic “Macho Man.” Though the

closing scene highlights the shift from the community’s initial shock at the idea that Brackett
33

might be gay to their eventual acceptance of his sexuality, it also shows him being recuperated

by paternal law in a way that is not entirely surprising. The film’s closing emphasis on the

restoration of (hetero)sexual difference within the context of the patriarchal Christian church—to

which two earlier scenes in the film had appealed to guide Brackett toward being honest about

his sexuality—points to the way that challenges to homophobia do not always represent

challenges to sexism. In and Out grates for its misogynist portrayal of two women characters as

vacuous. Emily Montgomery, Brackett’s fiancée, is a self-hating wreck who—herself a

teacher—nonetheless expresses the desire to be educated by her future husband. Sonia, Drake’s

girlfriend, is a whiny and entitled supermodel who cannot even operate a circular telephone dial.

In and Out systematically upholds paternal law and even perpetuates misogyny despite its

progressive critique of hypocritical silences around sexuality in educational and religious

institutions.

As such, In and Out illustrates that it is impossible to predict the consequences of the

authentic act, a point that Žižek misses in his brief gloss of the film. At other points, he

emphasizes that there is no certainty about the nature of such an act. Elaborating on the nature of

the ultimate act that would prompt a traversal of the fantasy, he argues that the structure of the

Kantian categorical imperative is “tautological,” an “empty form” that “can deliver no guarantee

against misjudging our duty” (Indivisible Remainder 170). Coming up with “a minimal positive

definition” of the act is a “game” involving guesses that “fill up the abyss of tautology that

resonates in ‘Do your duty!’” (The Indivisible Remainder 170). Žižek presents as the “best

candidate” for such an uncertain act the case of a man who “dress[es] up as a woman and

commit[s] suicide in public” (Indivisible Remainder 170). This example’s misogynistic and

transphobic character is outrageous and inflammatory, suggesting that revolution be purchased at

34

the price of the lives of those who challenge the binary gender system. By no means do I wish to

endorse this example as a program for queer theory. As both Butler and Gayle Salamon

compellingly argue, queer and trans theory should instead work to make gender diversity more

rather than less livable.28 Yet Žižek’s example also points to an aspect of his thought that allows

for his ideas to be appropriated and reworked for queer-theoretical ends. The relativism and

ambiguity he attaches to acts—including the example he gives here, which he presents as “the

best candidate” rather than a sure success—concedes that they take place within an inherently

conflicted field of competing ideologies that are subject to challenge and transformation

(Indivisible Remainder 170). In this context, Žižek’s example of the man who commits suicide in

drag represents a startling concession that the fundamental fantasy of (hetero)sexual difference is

contingent, ideological, and subject to traversal.

A strength of Lacanian theory is its potential to offer a flexible account of the structure of

desire and of its consequences: of desire as motivated by lack and as potentially productive of all

manner of genderings. And at its best, Žižek’s politics of the Real offers queer theory not a

release from the symbolic order but rather the possibility of changing its coordinates. It is thus

unfortunate that debate over the more radical implications of his theories has largely been

grounded by his and others’ insistence on presenting them in the language of sexual difference.

This move limits his work’s usefulness for queer and feminist theories alike by constricting

accounts of desire and by tacitly upholding the assumption that the symbolic order must be

grounded by the Name of the Father.

Even though orthodox Lacanian writings—including some of Žižek’s books—attempt to

forestall challenges to the claim that sexual difference is unalterably lodged in the Real, the more

radical strain within the latter’s texts opens up the possibility of contesting them. Both Copjec
35

and Žižek argue that (hetero)sexual difference is a fundamental antinomy, but the latter’s own

theory of traversing the fantasy makes (hetero)sexual difference itself available for traversal.

And if—as Žižek states—paternal law is an imposture, and the Name of the Father could be

supplanted by another master signifier, the phallogocentric structure of (hetero)sexual difference

could be radically overhauled (Contingency 221). And even if—as he and other Lacanians

argue—the structure of desire is indeed subtended by a fundamental antinomy that dictates that

“there is no sexual relationship,” there is no good reason to insist on calling this antagonism

sexual difference or on formulating it in terms of the masculine and the feminine (The Ticklish

Subject 272). Numerous other differences would do just as well.

