as Macdonald explains, is a unique concept within the Phenomenology: “in order for it to ‘be, it must be completely set free from thought,’ it must be allowed to exist and function without meddling from any process other than its own” (2014, 25). That is, Force cannot be ideated or iterated: it manifests as its own existence, bound or unbound, and corresponds to the multiplicity, potentiality, and changeability of form rather than any given form as such. By reading the movements of the dialectic through the differentiations of Force, Macdonald puts forth a model capable of considering the negation of the subject on the principle that doing so does not lead us into the field of abstract negativity. Undergirded by non-differentiation, such a model signals the radical otherness most foreign to individual thought. However, in this interpretation the absence of the individual does not assert itself as a mourning. Instead it gives way to a reuptake in the form of an experience of oneness with the whole.
“Force,” Macdonald writes, “is the movement of ‘matters,’ of moments, of objects that causes them to leave their individuality behind, becoming one with other(s), only to break this unity back up into its particularity and then start the whole process again” (ibid, 29). Thus, Force functions as a transitional material between particularity and unconditional unity: no force is inherently different to its “other” but an opposition is produced so that one might arrive at the realization of the absolute-as-impossible through consciousness (i.e. self-consciousness) which is always an awareness of difference.
The juxtaposition of this energetic model with Freudian metapsychology allows for an otherwise interpersonal dynamic to be transposed onto the intrapsychic level. In this way, the monadic (though internally divided) ego can be substituted for the movement of self-consciousness as a process of binding-unbinding-rebinding. As in the psychoanalytic schema, the subject is at once bound to itself, to its own process of consciousness, and to the external world. But the emphasis on a general energetic economy privileges the porousness of these implications rather than the subjective self-perception they sustain. In foregrounding externalization as a necessary movement of thought, this interpretation addresses the impossibility of