lacan – Page 16 – objet (a)

stavrakakis the real

As soon as we recognise the centrality of dislocation in our experience, we can easily understand the play between possibility and impossibility governing the field of social construction. If it is construction that makes possible the sedimentation of social reality, this reality is always threatened by an encounter with impossibility, with the part of the real that escapes the boundaries of construction.

… dislocation and the lack it creates in our representations of reality, is exactly what stimulates our new attempts to construct new representations of this real.

This play between possibility and impossibility, construction and dislocation, is structurally equivalent to the play between identification and its failure which marks the subjective level. However, this argumentation is still located at the level of a certain phenomenology of the social.

How can we further approach the status of this element which stimulates our desire to represent it through social construction, but which, due to the impossibility to represent it fully, returns to dislocate all our social constructions?

It is here that Lacanian theory can be of great help. In Lacan, the cause of this play between possibility and impossibility is, of course, the real. This is then the paradox of Lacans relation to constructionist argumentation. Lacan is not a mere constructionist because he is a real-ist; that is to say, in opposition to standard versions of constructionism Lacanian theory of symbolic meaning and fantasmatic coherence can only make sense in its relation to the register of a real which is radically external to the level of construction.

This Lacanian real-ism is, however, alien to all other standard versions of epistemological realism in the sense that this real is not the ultimate referent of signification, it is not something representable, but exactly the opposite, the impossible which dislocates reality from within.

The real does not exist in the sense of being adequately represented in reality; its effects however are disrupting and changing reality, its consequences are felt within the field of representation. 69

stavrakakis 1999 dislocation and the real

Indeed it is possible to trace in constructionist argumentation a certain moment when`something external to social construction makes its presence felt. It is the moment in which a problem or a crisis dislocates our social constructions. … This conceptualisation of the moment of the meaningless event, of the accident or the disaster that destroys a well-ordered social world and dislocates our certainties,
representing a crisis in which we experience the limits of our meaning structures, is something we cannot neglect. 67

It is only in Laclaus argumentation that this moment of negativity acquires central importance. What Laclau shows is that the level of the
objective, social reality itself as a sedimentation of meaning, exists in an irreducible dialectic with the moment(s) of its own dislocation. Social reality is eccentric to itself because it is always threatened by a radical exteriority which dislocates it.

Furthermore, this moment of dislocation is exactly what causes the articulation of new social constructions that attempt to suture the lack created by dislocation.

Since dislocation denotes the failure and subversion of a system of representation (be it imaginary or symbolic) by not being representable, since dislocation creates a lack in the place of a discursive order, dislocation can be conceived as an encounter with the real in the Lacanian sense of the word.

The lack, however, created by dislocation produces the need (rather the desire in our Lacanian vocabulary) for its filling. Hence the dual character of dislocations: If on the one hand, they threaten identities, on the other, they are the foundation on which new identities are constituted (Laclau, 1990 New Reflections:39). 67-68

The real is exactly what destroys, what dislocates this fantasmatic reality, what shows that this reality is lacking. 68

If reality constitutes the symbolically constructed and fantasmatically supported part of objectivity, the real also belongs to the objective level, it is what exceeds the domesticated portion of the objective. It is exactly what accounts for the failure of all symbolic representations of objective reality: the object which accounts for the failure of every neutral-objective representation (Ž Plague of Fantasies 1997:214). 68

The real is not
an ultimate referent of external reality but the limit which hinders the neutral
representation of external (symbolic) reality (Ž Plague 1997:214).

It is thus revealed in the failure of symbolisation itself. It is the radical externality which does not permit the
internalisation of the socially constructed reality, it is exactly what keeps identification from resulting in full identity.

Nonetheless, the real cannot be conceived independently of signification: it is revealed in the inherent failure/blockage of all signification, it is
exactly what reveals all symbolic truth to be not-all, it can only be thought as the internal limit of the symbolic order. The real cannot be symbolised per se but is shown in the failure of every attempt to symbolise it (Ž Plague:217). It is an internally shown exteriority surfacing at the intersection of symbolisation with whatever exceeds its grasp. 68

Stavrakakis 1999 why do we need an exteriority, a real

The blind spot of constructionism … is that on the one hand it reduces everything to the level of construction and, on the other hand, it occupies a metalinguistic or essentialist position outside construction.

Thus, in order to de-essentialise constructionist argumentation we need to relate the production of reality constructions to something external to the level of construction itself.

