3. Beyond Interpretation

Žižek’s conception of universality is based on his version of dialectical materialist logic. The first element of this logic is normally well understood, but the materialism is often set aside. It is this materialism, however – the materialism of jouissance – that gives Žižek’s perspective on universality its analytic power. Žižek emphasises the need for a true Lacanian analysis to go beyond purely structural accounts of social life and enter into the realm of jouissance. Without the concept of jouissance and other positivisations of the Real, most notably fantasy, the Lacanian conceptual apparatus losses much of its explanatory power.

There are few better examples of the importance of the materialist position than the gap between Žižek’s work and that of fellow Lacanian political theorist Ernesto Laclau. Laclau and Žižek have been engaged in a long-running dialogue. This dialogue started from positions that were initially very similar, working within the general sphere of post-Marxist radical democracy. Although each took on the other’s work uncritically, there were, and continue to be, considerable political and theoretical similarities between Laclau and Žižek. These similarities are especially strong around the issue of universality, particularly noticeable in Laclau’s use of terms like discourse, hegemony and the empty signifier, all of which strongly resonate with the Lacanian notion of objet a. An affinity also exists between Laclau and Žižek’s interpretations of the negative effect that the Real has upon the social, worked out in their concepts of dislocation and antagonism.
Žižek, however, has increasingly moved away from the post-Marxist, radical democratic emphasis that continues to characterise Laclau’s project. Žižek has made this move because he believes that such an approach, which does not move beyond the bounds of interpretation, is unable to displace global capitalism. Instead, Žižek has placed more emphasis on the issue of the economy and, more importantly for this debate, Žižek has shown how any political movement which deals solely at the level of language, and thus interpretation, is a limited one. Instead, the political traction that is needed for social transformation requires that one engages with the roles that fantasy and jouissance play in the constitution of political positions. This chapter will review the limits of the Laclauian approach and consider the value of fantasy and jouissance for political analysis. This chapter will than move on the relationship between universality and jouissance, embodied by the concrete universal and the symptom.

Laclau’s interpretation of Lacan

Laclau’s particular use of Lacanian categories has incited considerable debate (see J. Butler, Laclau, & Žižek, 2000; Daly, 1999a, 1999b; Glynos & Stavrakakis, 2003; Laclau, 2003; Stavrakakis, 1997; Stavrakakis, 1999). Glynos and Stavrakakis both acknowledge the theoretical affinities between Laclau’s work and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Indeed both these authors suggest, and Laclau himself concurs, that Lacan’s influence on Laclau’s work has increased (Glynos & Stavrakakis, 2003, p.111). This is readily apparent in Laclau’s use of Lacan’s negative ontology, as it pertains to the social/symbolic, and his sense that images of universality are constructed through discourse, hegemony, and the empty signifier. It is to these similarities between Laclau and Lacan that we shall now turn, before turning to the important differences between Laclau’s and Žižek’s readings of Lacan. Discourse and hegemony are the concepts most strongly shared by Laclau and Žižek. Discourse is Laclau’s primary concept; indeed his approach is labeled ‘Discourse theory’ (Torfing, 1999). Discourse is the linguistic totality around which social reality is constructed. Its fundamental premise is shared with Lacanian semiotics and developed from the shift that occurred in modern philosophy away from transcendentalism and towards language. The primary proposition of this shift was that the condition of possibility of any thought or action depends on the construction – through language – of a structured and meaningful field. This structured field is discourse (Laclau, 1993, p.431). Vitally, Laclau adds that the structured totality of discourse is never completely closed. This fundamental impossibility means that politics revolves around the battle to fix meanings in a discourse that can never be totally fixed. This battle for meanings, which in Discourse theory operates only in an interpretive sense, cannot bring wide ranging change, only small changes around a central axis. Only an intervention through the dislocatory power of the Real can force such a radical change. Nonetheless, the political significance of battles to fix meanings should not be underestimated, though it needs to be remembered that such battles get played out within the existing terms of a discourse and thus the outcomes circumscribed by such discourse.Laclau labels any partial fixation of a discourse ‘hegemonic’. A hegemonic discourse fixes meanings around nodal points. Laclau labels these nodal points ‘empty signifiers’, a concept that we shall return to in further detail below. Hegemony is a key link between Laclau and Žižek because of its similarity with Žižek’s conception of universality. Laclau contends that hegemony occurs through particular elements being presented as having universal address (Laclau, 2000b, p.207). Thus a straight translation is possible between Laclau’s notion of hegemony and Žižek’s concept of the abstract universal. However, as we shall soon develop, Laclau’s limited embrace of the Real and of dialectical materialism means that he is unable to view universality as a totality in the same manner as Žižek. Rather his conception of universality, as hegemony, is limited to the abstract universal. Laclau does develop a notion of the constitutive outside, similar to Žižek’s idea of the universal exception, but this concept does not have the same intimate link to the abstract universal as Žižek’s ‘exception’. We shall return to this point latter in this chapter.Laclau’s most productive contribution to psychoanalytic political theory is his work around the empty signifier, which finds its correlate in Lacan’s objet a. The empty signifier allows Laclau to discuss the relationship between the discursive and non-discursive domains. Empty signifiers are produced where the limit-point of a discourse appears, at the point where the discourse comes into contact with other discourses and divergences appear that need to be sutured. As such, the empty signifier signifies the emergence of an absence. Various political communities compete to ‘hegemonise’ the empty signifier with content that is particular to their own life-styles and interests. As the place holder of the presence of absence, the empty signifier takes the structural role of the universal. Indeed, the empty signifier becomes a nodal point, if not the nodal point, of the abstract universal imaginary.

