The Feminine Logic of Non-All

From Sarah Kay's Žižek: A Critical Introduction (London: Polity Press, 2003), pp. 27-28:

Žižek does not deny that Hegel's thought relies on this immanence, but he insists that this immanence results from the dialectical reversal into it of transcendence in the form of negativity. The passage from Kant's transcendental philosophy (which holds that the true nature of a thing forever eludes us) to Hegel's immanentism is effected not by 'filling out the empty place of the Thing ... but by affirming this void as such, in its priority to any positive entity that strives to fill it out' (Tarrying with the Negative, p. 39). That is, absence or negativity are integrated into the fabric of Hegel's thinking in such a way as to leave it flimsy, not wholly consistent, unable to wrap things up. Such thought is what Žižek, following Lacan, calls 'non all'.

The effect of this 'non all' is pervasive. For example, the first section of Hegel's Encyclopedia Logic explores the emergence of being as a correlate of nothing. Being cannot be conceived, says Hegel, except in relation to nothing, and thus nothing is the truth of being. But what does this mean? The very argument which Hegel advances about being attests to the way it is hobbled by the difficulty of accounting for this nothing (Tarrying with the Negative, p. 119). Hegelian reasoning is not a systematic advance towards the capturing of some truth; rather, it is the recording of a series of failures: 'Let us take a moment X: all attempts to grasp its concealed essence, to determine it more concretely, end in failure, and the subsequent moment only positivizes this failure; in it, failure as such assumes positive existence. In short, one fails to determine the truth of X and this failure is the truth of X' (Tarrying with the Negative, p. 119-120). Thus Hegel does not aspire to totality except 'in the negative experience of falsity and breakdown' (Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, p. 228). What is complete is so by virtue of being, at the same time, never more than partial.

By describing Hegelian logic as 'non all', Žižek is reading it through a psychoanalytic lens. In particular, he aligns Hegel's thought with Lacan's account of sexual difference, in which 'woman' is 'non all' [...]