Queer Theory, Political Economy, and Life Beyond the State
30 May 2024 - Otto Vogel
I will admit, I never found Žižek all that impressive. This makes his latest book, Christian Atheism actually impressive. It is worse than I expected. While a lot of academics make a hubbub about how this is Žižek getting involved in the nitty-gritty of christian theology, I don’t think that reveals what this text actually is. This text is paradoxical; it is Žižek repeating himself for the hundredth time and yet he’s gotten worse at it. One might say this comes from a place of consistency or a commitment to principles. But consistency over time requires inconsistency in what you say; it is in the nature of time that things fucking change.
This book is eclectic, something Žižek is well known for. I for one find his rapid shifting style between supposedly deep philosophy and pop culture more tiresome than either insightful or disorienting.
Žižek’s tone is self indulgent. He constantly speaks of himself. He can’t help himself but try to reply to his critics. They’re almost always glossed as “critics”, without giving them the dignity of being named. Disregarding the potential psychoanalytic implications of this, it is bad scholarship. If you don’t name your critics, I’m not sure that they exist, or if you are portraying them accurately.
Let’s look at the first almost-named critic (his name is only in a footnote.) Mark Carrigan, in his essay “What would the young Slavoj Žižek think of the old Slavoj Žižek?”, calls out how Žižek has moved further Right, and in particular has published what most would call anti-trans articles with the distinctly anti-trans publication Compact. Here Žižek is almost refreshingly open.
“My counterpoint is here an obvious one: can we really put woke and trans demands into the series of progressive achievements, so that the changes in our daily language (the primacy of “they,” etc.) are just the next step in the long struggle against sexism? My answer is a resounding NO: the changes advocated and enforced by trans- and woke-ideology are themselves largely “regressive,” they are attempts of the reigning ideology to appropriate (and take the critical edge off) new protest movements.”
This is somewhat fascinating. What exactly is the relationship between the “trans- and woke- ideology” and the “reigning ideology”? Are they one and the same thing? If so, how does transphobia still exist, and not just exist, but be very common? When did “trans- and woke- ideology” become a moment of the “reigning ideology”? How are the new protest movements being appropriated by the “reigning ideology” via “trans- and woke- ideology” via “changes in our daily language”? What about “woke and trans demands” that aren’t about daily language? There are a number surrounding medical access, surrounding transphobic violence, surrounding intimate partner violence, and so on. Why is Žižek so concerned with “daily language”? The core is we either have a relationship of more-or-less identity here (“reigning ideology” is “trans- and woke- ideology”, a laughable claim) or we have a claim of instrumentalization (“trans- and woke- ideology” is (now?) a tool of the “reigning ideology” to be used against new protest movements.)
We also find Žižek failing to understand dynamics in India later in this same paragraph. He attributes to “the woke” a time when he was criticized in India by apologists for the caste structure for speaking approvingly of Ambedkar. He was apparently “told that the caste system is a key part of Indian tradition that eludes the Western egalitarian notion of emancipation.” But this is odd, isn’t it? Ambedkar was Indian, he was born in Madhya Pradesh as a Mahar Dalit. By claiming that Ambedkar’s anti-caste stance is rejected by “Indians” because it is “Western”, Žižek is buying into an idea that Ambedkar’s position could only have come from his western education, instead of from the material conditions of oppression and violence that he grew up under. By positioning “emancipation” as a “European” ideal, Žižek essentially buys into the reactionary myth that the subaltern or the dispossessed are only able to oppose their oppression through being taught how to do so by academics and other intellectuals—in particular, “Western” academics. Combined with his general statements about how “[t]here is thus an element of truth in the well-known Rightist diagnosis that Europe today presents a unique case of deliberate self-destruction…” this points to something potentially much more dangerous.
This book is deliberately Žižek’s; he has written it in a way that nobody else could have. With all the manuscripts that were made available to him before publication and all the personal correspondences, he has implicated himself as uniquely capable of writing this book.
We should discuss Žižek’s citation practices. This is difficult, because his citations are a mess. There is no standardization. Some of these are so bad that it would be unacceptable for an undergrad to make these mistakes.
