Žižek proposes that we trace this through the 3 stages of theorization of the Symbolic in Lacan’s thought.
1) Symbolic as intersubjective dimension, focusing on speech as place of signification, and symptoms, traumas are blank spaces, analysand cannot properly gain ‘full speech’ and the goal of “analysis is to produce the recognition of desire through ‘full speech’, to integrate desire within the universe of signification.”
2) Schema L : the structuralist Symbolic through and through, the subject is at the mercy of the “Symbolic machine.”
foreclosure (Verwerfung),
repression (Verdrängung),
denial (Verneinung)
displacement (Enstellung)
3) Definitely NOT a synthesis of first 2 stages.
a barred Other (
) incomplete, not-all, an Other articulated against a void, an Other which carries within it an extimate, non-symbolizable kernel.
subject of the signifier (
):
It is only by working from the barred Other () that one can understand the subject of the signifier (): if the Other is not fractured, if it is a complete array, the only possible relationship of the subject to the structure is that of total alienation, of a subjection without remainder; but the lack in the Other means that there is a remainder, a non-integratable residuum in the Other, objet a, and the subject is able to avoid total alienation only insofar as it posits itself as the correlative of this remainder: <> a. In this sense, one is able to conceive of a subject that is distinct from the ego, the place of Imaginary misrecognition: a subject that is not lost in the ‘process without subject’ of the structural combination.
QUOTE: At first sight, it might appear that the Lacanian reference to Hegel is fundamentally limited to the first stage, with its themes of symbolization as historicization, integration within the symbolic universe, etc. Throughout this period, the Lacanian reading of the Hegelian text is ‘mediated’ by Kojeve and Hyppolite, and the predominant themes are those of struggle and the final reconciliation in the medium of intersubjective recognition, which is speech. In effect, the achievement of symbolic realization, the abolition of the symptom, the integration of every traumatic kernel into the symbolic universe, this final and ideal moment when the subject is finally liberated from Imaginary opacity, when the blanks of its history are filled in by ‘full speech’ when the tension between ‘subject’ and ‘substance’ are finally resolved by this speech in which the subject is able to assume his desire, etc. – is it not possible to recognize this state of plenitude as a psychoanalytic version of Hegelian ‘Absolute Knowledge’: a non-barred Other, without symptom, without lack, without traumatic kernel?
In the third stage, in which Lacan places the accent on the Real as the impossible/non-symbolizable kernel, ‘death drive’ becomes the name for that which, following Sade, takes the form of the ‘second death’: symbolic death, the annihilation of the signifying network, of the text in which the subject is inscribed, through which reality is historicized – the name of that which, in psychotic experience, appears as the ‘end of the world’, the twilight, the collapse of the symbolic universe. To put it another way, ‘death drive’ designates the ahistorical possibility implied, exposed by the process of symbolization/historicization: the possibility of its radical effacement.
The Freudian concept which best designates this act of annihilation is das Ungeschehenmachen, ‘in which one action is cancelled out by a second, so that it is as though neither action had taken place’,or more simply, retroactive cancellation. And it is more than coincidence that one finds the same term in Hegel, who defines das Ungeschchenmachen as the supreme power of Spirit.*
This power of ‘unmaking’ the past is conceivable only on the symbolic level: in immediate life, in its circuit, the past is only the past and as such is incontestable; but once one is situated at the level of history qua text, the network of symbolic traces, one is able to wind back what has already occurred, or erase the past. One is thus able to conceive of Ungeschehenmachen, the highest manifestation of negativity, as the Hegelian version of ‘death drive’: it is not an accidental or marginal element in the Hegelian edifice, but rather designates the crucial moment of the dialectical process, the so-called moment of the ‘negation of negation’, the inversion of the ‘antithesis’ into the ‘synthesis’: the ‘reconciliation’ proper to synthesis is not a surpassing or suspension (whether it be ‘dialectical’) of scission on some higher plane, but a retroactive reversal which means that there never was any scission to begin with – ‘synthesis’ retroactively annuls this scission. This is how the enigmatic but crucial passage from Hegel’s Encyclopaedia must be understood:
The accomplishing of the infinite purpose consists therefore in sublating the illusion that it has not yet been accomplished.**
One does not accomplish the end by attaining it, but by proving that one has already attained it, even when the way to its realization is hidden from view. While advancing, one was not yet there, but all of a sudden, one has been there all along – ‘too soon’ changes suddenly into ‘too late’ without detecting the exact moment of their transformation. The whole affair thus has the structure of the missed encounter: along the way, the truth, which we have not yet attained, pushes us forward like a phantom, promising that it awaits us at the end of the road; but all of a sudden we perceive that we were always already in the truth. The paradoxical surplus which slips away, which reveals itself as ‘impossible’ in this missed encounter of the ‘opportune moment’, is of course objet a: the pure semblance which pushes us toward the truth, right up to the moment when it suddenly appears behind us and that we have already arrived ahead of it, a chimerical being that does not have its ‘proper time’, only ever persisting in the interval between ‘too soon’ and ‘too late’.
This essay was originally published in French in Le plus sublime des hystériques – Hegel passe, Broché, Paris, 1999. It appears in Interogating the Real, London: Continuum, 2005, Rex Butler and Scott Stephens editors.
* G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 402.
** G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia of Logic: Part I of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences with the Zusädtze, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting and H. S. Harris, Indianapolis, Hackett, 1991, p. 286.