This exteriority, however, cannot be a transparent exteriority, a new essence which is objectively accessible. If that was the case we would have a return to traditional essentialism and objectivism. In other words, this outside cannot be a base on which the superstructure of reality constructions is erected.

It has to be an exteriority impossible to represent, to construct at the level of symbolic meaning, but also impossible to avoid. …

But why is that exteriority necessary? It is not only because otherwise social constructionism becomes essentialist. It is also because any tautological entrapment into the world of social construction is incapable of providing an account of the cause that governs the productions of social constructions of reality.

The crucial question that social constructionism is incapable of answering is the following: if the level of construction is engulfing the totality of the real, what stimulates the production of new social constructions?

This cause has to be something external to the level of construction itself otherwise the argument enters into a tautological spiral. We have established then so far that in order to de-essentialise the constructionist argument and reveal the logic that governs its production and articulation, without however reoccupying a traditional essentialist position, we have to locate an exteriority which serves as the cause of our social constructions, an exteriority which is in itself unrepresentable but constitutive of the play of representation.

What can this element be? Answer: Dislocation

Stavrakakis 1999, 66-67

fantasy sinthome

If fantasy is the support that gives consistency to what we call reality (Ž Sublime Obj:49) on the other hand reality is always a symptom (Ž 1992). Here we are insisting on the late Lacanian conception of the symptom as sinthome.

In this conception, a signifier is married to jouissance, a signifier is instituted in the real, outside the signifying chain but at the same time internal to it. This paradoxical role of the symptom can help us understand the paradoxical role of fantasy. Fantasy gives discourse its consistency because it opposes the symptom (Ragland-Sullivan, 1991:16). Hence, if the symptom is an encounter with the real, with a traumatic point that resists symbolisation, and if the discursive has to arrest the real and repress jouissance in order to produce reality, then the negation of the real within fantasy can only be thought in terms of opposing, of stigmatising the symptom. This is then the relation between symptom and fantasy.

The self-consistency of a symbolic construction of reality depends on the harmony instituted by fantasy.

This fantasmatic harmony can only be sustained by the neutralisation of the symptom and of the real, by a negation of the generalised lack that crosses the field of the social. (Stavrakakis 1999, 64-65)

But how is this done? If social fantasy produces the self-consistency of a certain construction it can do so only by presenting the symptom as an alien, disturbing intrusion, and not as the point of eruption of the otherwise hidden truth of the existing social order (Ž 1991 Looking Awry:40). The social fantasy of a harmonious social or natural
order can only be sustained if all the persisting disorders can be attributed to an alien intruder. […]

When, however, the dependence of fantasy on the symptom is revealed, then the play — the relation — between the symptom and fantasy reveals itself as another mode of the play between the real and the symbolic/imaginary nexus producing reality. (65)

Stavrakakis on Lack

Earlier entry on Stavrakakis

In other words it is the signifier as such, as instituted through symbolic castration, that introduces the idea of recapturing fullness, a fullness which is desired exactly because it is posited as lost/sacrificed. This fullness is in fact impossible to recapture because it was never part of ourselves.

Even the pre-symbolic real in which nothing is lacking should not be conceived as a stage of fullness. In Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis it is clearly stated that the real should not be understood as a raw and opaque mass (seminar of 2 December 1964). As Lacan also points out in his seminar on Anxiety, the non-lacking character of the real does not mean that the real is always full. On the contrary, it is plausible to conceive the real as full of holes. What it means is that it does not lack anything (seminar of 20 March 1963). There is no lack or absence in the real (II:313).

Lack is introduced then at the intersection of the real with the symbolic. It is the symbolic that entails lack.

Lack emerges in and through the symbolisation of the real. Before the introduction of the symbolic there is no lack and thats why we know that the real is not lacking; if it was lacking, lack would be introduced without the symbolic or before the introduction of the symbolic.

The real is related to lack exactly because in the process of symbolisation, the signifier produces the signified, creating the imaginary illusion of attaining the lost real. Sooner or later, the illusory character of this fixation of meaning is revealed. If the real is the domain of the inexpressible, the domain of death and inexpressible enjoyment (jouissance) then its presence, the encounter with the real, can only have as a consequence the revelation of the lack of our imaginary/symbolic constructs, of their inability to represent death and jouissance, to be real. (Stavrakakis 1999, 44)

unconscioius affects eh? guilt (conscience)

Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou. Self and Emotional Life. Columbia University Press 2013.

