(Queer) Theory and the Universal Alternative

James Penney

Diacritics, Volume 32, Number 2, Summer 2002, pp. 3-19 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/dia.2004.0024

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dia/summary/v032/32.2penney.html

Access provided by Florida State University Libraries (14 Feb 2014 04:31 GMT)
2
(QUEER) THEORY AND THE
UNIVERSAL ALTERNATIVE

JAMES PENNEY

Judith Butler. ANTIGONES CLAIM: KINSHIP BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH.

New York: Columbia UP, 2000.
Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek. CONTINGENCY, HEGEMONY,
UNIVERSALITY: CONTEMPORARY DIALOGUES ON THE LEFT. London:
Verso, 2000.

In October 2000, just a few weeks before the US presidential election, a young,
fashionable, handsome man handed me a political leaflet while I crossed Christopher
Street in Greenwich Village. I didnt give it much thought at the time (apart from noticing
that the boy was kind of cute): I was in transit toward the 4th Street subway station and
the Port Authority where I would catch the bus back to Cornell. When I decided to write
a review essay on the current state of poststructuralism, Marxism, and queer theory
through the lens of the two books listed above, I discovered I had lost the pamphlet,
certain that my hostile reaction to what I considered its fundamental conservatism and
trendy political correctness had unconsciously caused its mysterious disappearance.
When I rediscovered the leaflet in the chaos of my move away from Ithaca, I realized
that my relation to it had been hysterical: I was reluctant to address its traumatic content,
unwilling to excavate my multiple frustrations at the apparent impossibility of being a
homosexual and a socialist in America. And yet I couldnt really forget about it either:
though not an American citizen and therefore unable to vote, I found myself equally
unable simply to dismiss the leaflet as a mere inconsequential symptom of the pseudo-
democracy that America has always been, or unequivocally to endorse the snooty CBC/
Queen Street condescension of my fellow Canadian Lefties toward the primitive,
superficial, liberal (in the worst psychologistic sense), irremediably ideological, and
thoroughly depressing state of American political discourse. Those poor Americans,
the far-from-irrelevant logic goes. They either unquestioningly submit to the
individualistic fantasy of the American Dream in order to participate in the political
process, or they become hermetically imprisoned in their pseudo-political anti-statist
minoritarianism, too cool and too radical to condescend to the public sphere. After six
years in the United States, Ive now become aware that my inability to swallow much of
contemporary queer theoryauthored overwhelmingly by young, elite-educated
Americans with relatively narrow political horizonsis mostly due to the manner in
which it articulates numerous political assumptions fundamentally alien to my own
socialization in a country whose political differences from the US are insufficiently
appreciated in that nation, and in which extremes of climate and geography have
engendered a collectivist ethos in many ways fundamentally hostile to the American-
style extreme individualism with which I had lived for so many years.
But the interest of this sort of political autobiography is in this context undoubtedly
limited. Whatyou might now find yourself impatiently wondering if you dont already

diacritics / summer 2002 diacritics 32.2: 319 3

knowwere the contents of this famous pamphlet? And what exactly was my problem
with it? Published by a coalition of queer voters in New York called the Empire State
Pride Agenda, the pamphlet presented extremely selective profiles of the main candidates,
both Democrat and Republican, running for the offices of President, US Senator, State
Senator, and Member of the State Assembly. Each profile summarized the history of a
candidates positions with respect to rights issues of concern to gay, lesbian, bisexual,
and transgendered persons. The profiles made no concerted effort to represent the
candidates perspectives on any other issue: gun control, education, foreign policy, the
death penalty, taxation, health care (generally speaking, that is to say above and beyond
the issues related to AIDS-related illness and reproductive rights); only policies directly
concerning civil rights for nonheterosexual citizens were thoroughly broached.
I should confess that once I got the general idea I threw the pamphlet away in
disgust: Am I supposed to feel interpellated, I asked myself in full hysterical
Althusserian mode, by this utterly pseudo-political claptrap? Is this what it means to
be gay and political in America? What kind of political subject is this piece of political
literature presupposing? I further wondered to myself as my anger began to give way
to cool radical-democratic rationalism. Does it not implicitly suggest, I further mused,
that I vote for the fiscally conservative homosexual or queer-friendly Republican in
favor of capital punishment and low corporate taxes instead of the Democrat pushing a
patients bill of rights and the regulation of the pharmaceutical industry who spoke out
against gay marriage and domestic partnership benefits? And more fundamentally, is
there not something even more disturbingly wrong with the picture the pamphlet paints;
does it not commit a sin more fundamentally original: that it simply rehearses the already
existing binary of Democratic or Republican political options, rather than systematically
uncovering how this apparent choice represents a tragic caving-in to the logic of capital;
how it utterly wimps out on the only truly critical alternative, which is to create an
authentic political choice, to insist that the liberal-multiculturalist/identitarian-
postidentitarian framework might not in fact be the only possible, as they say, game in
town?1

1. In the interest of prolonging this more rational mood we can inquire more responsibly
after the leaflets modus operandi. In addition to examining each candidates public record and
voting history with respect to gay issues, the Agendas members circulated a questionnaire, the
results of which, so they tell us, also informed their endorsements. As stated in the pamphlets
introduction, the questions covered the following topics: comprehensive civil rights protections;
protecting students from anti-gay harassment in schools; funding for our health and human service
needs; anti-discrimination protections in the issuing of insurance policies; funeral and bereavement
leave for same-sex partners; opposition to the state anti-gay marriage bill; support of multicultural
curriculum in our schools; age-appropriate sex education; condom distribution and HIV prevention
and counseling; and recognition of our relationships through domestic partnership, civil union,
and/or same-sex marriage legislation. The careful reader will note that there are a number of
topics on the list that express interests extending in principle beyond the queer community stricto
sensu: health care, womens reproductive rights, multicultural and sex education. Yet the reader
will also remark that the topics, on the level of their address, presuppose a particular, carefully
delimited community whose members faithfully express our interests and which constitutes, in
short, us. In consequence, the issues of health care and health insurance, for example, are
approached not as concerns raising the general question of each citizens access to the benefits
they provide, but rather as a question of our specific needs as well as our right to protection
against discrimination. To be sure, the exclusivity of the lists mode of address works well in the
instance of sex education: we can be sure in most instances that in our efforts to have educators
broach strategies for safer same-sex relations they wont forget to talk about the pill and the
diaphragm. In the case of health care, however, the politically troubling consequences become all
too clear: as long as we are protected from the homophobic discrimination of private insurance
corporations, no further questioning of the health care system is required. Also worthy of note is

