The Queer Art of Failure

I. (Hetero)sexual Difference and the Real

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(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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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—“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 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.



Edelman’s 2006No 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 “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.



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 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-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 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 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 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 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 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 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!

