Why I oppose Historicism and Remain a Philosopher
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2021-05-07 · 0:40:57 · 4,577 words
psychoanalysissexuality-genderideologyhegel-dialecticssubjectivityphilosophy-generalliberalism-political-correctness
Žižek responds to Gabriel Tupinamba's book on Lacanian thought and the renovation of psychoanalysis, engaging critically with Tupinamba's critique of Lacan's 'structural dialectics' and his historicization of the real. He defends the Lacanian distinction between negative universals (constitutive impossibility, the non-sexual relationship) and the negation of positive universals, arguing that the real is a parallax gap rather than a substantial thing-in-itself. He extends this framework to critique dominant transgender and feminist ideology for abolishing sexual antagonism in favor of identity plasticity, and closes by arguing that identity politics, whether in gender or class, is the ideological trap that forecloses genuine emancipation.
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The ideas in it 21
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Lacan's schema of discursive positions (master, university, hysteric, analyst) referenced as part of the universal theory that emerges from clinical experience.
Postmodern historicist relativism that deconstructs every positive universality by exposing it as a contingent, biased historical variable, contrasted with the deeper move of asserting negative universals.
An impossibility or antagonism constitutive of an entire domain, not the negation of contingent positive identities but the assertion of a structural limit that persists across all forms (e.g., il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel).
as “alternate modernities”
The once-fashionable historicist idea that other paths to modernization are possible that avoid capitalism's constitutive antagonisms; Žižek follows Jameson in rejecting this as an ideological dream since modernity is a code name for capitalism.
Lacan's negative universal: there is no sexual relationship, meaning every determinate form of gender relation will fail to overcome the impossibility constitutive of human sexuality.
Tupinamba's critical term for Lacan's framework centred on the logic of the signifier, which Tupinamba accuses of illegitimately universalizing the analytic situation into an ontological a priori.
Implicit in references to the elusive virtual point of reference that appears as a limit of the structure, generated by and external to the logic of enclosure.
Lacan's procedure in which we only touch the real through the failure of our attempts to grasp it; Žižek defends this as subversive rather than mere epistemological limitation, linking it to the Hegelian motive of a deadlock being its own solution.
Implied in the discussion of the unconscious and symbolic space as the locus whose own lack overlaps with the subject's lack, following the Hegelian motive of problem-as-solution.
as “Kantian antinomy”
Used to describe the irresolvable split between two notions of society (Anglo-Saxon nominalist vs. Durkheimian organicist), which Žižek resolves by arguing the antinomy already IS the thing itself.
as “parallax real”
The real conceived not as a substantial density but as a pure gap between two irreconcilable perspectives, perceptible only in the shift from one to the other; it is the 'hard bone of contention' that pulverizes sameness into multiple appearances.
as “the unconscious as neither being nor not being”
Žižek's formulation that the unconscious is not merely epistemologically inaccessible but in itself 'not fully existing', dwelling in the domain of neither being nor not being, opposing any ontologization of the unconscious as substance.
Freud's formula, 'where it was, I shall become', cited to show that the ethical dimension of the unconscious is itself a psychoanalytic concept pointing to Lacan's refusal to ontologize the unconscious.
Lacan's logical schema distinguishing masculine (logic of enclosure, phallic exception) from feminine (non-all, no exception to phallic function) positions; Žižek argues the feminine side is paradoxically MORE immersed in the phallic function, not outside it.
Tupinamba's description of the masculine side of sexuation: totalization of a finite set that generates what it excludes as a non-existent virtual excess.
Infinite feminine enjoyment posited by Lacan on the feminine side of the formulas of sexuation, which Tupinamba reads as a structurally inaccessible excess; Žižek disputes this reading.
The symbolic operator (Phi) under which subjects are constituted; Žižek insists femininity is defined by its full immersion into it with no exception, not by excess beyond it.
as “tyranny of permanent rediscovery of new identities”
Žižek's characterization of the contemporary demand for ceaseless gender experimentation and identity reconstruction, which he identifies as the true tyranny, more repressive than traditional heterosexuality because it represses immanent sexual antagonism more thoroughly.
Implied in the Marxist parallel: the mystery of the commodity form is the mystery of the form itself, just as sexual antagonism is the mystery of its form rather than a hidden external reality.
The ideological trap of demanding recognition of one's specific cultural identity (whether gender, class, or race) rather than pursuing the abolition of the structural antagonism, described here as the worst bourgeois, even fascist, ideology.
A new German trend where working-class identity is celebrated and recognised, Žižek condemns this as the worst bourgeois/fascist ideology, giving workers their identity rather than fighting the class antagonism itself.
Stories he reaches for 4
Two ancient Greek painters compete: Zeuxis paints grapes so real birds try to eat them; Parrhasius wins by painting a curtain on a wall so that Zeuxis asks him to pull it aside. The mystery is not in what is hidden but in the convincing painting of a veil that creates the illusion of hidden content.
“There is no mystery behind the veil. The only mystery to be explained is how to convincingly paint a veil that creates the illusion of a content hidden behind it.”
The irreconcilable split between an individualist and a holist concept of society appears as a Kantian antinomy blocking access to the thing-in-itself; the resolution is that this antinomy already IS the fundamental feature of contemporary society, an irreconcilable antagonism between totality and individual.
“The antinomy which seems to preclude our access to the thing already is the thing itself.”
Žižek offers an unusual personal proof of his admiration for Tupinamba's book: not kindness but envy and hatred, 'Why wasn't it me who wrote such a beautiful book?', which for him is the ultimate honest proof of genuine admiration.
“When I read the book, there was no kindness in me... it was envy and hatred. Why wasn't it me who wrote such a beautiful book?”
Fascism is the exemplary case of an 'alternate modernity', it attempted to realize a version of modernity without capitalism's constitutive antagonisms and instead became its most extreme manifestation.
“Was fascism not an exemplary case of alternate modernity?”
Works invoked 4
Encore (Seminar XX) book
Cited as the key text for Lacan's formulas of sexuation; Žižek notes some formulations are ambiguous but insists the main thrust is clear and defends a close literal reading.
Described as 'the saddest text' Žižek has read lately, a document of Miller's provincial spirit and growing irrelevance.
Quoted as an example of the ideological position that dissolving sex into gender is 'immensely freeing'; criticized for proposing an antagonism-free vision of gender identity.
Žižek expresses genuine admiration (manifesting as envy) and treats the book as an urgency for Lacanian renovation; engages its arguments at length while making selective critical remarks.
People invoked 15
Referenced as the source of the organicist notion of society as a totality pre-existing individuals, contrasted with Anglo-Saxon nominalism in the Adorno antinomy example.
Gabriel Tupinambá positive
Žižek praises Tupinamba's book on renovating Lacanian thought as an urgency, expresses genuine admiration (via envy), and engages in sustained critical dialogue while agreeing with his core project; frames minor disagreements as internal debate.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Adorno's analysis of the antagonistic character of the notion of society, the split between Anglo-Saxon nominalism and Durkheimian organicism, is used to illustrate the Hegelian motive of the antinomy being the thing itself.
Jacques Lacan positive
Žižek defends Lacan's core insights, the real as constitutive impossibility, the formulas of sexuation, the proof by impotence, the non-sexual relation, against Tupinamba's historicizing critique, while insisting on Lacan's philosophical depth.
Francis Fukuyama positive
Žižek reframes (rather than dismisses) Fukuyama's end-of-history thesis, arguing that after global capitalism's victory the very sense of history changed radically, so Fukuyama was pointing to something real.
Judith Butler negative
Butler's reduction of sex to gender, the claim that sex is 'already gender' and that the distinction is 'immensely freeing', is criticised as an ideological vision that abolishes constitutive sexual antagonism.
