Alenka Zupančič Not-Mother: On Freud’s Verneinung
A guy goes into a restaurant and says to the waiter: “Coffee without cream, please.” The waiter replies: “I am sorry sir, but we are out of cream. Could it be without milk?”
This joke carries a certain real, even a certain truth about the real, which has to do precisely with the singular negativity introduced or discovered by psychoanalysis.
A negation of something that is neither pure absence nor pure nothing nor simply the complementary of what it negates.
At the moment it is spoken there remains a trace of that which is not.
This is a dimension that is introduced (and made possible) by the signifier yet is irreducible to it.
It has (or can have) a positive, albeit spectral, quality, which can be formulated in the precise terms of “with without (cream)” as irreducible to both alternatives (cream/no cream).
Hegel says, “Negation is part of the positive identity of an object.” An object is not only what it is, you have to include what it is not.