By traversing the fantasy of (hetero)sexual difference, the entire ideological apparatus of

what Gayle Rubin calls the “sex/gender system” could be overhauled through a change in the

point de capiton.29 This transformation would not necessarily render (hetero)sexual difference

entirely obsolete, but would instead allow us to understand it as having an incidental—rather

than a determining—effect on the structuring of subjectivity and desire. Thus, as a provocation to

fantasy’s traversal, I close with a sole injunction, directed to all who remain invested in insisting

that the fundamental antinomy that mobilizes desire must ever and always be called sexual

difference: Give it up!

36

1
See also “Riots and Occupations” for Halberstam’s critique of Žižek’s account of the
Occupy Wall Street protests.
2
In Gender Trouble, Butler argues that linguistic performativity has the potential to
subvert the Lacanian symbolic’s heterosexist terms. She refines this argument further in Bodies
That Matter, focusing on the way in which the terms of a phallogocentric symbolic order open
up possibilities for certain kinds of sexed identifications while precluding the possibility of
others. In Bodies That Matter, see especially Ch. 2, “The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological
Imaginary,” and Ch. 3, “Phantasmatic Identification and the Assumption of Sex.”
3
See Tim Dean’s Beyond Sexuality and Lee Edelman’s No Future for extended accounts
of the limitations posed to queer theory by work that focuses on the Imaginary order without
considering the Real.
4
See Bodies That Matter and Contingency, Hegemony, Universality for Butler’s critiques
of Laclau and Žižek. In The Psychic Life of Power, Butler responds to Mladen Dolar’s similar
account of the Lacanian Real.
5
In addition to Bodies That Matter, see “Gender as Performance” and “How Bodies
Come to Matter” for examples of texts in which Butler uses the term “foreclosure” in the manner
that I describe.
6
Lacan’s theory of psychosis is one source of Butler’s understandable suspicion about
Žižek’s emphasis on the unsymbolizable Real. She justifiably questions the presuppositions
through which Lacan, in the third seminar on The Psychoses (1955-6), 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, thereby subjecting himself to the signification of the phallus and
the law of castration. This account implies that to “foreclose” the Name of the Father, rejecting
the primacy of the phallus and sidestepping (hetero)sexual difference, is to court a psychosis
characterized by the delusional return in the Real of normative gender and sexual identities in
their inverted forms. Butler’s critique of this theory fuels her argument that Žižek, in The
Sublime Object of Ideology, rigidifies sexual difference as the “rock of the real” that consigns
queers to the “permanent outside” of the social (Bodies That Matter 197; “Gender as
Performance” 37).
Although Butler’s concerns about Žižek’s deployment of the doctrine 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 what she calls “abject” queer bodies, she attempts to
symbolize the unsymbolizable. Yet as Tim Dean points out, “[t]he theory that attributes to the
real specific social and sexual positions is Butler’s own, since Lacan characterizes the real as
asubstantial, unsexed, and ungendered” (Beyond Sexuality 210). Second, as I argue in Insane
Passions, Butler misreads Lacan’s account of the mechanism of psychotic “foreclosure,” and her
conflation of the Real with psychosis results from this erroneous interpretation (18-22). Though
in psychosis, the Real is the realm in which the foreclosed signifier returns, the Real is not
therefore equivalent to psychosis. To the contrary: for Lacan, even “normal” subjectivity is
anchored through the interlocking of the imaginary and the symbolic with the Real. As Malcolm
Bowie points out, the principal difference between the psychotic and the “normal” subject is that
for the former, the relationship between the three orders becomes incoherent as the result of a
“mispositioning of Subject and Other” in which the “imaginary becomes real…by passing
through the symbolic dimension without being submitted to its exactions and obliquities” (109).
37