Divergences between Laclau and Lacan/ Žižek
Despite the similarity between Laclau and Žižek’s work, there are also some notable absences in Laclau’s embrace of Lacan, particularly the concepts of fantasy and jouissance. These absences cannot be easily ignored, particularly because of their centrality to Lacan’s thought. Indeed, Glynos and Stavrakakis argue:
The problem is that, without taking into account enjoyment, the whole Lacanian framework loses most of its explanatory force. For example, what can possibly account for the constitutively of desire if jouissance is not accepted as the absent cause of human desire? Furthermore, such enjoyment helps us answer, in a more concrete way, what is at stake in socio-political identification and identity formation, suggesting that support of social fantasies is partially rooted in the jouissance of the body. What is at stake in these fields, according to Lacanian theory, is not only symbolic coherence and discursive closure, but also enjoyment, the jouissance animating human desire. (2003, p, 120)

Laclau does embrace the concept of the Real, but only in a limited and negative manner, one that does not, for him, necessitate the use of fantasy and jouissance. Rather Laclau uses the Real, often implicitly, as a limit to the discursive, an internal limit which prevents his work from falling in pure idealism (Glynos and Stavrakakis 2003, p.113). Laclau did not always posit the Real as in internal limit to the social. The fundamental thesis of his seminal text Hegemony and Socialist Strategy was the post-Marxism caveat ‘society does not exist’, but this was considered to be caused by external antagonisms faced by the universal imaginaries of political communities, rather than the internal limit-point of those imagined horizons, that is, the Real. It has only been through dialogue with Žižek that Laclau has come to differentiate between internal limits to a discourse (for him, dislocation, for Žižek, the Real) and limits that are external to such (antagonism).Thus, for Glynos and Stavrakakis, Laclau and Lacan have very similar positions in relation to the manner in which the Real disrupts symbolisation; dislocation, as the negative effect of the Real, is a good indication of this embrace (p.116). By contrast, Laclau does not acknowledge the positive, psychical effects that the Real has on symbolisation and the construction of political positions, that is, fantasy and jouissance. These effects represent attempts to positivise the lack that the Real causes within the symbolic order. For Žižek, the subject experiences these through objet a, in the drive of desire and the desire to fulfill drive, with objects that will give a sense of cohesion and coherence (for example, political ideologies). Such attempts to obtain fullness are, of course, always fantasmatic. At the same time as fantasy signals that limits exist to a universalising imaginary, it attempts to fill the void that those limit-points create within the subject.

