2. Fundamental Concepts and Theories

Orienting Lacanian Psychoanalysis in Relation to the Political

This chapter introduces and reviews the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis in relation to the argumentation developed in this thesis. These concepts do not reflect the full range of psychoanalytic terms, nor their ‘true’ meaning. Although it is important to clarify the manner in which a concept will be used, the uneven history and internally ruptured nature of psychoanalysis is such that definite definitions are elusive. Instead, the terms will be defined in the manner they will be used for the task of political analysis. The most popularised basis for such analysis is Slavoj Žižek’s appropriation of Lacanian psychoanalysis, which evaluates the possibilities for radical socio-political change, specifically in relation to the economy. Particularly salient for this approach are the concepts of the Real, jouissance, desire, fantasy, objet a and universality, especially the category of the universal he calls ‘the universal exception’. Before entering into a discussion of these concepts, however, it is useful to examine the predominant influences on Žižek’s work, Lacan, Hegel, Laclau and Marx, in order to establish the context in which he operates.Žižek’s main influence has been Jacques Lacan; above all, theoretically Žižek is a Lacanian, although Žižek’s use of Lacan is orientated for political rather than clinical analysis. Lacan himself was not political; he was very sceptical about the prospect of revolutionary change, particularly radical change of the sort examined in this thesis. Lacan considered there to be two different meanings of the term ‘revolution’. The first mode of revolution is the overthrow of a government or social order, redirecting evolution, so to speak. It was the second, conservative meaning of revolution, however, on which Lacan placed more emphasis. Here, revolution is taken to mean a rotation around a single central axis (Ciaccia, 2005). This differentiation is seminal for understanding the psychoanalytic conception of social and political change. The latter definition of revolution suggests that while there may be an appearance of movement and some plurality of positions, these are simply responses to the same fundamental and impossible Real. Thus to break out of the conservative conception of revolution and into true political revolution and radical social change, one has to enter into the realm of this fundamental blockage, the Real. This thesis supports Žižek’s view that the concept of the Real, articulated through Žižek’s concept of universality, gives substantial leverage to a psychoanalytic political approach. Furthermore, this approach allows for the possibility of revolutionary political change.The Real thus emerges as a core psychoanalytic concept for all analyses of political change or stability. The Real, however, cannot be conceptualised outside of the other registers of Lacanian psychoanalysis; the symbolic – the place of the Other that is structured through the production of signifiers – and the imaginary, that is, the illusionary register of wholeness that emerges for the subject via their identification with the arena of images. Thus the Real is not an entity in itself, but rather a fundamental lack, an effect without a cause that can be observed only through the presence gaps within, of absence, in the symbolic and the imaginary orders. As the limit to signification, the effects of the Real provide the core analytical emphasis for psychoanalysis, through the negative ontology established by the limitations of language (through the effect of the Real upon the symbolic and the imaginary), through the positivisations of this limit in fantasy (which enables the social realm to appear consistent), and through jouissance (for Lacan, the only real substance that exists within social life).The most important consideration in terms of socio-political change, however, is the relationship between the Real and Žižek’s rehabilitated conception of universality. Railing against the increasing focus on particularism within postmodern thought, Žižek has sought to rehabilitate the concept of universality. This rehabilitation has occurred through a re-reading of the work of Jacques Lacan, Karl Marx and Georg Hegel, as well as a dialogue with post-Marxist discourse theorist, Ernesto Laclau. The universal, in its abstract form, is both impossible, in that it can never be fully constituted, and necessary, due to the need to avoid the naked experience of anxiety that is provoked by encounters with the Real. It is this dynamic contradiction, which produces an exception to the universal within the universal – that is, the element which is both part of the universal, yet subverts its horizon – which drives the dialectic process and out of which any possibility for political change will emerge.
The dynamic relationship between the universal and its exception informs the key theoretical hypothesis of this thesis; socio-political change that is capable of generating more than a refashioning of (a simple rotation around) existing alternatives occurs through the dynamic dialectic interactions of the universal (a construction of both the symbolic and the imaginary) and the effect of the Real, embodied by excluded elements of that universal. How the relationship that exists between the universal, the particular, and the universal exception might best be interpreted has been a key point of debate between Žižek and Laclau. Žižek’s interchange with Laclau has been vitally important in his reformulation of a theory of the universal. As a consequence, discussion of the influences upon Žižek will begin with Laclau.
Žižek and Laclau