4
 Now at this point many will undoubtedly object that my little political narrative
falsely attributes a prescriptive dimension to a publication addressed to a particular
audience united by a single issue, and perhaps also that it betrays a certain lack of
appreciation for American political realities as well as for the broad spectrum of forms
of politicization in the indigenous queer movements. The publication makes no
assumptions, these same skeptics will continue, about its readers other political
convictions: it simply presents itself as a source of information to a particular constituency
that allegedly shares a set of concerns related to the experience of homosexuality. After
all, the logic would continue, were not talking about just any constituency: women,
Asian-Americans, illegal immigrants, health-care workers. Were concerned, rather, with
a set of persons united by the notion that they experience desire in a way generally
deemed inappropriate and who have, since at least the moment of the famed Stonewall
riots, emerged into political visibility in historically unprecedented fashion during our
unusually privileged tournant-de-sicle.
Indeed, one could in fact advance the argument that queer people make up the most
radically new of the so-called new social movements of which Ernesto Laclau,
Chantal Mouffe, and innumerable others have spoken, advancing as evidence the
irreducible historical novelty of the idea of a group of citizens predicating their
politicization on the notion of sexuality. As has been well documented, these newly
visible political interests have justified, since the 1960s and the emergence of the New
Left, the reorientation of Marxist and post-Marxist political discourse away from what
were viewed as a narrowly economistic concern with class antagonism and proletarian
cultures, an antidemocratic investment in structurally radical social transformation, and
an unrealistic conviction in the possibility of social harmony. What is now in crisis,
wrote Laclau and Mouffe in 1984, is a whole conception of socialism which rests upon
the ontological centrality of the working class, upon the role of Revolution, with a capital
r, as the founding moment in the transition from one type of society to another, and
upon the illusory prospect of a perfectly unitary and homogeneous collective will that
will render pointless the moment of politics [2]. In the stead of these allegedly
metaphysical fantasies was introduced an appreciation for the new proliferation of
identities whose concrete political demands, it was suggested, present the challenge of
a logic exceeding the conceptual capacities of a Marxist paradigm that, historically, has
been insufficiently appreciative of cultural and sexual differences. While there have
been instances of the subversive eruption of feminine and minority voices claiming
rights in the name of difference throughout the modern era, it is really only since the
creation of sexuality as a field of scientific inquiry in the nineteenth century that
subjects have presented themselves and their interests in the public sphere as different
not on account of any objectively identifiable trait such as race or sex, but rather on
account of their desire. It has of course been with reference to this new difference that
the numerous gay and lesbian movements of the past four decades have presented
themselves as deserving of modes of recognition and jurisprudential-constitutional
accommodation that account for the specificities of their modes of life, and protect
them from the heterogeneously nefarious agencies of discrimination.
Now it is perhaps uncontroversialbanal evento assert that the emergence into
wide-ranging political visibility of the sexual minorities coincides on the level of history
with the beginning of the collapse of Marxist/Communist ideologies and the ensuing
intellectual hegemony of a liberalism that tends to link up in an essential or necessary

the tokenistic gesture toward multiculturalism: Some of us are of color. the logic goes, therefore
we must represent ethnic diversity. Consequently, nonwhite heterosexual subjects, so long as
they are blessed with the required disposable income and leisure time, are allowed to come along
for the ride.

diacritics / summer 2002 5

way the model of a purge-crazy totalitarian Stalinism to the very libidinal-conceptual
kernel of the socialist-utopian impulse. Additionally, with the recent relative box-office
success of Before Night Falls, Julian Schnabels Reinaldo Arenas biopic, Western popular
consciousness has been reminded of the fundamental hostility of actually existing
orthodox Marxist humanism to the actual existence of homosexual desire and the
persons who experience it. These are perhaps only the two most obvious reasons why
one has been hard-put since the emergence of so-called queer theory to find an
authentically radical socialist voicethere have of course been exceptions2one that
goes as far as to interrogate the very conditions of historical possibility of the emergence
of the gay political movement, and to pose the touchy problem of the dependence of this
movement on an implicit and unconscious acceptance of the liberal-democratic
bourgeois political framework that is perhaps the greatest blight of our time.
This is the point where we may finally introduce the books that will be of concern
in the next pages. For insofar as we recognize that the voice of Judith Butler has been
the one that has most productively synthesized the concerns of the post-Marxist radical
democratic Left with the interests of the new, historically unprecedented sexually
minoritarian communities, her two recent textsthe one interrogating the implications
for sexuality and kinship of the very structuralist matrix of poststructuralist theory,
the other presenting scrappy theoretical exchanges with her two main post-Marxist
buddiesacquire monumental significance by virtue of their effort to hook queer theory
up with the major currents of contemporary progressive political theory. One is in fact
tempted to suggest that such a gesture, on account of its mere form, serves as an attempt
both to resuscitate from its premature cardiac arrest the category of the universal at the
conclusion of a postmodern age guilty of making a fetish of difference, and to counteract
the Foucauldian narcissistic inwardness that severs the imagination of queer theorys
political future from the crucial contemporary battle over the category of democracy
and the forms of national and supranational as well as state and nonstate power through
which this category is expressed.
In other words, the publication during the same millennial year of Judith Butlers
Wellek lectures on Antigone

and the dialogues on the Left between Butler, Ernesto
Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek is significant not only because it forces the issue of
homosexuality

onto the terrain of contemporary progressive political theory (although
of Zizek and Laclau the former is the only one for whom homosexuality has become a
key concern of his political discourse), but also because it presentspotentially, as I
shall arguean exciting new opportunity to rescue queer theory from its increasing

2. Decidedly non- or postliberalnot to mention explicitly Marxistapproaches to the

question of homosexuality have of course been extremely rare, and most recent instances of
this marginal tendency have tended to cluster around the notion of materiality in contrast to
the dominant postmodernist emphasis on discourse. There are of course a wide variety of
theoretical formulations of the material, many of which distinctly lack anything resembling a
radical political orientation. Donald Mortons edited volume The Material Queer: The LesBiGay
Cultural Studies Reader is the best recent example of an attempt to offer a synthesis of (post)-
Marxist alternatives to the hegemonic varieties of queer theory. Marx and Engels were largely
uninterested in homosexuality, and it is not an exaggeration to claim that this oversight has led
many major Marxist politicians and theorists to the conclusion that homosexuality is somehow
objectively reactionary. Additionally, there is some evidence in their correspondence of the most
banal, not to mention decidedly unscientific, variety of homophobia. Among the critics in the
Marxist tradition broadly conceived who have helpfully addressed the politics of sexuality, one
can mention Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin, Alexandra Kollontai, Herbert Marcuse, Guy
Hocquenghem, Mario Mieli, and Flix Guattari; and from among those still currently theorizing,
Jonathan Dollimore, Teresa Ebert, Danae Clark, Toril Moi, Jeffrey Weeks, John DEmilio, David
Horowitz, and Morton himself.

