The Specter Haunting Autism

Somewhere in the nod we were dropping cargo. Somewhere in the nod we were losing infrastructure, losing redundant systems, losing specific gravity. Weightlessness seemed at the time the safer mode. Weightlessness seemed at the time the mode in which we could beat both the clock and affect itself, but I see now that it was not. I see now that the clock was ticking.

—Joan Didion, The Last Thing He Wanted 

1.

A specter is haunting Europe. 

In 1993 Derrida conjured a spectral it. It raises, he said then, the curtain on the first act both of Marx’s seminal Communist Manifesto and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a play in which the roving revenant of a dead father, a dead sovereign—invoked at the height of the first-flush sugar rush following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and global dissemination of televised confrontations in Tiananmen Square—appears and speaks.

It, he said then, as around him rapid-fire implosions of Cold War binaries unleashed a flurry of proclamations trumpeting the imminent end of history, the promise of growth, of progress and profit without end, “responds to a name and corresponds to an essence. It would be,” he said (reverting to the conditional, conjuring) “a kind of non-object: One does not know if it is living or if it is dead… over there, an unnamable or almost unnamable thing… that looks at us. That concerns us” (Derrida, 1993/1994, p. 7).

What concerns us—what concerns me, as a Lacanian analyst practicing in the year 2025—is precisely what this apparition, here, today, might be saying. Derrida, still conditional, still here, puts it like this: the specter would exist, and we with it, in a kind of “non-present present, [the] being-there of an absent or departed one [One] no longer belongs to knowledge. At least no longer to that which one thinks one knows [One thinks, One knows] by the name of knowledge” (Derrida, 1993/1994, p. 6). Then, quoting Shakespeare: “the time is out of joint” (p. 20).

Its address (at once the conditions of its speaking and its dwelling-place, etymologically its guidance or direction, in service of a transmission or the delivery of a missive or letter) would incite new modes of knowing (and here my ears prick up). It would enjoin the practices of

another kind of “scholar” … capable, beyond the opposition between presence and non-presence, actuality and inactuality, life and non-life, of thinking the possibility of the specter, the specter as possibility. Better (or worse) he [sic] would know how to address himself to spirits… here is someone mad enough to hope to unlock the possibility of such an address. (Derrida, 1993/1994, p. 12)

To analyze, Derrida said then, means precisely to follow this ghost.

2.

Sergio Benvenuto (2025) argues, with brio and characteristic claritas, that what might at first glance appear to be a newish epidemic of a previously rare pathology should better be understood as an epidemic of diagnoses: Autism has increasingly become a, or the, preferred diagnosis. A “paradigmatic pathology” for our times, like hysteria in the late 1800s or schizophrenia in the mid- 20^th century, the horde of autism diagnoses effects a kind of seeming, a semblance or apparition: appearance of an epidemic.

Our times are “autismogenic,” he writes, which means to say they produce more and more autistics (they/we now becoming, Derrida, 1993/1994, might add, something like a “more-than-one or no more one, a crowd, mass or society… without a people… or without a leader, a crowd of ghosts in a disjointed or disadjusted now” [p. 3]. But I’m getting ahead of myself!) What Benvenuto says, precisely, is that autism expresses “certain fundamental contradictions” of the current age. “Today we want to see autistics everywhere” (Benvenuto, 2025).

The irony is that the proliferating diagnoses, the magnetic draw of the concept in application to ever-growing lists of symptoms and instances of individual cases, renders autism ever more slippery, ever more spectral; it becomes ever trickier to determine who and what an autist actually is, or what the designation describes: In some sense we have all become autistic, more or less, or our current historical moment—its discourses, treatments, institutions and operative assumptions—has itself become autistic. And yet the very ubiquity of autism signals, in some fundamental or incipient way, its death or disappearance. Everywhere and nowhere, a thing or no-thing, neither alive nor dead, a revenant… autism haunts the stage of the contemporary, or merges with its very scenery. (A kind of weightlessness to it, and an association: Heidegger’s Being and Time characterizes the fruit of “idle chatter as a mode of groundless floating, an uprooted ‘everywhere and nowhere’”; as cited in Steiner, 1989, p. 96.)

