Hegel’s Absolute Knowing does involve a “less”: it refers to a constitutive lack, the lack in the Other itself, not in our knowledge. Hegel’s Absolute Knowing is not an open field of endless progress, and it is the overlapping of the two lacks (the subject’s lack of knowing and the lack in the Other itself) that accounts for its “closure.”
To explain the mode of functioning of the objectless knowing, Milner evokes the TV series Dexter, in which a father who knows his son is genetically determined to become a serial killer tells him to become a cop and thus satisfy his innate urge to kill by killing only the killers themselves. (Jean Claude Milner, Clartes de tout, Paris: Verdier 2011) In a homologous way, Milner’s aim is to operate like a bird flying high up in the air, with no attachment to any particular object on the land; from time to time, the bird dives and picks out its victim-like Milner who, in his work, picks on one particular knowledge after another and tears it apart by displaying its inconsistency. But is this not precisely the mode of functioning of Hegel’s own Absolute Knowing which moves from one to another shape of knowing, touching it in its Real, i.e., bringing out its immanent/constitutive antagonism?
Slavoj Žižek 2012 Less Than Nothing, p.424
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