6
political irrelevance by forcing it beyond the limit of the liberal-democratic horizon
within which it has almost without exception been held. Whereas the overwhelmingly
dominant poststructuralist influence in queer theory has set itself the goal of achieving
recognition of the difference of nonheterosexual subjects within the existing
socioeconomic order, the recent resuscitation of the category of the universal makes it
possible for queer theory, in my view, to ally itself with more politically challenging
elements. Though these elements would require, to be sure, the slaying of a number of
queer sacred cows (that of sexual freedom being the most significant), they ultimately
offer a more thoroughgoing vision of general social emancipation of greatest benefit to
all subjects, queer and unqueer alike. In order to examine in what manner these texts
might contribute to such a political renaissance, however, it will first be necessary to
examine more systematically their contents, and to identify in precise terms the nature
and consequences of the theoretical antagonisms that fuel the debates not only between
the authors of Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, but also between the discourse of
radical democracy and the dominant assumptions of queer theory as they have in
exemplary fashion crystallized over the last decade in Butlers work.
As I progress through the issues presented in the two texts,

I will wish to highlight
two fundamental points. First, the battle between Butler and Zizek concerning the political
stakes of the category of the Real in Lacanian psychoanalysis,
inaugurated by Butlers
work in Bodies That Matter,3 has to my mind been won by Zizek, who has convincingly
established that the concepts of the Real and sexual difference in psychoanalysis are not
normative and/or heterosexist in the sense Butler wants to attribute to them. Consequently,
it should now generally be acknowledged that Butler is a weak reader of Lacan, and that
antihomophobic criticism would do well to return to Lacanian psychoanalysis (the way
has begun to be pointed out to us by Tim Dean, Christopher Lane, and others4) as the
most productive existing theoretical tradition for the achievement of its theoretical and
practical ends. And as a supplement to this first point, it should also be acknowledged
that Butlers inability to appreciate the agency of the Real in sexual difference is not
unrelated to the inability of her discourse to proceed to an examination of the
consequences of the identification of capital or the market as a kind of real against
which the more challenging antiliberal aspect of her discourse continually runs up.
Second, the queer theory constellation of discourses is so indelibly entrenched in
the presuppositions of poststructuralism and its (paradoxical) latently identitarian anti-
identitarianism, its minoritarian antistatism, and its lack of a utopian anticapitalist critical
horizon that the rubric, along with the entire project of radical democracy, might best
be left to those content with accommodating the demands of nonheterosexual
constituencies within the general framework of the third way liberal democracy
expressed in Anglo-America during the past decade by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair (as
well as, with fewer global implications, Jean Chrtien in Canada).5 It might now be the

3. Arguing with the Real; and Zizeks extended response to Butlers work in Passionate
(Dis)Attachments, or, Judith Butler as a Reader of Freud.
4. See, for example, Tim Deans Beyond Sexuality; Christopher Lanes The Burdens of
Intimacy: Psychoanalysis and Victorian Masculinity; and Tim Dean and Christopher Lane, eds.,
Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis.
5. Naomi Klein has eloquently articulated the logic of the conversion of many young
intellectuals of my generation whose politicization occurred during the heydey of 80s-style identity
politics and who felt a deep frustration with the representationalist ideological matrix of that
period of campus activism. What I question, Klein writes, is the battles we North American
culture warriors never quite got around to. Poverty wasnt an issue that came up much back then;
sure, every once in a while in our crusades against the trio of isms, somebody would bring up
classism, and, being out-P.C.-ed, we would dutifully add classism to the hit list in question. But

diacritics / summer 2002 7

case, in other words, that the current state of rights-based queer political activism has
become so mired in the corporatist and exploitative logic of capital that the only possible
radical strategy is to declare the entire category of sexual orientation irremediably
bourgeois, and to proceed toward the creation of the conditions of possibility for an
anticapitalist political theory in which the axis of sexuality might take a new, currently
unimaginable and more politically consequential form.6
But let us now turn concretely to the texts we have set ourselves the task of
examining. The three terms expressed in the Dialogues title nicely sum up what is at
stake in negotiations of Left/progressive political theory at a momentthe present
when one still finds oneself in the quandary left-over from the clash between orthodox
Marxist historicist teleology (capitalism inexorably leads to its revolutionary overthrow)
and the new postmodern politics predicated on identity claims and struggles for ethnic
and cultural postcolonial recognition. In this light a closer examination of the political
terrain these key terms demarcate is in order. First, contingency: in Laclaus view
Gramscis significance for Marxist theory consists in his suggestion that a political subject,
individual or collective, will bear no perfectly predictable relation to its material
conditions. Consequently, for example, there is no necessity whose consciousness
exhausts our subjectivitypolitical or otherwise, nor is it possible accurately to identify
particular agents as harboring special revolutionary energies or investments on account
of any allegedly objective structural position within the means of production [Contingency
49]. Laclaus Gramsci, one could say, precociously deconstructs orthodox Marxisms
idealization of the proletariat. Thus, given the failure of both second-world Soviet-style
economies and third world developing ones to delink successfully from the logic of
global capital and free market trade, and therefore the failure and apparent contingency
of the classic Marxist revolutionary narrative about capitals imminent overthrow, does
it still make any sense to uphold capitalism as a socioeconomic horizon from which
transcendence might still be possible? And further, given the contemporary lieu commun
about the historical contingency or structural incompleteness or necessary failure
of identity claims that has emerged from the postmodern critique of identity politics
(of which Butler is of course emblematic), is the traditional Marxist category of class
to be relegated to the same false identitarian status as the other, now more fashionable,
categories of difference, including that of sexuality itself?
Next, hegemony: classical Marxism argued for the determination of superstructural
social elements (state, civil society, public sphere, etc.) by the base factors constituting
a societys means of production. Laclau and Mouffes work strove to cloud the
transparency of this relation, thereby uncovering the significance of what they considered
the self-conscious, willed instances of political organization that occur, at least in part,
independently of structural determination, and that reflect an extremely broad spectrum
of public and private interests. They claimed to find a space of indeterminacy or
impossibility in the social field characterized by immanent antagonism; they called

our criticism was focused on the representation of women and minorities within the structures of
power, not on the economics behind those power structures [121].
6. Having already mentioned the example of Cuba, it is necessary to point out that the obvious
counterargument here would make reference to the same case of Reinaldo Arenas, imprisoned
and tortured by a revolutionary regime for whom homosexuality was precisely a bourgeois
deviation and consequently objectively reactionary and requiring elimination. But does the
emergence of this logic of extermination not indicate the Castro regimes failure to cast off the
notion of sexuality as an objective sociologically descriptive category? In other words, the
Cuban communists reprehensible error consisted in their inability to acknowledge that, if
homosexuality is indeed a bourgeois phenomenon, then heterosexuality must surely be too,
and the objectively reactionary notion is therefore neither homo- nor heterosexuality, but rather
the very concept of sexual orientation as such.

