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To this [[impasse]], Žižek counters with the Lacanian Real. Žižek has consistently argued, following [[Lacan]], that it is only by [[understanding]] the symbolic law to be rendered incomplete by an internally constitutive limit – the Real – that we can [[understand]] that law as ultimately [[contingent]] and subject to historical transformation. He argues not that the law excludes some set of acts or identities, but that the constitutive [[exclusion]] of the law is its own [[impossibility]] or gap. Žižek uses the [[logic]] of the Real to critique Butler’s understanding of the subject’s unconscious attachments to subjection. In ''[[The Psychic Life of Power]]'' (1997), Butler posits the unconscious as the site of “passionate attachments” to the very laws that pathologize [[desire]] and restrict its forms. To this model of the unconscious, Žižek opposes Lacan’s assertion that “[[the fundamental fantasy]] (the stuff ‘primordial attachments’ are made of) is already a filler, a [[formation]] which covers up a certain gap/void” (''TS'': 265). In [[other]] [[words]], the Real of the subject’s desire is not constituted by a passionate attachment to some set of [[repressed]] or [[foreclosed]] desires prohibited by the symbolic law, but is constituted by a [[fantasy]] that covers over the impossibility at the heart of all desires.
This differential understanding of [[The Subject|the subject ]] also grounds Butler’s disagreement with Žižek over [[Sexual Difference|sexual difference]]. In ''[[Bodies that Matter]]'', Butler critiques Žižek for suggesting that the Real is produced through the [[foreclosure]] induced by the threat of castration on the basis that “Žižek’s theory thus evacuates the ‘contingency’ of its contingency” because it relies upon a fixed notion of castration that is always already gendered by the [[Oedipus complex]] (Butler 1993: 196). She goes on to [[suggest]] that what is [[lacking]] in Žižek’s formulation of the [[traumatic]] kernel of the Real is the very social and historical specificity of each one of his examples of [[trauma]] (including the [[family]], the camps and the [[Gulag]]) (ibid.: 202). Put simply, Butler’s real problem with the Real is that it is a [[concept]] that she believes evades history and thus political appropriation. As she writes: “The problem here is that there is no way within this framework to politicize the relation between [[language]] and the real” (ibid.: 207). As a feminist philosopher and political theorist, Butler is invested in the field of the political, and because of this [[choice]] to align herself with history, she refuses, by definition, to accept a concept that she understands to be [[outside]] of history. By applying the same logic, Butler takes on Lacan’s assertion that “[[the Woman does not exist]]”, arguing that positioning the Woman as the always already “lost referent” is to preclude the possibility of her resignification (ibid.: 218).
In ''[[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology|The Ticklish Subject]]'', Žižek responds by reiterating his point that sexual difference and symbolic castration and the “[[Woman]]” have no positive [[existence]], but are the traumatic residues of the failure of the Symbolic fully to [[capture]] or define us. As he puts it in ''[[Contingency, Hegemony, Universality]]'', “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|sexual difference]]’ will mean” (''CHU'': 111). The fact that sexual difference is Real means that all [[signifiers]] of [[sexual identity]] are precisely not transhistorical norms, but are fully historically and culturally specific and may therefore be subject to reconfiguration.
