And should prolly be cross-listed with christopher robbins’ wiki: imaginary systems

” all positive content is a contingent fill-in of the void of the empty signifier; one should move beyond this gap between empty signifier and determinate content and ask a more radical question: how, through what violent gesture, does the very void of the empty signifier arise? This empty space of universality arises from the radical inadequacy (non-coincidence, inherent gap) of a Particular with itself. In other words, not only has the structural lack/void of all universality to be filled in by a particular content, its stand-in; it is this empty universality itself which is a stand-in for the radical non-coincidence of the particular to itself, for a missing particular, the element whose addition would make the particular “full,” coinciding with itself.”