the impossibility of appropriating the Heart of the Other is a positive condition for the definition of his own status as subject. This twist constitutes a radical change in perspective. It is this very failure – the frustration of the subject’s attempt to appropriate the opposed substantial contents in order to penetrate into the Heart of the Other – that includes the subject in the substance, in the Other. This reflexive shift is exactly what we see at the end of Kafka’s “parable” about the Doors of the Law: the man finally understands that the Door that supposedly hid an inaccessible substantial contentwas destined for him alone, that from the very beginning the unreachable Other of the Law was addressed to him, that it had accounted for him from the outset. The other’s lack It would therefore be a mistake to think that the dialectical relationship between Knowledge and Truth is a progressive approach guided by knowledge of the Truth, in which the subject recognizes the “falseness” and insufficiency of some figure of his knowledge, and so progresses to another figure that is closer to the Truth, etc., until finally Knowledge and Truth come together in Absolute Knowledge. In such a perspective, Truth is a substantial entity, an in-Itself, and the dialectical process takes the form of simple asymptotic progress, a gradual approach to the Truth, something along the lines of Victor Hugo’s famous quote: “Science is asymptotic to truth. Ever approaching but never touching it.” The Hegelian conjunction of the truth with the path toward the truth implies, on the contrary, that we are always already in contact with the truth. When knowledge changes, truth itself must change, which is to say that when knowledge does not correspond to the truth, we don’t simply need to accommodate the truth, but in fact transform the two poles – the insufficiency of knowledge, its lack in relation to the truth, indicates that there is always a lack, an incompleteness at the very core of truth itself. We must therefore toss out the traditional conception of the dialectical process as moved forward by particular, limited, and “unilateral” elements that push it toward a final totality. The truth at which we arrive is not “whole,” the question always remains open, it simply becomes a question we ask of the Other

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