There is a nice anecdote about a Latin American poet who modified the political tenor of his poetry according to whoever was his most recent mistress: when she was a proto-fascist rightist, he celebrated military discipline and patriotic sacrifice; when he got involved with a pro-communist woman, he started to celebrate guerrilla warfare; later, he moved on to a hippy mistress and wrote about drugs and transcendental meditation.
This is what “woman as a symptom of man” means, not merely that a man uses a woman to articulate his message — on the contrary, woman is the determining factor: man orients himself towards his symptom, he clings to it to give consistencyto his life. And the Hegelian Cunning of Reason works in a similar way: it is not that Reason is a secret force behind the scenes using human agents for its purposes: there are nothing but agents following their particular purposes, and what they do “auto-poetically” organizes itself into a larger pattern. 528