“Woman is a symptom of man” seems to be one of the most notoriously “antifeminist” theses of the late Lacan. There is, however, a fundamental ambiguity as to how we are to read it: this ambiguity reflects the shift in the notion of the symptom within the Lacanian theory. 10 If we conceive the symptom as it was articulated by Lacan in the 1950s—namely as a cyphered message—then, of course, woman-symptom appears as the sign, the embodiment of man’s fall, attesting to the fact that man “gave way as to his desire.” For Freud, the symptom is a compromise formation: in the symptom, the subject gets back, in the form of a cyphered, unrecognized message, the truth about his desire, the truth that he was not able to confront, that he betrayed. So, if we read the thesis of “woman as a symptom of man” against this background, we inevitably approach the position that was most forcefully articulated by Otto Weininger, Freud’s contemporary, a notorious Viennese antifeminist and anti-Semite from the turn of the century, who wrote the extremely influential bestseller Sex and Character 11 and then commited suicide at the age of twenty-four. Weininger’s position is that, according to her very ontological status, woman is nothing but a materialization, an embodiment of man’s sin: in herself, she doesn’t exist, which is why the proper way to get rid of her is not to fight her actively or to destroy her—it is enough for man to purify his desire, to rise to pure spirituality, and, automatically, woman loses the ground under her feet, disintegrates. …We have thus the male world of pure spirituality and undistorted communication, communication without constraint (if we may be permitted to use this Habermasian syntagm), the universe of ideal intersubjectivity, and woman is not an external, active cause which lures man into a fall—she is just a consequence, a result, a materialization of man’s fall. So, when man purifies his desire of the pathological remainders, woman disintegrates in precisely the same way a symptom dissolves after successful interpretation. …If, however, we conceive the symptom as it was articulated in Lacan’s last writings as a particular signifying formation which confers on the subject its very ontological consistency, enabling it to structure its basic, constitutive relationship to enjoyment (jouissance), then the entire relationship is reversed: if the symptom is dissolved, the subject itself loses the ground under his feet, disintegrates. In this sense, “woman is a symptom of man” means that man himself exists only through woman qua his symptom: all his ontological consistency hangs on, is suspended from his symptom, is “externalized” in his symptom. men are “active,” they take refuge in relentless activity in order to escape the proper dimension of the act. The retreat of man from woman (the retreat of the hard-boiled detective from the femme fatale in film noir, for example), is thus effectively a retreat from the death drive as a radical ethical stance: the opposite of Weininger’s image of woman as incapable of a proper ethical attitude.

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