possess it and as a result it is structurally unlike what we associate with knowledge. Consequently, Bataille terms this experience of one’s own contingency as a situation of “non-knowledge” or “unknowing”: non-savoir.
This formulation provides a means of “understanding” death as that which is necessarily inaccessible to the operations of thought: the unspeakable excess rendered by a situation of ambivalence and alternation between the desire for meaning and the drive to surpass it. However, the fascination-turned-horror of a transgression that puts one beyond alterity reawakens the desire to install again the limits that one has just surpassed. Death, in other words, is not an ontological category of its own. As such it would be either unviable or fundamentally fraudulent. Rather, it is only “knowable” as the situation of ontological uncertainty that it reveals or the ontological oscillation it evokes.
The Vanishing Mediator
In Hegel and Psychoanalysis, Molly Macdonald (2014) presents an alternative reading of Hegel that challenges the predominant interpretations of Absolute Knowledge. Framing the reading through the perspective of the Third (Dritte), Macdonald puts forth a bird’s-eye view of the dialectic: the constant mechanical shifting between two observed from a position of exteriority as the organic movements of a larger whole. By introducing this witness, she bypasses the overemphasis on the individual trajectories of either lord or bondsman. Rather, she foregrounds the mo(ve)ment in which two terms, mutilated beyond the possibility of recognition (that is, distinguishment) give way to a dynamic interplay between unbound forces, a reciprocal interaction that we might refer to as “intersubjectivity” were it not for its lack of any identifiable subjects.
This interpretation is made possible by the emphasis on the energetics or economics of the system in its totality instead of the integrity of its individual components. In that sense, Macdonald reads into Hegel the play of forces more commonly attributed to Nietzsche. However, she introduces a stipulation that deconstructs dialectical opposition: Force as Universal Medium. Force,