Architexts Week 11 Slavoj !i"ek, How Did Marx Invent The Symptom? 1. ...

. the symptom as a sign of the disfunction and illness of the social body (P. Naveau), the symptom as the particular element that belies the universal of which it is part (S. !i"ek), the symptom as metaphor of the truth and as an effect of the symbolic in the eld of the real. #
! # # [Sidi Askofar, Le symptme social, in Michel Lapeyre and Andr Soueix (eds.), Marx et Lnine, Freud et Lacan: Actes du 2e colloque de La Dcouverte Freudienne 16 et 17 !dcembre 1989 (Les sries de la dcouverte Freudienne), 2me dition, (Toulouse: # Presses Univerisitaires du Mirail, 1992) pp.111-126 #( p . 112)]

! 2. According to Lacan, it was none other than Karl Marx who invented the notion of symptom. Is this Lacanian thesis just a sally of wit, a vague analogy, or does it possess a pertinent theoretical foundation?
! [!i"ek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p.11]

3. In his attribution of the discovery of symptom to Marx, Lacan is, however, more distinct: he locates this discovery in the way Marx conceived the passage from feudalism to capitalism: One has to look for the origins of the notion of symptom not in Hippocrates but in Marx, in the connection he was rst to establish between capitalism and what? the good old times, what we call the feudal times.
! [!i"ek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p.23]

4. The origin of the concept of symptom is not to be found in Hippocrates but in Marx, in the connection he was the rst to make between capitalism and what? - The good old times, what we call the feudal times. After all, capitalism is considered as having benecial effects, since it has the advantage of reducing proletarian man to nothing, whereby it realizes the essence of man, of being stripped of everything and of being the messiah of the future. This is the way in which Marx analyzes the notion of the symptom. He gives many other symptoms of course, but the relationship of it with faith in man is undeniable. # If we do not make of man the vehicle of an ideal future, if we determine him in his particularity, in each case in terms of his unconscious and the fashion in which he enjoys it, the symptom remains in the same place where Marx has put it, but it takes on another meaning. Not the social symptom, but the particular symptom. No doubt these particular symptoms are of different types, the symptom of the obsessive is not the symptom of the hysteric.
# # [Lacan, Le Sminaire de Jacques Lacan: R.S.I (Les sminaires des 11 et 18 Fvrier 1975) , ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, in Ornicar? (Rentre, 1975) pp.91-106 (p.106)]

5. Alienation has nothing to do with what results from deformation... I would say in the most traditional way: it is sufciently established by a thought that is called Marxist, it is clear that alienation in Marxism has nothing to do with what is, strictly speaking, confusion. Further, Marxist alienation absolutely does not in itself suppose the existence of the Other. It consists simply in that I do not recognize, for example, my labour in this thing... my work returns to me and I must pay a certain price for it.
[Lacan, Le sminaire XIV: La logique du fantasme, 1966-1967, unpublished manuscript, 25th January 1967 (p. 89/6 -90/7)]

6. ... there is a fundamental homology between the interpretive procedure of Marx and Freud more precisely, between their analysis of commodity and dreams. In both cases the point is to avoid the properly fetishistic fascination of the content supposedly hidden behind the form: the secret to be unveiled through analysis is not the content hidden by the form (the form of commodities, the form of dreams) but, on the contrary, the secret of this form itself.
! [!i"ek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p.11]

7. The very concept of ideology implies a kind of basic, constitutive naivety: the misrecognition of its own presuppositions, of its own effective conditions... That is why such a naive consciousness can be submitted to a critical-ideological procedure. The aim of this procedure is to lead the naive ideological consciousness to a point at which it can recognize its own effective conditions, the social reality that it is distorting... the main point is to see how the reality itself cannot reproduce itself without this so-called ideological mystication.
# [!i"ek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p.28]

8.The structure is always triple; there are always three elements at work: the manifest dream-text, the latent dream content or thought and the unconscious desire articulated in a dream [[!i"ek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p.13]... The essential constitution of dream is... not its latent thought (the mechanisms of displacement and condensation, the guration of the contents of words or syllables) but this work [!i"ek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p.12] 9. Because it offers a kind of matrix enabling us to generate all other forms of the fetishistic inversion: it is as if the dialectics of the commodity-form present us with a pure $distilled, so to speak version of a mechanism offering us a key to the theoretical understanding of phenomena which, at rst sight, have nothing to do with the eld of political economy.
# [!i"ek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p.16]

10. "# %&'()* we usually translate the false is, for Greek thought, dissembling. Dissembling lets something it sets out and sets up appear differently than it is in truth. In the different than resides the not-such-as, which, experienced on the basis of dis-hiding and unconcealedness, brings about a concealment. Nevertheless, insofar as dissembling not only sets something else before namely, before what is to be presented but lets something appear otherwise than it is in truth, dissembling also unveils and hence is a kind of disclosure.
# [Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. by Andr Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998) #p.44]

11. ... we know very well that money, like all other material objects, suffers the effects of use, that its material body changes through time, but in the social effectivity of the market we none the less treat coins as if they consist of an immutable substance, a substance over which time has no power, and which stands in antithetic contrast to any matter found in nature
# [!i"ek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p.18]

12. The exchange abstraction is not thought, but it has the form of thought
# [Sohn-Rethel, cited in !i"ek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p.19]

13. There is... no such thing as Lacans Marxism. Not because a Lacanian Marxism imbued with the agenda and spirit of broadly social, class-based revolution does not exist though that may be reason enough but because the causal logic deployed by Lacan does not delineate the mechanism of historical agency along Marxist lines, does not entertain a revolution (as insurgency) that will not also be a revolution (as repetition and return)...
# ! [Joe Valente, Lacans Marxism, Marxisms Lacan (from !i"ek to Althusser), in The Cambridge Companion to Lacan, ed. by Jean-Michel Rabat (Cambridge: Cambridge #University Press, 2003) pp. 153-172 (p.157)]

14.Freed from the residual scientism of Althusser, Lacanian post-Marxists can afrm the presence, in the historical eld of events and in ourselves as agents, of indeterminacy and contingency as the open horizon that makes possible radical action and social change. #
## [William Pietz, Fetishism and Materialism: The Limits of Theory in Marx, in Emily Apter and William Pietz (eds.) Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, #1993) pp.119-151 (p.127)]

15. !i"eks great contribution is to reveal semiological criticism and poststructuralist theory as, at best, a form of the sort of left-Hegelianism that Marx began his own intellectual development by criticizing. [Pietz, p.127]

16. The deadlock of resistance brings us back to the topic of parallax: all that is needed is a slight shift in our perspective, and all the activity of resistance, of bombarding those in power with impossible subversive (ecological, feminist, antiracist, antiglobalist ...) demands, looks like an internal process of feeding the machine of power, providing the material to keep it in motion.
# # [!i"ek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006) p.302]

17. ... perhaps we should assert this attitude of passive aggression as a proper radical political gesture, in contrast to aggressive passivity, the standard interpassive mode of our participation in socio-ideological life in which we are active all the time in order to make sure that nothing will happen, that nothing will really change. In such a constellation, the rst truly critical (aggressive, violent) step is to withdraw into passivity, to refuse to participateBartlebys I would prefer not to is the necessary rst step which, as it were, clears the ground, opens up the place, for true activity, for an act that will actually change the coordinates of the constellation.
# # [!i"ek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006) p.301]