Laclau and Žižek have very similar theoretical orientations, combining the insights of psychoanalysis, Marxism and post-structuralism, although both disavow the continued influence of the latter (Žižek & Daly, 2004, p.46). Laclau and Žižek have been central in generating a form of political analysis that draws upon Lacanian psychoanalysis. That said, as we shall soon observe, these approaches have notable differences, mainly around how the Real is to be conceptualised. Laclau and Žižek each agree on the fundamental importance of the radically negative character of social life, exemplified in the core maxim of Laclau’s seminal text Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: ‘society does not exist’ (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985). This formulation, which correlates with the Lacanian ideas that ‘the big Other doesn’t exist’ and that ‘there is no sexual relation’, has led both Laclau and Žižek to reject the prospect of positive utopian politics.
Despite this initial similarity in political positions and their shared theoretical allegiances, Laclau and Žižek now inhabit quite different positions on both counts. As such, a detailed analysis of the divergences between Laclau and Žižek is more than warranted to examine the political possibilities available from psychoanalytic theory. Of particular interest is the use – or in Laclau’s case, the non-use – of the Lacanian categories of jouissance and fantasy. The absence of these particular expressions of impossibility in Laclau’s work, along with his relatively formalist interpretation of the Real, reveals a deeper issue in his largely structurally based analysis; that of the need to go beyond the act of interpreting social structures, practices and institutions in order to achieve radical change. The role that jouissance plays within political analysis for taking such analysis beyond mere interpretation shall be the central focus of the following chapter.Laclau and Žižek share a common belief that language contains limit-points that are inherent to itself, establishing the social realm upon a negative ontology. Paradoxically though, this negative ontology is the very basis for the construction of universality. In its unmediated form, the negativity that is inherent to the social domain (through the effect of the Real) is unbearable for the subject. By means of the prospect of jouissance, however – the troubling pleasure to which we shall soon return – the subject is driven towards the intrinsic wholeness of universality. As a result, the universal becomes an impossible yet necessary object, exemplified in Lacan’s concept of objet a and Laclau’s notion of the empty signifier (both of which are paradoxically produced at the limit point of the discursive, yet offer the impossible prospect of the suturing of these limits). The impossibility of universality, combined with the jouissance involved in its construct, produces a necessary exclusion of some elements. These elements, both in the form of what is known as symptoms or as the concrete universal, are central to the psychoanalytic conception of universality.

Žižek, Hegel and LacanŽižek has redeveloped universality through his reading of Lacan and Hegel. Although it is widely accepted that Lacan is the main influence on Žižek’s thought, Žižek has also re-read Hegel through the process of après-coup, that is, the paradoxical formula by which advancements are gained by retrospectively interpreting the past in the terms of the future in order to ‘release its significance for the present’ (Kay, 2003, p.18). This has allowed Žižek the opportunity to re-establish what he regards as the common bond between Hegel and Lacan, their belief in the radical negativity which reigns at the heart of the social (p.17). Working with this negative ontology through the process of après-coup, Žižek has re-read Hegel via Lacan to make the former a philosopher of the Real (p.17). Likewise, Žižek has given a political edge to Lacan’s mostly apolitical thought. This political edge is achieved through the Hegelian dialectic, which Žižek has renewed in the name of dialectical materialism, which he describes as the struggle of opposites in the form of an irresolvable tension that characterises the universal (Žižek, 2006a, p.7).