Benvenuto (2025) describes how, with the formulation and widespread adoption of the conception of autism as a spectrum, psychiatry has shifted “from a categorical paradigm to a dimensional one,” from a binary opposition between health and sickness to a “continuum of differences.” A given person is no longer “an autist” or “not an autist” but more or less autistic; autism, previously understood as a pathology, has come to be seen as a sliding scale of neurotypicity and neurodiversity, “a continuous series of nuances.”

As “the common features of autism come more and more to elude us” (Benvenuto, 2025), the designation itself has become a kind of specter. The “well-known traits” can be listed (difficulty reading affect conveyed by the eyes or “habituating to novel facial stimuli, neurological overconnectivity or sensory hyperacuity”), but, in the absence of a “structural link” between them, the overall effect is a can’t see the forest for the trees-type situation (as if you tried to describe blindness by listing exhaustively all its features, but without mentioning impaired vision). 

“There is something spectral,” Benvenuto—following Laurent—points out, “about the spectrum.  Autism haunts psychiatry” as a kind of present absence or slippery ubiquity, evoking the etymology of the word itself: appearance, apparition, image, the Latin spectrum rooted in the Indo-European spek, meaning to observe. Viewing autism as a spectrum then, as a sliding scale of differences, suggests that its “various forms and iterations are so heterogeneous they might not in the end even add up to a single syndrome” (Benvenuto, 2025). 

If each case of autism is understood to be unique and distinct, in some sense individual (undivided or indivisible, single, singular) or conditional (etymologically contingent, dependant on a condition or circumstance), it becomes ever more challenging to find the common feature that links them; the absence of this shared “unary trait” (the nur einen einzigen Zug of Freud’s Group Psychology, 1921/1955a) renders autism still more ghost-like. (Benvenuto notes that as testimonies and representations of autistic people become more current in the culture, more marketed—online, in memoirs, as characters in novels and shows—it almost seems psychiatry is beginning to abandon the category. He evokes a future in which it, like hysteria, will have “disappeared from the psychiatry textbooks”; Benvenuto, 2025.)

So Benvenuto searches for a structural trait allowing an approach to autism as something other than an ever-expanding list of symptoms with no metapsychological common thread, in the manner of the DSM: He seeks something more tangible than a ghostly specter or spectrum. He searches out a properly psychoanalytic way to identify the quiddity of what transcends or subtends all the variegated facets of its expression, and suggests it is an agnosia—a not-knowing, an inability to see or perceive—of subjectivity itself. “All autistic traits or deficits,” he hypothesizes, “are ways of expressing this agnosia of subjectivity” (Benvenuto, 2025). This rhetorical move has a clarifying or bracing effect, akin to putting forward the hypothesis that the blind lack the ability to see—it reveals, in retrospect, the absurdity of lists of diagnostic terms and conditions in the absence of a structuring concept. Now a forest emerges from the groves.

Benvenuto then draws a parallel with astonishing implications: this blindness to subjectivity characterizes both autists and the cognitivist discourse on autism itself, its theoretical-institutional surround; this is a régime which, he writes, like an autist “perceives realism incarnate” (Benvenuto, 2025).

Cognitive science characterizes autism as blindness to the mind of others. Yet it itself privileges the ontological over the epistemological, objective reality over subjective experience, conflating—like the very autists it studies, diagnoses and treats—noumena and phenomena, things-in-themselves and things as they appear to us. Neuroscientific approaches, like autistic people, “lack a perception of their own subjectivity: they perceive only cognitive minds. If the cognitive-behavioral theory of the human mind were universally valid,” Benvenuto (2025) writes, “we would all be autistic.”

