Critiquing a symptom doesn’t make sense not because the symptom isn’t essential (that one should instead aim for the “true cause” concealed behind the visible symptom) but because the symptom is essential: The substance of the issue not only implicates the subject by causing his/her desire, in a sense it is the subject.

Critiquing a symptom makes no sense; a critique can never sensibly aim at the essence of a symptom. So what does it do? It aims at the coincidence of the symptom with the subject: It is “problematic” that certain symptoms manifest through the subject, and there must be an “underlying cause” that makes them coincide.

In the case of a physical illness, the coincidence of the subject with the symptom is explained by medically diagnosing a certain malfunction or disorder that is hypothesized to be taking place within the subject’s body. In the case of a “critical diagnosis” that aims for the subject’s mind instead of his/her body (the mind as the “critical” constituent of the body) the malfunction or disorder that causes the unfortunate coincidence of the symptom can only be identified to be the subject himself/herself.

In contrast to medical advice that takes the body as its subject-matter, a criticism directly addresses the spiritual being of the subject and calls him/her to terminate its coincidence with a certain symptom. The critic presupposes a “hidden cause” that makes the subject coincide with the symptom, but this cause can be nothing other than the target’s own subjectivity.

This is why any and all critique echoes a single eternal motto: “Don’t be a problem.” This effectively says “Don’t be a subject” and moves the attention away from the symptomatic essence to imaginary meaning. In other words, every critique practically says “Shut up and move on!” like the riot police.

This is the main reason why there is something called Psychoanalysis instead of Psychology Critique. If there would be a practice called Psychology Critique, it would be mainly about reproaching patients for satisfying themselves with the wrong stuff, having an unrealistic sense of happiness, relying on too many false hopes, etc. But the patients (hopefully) already receive such superegoic wisdoms from their parents. Psychoanalysis was founded because such “critical” entanglement with the superego can be not only unnecessary but also harmful.

Doesn’t the still quite prestigious practice of Ideology Critique more or less amount to a slightly more socialized version of the Psychology Critique that I just desribed? Ideology Critique reproaches the subject for having a claim to truth in his/her “false consciousness” and invites him/her to “another” claim on truth that is “alternative” and supposedly “more true” but is formally identical to the previous one, since every consciousness is structurally false as it can never coincide with the subject’s true unconscious desire. What happens is the following:

1) The subject is forced to break its coincidence with its symptom because it’s “wrong”.

2) Since this coincidence can’t break, the subject is effectively guilted into obedience.

3) New Master-Signifiers are installed in the superego and they are used for anchoring new imaginary meaning.

In guilting the subject into obedience, the critic effectively projects and inflicts his/her own frustrations onto the target, following Freud’s formulas in “A child is being beaten” [1]. In brief, the critic implants his/her own lack onto the target.

The lack that the critic implants to his/her target is the “being in default” that pertains to each and every subject. Lacan defines this quality through “the father who does not know that he is dead” (in a dream Freud mentions):

The subject himself, as he situates himself, as he assumes himself, knows as one might say, because the other [dead father] does not know, the subjective position of the other [his position of being dead via the other]. And here of being in default as one might say. That he is dead, of course, is a statement that after all cannot touch him. Every symbolic expression like this one, of the being dead, makes him subsist, preserves him when all is said and done. It is precisely indeed the paradox of this symbolic position: the fact is that there is no being to being, no affirmation of the being dead which in a certain fashion does not immortalise him. And this indeed is what is in question in the dream. But this subjective position of the being [dead father] who is in default, this subjective lesser value, is not directed at the fact that he is dead, it is essentially directed at the fact that he is the one who does not know. This is how the subject situates himself before the other. (Lacan, Seminar 6)

So this lack is essentially ignorance. The critic apparently practices a “love of knowledge” (philosophy) which essentially amounts to a “hatred of ignorance”:

1) The critic truly hates his/her own ignorance. So (s)he obsessively represses his/her passion of ignorance by his/her passion of hatred [2] in order to suppress the vital questions: “Am I dead or alive? Do I truly exist or not?”

2) The critic displaces his/her own ignorance onto the target and says “I am in the know! You are the ignorant one! Let me present you my wisdom!”

3) The critic inflicts his/her hatred of ignorance onto the target and says “You are in the wrong! Let me show you the right way!”

Although criticism may sometimes serve the function of installing a necessary superego, the critical implantation of lack onto the other points to an ethical deficit essential to every critique: The critic fails to own his/her lack, and attempts to deal with this failure by (1) displacing this lack and (2) inflicting this failure onto another human being. In effect, the critic is more concerned with intentions (what is right/wrong) than desires (what is true/false) [3]. It’s not surprising that the quintessential critics would be the parents who install the child’s superego: Their failure to own their lack was the true reason behind their decision to have a child in the first place. If people had the ability to own (up) their lacks, they would first solve the climate crisis and then busy themselves with having children and installing their superegos.

Therefore, rather than Ideology Critique, the name Ideoanalysis is much more befitting to a practice that acknowledges the necessity to own (up) one’s lack. Since this was Lacan’s message, let’s spell his name accordingly: Lack-own.

Işık Barış Fidaner is a computer scientist with a PhD from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. Admin of Yersiz Şeyler, Editor of Žižekian Analysis, Curator of Görce Writings. Twitter: @BarisFidaner

Notes:

[1] See “Occidental Demembrance”

[2] See “Making the combinatorial unworld of the unconscious permeable”

[3] See “True-False : Right-Wrong = Desire : Intention”