“Absolute Knowledge” is divisive AK is in no way a position of “total knowledge,” a position from which, at long last, the subject could finally “know everything.” We must take into account the exact place at which the idea of AK emerges, the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit, the point when the consciousness “de-fetishizes” itself and thus gains the ability to access true knowledge, knowledge instead of truth, and therefore “science” in the Hegelian sense. As such, AK is just a “scilicet,” a “you can know” that opens the space for the development of science (logic, etc.). What does the fetish represent at its core? An object that fills the constitutive lack in the Other, the empty space of the “original repression,” the place where the signifier must be missing in order for the signifying network to articulate itself. In this sense, “de-fetishization” is equivalent to the experience of the constitutive lack in the Other, the Other as barred. Perhaps de-fetishization is even more difficult to accomplish because the fetish reverses the traditional relationship between the “sign” and the “thing.” We normally understand the “sign” as something that represents, replaces, the missing object. When the fetish is an object, it is a thing that replaces the missing “sign.” It is easy to detect absence, the structure of co-referential signifiers, where we thought there was the full presence of a thing, but it is much harder to detect the inert presence of an object in the place where we thought there were only “signs,” an interplay of representations referring back to each other, nothing more than traces. This is why we must take care to differentiate Lacan from any so-called “poststructuralist” tradition whose objective is to “deconstruct” the “metaphysics of presence,” to deny the possibility of full presence, to see only the traces of absence, to dissolve fixed identity into a cluster of references and traces … Lacan is actually much closer to Kafka than to the poststructuralists. It has become a cliché to see Kafka as the “writer of absence” who described a world whose structure remained religious, but where the central space reserved for God is empty. But this is not where it ends; it remains to be shown how this Absence itself conceals an inert, nightmarish presence, an obscene superego object, the “Supremely-Evil-Being.” It is from this perspective that we must reinterpret the two features of AK that initially seem to possess a certain kind of “idealistic” resonance: AK as the “abolition of the object,” in which it does away with objectivity as outside the subject and opposed to it, and AK as the abolition of the Other, removing the dependence of the subject on an instance that is external and de-centered. Hegelian “sublation of the Other” is in no way equivalent to a fusion of the subject with its other, in which the subject appropriates the substantial contents. Rather, we should understand it as a specifically Hegelian way of saying “the Other does not exist” (Lacan), that it does not exist as Guarantor of truth, the Other of the Other, and that therefore we must posit a lack in the Other, that the Other is barred.

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