Hegelian dialectic: does the dialectic preserve negativity rather than absorb it in totalizing closure?

Slavoj Žižek, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Hegel is the philosopher of negativity and the non-All, not the totalizer of teleological history. The Real persists as the fissure in the symbolic; the dialectic does not absorb it in any reconciling Aufhebung. Substance becomes subject precisely through self-sundering. Hegelian truth wins through utter dismemberment — the system is open because incompletion is its very form.12

Sources

  1. In other words, Hegel's "Substance as Subject" should thus be read in a way homologous to Lacan's re-reading of Freud's famous formula wo es war soll ich werden, which also should not be interpreted as a demand for the simple subjectivization of the unconscious substance ("I should appropriate my unconscious"), but as the recognition of my place within it, of how the subject exists only through the inconsistency of…
    Less Than Nothing, pp. 380–381
  2. INTERLUDE 3 KING, RABBLE, WAR... AND SEX 453 permanent feature which can never be aufgehioben, Hegel is here more material ist than Marx: in his theory of war (and of madness), he is aware ofthe repetitive return of the "abstract negativity" which violently unbinds social links.
    Less Than Nothing, pp. 453–455

Where the argument is made

  • For They Know Not What They Do (1991), Tarrying with the Negative (1993), The Ticklish Subject (1999), The Parallax View (2006), Less Than Nothing (2012), Absolute Recoil (2014), Disparities (2016)

How the argument was received

Defended consistently from For They Know Not (1991) onwards; the central thesis of Less Than Nothing (2012), Absolute Recoil (2014), and Disparities (2016). The reading sets the position apart from both orthodox Hegelianism and the deflationary non- metaphysical Hegel of Pippin and Brandom.