The psychoanalytic definition of universality is of a different kind from that traditionally constructed in both modern and post-modern philosophy, in that it is based on a radically different articulation of the relationship between elements that Hegel suggested constitute the domain of universality – they being the universal, the particular and the universal exception (Kay, 2003, p.39). Modern and post-modern philosophy share a view that both social cultural plurality and particularity exist in relation to concrete institutions, such as the State and Discourse, respectively. Within psychoanalysis, alternatively, the opposed poles of plurality and particularity are related responses to an elemental, universal lack; the impossible Real that produces an exception which is constitutive of the universal itself (Daly, 1999a, p.75; Žižek, 1989, p.4).

For Žižek, this means that a universal can never be fully constituted in itself. This is seen in the role that the singular, which Žižek calls the exception, plays in the constitution of a universal horizon. Any form of identity has to form abstractly from the particular elements that make up the basic building blocks of a discursive structure. Discourses must exclude other particular elements to achieve this abstraction (Žižek, 1999, p.180). This exclusion thus becomes a condition of possibility of the universal, and vitally, evidence of the failure of the universal; the excluded particular of a given social formation bears witness to the very impossibility of the conception of universality by which that formation is ordered. This particular element, the singular exception, operates as an unsymbolisable remainder or trace that is generated in the process of producing a universal imaginary through the effect of the Real.

The excluded particular creates a short-circuit in the relationship between the universal and the particular. The excluded element becomes a universal exception, bypassing the particular through its singularity. The exception is singular, rather than particular, because it negates the universal horizon – an embodiment of the opposite of the universal – but at the same time exceeds that horizon because the universal imaginary requires the presence of this singularity: at the same time as it negates the universal, the constitutive role of the singular means that it exceeds the abstracted universal horizon. As this thesis will develop in more detail in subsequent chapters, it is this disavowed element of the universal – the exception – which offers a potential exit-point from the stabilising, functionalist-like cycles of change that routinely get presented as Change within popular discourses.
Zizek and Marx

Despite Žižek’s initial affinity with Laclau and Mouffe’s variant of post-Marxism, the influence of classical Marxism on Žižek’s work should not be underestimated. It is clear that Žižek has sought to become an orthodox Marxist as well as an orthodox Lacanian. There are those, such as Sean Homer (Homer, 2001), who believe that orthodox Lacanian and Marxist thought are “theoretically incommensurable intellectual systems” (p.7) and as such, obstacles to the kind of radical political economy envisaged by Žižek. Homer’s position, however, lacks an appreciation of the après-coup manner in which Žižek uses a theorist. By approaching a theorist in a retroactive manner, Žižek is able to reinterpret them in terms of his own thought and contemporary circumstances, rather than according to the letter of what the theorist had written. Thus, for Žižek, to be an orthodox Marxist is not to simply repeat Marx, but rather to re-read him après-coup and unleash the significance of his thought for contemporary analysis. Žižek uses Hegel in much the same manner; he is not trying to follow either Hegel or Marx to the letter but, rather, to rehabilitate Hegelian and Marxist thought for contemporary times. In this sense Žižek is post-Marxist; his adherence to Lacanian semiotics prevents him from taking on the more humanist of Marx’s concepts, such as ‘species being’ or ‘false consciousness’. More importantly, however, it allows Žižek to return the economy and class antagonism to the core of political analysis.

To summarise these points: Žižek brings together his conceptions of Marx, Lacan, Hegel, and his own thoughts on universality and the Real, into a critique of global capitalism. Global capitalismhas increasingly become his main political target. Žižek has become frustrated with the emphasis on postmodern particularism, as is expressed politically in the ‘new social movements’. For Žižek these movements represent an implicit acceptance of the horizons of global capital and are an example of a ‘rotational revolution’. In this same vein, this thesis contends that a truly radical movement needs to invoke the Real and its relationship with the universal, especially the universal exception. The Real is perhaps the concept of Lacanian psychoanalysis and any related political analysis, because it breaks down previous barriers of purely interpretative methods, entering into the realm of pleasure/jouissance to enable understanding of how a universal ideology grips the subject.