This is, bluntly put, unacceptable. Žižek is a well known, influential author. He has the ability to pay a student to go through and do his citations for him, or to have the bare minimum practices. For those of you out there who want to avoid these errors, I humbly offer these notes:
Let’s start with his explicit account of “sex”. This is in 2.5, “The Ultimate Choice”.
According to Žižek, Lacan takes Freud’s notion of primordial repression and describes it in more specific terms. The “binary signifier” $S_2$ is repressed, while its counterpart, the “master signifier” $S_1$ remains unrepressed. This is where Žižek says that Lacan is breaking with a “binary” logic. This is because he breaks the idea of symmetry or duality between the “sexes”—he breaks with what we typically call complimentarianism. According to Mladen Dolar, the repression of the binary signifier (here Žižek says “the lack of the binary signifier” but that is a slippage. It is repressed, not strictly speaking, lacking.) entails that “while there is more than one sex, there are less than two”. This ‘non-sex’ is firmly fixed to the feminine side. The “entire tradition of patriarchy” is a history of attempts to reconstruct that “missing binary signifier” that would “complement the masculine Master-Signifier, i.e., to impose onto women a fixed symbolic identity[.]” Here Žižek makes a provisional agreement with “some trans-feminists” who argue that “feminine identity is somehow closer to LGBT+ flexibility than to masculinity”. We might say that “feminism” for Lacan/Žižek is then the political opposition to patriarchal identity fixing. It is trying to keep the realm of the feminine “open”.
Now, Žižek says that the masculine is also not purely fixed; “each sex is ‘unsexed’ in its own way. The reason is that ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ do not stand for a fixed set of properties: they both name a certain deadlock which can only be articulated in a series of inconsistent and even self-contradictory features.” [Maybe this is the core. Both terms, while distinct, refer to the same central point.]
Sexual difference is coming from this flux (Žižek says “de-sexualization”) as it “stands for the two ways to organize the constitutive imbalance of primordial repression.” (emphasis mine) In the first (feminine!) resolution, we arrive at on the scene seeing $S_1$ and “the Void” that’s taking the place of the repressed $S_2$. “[T]he chain of $S_2$ emerges” to supplement this lack. In the second (masculine!) resolution, we see the fundamentally incomplete $S_2$ and $S_1$ is constructed in order to “fill the void of this incompleteness”. Žižek traces out some implications from this: in the first option, a(n inconsistent) multitude “explodes” out; in the second option, “a multitude is totalized into an All through the exception which fills in its void.” We have to consider this in this order; the feminine accounts for the multiplicity that the masculine tries to totalize.
What we should ask here, naïvely and full of ill will, is “how is this not dualistic”. We have dropped a notion of symmetry, of complimentarianism, of the harmonious pair, for a series. It’s not ‘Masculine’<->’Feminine’, it’s ‘ ‘->’Feminine’->’Masculine’. But it’s unclear that this really breaks from the dualistic structure that Žižek ascribes to “paganism”. We still have two terms here; the feminine and the masculine ways of resolving the primary repression. Žižek himself says that sexual difference “stands for the two ways”. In what way is Lacan erasing the “last traces of the duality”, and not instead inscribing it more deeply and thus strengthening the duality. It is no longer a duality of symmetry, instead it is the duality of asymmetry, of two things being fundamentally, intrinsically, inexorably two.
Perhaps an example might be helpful. Black, in his 1952 paper “The Identity of Indiscernibles” describes a universe where there is nothing except two identical spheres. They have every property of each other; anything I can say about one, I can say equally about the other. They are indiscernible; in some senses, they are the same sphere! Isn’t that a better case of “more than one, but not really two”? There are two spheres, I’ve said so. But there’s not a way to tell them apart, they’re basically the same sphere.2 Žižek’s account seems much more attached to there being “two” sexes, precisely in how he rejects them being symmetric. Nothing proves that there are two things in front of you more than that they don’t resemble each other.
Now, Žižek’s ontology is “not sexualized” in that it does not ascribe sex to everything in the universe. But it does ascribe sex to every possible subject position. By Žižek’s favourite “Kant to Hegel” style move, this “sexed” distinction in subject positions must be ascribed to the universe itself. Therefore, it is a “sexed” ontology.
