... the Lacan of the early 1950s was Hegelian (under the influence of Kojeve and Hyppolite, of course)

... the Lacan of the early 1950s was Hegelian (under the influence of Kojeve and Hyppolite, of course), often directly designates the analyst as the figure of the Hegelian philosopher, the work of analysus as following the Hegelian "cunning of reason," the end of analysis as "absolute knowledge," the mediation of all particular content in the universal symbolic medium, etc.; in clear contrast, the "Lacan of the Real" asserts some traumatic core of the Real which forever resists being integrated into the Symbolic - and he does this by way of linking the Freudian das Ding with the Kantian Thing-in-itself. 1 We can clearly discern here the contours of the Lacan of symbolic castration: the Thing is prohibited, and this prohibition, far from thwarting desire, sustains it - in short, the symbolic order functions like Kant's transcendental screen through which renders reality accessible and simultaneously prevents our direct access to it?

Seminar XI, Lacan struggled to overcome this Kantian horizon - the clearest indication of it is his reactualization of the concept of drive. Drive functions beyond symbolic castration, as an inherent detour, topological twist, of the Real itself - and Lacan's path from desire to drive is the path from Kant to Hegel. This shift in late Lacan from the "transcendental" logic (symbolic castration as the ultimate horizon of our experience, emptying the place of the Thing and thus opening up the space for our desire) to the dimension "beyond castration," i.e., to a position which claims that, "beyond castration," there is not only the abyss of the Night of the Thing which swallows us, also has direct political consequences: the "transcendental" Lacan is obviously the "Lacan of democracy" (the empty place of Power for whose temporary occupancy multiple political subjects compete, against the "totalitarian" subject who claims to act directly for the Other's jouissance), while Lacan "beyond castration" points towards a post-democratic politics. - There are thus three phases in the relationship of Lacan towards the tension between Kant and Hegel: from the universal-Hegelian self-mediation in the totality of the Symbolic, he passes to the Kantian notion of the transcendent Thing which resists this mediation, and then, in an additional twist, he transposes the gap that separates all signifying traces from the Otherness into the immanence itself, as its inherent cut.)

Slavoj Zizek, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel and... Badiou!

ZIZEK BOOKS