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 that the psychotic forecloses.
7
In addition to the texts by Žižek that I cite in this essay, see also Copjec’s “The Fable of
the Stork and Other False Sexual Theories.” This recent essay offers a useful—though general—
defense of psychoanalytic approaches to sexuality, but remains locked into a Lacanian model of
sexual difference that conflates “sex” with “sexuality” and does not ask what it might mean to
theorize subjectivity from the perspectives of intersexed and transgendered people—an exercise
that would expose the aporias in her account of subjectivity.
8
Fink observes that in the clinical setting, “a great many biological females turn out to
have masculine structure, and a great many biological males prove to have feminine structure”
(108).
9
It is curious and unfortunate that despite Tim Dean’s challenge in Ch. 1 (“How to Read
Lacan”) to the account of the symbolic order as grounded through acceptance of the phallic
signifier, he reverts in Ch. 2 (“Transcending Gender”) to a strict account of sexual difference as
intractably Real. See especially p. 86 of Beyond Sexuality.
10
For Lacanian arguments that pathologize transsexuality and argue against sex
reassignment, see Catherine Millot, Horsexe; Charles Shepherdson, “The Role of Gender and the
Imperative of Sex”; and Tim Dean, Beyond Sexuality. In Please Select Your Gender, the latest
entry in the Lacanian literature on transgender, Patricia Gherovici disentangles more carefully
than Millot those cases of transsexual aspirations its author considers to be symptoms of an
underlying disorder—and therefore not adequately addressed through sex reassignment—from
those for whom she considers sex reassignment to be an appropriate response. Nonetheless, her
analysis continues to rely upon problematic presuppositions about the primacy of the phallic
signifier, and stages challenges to sexual difference as signs of pathology rather than as
resistance to ideology. See Gayle Salamon, Assuming a Body, for a pioneering cross-reading of
Freud and Lacan with Maurice Merleau-Ponty that offers a non-pathologizing account of
transsexuality and transgenderism.
11
Restuccia has revised this thesis in her argument for a Lacanian conception of self-
shattering “queer love,” and in that context argues that Tim Dean’s Beyond Sexuality—which she
views as making a similar argument in the name of “desire”—“locates…Lacanian Love in a
place beyond sexual difference” (130). However, while Dean challenges the privileging of the
phallus in readings of Lacan and focuses instead on the objet a that emerges as the genderless
object-cause of desire in Lacan’s later work, he nonetheless retains the emphasis on sexual
difference that remains so problematic in Lacanian discourse. See especially Ch. 2
(“Transcending Gender”) of Beyond Sexuality for examples of this problem.
12
For a critique of Hart, see my book Insane Passions, pp. 18-22.
13
See PMLA 121.3 (2006) for a forum on “The Anti-Social Thesis in Queer Theory”
introduced by Robert Caserio and featuring short essays by Lee Edelman, Judith Halberstam,
José Esteban Muñoz, and Timan’s is the only contribution that addresses the psychoanalytic
arguments of No Future; he offers Guy Hocquenghem’s Deleuzian approach to gay sexuality as
an alternative to Edelman’s Lacanian and Žižekian perspective. See my article entitled “The
Sinthomosexual’s Failed Challenge to (Hetero)sexual Difference” for further discussion of
problems with Edelman’s argument in No Future.
38