Donald Trump positive
Used as evidence that conservative anti-hedonism is a fake reactive phenomenon: Trump is a ruthless hedonist posing as a conservative, making him the ultimate 'postmodern historicist president'.
Alain Badiou negative
Badiou's proposed solution, creating a new symbolic space for men and women through philosophical invention of new signifiers, is dismissed as an empty ideological dream that avoids the constitutive antagonism of sexuality.
Fredric Jameson positive
Cited approvingly for rejecting the notion of 'alternate modernities' by identifying modernity as a code name for capitalism, supporting Žižek's argument against historicist relativization.
Jacques-Alain Miller negative
Described as exhibiting a 'provincial spirit and growing irrelevance' in his ruminations on Judith Butler and the transgender movement; his text is a document of Lacanian ideological conservatism.
Suzanne Moore negative
A Guardian column by Moore praising Butler's dissolution of the sex/gender distinction is quoted and then criticized as ideologically envisioning sexuality as an antagonism-free zone of free choice.
Karl Marx positive
Invoked alongside Freud as sharing the principle that the exception is the key to normality; the mystery of the commodity form (= mystery of the form itself) is cited as parallel to the mystery of sexuality.
Sigmund Freud positive
Invoked throughout as the foundation for the claim that sexuality is constitutively antagonistic and that the exception (analytic clinic) is the key to normality; Wo es war formula cited for its ethical-ontological implications.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
The Hegelian motive that the deadlock-problem is its own solution is described as 'basic' to Žižek's reading; Hegel is also claimed to be a radical historicist in the non-all feminine sense.
Immanuel Kant positive
The Kantian distinction between negative and infinite judgments is used (via Tupinamba) to develop the negative/positive universals distinction; Kantian antinomy is invoked in the Adorno example, and the necessary transcendental illusion of confusing libidinal and external real is described as 'Kantian'.
What it argues
negative universals vs. negation of positive universalsthe parallax real as constitutive antagonismcritique of Lacanian structural dialectics (Tupinamba debate)sexual difference and the impossibility of sexual relationidentity politics as bourgeois/fascist ideologytransgender and feminist ideology vs. radical psychoanalytic coreclass antagonism and the limits of classism
Dialectical moves 10
“The problem-deadlock is its own solution — the antinomy between two notions of society already IS the fundamental feature of today's society.”
Žižek defends the Hegelian move that the irresolvable deadlock between competing perspectives does not indicate a thing-in-itself beyond them but is itself the social reality.
“The parallax real is not the hard core that persists as the same but the hard bone of contention which pulverizes the sameness into a multitude of appearances.”
The real is not substantial but purely relational, a gap rather than a ground, inverting the common intuition that the real underlies appearances.
“Femininity is paradoxically more, not less, immersed into the field of phallocentrism — the very idea of a woman who eludes the masculine symbolic grasp is part of masculine ideology.”
The common assumption that femininity stands outside or exceeds phallic logic is itself a masculine projection; true femininity is non-all precisely through total immersion.
“The ethical is here a psychoanalytic concept — the dimension of ought in 'Wo es war, soll ich werden' is not opposed to psychoanalysis but is psychoanalysis.”
Žižek collapses the apparent opposition between the ethical and the psychoanalytic, showing the ethical dimension is internal to Freud's formula.
“In the space of multiple gender identities, what is repressed returns with a vengeance, but repression gets much stronger — the return of the repressed IS a deeper repression.”
Inverting the liberatory claim of queer multiplicity: permitting all perversions represses sexual antagonism more thoroughly than traditional heterosexuality's explicit containment.
“The real is not the way things really are — the real is the force which makes us violate and distort the way things really are.”
The real is not a deeper truth beneath appearances but the pressure that produces systematic falsification, it is on the side of distortion, not correctness.
“The mystery of the commodity form is the mystery of this form itself, the rise of the form of mystery — just as the mystery of sexuality is the mystery of its form, not of any reality behind fantasies.”
Following Marx, Žižek argues the apparent mystery of both commodities and sexuality is not a hidden content but the enigmatic character of the form itself.
“Far from being a proof of our epistemological limitation, the inaccessibility of the unconscious means the unconscious is in itself not fully existing — it dwells in the domain of neither being nor not being.”
The unconscious's inaccessibility is not an epistemological problem but an ontological one: it has no full existence to be accessed.
“Donald Trump himself is the ultimate proof: a ruthless hedonist posing as a partisan of conservative values — if there ever was a postmodern historicist president.”
Conservative anti-hedonism is already contaminated and mediated by what it opposes; Trump embodies postmodern identity-play in the guise of conservatism.
“To abolish a structural impossibility, we lose also the identities which generate this spectral X — you cannot have the same elements just more fully themselves.”
Genuine emancipation does not preserve existing identities in a more fulfilled form; it dissolves the structural antagonism that constituted those identities.
Claims 24
asserts
The renovation of Lacanian thought advocated by Tupinamba is an urgency, because it compels confrontation with the philosophical implications of psychoanalysis rather than merely reflecting clinical ideology.Tupinamba's project
asserts
Ideology operates not only by eternalizing a contingent historical situation but also by reducing a constitutive antagonism to a contingent deviation — the dream that 'another capitalism' or 'another sexuality' is possible without its structural impasses.ideology
asserts
The postmodern negation of positive universals must be supplemented by the assertion of negative universals — impossibilities constitutive of an entire domain — not just demonstration of contingency.the limits of postmodern historicism
asserts
The Lacanian 'proof by impotence' (we touch the real only through failure) should not be dismissed; it names the Hegelian insight that the deadlock IS its own solution, and the subject's lack overlaps with the lack in the Other.proof by impotence / Lacanian real
asserts
The real is purely parallactic and non-substantial — not a hard core that persists but a gap between two perspectives, the 'hard bone of contention' that generates the multiplicity of appearances.the status of the real
asserts
Femininity is defined by its full immersion into the phallic function with no exception, making the feminine position paradoxically more — not less — immersed in phallocentrism than the masculine.Lacan's formulas of sexuation
asserts
The very idea of a substantial woman who eludes masculine symbolic grasp is itself part of masculine ideology, not a feminist insight.masculine ideology / formulas of sexuation
asserts
Authentic historicity, as opposed to historicism, is feminine in Lacan's sense: it abolishes the exception and historicizes its own notion of historicity, which is why Hegel is a radical historicist.historicity / Hegel
reframes
Fukuyama's 'end of history' should not be dismissed, because after the victory of global capitalism the very sense of history changed radically.Fukuyama's end of history thesis
asserts
The task today is to separate transgender and feminist ideology from the radical core of those movements, just as Tupinamba separates Lacanian ideology from Lacan's radical teaching, and only Lacanian psychoanalysis combined with Marxism can do this.transgender and feminist politics
rejects
Dominant transgender and feminist ideology forgets to assert the negative universal — the constitutive antagonism of human sexuality — and ends up proposing an ideological vision of joyful non-binary plasticity.transgender and feminist ideology
asserts
The true tyranny today is the tyranny of the permanent rediscovery of new identities; conservative campaigns against hedonism are a reactive fake already contaminated by what they oppose.contemporary identity culture
rejects
Butler's reduction of sex to gender and the claim that sexual difference is 'immensely freeing' fails to account for the immanent antagonism of sexuality which is not the effect of patriarchal power but constitutive of sexuality itself.Judith Butler / sex-gender distinction
asserts
In the space of multiple gender identities, repression of immanent sexual antagonism actually gets much stronger than in traditional heterosexuality, even as all perversions are permitted or solicited.repression in contemporary sexuality
asserts
The sexual impossibility constitutive of human sexuality is not eternal but is constitutive of the field — to eliminate it would mean we are simply no longer dealing with sexuality.historical character of sexual antagonism
rejects
Badiou's solution — new symbolization of sexual difference beyond patriarchy and capitalist nihilism — is an empty dream and ideological mirage that enables us to avoid the constitutive antagonism.Alain Badiou's sexual politics
asserts
The external universe is not really a mystery — it is only apparently mysterious when caught in the deadlocks of our libidinal economy; metaphysical mystification arises from confusing the libidinal thing with the ultimate enigma of external reality.external reality vs. the real
asserts
The mystery of sexuality — the structural need to supplement the lack of a fixed formula with fantasmic supplements — is constitutive of sexuality; there is no external reality behind the spectrum of fantasies, only the mystery of the form itself.sexuality and fantasy
asserts
Class antagonism, like sexual antagonism, cannot be resolved by multiplying strata or identities; the antagonism is one, and 'classism' — celebrating working-class cultural identity — is the worst bourgeois/fascist ideology.class antagonism / classism