What is an unconscious affect? How are affects able to be unconscious? For Lacanians, unconscious affects are a contradiction in terms.

Guilt = Affect yes or no?

Freud in mid mature career around 1920 or so, 180 degree change, he added the notion of superego to his theoretical vocabulary. Hints in 1914, On Narcissism. But coming out in The Ego and the Id (1923)

Superego: there are unconscious dimensions of the superego. What analysts see often are patients who feel guilty but don’t know why, some commit a crime just so in order to give a cause to this unbearable feeling of guilt: guilt-in-search-of-a-crime. 79

There are unconscious dimensions of the superego. Is it possible for someone to feel guilty without being (fully) conscious of feeling this way? 79 If affects are felt then they have to be conscious right?

Kant phenomenal noumenal split subject Johnston

Johnston, Adrian. Žižek‘s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity. Northwestern University Press, 2008.

That is to say, if psychoanalysis is indeed correct to maintain that the subject ontogenetically emerges through and comes to constitute itself by a sort of radical, primordial gesture of negating rejection (whether as Freud’s primal/primary repression as original Verwerfung or Verneinung, Lacan’s “cut” of symbolic castration, or Julia Kristeva’s abjection) , then feelings of revulsion toward the corporeal substratum of the mortal body essentially are indicative of the presence of a form of subjectivity resistant to being collapsed back into its material foundation. (Johnston ŽO 25)

The subject is inherently barred from any form of phenomenal self-acquaintance in which it would know itself as finite in the ontological-material sense. The nothingness fled from, the void that Kant allegedly labors so hard to avoid, is nothing other than the very absence of the subject itself, the negation of the insurmountable “transcendental illusion” of its apparent immortality. (31)

The split within the structure of the subject that Zizek credits Kant with having discovered is that between the phenomenal and noumenal dimensions of subjectivity, namely, between the subject as it appears to itself in an experiential fashion (i.e., through conceptual and spatio-temporal mediation) and the subject as it exists/subsists “in itself.”

The subject an sich that makes experience possible cannot itself fall, as a discrete experiential, representational element, within the frame of the field it opens up and sustains (a point already grasped by Descartes in his second meditation). Hence, Kant famously speaks of “this lor he or it (the thing) that thinks”. The noumenal subject is just as much of a permanently shrouded mystery as things-in-themselves. The entire thrust of the first Critique (particularly the “Dialectic of Pure Reason”) is to establish the epistemological grounds for forbidding any and every philosophical reference to the noumenal realm beyond the familiar limits of possible experience. (Johnston ŽO 30)

According to Zizek’s heterodox juxtaposition of Kant and Lacan, the psychoanalytic notion of fantasy has direct relevance to this splitting of subjectivity between, on the one hand, the noumenal subject of (unconscious) enunciation and, on the other hand, the phenomenal subject of utterances (as determinate signifier-predicates). [ŽO 32]

If… one bears in mind the fact that, according to Lacan, the ego is an object, a substantial “res,” one can easily grasp the ultimate sense of Kant’s transcendental turn: it desubstantializes the subject (which, with Descartes, still remained “res cogitans,” i.e., a substantial “piece of reality”)—and it is this very desubstantialization which opens up the empty space (the “blank surface”) onto which fantasies are projected, where monsters emerge. To put it in Kantian terms: because of the inaccessibility of the Thing in itself, there is always a gaping hole in (constituted, phenomenal) reality, reality is never “all,” its circle is never closed, and this void of the inaccessible Thing is filled out with phantasmagorias through which the trans-phenomenal Thing enters the stage of phenomenal presence—in short, prior to the Kantian turn, there can be no black hulk at the background of the stage. (Zizek Enjoy Your Symptom 1992, 136) [Johnston ŽO 32]

Elsewhere Zizek draws out the consequences of this, maintaining that every mediated identity, all signifier-predicates appended to the original nothingness of subjectivity in its raw negativity, are “supplements” aiming to “fill out this void”:

Lacan’s point here is that an unsurmountable gap forever separates what I am “in the real” from the symbolic mandate that procures my social identity: the primordial ontological fact is the void, the abyss on account of which I am inaccessible to myself in my capacity as a real substance — or, to quote Kant’s unique formulation from his Critique of Pure Reason, on account of which I never get to know what I am as “I or he or it (the thing) which thinks [Ich, oder Er, oder Es (das Ding), welches denkt]”