There’s something important to consider here. Žižek regularly claims that an antagonism is constituted by the fact it is impossible to present “impartially.” This means that when we are talking about Žižek’s positions surrounding feminism and queer issues, what matters more than his supposed “conclusions” is how he presents the issue. From his book Organs Without Bodies:
Recall the good old example of class struggle. There is no “neutral” view on class struggle, given that every notion of class struggle already implies that we took sides in the class struggle. The “real” of the class struggle is thus the very obstacle that prevents us from adopting a neutral perspective in relation to it.
For Žižek, there is little considered more “real” than “sexual difference”. If trans (or queer) and feminist struggles are concerned with sexual difference–which Žižek does seem to think is the case–then a “neutral” view on feminism, or on queer struggles, is impossible. Žižek, by his own logic, must be taking up a position, must be taking up a side.
I am going to try to demonstrate that Žižek’s “side” is much closer to reactionary, conservative elements in the “West”, but honestly, I shouldn’t really have to do that demonstration. Žižek is basically explicit about it.
“On every Italian train station, you find a board announcing: “Vietato attraversare i binari!” (“It is prohibited to walk across the /double/ rails!”). For obvious reasons, I much prefer a literal translation: “It is prohibited to traverse the binaries!“ is this not what the traditional heterosexual ethic enjoins us? “Do not transgress the binary order of (normal) sexual difference!” What we are getting today, with our anti-binary ideology, is the opposite injunction — “It is prohibited not to transgress the confines of binary sexuality!“— which is much worse than the traditional one.”
Actually, to call it explicit is underselling it. Žižek states that the traditional heterosexual ethic is preferable to the “anti-binary ideology.” He has shown us what side he stands with.
With that said, now we should complicate the picture of Žižek’s relationship to feminism. He invokes “the long struggle against sexism” against “woke and trans ideology” early on, he says that “[m]odern feminism is only thinkable in the Cartesian space which breaks with any sexualized ontology”, states that “[f]eminism arises when women experience that their social situation doesn’t allow them to realize their potentials”. Here, Žižek aligns himself with some form of feminism. But he also disagrees with (trans) feminists who don’t want to define women via a negation, decries “anti-masculine tendency” that is “often the case with the Western feminism”, talks about how “the LGBT+ and new feminists” operate “on a decidedly pre-Freudian notion of the subject”. This isn’t all that unusual. Any “feminist” is a particular type of feminist; branches of feminism are incompatible with each other. But I am unconvinced that Žižek is actually committed to a form of feminism that actually aims at the liberation of women. For one, Žižek only mentions “abortion” once, as an element of the “Culture War”—this ignores the deep economic components of forced birth. Childrearing is a cost that, under our patriarchal society, is externalized onto women. They have to take off time, they often lose their jobs, there is difficulty finding places to breastfeed, and birth is a painful and potentially very dangerous event. It is intrinsically political, it is only presented as a “culture war” because it is not something that primarily affects white men. The “culture war” is the current tenor of political struggle in the USA. It is also not being driven by the “Left”; abortion was rendered illegal by a committed, long term effort by the Christian Right in the USA. Anti-trans legislation was put forwards by Right-wing, republican legislators. What was a relatively niche legislative concern–the political emancipation of trans people from a cispatriarchal system—was turned into a culture-war signifier. The Right Wing fantasy is that of “lower- and middle-class ordinary families […] that just want to live their traditional lives”, “traditional lives” somehow threatened by the existence of queer people. If abortion is a struggle we shouldn’t emphasize, instead focusing on the “economic”, how can we really say Žižek is concerned with the liberation of women? Is being forced to be a mother not a case where “their social situation doesn’t allow them to realize their potentials”?
Moving along, Žižek sets the tenor for his discussion of “LGBT+” pretty clearly:
And the issue carefully avoided by the partisans of the new asexual man is: to what extent are many other features usually identified with being-human, features like art, creativity, consciousness, etc., dependent on the antagonism that constitutes the Sexual. This is why the addition of “asexual” to the series of positions that compose LGBT+ is crucial and unavoidable: the endeavour to liberate sexuality from all “binary” oppressions to set it free in its entire polymorphous perversity, necessarily ends up in the abandoning of the very sphere of sexuality – the liberation OF sexuality has to end up in the liberation (of humanity) FROM sexuality.
