… the primordial gesture of creation is not that of an excessive giving, of assertion, but a negative gesture of withdrawal, of subtracting, which only opens up the space for creation of positive entities.
This is how “There is something rather than nothing”: in order to arrive at something, one has to subtract from nothing its nothing(ness) itself, i.e., one has to posit the primordial pre-ontological Abyss “as such,” AS NOTHING, so that, in contrast to (or against the background of) nothing, something can appear.
🙂 Subtract nothing from nothingness, in order to get something. Otherwise nothing will just go on, dumbly, dumb dumb, without a cut, it merely langors, lingers, but never approaching creation of something new out of itself.
The underlying problem is here which of these negation is the primordial one, i.e., which one opens up the space for all others. From the Lacanian perspective, the most obvious candidate may appear to be the notorious “symbolic castration,” the loss which opens up and sustains the space of symbolization — recall, insofar as the Name-of-the-Father is the bearer of symbolic castration, how Lacan plays on the French homophony between le Nom-du-Pere (the name of the father) and le Non-du-Pere (the no of the father).
But it seems more productive to follow a more radical path of thinking beyond father (pere) to what is even worse (pire). Again the most obvious candidate for this “worse” is (death-)drive, .a kind of Freudian correlate to what Schelling called the primordial “contraction,” the obstinate repetitive fixation on a contingent object which subtracts the subject from direct immersion into reality.
Drive as such is death-drive — not in the sense of longing for univeral negation-dissolution of all particularity, but, on the contrary, in the sense of the “spontaneous” life-flow of generation and corruption getting “stuck” onto some accidental particularity and circulating endlessly around it.
If Life is a song played on an old LP (which it definitely is not), drive arises when, due to a scratch on the LP surface, the needle gets stuck and the same fragment is repeated.
The deepest speculative insight is that a universality can only emerge when a flow of particularity get stuck onto a singular moment. And this Freudian notion of drive brings us to the radical ambiguity of Hegel’s dialectics: does it follow the logic of drive or not?
Hegel’s logic is a logic of purification, of “unstucking”: even when a subject puts all of his libidinal investment into a contingent fragment of being (“I am ready to risk everything for that!”), this contingent fragment — the Lacanian objet a — is, in its indifferent accidentality, an operator of purification, of “unstucking” from all (other) particular content — in Lacanese, this object is a metonymy of lack. The subject’s desire is here the transcendental void, and the object is a contingent ontic filler of this void.
In drive, in contrast, objet petit a is not only the metonymy of lack, but a kind of transcendental stain, irreducible and irreplacable in its very contingent singularity, not just a contingent ontic filler of a lack.
While drive is a mode of being stuck onto a contingent stain-object, dialectical negativity is a continuing process of un-stucking from all particular content: jouissance “leans on” something, hanging onto its particularity — this is what is missing in Hegel, but operative in Freud.