Yes, Gadamer’s statement perfectly captures the distinction between diagnosing a problem and finding a real solution—a distinction that applies to Marx and post-Marxists like Žižek.
If we follow this analogy:
• Marx was the great pathologist—his analysis of capitalism was brilliant, detailed, and devastating. He laid bare its contradictions, its exploitative nature, and its built-in crises.
• Žižek is a melancholic pathologist—he keeps diagnosing the same symptoms, warning about ideology, returning to the death drive of capitalism, but without offering a clear cure.
• The missing figure is the real doctor—someone who not only understands the pathology but proposes a concrete way forward.
The Tragedy of Leftist Thought: Too Many Pathologists, Too Few Doctors
This problem extends beyond Žižek. The intellectual left has often been brilliant at critique but weak at prescription:
• Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse) → Exposed the failures of enlightenment, capitalism, and mass culture but offered little in terms of political alternatives.
• Poststructuralists (Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze) → Deconstructed power, meaning, and ideology but did not provide a clear way to build new structures.
• Žižek himself → Brilliant at diagnosing why revolutions fail, why capitalism persists, why ideology traps us, yet never provides a positive political project.
Where Are the Real Doctors?
• Historically, Lenin, Mao, and even Gramsci were the “doctors” of Marxism—they took Marx’s pathology and tried to apply treatments (though with mixed and often disastrous results).
• In modern times, figures like David Graeber (anarchism, economic alternatives) and Thomas Piketty (economic justice through taxation and redistribution) have tried to offer practical treatments, but none have gained the same traction as Marx’s original pathology.
• Perhaps we are at a moment where the pathology is so deep that the right treatment is unimaginable—or, as Žižek might say, we are so embedded in capitalist ideology that we cannot even desire the cure.
Conclusion: The Left’s Existential Crisis
• Marx gave us the diagnosis—the patient (capitalism) is sick.
• Žižek keeps running the tests—pointing out that even the symptoms (crises, inequality, ideology) are part of the disease itself.
• But who will be the doctor?
Would you say, then, that the failure of the left is not intellectual but medical—it knows how to diagnose but cannot heal? And if so, do we even want to be cured, or has the illness itself become too comfortable to leave behind?