Now the uncharitable and obviously false reading here would be that Žižek thinks that queer people are incapable of art. The raw number of queer artists out there puts this idea to shame. The arts have always been an area where queer people have worked, and where gender was troubled. There is a better reading; Žižek claims that “[sexual] difference is embodied precisely in trans subjects.” Now, since trans identity is in fact historically mediated, we need to read this carefully. Žižek must be referring to those who embody gender trouble, be them homosexual, transsexual or transgender, bisexual, asexual or so on. These people must be capable of art because they embody sexual difference. But what does that actually mean?3 It’s all fine to have this abstract conception; but how does Woolf’s Orlando, a masterpiece in genderbending literature, “dependant on the antagonism that constitutes the Sexual”? Where does the antagonism come in? And what do we make of asexual artists? How are they caught up in sexual difference?
Let’s move to Žižek’s rejection of the usage of the term “they”.
“Some (mostly academic) institutions are now establishing a rule that, when you encounter for the first time (or talk about) a person, you should refer to this person as “they” independently of how this person appears — you should pass to “he” or “she” only if this person explicitly demands to be addressed like that. I find this demand problematic because it elevates exception (“they” first referred to all those who do not fit the binary of men and women) into universality, into a universal standard: we are all “they” and “he” or “she” becomes one of its subspecies. However, sexual difference is an antagonism, an “impossible” difference, impossible in the sense that difference precedes what it differentiates, so that “masculine” and “feminine” are two ways to obfuscate the trauma of difference. While, empirically, there are not just men and women but also those who do not fit any of these two identities, this does not entail that human sexuality exists as a neutral universality which has many subspecies: sexual difference means that there are men, women, and their difference as such, and this difference is embodied precisely in trans subjects who do not fit any of the two main categories.”
This passage is confusing. I thought that Lacanian psychoanalysis rejected all dualism, but now there are “two main categories” of subjects? Surely if this is written in the world, in the very nature of subjectivity, our language will not fuck much up. Are we to say that Georgian subjects are already dealing with something “problematic” since Georgian doesn’t have gendered personal pronouns?4 In fact, the singular indeterminate “they” actually precedes the singular determinate “they”, that is, we have used “they” to refer to a person whose gender is unknown for longer than we have used “they” to refer to someone whose gender is “not man and not woman”.5 Žižek’s claim here is nonsensical. Why is he making it?
What are we to make of the “empirical fact” of non binary people, if this does not break down the “two main categories”? What does it mean for a subject to chose “they”? Or to chose to be an even less ‘coherent’ position, like a ‘he/him lesbian’, or a ‘she/her man’? These people exist, I know them. Žižek agrees they are not men, nor are they women. Now, they embody “the trauma of difference” (who’s trauma?) but that doesn’t answer which of the two exclusive subject positions they take up. Do they construct the multiplicity embodied in the $S_2$ chain, or do they construct the impossible totalizing signifier? Don’t they have to take up one? Or are they somehow always ambivalent, taking up one, then the other, then the first, then the first again, then another one, then, then, then…? What does it mean, for the subject themselves, not an observer, for the subject to ‘precisely embody sexual difference’? Either Žižek can speak on this, can try to offer trans people some key to understanding themselves, or he cannot, and the people best positioned to speak about trans people are probably trans people themselves.
The choice of gender is forced, because we live in a world structured by gender. Whether gender can be abolished or not I’ll leave as an open question for now. Why does Žižek seem to think that trans people must be told that this taking up of gender is “forced”? To quote the revolutionary Zapata, “[w]e of the people have known this longer than you have[.]”6 We know that taking up a non-binary identity is not a “blissful harmony”, we know how transphobia works better than Žižek does. We know how to identify the anti-trans phantasm, a phantasm Žižek indulges when he speaks of “trans rights” as a “culture war issue” and blames it on the “Left”. The phantasm is a construction of the Right; they are the ones who decided to make it about us.
In the very next section, “Neither Biological Sex Nor Cultural Gender”, Žižek shows just how ill-informed about trans issues he is. We will pass over his commentary on puberty blockers by referencing other articles.7 I will focus on other claims he makes that I am more equipped to handle.
