pp. 127-8: When one is dealing with a universal structuring principle,one always automatically assumes that--in principle, precisely--it is possible to apply this principle to all its possible elements, so that the principle's empirical non-realization is merely a matter of contingent circumstances. A symptom, however, is an element which--although the non-realization of the universal principle in it appears to hinge on contingent circumstances--has to remain an exception, that is, the point of suspension of the universal principle: if the universal principle were to apply also to this point, the universal system would itself disintegrate.
In the paragraphs on civil society in his Philosophy of Right, Hegel demonstrates how the growing class of 'rabble [Pöbel]' in modern civil society is not an accidental result of social mismanagement, inadequate government measures, or simple economic bad luck: the inherent structural dynamic of civil society necessarily gives rise to a class which is excluded from its benefits (work, personal dignity, etc.)--a class deprived of elementary human rights, and therefore also exempt from duties towards society, an element within civil society which negates its universal principle, a kind of 'non-Reason inherent in Reason itself'--in short, its symptom. Do we not witness the same phenomenon in today's growth of an underclass which is excluded, sometimes even for generations, from the benefits of liberal-democratic affluent society? Today's 'exceptions' (the homeless, the ghettoized, the permanent unemployed) are the symptom of the late-capitalist universal system, the permanent reminder of how the immanent logic of late capitalism works: the proper capitalist utopia is that through appropriate measures (affirmative action and other forms of state intervention for progressive liberals; the return to self-care and family values for conservatives), this 'exception' could be--in the long term and in principle, at least--abolished. And is not an analogous utopianism at work in the notion of a 'rainbow coalition': in the idea that, at some utopian moment to come, all progressive struggles (for gay and lesbian rights; for the rights of ethnic and religious minorities; the ecological struggle; the feminist struggle; and so on) will be united in a common 'chain of equivalences'?
The necessary failure here is structural: it is not simply that, because of the empirical complexity of the situation, all particular progressive fights will never be united, that 'wrong' chains of equivalences will always occur (say, the enchainment of the fight for African-American ethnic identity with patriarchal and homophobic attitudes), but, rather, that occurrences of 'wrong' enchainments are grounded in the very structuring principle of today's progressive politics of establishing 'chains of equivalences': the very domain of the multitude of particular struggles, with their continuously shifting displacements and condensations, is sustained by the 'repression' of the key role of economic struggle. The Leftist politics of the 'chains of equivalences' among the plurality of struggles is strictly correlative to the abandonment of the analysis of capitalism as a global economic system--that is, to the tacit acceptance of capitalist economic relations and liberal-democratic politics as the unquestioned framework of our social life.
In this precise sense, symptom turns a dispersed collection into a system (in the precise sense this term acquired in German Idealism): we are within a system the moment we breach the gap which separates the a priori form from its contingent content--the moment we envisage the necessity of what appears to be a contingent intrusion which 'spoils the game'. A system indicates the fact that 'there is One' (Lacan's y a de l'un), an inherent element which subverts the universal frame from within; to return to our example: the 'systemic' nature of late-capitalist political struggle means that the chain of equivalences of today's identity struggles is necessarily never completed, that the 'populist temptation' always leads to the 'wrong' chain of equivalences.
p. 129: This necessity of the utter, imbecilic contingency, this enigmatic notion of an unexpected intrusion which none the less pops up with absolute inevitability (and has to pop up, since its non-arrival would entail the dissolution of the whole domain of the search for the Goal), is the highest speculative mystery, the true 'dialectical synthesis of contingency and necessity' to be opposed to platitudes about the deeper necessity which realizes itself through surface contingencies. One is tempted to contend that when Hegel makes his 'panlogistic' claim according to which 'Reason rules the world' (or 'what is actual is reasonable'), its actual content is this kind of necessary intrusion of a contingency: when one is sure that 'Reason rules the world', this means that one can be sure that a contingency will always emerge which will prevent the direct realization of our Goal.
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