A Thinking Relationship: The End of Subalternity—Notes on Hegemony, Contingency, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left

Philosophy has a horror of discussions. It always has something else to do. Debate is unbearable to it, but not because it is too sure of itself. On the contrary, it is its uncertainties that take it down other, more solitary paths.

—Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?

"We are but one." Everyone knows, of course, that two have never become but one, but nevertheless "we are but one." The idea of love begins with that. It is truly the crudest way of providing the sexual relationship, that term that manifestly slips away, with its signified.

—Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality

The Hegemony/Subalternity Relation

Is there a thinking relationship in this book? Is it one discussion, or are there three? Are they all reflecting in the wake or withdrawal of one common silent affirmation that eludes them as much as it calls them and ensnares them? Or do we face a series of three, a serialization of thinking that alternately finds and loses intersections whose aleatory character reveals and belies encounter for what it is (not)? The question becomes obsessive. The more unasked it is, the more it haunts the reading of Judith Butler,

Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek's Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. But asking it provides no resolution, since it asks about a secret, and the secret is structural, and nobody knows what it is. It "structures in advance the very terrain on which the multitude of particular contents fight for hegemony"—it structures it the way a vortex structures the movement of water. "The question is, also and above all, which secret privilegings and inclusions/exclusions had to occur for this empty place as such to emerge in the first place?" ¹ Indeed, not just to emerge, but also to vanish into itself. The question—Is there a thinking relationship?—vanishes throughout the book into the empty place that makes it possible.

This empty place is not just any empty place. It is thinking's constitutive outside, the Real, which organizes as much as it disorganizes this particular conversation. In Lacanian terms, as one talks about the Real, the Real becomes an object a. The Real has always already entered—and left—the conversation. No wonder then—but it is a wonder—that the question makes its first appearance, like the Kantian ghost Zizek mentions (235), through the questionnaire that opens the book. There, Butler, Laclau, and Zizek ask their questions, ostensibly to one another, and they are the same question(s). Which, of course, does not quite respond to the question about the relationship between the questions. Is there one?

Can the ahistorical recourse to the Lacanian bar be reconciled with the strategic question that hegemony poses, or does it stand as a quasi-transcendental limitation on all possible subject-formation and, hence, as indifferent to politics? (Butler, 5)

There is the widespread feeling that neither a radical historicism nor a fully fledged transcendentalism would constitute appropriate answers, and some kind of solution which avoids the pitfalls of the two extremes—such as quasi-transcendentalism—has been postulated. . . . What would be the preconditions for a theoretical advance in this field, and what would be the consequences of the latter for historical analysis? (Laclau, 8–9)

Is the "subject" simply the result of the process of subjectivization, of interpellation, of performatively assuming some "fixed subject-position," or does the Lacanian notion of the "barred subject" (and the German Idealist notion of the subject as self-relating negativity) also pose an alternative to traditional identitarian-substantialist metaphysics? (Zizek, 9)

I will, then, start here. My particular guiding thread, not to the questions but to their answers throughout the book, will be the hegemony/subalternity relation—again, providing there is one. I am interested in the structurality or...