Consequently, a vital distinction exists between the empty signifier in Laclau’s work and objet a in Žižek’s: both signal the presence of an interminable absence within the symbolic order and the subject. A politically significant difference exists between them, however, insofar as objet a contains elements of all three Lacanian registers (of the imaginary, symbolic and Real). Alternatively, Laclau’s notion of the empty signifier acknowledges the Real and then, staying with Lacan’s terminology, conflates the symbolic and imaginary. The effect of this is to understate (at best) the role of affect in the construction of discursive positions (that is, the impact of the imaginary’s quest for wholeness). Glynos and Stavrakakis suggest that Laclau’s conflation of the imaginary and symbolic levels occurs because of Laclau’s avoidance of the notion of jouissance. They contend that Laclau ignores jouissance because his work is framed in purely formal and structural terms rather than a substantial focus which includes the body, which is the site of jouissance (Glynos & Stavrakakis, 2003, p.119).Thus while for Laclau the empty signifier fulfills the same function as objet a, it is a purely discursive concept filling a Real lack. For Laclau, the influence of the Real upon the empty signifier does not have the same kind of materiality, through jouissance, as with objet a. Nor is the empty signifier an object of fantasy like objet a in Žižek’s work. Because of these exclusions, the empty signifier does not have the explanatory value of objet a in terms of the manner in which a discourse or ideology gains a grip on the subject. Nonetheless despite these limitations the empty signifier does have some discursive explanatory value. This value lies in its structural location, representing the gaps that persist within discourse, held open by a class of signifier that is necessarily empty. Conversely, as has already been noted, Laclau does not attribute to the empty signifier the same imaginary and Real role as with Lacan’s objet a. Nevertheless, because of its structure value, the term ‘empty signifier’ will continue to be used throughout this text, with the proviso that it takes on all the meaning of objet a, but is projected for a more specific use, that of representing a constitutive gap within a discursive structure.
In a similar vein, Žižek dismisses deconstructive and post-structuralist theory because it overlooks the jouissantic excess which operates in discourse (Daly, 1999b, p.80). In doing so, Žižek contends that the post-structuralist approach places too much emphasis on the semiotic contingency of the discursive realm rather than the interminable impress of the Real upon the human condition, regularly experienced through trauma and enjoyment (p.76).Trauma and enjoyment are part of the non-discursive ‘beyond’ to the social that Laclau rejects. Without the concept of jouissance, however, it is difficult to consider what would be animating the play of the social and the symbolic order in the Laclauian conception of discourse (Daly, 1999a, p.227). This is the fundamental question for all theories of ideology, universality or indeed any play of the social; what accounts for the grip with which an ideology holds a subject? (Glynos, 2001, p.199). Glynos and Stavrakakis, in their discussion paper on Laclau’s embrace of Lacan, contend:
The importance psychoanalysis attaches to the notion of the Real qua fantasmatically structured jouissance suggests that symptomal analyses of the discursive or interpretative kind, though perhaps a necessary prerequisite, are often not sufficient to effect a displacement in the social subject’s psychic economy. (Glynos & Stavrakakis, 2003, p.122)
From this perspective, the concept of jouissance is needed in order to produce an adequate account of discourse. In reply, Laclau acknowledges the role of jouissance but argues that all of the concepts that Glynos and Stavrakakis state are missing from his work are present in his use of the term discourse, although Laclau acknowledges that his use of many Lacanian terms is often only implied (Laclau, 1993, p.278). Glynos and Stavrakakis, he continues, unadvisedly produce a duality of discourse and jouissance, whereas it is more productive to construct the two as a dualism, approached through a notion that discourse comprises a ‘relational complex’ (p.283). Such an approach is, I believe, mistaken. While Laclau argues that jouissance and fantasy are tacitly included within his concepts of hegemony and discourse, his work loses an explanatory thrust that is available within Žižek’s explicit appropriation of these Lacanian concepts because Laclau does not specifically focus on the postivised elements of the Real, specifically fantasy and jouissance. These concepts are not additions to the symbolic, but rather they condition the symbolic; they are the very material pre-condition upon which the symbolic is constructed. Therefore, they cannot be simply implicitly assumed within the realms of the symbolic or discourse, but instead should be considered explanatory factors in their own right. Despite his assertions to the contrary, by only implicitly acknowledging the materialism of the Real, Laclau’s work lacks the explanatory force evident in Žižek.