Modalities of the Real and of Jouissance
According to psychoanalyst Bruce Fink, the Real can be divided into two basic categories, the Real that exists ‘before the letter’ (R1) and the Real that persists ‘after the letter’ (R2). R1 is the name we give to the (mythical) time before language, a time that is created only by signification itself. There is no absence in R1. It is only R2 that cuts up the Real of R1 through the act of creating what is labeled ‘reality’ via the symbolic. These cuts in the Real ‘before the letter’ occur because of the distance between reality and the Real that is created by the symbolic, a symbolic which cannot fully grasp what is beyond its limits. In reality, R1 exists only as an absence. This absence is, however, given a name and thus an existence; without this operation of naming it within the symbolic, R1 would only be felt as an absence. Through the process of naming, however, R1 is given an existence (albeit ‘only’ a symbolic one) within human experience (Fink, 1995, p.24-5).R1, however, is not purely a temporal conception in the sense of ‘coming before language’. R1 is not only what is before symbolisation, but also what has not yet been symbolised. Thus, the Real can be symbolised from one perspective but not from another (p.26). What may be openly accepted in one discourse, for example the radical unsustainability of capitalist production within eco-Marxist thought, may be impossible to symbolise within another, such as free-market capitalist ideology. While the unsustainability of capitalism production is Real from the latter perspective, it is symbolic within the former. Therefore the Real can be symbolically manipulated, but not within the terms amongst which the Real remains unsymbolisable. Rather, the effect of the Real can be forced upon the realm in which it remains the impossible. Therefore, while the Real is impossible, importantly for our argument on political change, it is also the impossible that happens. For those who doubt the political potential of Lacanian thought, the Real (in the form of R1) acts only as a limit to symbolisation, as an external limit which allows only for conservative politics (J. Butler, 2000, p.141). In contrast, Žižek argues that the Real cannot be reduced an a priori symbolic norm (Žižek, 2000b, p.309). In his view, the Real is not a pre-social element that opposes the symbolic, nor an effect of the social itself, but rather it is both the precondition for the establishment of reality and the exclusions that occur to/within reality itself (p.311).

Žižek himself has battled against the Real as an a priori. In the foreword to the 2nd edition of For They Know Not What They Do, Žižek states that in his previous book The Sublime Object of Ideology, he was guilty of a transcendental reading of the Lacanian Real in which the Real appears as an actually-existing condition of absence. To avoid this kind of reading, he introduces three separate modalities of the Real which map onto the triad of Lacanian registers (Real, imaginary, symbolic); the real Real, the imaginary Real and the symbolic Real. The real Real is the primordial lack or horrifying Thing. The imaginary Real is the manner in which an object comes to appear to be sublime, as in objet a. It is the symbolic Real, though, which is of most interest in relation to this thesis.

The symbolic Real is the Real as a consistent background to the symbolic, it is that which has hegemonised hegemony itself (Žižek, 2002, p.xii). Žižek uses this definition of the Real in his definition of global capital as that which sets the fundamental limits of all symbolisation. Therefore the symbolic Real has much in common with Fink’s R2 because the symbolic Real, in combination with other forms of the Real, introduces inconsistencies into the symbolic order. As an illustration, with capital as the symbolic Real, any discourse in apparent contradistinction with capital, such as ecologism, can only express itself up to a certain limit, that limit being established by capital. Beyond this point the discourse becomes marked with inconsistencies; we see this in the economic interventions of ecological thought, which while critiquing the fundamental premises of capitalism, such as the drive for profit, cannot bring itself to designate capital as the problem itself.

As a consequence, the Real cannot simply be considered external to symbolisation either in the form of R1 or R2. The Real is not just what is excluded from the symbolic, but rather has what Lacan termed an ‘extimate’ relationship with the symbolic order in that the Real is simultaneously within and outside the symbolic. This is the case for R1 because it establishes the outer limits of symbolisation, but also for R2. R2 operates as the factor that distorts symbolisation from within; it is the disavowed ‘X’ that warps our knowledge in a manner in which we cannot be aware at the time of ‘knowing’. In this sense, the Real is an effect without a known cause. To rephrase the point, although the Real is disavowed, it is also the elemental pre-condition and support of reality in the sense that it constitutes its very limits and thus the conditions of possibility for the symbolic (Kay, 2003, p.168).