First, Žižek claims:
“A (biological) man becoming a (psycho-social) man is a process no less violent and “unnatural” than for a (biological) man becoming a (psycho-social) woman. Plus such violent tensions are, of course, not just facts of inner psychic life — they are embedded in antagonisms which traverse the entire social body.”
Ah Žižek, blind Žižek. The claim that the process of a cis man assuming some sort of masculinity is “no less violent” than a trans woman assuming some sort of femininity may be true on the level of the psyche, it is certainly not true on the level of the social body. The very existence of transphobia points to where Žižek is wrong; a trans woman assuming some sort of femininity is attacked, sometimes killed. She becomes subject to a form of social violence that he is never subject to. The violence is asymmetrical here; there is no equivalence, no symmetry.
“Trans advocates claim that gender identity is not biological but a socially constructed contingent fact, a matter of choice social [sic]; however, when they oppose the patriarchal oppression, the imposition of binary sexuality, they invoke the raw fact of how an individual FEELS, its immediate self-experience (it is enough for a man who wants to become a woman just to claim “I was born into a wrong body”) which is not again presented as something historically mediated.”
Firstly, I am unaware of any medical system where self-identification of gender dysphoria is sufficient to medically transition. This is why “DIY HRT” is a thing. And as to why the raw emotion is not presented as “historically mediated”? Many trans people have not lived through multiple historical periods. A study of the history of trans people—a study many trans historians have done, like Halberstam—quickly uncovers that yes, trans identity and the emotions around that are historically mediated. But, we are small relative to history, our own emotions, while they are historically mediated, are not presented to ourselves as such, because emotions are not something easily read off history. Are we to expect every trans person to be a historian? Are trans people now “the subject supposed to know” every detail of their own history?
“Here TERFs who insist that a trans woman should not be simply accepted as a woman have a point: what those who claim a trans woman is a woman tout court tend to ignore is the basic lesson of materialism. In our societies, being a woman is not just a fact of inner feeling, it resides in a set of social material practices (women give birth, have periods, go through a menopause …), and the submission of women refers to all these practices.”
Ah Žižek, you’ve moved against yourself here. What was “the basic aim of patriarchal ideology” again? “to impose on [the feminine] a firm identity, to determine ‘what a woman really is’”? But here, being a woman “is not just a fact of inner feeling”, it “resides in a set of social material practices”. So a woman “really is” a subject who can give birth, has periods, go through a menopause… . By Žižek’s and Lacan’s criteria, the TERFs, and Žižek who agrees with them, are engaging in patriarchal ideology!
“I find problematic the following stance:
“Spouses who refuse to fund their partner’s gender surgery may be domestic abusers, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) says in new guidance. These include ‘withholding money for transitioning’, which would include either spouse refusing to pay for gender surgery, counselling or other treatment in a way that amounted to coercive control or abuse. Other behaviors could be ‘criticizing the victim for not being “a real man/woman” if they have not undergone reassignment surgery’, or ‘threatening or sharing pre-transition images’, or refusing to use their preferred name or pronoun.”
So what happens if I am, say, a woman married to a man who, since he decided to identify as a woman, wants to do gender surgery to become also a biological woman? Does this not somehow affect my conjugal obligations? I married THAT man, not a person to whom I am obliged even if s/he changes his/her sexual identity.”
The passage Žižek cites, the “problematic stance”, does not mention divorce or annulment. If transition breaks the obligation, then the couple can get a divorce. This has happened before and will happen again. What the passage discusses is what is potentially abusive. Let’s set aside the ascription of identity, that the spouses become “domestic abusers”, let us focus on the potential abusiveness of the behaviour. First, the withholding of funds is not in the abstract; it is withholding funds “in a way that amounted to coercive control or abuse.” The other behaviours are just forms of transphobic abuse, aimed at invalidating the identity of their partner. All of these make the home hostile, are forms of coercive control exerted over the partner. If this is a matter of transition “affecting my conjugal obligations” as Žižek imagines, then Žižek is saying that transition annuls the conjugal obligations so much that transphobic abuse of the partner should be permitted. What matters here is not an abstract matter of “conjugal obligations” changing—those change all the time, one might say that caring for your partner if they become disabled is a change in conjugal obligations—what matters here is one partner using the other’s deeply felt (and yes, historically mediated) need for transition as a vector of control and abuse.