My reply to Laclau’s position suggests that Žižek’s form of psychopolitical analysis provides greater potential for inducing socio-political change than one that approaches discourse as a psychically neutral entity that can be handled in a methodologistic manner. That said, Žižek’s political analysis does lack the textual subtly that Laclau provides when discussing the plurality of discourses which circulate around the lack that constitutes the social. It is in this role that I consider Laclau’s work most useful. Two concepts in particular that Laclau has developed – which have been introduced above – are productive for political analysis; antagonism and dislocation. Productively, they enable analysis to differentiate between socio-political tensions that emerge as a consequence of the ahistorical, structural void (marked by the notions of the Real, objet a, and jouissance) and those divisions that occur as a consequence of contingent, cultural differences, this being an issue with which Žižek continues to wrestle (Žižek, 2000b, p.308-316).


Advantages of Laclau’s approach: Antagonism(s)

Antagonism refers, for Laclau, to the effects of culturally contingent differences that produce limit-points to/within the objectivity of particularistic discursive positions (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985, p.122). As such, antagonisms introduce a principle of negativity into discourse. It is at the point of antagonism that hegemonic battles for meaning are waged (Howarth & Stavrakakis, 2000, p.9). Thus antagonisms are vital for politics as they are the point at which meanings can be changed by interests and forces outside of the prevailing discourse. Although Laclau and Žižek notionally agree with the concept of antagonism, Laclau’s political position does not extend beyond the idea that culturally-contingent antagonisms alter social meanings. Instead, his initial approach to this issue appeared to assume the existence of an elemental void (the Real), whose dislocating effects are of no significance relative to the antagonisms that develop between actually existing socio-political positions.

A conflation of antagonism and dislocation is not an uncommon error. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau and Mouffe assumed that antagonism and dislocation were one in the same, considering antagonism to be responsible for the impossibility of society (Torfing, 1999, p.128). This position rides a fine line with the post-structuralist definition. Here it is the presence of the ‘Other’ which prevents the full identity of the subject or system; the existence of the capitalist, for example, is antagonistic for the worker, the obstacle to the formation of a proletariat that is ‘for itself’ (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985, p.125). This, however, assumes that the impossibility of society is always external, rather than internal to society, that the locus of impossibility is proto-transcendental to society. As Žižek points out, what is negated in the concept of social antagonism is the negation that has always already occurred to discourse by a force – the Real – that is both prior yet wholly internal to it, that exists in a condition with the social, as Lacan put it, of extimacy (Žižek, 2005a) .

As a consequence of Žižek’s argument, Laclau has since move beyond the post-structuralist position, adopting Žižek’s critique of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Žižek, 2005a, p.271-285). Here Žižek suggests that it is important to distinguish between a form of antagonism that functions as an a priori limit-point to the social, the very impossibility around which the social is based, and a form of antagonism that operates as conflict between subject positions (p.276). This ‘double’ of antagonism means that while the latter antagonism may very well be an actual antagonism for the subject, at the same time it is just a foil for the true, constitutive antagonism. The ideological illusion in operation here is that if the antagonism between subjects is removed, then lack would also be thought to disappear. That elemental lack does not disappear, however, and, instead, appears with naked force when the subject’s defences against it are removed. Thus Žižek suggests ‘(I)t is precisely in the moment when we achieve victory over the enemy in the antagonistic struggle that we experience antagonism in its most radical dimension’ (p. 274). Žižek’s point is that it is the Real which is responsible for the impossibility of society, rather than historically contingent antagonisms. In response, Laclau developed the concept of ‘dislocation’.

