Exception/Not-All

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), pp. 363-4:

These two concepts are usually opposed as respectively the masculine and feminine sides of Lacan's formulae of sexuation: the masculine side consists of a universality made possible by an exception to it; the feminine side does not form such a universality, but there is no exception to it. 'Woman is not-all ... but this means precisely that woman is not-all caught into the phallic function' (p. 67). This masculine logic in fact coincides with that of the master-signifier, in which a certain term (always itself undefined) outside of a series of phenomena explains them and allows them to be exchanged for one another: 'The Master-Signifier ... [is] no longer a simple abbreviation that designates a series of markers but the name of the hidden ground of this series of markers that act as so many expressions-effects of this ground' (p. 186). But as Žižek's work has progressed, he has more and more emphasized the feminine logic of the not-all over this masculine logic of the exception, ultimately understanding it as its real cause. The masculine logic of the exception is an 'exception' within a larger logic of the not-all. For example, of the 'symptom', Žižek writes: 'Symptoms were the series of exceptions, disturbances and malfunctionings ... Later, however, with his notion of the universalized symptom, Lacan accomplished a paradoxical shift ... in which there is no exception to the series of symptoms ... and the symbolic law ... is ultimately just one [of them]' (p. 306). This leads Žižek to consider the Hegelian logic of 'concrete universality', in which it is not that 'the exception grounds the [universal] rule ... [but the] series and [its] exceptions directly coincide' (p. 305). It is a logic that is also to be seen in Žižek's notion of 'love', which renders what is not-all, without nevertheless being an exception to it: 'Even when it is "all" (complete, with no exception), the field of knowledge remains in a way not-all, incomplete. Love is not an exception to the All of knowledge, but rather a "nothing" that renders incomplete even the complete series or field of knowledge' (p. 308).