Whilst the Real operates with the symbolic realm as a lack, it is not only a negative condition. The Real also exists as a condition of excess. The excessive element of the Real comes through the positivisations that occur of the Real through subjects’ uses of fantasy. These positivisations underpin the functioning of the social; fantasy, desire and, most importantly, jouissance. Jouissance is a paradoxical state of suffering/enjoyment that lies ‘beyond the pleasure principle’ (Evans, 1996, p.92). This troubling pleasure is the substance recognised by psychoanalytic thought as the material substrata of social life and, as such, it is the only substance known to psychoanalysis (Braunstein, 2003, p.19). Jouissance is not simply enjoyment or pleasure, although it can operate in these modes, but it also goes beyond pleasure into a kind of troubling, excessive pleasure that includes elements of transgression and suffering. Jouissance operates in numerous modalities, each altering the manner in which it is expressed. Indeed, Braunstein cites twenty different modalities for the operation of jouissance, from the initial satisfaction of necessities in the pre-symbolic child (‘pure Jouissance’) to the jouissance of the symptom, to the failure of the symbolic order to provide the subject with access to pure Jouissance.Fink (1995, p.60), in a similar manner to both Braunstein and his own distinction between modalities of the Real, distinguishes between two orders of jouissance, J1 and J2. J1 refers to Jouissance ‘before the letter’. This Jouissance is the Real link of unity between the mother and the child, in this sense it is ‘pure’, unmediated Jouissance. J2 is jouissance ‘after the letter’, that which occurs once the subject enters language. Here Jouissance gives way to jouissance because of the mediating affect of language upon the subject of the signifier. The subject loses access to Jouissance, but is able to procure a second-order form of jouissance that compensates for that loss. This procurement occurs through the staging of fantasy (Fink, 1995, p.60). Compensatory jouissance revolves around the necessarily impossible attempts to regain the original unity of Jouissance (such as through universality) which are supported by fantasy. These attempts cannot succeed because the subject cannot return to a time before language, a time of J1, but this very impossibility is repressed in fantasy.

Conversely, Žižek contends that J1 itself is a fantasmatic creation. This form of jouissance does not really exist, it is only a fantasmatic construction produced because of the lack of jouissance within the symbolic order. Fantasy initiates the idea for the subject that there was once a time or space before lack. However, like the Real before-the-letter, J1 only exists because it is given a name in language. Žižek contends that this conception (of a lost, primal jouissance) ignores a paradox that is caused by the Real, that there is no enjoyment for the subject before their enmeshment in surplus-enjoyment. The fundamental illusion is that behind jouissance there is, or once was, an original Jouissance (Žižek, 1993, p.35-6). Therefore, Žižek suggests that social analysis should avoid any fixation on J1, as if surplus-enjoyment, J2 is somewhat secondary, as though there is first a primary Jouissance, then after the insertion of the signifier into the young infant there exists a remainder of jouissance. Conversely, the fantasmatic nature of both forms of jouissance means that neither should be dismissed conceptually; the operation of jouissance can only be understood through the relationship between the two orders. Rather, J2 can only operate through the prospect of J1. This prospect informs the production of J2, both in sense that the fantasmatic postulate of J1 gives rise to the drive for jouissance, but also produces the very impossibility of returning to Jouissance. The paradoxical nature of second-order jouissance is embodied in the form of an excessive surplus or remainder which imbues the symbolic. Interpreted in this manner, surplus enjoyment is also a creature of the super-ego (Kay, 2003, p.163).