Psychoanalysis, in sharp contrast, grounds the very blind spot of autism and of cognitive-behavioral method as its proper function and field: It plays on the subjective condition of division, on desire, on the polyvalence and equivocation of metaphor (“condensation”) and the metonymic sliding of slips (“displacement”). Freud called Spaltung the split—which Lacan (2005/2013) elaborated as impossibility, as wall, as impasse or real—between the storehouse of grasped facts and the infinitude of unknown knowing, between predication and essence, the solidity of the statement and the vicissitudes of its enunciation.

For those who follow Freud, the “I” can never be master in its own house because it is constitutively driven by the Spaltung des Bewusstseins, the split between cognition and the primary process riddling the “I” (or ego) itself (Freud, 1938/1955b, pp. 275-278)—a sovereign agency which takes itself as its own subject, or object, ever-haunted by a “they,” a phantasmatic, desiring Other rendering any sure boundary-line between the proper and the it virtually undelineable.

Lacan, following Freud and following Heidegger, refused to conflate knowing and the ontic essent. For him the psychoanalytic subject locates its information (in-formation), its very source, precisely in the gap between knowing and being, in the fissure subjectivity wraps itself around like a torus enclosing, in Benvenuto’s potent formalization, empty space.

“The world inhabited by autistics,” Benvenuto (2025) writes, “appears too poor of signifiers,” and in fact we might argue that this desertification, a kind of disenchantment or draining away of the translinguistic, etymological or associative language meshes into which we are born, plagues many of us today. “For both autistics and cognitive scientists language is only a formal object, similar to the language described by Chomsky’s theory of transformational grammar” underwriting artificial intelligence systems and the increasingly algorithmic operations of our rules (Daston, 2022), media and institutions. The eclipse of signifying play in speech, our failure to grasp the “performative nature of words,” to hear or articulate the question in a demand or the equivocity in a statement, to grasp how speaking beings act in and with and through language, is endemic to the contemporary socius.

3.

Benvenuto points out how the experience of the autist is one of being plunged into an “anti-hermeneutic, purely ontic world,” redolent with “signs akin to stones or rivers and the sullen beauty of prime numbers,” and suggests that via this very experience of material signs, a world of real patterns and meshes, topological structures and formulae in the absence of a subjective “skin,” analysts might learn some new things about subjectivity.

The idea that autism allows access to a material and aesthetic perception of signifiers has much to teach analysts, both clinically and theoretically. It evokes Lacan’s appreciation for the elegance of mathematical, geometric and biological forms, and recalls his appreciation for H. E. Huntley’s splendid 1970 text The Divine Proportion: A Study in Mathematical Beauty. It suggests manifold possibilities for a more etymological or (subversively) philological application of Lacan’s teachings in the clinic, and opens the door to reformations of analytic praxis that take seriously some of its more astute critics, as well as poets, Celan paramount perhaps among them, who work masterfully with the materiality of the signifier.

Yet this Logos renders subjectivity itself spectral. In a 1986 discussion of the ethical limits (suggested by sporadic comments of Wittgenstein, via Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Eliot and Tolstoy) of Shakespeare’s “spectacularity,” limits of a stagecraft copious with with “human types” and teeming semblances, George Steiner (1996) analyzes the logic informing Wittgenstein’s charge that Shakespeare’s dazzling “scenic significances” are fundamentally “untrue to life” (p. 119). Shakespeare’s “prepotent plenitude” (p. 120), the “psychological-carnal presence of his personae” (p. 119), as this line of argument would have it, comprise a “merely phenomenal significance” (p. 120); the manipulative sovereignty and singularity of his spectacular skills belie a more ethical truth-to-life which would be epitomized by a kind of object-knowing “antithetical to ‘knowingness,’ to the encyclopaedic myriad-mindedness … so many have found” (p. 121) and celebrated in the universe of his works.