asserts
The real for Lacan is not the way things really are but the force or pressure that makes us violate and distort the way things are — the real is what forces falsification.the Lacanian real
asserts
When a structural impossibility is abolished, the identities generated by that spectral X also disappear — you cannot keep the same elements (workers, capitalists, etc.) and just make them more fully themselves.identity politics and structural change
asserts
Fascism was an exemplary case of 'alternate modernity', showing that the historicist dream of avoiding capitalism's antagonisms leads directly to fascism.fascism / alternate modernities
rejects
Jacques-Alain Miller's ruminations on Judith Butler and the transgender movement are a document of his provincial spirit and growing irrelevance.Jacques-Alain Miller
asserts
For Lacan, the analyst-analysand dyad is not an artificial exception but an exception that brings out a basic feature of the social link obfuscated in so-called normal intersubjectivity.the analytic situation
Quotes 12
“The real is not the way things really are. The real is the force, the pressure which makes us violate, distort the way things really are. When you see things in the wrong way, the real is that which forces you into this falsification.”Slavoj Žižek · the Lacanian real as productive distortion
“The parallax real is that which accounts for the very multiplicity of appearances. It is not the hard core which persists as the same but the hard bone of contention which pulverizes the sameness into a multitude of appearances.”Slavoj Žižek · parallax real
“There is no mystery behind the veil. The only mystery to be explained is how to convincingly paint a veil that creates the illusion of a content hidden behind it.”Slavoj Žižek · the mystery of form vs. hidden content
“The true tyranny is the tyranny of this permanent rediscovery of new identities.”Slavoj Žižek · critique of identity politics / gender fluidity
“Is not the ultimate proof here Donald Trump himself, a ruthless hedonist posing as a partisan of conservative values. If there ever was a postmodern historicist president.”Slavoj Žižek · Trump as postmodern conservative
“Ideology is not only the elevation of capitalism into the most appropriate and rational economic order, ideology is also the dismissal of crises and antagonisms that characterize capitalism into a deviation due to particular unfortunate circumstances.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology as denial of constitutive antagonism
“Only Lacanian psychoanalysis combined with Marxism can do this job.”Slavoj Žižek · Žižek's theoretical programme
“The antinomy which seems to preclude our access to the thing already is the thing itself. The fundamental feature of today's society is the irreconcilable antagonism between totality and the individual.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian resolution of antinomy
“Femininity is defined precisely by its full immersion into the phallic function. There is no exception to it. Which is why paradoxically feminine position is more, not less, immersed into the field of phallocentrism.”Slavoj Žižek · feminine non-all as total immersion
“The unconscious is in itself not fully existing. It dwells in the domain of neither being nor not being.”Slavoj Žižek · ontological status of the unconscious
“When I read the book, there was no kindness in me, oh I admire you what a book, it was envy and hatred. Why wasn't it me who wrote such a beautiful book? That's for me the ultimate honest proof.”Slavoj Žižek · envy as honest admiration
“External universe is not really a mystery, it is just whatever it is. It only appears a mystery when it gets caught in the deadlocks of our libidinal economy.”Slavoj Žižek · external reality vs. libidinal real
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
I'm on. Thanks very much. I'm truly honored to be here. Why? The saddest text I've read lately are Jacques-Alain Miller's ruminations on Judith Butler and the transgender movement. A document of his provincial spirit and growing irrelevance. This text in itself shows why the renovation of the Lacanian thought and practice advocated by Tupinamba is an urgency today. Not only does his book spoil the ideological game that predominated in Lacanian circles for decades, Tupinamba compels us to confront the philosophical implications of psychoanalysis. I already wrote elsewhere about all this, I just want to in a very personal manner to give you an empirical proof that I'm fascinated by Tupinamba's book and I admire it. You know why? When I read the book, there was no kindness in me, oh I admire you what a book, it was envy and hatred. Why wasn't it me who wrote such a beautiful book? That's for me the ultimate honest proof that, well, things change. Let me begin now with the difficult relationship between the analytic clinic and the universal theory that emerges out of it, theory of signifier, of four discourses and so on. Yes, Freudian theory is rooted in clinical experience. But, the task of analytic theory is not just to relativize itself in this way. It is also to account for the very possibility of something like clinical experience in terms of universal human predicament. How is our symbolic space structured so that a couple of analysand and analyst can operate the way it does, contravening the standard form of intersubjective exchange? For Lacan, the dyad analyst-analysand is not just an artificial exception but an exception to or a distortion of normal communication which brings out a basic feature of the social link, discourse, obfuscated in so-called normal intersubjectivity. For Freud as well as for Marx, the exception is the key to normality. So, how should we historicize the psychoanalytic experience? Tupinamba aptly refers here to the Kantian distinction between negative judgments, judgments that negate a predicate like he is not dead, and infinite judgments, judgments that assert a non-predicate like he is undead. Along the same lines, Tupinamba proposes the distinction between the negation of positive universals and the affirmation of negative universals. While fully endorsing this line of thought, I would just give it a slightly different reading. Maybe, maybe it's not different at all. Negation of positive universals reached its peak in postmodern historicist relativism. Every positive universality is deconstructed, it is demonstrated how this universality is biased, how it secretly privileges and eternalizes a content which is a contingent historical variable. But we should always bear in mind that ideology is not only the eternalization of a specific historical situation, it is also the reduction of something that is constitutive of the entire field to a specific contingent property. Ideology is not only the elevation of capitalism into the most appropriate and rational economic order, ideology is also the dismissal of crises and antagonisms that characterize capitalism into a deviation due to particular unfortunate circumstances and the accompanying idea that another capitalism is possible which would avoid crises and antagonisms. Along this line, Fredric Jameson rejected the once fashionable notion of alternate modernities, the idea that our Western liberal capitalist modernity is just one of the paths to modernization and that other paths are possible which could avoid the deadlocks and antagonisms of our modernity. Once we realize that modernity is ultimately a code, a code name for capitalism, it is easy to see that such historicist relativization of our modernity is sustained by the ideological dream of a capitalism which would avoid its constitutive antagonisms. Was fascism not an exemplary case of alternate modernity? In a strictly homologous way, the reduction of the impasses of sexuality to a specific historical constellation, say of Western patriarchy, opens up the space for the utopia of a full sexuality without its impasses and perversions which, as Freud demonstrated, inhabit its very notion. The way out of this ideological deadlock is to supplement the negation of positive universals with the assertion of negative universals, with an impossibility constitutive of the entire domain. Yes, all positive identities are relative, unstable, they are so many attempts to deal with the same underlying antagonism, and what triggers change is the ultimate failure of every attempt to resolve this antagonism. One of Lacan's negative universals is of course il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel, there is no sexual relationship, which means that it is not enough to point out the immanent instability and historical character of the traditional gender binary. One should also add that every determinate form of gender relationship, no matter how open and flexible it is, will fail to overcome the impossibility constitutive of human sexuality. Here I find, listen Gabriel and sharpen your knife to strike back, here I find a little bit problematic Tupinamba's critique of what he calls structural dialectics, his attempt to historicize the real. According to Tupinamba, the logic of the signifier, the core of structural dialectics, ontologizes into a universal frame the differential structure caught into a self-referential movement of circulating around its constitutive impossibility. And within this frame, the real appears as the impossible of this structure and as such as an a-historical limit, the elusive excess that defines the structure itself. However, according to Tupinamba, this ontologization of the logic of signifier is based on ignoring the fact that it is rooted in the artificially produced analytic situation, a situation engendered by the enclosure of the clinical space, analyst-analysand. The real is the impossible excluded from and by this situation and as such a historical variable which can be analyzed as part of another wider reality. I think we can now understand in what sense for Tupinamba what is ultimately to blame for Lacan's limitations are his philosophical commitments as they are discernible in his elevation of the logic of the signifier into an ontological a priori. The logic of the signifier, the ultimate frame of our access to reality, provides de facto a kind of transcendental frame to our access to reality. What eludes it cannot be conceptualized in Lacan as another reality but can only appear as a limit phenomenon, an elusive virtual point of reference ultimately defined only by our failure to reach