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

First and foremost, though, Schwartz downplays the intersubjective "pull" implicit within the intersectional "push" of identity politics discourse. Even if Schwartz cannot coherently envision a "man" identifying as a "woman," he poses a false dichotomy for the meaning of signifiers, namely signifiers are either meaningful (i.e., retain the original signified) or meaningless (i.e., retain no durable, long-lasting signified). He simply excludes any semiotic process of garnering newfound meaning for signifiers. Instead of making the signifiers of "man" and "woman" meaningless, the identity category of transgender adds and subtracts a series of significations originally residing within the overarching chain of gender binarization, which conceals the discursive mandate that someone is either a man or a woman for the duration of his or her life, and these dichotomous positions cannot be exchanged with one another. The intersectional modification of gender, thus, is merely a re-signification, involving the maintenance of extant terms for describing gender while altering their linguistic content. Schwartz overlooks the intersubjective dimension baked into the intersectional process of resignification itself. Second, as mentioned above, Schwartz idealizes the post-Oedipal symbolic order in such a manner that mimics the alleged pre-Oedipal primary narcissism attributed to identity politics discourse. Both resist the destabilizing register of the Real, such that Schwartz staticizes the social order to the same degree that the narcissistic child idealizes the primordial mother.

Why does Schwartz imagine the social order, prior to the introduction of political correctness and identity politics, as a synchronized, harmonious, and infallible system? In this sense, political correctness and identity politics represent the only obstacle to society's smooth functionality. This cannot possibly be true. There are plenty of institutional factors that prevent the smooth functionality of society (e.g., bureaucratic red tape, corruption, miscommunication, etc.), but Schwartz has latched onto the factor (i.e., political correctness and identity politics) that most acutely threatens his access to the primordial mother, the institutional legitimacy associated with his academic accolades. Schwartz reveals his personal stake in the project of discrediting and dismantling identity-based discourse: his strategy for attaining mother's love (i.e., identification with the post-Oedipal father) is invalidated by political correctness and identity politics. If the academy is fraught with white privilege and racism, Schwartz's accomplishments suddenly become impugned, which, in turn, calls into question his entire career. This should explain, for the most part, why Schwartz's first scholarly foray into political correctness studied its impact on the university [12]. Just as Seshadri-Crooks's [4] account of whiteness demonstrates its unconscious desire for achieving wholeness through a particular image of humanity, Schwartz unconsciously desires a complete symbolic order that denies the existence of Reality (i.e., the destabilizing, disruptive force of jouissance) and ensures the death of the subject (i.e., the lack of a lack or a missing signifier). In general, he violently assimilates the remainder of subjectivity into the extant identity categories of the symbolic order, foreclosing the possibility of the subject's engagement in the political from her individual standpoint.

Albeit not advocating for the preservation of the extant social order, Žižek [2] takes issue with the "individual standpoint" of identity-based discourse from which demands are made upon the political. In *The Ticklish Subject*, Žižek depicts the political as a breeding ground for the universalization of particular stances, including anti-authoritarian proposals that transcend the plight of any specific group of people. For instance, Žižek invokes the example of "four journalists [being] arrested and brought to trial by the Yugoslav Army in Slovenia in 1988"; indeed, he expresses dismay at the literal interpretation of the resulting slogan "Justice for the four

accused!" because it minimized and trivialized the political struggle to nothing more than a legal dispute between several journalists and a state apparatus (207–208). Conversely, Žižek highlights the universal implications of the slogan, placing the interests of free speech, free press, and a fair trial at the forefront of political decision-making. This universalization of the particular accorded to the normal progression of politics by Žižek stands in stark contrast to the particularization of the universal by identity-based discourse: "This is politics proper: the moment in which a particular demand … starts to function as the metaphoric condensation of the global restructuring of the entire social space … [which diametrically opposes] postmodern 'identity politics' … that is, the assertion of one's particular identity, of one's proper place within the social structure" (208). Žižek, however, overlooks the importance of intersectionality in the construction of identity within the political and the unconscious desire resting at the center of identity politics, namely the nonexistence of the Other's Other.

Žižek, thus, neglects the unconscious desire residing within the discursive formation of identity politics, involving the exposure of the social order's incompleteness (in contrast to suturing – that is, attempting to complete, finalize, or totally and definitively determine – the social order in a manner that resembles the discursive formation of whiteness). Even though identity-based discourse presupposes the pervasiveness and ubiquitous nature of oppression experienced by marginalized groups (i.e., enabling its identification of transnational forms of marginalization), intersectionality routinely usurps the intersubjective agreement underlying individuals' identifications with existing categorization schemas. In turn, identity politics undercuts itself through the destabilization of agreed-upon narratives concerning oppression, such that racism, xenophobia, transphobia, ableism, etc. function in a similar fashion across disparate contexts but differ in functionality at the intersection of individual political experience. To put otherwise, the extimate aspect of the Real belonging to identity politics, at its zero-point, structures the semiotic field of differential relations while also, at the same level, representing the discursive point at which the semiotic field loses coherency.

The neologism of "extimacy" signifies the most intimate aspect of a discursive formation, organizing and managing the semiotic relations between each term's signified and the master signifier, and the excluded middle from the core of a discursive formation, representing the Thing around which a discourse revolves and from which a discourse requires the greatest amount of distance to maintain the fantasy of consistency. Žižek [13], in *Metastases of Enjoyment*, describes the "ex-timate" as the "inherent decentrement of the field of signification" (29). A confrontation with the center paradoxically results in a decentering of itself. In the case of identity politics, marginalized subjects strive for a clear and distinct perception into the underlying structure of the social order, rendering the patterns of oppression intelligible. The discursive formation of identity politics, in short, assumes the existence of an Other to the Other, an undergirding, discernible rhyme, reason, or pattern to comprehending the social order in its totality. In order to completely chart the experience of oppression by each and every marginalized subject, however, the individual must understand the intersection of oppressive apparatuses (and associated identity categories) for constructing her experience of the political. Intersectionality, though, irrevocably obfuscates the machinations of the social order writ large, perpetually complicating the vision of oppression to, in some cases, incomprehensibility (i.e., similar to Schwartz's [1]
