Slavoj Zizek (1999a), 'Hegel's "Logic of Essence" as a Theory of Ideology', in Elizabeth Wright & Edmond Wright, The Zizek Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 225-250.


In Zizek's 'Hegel's "Logic of Essence" as a Theory of Ideology', stresses Hegel's 'tarrying of the negative' to describe the retention of contradiction rather than the false harmonising at the point of synthesis (1999a). To Zizek, any harmonising dialectical synthesis that leads to an evolutionary advance must be rejected. This is, in other words, a rejection of 'higher-order synthesis' (although note that Hegel does not actually use these terms 'thesis', 'antithesis' and 'synthesis'). This is a move from 'in-itself' to 'for-itself' in Hegel's terms - from 'ground' to 'conditions' where ground is the essence and the conditions are the conditions that bring this about. The two opposing factors must be combined without losing the antagonism. There must be an antagonism between ground and conditions, between the inner essence and the external circumstances that gives rise to that essence.   

In Hegel, the subject can only arrive at essence once all obstacles have been abolished - and Zizek sees a parallel in Lacan's view of the subject but this is not my concern here. What is useful is that the human subject must perform a 'creative act of constructing necessary entities out of the material found' (in Zizek, 1999a: 226). This is not simply a retrospective recognition of false conditions nor projected by some concept of an autonomous subject (on which many a post-structuralist critique of Marxism is based) but an antagonistic interaction of the two - both internal and external factors (this is close to the position of Arendt and Lefebvre of course and their readings of the dialectical method). Instead the subject exists within an 'absolute unrest of becoming' built upon the antagonism between contingency and necessity (Zizek, 1999a: 239), themselves expressing the dialectic of what is possible and actually exists. 

This raises the question of whether human subject create the external world from within or as a result of external circumstances. Zizek, quotes Marx from the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte': 
'Men [sic] make their own history; but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.' (in Zizek, 1999a: 228) Hegel, as Zizek points out, would reject this view as too deterministic. It does not take account of the ways in which inner essence can be transformed into external conditions and vice versa. This is a radical anti-evolutionary approach to dialectic synthesis. Zizek explains:
'The simultaneous reading of these two aspects undermines the usual idea of dialectical progress as a gradual realization of the object's inner potentials, as its spontaneous self-development. Hegel is here quite outspoken and explicit: the inner potentials of the self-development of an object and the pressure exerted on it by an external force are strictly correlative; they form the two parts of the same conjunction.' (1999a: 228)

The point can be applied to the revolutionary subject of course - whether it can be said that the potential is necessarily in the proletariat and that the potential can be realised or actualised by external circumstances. This does not assume an autonomous subject by any means but a subject partly formed and forming external circumstances, including those related to history. It is simply an error of judgement to think that potential was not realised because of external conditions. For Hegel, external circumstances are not to be blamed, but on the contrary 'the very arena in which the true nature of these inner potentials is to be tested' (Zizek, 1999a: 229). Put another way, the knowledge required for revolution is self-referential. In historical materialism, the subject is required to act through self-knowledge of their role in history in order to become a revolutionary subject. Zizek explains this 'class consciousness' neatly as the change from 'class-in-itself' to 'class-for-itself' (1999a: 231). This expresses the antagonism between possibility and actuality that underpins radical thinking and action.