Žižek's Critique of Weininger

From Tony Myers' Slavoj Žižek (London: Routledge), pp. 83-84:

Weininger, for Žižek, fails to go far enough. He fails to recognize in the 'nothingness' he discerns in woman, the very basis of subjectivity itself.

As we saw in Chapter 1, the subject is precisely this void or nothingness that precedes its inscription within the Symbolic Order. What Weininger fears, according to Žižek, is not woman, but the void of subjectivity itself, the absolute negativity of the 'night of the world' which forms the subject. Woman, in other words, is the subject par excellence. The fact that behind the enigma, the feminine mask, Weininger does not find something--some opaque mystery--but, rather, nothing, means that, for Žižek, Weininger stumbled accidentally upon the universal truth of subjectivity. Another way of looking at this is to conceive of it in terms of the distinction borrowed from linguistics by Lacan between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the enunciated. The abyss or void of the subject is the subject of enunciation, whereas the subject of the enunciated is the Symbolic subject, the subject of the social network. Weininger's contention that 'woman does not exist' therefore amounts to saying that woman does not exist at the level of the subject of the enunciated--she is excluded from Weininger's patriarchal Symbolic--she only exists at the level of the enunciation, as the void of the subject.