8
hegemony the temporary filling in of this space by a particular political interest. And so,
it has been fifteen years since Laclau and Mouffe maintained in this way that the concept
of hegemony constitutes a kind of vanishing mediator between orthodox Marxist class
essentialism (the notion, in other words, that the privileging of the class struggle as
the ultimate horizon of historical process performs an inherent violence against the axes
of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc.) and todays world of free-floating
postindustrial identities and competing ideologies (in which class is simply one
among many aspects of the proliferation of differences).7 Is it now necessary to conclude
that the very concept of hegemony is itself an ideological product of the hegemonic
status of liberal democracy and multinational capital, in other words that the latter
constitutes a kind of illusory limit-concept beyond which the pursuit of pluralism,
freedom, equality, and democracy itself necessarily turn into their fascist and/or
totalitarian perversions?
And finally, universality: if we acknowledge that Left-leaning cultural criticism
has in the last decade or so reached a virtual consensus that the Foucault-style postmodern
emphasis on difference, specificity, and particularity necessarily features either (a) a
socioeconomic short circuit that fails to recognize the production of these differences
by a universal, capitalist totality or world system, or (b) a sociopolitical and/or
logical short circuit misrecognizing the fact that, by virtue of the lack of closure of the
general social field (the barred Other for Lacanians, the structural necessity of suture/
articulation for the radical democrats), any expression of a particular political interest
always manifests either an implicit call to the universal or a formally necessary
gesture of universalization, how is the very concept of the universal to be elaborated?
More specifically, is the dimension of the universal a kind of neutral a priori structural
gap or emptinessas Laclau, for example, argueswhose position is then filled in

by a hegemonic political constellation, or is it ratheras Zizek suggests, and Butler
appears to concurthe result of a primal, original gesture of violent exclusion whose
expression implies that the very field of universal political hegemonization depends on
such a moment of foreclosure and features in consequence an irreducible dimension of
historicity?
One of the particularly telling examples to which Contingency, Hegemony,
Universality alludes links up with both the concern for the politics of kinship Butler
expresses in the Antigone book and the conceptual horizon put forth in the Dialogues.
Indeed, one of the principal motivations behind Butlers reexamination of the critical
reception of the Sophocles tragedy is to develop how Antigones defiance suggests a
radical critique of kinship opposing itself to all efforts on the part of the state to normalize
family structures. The example in question is the recent controversy in the American
press (and elsewhere, of course, but the examples expression takes on a decidedly
American valence) concerning the desirability of the legalization of gay marriage and
the recognition of the rights of homosexuals to join the military and be open about
their sexualities (the reference is of course to the notorious dont ask, dont tell policy

7. See in particular the passage in the chapter Hegemony and Radical Democracy in
which the authors claim that the basic obstacle [to the Lefts capacity for action and political
analysis] has been classism: that is to say, the idea that the working class represents the privileged
agent in which the fundamental impulse of social change resides . . . [177]. I would suggest
that, rather than discard the concept of class tout court, it is an infinitely more productive analytic
move to trace the socioeconomic transformation of the industrial working class under late
capitalism, thereby retaining the fundamental Marxian presupposition that the most objectively
potentially revolutionary constituency is necessarily the one most concretely disenfranchised by
a social formation. The question then becomes: what is the socioeconomic content, in our present
historical juncture, of the concept working class?

diacritics / summer 2002 9

of the Clinton administration). These examples are salient because they feature universal
forms (that is, marriage, military service) essential to most modern conceptions of
citizenship that mask disavowed exclusions of particular constituencies (that is,
homosexuals).
The question then becomes whether or not the inclusion of the excluded particular
within the realm of the universal carries an inherent political value and/or whether or
not the very goal of inclusion sidesteps a more fundamental problem concerning the
constitution or formation of the field of universality as such. More specifically, the
latter mode of questioning would interrogate the ways in which the legal form of marriage,
regardless of its particular contents, discriminateson the level of taxation and access
to modes of state-sponsored or corporate social benefits, for example (assuming for a
moment that the latter expression is not oxymoronic)against subjects who, by choice
or by circumstance, do not find their lives linked in a such a special way to a single
person. Additionally, such a logic would underline the notion that the discourse concerning
gays in the military glosses over the question of why they would want to be there in
the first place, given in particular the obvious points to be made about the increasingly
self-righteous blackmail of American foreign policy, the role of the US military in shady
terrorist activities the world over, and the utter nonpoliticization of the US defense budget
in the last presidential elections. Butler is justifiably concerned about all of these issues
when she underscores how the conceptual horizon of inclusion takes for granted the
normative framework to which one, as an excluded subject, seeks access.

One might say that the advances that are sought by mainstream liberal activists
(inclusion in the military and in marriage) are an extension of democracy and
a hegemonic advance to the extent that lesbian and gay people are making the
claim to be treated as equal to other citizens with respect to these obligations
and entitlements, and that the prospect of their inclusion in these institutions is
a sign that they are at present carrying the universalizing promise of hegemony
itself. But this would not be a salutary conclusion, for the instatement of these
questionable rights and obligations for some lesbians and gays establishes
norms of legitimation that work to remarginalize others and foreclose
possibilities for sexual freedom which have also been long-standing goals of
the movement. The naturalization of the military-marriage goal for gay politics
also marginalizes those for whom one or the other of these institutions is
anathema, if not inimical. [Antigones Claim 160]

Here I would point out one fundamental problem that I will further develop at a
later point: the fact that Butlers argument in favor of the interrogation of the machinations
of power in the normative constitution of the universal has recourse to an ideal of sexual
freedom as a kind of Kantian summum bonum outside the realm of politicization not
only indicates how her framework fails to step completely outside of the liberal framework
that she attacks, but also bespeaks a fundamental and dangerous misunderstanding about
the current state of safer-sex education in the gay community and the history of HIV
transmission between homosexual men.8 Nevertheless, it is also clear that Butlers point
here carries a basic, irrefutable significance. Insofar as mainstream gay and lesbian
politics is limited by the horizon of inclusion, visibility, and equality, the more crucial
question of the ideological frame through which these ideas are viewed remains

8. Gabriel Rotello has exhaustively demonstrated how the ideal of sexual freedom has
had a devastating ideological impact on efforts among safer-sex educators to curtail the spread
of HIV among men who have sex with men [see Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay
Men].