The thinginess of this savoir, this know-how, would be precisely that of the autist who, possessing access to a material and aesthetic perception of signifiers, resembles those rare poets with the capacity to, in Steiner’s (1996) formulation, “object-know” (p. 121), whose knowledge is “organized, i.e. made organic, by ethical perception” (p. 121). The transmission of this knowledge is less an aesthetic than a moral act. It bears witness to substantive being and signifies its forms, carrying, in Canetti’s words, a “responsibility for life.” The dynamics of this act would be those of a life-giving compassion, a radical reminder of the power, of the obligations, of truth-saying. (Steiner, 1996, pp. 121-122)

We might say of the autist, as Martin Heidegger would say of Sophocles, of Hölderlin or Rilke or Celan, that it is through their “openness, their vulnerability to the pressures of being, that the mystery, that the hidden pulse of primordial coming-into-being in the inorganic and organic presences of our world, are made perceptible” (Steiner, 1996, p. 122). Counterintuitively it’s precisely these blasphemers, perceiving realism incarnate, who are the quintessential parlêtres of Lacan’s formulation; they, as Steiner (1996) puts it without apparent reference to Lacan, “speak-being” (p. 122).

We might take Wittgenstein’s bafflement encountering the “natural pulse of tragi-comic enactment” (Steiner, 1996, p. 131) in Shakespeare—his inability to hear the concord and logical form transmitted by the texts’ transcendent music, his refusal to join the verbal play in which “the matter of human existence is imitated, stylized, selected pluralistically,” in which “torment and ruin” and “pleasure and hope” (p. 131) are rendered theatrical—as akin to the bafflement of the autist, faced with the myriad of subjective, signifying givens fluently transported via the lips and eyes of the allistic. Or even to the bafflement of a cognitively-minded contemporary confronting the sophistry of my verbal performance here: “Magellanic clouds of verbal energy turning around a void, around an absence of truth and moral substance” (p. 124). Each one (the autist, the cognitivist) would “draw,” as Wittgenstein (1921/2009) puts it, “a limit to thinking in language, on the other side of which lies simply nonsense” (p. 4). Each would say, with Wittgenstein, that “what can be said at all can be said clearly; that whereof one cannot speak thereof one must remain silent” (p. 82).

Regardless of who, exactly, we understand “the autistics” to be, practicing psychoanalysis today entails pursuing the talking cure in a world largely drained of signifying, a world suffering from a scarcity of the unconscious where it becomes increasingly difficult to bear the question in the demand. It may very well be, as Benvenuto suggests, that analysts need to become more “active,” saying and showing (rather than merely listening and punctuating) in a way that helps contemporary analysands to perceive the subjectivity of others—a subjectivity (barred, unheimlich, deictic, performative), evinced by the very act of saying, that can never be reduced to what is said.

What new modes of declaring, of declaration—of elucidation, disclosure, annunciation—are analysts now called to cultivate or lean on, what new models of “capture, of concept or condition” (Serres, 1983/2015, pp. 33-34), what new techniques of playing or dancing or interpreting acting out on stages where the organic itself has given up its tragi-comic ghost or even (shades of Jean Baudrillard) in contemporary “spaces,” non-places perhaps best described as ob-scene—desertified zones where no stage remains? What acts, what facts, what ethics  might now be possible in a symbolic terrain voided of God, of any transcendence whatsoever, a topos purged precisely of that beyond-the-empirical signified for Lacan by the Father and his name(s) (Lacan, 2005/2013), by the impossible, or even by the very notion of “structure?”

Here we arrive at a logical impasse. Does autism speak-being, or does it represent the apotheosis of a fallen condition in which the be-all and end-all of speech would be henceforth foreclosed, a barren field enclosed or eclipsed between the opening and concluding propositions of Wittgenstein’s (1921/2009) Tractatus: “The world is everything that is the case” (p. 5; everything that is, etymologically, in decline or declension, falling or fallen) and “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” (p. 82)?

