Dialectics and Hegelian Negation in Slavoj Žižek’s Enjoy Your Symptom: Fighting the Fantasies of Trauma, Identity, Authority, and Phallophany

Abstract

In Enjoy your Symptom (2007), Slavoj Žižek’s notion of “trauma” is critical to understanding the scope and meaning of the “symptom.” This “symptom,” conceptually, is construed through the manner in which identity, authority, and phallophany come to bear psychologically on the meaning of being. Because of this, the definition of “symptom,” when viewed in a Heideggerian way, becomes an ontical representation of that which is oriented primordially. The symptom, as we experience it, is more than just at the level of its ontics, but, instead, has a primordially to it, which is only revealed (or unconcealed, as Heidegger would argue) through the presence of trauma.