Dislocation, as an ‘unrepresentable’ moment, draws upon the notion of the Real to a greater degree than the concept of antagonism, the latter referring more to subjects’ attempts to assuage the initial dislocation that is caused by the Real (Stavrakakis, 1997, p.126). Thus dislocation stages, through repeated failures (for example, of socio-political policy to resolve disputes between diverging social interests) the elemental lack around which the social is based. Dislocation, by being in itself unrepresentable, is exactly what shows the limits of every discursive form, of each one’s inability to represent once and for all the essence of the social, to symbolise the Real of the social in a definite way (p.124). Thus, a dislocation occurs when events happen that cannot be domesticated or integrated into the existing structure of the discourse (Torfing, 1999, p.301). In light of its thorough-going disruption to prevailing discourse, dislocation offers the prospect of radical social change, pointing to the political significance of situations such as when a discourse is confronted with an example that it cannot bear. To return to a previous discussion, this ‘unbearable’ example is, in Žižek’s terms, the constitutive exception to the universal, that is, its symptom, the concrete universal.

The difference between antagonism and dislocation turns upon their diverging conceptualisatons of the Real. Dislocation presupposes that the Real is internal to discourse, disrupting a discursive formation from within. The notion of antagonism, alternatively, sees the effect of the Real lying in the limits that become imposed because of conflicts that occur between incommensurable discursive positions. Antagonism operates only within the existing limits of the discourses that are used to map the social and thus poses no Real threat to the structure of the social (Homer, 2001, p.9-10). It brings about change only in the sense of a revolution of revolving sameness, a multiplicity of responses to the same fundamental lack. Antagonism thus has the effect of forestalling the radical kinds of social transformation that are forestaged by dislocation. Antagonisms negate alternative points of view in addition to occluding the lack upon which the development of multiple options depends. The ability of social conflicts to generate a range of possible positions, say over a given policy issue, covers up that initial lack. In Lacanian terms, antagonism vehicularises objet a, giving it solid form through the production of fantasies about the many and various resolutions to conflict situations that might emerge. The subject thus receives jouissance from the very presence of an antagonism because it offers to them the prospect of social fullness; if only the antagonism were to disappear, then true society would be possible.

The use of Laclau in further argumentation

The above differentiation between antagonism and dislocation enables us to draw out a subtlety within the concept of antagonism that was not previously evident: we can differentiate between three different types of antagonism. The first is the condition of ‘pure antagonism’, as represented by Laclau’s’ idea of dislocation. Secondly, there exists ‘external antagonism’, Žižek’s response to Laclau’s notion of antagonism. External antagonisms are the fantasmatic postulations of an element that is responsible for the failure of society. Finally, we can almost return to Laclau’s original position of antagonism – as that which is responsible for the impossibility of society – as developed in his early notion of a ‘social antagonism’. Social antagonisms are the deadlocks that occur within the social fabric. Social antagonisms are not necessarily fantasised external antagonisms, although they are often presented in this manner. However, the main affect of social antagonisms is to lock into conflict competing perspectives between which no common ground can be found, e.g. the clash between workers and capitalists can be considered a social antagonism because there is no common ground or point of translation between the positions, despite various fantasmatic efforts to suture this gap, such as the trade union movement. This particular antagonism can be posited as an external antagonism and might indeed be so in some cases e.g. where the capitalist is preventing the worker from achieving his full identity. Nonetheless, this masks the fundamental clash of incommensurable forces. The idea of a true social antagonism is extended further in the following chapter, particularly in relation to Žižek’s notion of political parallax.

