In order to grasp the radical link between the subject and nothingness (the Void), one should be very precise in reading Hegel’s famous statement on substance and the subject: it is not enough to emphasize that the subject is not a positively existing self-identical entity, that it stands for the incompleteness of substance, for its inner antagonism and movement,
for the Nothingness which thwarts the substance from within, destroying its unity, and thus dynamizes it―the notion best rendered by Hegel’s remark, apropos the “unrest” of substantial unity, that the Self is this very unrest (“eben diese Unruhe ist das Selbst”).
This notion of the subject still presupposes the substantial One as a starting point, even if this One is always already distorted, split, and so on. And it is this very presupposition that should be abandoned: at the beginning (even if it is a mythical one),
there is no substantial One, but Nothingness itself; every One comes second, emerges through the self-relating of this Nothingness. In other words, Nothing as negation is not primarily the negation of something, of a positive entity, but the negation of itself. 379