The Super-Ego

Lacan’s definition of the super-ego differs from Freud’s original conception. Freud maintained that the super-ego helped to keep the id in check and maintain a balanced ego. In contrast, Lacan considered the super-ego to be not only the subject’s ‘moral’ or normative conscience but, more productively, an unconscious site of enjoyment/perversion. Thus, where Freud conceived of the unconscious as being a site that resists law, Lacan regards the unconscious, through the super-ego, to be the very place of compliance; one does not battle to follow the law, instead we enjoy submitting to norms through the surplus enjoyment that is supplied by the super-ego. Thus, for Lacan, the super-ego becomes an obscene supplement to the symbolic law, enabling the subject to conform.


The super-ego operates because in the process of becoming a social being, the subject makes a (forced) choice away from pure Jouissance and towards language. Although pure Jouissance is not attainable after subjectification, this impossibility is forgotten. The subject represses the initial negation, the impossibility of achieving fullness. It ‘forgets’ that it never had the thing in the first place. The super-ego plays an important role in maintaining the image that fullness is possible. It presses ‘guilt’ upon the subject when s/he experiences things going wrong for it and accounts for those events in terms of its failure to do what is required of it (that is, does not follow the symbolic law). However, every time the subject gives in to the demands of the super-ego and the social order (naturally) is not sutured, more guilt is produced. The more we submit, the more we need to submit. The surplus-enjoyment of the super-ego is very similar to the Marxist notion of surplus-value; the more you have the more you need.
It is through fantasy that the subject learns to control jouissance and the demands of the super-ego, thereby structuring its desire (Kay, 2003, p.163).Lacan located desire within a field which also incorporated need and demand. Upon entry into the social, the subject loses access to the level of biological need (e.g. hunger) because every need has to be articulated through the Other of the symbolic order. That which can be articulated (need) can be satisfied, but the unsymbolisable remnant – desire – cannot. Because of its articulation through the Other, need becomes a demand to the Other (Evans, 1996, p.37). Desire is that which is in demand more than need, the impossible quest for the mythical lost Jouissance (Stavrakakis, 2000, p.87). Desire operates as a metonymic chain, objects being presented as a series of substitutions for the constitutive lack, these objects being presented as an embodiment of a lost Jouissance (Žižek, 1999, p.228; Kay, 2003, p.160). Lacan also locates desire in relation to drive. Desire aims at an object whose possession is sought, ultimately the enigmatic objet a. When this object is obtained, desire does not subside, but is rather transferred to another object in a metonymic fashion. In contrast, drive does not aim at the object, but rather generates enjoyment from circulating around the object and precisely not achieving the goal (Evans, 1996, p.46). The object around which drive circulates is objet a. Objet a is a particularly seminal concept for Lacanian psychoanalysis. Objet a can be considered the site of fundamental lack, the void at which the subject remains perpetually riven. As such Lacan places it at the centre of the Borromean knot, as the point where all three registers (of Real, imaginary, and symbolic) meet. While objet a is primarily an imaginary concept –- it is constructed in fantasy as the object that will represents a return to Jouissance – it has connotations of the Real and is symbolically constituted through the signifier (Evans, 1996, p.124). As well as its triadic structure, objet a is also both the object-cause and the logic of desire. Objet a is able to function as this paradoxical object-cause because it is the remnant of the Real, of R1, that remains in the subject after the subject enters the symbolic order and is thereby an element of the Other, being the lack that persists on account of the inability of language to connect with material reality. Fantasy uses objet a in order to maintain the consistency of reality. For this consistency to operate, some object must be postivised such that it can stand in for the inherent lack that would otherwise threaten consciousness (Žižek, 1997, p.81; 2001a, p.149). This object is then retroactively posited as the cause of desire.