Every symbolic identity I acquire is ultimately nothing but a supplementary feature whose function is to fill out this void. This pure void of subjectivity, this empty form of “transcendental apperception,” has to be distinguished from the Cartesian Cogito which remains a res cogitans, a little piece of substantial reality miraculously saved from the destructive force of universal doubt: it was only with Kant that the distinction was made between the empty form of “I think” and the thinking substance, the “thing which thinks.” (Zizek Metastases of Enjoyment 1994, 144) Johnston ŽO 32-33

Thus, the entire range of significations and images proposed by the subject to itself in response to the question of self-identity (“Who or what am I?”) falls under the heading of transcendental illusion. That is to say, these fantasmatic productions striving to seal this crack in reality are semblances. And yet they are the inevitable results of a structurally determined dynamic rooted in subjectivity’s internal division: “The subject is this emergence which, just before, as subject, was nothing, but which, having scarcely appeared, solidifies into a signifier” (SXH99). ŽO 33

subject-as-negativity two intersecting lacks

What if the negativity of Cartesian-Kantian-Hegelian subjectivity (as the monstrous cogito, the horrible void of the Thing, and the terrifying abyss of nocturnal dismemberment) is a symptomatic ideality-as-idealization derived from and conditioned by a contingent yet a priori material foundation (what, in psychoanalysis, would be designated as a violent “reaction-formation”) ?

Is the subject-as-negativity a response to its corporeal Grund (ground), to a primordially chaotic and discordant Real that produces its own negation immanently out of itself? Are Zizek’s otherwise inexplicably odd choices of adjectives here indicative of such a link, of a thinly concealed umbilical cord tethering the (pseudo)immateriality of the modern subject to a dark base rendered obscure through a forceful disavowal/abjection? 22

Lacan furthers this Freudian line of thought through his portrayal of the libido in the myth of the lamella (a myth Zizek cites repeatedly). Sexuality is depicted as a frightening monster-parasite that aggressively grafts itself onto the being of the individual and drives him or her toward death.

In the same seminar in which the lamella is invoked (the eleventh seminar), Lacan also sketches a logic of two intersecting lacks, a Real lack (introduced by the fact of sexual reproduction) and a Symbolic lack (introduced by the subject’s alienation via its mediated status within the defiles of the signifying big Other).

The Real lack is nothing other than the individual’s “loss” of immortality due to its sexual-material nature as a living being subjected to the cycles of generation and corruption, albeit as a loss of something never possessed except in primary narcissism and/or unconscious fantasy.

Symbolic lack serves, in away, as a defensive displacement of this more foundational lack in the Real.

Not only are psychoanalytic psychopathologies painful struggles with both of these lacks, but “it is this double lack that determines the ever-insistent gap between the real and the symbolico-imaginary, and thus the constitution of the subject” (Verhaeghe Collapse of Function of Father 2000, 147).

One possible manifestation of the neurotic rebellion against this fundamental feature of the corporeal condition is a strong feeling of disgust in the face of all things fleshly, of everything whose palpable attraction and tangible yet fleeting beauty smacks of a transience evoking the inexorable inevitability of death (an attitude that Freud comments on in his short 1916 piece “On Transience”). [Johnston ŽO 23]

barred real Being as incomplete internally inconsistent

Johnston, Adrian. Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity. Northwestern University Press, 2008

In Organs Without Bodies, Žižek insists,while discussing Kant, that freedom (in the form of autonomous subjectivity) is possible only if being, construed as whatever serves as an ultimate grounding ontological register, is inherently incomplete and internally inconsistent. … “Schelling was first and foremost a philosopher of freedom” [Indivisible Remainder, 15]

He goes on bluntly to assert that “either subjectivity is an illusion or reality is in itself (not only epistemologically) not-All (Organs Without Bodies 2004,115).

If being is entirely at one with itself, if material nature is a perfectly functioning machine in which each and every cog and component is organically coordinated into the single, massive whole of an uninterrupted “One-All,” then no space remains, no clearing is held open, for the emergence of something capable of (at least from time to time) transcending or breaking with this stifling ontological closure.

Being must be originally and primordially unbalanced in order for the subject as a (trans-)ontological excess to become operative.