There’s another odd point; why is the sexual position of the partner so important to conjugal obligations? Even the emphasis is weird here. Female Žižek “married THAT man”; well “THAT man” is now “THAT woman”, isn’t she? The operative term here isn’t “THAT”, it’s “man”. If I didn’t think it silly, I would say Female Žižek is trying to obscure how much importance she’s attaching to gender by trying to direct us to the particularity of the person she has married. But that’s silly; the person she married is in some sense the same person. If “sexual maturation” is substantially the same between cis and trans subjects, then why doesnt the sexual maturation of the cis man annul the marriage in the same way? Is it that transition is different? Is it somehow more “violent”? If “cis- men or women are also trans; they have to work hard, to go through a process full of traumatic cuts” (Notice how Žižek uses the pronoun ‘they’ to refer to indeterminate gender!) then why is transition so much different? Why is the trans person’s “trans-ness” so different? Is it just a matter of personal preference we are supposed to take as a deep theoretical point?
In my critique it may seem like I have basically argued that Žižek overemphasizes “class struggle” at the expense of other struggles, in particular queer struggles and the struggles taken up by feminism. So, what Žižek or his defenders may point to are passages like:
Another lesson of these insights is that psychoanalysis undermines the simple opposition between our sexual drives and their oppression: it asserts the inextricable mixture of these two levels. The topic of sexism and racism is thus not somehow secondary, so that we should move the focus onto “real” economy, as some Leftist critics of Wokenness seem to imply.
But this is an abstract conception. How is it that sexism and racism are not secondary? How is it that they are tied into the economic? I don’t think Žižek gives a sensible answer to this, and I think his attempt to argue about how “culture war” issues are being “overemphasized” points towards a conception of class struggle as only being reached via a “departure” from the “culture war”, not via, say, a radicalization of the culture war along class lines.8 But perhaps elsewhere, we will find a better resolution.
Laclau’s multiplicity of antagonisms with no privileged struggles is a pure perfect form, and class struggle is what disturbs this perfect symmetry. The point is not that economic base is a “hidden variable,” the hidden substantial truth of all antagonisms which operates independently of all contexts, but a kind of structural imperfection, an “attractor” which disturbs the pure form. […] One has to add here that, already at a formal level, class struggle is not an antagonism like others: the goal of the anti-racist struggle is not to destroy an ethnic group but to enable the peaceful co-existence of ethnic groups without oppression; the goal of feminist struggle is not to annihilate men but to enable actual equality of all sexes and sexual orientations; etc. But the goal of the class struggle is, for the oppressed and exploited, the actual annihilation of the opposite ruling class as a class (not of the individuals who compose it, of course), not the reconciliation of classes (it is Fascism which aims at the reconciliation of classes by way of eliminating the intruder – Jews – which introduces antagonism). This brings us back to the paradox of class difference which precedes classes (as self-identical social groups): if classes precede their struggle, then the way is open for Fascism, i.e., for the collaboration of classes. Only if class struggle precedes classes can the class society really be overcome.
Well this seems promising! The “class struggle” acts as an attractor for all other struggles, because it is precisely resolvable. All these other antagonisms will end up being involved in the end. But problems do remain.
We should thus renounce any vision of a perfect society and accept irreducible antagonisms, which means that the state and a basic alienation of social life are here to stay.
Firstly, we should note that this breaks Žižek strongly from Lenin and Marx. Not just on the level of “empirical” claims about possibility of a stateless society, but in fact on the level of theoretical conceptions about what the State is. If we have both (a) the possibility of a classless society due to the “impossible difference” embodied in class antagonism, and (b) the impossibility of a stateless society, then necessarily the State is not a tool of class rule. This is a pretty substantial break with Marx and Lenin. What does it even mean to have a State, a ruling apparatus, without a “ruling class”? Why is a society being “classless” not a “vision of a perfect society” but a society being “stateless” is? There have been a lot of stateless societies across time, all of them far from perfect. Why is the preservation of the state needed, if not to mediate class antagonism? Is it needed to mediate other antagonisms? What does that mean? Would that not reproduce the fundamental division again, just under another name? The “difference” of state power would produce a new “class struggle” between those with state power and those without state power.