Žižek further elevates the concept of objet a in The Parallax View (Žižek, 2006a), such that it becomes ‘The object of psychoanalysis … the core of the psychoanalytic experience’ (p.19). Žižek identifies objet a as being the cause of the Parallax gap (the incommensurable gap between two objects of a totality), objet a being the unknowable ‘X’ that forever eludes the symbolic and that produces a multitude of symbolic responses through which the subject seeks to give it form. Objet a eludes the grasp of the symbolic, avoiding description, because it is produced by the subject in the formation of its own gaze. It is an indelible, material ‘stain’ within that gaze that signifies the constituting effect of the subject’s own inclusion in the reality they have constructed. In light of its ineffable form, objet a is a, if not the, central concern of fantasy. Fantasy constructs desire around the objet a; fantasy does not seek to satisfy desire, but rather constructs it, teaching the subject how to desire (Žižek, 1997, p.7). Fantasy, in the Lacanian sense, is not opposed to reality, but rather structures reality and protects the subject from the effect of the Real (Kay, 2003, p.163; Evans, 1996, p.60, Žižek, 1997, p.1).
Fantasy, Ideology and Universality

Fantasy has an intimate relationship with ideology. Ideology presents the social to the knowing subject as being a consistent entity. Fantasy also achieves this task by portraying the dislocations which threaten that consistency as antagonisms that are external to social life, and thus amenable to corrective action. For example, ideology and fantasy operate within capitalism by presenting market failures (evidence of the inconsistency of the capitalist discourse) as the fault of external factors, such as government intervention. In this manner capitalist ideology maintains its consistency. The consistency produced by ideology allows for the prospect of universality – that discourses like capital are ‘natural’ and ‘objective’. The issue of the universal brings together the concepts of jouissance, objet a, fantasy, ideology, desire, and the Real. These elements interact to produce the abstract universal, that is, the imaginary vista of a shared aspirational horizon through which political communities organise themselves. As such, the abstract universal is constructed in ideological fantasy. Moreover, it is supported, or rather motivated, by jouissance, particularly the jouissance which the subject obtains through the participating in the symbolic order, J2.

The subject obtains jouissance from abstract universal imaginaries because they appear to promise social fullness by suturing the lack in the Other, by eradicating its inconsistencies. The suture occurs through the idea that the fully inclusive, consensual Society is not impossible; such as the dream of Third Way politics, that a middle approach is available that gives the benefits of economic growth whilst protecting social justice. Abstract universal imaginaries are at the heart of politics, although, as shall be developed in Chapter 3, they cannot produce radical change but, rather, only minor alterations to prevailing social arrangements. These minor changes pivot around a fundamental limit point within the discursive structures that support those arrangements (that is, the Real). Illustrating local, political expressions of these universalising imaginaries, the New Zealand National Party, in their ‘Vision for New Zealand’ state, ‘The National Party seeks a safe, prosperous and successful New Zealand that creates opportunities for all New Zealanders to reach their personal goals and dreams’ (NationalParty, 2006). Similarly the vision statement of the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand states ‘In our Vision, Aotearoa New Zealand is a place where people respect each other and the natural world we share. It is healthy, peaceful and richly diverse’ (GreenParty, 2006) Both these visions exemplify wonderfully the substance and tone of the abstract universal.The abstract universal, however, can never be fully universal because it is always an abstraction of a particular object, typically, a political community. This particularistic object is unable to construct itself as universal because of the lack inherent in its constitution. The lack is occluded by fantasy, however, and the abstract universal is able to organise subjects’ experiences of jouissance. Despite this, the abstract universal remains split between two elements – one negative, the other a positivisation – that act as an embodiment of the effect of the Real: the nodal point and the universal exception. The nodal point is a positivisation of the Real, occurring as it does at a point where the abstract universal fails. As such, the nodal point is the component around which particular elements are organised and condensed in order to suture the universal. As an example, the signifier ‘New Zealander’ provides a nodal point for the structuring of New Zealand identity. At a point where national identity might break down because of a conflict between particular elements, such as Maori and Pakeha, ‘New Zealander’ is able to condense these particular elements and suture the lack inherent in a political community like New Zealand. This nodal point corresponds to the objet a, and also resonates with Ernesto Laclau’s concept of the empty signifier, which will be returned to in greater detail in chapter 3.Of more political significance than the condensing effect of the nodal point, for Žižek, is the existence of an exception to that universal, that which Laclau terms the constitutive outside. This exception is conceptualised in two forms, the concrete universal and the symptom. The concrete universal is a key site for any political formation seeking to evoke a radical dislocation. Here, dislocation refers to failures within the discursive structures by which political communities organise that are caused by encounters with events and conditions that couldn’t be envisaged within the terms of those structures (the Real, R2). Dislocation produces both a sense of lack and the desire to fill that lack (Stavrakakis, 1999, p.68). In this sense, dislocation has both a destructive and constructive influence on the social (Laclau, 1990, p.39).
Concrete Universality and the Symptom
The concrete universal must be excluded in order for the abstract universal to appear coherent. The ability of the concrete universal to subvert that exclusion and become a source of political change turns upon its ability to operate as an affect of the Real. That is, the concrete universal exists outside of the terms of the dominant universal horizon. From the perspective of this imaginary, the concrete universal is the impossible, it is Real. As an illustration, one element of the abstract universal imaginary of western capital could be considered that the ‘deserved’ wealth of those members at the upper echelons of society occurs because democratic capitalist societies are inherently meritocratic. However, what must be excluded from this formulation is the poverty of the Third World, the existence of which is required in order for this wealth to be maintained. Without this exclusion, the abstract universal would not be able to be cohesively formed. The excluded element, the concrete universal, constitutes the Truth of the abstract universal in that its exclusion is a necessary one. In order for the concrete universal to exert political pressure upon the abstract universal, it must be represented within that same universal, undermining its coherence. The form which it takes in doing so is as the symptom. The symptom ‘reveals the truth’ of the abstract universal within the very terms by which the abstract universal is constituted. The symptom does so by embodying the presence of the Real imposed by the concrete universal, by constituting it as a force that cannot be fully domesticated by the abstract universal.

