Friday, July 24, 2015

Che Vuoi?

...and if ever truthfully answered, wouldn't the phantasmatic coordinates of fantasy be destroyed?
If "individuation is a relation conceived as a pure or absolute between, a between understood as fully independent of or external to its terms - and thus a between that can just as well be described as 'between' nothing at all" (Hallward 154), its status is then that of a pure antagonism. Its structure was deployed by Lacan apropos sexual difference which, as a difference, precedes the two terms between which it is the difference: the point of Lacan's "formulas of sexuation" is that both masculine and feminine position are two ways to avoid the deadlock of the difference as such. This is why Lacan's claim that sexual difference is "real-impossible" is strictly synonymous with his claim that "there is no sexual relationship." Sexual difference is for Lacan not a firm set of "static" symbolic oppositions and inclusions/exclusions (heterosexual normativity that 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. And the same goes for the political difference (class struggle): the difference between Left and Right is not only the difference between the two terms within a shared field, it is "real" since it is not possible to provide its neutral description - the difference between the Left and the Right appears differently if perceived from the Left and from the Right: for the first, it signals the antagonism which cuts across the entire social field (the antagonism concealed by thje Right), while the Right perceives itself as the force of moderation and social stability and organic unity, with the Left reduced to the position of an intruder that disturbs this organic stability of the social body - for the Right, the Left is as such "extreme."
- Slavoj Zizek, "Deleauze and the Lacanian Real"

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