Finally, I would like to draw out a passage from Organs Without Bodies:
The moment we pass from the single underlying antagonism to the multitude of antagonisms we endorse the logic of nonantagonistic One-ness: the proliferating multitude of antagonisms exists against the background of a neutral One as their medium, which is not itself marked or cut by an antagonism. Which is why, with regard to politics, it is crucial to “privilege” one antagonism over all others. The apparently innocent logic of “today, we know that class struggle is not the ultimate reference of all other struggles but just one in the multitude of antagonistic struggles that characterize social life” already pacifies the social edifice, neutralizing the impact of antagonism. As to the idea that privileging One antagonism leads to “binary logic,” one should emphasize that the fact of sexual difference signals precisely the failure of “binary logic,” the failure of the signifying couple that would “cover” sexual difference—there is sexual difference because the binary signifier is primordially repressed, as Lacan put it. In other words, the antagonism of/in the One does not mean the harmonious tension between the two (opposing principles, etc.) but means the inner tension, the impossibility of self-coincidence, of the One itself—or, as Alain Badiou articulates it in a concise way, “atheism is, in the end, nothing other than the immanence of the Two.”
Žižek really hasn’t written more than one book, has he? Digging in, we find that yes, the social world must be riven by a singular11 antagonism; this “privileged” antagonism is the class struggle. Does this mean that the class struggle is metaphysically privileged? No. If it were, then that would imply that the vision of a classless society would be one of those “visions of a perfect society”. So we have a displacement, don’t we? Clearly the actual, fundamental division is “sexual difference”. This antagonism is what actually divides the social field, making it fail to be identical to itself. But now we get into something odd. Let’s trace the logic. We can’t have a multiplicity of antagonisms actually defining the social field where these antagonisms are valued the same; there must be a singular antagonism. This antagonism is not reinscribing the logic of the One somehow, nor is it “dualistic”. It is instead showing the failure of the One to be itself. But does this “minimal distance”, this “primary antagonism” fail to be itself? It seems to do so, and instead of securing the theory, it blows it apart.
There are two primary antagonisms here. One is “sexual difference” and the other is “class struggle”. We shouldn’t touch “sexual difference” too much. We should try to tackle “class struggle”, because we can in fact abolish class. So, on the ontological level, sexual difference is the “privileged” antagonism. On the social level, the “privileged” antagonism is now “class struggle”. Everything pulls back to class struggle. This would be fine and good if “sexual difference” did not appear in the social field as an antagonism. 12 We now have two antagonisms. “Sexual difference” and “class struggle.” How should we pick a priority? Well, Žižek says, we go with “class struggle” for two reasons. First, “sexual difference” is insurmountable. You aren’t winning, it’s doomed to failure. (Or alternatively, it’s not desirable to get rid of “sexual difference.”) Second, he points to the “purely formal” argument. There’s a distinguishing characteristic of “class struggle”, in that it aims to destroy one side of the struggle as a term in the struggle (it aims to destroy the ruling class as a class.). But we’ve seen that doesn’t hold up; anti-racism aims to destroy “whiteness” as a race. So now we have to pick between “class struggle” and “anti-racism”. My point is that “class struggle” only retains its primary position out of a sort of fiat; the recourse to ontology that Žižek makes when he says that “[t]he moment we pass from the single underlying antagonism to the multitude of antagonisms we endorse the logic of nonantagonistic One-ness […] Which is why, with regard to politics, it is crucial to “privilege” [class struggle] over all others” is illegitimate. He is using the ontological priority of “sexual difference” to ground the political priority of “class struggle”, which he cannot do unless “class struggle” is somehow also ontologically prioritized. But first, antagonisms get raised to an ontological priority via them being unavoidable, and second, that would give us either two ontologically prioritized antagonisms, or make “class struggle” a moment of “sexual difference”, both of which seem unacceptable to Žižek.13
My critiques of Žižek here might make you think that I think Žižek’s transphobia is a subjective error; his Lacanian theory should have a way to encompass trans people nicely, to not slip into these transphobic errors. But that is the Kantian position; we should instead take the Hegelian position and say that the transphobia is in the Lacanian theory itself. Wedded as it is to the dualistic dogma of “sexual difference”, Žižek’s Lacanianism objectively cannot “think trans”.
There are a number of open roads for a criticism of this book to take.