In order for the system to survive the existence within itself of the symptom, to functionally operate, the symptom must be domesticated. This domestication predominately occurs by the inclusion of the symptom within the ideological fantasy of the abstract universal. Ideological fantasy, the symbolic component of the imaginary, has the role of presenting the symbolic to subjects as full and coherent. By doing so, ideological fantasy offers the prospect of Jouissance. The dislocating effect of the symptom is pacified in ideological fantasy by being interpreted as an external element that has to be fixed e.g. a market failure caused by a rise in the minimum wage, rather than a constitutive failure that goes to the core of capitalism. Alternatively, the symptom might be portrayed as an external antagonism that is preventing the full expression of society e.g. solo mothers exploiting the benefit system, causing taxes to rise.

Hence the strong relationship between the symptom and objet a; the symptom often stands in as that which needs to be eliminated to allow the full expression of society. The removal of the symptom becomes an object of desire. Additionally, these methods of portraying the disruptive -effect of the symptom produce jouissance in that they keep a distance between the abstract universal horizon and the very impossibility of its construction. Thus, while ideological fantasy conceals the radical negativity of the social, preventing the subject from the experiences of anxiety, trauma and dislocation which come from naked exposure to the Real, the symptom also gives rise to the inherent negativity that exists as an excess to the universal.
The relationship between the symptom, ideological fantasy, objet a and concrete universality will be elaborated upon further in chapters 4 and 5, particularly the jouissance that is generated by the symptom. Indeed, the symptom, the concrete universal, and the various measures used to domesticate these subversive forces, constitute the basis of the methodological position and political approach at the heart of this thesis. The key to this methodological position, both in the sense of domesticating the symptom and exploiting it as a disruptive factor, is the affective force of jouissance inherent in both modalities of the universal. That is, one cannot simply examine the social only as the symbolic realm, but rather enter into analysis of both the lack and excesses produced by the Real. The following chapter deals with the limits of the interpretive approach, as is characterised by the work of Ernesto Laclau. That discussion leads into a further elaboration of the roles that universality and jouissance play in the construction of social transformation, and of their reconstitution of the notion of dialectical materialism.