The unconscious operates in another register of negation. But still, we have to complicate this picture. And obviously, it's clear that any kind of opposition must be carefully qualified if we take Hegel seriously. The opposition between formal sublation and formalist repetition can't be so straightforward. A strong reading of Hegel, such as Zizek's, suggests that sublation succeeds through what exempts from it and this is very interesting. So this is why Zizek wants to say that he wants to contrast the account of the contrast between non-conceptual negativity and conceptual negativity and the contrast between Freud and Hegel or Lacan and Hegel
with the standard philosophical critiques of Hegel where there's always some kind of, that there's something that resists integration within the concept and this is like some kind of a non-conceptual difference, a sheer particularity, etc. The history of 20th century philosophy is replete with attempts to identify something that will kind of, you know, inhibit or jam the machinery of determinant negation. and Zizek proposes that it's actually these, he thinks that these attempts are unsatisfying because they, well, he just considers them problematic and he considers that,
he wants to say that if we understand Hegel, if we have a more generous reading of Hegel, we see that sublation or aufheben is precisely works by not working. It integrates the failure of determinately negating something within itself so that this failure is constitutive of the workings of formalization. So here's another quote from Zizek. The direct attempt, well, I won't read because we're short of time, so I'll just read the end of the quote. So if one reads Hegel in this way, the lesson of the Hegel and the Hegel is that the law of itself, the initial failure of determinately negating something
is precisely the condition for successfully negating it. In Hegel, the point is not to reify the movement of the dialectic into thesis, antithesis, synthesis, but to think of a kind of a misfire or a congenital kind of inability or weakness as the condition for overcoming whatever resists determination. So this is why the loss itself is the gain. So I think this is the right way to understand Hegel because the movement of becoming charted in the science of the experience of consciousness
is a movement of desubstantialization. It's the derealization of the first object. Why? Because the absoluteness of the first object, The distinction between knowledge and truth in its first iteration turns out to be false, to be unsatisfactory. And what happens is that when you overcome this first distinction, you desubstantialize the first object of knowledge. And this desubstantialization generates the successor object. This is also why Hegel is not Aristotelian, because for him there is no substance, there is no already constituted substance within which are encoded certain potentialities or possibility.
If the essence of being is contradiction or nothingness, nothing has a substantial form within itself and it's impossible to say in advance what things can and cannot do. There are no intrinsic potentialities in things. But if the lesson of sublation is that loss itself is an achievement, then there may be a secret complicity between the blockages generated by reason itself and those generated by its other. Reason's resistance to itself generates another form of resistance through which reason overcomes its own resistance." Well, this would be again an optimistic. This is obviously the reading that a Hegelian will want to insist upon. It may not be credible. Here's a quote from Ladon-Dolar's Hegel and Freud.
It's the productivity of the negative that is Hegel's most radical insight. If there's something bewildering and interesting in Hegel, it resides in his grandiose efforts to pursue the crack, the splits, the splits around which self-consciousness is constituted, not as a failure or a malfunction but as an enabling principle, to take it as the productivity of the negative. He saw his task not as filling in the cracks, I.e. not, Hegelian philosophy is not an attempt to plug in, to fill in the discontinuities of the gaps in the fabric of reality, but to accentuate them. He saw his task not as filling in the cracks,
but as producing a scission where there seem to be none, a scission that enables any positive entity. Now, what is, again, the reason why it's not possible to simply kind of juxtapose Hegelian self-consciousness or Hegelian negativity and some kind of straightforward non-dialectical negativity is because, as Mladen Dolar points out, there is already a kind of, there's a meaning generating activity at the level of the unconscious itself. So again, the passage in bold here is the one I really want to focus on. If there is a diagnosis of the philosophical endeavor, i.e. to make things meaningful or to make things consistent,
then this business of philosophy starts already in the unconscious. The philosopher has an accomplice in the unconscious which starts stopping the gaps even before philosophy starts filling them in. So the unconscious is effaced at the same time that it is produced. This is why the unconscious is not a substance. It's not some kind of entity whose kind of ontological status has to be adjudicated. And finally, the philosophical illusion is structural. It has its basis in the unconscious itself as effacement. So what this means then is that there's a kind of, I guess, a kind of a hidden complicity
between the operations of the unconscious of self-consciousness and the psychoanalytic unconscious. there's a kind of connection or a very kind of subtle and intricate connection between the formal unconscious and the material unconscious. So the repetition which is constitutive of the material unconscious is a fixation or a kind of stuckness on particularity. And this repetition, unlike the repetition, the kind of idealizing repetition that generates the Hegelian dialectic or the alleged progress of self-consciousness
is, as Zizek puts it, sustained by its impurity, by the persistence of a contingent pathological element to which the movement of repetition gets and remains stuck. Now, again, what is very interesting here is that this pathological element, It's not a psychological element, it's not a substantial element disturbing the formal mechanism of symbolization, but a purely formal curvature of symbolization itself. A purely formal curvature of symbolization itself. So I think that the issue is to connect the surplus of conceptual form with the curvature of symbolization.