4.

On the ethical parameters of autistic knowing my reading of Benvenuto falters. I stumble on a kernel of contradiction, slip into a sensation of logical looping or paradox I can’t quite wrap my brain around. I hesitate. Insistence of manifold, intervolved impasses; this accomplished text is veined (“crazed”) with ineluctable divides or splits, repeated enigmas, manifest contradictions. It conjures a horde of apparitions, renderings spectral of fundamental barricades or constitutive tears, shades intimating the very siphons—properly subjective, which would be to say proper to subjects, at hand to them, still, today—around which psychoanalysis itself, still, today, cycles.

Autism has been understood as the absence of a capacity for empathy, an “inability to directly perceive the subjectivity of others” (as Benvenuto (2025) puts it, the “agnosia of the very particular object cognitivism fails to delineate and conceptualize: subjectivity,” one’s own and others’ both). Autists—as well as the Logos at once exemplifying the category and rendering it spectral—”perceive only cognitive minds, in which the function of metaphorization is actually quite flawed.”  They “argue for purely neurological explanations.” Yet autists sense things (objects, creatures, shapes and formulae) acutely, exquisitely, intrusively or excessively. Sensation and meaning are in them undivided. The only agnosia truly attributable to autists, the only thing they are constitutionally unable to know is subjectivity’s essential lack, duplicity, lability… the mercurial, hermeneutic, signifying skin cleaving a unitary being from unmediated world. If, as Benvenuto reminds us, “desire is the fundamental expression of subjectivity,” then autism would signal its failure.

With respect to the shift from a categorical to a dimensional paradigm, the adoption of the autism spectrum model suggests an “irenic” turn. “Peaceable” would describe at once the “compassionate truth-saying” of the autistic condition and its (cognitivist) discursive surround, which aims to replace the cruelty of prior distinctions between normal (henceforth “neurotypical”) and pathological (autism characterized, as from the very coining of the term by Bleuler, 1911/1950, as a form of schizophrenia, hallucinatory wish fulfilment or so-called “mental defect”) with a new, more inclusive or progressive stance. The dimensional paradigm heralds a kinder, more gentle world in which naturally occurring differences would be normalized and embraced, rather than branded and punished. And yet this very “progress” parallels civilizational repetitions and revolutions of an increasingly dystopic tenor: tsunamis of algorithm-driven autocracy and surveillance, ecosystemic collapse, climactic cataclysm, accelerating states of “total” or “pure” war, genocide.

So are we talking about empathy or lack thereof? Is empathy missing from autism, or does it comprise its very mode of being, its moral requisite or prerequisite? Autism expresses certain fundamental contradictions of the current age.

Does the condition represent the ultimate withdrawal into a singular existence—autonomous, self-ruled, in-dividual—or the resorption of all singularity into aggregates, collectives, categories and taxonomies? Psychiatry’s relentlessly assimilative patterning, since Kraepelin—its reduction to a set of symptoms or given criteria, its refashioning of clinical-temporal specificities as common shapes, traits or features, ideal types or nosologies—Benvenuto (2025) describes, quite rightly, as resulting in a situation in which each instance of autism has come to be seen as, at once, utterly unique and common, communal or even universal.

How might we differentiate the structural trait sought by Benvenuto—indeed any set of interpretive or prescriptive forms gleaned from the psychoanalytic clinic, Lacanian or otherwise—from the counter-subjective empathy he sees as endemic to the spectrum-system? For what appears innocently, he might remind us, as a more compassionate, progressive or inclusive stance, harbors the blood lust of the horde-animal; assimiliation to taxonomy or type instantiates the “massification” Freud (1921/1955a, p. 105) described in Group Psychology as Einfühlung: the “molding of a person’s own ego after the fashion” (p. 106) of a leader (or, tellingly, after the fashion of “the one”) “taken as a model and introjected” (p. 106), the common quality undergirding social ties patterned (which means, etymologically, identified with a patron) on the imitation of a power figure, a potentate. This feeling (ein Fühlung signifying, literally, in feeling) described by Kristeva (1983/1987) as “affective bonding to the speech of the Other” (pp. 24-25) obviates subjectivity: The affect makes a ghost of it. Comprising the assimilation of other people’s feelings and group-think, crowd-sourced “egology” (Derrida, 1993/1994, p. 129), mass hysteria, and the dark jouissances of totalitarianism, empathy links—linguistically, socially, historically—autism with autocracy.

