production and who are consequently obliged to sell on the market their own labour instead of the products of their labour.

With this new commodity, the equivalent exchange becomes its own negation -- the very form of exploitation, of appropriation of the surplus-value. The crucial point not to be missed here is that this negation is strictly internal to equivalent exchange, not its simple violation: the labour force is not 'exploited' in the sense that its full value is not remunerated; in principle, at least, the exchange between labour and capital is wholly equivalent and equitable. The catch is that the labour force is a peculiar commodity, the use of which -- labour itself -- produces a certain surplus-value, and it is this surplus over the value of the labour force itself which is appropriated by the capitalist.

We have here again a certain ideological Universal, that of equivalent and equitable exchange, and a particular paradoxical exchange -that of the labour force for its wages -- which, precisely as an equivalent, functions as the very form of exploitation. The 'quantitative' development itself, the universalization of the production of commodities, brings about a new 'quality', the emergence of a new commodity representing the internal negation of the universal principle of equivalent exchange of commodities; in other words, it brings about a symptom. And in the Marxian perspective, Utopian socialism consists in the very belief that a society is possible in which the relations of exchange are universalized and production for the market predominates, but workers themselves none the less remain proprietors of their means of production and are therefore not exploited -- in short, 'Utopian' conveys a belief in the possibility of a universality without its symptom, without the point of exception functioning as its internal negation.

This is also the logic of the Marxian critique of Hegel, of the Hegelian notion of society as a rational totality: as soon as we try to conceive the existing social order as a rational totality, we must include in it a paradoxical element which, without ceasing to be its internal constituent, functions as its symptom -- subverts the very universal rational principle of this totality. For Marx, this 'irrational' element of the existing society was, of course, the proletariat, 'the unreason of reason -- itself' ( Marx), the point at which the Reason embodied in the existing social order encounters its own unreason.

In his attribution of the discovery of symptom to Marx, Lacan is, however, more distinct: he locates this discovery in the way Marx

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