10
unexamined. Take the example of contemporary US network television: one can
represent blacks, Hispanics, gays, and lesbiansin fact if one doesnt one is
increasingly subject to very effective consumer-based boycotts by groups such as the
very Hollywood GLAAD, for exampleas long as they are objectively attractive
corporate lawyers with impossible Manhattan apartments whose lives proceed in perfect
synchrony with the dominant corporatist and consumerist ethic, and whose problems do
not extend beyond the psychological nexus defined by relationships and affairs of the
heart, intriguing though they may be. Butler admirably underscores how official forms
of social legitimizationlike marriageassociated with regimes of state power create
a kind of shadowy parallel universe of invisible and voiceless subjects who are not
only concretely oppressed by such instances of normative control, but who also, more
radically, remain fundamentally culturally unintelligible; underneath the threshold of
representation, in other words,

defining the acceptable forms of life.
Intriguingly, Slavoj Zizek, in his final contribution to the Dialogues, latches on to
Butlers provocative examples and introduces a subtle point not about the violent forms
of exclusion effected by the constitution of the field of universality per se, but rather
about the logic of the relation between Butlers conceptualization of this primal
exclusion and her viewscommunitarian, antistatist, in short
ambiguousabout
concrete political agency in the era of multinational capital. Zizek reproaches Butler
with an overly Foucauldian conception of state power that tends toward a totalizing
closure of the field of state powers effects, that fails to apprehend how state
power is
split from within and relies on its own obscene spectral underside [313].
Z izeks point
herealong with the argument about the Real, the major criticism Zizek directs at
Butlermight at first glance appear to be an inconsequential quibble. In other words, it
might not seem to make much of a difference for political strategy whether one considers
state power an unambiguous expression of the normative force of the law, or whether in
contrast the force of law is, if I may put it this way, structurally hypocriticaldepends

upon, and works in tandem with, its own violation. However, I tend to agree with Zizek
that Butlers assumption that the relation between the normative instance of state power
(the law) and its register of shadowy exclusions is one of antagonism rather than
disavowed complementarity leads the American critic to underestimate the importance
of addressing the normative instance itself, of recognizing the consequences of the notion
that, to put it in psychoanalytic terms, transgression is already presupposed by, and
therefore dependent on, the law.
It occurs to me that the example of gay marriage illustrates this rather well. Marriage
conventionally (that is, heterosexually) conceived is almost universally considered the
underlying linchpin of the social bond, the very instance of particularity representing
the totality of the set of relations constituting the social as an intelligible whole. The
vocabulary of kinship cross-culturally, for example, is incomprehensible in the absence
of the idea of marriage; and this is so even when one includes the case of matriarchal
societies. Further, few would disagree that marriage continues to function even in the
most liberalized cultures and state regimes as a precondition of full political and cultural
legitimacy, indeed of citizenship as such. Yet if one presupposes that the institution or
ideology of marriage as a form of state and/or civil discipline produces as its social
effect a set of abject subjects who carry subversive or upsetting potentialities by virtue
of their mere existence outside the norm, one simply fails to appreciate the level on
which the institution of marriage concretely enables its own adulterous transgressions.
By this I not only mean that bourgeois marriage has always worked at least in part in
synchrony with the forms of unfaithful enjoyment that it enables (how many bourgeois
marriages, for example, have functioned as a precondition of a spouses hetero- and/or
homosexual dalliances), but also that the form of marriage itself creates the possibility

diacritics / summer 2002 11

for an obscene, sanctimonious sadism toward those who do not benefit from its
legitimating powers. One does not have to be gaysimply unattachedto have suffered
from the superegoic condescension of those happy spouses who assure their single friends
of the imminence of the day when they will find the one who will make them happy.
It is in this sense that the legal form of marriage takes on the guise of what Zizek
designates with a term from Hegelian logic: concrete universality. Marriage presents
itself as the minimum form of the social bond as such, and yet is concretely available
only to heterosexual subjects of a certain level of material comfort and liberal rational
self-interest. Indeed, given in particular the ideological mobilization of the institution
of marriage in the US, it is not at all difficult to envisage how in this particular case the
inclusion of same-sex couples within the set of marriageable partners has the effect of
obliterating the concept of marriage tout court. Numerous cultural commentators of the
moral majority persuasion have gone on record in recent years as claiming that if same-
sex partners were allowed to marry, marriage wouldnt be marriage anymore. One
even gets a sense of the need in conservative circles, once homosexual unions become a
concrete possibility, for a supplementary/compensatory authentic marriage concept
that would rescue the notion from its homosexual perversion and preserve the sanctity
of real marriage. There is nothing particularly complicated or difficult about this logic.
The Moral Majority discourse outwardly admits to the not-so-hidden truth of marriage
when it recognizes that the concept depends on its increasingly hypocritically undisclosed
heterosexual essentialism. It consequently becomes clear that, on one level at least,
the hyperbanal conformist image of the suburban upper-middle-class homosexual
couple with one-point-three children and two SUVs has the effectcounterintuitive,
surely, from the perspective of progressive common senseof radically calling into
question the very notion of the social bond as such.
While one would hardly wish to uphold this normative couple as the very incarnation
of revolutionary political praxis, it is nonetheless evident that this paradoxical logic of
mainstream radicalism in the context of gay marriage accounts for the much wider
general acceptance of domestic partnership notions, not to mention the universally
controversial (yes, even in Holland and Denmark!) character of adoption rights for
same-sex partners. The French, for example, recently invented a new form of civil
unionthe PACSin order to keep marriage safe from homosexuals, and even the
most socially progressive polities have shown tremendous cultural resistance to
recognizing homosexual couples as legitimate parents. (Tellingly, the notion of a
homosexual couple raising a child appears to be more worrisome than that of a gay
single parent.) In the homophobic imaginary the association of homosexuality with the
shadowy social registers of transgression is much less threatening than the reality of a
normal homosexual family that is in all its fundamentals exactly like us. In Canada,
for example, despite Qubecs very recent limited legalization of same-sex adoption,
polls have consistently shown that cultural resistance to gay parenting is as high or
higher in this historically queer-positive province/nation than in the generally more
socially conservative remainder of the country. With these paradoxical observations in
mind, one is tempted to conclude that the more gay cultures are mainstreamednot in
the sense of the integration of homosexual markets within global capitalism or of the
representation of multiculturally correct upper-middle-class homosexual professionals
on American network TV, but rather in the sense of the increasing concrete resemblance
of gay families/couples to normal heterosexual ones across the socioeconomic strata
the more the most fundamental assumptions concerning cultural intelligibility are called
into question. Contra Butler, then, it may very well be the case that the best way to
attack marriage as such is paradoxically by means of an act of straightforward
conformity or imitation. In other words, the result of the full integration of
homosexual subjects within the universal set of privileges accruing from the institution