it. So, the real is not just impossible for us to grasp, it is impossible in itself. It fully coincides with its own impossibility and Tupinamba rather dismissively refers to this redoubling of impossibility to Lacan's claim that we only touch the real through the failure of our attempts to grasp it as a proof by impotence. Quote from Tupinamba: the impotence of the model counts as the potency of the proof. End of quote. It is here that I again slightly, maybe, I'm sure of nothing, disagree with Tupinamba. I think that he gets all too easily rid of the subversive power of the proof by impotence which indicates the pivotal point at which Lacan's motive of the overlapping of two lacks, subject's lack and the lack in the other, echoes the basic, in my reading, the basic Hegelian motive of the problem-deadlock as its own solution. In my past work I was obsessively returning to this motive, enumerating examples. Say, the well-known Adorno's analysis of the antagonistic character of our notion of society. In the split between the two notions of society, the Anglo-Saxon individualistic nominalistic notion and Durkheimian, Émile Durkheim, organicist notion of society as a totality which pre-exists individuals, this split seems irreducible. We seem to be dealing with a Kantian antinomy which cannot be resolved via a higher synthesis so that society appears as an inaccessible thing in itself. However, I think that to resolve this deadlock we should merely take note of how this antinomy which seems to preclude our access to the thing already is the thing itself. The fundamental feature of today's society is the irreconcilable antagonism between totality and the individual. What this means is that ultimately the status of the real for me is purely parallax and as such non-substantial. The real has no substantial density in itself. It is just a gap between two points of perspective, perceptible only in the shift from the one to the other. The parallax real is that which accounts for the very multiplicity of appearances. It is not the hard core which persists as the same but the hard bone of contention which pulverizes the sameness into a multitude of appearances. Now I come to the first crucial point. For Tupinamba, this refusal to think the real in itself, this reduction of the real to a mark or a trace of its own impossibility is [unintelligible] insofar as the unconscious is one of the names of the real also, quote from Tupinamba, in the last instance, the reason why for Lacan the unconscious must be conceived as an ethical instance and not as a psychoanalytic concept. End of quote. But I see this as a wrong alternative. Ethical is here a psychoanalytic concept. It designates the dimension of ought in Freud's formula Wo es war, soll ich werden, where it was, I shall become. And as such it points towards Lacan's refusal to ontologize the unconscious into a substance or substantial base of subject's psychic life. Here we encounter, I think so, a proof by impotence at its most trenchant. The inaccessibility of the unconscious is not just a sign of our epistemological limitation, of our inability to reach another side where the unconscious fully exists. The unconscious is in itself not fully existing. It dwells, dwells in the domain of neither being nor not being. Now we reach the next central motive of Tupinamba's critique of Lacan, his critical reading of Lacan's formulas of sexuation. To somehow simplify the line of argument, Tupinamba qualifies phallocentrism, the masculine side of the formulas of sexuation, as the logic of enclosure, totalization of a finite set, which generates what it excludes as a non-existent virtual excess that escapes language. And although Lacan deploys the feminine side of the formulas as escaping this logic of enclosure, he ultimately still conceives the feminine side, the infinite jouissance féminine, the way it appears from the masculine side, as an excess with no positive reality. But since Lacan's structural dialectics, whose core is the logic of signifier, is ultimately for Tupinamba an illegitimate universalization of the way speech functions in psychoanalysis, one should not conceive feminine enjoyment as structurally inaccessible but only as currently outside of our reach. So for Tupinamba the epistemological implication of the phallic logic is clear. Since this logic can only conceive radical otherness external to the symbolic space as an immanent excess of this space itself, and since this immanent excess is part of our libidinal psychic reality, it has to generalize the properties of the psychic real over those of indifferent otherness. A quote from Tupinamba: what is not the signifier exists only insofar as it remains marked within the signifying chain as a stumbling block that is then displaced to a fantasmic exception with no actual existence. End of quote. My naive question, does this hold? It is true that some formulations in Lacan's seminar Encore are somewhat ambiguous. He does characterize feminine enjoyment as an excess outside language. But, the main thrust of his argumentation is clear. There is no need for a function other than Phi, phallic function, to conceptualize femininity as it is in itself and not just as something in excess of the phallic function. To see this one should only read Lacan closely and literally. Femininity is defined, that's the paradox on which I insist almost everybody disagrees here with me, femininity is defined precisely by its full immersion into the phallic function. There is no exception to it. Which is why paradoxically feminine position is more, not less, immersed into the field of phallocentrism. In my reading of the formulas of sexuation, I'm thus tempted to reach the exactly opposite conclusion. Is the externalization of what is not closed under phallocentrism, its externalization into an unfathomable otherness, not part of the masculine formulas? Or to put it in more conventional terms, is the very idea of a substantial woman that eludes the masculine symbolic grasp not part and parcel of masculine ideology? Tupinamba of course sees that. Far from being limited to the relation between sexes, Lacan's formulas of sexuation are extraordinarily productive as a means to clarify other relations. For example, the basic feature of authentic historicity as opposed to historicism is that it is feminine in the sense of Lacan's formulas of sexuation. It abolishes this exception. It relativizes its own position and thus historicizes its own notion of historicity. It is in this sense that for me Hegel is a radical historicist. For him every historical epoch, with every historical epoch, the universal notion of history also changes. Such an approach allows for no exception to historicity and is for this reason non-all. There is no single universal notion of historicity since this notion is itself caught into the process of historical change. Historicism is not radical enough because it does not take into account how each historical break is not simply a break within history but changes the very notion of history. This is why I think frankly we shouldn't dismiss as ridiculous Fukuyama's talk about the end of history in After the victory of global capitalism, the sense of history changed radically. So where does Tupinamba stand here? His central claim is that what eludes phallic domain, quote from him again, does not need to point to something that is structurally inaccessible. It could also mean that it is currently outside of our reach. End of quote. So when, in the very last paragraph of his book, of the manuscript, I read originally the manuscript so I'm not sure if it's in the printed book, Tupinamba pleads for, quote, a new compossibility between transgender and feminist critiques on the one side and psychoanalysis on the other, end of quote, as a way to articulate positively, not just as a limit case, what is not closed under phallocentrism, I'm tempted to propose a counter-claim. In the same way that Tupinamba tries to separate Lacanian ideology from the radical core of Lacan's teaching, our task today is to separate the transgender and feminist ideology from the radical core of this movement. Only in this way can the movement be redeemed. And only Lacanian psychoanalysis combined with Marxism can do this job. This brings me back to the distinction between the negation of positive universals and the assertion of negative universals. In its ferocious negation of positive universals, emphasizing how the gender binary is a historical variable, not a transcendental a priori of human sexuality, the predominant form of transgender and feminist ideology forgets to assert a negative universal, the antagonism that characterizes human sexuality as such. So, it ends up proposing an ideological vision of sexuality which, freed from patriarchal binary constraints, becomes a joyful experience or expression of our true selves, a practice of non-binary plasticity where a subject permanently experiments with itself and reconstructs itself playing with different identities from hetero to gay, from bisexual to asexual. But for me today, the true tyranny is the tyranny of this permanent rediscovery of new identities. All the conservative fundamentalist campaigns against contemporary hedonism, sorry, and egotism, is for me a fake, a reactive phenomenon which is already contaminated, mediated by what it opposes. For example, is not the ultimate proof here Donald Trump himself, a ruthless hedonist posing as a partisan of conservative values. If there ever was a postmodern historicist president, politician, etcetera. Along these lines, in a column that I want to quote briefly from The Guardian newspaper, Suzanne Moore praised Judith Butler's reduction of sex to gender. Quote: Butler writes, if the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called sex is as culturally constructed as gender. Indeed, perhaps it was already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all. How immensely freeing that it is. End of quote. For Moore, the notion of sex designates an immutable stable binary identity, masculine or feminine. It is a contingent social construct but this contingency is obfuscated by a reference to biology, sex is part of our natural identity, or justified by ideology. Gender, gender identity is in contrast a contingent social construct and the experience of this contingency is immensely freeing. It opens up the space for freely shifting between different identities. A permanent shifting