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Slavoj ŽiŞek, The Plague of Fantasies (London; Verso, 1997)
Cyberspace, Or, The Unbearable Closure of Being What is a symptom? 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 potential 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 itself would disintegrate. In the paragraphs on civil society in his Philosophy of Right, Hegel demonstrates how the growing class of 'rabble [PĂśbel]' 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