Benvenuto wants to steer clear of the empathy trap. He seeks a common feature that would stand for diverse instances or cases of autism, a structure able, like Freud’s “unary trait,” to function as a signum of alterity for each singleton. An inherited mark of the Other haunting the horde-animal, Lacan (2006/2024) conceived of the unary trait as a bodily loss (pp. 97-106); this concomitant excess and lack, inclusion and exclusion of bodily enjoyment, becomes what he calls a “cause” (p. 100), an “objectless desire conjugating,” in his words, “our desire to know” (p. 106). I suggest that we, like Lacan and like Benvenuto before us, persist in hunting “single traits” that might transmit “something of the One” from preexisting forms or models or potencies. (The French word trait, Michel Serres, reminds us, functions something like the English word draft: It signifies “both material bond and basic stroke of writing, dot and long mark, a binary alphabet” [Serres, 1990/1995, p. 103]… the bond or contract—social, symbolic, quintessentially subjective—binding speaking beings.)

5.

The enigmas larding the current discourse on autism suggest that rather than cleaving to one or another orthodoxy, analysts might more helpfully conceive, following Derrida, of our practice as one of paradoxy, requiring a stance running counter to all currents of shared opinion:

—If autists (in some sense, more or less, now all of us) are taken as, at once, failing to experience empathy and being, increasingly, exquisitely attuned to the sensing of things and creatures and formulae as ontic, fundamentally real objects and relations…

—If the spectrum heralds at once a joining or assimilation with others via a shared, named condition and one’s own utter singularity, a concomitant presence and absence of structure, appearance of a form or figure rendering subjects themselves spectral…

—If psychoanalysts, grappling with the paradoxes of autism, find themselves cycling around the same slashed torus or Möbius strip delineated by Kraepelin and Bleuler whereby a “psychotic” hypertrophy of signifiers flows seamlessly into an “autistic” desertification of the signifier, surplus cycling at once into loss and back around again (as evinced in algorithmically replicated and disseminated conspiracy theories)…

—If, even today and despite all protestations on the part of analysands, statements persist in perpetual inadequation to their own “proper” (Derrida, 1993/1994, p. 115) content, invoking spectral revenants appearing at once unified and doubled or multiplied (and yet neither), alive and dead (and yet neither), present and absent (and yet neither)…

—If the cruel hierarchies of the past are overturned as, at once, the dys-topic insists as the essential topic, the essential topos for psychoanalysis today…

We might persist in conspiring to invoke subjectivity, as it is so cunningly evoked by Benvenuto, such that it would continue to emerge apophatically, as a kind of water-mark, from the negative space of the knot or aporia, bar or wall (Lacan, 2011/2017), “void at the center of the torus” or “true hole” (Benvenuto, 2025); the whirlpool, gap, slot or slit opening between the saying and the said, between the spoken sentence and what is understood in what is heard—from within language, that is, dominated or ruled by sense (meaning), at once by semblance.

If. At once. And yet—

Now a verbal performance, an act: I want to torque or twist (Zug) his enunciation to say Subjectivity is a specter haunting autism. 

Only we are mad enough to address it. So follow it.

The time is out of ioynt: Oh cursed spight,

That ever I was borne to set it right.

Nay, come, let’s goe together. [Exeunt]

—William Shakespeare, Hamlet