which runs smoothly involving no antagonisms and tensions. So the idea is that antagonism and tension emerge when this open space of gender games is subordinated to the tyranny of sex, to the patriarchal order of binary opposites. Patriarchal order is about power, about the exercise of power and domination, and power is what sustains the passage from gender to sex. In short, gender identities move in the liberal space of the freedom of choice, a space which is inherently safe. Nobody controls me there, nobody tries to impose on me an identity which is not mine. While sex or sexuality as such involves abuse, violence, domination, and is as such the space of antagonisms. Well, I of course don't agree with this entire line of thought. Why not? The Lacanian reply... reply, sorry, is that what multiple gender identities exclude is not sexual difference as a stable hierarchical order but the antagonism and impossibility that defines this difference, sexual difference. Traditional heterosexual binary order admits the potential aggressiveness and tension that pertains to sexual difference and it tries to contain it through the ideological notion of the harmonious relationship between the two sexes. Sexual antagonism is here repressed but it remains as a potential threat. In the space of multiple gender identities, what is repressed returns with a vengeance. All sexual perversions, all violations of heterosexual normativity, they are not only permitted but even solicited. However, the paradox is that repression gets much stronger in this return of the repressed. What is much more repressed than before in traditional heterosexuality is the immanent antagonism of sexuality. Now we come to the crux of the problem. But is the impossibility that pertains to sexuality not historical and as such variable? Why can't we imagine and practice a different sexuality no longer branded by a constitutive antagonism? A sexual relationship which is not structurally inaccessible but just currently outside of our reach. Incidentally it is sad to see how even Alain Badiou falls into this trap. His solution for our sexual predicament is the creation of a new symbolic space for men and women beyond traditional patriarchal hierarchy but also beyond capitalist nihilism of the outlaw real. Such a new symbolic space can only arise by means of a properly philosophical gesture of the creation of new basic signifiers, of a new symbolization through which both sexes are reinvented. A new space where women are also scientists, politicians, artists, where men also deal with reproduction and so on. From the Lacanian perspective, however, the first thing to do is not to search for the traces of some new symbolization of sexual difference but to interrogate what is sexuality here and now more than its patriarchal traditional symbolization. Without this interrogation, the dream of a new symbolic space of sexuality is just that, an empty dream, an ideological mirage that enables us to avoid the antagonism constitutive of human sexuality. But again, is this antagonism-impossibility an a-historical a priori? Lacan's answer seems easy to me here. It is of course not eternal, but it is constitutive of human sexuality. We can of course imagine an asexual reproduction or a life with totally different modalities of pleasure. But in this case we are simply no longer dealing with sexuality. It is exactly like with all alternate modernities. One thing is to pass from one to another form of modernity, say from liberal democracy to fascism or authoritarian populism, which are just different ways to deal with the underlying antagonism that defines capitalism. Another thing is to break out of the very field of modernity inclusive of its constitutive antagonism. What do I want to say here? To simplify to the utmost. Yes, of course there is so-called external reality which is out there independently of us. Who knows what is out there in the cosmos? The only thing we can be sure is that there is an infinite numbers of things we don't yet know. But this infinity of the external world is something profoundly indifferent, in itself banal, flat, and even stupid. The fact that we don't know it means just that, that we don't know it. There is no mystery here. No proper dialectics of appearance, no structural illusion in the proper dialectical sense. The impossibility of sexual relation is I think something radically different. The mystery of sexuality, our structural need to supplement the lack of a fixed formula of sexual relation with fantasmic supplements is constitutive of sexuality. It is what transforms animal mating into human eroticism. There is no external reality to be discovered behind the specter of fantasies. The only mystery is here the mystery of the form itself. In exactly the same way Marx points out that the mystery of the commodity form is the mystery of this form itself, the rise of the form of mystery. Here we can see how the difference between the two reals, the real of the impossible thing and the indifferent external reality is fundamental for Lacan. The source of metaphysical mystification resides precisely in the confusion between the two, in the identification of the libidinal thing from the inner space with the ultimate enigma of external reality. One could even say in a Kantian mode that this identification is a necessary transcendental illusion. External universe is not really a mystery, it is just whatever it is. It only appears a mystery when it gets caught in the deadlocks of our libidinal economy. Or to evoke again the anecdote often quoted by Lacan about Zeuxis and Parrhasius, the two painters from ancient Greece who compete to determine who can paint a more convincing illusion. You know the story. First, Zeuxis produced such a realist picture of grapes that birds tried to eat them. Then, Parrhasius won by painting on the wall of his room a curtain so that Zeuxis asked him, Okay now please pull aside the veil and show me what you painted. In Zeuxis' painting, the illusion was so convincing that the image was taken for the real thing. In Parrhasius' painting, the illusion resides in the very notion that what the viewer saw in front of him was just a veil covering up the hidden truth. This is how mystery functions in a symbolic space. There is no mystery behind the veil. The only mystery to be explained is how to convincingly paint a veil that creates the illusion of a content hidden behind it. And incidentally it's I think the same with social antagonisms. For example, if we were to ask today how is the American political space, North American, you know, structured, we would if we were to ask this question we would get a totally different answer from a partisan of Trump or from liberal center-left. Trump would present... presented himself as the voice of the hardworking people against the corrupted non-patriotic enemies of the people, and a liberal leftist would have presented himself as the last bulwark of human rights and freedoms against fascist demagoguery. So the real is not that... what I want to... the real is not the actual reality social structure. The real is the antagonism which generates this... which generates this opposite vision. And I like this parallel of sexual difference between... with social class antagonism because... because... because... I think we have the same attempt to deny binary logic also with some sociologists. They claim, Oh you are old fashioned there not only two classes, there are many strata many classes and so on and so on. Of course there are, but the antagonism between all this is one. Antagonism precisely because it it is antagonism cannot be directly translated into a symbolic binary. Antagonism necessarily appears as at least three, or in classical Marxist term we have the ruling class, the oppressed, but then we also necessarily have middle classes, those who are excluded from social body as such and so on and so on. Why is this important today? Because I think that in struggle in the feminist struggle as well as in struggle for social emancipation, the temptation is the identity politics. For example, now I don't know if you know it but I notice now then in Germany there is an interesting new trend called classism. The idea is that working class should be recognized in its specific cultural identity. Workers are taught to celebrate their identity, their small rituals and so on, they have an identity of their own. I think this is the worst bourgeois ideology that you can imagine. It's basically even a fascist solution. It is we give you your identity. But, the the struggle for class struggle is not this. Class struggle is an attempt to live to cancel myself as class and and the opposite class. So, to conclude, exactly minutes, what I what I claim is that that's my basic argument where I would love to get Gabriel's answer, what I claim is that when Lacan speaks about this real as the constitutive constitutive antagonism which has no real existence but is just an immanent limit and so on, this is of course historical in the sense that it can disappear. But, the entire field disappears without it. What is wrong with identity politics is that you want the same elements, workers, capitalists, state apparatus, but just in their more full identity. As fascists always repeated, workers deserve full recognition, their honor, their dignity and so on and so on. So I think again that it's crucial here to see the radicality of the change demanded when we want to move out when we want to or when we want to abolish a certain structural impossibility. We lose also the identities which generate this spectral X, the real as impossible. This for me is a totally different sphere, this is sphere of symbolic antagonisms and so on which has nothing to do with the problem of so-called external external reality. The real for Lacan is not the way things really are. I would even have said and I did in some of my books as the real for Lacan is precisely the force which which the real is the force, the pressure which makes us to violate, distort the way things really are. When you see things in the wrong way, the real is that which forces you into this falsification. I can explain more books but now I'm obsessional neurotic, I think is exactly minutes and half. Thanks very much and Gabriel please, I hope you sharpened your knife. This is not a rhetorical point in the sense that I know the truth now I graciously allow you to agree with me or not. It's a debate. Please.
