Žižek's Antagonism and the Futures of Trans-Affirmative Lacanian Psychoanalysis

This essay uses Slavoj Žižek's recent writings about transpeople—and their reactions to him—as a way to reconsider the contributions that Lacanian psychoanalysis could make to trans theory. Affirming that there is already considerable value to trans-affirmative theorizing in the work of Shanna Carlson, Patricia Gherovici, and Gayle Salamon, this essay nonetheless argues that Žižek's work offers—despite itself—a way of traversing the fantasy of sexual difference that structures Lacanian accounts of gender. By going beyond the assumption that the antinomy that structures subjectivity must always and only be named “sexual difference,” this essay creates an opening for thinking sex, gender, and sexual difference otherwise.