As Schelling himself succinctly states, “Were the first nature in harmony with itself, it would remain so. It would be constantly One and would never become Two” . Those points and moments where being becomes dysfunctional (i.e.,when,to put it loosely, “the run of things” breaks down) signal the possibility for the genesis of subjectivity as that which cannot be reduced to a mere circuit in the machinery of a base material substratum in which everything is exhaustively integrated with everything else.

Zizek makes the move of identifying the Schellingian-Lacanian subject with this inconsistency internal to the ontological edifice itself: “Subject designates the ‘imperfection’ of Substance, the inherent gap, self deferral, distance-from-itself, which forever prevents Substance from fully realizing itself, from becoming’ fully itself” (The Abyss of Freedom, 7)

barring of the Real origin of experience Johnston

Johnston, Adrian. Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity. Northwestern University Press, 2008.

According to this reading, Schelling basically agrees with Kant that attributing a notion such as “existence” to the noumenal ground underlying reality is erroneously to apply a concept forged within the boundaries of already constituted experience to the pre-experiential foundation of this same experiential field (in short,it amounts to a category mistake). Like Kant, Schelling forbids using discursive concepts to analyze and characterize the Real.

However, unlike Kant, Schelling refuses to conclude that the question as to the origin of experience (for instance, the enigma of how a thing affects the receptivity of the senses so as to become an object) is therefore meaningless and not worth asking.

Žižek identifies as the nature of Schelling’s peculiar radicalization of Kant (a radicalization crucial to allowing for the possibility of forging a transcendental materialist account of subjectivity). Žižek alludes to the idea that both Kant and Schelling uncover (although the former, in restricting himself to an epistemological investigation, fails to appreciate the true significance of this discovery/insight) the fact that being itself is shot through with antagonisms and tensions, riddled with cracks, fissures, and gaps (rather than being something homogeneous and harmonious, an ontological plane placidly consistent with itself). What one could call this “barring” of the Real is absolutely essential to Žižek’s philosophical project,a project centered on deploying and defending, in the midst of a prevailing postmodern doxa hostile to the very notion of subjectivity, a robust theory of the subject. Johnston ŽO 77

preontological Johnston

Johnston, Adrian. Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity. Northwestern University Press, 2008

Grund, rather than being the hard, ontological substance behind the ephemeral facade of experience (as it’s been characterized here thus far), is, in fact, “preontological“: “The enigma resides in the fact that Ground is ontologically non-accomplished, ‘less’ than Existence, but it is precisely as such that it corrodes the consistency of the ontological edifice of Existence from within (Žižek 1996b,62; Žižek 1997a,7).

In The Abyss of Freedom, Žižek proclaims that “the Ground is in itself ontologically hindered, hampered, its status is in a radical sense preontological — it only ‘is’ sous rature, in the mode of its own withdrawal” (Zizek1997a,6).

And in The Plague of Fantasies, he utilizes this interpretation of the Schellingian Real as preontological (instead of it being the ontological per se) to identify Schelling as a thinker who completes Kant’s insight into the “ontological incompleteness of reality” 76

Sous rature is a strategic philosophical device originally developed by Martin Heidegger. Usually translated as ‘under erasure’, it involves the crossing out of a word within a text, but allowing it to remain legible and in place.

Žižek quote

German Idealism outlined the precise contours of this pre-ontological dimension which precedes and eludes the ontological constitution of reality… Kant was the first to detect this crack in the ontological edifice of reality, if (what we experience as) “objective reality” is not simply given” out there, “waiting to be perceived by the subject, but an artificial composite constituted through the subject’s active participation — that is, through the act of transcendental synthesis — then the question crops up sooner or later what is the status of the uncanny X which precedes transcendentally constituted reality? It was Schelling, of course, who gave the most detailed account of this X in his notion of the Ground of Existence.. .the pre-logical Real which remains for ever the elusive Ground of Reason which can never be grasped “as such,” merely glimpsed in the very gesture of its withdrawal (Žižek 1997c, 208) 77

johnston subject

Johnston, Adrian. Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity. Northwestern University Press, 2008

“Contradiction” designates the antagonistic relationship between what I am “for the others” — my symbolic determination — and what I am “in myself,”abstractedly from my relations to others.

It is the contradiction between the void of the subject’s pure “being-for-himself” and the signifying feature which represents him for the others, in Lacanian terms: between $ and S1.