I'm on. Thanks very much. I'm truly honored to be here. Why? The saddest text I've read lately are Jacques-Alain Miller's ruminations on Judith Butler and the transgender movement. A document of his provincial spirit and growing irrelevance. This text in itself shows why the renovation of the Lacanian thought and practice advocated by Tupinamba is an urgency today. Not only does his book spoil the ideological game that predominated in Lacanian circles for decades, Tupinamba compels us to confront the philosophical implications of psychoanalysis. I already wrote elsewhere about all this, I just want to in a very personal manner to give you an empirical proof that I'm fascinated by Tupinamba's book and I admire it. You know why? When I read the book, there was no kindness in me, oh I admire you what a book, it was envy and hatred. Why wasn't it me who wrote such a beautiful book? That's for me the ultimate honest proof that, well, things change. Let me begin now with the difficult relationship between the analytic clinic and the universal theory that emerges out of it, theory of signifier, of four discourses and so on. Yes, Freudian theory is rooted in clinical experience. But, the task of analytic theory is not just to relativize itself in this way. It is also to account for the very possibility of something like clinical experience in terms of universal human predicament. How is our symbolic space structured so that a couple of analysand and analyst can operate the way it does, contravening the standard form of intersubjective exchange? For Lacan, the dyad analyst-analysand is not just an artificial exception but an exception to or a distortion of normal communication which brings out a basic feature of the social link, discourse, obfuscated in so-called normal intersubjectivity. For Freud as well as for Marx, the exception is the key to normality. So, how should we historicize the psychoanalytic experience? Tupinamba aptly refers here to the Kantian distinction between negative judgments, judgments that negate a predicate like he is not dead, and infinite judgments, judgments that assert a non-predicate like he is undead. Along the same lines, Tupinamba proposes the distinction between the negation of positive universals and the affirmation of negative universals. While fully endorsing this line of thought, I would just give it a slightly different reading. Maybe, maybe it's not different at all. Negation of positive universals reached its peak in postmodern historicist relativism. Every positive universality is deconstructed, it is demonstrated how this universality is biased, how it secretly privileges and eternalizes a content which is a contingent historical variable. But we should always bear in mind that ideology is not only the eternalization of a specific historical situation, it is also the reduction of something that is constitutive of the entire field to a specific contingent property. Ideology is not only the elevation of capitalism into the most appropriate and rational economic order, ideology is also the dismissal of crises and antagonisms that characterize capitalism into a deviation due to particular unfortunate circumstances and the accompanying idea that another capitalism is possible which would avoid crises and antagonisms. Along this line, Fredric Jameson rejected the once fashionable notion of alternate modernities, the idea that our Western liberal capitalist modernity is just one of the paths to modernization and that other paths are possible which could avoid the deadlocks and antagonisms of our modernity. Once we realize that modernity is ultimately a code, a code name for capitalism, it is easy to see that such historicist relativization of our modernity is sustained by the ideological dream of a capitalism which would avoid its constitutive antagonisms. Was fascism not an exemplary case of alternate modernity? In a strictly homologous way, the reduction of the impasses of sexuality to a specific historical constellation, say of Western patriarchy, opens up the space for the utopia of a full sexuality without its impasses and perversions which, as Freud demonstrated, inhabit its very notion. The way out of this ideological deadlock is to supplement the negation of positive universals with the assertion of negative universals, with an impossibility constitutive of the entire domain. Yes, all positive identities are relative, unstable, they are so many attempts to deal with the same underlying antagonism, and what triggers change is the ultimate failure of every attempt to resolve this antagonism. One of Lacan's negative universals is of course il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel, there is no sexual relationship, which means that it is not enough to point out the immanent instability and historical character of the traditional gender binary. One should also add that every determinate form of gender relationship, no matter how open and flexible it is, will fail to overcome the impossibility constitutive of human sexuality. Here I find, listen Gabriel and sharpen your knife to strike back, here I find a little bit problematic Tupinamba's critique of what he calls structural dialectics, his attempt to historicize the real. According to Tupinamba, the logic of the signifier, the core of structural dialectics, ontologizes into a universal frame the differential structure caught into a self-referential movement of circulating around its constitutive impossibility. And within this frame, the real appears as the impossible of this structure and as such as an a-historical limit, the elusive excess that defines the structure itself. However, according to Tupinamba, this ontologization of the logic of signifier is based on ignoring the fact that it is rooted in the artificially produced analytic situation, a situation engendered by the enclosure of the clinical space, analyst-analysand. The real is the impossible excluded from and by this situation and as such a historical variable which can be analyzed as part of another wider reality. I think we can now understand in what sense for Tupinamba what is ultimately to blame for Lacan's limitations are his philosophical commitments as they are discernible in his elevation of the logic of the signifier into an ontological a priori. The logic of the signifier, the ultimate frame of our access to reality, provides de facto a kind of transcendental frame to our access to reality. What eludes it cannot be conceptualized in Lacan as another reality but can only appear as a limit phenomenon, an elusive virtual point of reference ultimately defined only by our failure to reach it. So, the real is not just impossible for us to grasp, it is impossible in itself. It fully coincides with its own impossibility and Tupinamba rather dismissively refers to this redoubling of impossibility to Lacan's claim that we only touch the real through the failure of our attempts to grasp it as a proof by impotence. Quote from Tupinamba: the impotence of the model counts as the potency of the proof. End of quote. It is here that I again slightly, maybe, I'm sure of nothing, disagree with Tupinamba. I think that he gets all too easily rid of the subversive power of the proof by impotence which indicates the pivotal point at which Lacan's motive of the overlapping of two lacks, subject's lack and the lack in the other, echoes the basic, in my reading, the basic Hegelian motive of the problem-deadlock as its own solution. In my past work I was obsessively returning to this motive, enumerating examples. Say, the well-known Adorno's analysis of the antagonistic character of our notion of society. In the split between the two notions of society, the Anglo-Saxon individualistic nominalistic notion and Durkheimian, Émile Durkheim, organicist notion of society as a totality which pre-exists individuals, this split seems irreducible. We seem to be dealing with a Kantian antinomy which cannot be resolved via a higher synthesis so that society appears as an inaccessible thing in itself. However, I think that to resolve this deadlock we should merely take note of how this antinomy which seems to preclude our access to the thing already is the thing itself. The fundamental feature of today's society is the irreconcilable antagonism between totality and the individual. What this means is that ultimately the status of the real for me is purely parallax and as such non-substantial. The real has no substantial density in itself. It is just a gap between two points of perspective, perceptible only in the shift from the one to the other. The parallax real is that which accounts for the very multiplicity of appearances. It is not the hard core which persists as the same but the hard bone of contention which pulverizes the sameness into a multitude of appearances. Now I come to the first crucial point. For Tupinamba, this refusal to think the real in itself, this reduction of the real to a mark or a trace of its own impossibility is [unintelligible] insofar as the unconscious is one of the names of the real also, quote from Tupinamba, in the last instance, the reason why for Lacan the unconscious must be conceived as an ethical instance and not as