When one follows our Lacanian interpretation of Hegel’s spiritual adventure [1] one notices that Hegel’s Force refers to his staging of two discourses, alternating between them. He switches back and forth between the hysteric’s discourse and the analytic discourse: The former feeds the existing knowledge S₂ with new truths and the latter dissolves that knowledge back into the articulation of a new S₁. The key to this interpretation is the interaction between being-for-self and being-for-another.

The initial tension that underlies all generation of knowledge about reality is captured by Hegel’s phrase “being-in-itself or being-for-us” (The Phenomenology of Spirit, §87). Here “or” indicates the paradoxical equivalence of them: The object appears to have a hidden truth to which we have no access (being-in-itself, famously Kantian) but we have to understand that this appearance of an inaccessible beyond is actually due to our perspective (being-for-us). Of course, the quintessential example of “being-in-itself or being-for-us” is “womanhood or male gaze”. This tension is Hegel’s way of formulating the subject-supposed-to-know that drives the articulation of knowledge. Then being-for-self emerges, which is something else.

What is being-for-self? In perceiving the Thing, “consciousness discovers that the Thing is demolished by the very determinateness that constitutes its essence and its being-for-self” (§126). It is clear from this sentence that being-for-self is the signifier as the “murder of the Thing”. Hegel talks about the symbolic articulation of thoughts and memories in terms of “the recollected in-itself, ready for conversion into the form of being-for-self” (§29). These symbolic articulations constitute the spiritual which is alone the actual; the signifier is the self-referential essence (§25). The signifier is what authorizes us to acknowledge the Thing.

Hegel calls the diverse outer existence of the Thing, being-for-another. This is the embodiment of the Thing. “Sound common sense” pits being-for-another against the official self-referential essence conferred on the Thing by the being-for-self, and deems being-for-another to be “an unessential moment that yet is necessary” (§131). This recalls the Freudian mechanism by which the repressed content (being-in-itself) necessarily returns by being displaced to an apparently insignificant element (being-for-another). Moreover, “unessential yet necessary” recalls the formula of fetishistic disavowal: “I know very well but all the same…” Temporarily forgetting and subsequently remembering this symptomatic element is not a problem; but if it gets disavowed then the official being-for-self would be fetishized. Hegel never allows this to happen, which explains the forcefulness of his dialectics.

Since being-for-another is equally essential as the being-for-self, “the unity of ‘being-for-self’ and ‘being-for-another’ is posited; in other words, the absolute antithesis is posited as a self-identical essence.” (§134) This is Hegel’s version of the symbolic order.  Examine this formulation:

on one side, a universal medium of many subsistent ‘matters’, and on the other side, a One reflected into itself, in which their independence is extinguished. The former is the dissolution of the Thing’s independence, i.e. the passivity that is a being-for-another; the latter is being-for-self. (§135)

At this point, being-for-another refers to the chain of signifiers S₂ or knowledge about the diverse outer existence (embodiment) of the Thing, whereas being-for-self refers to the Master-Signifier S₁ that authorizes us to designate the Thing within the symbolic order. Since substance is also subject, we can paraphrase the Lacanian maxim: Being-for-self represents the subject for being-for-another.

But there’s a catch in positing the unity of these two terms: “they are no longer separated from one another at all but are in themselves essentially self-superseding aspects, and what is posited is only their transition into one another.” (§135) What does it mean to transition back and forth between S₁ (being-for-self) and S₂ (being-for-another)?

It simply means that Hegel is constantly switching between the hysteric’s discourse that produces S₂ (being-for-another) and the analytic discourse that produces S₁ (being-for-self). This dialectical swinging is what he somewhat mysteriously calls the Force:

this movement is what is called Force. One of its moments, the dispersal of the independent ‘matters’ in their [immediate] being, is the expression of Force; but Force, taken as that in which they have disappeared, is Force proper, Force which has been driven back into itself from its expression. (§136)

The “expression of Force” is the hysteric’s discourse that feeds knowledge S₂ to the analytic discourse which is the “Force proper” that produces S₁ [2]. This Force is entirely different from “cognition as instrument” (Master’s discourse) and “cognition as medium” (University discourse) whose imposture Hegel denounced, because the Force posits the unity of being-for-self and being-for-another; it puts S₁ and S₂ within brackets, as it were. The disruptive contradiction between S₁ and S₂ is thereby sublated and it takes the objective form of the Force:

the movement which previously displayed itself as the self-destruction of contradictory Notions here has objective form and is the movement of Force, the outcome of which is the unconditioned universal as something not objective, or as the inner being of Things. (§136)

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Işık Barış Fidaner is a computer scientist with a PhD from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. Admin of Yersiz Şeyler, Editor of Žižekian Analysis, Curator of Görce Writings. Twitter: @BarisFidaner

Notes:

[1] See “Hegel’s Spiritual Adventure Actually Sets Out From Lacan’s Four Discourses”

[2] In Žižek’s terms, Force is expressed when “multiplicity fills in the lack of the binary signifier” whereas Force proper intervenes when that “multitude is totalized into an All through the exception which fills in its void.” (Sex and the Failed Absolute)