The triad of positions around antagonism suggest that there is an intimate link between jouissance, objet a, fantasy, antagonism, and symptom. The symptom – say, for example, climate change – emerges within a political community as the object-cause of desire (objet a), as the sublime object that both embodies the affect of the Real, yet also stands in for the lack of Real, providing jouissance through the impossible prospect of a suture. In the case of the symptom, it becomes an objet a because fantasy constructs the symptom as that which is standing in the way of Jouissance. Thus the symptom becomes an external antagonism; the symptom is presented as a ‘straw’ enemy, the ‘Other’ that is preventing the full expression of society and the abstract universal imaginary. Fantasy can then extend to the idea that the society’s ills are the result of the Other’s presence. The symptom thus becomes a contingent object that can be removed; its cause is presented as an external antagonism.

In ideological fantasy, the removable of the antagonism is projected as bringing about the eradication of the symptom. This is, however, a necessarily false fantasy – the removal of the antagonism will merely expose the universal imaginaries, that bind together the political community, to the dislocatory effect of the Real: the eradication of the supposed cause of division will remove the unconscious supplement upon which the universal imaginary depends for its form, exposing the community’s self-perception to its own inconsistency. As a consequence, a socially important discourse requires the presence of antagonism and its symptom so that stability can be maintained. Moreover, they become the points of enjoyment, of jouissance, that bind subjects to the discourse.As an illustration, the hegemonic global capitalist imaginary is that of ‘development’, which has the built-in assumption that all nations have the capacity to be ‘developed’. As will be further argued in this thesis, particularly in chapter seven, which focuses on the discourse of poverty, this is not the case. Rather, ‘developing’ countries are the concrete universal of capitalism: they are required to stay in poverty for the maintenance of the global capitalist system; they maintain the over-supply of labour which produces the low wages and low costs of agricultural produce that global capital relies on for the support of an ever-increasing desire for consumption within the so-called developed world. For this capitalist imaginary to remain, its fundamental impossibility must be displaced to an external cause. Thus the symptoms of its failures, such as poverty, are posited as the result of an antagonism, such as corruption in Third World governments. These symptoms and antagonisms become a point of enjoyment for the capitalist subject; it dilutes their sense of responsibility for these ills and thus maintains the hegemonic capitalist horizons. To this end, the imaginary of fully globalised development for everyone can be sustained. Without this antagonism, the system would be faced with the full dislocatory effect of the Real, in the form of the concrete universal, that is, the persistence of structurally-induced poverty.

In conclusion, Žižek argues that the discursive structures of ‘the universal’ exist through supports that are material in effect – fantasy, desire, and more particularly, jouissance. In so doing, he notes the value of Laclau’s notions of antagonism and dislocation, particularly when coupled with the ideas of discourse, hegemony and the empty signifier. Indeed, Žižek has described social antagonism as ‘perhaps the most radical breakthrough in modern social theory’ (Žižek, 2005a, p.271), because, in developing the concept of antagonism, Laclau has been able to incorporate the Lacanian Real as a tool for social and ideological analysis (Žižek, 1989, p.162). That said, it is evident that his appropriation of the Lacanian Real limits its effects to that of a primal lack that comprises the necessary precondition for the play of textual multiplicity. In doing so, Laclau is able to demonstrate why social constructions are necessarily contingent. That said, he cannot then explain why symbolic formations sustain themselves in spite of this contingency. Žižek, in contrast, emphasizes the productive effects that the Real continues to have upon the constitution of political positions, ‘long after’ its a priori dislocation of those positions, particularly through the machinations of fantasy, desire, and jouissance. More importantly, in acknowledging the materiality of universality through an enlarged conception of the Real, Žižek not only exposes the political makeup of social constructions, but also the political nature of the non-contingent and material exception upon which these social constructions are based. When developed against a background of Hegelian dialectics, these notions give rise to a rebirthed notion of universality. It is to the materiality of this universality that we shall now turn.