*A Psychoanalytic Approach to Identity Politics DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.105402*

will never suffice: the individual always-already exceeds semiotic circumscription in the symbolic order. There is a remainder, a leftover, a stain evading assimilation into extant identity categories; indeed, the escaping excess should not be condemned, loathed, or castigated because, after all, it fuels the discursive formation of identity politics. Imagine the culmination of identity politics; that is, through a series of hardnosed, social scientific decisions, we accurately determine the political experience of each and every subject position. In turn, the social order could clearly and distinctly designate individuals as "being-black" or "being-a-woman," arriving at a definitive framework for assessing whether, for instance, Rachel Dolezal is black or Caitlyn Jenner is a woman. Spelling doom for identity politics, the definitive establishment of meaning for categorical designations inspires a teleological paradox: on the surface, identity politics strives for its dissolution through the clearcut determination of individual experience, but, at its core, identity politics conceals its underlying drive for incompletion, indeterminacy, and gappiness.

The surface-level desire communicates a Sisyphean task: following the establishment of definitions for identity categories, the objectively-excluded remainders will subjectively identify with "improper" categories, re-creating the zero-point of identity politics. The discursive formation of identity politics explicates the political experience of the excluded, those pushed to the periphery by bias, prejudice, and discrimination. Any hard-and-fast categorical demarcation of the excluded, thus, requires the conceptual distinction between extensional (i.e., those falling underneath the signifier/category) and non-extensional content (i.e., those falling outside the signifier/category), perpetually creating an excluded set of people. Transexclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), for example, determine the boundaries of "being-a-woman" on the basis of innate physiological characteristics for womanness, informed by the primary and secondary sexual characteristics usually attributed to "biological" women. The exclusion concomitant with the biological significance of "woman" represents the form of violence contested by identity politics, which appears at the juncture of every definition for any identity category. The completion of identity politics, in turn, is impossible: the conceptual distinctions required to neatly demarcate political experience would only perpetuate further pockets of exclusion, mandating more conceptual distinctions and categorical designations ad infinitum. What, then, is the goal of identity politics? How can we understand the progression of identity politics in relation to the oppressive organization of the social order? Psychoanalytic allusions to "the Real," as put forth in Lacanian contexts, offer conceptual resources for pinpointing the positionality and teleology of identity politics with respect to the symbolic register.
