A Symptom of the Symptom

A Symptom of the Symptom

A Symptom of the Symptom

Slavoj Žižek has been concerned with the concept of the symptom from the very beginning. In fact, “The Symptom” comprises the subject matter of the first part of his first book published in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology (first published in 1989, second edition issued in 2008). This text begins in a way that is rather characteristic of all Žižek’s writings— with a statement from Jacques Lacan that seems, at first, to be counterintuitive: “According to Lacan, it was none other than Karl Marx who invented the notion of symptom” (Žižek, 1989/2008, p. 3). And the two chapters that follow this statement, “How Marx Invented the Symptom” and “From Symptom to Sinthome,” are designed to explicate and develop this insight. In doing so, Žižek provides a characterization of the symptom that can itself be considered symptomatic of Western metaphysics.

The word “symptom” is typically used to indicate a mode of indication. As Todd McGowan (2014) explains for the entry “symptom” in the Žižek Dictionary, “the usual idea of the symptom in both psychoanalysis and traditional medicine sees it as an indication of an underlying disorder that some form of therapy (either analytic or medicinal) will attempt to cure and thereby eliminate” (p. 242). Formulated in this way, “symptom” is understood as a sign that refers to and is the external manifestation or indication of something that is more fundamental and often hidden from direct perception. We therefore commonly distinguish the symptom from its underlying cause, and this common understanding not only adheres to the standard formula of semiotics but is informed by an original ontological decision that differentiates between mere external appearances and the more profound substance that is its ultimate cause and referent. Characterized in this fashion, the usual understanding of “symptom” can be accommodated to and explained by a metaphysical arrangement that is at least as old as Plato. According to the standard account of Platonism, or what is often called (not without controversy) “Plato’s theory of the forms,” appearances are nothing less than symptoms of more substantial transcendental ideas, and the task of thinking is to learn to penetrate or see beyond these mere external apparitions and gain access to the true form and original cause.

For Žižek, however, the symptom is formulated in a way that is entirely otherwise. “Symptom” is not the sign of some hidden kernel of truth that is more substantial or profound; it is the necessarily excluded other of the system that makes the system possible in the first place. As Žižek (1989/2008) explains,

the ‘symptom’ is, strictly speaking, a particular element which subver ts its own universal foundation, a species subverting its own genus . . . a point of breakdown heterogeneous to a given ideological field and at the same time necessary for that field to achieve its closure, its accomplished form. (p. 16)

For this reason, “symptom” possesses a “radical ontological status” (Žižek, 1989/2008, p. 81); it is the constitutive part of a system that is necessarily excluded from the system as such. Or as Žižek (1999) explains by way of a passage he appropriates from Jacques Rancière, it is “the part of no part” (p. 188). The symptom, therefore, comprises the constitutive exception that “threatens the functioning of the system, even though it is the necessary product of this same system” (McGowan, 2014, p. 242). It is a kind of unacknowledged (and always already unacknowledgeable) excremental reminder that is necessary for something to produce itself and function as the system that it is.

This alternative conceptualization of the symptom—a conceptualization that is simultaneously dependent on Lacan’s work and beyond the circuit of its determinations—turns out to be symptomatic of Platonism. And the fact that Žižek himself never actually acknowledges this as such is just one more symptom of the symptom. It is, in fact, only by excluding this particular concept of the symptom (the very idea of the “constitutive exception”), that Platonism can become what it is. One might recall that Socrates, as was described in Plato’s Apology, explains and tries to defend his own efforts as a response to the Oracle at Delphi (Plato, 1982, p. 21a). The Delphic temple, as is reported in Protagoras (Plato, 1977, p. 324b), famously had two laconic statements inscribed above its gate: “Know thyself ” and “Nothing in Excess.” Although the latter has typically been interpreted as a call to moderation in all things, it can also be read as the trace of the symptom, inscribed at the very gateway to knowledge. In this way, the statement “Nothing in excess” may be interpreted as an exclusive operation, indicating that whatever might come to exceed the grasp of self-knowing is to remain unacknowledged, unknowable, or nothing. Consequently, every attempt to demarcate the proper boundaries of a system and cordon off its internal workings from what it is not, always and without exception, produces an exceptional externality that it must deny—an absolutely other that is cast off, externalized, and remains nothing.

A Symptom of the Symptom

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