Žižek, Slavoj. “Schelling-for-Hegel: The ‘Vanishing Mediator’” The Indivisible Remainder. London: Verso, 1996, 92-186.
Hegel’s whole point is the subject does NOT survive the ordeal of negativity: he effectively loses his very essence, and passes over into his Other. One is tempted to evoke here the science-fiction theme of changed identity, when a subject biologically survives, but is no longer the same person – this is what the Hegelian transubstantiation is about, and of course, it is this very transubstantiation which distinguishes Subject from Substance: ‘subject’ designates that X which is able to survive the loss of its very substantial identity, and to continue to live as the ‘empty shell of its former self’.
[T]he symbolic order (the big Other) is organized around a hole in its very heart, around the traumatic Thing which makes it ‘non-all’; it is defined by the impossibility of attaining the Thing; however, it is this very reference to the void of the Thing that opens up the space for symbolization, since without it the symbolic order would immediately ‘collapse’ into the designated reality – this is to say, the distance that separates ‘words’ from ‘things’ would disappear.
The void of the Thing is therefore both things at the same time: the inaccessible ‘hard kernel’ around which the symbolization turns, which eludes it, the cause of its failure, and the very space of symbolization, its condition of possibility.
That is the ‘loop’ of symbolization: the very failure of symbolization opens up the void within which the process of symbolization takes place. 145