the notion of 'class struggle' is that society is 'held together' by the very antagonism, splitting, that forever prevents its closure in a harmonious, transparent, rational Whole -- by the very impediment that undermines every rational totalization. Although 'class struggle' is nowhere directly given as a positive entity, it none the less functions, in its very absence, as the point of reference enabling us to locate every social phenomenon -- not by relating it to class struggle as its ultimate meaning. ('transcendental signified') but by conceiving it as (an)other attempt to conceal and 'patch up' the rift of class antagonism, to efface its traces. What we have here is the structural-dialectical paradox of an effect that exists only in order to efface the causes of its existence, an effect that in a way resists its own cause.

In other words, class struggle is 'real' in the strict Lacanian sense: a 'hitch', an impediment which gives rise to ever-new symbolizations by means of which one endeavours to integrate and domesticate it (the corporatist translation-displacement of class struggle into the organic articulation of the 'members' of the 'social body', for example), but which simultaneously condemns these endeavours to ultimate failure. Class struggle is none other than the name for the unfathomable limit that cannot be objectivized, located within the social totality, since it is itself that limit which prevents us from conceiving society as a closed totality. Or -- to put it in yet another way -- 'class struggle' designates the point with regard to which 'there is no metalanguage': in so far as every position within social totality is ultimately overdetermined by class struggle, no neutral place is excluded from the dynamics of class struggle from which it would be possible to locate class struggle within the social totality.

This paradoxical status of class struggle can be articulated by means of the crucial Hegelian distinction between Substance and Subject. At the level of Substance, class struggle is conditional on the 'objective' social process; it functions as the secondary indication of some more fundamental discord in this process, a discord regulated by positive mechanisms independent of class struggle ('class struggle breaks out when the relations of production are no longer in accordance with the development of the productive forces'). ²⁹ We pass to the level of Subject when we acknowledge that class struggle does not pop up at the end, as the effect of an objective process, but is always-already at work in the very heart of the objective process itself (capitalists develop means of production in order to lower the relative and absolute value of the labour force; the value of the labour force itself is not objectively given but results from the class struggle, etc.). In short, it is not possible to isolate any 'objective' social process or mechanism whose innermost logic does not involve the 'subjective' dynamics of class struggle; or -- to

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