a psychoanalytic concept. End of quote. But I see this as a wrong alternative. Ethical is here a psychoanalytic concept. It designates the dimension of ought in Freud's formula Wo es war, soll ich werden, where it was, I shall become. And as such it points towards Lacan's refusal to ontologize the unconscious into a substance or substantial base of subject's psychic life. Here we encounter, I think so, a proof by impotence at its most trenchant. The inaccessibility of the unconscious is not just a sign of our epistemological limitation, of our inability to reach another side where the unconscious fully exists. The unconscious is in itself not fully existing. It dwells, dwells in the domain of neither being nor not being. Now we reach the next central motive of Tupinamba's critique of Lacan, his critical reading of Lacan's formulas of sexuation. To somehow simplify the line of argument, Tupinamba qualifies phallocentrism, the masculine side of the formulas of sexuation, as the logic of enclosure, totalization of a finite set, which generates what it excludes as a non-existent virtual excess that escapes language. And although Lacan deploys the feminine side of the formulas as escaping this logic of enclosure, he ultimately still conceives the feminine side, the infinite jouissance féminine, the way it appears from the masculine side, as an excess with no positive reality. But since Lacan's structural dialectics, whose core is the logic of signifier, is ultimately for Tupinamba an illegitimate universalization of the way speech functions in psychoanalysis, one should not conceive feminine enjoyment as structurally inaccessible but only as currently outside of our reach. So for Tupinamba the epistemological implication of the phallic logic is clear. Since this logic can only conceive radical otherness external to the symbolic space as an immanent excess of this space itself, and since this immanent excess is part of our libidinal psychic reality, it has to generalize the properties of the psychic real over those of indifferent otherness. A quote from Tupinamba: what is not the signifier exists only insofar as it remains marked within the signifying chain as a stumbling block that is then displaced to a fantasmic exception with no actual existence. End of quote. My naive question, does this hold? It is true that some formulations in Lacan's seminar Encore are somewhat ambiguous. He does characterize feminine enjoyment as an excess outside language. But, the main thrust of his argumentation is clear. There is no need for a function other than Phi, phallic function, to conceptualize femininity as it is in itself and not just as something in excess of the phallic function. To see this one should only read Lacan closely and literally. Femininity is defined, that's the paradox on which I insist almost everybody disagrees here with me, femininity is defined precisely by its full immersion into the phallic function. There is no exception to it. Which is why paradoxically feminine position is more, not less, immersed into the field of phallocentrism. In my reading of the formulas of sexuation, I'm thus tempted to reach the exactly opposite conclusion. Is the externalization of what is not closed under phallocentrism, its externalization into an unfathomable otherness, not part of the masculine formulas? Or to put it in more conventional terms, is the very idea of a substantial woman that eludes the masculine symbolic grasp not part and parcel of masculine ideology? Tupinamba of course sees that. Far from being limited to the relation between sexes, Lacan's formulas of sexuation are extraordinarily productive as a means to clarify other relations. For example, the basic feature of authentic historicity as opposed to historicism is that it is feminine in the sense of Lacan's formulas of sexuation. It abolishes this exception. It relativizes its own position and thus historicizes its own notion of historicity. It is in this sense that for me Hegel is a radical historicist. For him every historical epoch, with every historical epoch, the universal notion of history also changes. Such an approach allows for no exception to historicity and is for this reason non-all. There is no single universal notion of historicity since this notion is itself caught into the process of historical change. Historicism is not radical enough because it does not take into account how each historical break is not simply a break within history but changes the very notion of history. This is why I think frankly we shouldn't dismiss as ridiculous Fukuyama's talk about the end of history in After the victory of global capitalism, the sense of history changed radically. So where does Tupinamba stand here? His central claim is that what eludes phallic domain, quote from him again, does not need to point to something that is structurally inaccessible. It could also mean that it is currently outside of our reach. End of quote. So when, in the very last paragraph of his book, of the manuscript, I read originally the manuscript so I'm not sure if it's in the printed book, Tupinamba pleads for, quote, a new compossibility between transgender and feminist critiques on the one side and psychoanalysis on the other, end of quote, as a way to articulate positively, not just as a limit case, what is not closed under phallocentrism, I'm tempted to propose a counter-claim. In the same way that Tupinamba tries to separate Lacanian ideology from the radical core of Lacan's teaching, our task today is to separate the transgender and feminist ideology from the radical core of this movement. Only in this way can the movement be redeemed. And only Lacanian psychoanalysis combined with Marxism can do this job. This brings me back to the distinction between the negation of positive universals and the assertion of negative universals. In its ferocious negation of positive universals, emphasizing how the gender binary is a historical variable, not a transcendental a priori of human sexuality, the predominant form of transgender and feminist ideology forgets to assert a negative universal, the antagonism that characterizes human sexuality as such. So, it ends up proposing an ideological vision of sexuality which, freed from patriarchal binary constraints, becomes a joyful experience or expression of our true selves, a practice of non-binary plasticity where a subject permanently experiments with itself and reconstructs itself playing with different identities from hetero to gay, from bisexual to asexual. But for me today, the true tyranny is the tyranny of this permanent rediscovery of new identities. All the conservative fundamentalist campaigns against contemporary hedonism, sorry, and egotism, is for me a fake, a reactive phenomenon which is already contaminated, mediated by what it opposes. For example, is not the ultimate proof here Donald Trump himself, a ruthless hedonist posing as a partisan of conservative values. If there ever was a postmodern historicist president, politician, etcetera. Along these lines, in a column that I want to quote briefly from The Guardian newspaper, Suzanne Moore praised Judith Butler's reduction of sex to gender. Quote: Butler writes, if the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called sex is as culturally constructed as gender. Indeed, perhaps it was already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all. How immensely freeing that it is. End of quote. For Moore, the notion of sex designates an immutable stable binary identity, masculine or feminine. It is a contingent social construct but this contingency is obfuscated by a reference to biology, sex is part of our natural identity, or justified by ideology. Gender, gender identity is in contrast a contingent social construct and the experience of this contingency is immensely freeing. It opens up the space for freely shifting between different identities. A permanent shifting which runs smoothly involving no antagonisms and tensions. So the idea is that antagonism and tension emerge when this open space of gender games is subordinated to the tyranny of sex, to the patriarchal order of binary opposites. Patriarchal order is about power, about the exercise of power and domination, and power is what sustains the passage from gender to sex. In short, gender identities move in the liberal space of the freedom of choice, a space which is inherently safe. Nobody controls me there, nobody tries to impose on me an identity which is not mine. While sex or sexuality as such involves abuse, violence, domination, and is as such the space of antagonisms. Well, I of course don't agree with this entire line of thought. Why not? The Lacanian reply... reply, sorry, is that what multiple gender identities exclude is not sexual difference as a stable hierarchical order but the antagonism and impossibility that defines this difference, sexual difference. Traditional heterosexual binary order admits the potential aggressiveness and tension that pertains to sexual difference and it tries to contain it through the ideological notion of the harmonious relationship between the two sexes. Sexual antagonism is here repressed but it remains as a potential threat. In the