The Symptom

At this point we must of course ask ourselves the naive but necessary question: If the world and language and subject do not exist, what does exist; more precisely: what confers on existing phenomena their consistency? Lacan's answer is, as we have already indicated, symptom. To this answer, we must give its whole anti-post-structuralist emphasis: the fundamental gesture of post-structuralism is to deconstruct every substantial entity, to denounce behind its solid consistency an interplay of symbolic overdetermination - briefly, to dissolve the substantial identity into a network of non-substantial, differential relations; the notion of symptom is the necessary counterpoint to it, the substance of enjoyment, the real kernel around which this signifying interplay is structured.

To seize the logic of this universalization of symptom, we must connect it with another universalization, that of foreclosure (Verwerfung). In his unpublished Seminar, J.-A. Miller ironically spoke of the passage from special to general theory of relativity). When Lacan introduced the notion of foreclosure in the fifties, it designated a specific phenomenon of the exclusion of a certain key-signifier (point de capiton, Name-of-the-Father) from the symbolic order, triggering the psychotic process; here, the foreclosure is not proper to language as such but a distinctive feature of the psychotic phenomena. And as Lacan reformulated Freud, what was foreclosed from the Symbolic returns in the Real - in the form of hallucinatory phenomena, for example.

However, in the last years of his teaching Lacan gave universal range to this function of foreclosure: there is a certain foreclosure proper to the order of signifier as such; whenever we have a symbolic structure it is structured around a certain void, it implies the foreclosure of a key-signifier. The symbolic structuring of sexuality implies the lack of a signifier of the sexual relationship, it implies that 'there is no sexual relationship', that the sexual relation cannot be symbolized - that it is an impossible, 'antagonistic' relationship. And to seize the interconnection between the two universalizations, we must again apply the proposition 'what was foreclosed from the Symbolic returns in the Real of the symptom': woman does not exist, her signifier is originally foreclosed, and that is why she returns as a symptom of a man.

-Slavoj Zizek, "The Sublime Object of Ideology"