12
of marriage might be the dissolution of this very field of universality itself, indeed the
very elimination of the bourgeois family unit as the summum bonum of mainstream
liberal politics.
The political terrain of family and kinship is more broadly explored in Antigones
Claim, where Butler endeavors to trace contemporary attitudes on these topics through
structuralism and German idealism all the way back to the foundations of Western culture
in Greek antiquity. As I have already intimated, Butler wants to examine Sophocless
tragedy as a way of reexamining the concept of kinship in contemporary theory, its
place in culture and civil society. and its relation to the forms of state power. Butler
views Antigones defiant action as an ultimately doomed attempt to def[y] the state
through a powerful set of physical and linguistic acts [2]. According to Butler this
action suggests a new form of feminism she hopes will take on, in Foucauldian fashion,
the power of the state to set the conditions not simply for legitimate kinship relations,
but more fundamentally for basic political, social, and cultural intelligibility. Butler
sums up her investment in the figure of Antigone when she identifies two theoretical
questions the play asks the contemporary reader: whether there can be kinship without
the support and mediation of the state, and whether there can be the state without the
family as its support and mediation [5].
Thus, as numerous critics have done before her, Butler identifies in Antigones
subversive actshe violates, we remember, a civic edict by performing a burial right
on the body of her brother, Polynices, who had led the Argive army in an invasion of
Thebesa protest against a certain authoritarian and androcentric logic that identifies a
collective normative good and, through this identification, sets up conditions of
intelligibility for the expression of legitimate political interests. Butler discusses how
the singular case of Antigone has been a fundamental leitmotiv in Western ethics (Hegel,
Hlderlin, Lacan) because it investigates the parameters through which collective social
norms are instituted and contested. According to the Hegelian interpretation of the tragedy
famously outlined in his Phenomenology of Spirit, Antigone acts in accordance with an
ethical law associated with the feminine realm of the household gods (linked to the
family) and the unknowable dimension of death, whose meaning exceeds the public
realm of political citizenship and commercial exchange. This law enters into conflict
with the masculine political law of Creon, ruler of Thebes, whose legislative efforts
ensure the smooth functioning of the polis and the limitation of individual actions on
behalf of the security of the collective of citizens. In Hegels view these two opposing
laws enter into a dialectical conflict that occasions the self-destruction of the ancient
ethical world and the elaboration of a new set of ethical customs in which subjects
feature a less immediate, more self-reflexive relation to the sphere of legality in which
they are inscribed. For Butler, the Hegelian reading brings into relief the ethical dimension
of the primordial antagonism between forms of kinship and regimes of legality enunciated
in the name of the state. In his seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis, Lacan, somewhat
less famously, presented a trenchant critique of the Hegelian reading of Antigone [see
Lacan 243325], and Butler takes the opportunity offered by the Lacanian interpretation
to link, in a first moment, Antigones heroic act to the development of the concept of
kinship in Lvi-Straussian structuralist anthropology (and its borrowing of the taboo-
as-threshold-of-culture paradigm in Freudian psychoanalysis) and to frame, in a second,
the entire conceptual apparatus of Lacanian psychoanalysis around the allegedly
ahistorical set of presuppositions essential to the notion of symbolic structure it
elaborates.9 Lacanians tend to sever the symbolic account of kinship from the social,

9. For a contextualization of Lacans oft-misinterpreted reading of Antigone through Freuds

work on hysteria, Kants analytic of the beautiful, and Sades conception of crime, see my Beyond
At: Lacan, Ethics, and the Real.

diacritics / summer 2002 13

Butler offers, thus freezing the social arrangements of kinship as something intact and
intractable [14].
But Butler has mistakenly assumed that the unnamed Lacanians to which she refers
are competent readers of Lacan. Allow me therefore to take the time to develop why I
think Butlers argument against Lacanian theory is founded on erroneous presuppositions.
Not only does Lacans notion of the Real, according to Butler, abject certain cultural
norms that are in reality historically contingent to a domain outside the field of culture
and therefore outside the reach of modification, but his concept of the Symbolic Order
rests on the notion of a taboo against homosexuality and the free expression of feminine
desire that inaugurates a patriarchal and heterosexist social economy. The paranoid
aspect of Butlers criticism of the Lacanian realher idea, in other words, that the
premise of an internally limited sociosymbolic structure necessarily masks the positive
naturalization of a power regime viewed as in some sense outside history or
representation10manifests itself most vividly in her unfortunate misreading of Lacans
thesis about Antigones defiant burial of her brother. On one level, Butlers error may be
illuminated by her incorrect presupposition that the concept of the Lacanian symbolic is
identical to a structuralist Lvi-Straussian framework upholding that every possible
sociosymbolic system carries an inherent frame of intelligibility linked to the prohibition
of incest, the exchange of women between kinship groups, and the repression of
homosexuality. Butler argues that despite their protestations to the contrary, Lacanian
theorists (she doesnt say which ones) usually regress from speaking of strictly symbolic
forms of normativity to more concrete statements implying heterosexist, concretely social
norms. The distinction between symbolic and social law, she writes, cannot finally
hold [19].
Though you will never catch me endorsing the often ridiculous social
prognostications of numerous French Lacanians, it is eminently unclear where Butler
found the distinction she names, since Lacan himself never introduced such a concept
as a social law. Lacan formulated the symoblic laws strange inability to legislate not
with reference to particular social conventions (which everyone knows are historically
contingent) but vis--vis an agency both unchanging and resistant to articulationthe
Real. Indeed, one of the fundamental focus-points of Lacans mid- to later teaching
consisted in an elaboration of the consequences of the disarticulation of the Symbolic
from the Real. This means that all possible sociosymbolic systems necessarily fail to
conceal the traumatic eruption of the Real; for Lacan, in other words, any such system
repetitively enacts its failure to totalize itself, to bring itself to a point of positive closure,
to legislate its law. A sociosymbolic system is limited not by an externally imposed
regime of power, but rather by an internally instituted impossibility that splits power
from itself. It is precisely the space of this eruption, this instance of impossibility or
failure, that Lacan wants to claim in his ethics seminar for Antigones act.

10. Interestingly, it is not Zizek but Laclau who offers the most incisive rebuttal in the Dialogues
to Butlers argument that the idea of the Lacanian real hides a secretly normative, ahistorical
kernel. If I say that the limits to historical variability are to be found in something which can be
positively determined, I would have set up a transcendental limit which has an ontic determination
of its own. But if I say that a negative limit has been set upsomething which prevents any
positive limit from being fully constitutedno ontic determination is involved [184]. It is precisely
this psychoanalytic notion of an internally limited sociosymbolic orderone that fails to achieve
completion not on account of an external obstacle imposed by power but on account of a
strictly intrinsic, structural lackthat Butler simply fails to understand in her reading of Lacan.
And when it comes to the question of sexual difference, it is precisely because this Ur-difference is
real rather than symbolic that the Symbolic Order can in no manner, as is quite evidently the case,
successfully discipline subjects into becoming heterosexual.

