Žižek's Hegelian Version of Lacan

“The basic insight elaborated in the first half of For They Know Not What They Do is that Hegelian dialectics and the Lacanian ‘logic of the signifier’ are two versions of the same matrix.”
--From Žižek's For They Know Not What They Do, second edition (2002), p. xviii.

Žižek develops this insight by locating the accomplishment of German Idealism in its affirmation of subjectivity as the confrontation with negativity. He argues that Hegel’s dialectic is ruptured from within by a surd element that prevents the complete and consistent understanding of any whole or totality. In short, any conceptual unification is disrupted from within by an indefinable void that proves to be essential to the very concept in question.

Žižek shows that consciousness is always linked to a "limit-moment," an experience that things are out of joint, that something has gone wrong. Why is consciousness itself linked to a fundamental disjoint or lack of symmetry? Put simply, Lacan's answer is that the subject is the asymmetry between nature and culture. In other words, the irresolvable negativity or incommensurability revealed by Hegelian dialectics is what Lacan describes as the Real of subjectivity.

Žižek’s aim is to evoke this gap--this irrepressible void at the heart of subjectivity--and, in my view, Žižek delineates this "parallax gap" more clearly than any previous dialectical philosopher (e.g., Plato, Kant, the German Idealists). Moreover, Žižek seems never to lapse into the illusion of completeness or totality that arises from the imaginary register.