List der Vernunft (Cunning of Reason) and Lust der Vernunft (Pleasure of Reason)
In his review of Badiou’s Ethics, Terry Eagleton wrote:
There is a paradox in the idea of transformation. If a transformation is deep-seated enough, it might also transform the very criteria by which we could identify it, thus making it unintelligible to us. But if it is intelligible, it might be because the transformation was not radical enough. If we can talk about the change then it is not full-blooded enough; but if it is full-blooded enough, it threatens to fall outside our comprehension. Change must presuppose continuity―a subject to whom the alteration occurs―if we are not to be left merely with two incommensurable states; but how can such continuity be compatible with revolutionary upheaval? 519-520
The properly Hegelian solution to this dilemma is that a truly radical change is self-relating: it changes the very coordinates by means of which we measure change.
In other words, a true change sets its own standards: it can only be measured by criteria that result from it.
This is what the “negation of negation” is: a shift of perspective which turns failure into true success.
And does the same not go for the Freudian Fehlleistung (acte manqué)―an act which succeeds in its very failure?
Robert Pippin is right to emphasize that “the realization that only in such ‘failure’ is there success (success at being Geist) is an achievement like no other” in the history of philosophy.
This is where the standard reproach to Hegel (that he fails to fully confront negativity, failure, collapse, etc., since there is always a mechanism of redemption built into the dialectical process which guarantees that the utter failure will magically be converted into its opposite) falls short: the story of the Hegelian dialectical reversal is not the story of failure as a blessing in disguise, as a (painful but necessary) step or detour towards the final triumph that retroactively redeems it, but, on the contrary, the story of the necessary failure of every success (of every direct project or act), the story of how the only “success” the subject can gain is the reflexive shift of perspective which recognizes success in failure itself. 520