14
 That Lacan calls Antigone the guardian of the being of her brother signifies that
this dimension of being is what every sociosymbolic system necessarily lacks (Lacan
in fact defines the subject as featuring an essential manque--tre, or lack of being);
crucially, however, by insisting that Antigone, through her act, occupies or places
herself at this impossible place or limit, Lacan insists not only that the reconfiguration
of any sociosymbolic order is concretely possible, but also that every social system will
in a sense objectively put forth how this reconfiguration might be effected through the
manner in which it qualifies as criminal or unintelligible specific realms of theory
and praxis. In Butlers view, when Lacan claims that Antigone, in defiance of Creons
edict, affirms the properly transcendental value of her brothers being, he forgets that
Antigone is also committing a crime [53]. In the seminar in question, however, Lacan
makes clear that the link between beings affirmation and criminality is precisely his
point: The fruit of the incestuous union [between Oedipus and Jocasta], he says, has
split into two brothers, one of whom represents power and the other crime. There is no
one to assume the crime and the validity of crime apart from Antigone [283, my
emphasis]. Thus, at the precise moment when Lacan insists that the function of the
ethical act is precisely to demonstrate that the sociosymbolic orderthe Otherfails to
institute the norms we attribute to it and that, in consequence, anything, including in
particular the impossible, can happen, Butler symptomatically falls back on her
stubborn insistence that the Other has a predetermined structure, that it must have ultimate
authority when it comes to the identification of legitimate forms of life.
This idea of the presence of a field of objective potential transgression in any
sociosymbolic system is what Lacan attempts to elaborate whenin a passage of the
seminar not quoted in Butlers argumenthe insists that Antigone presents herself as
the defender of the legitimacy of crime, as an advocate for the sacrificial victim
who is burnt at the stake in order to render possible the emergence of a coherent
sociosymbolic system. Thus, when Lacan associates Antigones crime with what he
calls the discourse of the father, in other words with Oedipuss incestuous criminality,
he is precisely not upholding the idea of the paternal functions smooth patriarchal
command over the sociosymbolic system in the manner Butler attributes to Lvi-Strauss.
Rather, he is underlining the notion that the figure of the father is always double: the
reassuring father who guarantees the effectiveness of symbolic exchange is always
haunted by the real father of traumatic incestuous enjoymentwhat Lacan called the
pre-version. It is in the name of this fatherthe perverse father-of-enjoyment in whom
Oedipus at Colonus recognized himself at the moment of his self-blinding and his desire
never to have been bornthat Antigone acts, not in the name of the symbolic father
who would uphold the sociosymbolic status quo. Antigone is therefore for Lacan the
most sublime embodiment of the subject who does precisely what Butler wants to do in
the most challenging moments of her contribution to the Dialogues, namely to move
beyond the political framework of hegemony and its implied model of competing
interests struggling for recognition and to access the terms of a more radical framework,
one that interrogates the logic of the constitution of the field of criminality/unintelligibility
that had to be abjected in order to make hegemonization possible in the first instance.
Antigone, in other words, is the subject who refuses to accept the terms of life as
presently constituted and, in refusing to give up on her desire, accepts the consequences
of occupying the zone of death and impossibility in the mad, suicidal hope that
a better future might come.
The radicalism of Antigones act also poses, not coincidentally, a crucial challenge
to the contemporary sociosymbolic universe of queer theory. For if it is indeed the case
that the political horizon of gay and lesbian politics is at present so deeply entrenched in
the field of liberal ideology and its rhetoric of freedoms and rightswhat does sexual

diacritics / summer 2002 15

freedom pushed to its logical conclusion in the context of the HIV crisis imply, one
could very plausibly argue, if not the right to choose not to wear a condom, to infect
ones partnerthen the most politically consequential move at the present moment, the
one that would truly constitute an act in the Lacanian sense, might precisely be the
suicidal gesture of its self-obliteration, the very reconstitution of the field of
intelligibility of queer political activism, such that the axial radius of sexuality would
be more decisively tied to the Marxian concepts of class and mode of production. The
goal here would be to render the category of sexual orientation not meaningless in itself,
but rather meaningless in the absence of the additional socioeconomic qualifications
Ive just mentioned.
Of course the point of such a gesture is not to cease working toward the most
important concrete goals of queer politicsthe legal recognition of same-sex
partnerships, the extension of marriage and adoption privileges to same-sex partners,
the further development of antidiscrimination legislation and, most crucially, the
integration of responsible antihomophobic sex education within public secondary
education11but rather to acknowledge that such efforts (a) are not as structurally
dependent on identity-predicated formulations of homosexuality as we have been
heretofore led to think; and (b) remain inscribed within an extremely limited liberal
conceptual horizon of rights and freedoms which fails to recognize how such concepts
have limited meaning for the most concretely disenfranchised subjectsqueer and
straight and everything beyond and in betweenthe world over. The overarching
claim to be made along these lines is that the postmodern reluctance to identify the
inscription of its project within the actually existing capitalist logic of ultraliberalized
trade, lawless free trade zones and stateless migrant workers, and the elevation of the
drive for profit to the objective principle underlying all imaginable forms of social
organization has the effect of failing to target what one is tempted to call the real
enemy: the totalitarian macroeconomic opacity with which the historical impediments
to the voracious, inherently exploitative expansion of Big Capital are being systematically
dismantled at a level utterly beyond the reach of any state apparatus, and therefore
beyond the reach of any authentically democratic, citizen-based process of collective
decision-making.
Perhaps the best way of encapsulating this somewhat self-contradictory new project,
particularly in the light of the paradoxical logic of mainstream radicalism identified
in the debate surrounding gay marriage, is through the notion of pushing the liberal
logic of rights and freedoms beyond the inherent limits of liberal ideology itself, in
other words of performing the liberal gesture of universalization on behalf of those
subjects excluded by the very constitution of liberalisms horizon of intelligibility, those
subjects concretely deprived of the rights and freedoms liberalism is in theory supposed
to bestow. And if one would concern oneself with the inevitable clamorous accusation
that the accomplishment of such a gesture discredits the premises of freedom as such,
one should perhaps consider such accusations as evidence in favor of the objective
authenticity of the gesture itself.

11. It is to be noted here that as soon as one tries to draw up such a list of the ongoing
concrete goals of queer politics, one is instantly reminded of the inextricability of these projects
from wider ones involving the social as a whole. It is perhaps unnecessary to point out that the
integration of responsible anti-homophobic sex education within public secondary education
for example, presupposes that there already exists a uniformly high-quality public secondary
education system in ones field of political intervention. This presupposition is becoming
increasingly invalid in the case of the vast majority of developed (post)industrial Western nation-
states.