a symbolization which is irreducible to conceptual form. Okay, I'll move on. So this and if we understand this, the attempt to articulate these two dimensions of the surplus of form at the level of self-consciousness and the curvature of symbolization, We have to understand the way in which this, there's an inscription of division, of a kind of a radical conception of Fischer in Hegel's,
there's a non-conceptual difference in Hegel's thinking, which is to say it's the coincidence of fission and fusion. The idea that what drives or propels a dialectical process is not a determinate negation to begin with, but this splitting which is also a fusion. And this is this, Haedtel's most radical challenge to the law of identity and the principle of non-contradiction. And this challenge is not, it subverts any kind of conceptual logic which is predicated on the law of identity. This is why, as Madden-Dolar writes, Hegel's atom, his elementary particle, is the atom itself as that which cannot be divided, as the division,
as the indivisible division, the split on which any unity is premised. And this is also why, in Dolar's reading, the subject is the cliniment of something, the way that it always necessarily strays from itself. So the clinamen is precisely not to be understood as the deviation from a preexisting trajectory. It's not the kind of the deviation in the linear trajectory of the atom as kind of traditionally conceived, but it's an originary deviation. It's a deviation which is not related back to any kind of pre-existing trajectory. In other words, it's not the deviation of a substantial thing.
So already, so if in Hegelian negativity there's a deviation, a deviation of negation operative, And if Hegelian negation is already a deviation, one deviating from its track and splitting into two, then with psychoanalysis, with psychoanalytic negativity introduces a kind of deviation of deviation, or what Dolor calls a clinamen of the clinamen, a redoubling of clinamen. And again, the key import of this is to say that this is a negation that produces something that it cannot itself negate. So here you have a kind of negation that doesn't work in the Hegelian sense, that cannot be determined, conceptually determined to yield a new form.
So now, one question here is how this relates. is the expression self-relating negativity is very important both in Zizek and Vladendoir's readings. But the crux of self-relating negativity in Hegel, it seems to be, well, there's an account of it in his famous logic of essence, which articulates the objective and subjective domains. Because Hegel describes where being is the becoming of something, the becoming of an entity is its determinant becoming, becoming something.
In the realm of essence, essence is the movement from nothing to nothing and thereby back to itself. Transition or becoming sublates itself in its transition. The other which comes to be in this transition is not the non-being of a being, but the nothingness of a nothingness. And this, to be the negation of a nothingness, constitutes being. Because essence mediates subjectivity and objectivity and ultimately essence crystallizes in contradiction. The essence of everything that is, is contradiction. And the Hegelian wager is that contradiction itself can be determined.
Classical logic rejects contradiction precisely because from a contradiction, anything can be deduced. You can never determine a contradiction. Anything falls from the negation of a contradiction. Hegel wants to suspend the law of identity, the principle of non-contradiction, but he still believes that contradiction exerts a determining power. It can be conceptualized, determinately conceptualized. So, contradiction then has both a formal and a material aspect. In other words, there's contradiction at the level of conceptual impossibility. Contradiction indexes conceptual impossibility.
