Antagonism

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), p. 358:

Throughout his work, Žižek presents the social as inherently split, antagonistic, with no possibility of any final unity or harmony. It is for this reason that the various ideological terms that construct society's image of itself (ecology, feminism, racism, etc.) are always disputed. But beyond any particular definition of these terms--whether left, right or centrist--it is in this dispute itself that the 'truth' of society is to be found: 'In social life, for example, what the multitude of (ideological) symbolizations-narrativizations fails to render is not society's self-identity but the antagonism, the constitutive splitting of the "body politic"' (p. 195). One of the names for this antagonism is class struggle, the ongoing conflict between the workers and those who control the means of production: 'Is the supreme example of such a "Real" not provided by the Marxist concept of class struggle? The consequent thinking through of this concept compels us to admit that there is no class struggle "in reality": "class struggle" designates the very antagonism that prevents the objective (social) reality from constituting itself as a self-enclosed whole' (p. 242). In other words, we might say that class struggle is merely the name for the underlying split between positively constituted ideological entities and the void from which they are enunciated. It is not some external limit or shortcoming that could one day be made up--as even the classical notion of class struggle would seem to promise--but an internal limit that is structurally necessary to the realization of the social itself: 'to grasp the notion of antagonism, in its most radical dimension, we should invert the relationship between the two terms: it is not the external enemy who is preventing from achieving identity with myself, but every identity is already in itself blocked, marked by an impossibility, and the external enemy is simply the small piece, the rest of reality upon which we "project" or "externalize" this intrinsic, immanent impossibility' (p. 252).