16

It is precisely with respect to these last notions that Zizeks polemic against Laclau
and his radical democratic followers is absolutely correct: the radical in radical
democracy refers only to the disturbing decisiveness and passivity with which the
classical Marxist denunciation of the cultural and material devastation performed by
unlimited capital is rather cynically abandoned in that discourse. Indeed, a bitter historical
irony attaches itself to this observation when one recalls that, for early Marxism, the
concept of radical democracy referred not to the maximization of the progressive
potentialities of liberal democracy, but rather to the dictatorship of the proletariat, in
other words to the admittedly paradoxical notion that true democracy is possible only
by means of the suspension of democracy as it has been construed by the constitutional
apparatus of parliamentary liberalism. While the dictatorship of the proletariat, for
historical reasons, is undoubtedly no longer desirable nor possible in the mode Marx
himself imagined, one fundamental point remains: it is necessary to leave open the
utopian possibility of a political act in the present that would, in general terms, transform
in toto the conditions of intelligibility of the notion of democracy itself and, more
specifically, inaugurate a new political symbolic in which the problematic of sexuality
would find itself essentially and decisively tied to the basic economic conditions of the
subjects position within the social worlds means of material production and resource
distribution. Queer theory must proceed to its self-destructive auto-critique, to the
traversal of its most intimate liberal fantasies (that of so-called sexual freedom
undoubtedly being the most fundamental) because it fully participates in the cultural
and socioeconomic logics that impede the emancipation of the great majority of the

worlds citizen and noncitizen subjects, queer and not-so-queer alike. Zizek is certainly
worth quoting here:

. . . The much-praised postmodern proliferation of new political subjectivities

[of which queer theory has of course been an integral part], the demise of
every essentialist fixation, the assertion of full contingency, occur against
the background of a certain silent renunciation and acceptance: the renunciation
of the idea of a global change in the fundamental relations in our society . . .
and, consequently, the acceptance of the liberal democratic capitalist framework
which remains the same, the unquestioned background, in all the dynamic
proliferation of the multitude of new subjectivities. [Contingency 321]

In Lacanian terms, one is tempted to suggest that the subservience of queer theory

to the reformist horizon of the postmodern agenda as Zizek here concisely defines it can
be related to a certain fantasmatic and transferential fascination with a queer version of
the big Other: if only homosexuals are properly included within the great spectacle of
popular (and other forms of) culture, if only we succeed in constructing the proper
positive representations of ourselves in all our glorious diversity, then we would really
experience ourselves as a strong community, as a fully legitimate ensemble of citizens
unambiguously recognized by and integrated in the social system. That it is not strictly
speaking possible for non-heterosexual subjects to be socialized in the absence of a
deep psychological sense of difference and exclusion renders this fantasy of a coherent
and objectively sanctioned queer home open to full articulation all the more irresistible.
Perhaps this observation goes some way toward explaining why, from my perspective
at least, there has always been an uneasy undercurrent, a desperate and exclusionary
drive toward conformity, in most post-Stonewall gay and lesbian movements, a kind of
oppositional normativity that belies their outward rhetoric of diversity and inclusiveness.
I would further suggest that the traversal of this fantasy requires the recognition
that this idealized queer big Other who would bestow consistency and legitimacy on the

diacritics / summer 2002 17

nonheterosexual community is not-so-secretlyespecially in the US and in spite of its
politically correct multicultural diversityan upper-middle-class urban (not to mention
Western or, more precisely, of residence in the West) consumer who functions to
mask the reality of a mass of queer subjects (though many undoubtedly have never
heard of the term) very differently positioned with respect to the mode of production
and whose interests may not fit too nicely within the hegemonic liberal framework of
rights and freedoms. That a lower-middle-class lesbian, to take a somewhat simplistic
example, should experience a spontaneous frisson of solidarity with a progressive
liberal (and largely academic) queer movement rather than with the concerns of a
historically homophobic labor movement is not nearly as obvious a notion as one might
wish to think.12 The experience of the nonexistence of the queer big Other would
serve to disrupt the libidinal logic of ersatz solidarity between subjects of the same
sexual orientation and redistribute their political awareness along different, more
concretely socioeconomic, lines. And to return to the autobiographical narrative with
which I began, it becomes apparent that there is a certain subtle but insidious blackmail
at work in that political pamphlet handed to me in Christopher Street on the level of its
assumption that ones concern with ones sexual rights should outweigh all other
issues, that a candidates history on gay issues should take precedence over his or her
record on poverty or welfare, for example. It is in this precise sense that the category of
sexual orientation is a priori bourgeois. The time has come, in other words, to hold
the place for a new kind of post-Marxist anticapitalist unity of theory and praxis in
which the new realm of impossibility would situate itself precisely in the neighborhood
of the variety of insipid pseudo-political literature that greeted me that fateful day in
Greenwich Village. This geopolitical monikers gentrified trajectory and ideological
centrality to the modern gay movements might now servewhy not?as a metonymic
term for what deserves to be the tragic fate of the entirety of that pseudo-progressive
liberal queer theory for which a truly global alternative must now be sought.

WORKS CITED
Butler, Judith. Arguing with the Real. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits
of Sex. New York: Routledge, 1993. 187222.
Dean, Tim. Beyond Sexuality. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.
Dean, Tim, and Christopher Lane, eds. Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis. Chicago: U
of Chicago P, 2001.
Klein, Naomi. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. Toronto: Vintage Canada,
2000.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis
1959-1960. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Dennis Porter. New York: Norton,
1986. 243325.

12. One can appreciate in this light the acerbically detached tone of a paragraph in a
Canadian-published, collectively authored position paper reprinted in the aforementioned The
Material Queer. Marxists recognize . . . that there is nothing inherently revolutionary about
homosexuality, or about the struggle against AIDS. The gains won by lesbians and gays over the
past several decades have led to the development of an upwardly mobile layer of openly homosexual
professionals (many associated with the AIDS industry) who desperately crave bourgeois
respectability [1917 Collective 377]. This invaluable article is also the source, incidentally, for
my comments about Marxs and Engelss personal attitudes with respect to homosexuality; it
additionally contains fascinating information about the startlingly progressive outlook on
homosexuality prevalent among first-generation Bolsheviks, naturally lost to Stalinist calcification
after the initial glorious years of the October revolution.

18
Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a
Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso, 1985.
Lane, Christopher. The Burdens of Intimacy: Psychoanalysis and Victorian Masculinity.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.
Morton, Donald. ed. The Material Queer: The LesBiGay Cultural Studies Reader.
Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996.
The 1917 Collective. The Material Queer. Capitalism and Homophobia: Marxism and
the Struggle for Gay/Lesbian Rights.
Penney, James. Beyond At: Lacan, Ethics, and the Real. Journal for the
Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 7.1 (Spring 2001): 2438.
Rotello, Gabriel. Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men. New York: Plume,

1998.
Zizek, Slavoj. Passionate (Dis)Attachments, or, Judith Butler as a Reader of Freud.
The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso, 1999.
247312.

diacritics / summer 2002 19