But then there must be a kind of, if there is a kind of such a thing as, if there are blockages and impasses at the level of the unconscious, what you have are material impossibilities. You have something equivalent to material impossibility. And this is important then to understand the task of psychoanalysis. And here is Zizek describing the basic kind of wager of psychoanalysis. The premise of psychoanalysis is that one can intervene with the symbolic into the real because the real is not external reality in itself but a crack in the symbolic.
So one can intervene with an act which reconfigures the field and thus transforms its imminent point of impossibility. So in other words, you can transform material impossibility through some kind of, well, intervention in the symbolic. I think that's, you know, I wait to be corrected on this, but, you know, I think this is what Zizek is suggesting. And this is what traversing the fantasy amounts to. This means, it doesn't mean resigning oneself. It doesn't mean a kind of tragic fatalism, resigning oneself to, you know, to what is and saying there's nothing to be done. It means, you know, traversing the fantasy.
It means a kind of recognition of an acknowledgement of one's own kind of delusions in a way that would affect a transformation. So traversal would be the recognition of misrecognition, not of the misrecognized as a preexisting reality. What is recognized is the failure of conceptual negation and through this the persistence of non-conceptual negation. or what Mladen Doar called the deviation of deviation. And acknowledging this deviation is transformative. But how? How is it? Well, in the work of Samu Tomshek, who is also kind of explicitly concerned
with the relationship between Marx and Lacan, there is a link between political intervention and psychoanalytical or the kind of traversal kind of elaborated by the work of analysis. And as he writes, for the critique of political economy, the form of interpretation will be no less important than the organization of the proletariat. And indeed, the transformation of the form of interpretation necessitates the form of organization. In other words, you overcome the distinction between theory and practice or between the kind of the conceptual representation of the world and some kind of material activity in the world,
and you try to understand how transformation is the key to an intervention, so cutting into the consistency of the psychic and political order. And in this sense, Zizek then proposes what he calls, he says that the key, or what psychoanalysis must retain from Hegel is the notion of a speculative identity of form and formlessness. In other words, of the surplus of form and the excess of formlessness. Hegel's limit is that while he can maybe conditionally think antagonism,
he is not able to think the ultimate speculative identity of the purely formal antagonism and the contingent remainder or excess of a little piece of reality. This limitation, this inability to think the indivisible remainder of the dialectical form not as an excess of the real which eludes dialectical mediation but as the product of this mediation. So, this is again very, very important because this is a radical shift away from, I think a significant advance over the traditional approach to Hegel, that the particularity which resists conceptual subsumption is in fact this unconceptualizable residue. And that stance will not work with Hegel,
precisely because Hegel's whole work is about pulverizing substance. So any kind of, for Hegel, any kind of postulated immediacy or postulated transcendence, anything will immediately be diagnosed as a disavowed formalization. You can't just posit formlessness. You have to understand how the very positing of formlessness involves a formalization. So the challenge then is to think the coincidence of the formal antagonism and the excess of particularity. So a transformative intervention in this sense, transformation, short circuits the surplus of mediating form and the excess of material particularity.
But this short circuit is not a relation or it seems it can't be understood as a relation because, once again, according to Samuel Tomczyk, the whole point, what is most powerful for psychoanalysis in Marxism is the idea that theories of contracts, be it social or economic, are constructions, the function of which is to mask a discursive deadlock. In other words, there is no social relation. Society is structured around an antagonism or a contradiction, which is social non-relation. So once we get this thing, then we have to find a way of kind of, if we're going to be, you know,
of Lacanian Marxists, anyone wishing to be a Lacanian Marxist has to find a way to articulate this, the operation of the drive, the drive is a kind of fixation on a particularity with the capital relation. So this is Zizek writing again from Less Than Nothing, the drive inheres in capitalism at a more fundamental systemic level. The drive is that which propels forward the entire capitalist machinery. It is the impersonal compulsion to engage in the endless circular movement of expanded society.