We have seen that for Žižek, the Hegelian triad involves the internalization of nothingness or difference. Consequently, Žižek's account of identity in Hegel rebuts Lacan's objection that Hegel promotes a self-identical subject of self-consciousness. Žižek is much taken with the unceasing, restless movement of Hegel's dialectic and the implications this has for identity. No sooner does something approach identity with itself than it reverses into its opposite, a process Žižek repeatedly illustrates with the paradox that tautology is actually a form of contradiction. For example, the assertion 'Law is Law' as good as concedes that the only reason to obey the law is that it is imposed on us, and thus that there is something inherently violent, arbitrary and ultimately lawless about it (e.g., For They Know Not, 34). Žižek is equally fascinated by the converse formulation, whereby a thing becomes identified with its opposite, as in the Hegelian equation 'the Spirit is a bone': in its very inertia, the skull provides us with a representation of the Spirit that once animated it (Sublime Object, 208).
The only conceivable identity, then, is one that, at the same time, includes an element of non-identity. Žižek offers nationality as an example. The English are initially defined in relation to their external borders as being separate from the Scots, the French and so on; but when we come to examine the group that we have demarcated in this way, we begin to ask who, among the English, are really properly English--is it any particular group more than others? Gradually it emerges that there is something problematic about every individual's claim to Englishness: 'The final answer is of course that nobody is fully English, that every empirical Englishman contains something "non-English"--Englishness thus becomes an "internal limit", an unattainable point which prevents empirical Englishmen from achieving full identity-with-themselves (For They Know Not,110). Another example is that of the political propogandist who claims that all other parties act out of factional interest, while his alone does not. This claim is a clear case of promoting a factional interest: what the propagandist puts on one side of a category boundary (in the other parties) in fact returns to lodge on the other (in his own) (Tarrying, 133). Identity results from 'determinate reflection', in that it deposits back on the thing to be identified, in the form of an inner contradiction, the differences by virtue of which it distinguishes itself from others (Tarrying, 130).
Žižek uses this account of identity as fissured to argue against the prevailing view of self-consciousness in Hegel. It is not the case, says Žižek, that consciousness relates to an external object as to another subject and that self-consciousness then internalizes that relation. Self-consciousness is not my capacity to internalize another subject, but my failure to internalize a resistant object. It is precisely because the object retains its difference that self-consciousness can track the movement of reflection from subject to object and back (Tarrying, 128). Hegel is thus brought into line with what Žižek had earlier said about Lacan: 'self-consciousness is the very opposite of self-transparency: I am aware of myself only insofar as outside of me a place exists where truth about me is articulated' (Tarrying, 67). Once more, by arguing against Lacan's critique of Hegel, Žižek brings the two thinkers into alignment. Hegel becomes a philosopher of the symbolic, in the Lacanian sense of one for whom 'the truth is out there' (as the X-Files motto, beloved of Žižek, has it). The truth about me lies not in some knowledge I might have about myself, but in the (failed) exchanges between myself and the world. By the same token, Lacan's meditations on identity and identification are dignified as coextensive with those of Hegel.
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