"Sexual difference is that “bedrock of impossibility” on account of which every “formalization” of sexual difference fails. In the sense in which Butler speaks of “competing universalities,” one can thus speak of competing symbolizations/ normativizations of sexual difference: if sexual difference may be said to be “formal,” it is certainly a strange form—a form whose main result is precisely that it undermines every universal form that aims at capturing it. If one insists on referring to the opposition between the universal and the particular, between the transcendental and the contingent/pathological, then one could say that sexual difference is the paradox of the particular that is more universal than universality itself—a contingent difference, an indivisible remainder of the “pathological” sphere (in the Kantian sense of the term), that always somehow derails or destabilizes normative ideality itself. Far from being normative, sexual difference is thus pathological in the most radical sense of the term: a contingent stain that all symbolic actions of symmetrical kinship positions try in vain to obliterate. Far from constraining in advance the variety of sexual arrangements, the Real of sexual difference is the traumatic cause that sets in motion their contingent proliferation. This notion of the Real also enables me to answer Butler’s reproach that Lacan hypostasizes the “big Other” into a kind of prehistorical transcendental a priori. For as we have already seen, when Lacan emphatically asserts that “there is no big Other,” his point is precisely that there is no a priori formal structural scheme exempted from historical contingencies—there are only contingent, fragile, inconsistent configurations. (Furthermore, far from clinging to the paternal symbolic authority, the “Name-of-the-Father” is for Lacan a fake, a semblance that conceals this structural inconsistency.)"

- Slavoj Zizek