evidence, one could maintain that 'woman' stands for the aspect of concrete existence and 'man' for the empty-ambiguous universality. The paradox (of a profoundly Hegelian nature) is that 'woman' -- that is, the moment of specific difference -- functions as the encompassing ground that accounts for the emergence of the universality of man.

This interpretation of social antagonism (class struggle) as Real, not as (part of) objective social reality, also enables us to counter the wornout line of argumentation according to which one has to abandon the notion of ideology, since the gesture of distinguishing 'mere ideology' from 'reality' implies the epistemologically untenable 'God's view', that is, access to objective reality as it 'truly is'. The question of the suitability of the term 'class struggle' to designate today's dominant form of antagonism is secondary here, it concerns concrete social analysis; what matters is that the very constitution of social reality involves the 'primordial repression' of an antagonism, so that the ultimate support of the critique of ideology -- the extra-ideological point of reference that authorizes us to denounce the content of our immediate experience as 'ideological' -- is not 'reality' but the 'repressed' real of antagonism.

In order to clarify this uncanny logic of antagonism qua real, let us recall the analogy between Claude Lévi-Strauss's structural approach and Einstein's theory of relativity. One usually attributes to Einstein the relativization of space with regard to the observer's point of view -- that is, the cancellation of the notion of absolute space and time. The theory of relativity, however, involves its own absolute constant: the space-time interval between two events is an absolute that never varies. Space--time interval is defined as the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle whose legs are the time and space distance between two events. One observer may be in a state of motion such that for him there is a time and a distance involved between two events; another may be in a state of motion such that his measuring devices indicate a different distance and a different time between the events, but the space--time interval between the two events does not in fact vary. This constant is the Lacanian Real that 'remains the same in all possible universes (of observation)'. And it is a homologous constant that we encounter in LéviStrauss's exemplary analysis of the spatial arrangement of buildings in an aboriginal South American village (from his Structural Anthropology).

The inhabitants are divided into two subgroups; when we ask an individual to draw the ground-plan of his or her village (the spatial arrangement of cottages) on a piece of paper or on sand, we obtain two quite different answers, depending on which subgroup he or she belongs to: a member of the first subgroup (let us call it 'conservativecorporatist') perceives the ground-plan of the village as circular -- a ring of houses more or less symmetrically arranged around the central

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