More precisely, “contradiction” means that it is my very ‘alienation’ in the symbolic mandate, in S1, which retroactively makes $ — the void which eludes the hold of the mandate — out of my brute reality.” (Žižek Tarrying 1993,131)

Master signifiers are operators of subjectification. In Žižek’s account of subject formation, ego-level subjectifying identification must first fail in order for the void of $ to be illuminated. 211-212

The Žižekian subject emerges from the failure of subjectifying identifications. 220

The subject truly emerges through the coming to light of the unsuturable gap between itself and its multiple possible operators of identificatory subjectification — the upshot here being that all such operators are ultimately “bones” (in Lacan’s language, subjectification amounts to the progressive “cadaverization” or “corpsification” of $, its “fading” into the lifelessness of objectified reified identities mediated by skeletal structures consisting of signifier-like elements.) 231

Žižek’s reading of Hegel’s discussion of phrenology [the Spirit is a bone] makes clear yet again that the subject-for-itself, as an explicit, self-relating negativity devoid of any concrete determinateness (i.e., $-as-empty), surfaces only after the implosion of identification. The “That’s not me!” dis-identification bringing into view the void of $ occurs following several unsuccessful attempts at establishing lasting forms of “That’s me!” identification. 231

Of course, this is quite consonant with the basic spirit of Hegelian dialectical philosophy, given that, for Hegel, truth is reached not by avoiding error, but rather precisely by passing through error; the key insights of dialectics require that certain mistakes must be made before these insights disclose themselves. There are no shortcuts, no safe paths allowing for errors/mistakes to be bypassed in the progress toward subsequent stages of philosophical reflection (in this vein, bypassing the false ultimately blocks further movement in the direction of the true). 231

So it is with the Žižekian delineation of subject formation: the void of the pure self-reflexive negativity of $-as-empty doesn’t reveal itself until after the unfolding of a series of failed attempts to conceal this void through processes of identificatory subjectification. In other words, the faceless anonymity of the cogito-like subject is not, as Žižek sometimes insinuates, an a priori structural emptiness preexisting the sequences of subjectifying identifications that try in vain to fill up this hole in the fabric of constituted reality. Rather, this hole is gradually hollowed out through the increasingly apparent contingency of all operators of subjectification, a contingency that becomes apparent solely through the rise and fall of various temporarily hegemonic master signifiers of identity jostling and displacing one another. In short, the more frantic is the “mad dance of identification” the more visible is the identityless void of $. To paraphrase Marx, when all solid identities melt into air, the subject as devoid of any solid identity begins to emerge … 231

Both Dolar and Žižek are committed to a theory of subjectivity according to which the subject (more specifically, the fully constituted subject as a for-itself emptiness) is a forever-alienated X, a homeless misfit, inherently incapable of finding a proper place within the domains of either nature or culture. In fact, this barred S ($), in its various guises and manifestations, is the factor responsible for the barring of both the Real ($-as-in-itself is the immanent negativity perturbing the “not all” of being’s conflict-riddled substance) and the Symbolic ($-as-for-itself is the impossible-to-represent void defying reduction to the mediating sociocultural terms of the big Other — $-as-self-reflexive-negativity is, in a sense that dovetails nicely with Hegel’s equation of of the spirit with a bone, the proverbial “bone in the throat” of the symbolic order) 234

Consequently, Dolar and Zizek insist that there is always a stain/tain,a spot of opacity, on the surfaces of nature and culture interfering with the otherwise smooth two-way flow of dialectical reflection between thinking and being,between subject and object. Without this opaque obstacle i.e., bone), subjectivity would lose itself through full immersion in the immediacy of being; the subject would be drowned in and by the completeness of a self-enclosed substance (i.e.,a subjectless substance). An internal limit to the movement of Aufhebung preserves the (non-) being of $.

Both Dolar and Zizek regard the genuine Hegelian gesture condensed in the infinite judgment of his phrenological formula to be the sudden transformation of the subject’s failure to find itself amidst the debris of the world into a success (i.e., the lack of adequate externally mediated representation by concrete entities is subjectivity at its purest insofar as instances of this lack present the subject with chances to grasp itself self-reflexively as a negativity irreducible to representation). The idea of finally surmounting the division between the spirit of subjectivity and the bone of objectivity is a pseudo-Hegelian (rather than properly Hegelian) notion. 234