The Jacobin Reign of Terror … for Hegel, is that within it for the first time subjects could at any moment ‘lose everything’ with no hope of any equivalent return. To quote The Phenomenology of Spirit
… all these determinations [that the subject receives in its ‘acculturation’ hence] have vanished in the loss suffered by the self in absolute freedom: its negation is the death that is without meaning, the sheer terror of the negative that contains nothing positive … [Hegel, 1997:362]
… it is only when the individual has experienced this ‘terror of the negative’, and had the courage to see in what appeared to him qua particular Self as a groundless alien force something which is ‘immediately one with self-consciousness’, that full ‘self-consciousness’ emerges. [Žižek 1999a: 94] (139).
‘Subject’ [thus] emerges at this very point of utterly meaningless voidance brought about by a negativity which explodes the frame of balanced exchange. That is to say, what is ‘subject’ [in Hegel] if not the infinite power of absolute negativity/mediation … [for] whom every ‘pathological’ particular positive content [henceforth] appears as ‘posited’, as something externally assumed? [Žižek, 1993, 27; Hegel 1997: 355-63] (139)
Žižek thus comments that what ‘… Bataille fails to … note … is that the modern (Cartesian) subject no longer needs to sacrifice goats intestines, his children, and so on, since his very existence already entails the most radical … sacrifice, the sacrifice of the very kernel of his being’. [Žižek, 1996a 125 … ] (139).
In Hegel, who for Žižek most consistently thought through this subject’s philosophical subversion, the ‘Cartesian’ subject corresponds to: ‘.. the purely negative gesture of limiting phenomena without providing any positive content that would fill out the space beyond the limit.’ [Žižek, 1993, 21]
From Hegel’s Realphilosophie of 1805-6:
The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything in its simplicity — an unending wealth of presentations, images, none of which occurs to him or is present … here shoots out a bloody head, there a white shape … [Žižek, 1991a, 87; 1997b:8; 1992: 50; 1999b: 136] (139)