One of the few times he does is when he is citing a transfeminist to disagree with her. This may just be due to how The Independent formats its titles. ↩
There is an interesting example of this in mathematics. When talking about complex numbers, there is no real way to distinguish between $+i$ and $-i$; in fact, there are models that can’t distinguish them. This follows directly from the construction of the complex numbers via field extensions. ↩
Note here that I am not asking for the meaning of “sexual difference” as such. I am asking what does it mean for trans subjects to “embody” “sexual difference”, and in particular, what it means for a trans subject to produce art. What does the antagonism being fundamental for art entail? ↩
I was informed of this by a personal Georgian friend. They were profoundly confused when I showed them this passage. They also mentioned that Armenian doesn’t have gendered personal pronouns. ↩
See the paper Balhorn, M. (2004). The Rise of Epicene They. Journal of English Linguistics, 32(2), 79-104. https://doi.org/10.1177/0075424204265824. Note that the discussion in the paper is about sex and not gender. There is no discussion of non-binary people. ↩
See https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emiliano-zapata-whose-violence ↩
See Priyanka Boghani, “When Transgender Kids Transition, Medical Risks are Both Known and Unknown” https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/when-transgender-kids-transition-medical-risks-are-both-known-and-unknown/ and Grace Abels, “Puberty Blockers: The facts and the myths” https://www.politifact.com/article/2023/aug/28/puberty-blockers-the-facts-and-the-myths/. The basic point is that Žižek’s intervention here isn’t all that informative, and he does not understand the violent trauma that undergoing the “wrong puberty” can cause. ↩
Please note, I don’t think this is sensible. The relationship is far more complicated, the question of the overcoming of capitalism is not reducible to the question of a supposed “class struggle” between two classes, and the “culture war” is, ironically, primarily a thing constructed surrounding the State. The “culture war” only makes sense as a media circus, drummed up and sustained by political interests that want to galvanize people into “camps”. It is a political tool for maintaining voter and viewer bases. ↩
I really have to note here, Jews are not an ethnicity or a race. They are a complicated ethno-religious group that cannot be totalized cleanly. Even among Ashkenazi Jews there are non-white people. What this sentence really should say is “Otherwise ‘white’ Jews get included or excluded…” but not putting that in a footnote really would commit me to explaining a lot more than I can in this essay. ↩
I haven’t mentioned this in this essay, but Žižek distinguishes humans from animals via how humans can have perversions and can engage in sex for pleasure absent their need for reproduction. This is empirically suspect. ↩
The question of the “singular” antagonism is ironically central here. How should we understand this passage from Organs without Bodies as a reply to Deleuze? That’s complicated. I think this ends up involving Žižek’s application of the idea of the “minimal difference”, a concept deeply alien to (my understanding of) Deleuze. If we take Deleuze’s appropriation of the concept of the Mannigfaltigkeit (manifold) from Reimann, and his use of calculus in general, the idea of the “minimal difference” vanishes as an illusion. There is no minimal difference, and certainly not one that becomes perceptible. But if one did exist, sure it might involve multiplicity. But how does this question of multiplicity end up breaking the concept of “antagonism”? I think that has much less to do with anything positively within Deleuze’s philosophy, and more of what isn’t there, or is excluded by means of critique; the idea of a difference that is unique. (Difference is subject itself to the logic of difference. There is a univocity of being; difference.) Something within (Žižek’s?) Lacanianism is self identical; the gap, the fissure, sexual difference. It is, as Derrida so wonderfully put it, “le manque n’y manque jamais”, the gap that’s never missing, the lack that’s never lacking. This gap is governed by a logic of identity; it is sexual difference, it is not class difference, not racial difference, not linguistic difference. In order for the difference to remain unmoving, to not be something we can “get past” it must remain itself. I am far from the first person to comment on this. Derrida makes motions towards this critique, and the essay “The Political Theory of Constitutive Lack: A Critique” by Andy Robinson does an excellent job showing that there is a logic of Barthesian Myth going on behind this. ↩
And, regarding footnote11, actually secure the theory against the criticism that “sexual difference” must remain self-identical. It would, however, make what exactly Žižek dislikes about Deleuze very unclear. ↩
If “class struggle” is a moment of “sexual difference”, what the fuck does that mean? ↩