space of multiple gender identities, what is repressed returns with a vengeance. All sexual perversions, all violations of heterosexual normativity, they are not only permitted but even solicited. However, the paradox is that repression gets much stronger in this return of the repressed. What is much more repressed than before in traditional heterosexuality is the immanent antagonism of sexuality. Now we come to the crux of the problem. But is the impossibility that pertains to sexuality not historical and as such variable? Why can't we imagine and practice a different sexuality no longer branded by a constitutive antagonism? A sexual relationship which is not structurally inaccessible but just currently outside of our reach. Incidentally it is sad to see how even Alain Badiou falls into this trap. His solution for our sexual predicament is the creation of a new symbolic space for men and women beyond traditional patriarchal hierarchy but also beyond capitalist nihilism of the outlaw real. Such a new symbolic space can only arise by means of a properly philosophical gesture of the creation of new basic signifiers, of a new symbolization through which both sexes are reinvented. A new space where women are also scientists, politicians, artists, where men also deal with reproduction and so on. From the Lacanian perspective, however, the first thing to do is not to search for the traces of some new symbolization of sexual difference but to interrogate what is sexuality here and now more than its patriarchal traditional symbolization. Without this interrogation, the dream of a new symbolic space of sexuality is just that, an empty dream, an ideological mirage that enables us to avoid the antagonism constitutive of human sexuality. But again, is this antagonism-impossibility an a-historical a priori? Lacan's answer seems easy to me here. It is of course not eternal, but it is constitutive of human sexuality. We can of course imagine an asexual reproduction or a life with totally different modalities of pleasure. But in this case we are simply no longer dealing with sexuality. It is exactly like with all alternate modernities. One thing is to pass from one to another form of modernity, say from liberal democracy to fascism or authoritarian populism, which are just different ways to deal with the underlying antagonism that defines capitalism. Another thing is to break out of the very field of modernity inclusive of its constitutive antagonism. What do I want to say here? To simplify to the utmost. Yes, of course there is so-called external reality which is out there independently of us. Who knows what is out there in the cosmos? The only thing we can be sure is that there is an infinite numbers of things we don't yet know. But this infinity of the external world is something profoundly indifferent, in itself banal, flat, and even stupid. The fact that we don't know it means just that, that we don't know it. There is no mystery here. No proper dialectics of appearance, no structural illusion in the proper dialectical sense. The impossibility of sexual relation is I think something radically different. The mystery of sexuality, our structural need to supplement the lack of a fixed formula of sexual relation with fantasmic supplements is constitutive of sexuality. It is what transforms animal mating into human eroticism. There is no external reality to be discovered behind the specter of fantasies. The only mystery is here the mystery of the form itself. In exactly the same way Marx points out that the mystery of the commodity form is the mystery of this form itself, the rise of the form of mystery. Here we can see how the difference between the two reals, the real of the impossible thing and the indifferent external reality is fundamental for Lacan. The source of metaphysical mystification resides precisely in the confusion between the two, in the identification of the libidinal thing from the inner space with the ultimate enigma of external reality. One could even say in a Kantian mode that this identification is a necessary transcendental illusion. External universe is not really a mystery, it is just whatever it is. It only appears a mystery when it gets caught in the deadlocks of our libidinal economy. Or to evoke again the anecdote often quoted by Lacan about Zeuxis and Parrhasius, the two painters from ancient Greece who compete to determine who can paint a more convincing illusion. You know the story. First, Zeuxis produced such a realist picture of grapes that birds tried to eat them. Then, Parrhasius won by painting on the wall of his room a curtain so that Zeuxis asked him, Okay now please pull aside the veil and show me what you painted. In Zeuxis' painting, the illusion was so convincing that the image was taken for the real thing. In Parrhasius' painting, the illusion resides in the very notion that what the viewer saw in front of him was just a veil covering up the hidden truth. This is how mystery functions in a symbolic space. There is no mystery behind the veil. The only mystery to be explained is how to convincingly paint a veil that creates the illusion of a content hidden behind it. And incidentally it's I think the same with social antagonisms. For example, if we were to ask today how is the American political space, North American, you know, structured, we would if we were to ask this question we would get a totally different answer from a partisan of Trump or from liberal center-left. Trump would present... presented himself as the voice of the hardworking people against the corrupted non-patriotic enemies of the people, and a liberal leftist would have presented himself as the last bulwark of human rights and freedoms against fascist demagoguery. So the real is not that... what I want to... the real is not the actual reality social structure. The real is the antagonism which generates this... which generates this opposite vision. And I like this parallel of sexual difference between... with social class antagonism because... because... because... I think we have the same attempt to deny binary logic also with some sociologists. They claim, Oh you are old fashioned there not only two classes, there are many strata many classes and so on and so on. Of course there are, but the antagonism between all this is one. Antagonism precisely because it it is antagonism cannot be directly translated into a symbolic binary. Antagonism necessarily appears as at least three, or in classical Marxist term we have the ruling class, the oppressed, but then we also necessarily have middle classes, those who are excluded from social body as such and so on and so on. Why is this important today? Because I think that in struggle in the feminist struggle as well as in struggle for social emancipation, the temptation is the identity politics. For example, now I don't know if you know it but I notice now then in Germany there is an interesting new trend called classism. The idea is that working class should be recognized in its specific cultural identity. Workers are taught to celebrate their identity, their small rituals and so on, they have an identity of their own. I think this is the worst bourgeois ideology that you can imagine. It's basically even a fascist solution. It is we give you your identity. But, the the struggle for class struggle is not this. Class struggle is an attempt to live to cancel myself as class and and the opposite class. So, to conclude, exactly minutes, what I what I claim is that that's my basic argument where I would love to get Gabriel's answer, what I claim is that when Lacan speaks about this real as the constitutive constitutive antagonism which has no real existence but is just an immanent limit and so on, this is of course historical in the sense that it can disappear. But, the entire field disappears without it. What is wrong with identity politics is that you want the same elements, workers, capitalists, state apparatus, but just in their more full identity. As fascists always repeated, workers deserve full recognition, their honor, their dignity and so on and so on. So I think again that it's crucial here to see the radicality of the change demanded when we want to move out when we want to or when we want to abolish a certain structural impossibility. We lose also the identities which generate this spectral X, the real as impossible. This for me is a totally different sphere, this is sphere of symbolic antagonisms and so on which has nothing to do with the problem of so-called external external reality. The real for Lacan is not the way things really are. I would even have said and I did in some of my books as the real for Lacan is precisely the force which which the real is the force, the pressure which makes us to violate, distort the way things really are. When you see things in the wrong way, the real is that which forces you into this falsification. I can explain more books but now I'm obsessional neurotic, I think is exactly minutes and half. Thanks very much and Gabriel please, I hope you sharpened your knife. This is not a rhetorical point in the sense that I know the truth now I graciously allow you to agree with me or not. It's a debate. Please.