It is through the very thing that initially seemed to exclude us from the Other – our question through which we came to see the Other as enigmatic, inaccessible, transcendent – that brings us together with the Other, because this question is the Other’s question, because the substance is the subject (let us not forget that the thing that defines the subject is the very question itself). Would it not therefore be possible to base Hegelian “dis-alienation” on Lacanian separation? Lacan defined separation as the superimposition of two lacks (cf. Lacan 1998a: 214); when the subject encounters the lack in the Other, he responds with a pre-existing lack, his own lack. In the process of alienation, the subject is confronted with a full, substantial Other, in whose depths there supposedly lies a “secret,” an unreachable treasure. “Dis-alienation,” therefore, has nothing to do with appropriating this secret; the subject never finally pierces into the Other’s hidden core – far from it, the subject simply experiences that this “hidden treasure” (agalma, the object-cause of desire) is already missing from the Other herself. “Dis-alienation” can be reduced to the act through which the subject perceives that the Other’s substantial secret is also a secret for the Other, in other words, the experience of a separation between the Other and its “secret,” the object little a.

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