Slavoj Žižek, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The symbolic order is, to put it simply, the network of rules, codes, and presuppositions that structures every act of communication before any individual speaker opens their mouth.1 When I speak, I am never merely exchanging information with another individual — I am always already embedded in a vast anonymous structure that precedes me, and it is only by blindly relying on this structure that speech is possible at all.
Some of these rules I can, upon reflection, become at least partially aware of — grammatical rules, shared life-world assumptions. Others operate as unconscious prohibitions I follow without knowing I follow them. And then there are meanings I know perfectly well but must not be seen to know — the obscene underside that polite conversation passes over in silence precisely in order to maintain its proper surface.1
But here is where it gets interesting, and where the standard picture breaks down. The symbolic order is not a closed, consistent totality. It is, as I argue in The Sublime Object of Ideology — a reading of Lacan's logic of the signifier and its relation to ideology — structured around a fundamental impossibility, a traumatic kernel it cannot absorb.2
The moment enjoyment (jouissance) penetrates the field of the signifier, the symbolic becomes inconsistent, porous, perforated — and the only signifier that can mark this intrusion is the signifier of the lack in the Other itself, S(Ø).2 Without this lack, the Other would be a closed structure, and the subject would have nowhere to go except total alienation within it.
It is precisely because the big Other is also barred, also crossed-out, that the subject achieves what Lacan calls separation — not the melancholy recognition that I am cut off from the object by language, but the discovery that the Other itself does not have the final answer, that it too is blocked, desiring.2 This is the Hegelian lesson I draw from Lacan in Less Than Nothing: de-centering is always redoubled.3
When the subject finds itself displaced, deprived of the core of its being, this does not mean that the core has migrated to some natural substance or primordial ground. It means that the big Other — the virtual symbolic order, what one might call our "second nature" — is itself constructed around a lack.3 The gap separating the subject from the big Other is simultaneously the gap in the heart of the Other itself.
Two lacks overlap, and this overlapping is what makes the whole structure so vertiginous. And this is why the symbolic order has what I call, in For They Know Not What They Do, the structure of a finite totality.4 Every language constitutes a universe complete and closed in itself — nothing, in principle, lies outside it, everything can be said in it.
Yet this very claim to completeness is marked by an irreducible finitude, a central void around which the whole order turns.4 If that void were filled in, the order would not be completed — it would dissolve. The symbolic order is defined by what it cannot include, and it is sustained by that exclusion. The joke I use to illustrate the big Other is crude but precise: the shipwrecked peasant who has sex with Cindy Crawford and then, to feel the full satisfaction of the event, needs to tell his best friend about it.1
What this reveals is that private enjoyment is structurally impossible — there is always a Third, a witness, whose gaze the subject requires to complete the experience. That Third is the big Other: not a person, not a god necessarily, but the anonymous symbolic space in which the act is registered and recognized. Sex, in this sense, is always minimally exhibitionist.1
And this is not a contingent feature of neurotic psychology — it is the formal condition of any symbolically mediated experience whatsoever.5
When we speak (or listen, for that matter), we never merely interact with others; our speech activity is grounded on our accepting and relying on a complex network of rules and other kinds of presuppositions.How to Read Lacan, pp. 21–22
the most radical dimension of Lacanian theory lies not in recognizing this fact but in realizing that the big Other, the symbolic order itself, is also barré, crossed-out, by a fundamental impossibility, structured around an impossible/traumatic kernel, around a central lack.The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 168
when the subject is de-centered, the core of its being is not the natural Substance, but the 'big Other,' the 'second nature,' the virtual symbolic order which is itself constructed around a lack.Less Than Nothing, p. 872
the symbolic order is defined by the paradox of a finite totality: every language constitutes a 'totality', a universe complete and closed in itself; it allows of no outside, everything can be said in it; yet this very totality is simultaneously marked by an irreducible finitude.For They Know Not What They Do, p. 320
This Third, which is always present as the witness, belies the possibility of an unspoiled innocent private pleasure. Sex is always minimally exhibitionist and relies on another's gaze.How to Read Lacan, pp. 21–22