14
I develop this claim at greater length in “The Unpredictable Future of Fantasy’s
Traversal” with particular attention to Edelman’s and Žižek’s divergent treatments of futurity.
15
Michael Snediker’s Queer Optimism criticizes Edelman’s overly pessimistic
interpretation of Lacan and turns to D.W. Winnicott for a psychoanalytic means of theorizing
optimism that is not dependent on naïve appeals to a better future. Ruti’s “Why There is Always
a Future in the Future” offers a critique of Edelman’s reading of Lacan in the context of
therapeutic concerns.
16
Though Pluth recognizes, as do I, that Lacanian theory creates an opening for a
fundamental restructuring of subjectivity through the act that traverses the fantasy—a
reconfiguration that Pluth identifies as offering freedom and that I am more concerned to identify
as a form of optimism—I differ from him in finding such potential in Žižek and Lacan’s work.
Pluth offers an even more radical perspective on traversing the fantasy than Žižek, arguing that
Lacan’s “subjectivity of the act” that prompts fantasy’s traversal entails continued engagement
with signification but a newfound freedom from the need to seek recognition in the Other. While
this suggestion goes beyond the scope of Žižek’s work, and thus lies outside the focus of this
essay, I explore the potential of Pluth’s “subjectivity of the act” in “The Unpredictable Future of
Fantasy’s Traversal.”
17
In Undoing Gender, Butler points up the way in which the insistence on the part of
certain Lacanians that “‘It [sexual difference] is the law!’ becomes the utterance that
performatively attributes the very force to the law that the law itself is said to exercise” (46). She
concludes that the claim that “‘It is the law’ is…a sign of allegiance to the law, a sign of the
desire for the law to be the indisputable law,” and observes that this “theological impulse within
the theory of psychoanalysis…seeks to put out of play any criticism of the symbolic father, the
law of psychoanalysis itself” (46). Whereas Butler’s theory deregulates sexuality and gender by
challenging the priority of the Law of the Father, orthodox Lacanians constrict the horizon of
possibilities for gender and sexuality by continuing to subject them to paternal law.
18
Even more symptomatic in this regard than Žižek’s reiterated insistence on the (failed)
foundationality of sexual difference in his chapter on Butler is his mournful suggestion, in the
chapter entitled "Whither Oedipus?", that the contemporary decline of the Law of the Father
"entails the malfunctioning of 'normal' sexuality and the rise of sexual indifference" (367).
19
See, for example, his critique of the emphasis on “tolerance” in North American
multicultural discourse, a topic he addresses in Violence and in Žižek: The Reality of the Virtual.
20
See, for example, Kessler’s Lessons from the Intersexed and Fausto-Sterling’s Sexing
the Body.
21
See Butler, Gender Trouble.
22
A good deal of the muddiness of debates between theorists of “gender” and those of
sexual difference might well come from the positivist assumptions underpinning gender theory,
which was initiated by English-speaking social scientists well before Butler’s reworking of its
terms brought it into dialogue with psychoanalytic accounts of “sexual difference.”
23
See pp. 6-9 of my article entitled “The Sinthomosexual’s Failed Challenge to
(Hetero)sexual Difference” for a reading of Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts that uncouples
“sex” from “sexuality.” In this essay I suggest that whereas Lacan’s own work is inconsistent in
its use of these concepts, sometimes furthering and at other moments challenging their
conflation, Žižek and similarly minded contemporary Lacanians more simply equate them.
39

24
See Pluth, pp. 100-102, for more on the difference between the act involved in
traversing the fantasy and other kinds of acts.
25
Butler and Žižek’s approaches to the Lacanian symbolic are grounded in different
theories of linguistic performativity. For Žižek’s, see Enjoy Your Symptom! and The Sublime
Object of Ideology; for Butler’s, see Bodies That Matter. Rather than focusing on the intricacies
of their debate over language, I focus on how their arguments deploy the Real, as it is necessary
to engage both it and the symbolic to dislodge the point de capiton.
26
Though he shares Žižek‘s view of the way in which the Lacanian act can overhaul the
subject by intervening at the juncture of the symbolic and the Real, Pluth goes on to critique
Žižek’s account of the structure of subjectivity that follows traversal of the fundamental fantasy.
This discussion concerns the account of subjectivity that Lacan develops in his final seminars in
his work on the sinthome, and so touches on what Lorenzo Chiesa calls an issue that “remains
unconcluded in Lacan’s work”—one that is beyond the scope of this article (189).
27
See my article entitled “The Sinthomosexual’s Failed Challenge to (Hetero)sexual
Difference” for a more detailed reading of Edelman that makes a similar claim.
28
In Salamon’s Assuming a Body, see especially Ch. 7, “Withholding the Letter,” which
challenges reductionist uses of Lacan’s theory of the symbolic order.
29
For another argument for the incidental rather than determining status of “sexual
difference,” see Tim Dean, “Homosexuality and the Problem of Otherness.”
40

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