The Skull-Bone and the Bloody Head: Lacan’s Lamella and Kojèvo-Hegelian Desire

Slavoj Žižek has made it his essential project to renew an understanding of G.W.F. Hegel’s subjectivity by means of the psychoanalytic theory and practice of Jacques Lacan. One crucial element in such an endeavor is Lacan’s notion of the lamella, a particular understanding of excessive desire as indestructible and exterior to the self. I would like to investigate Žižek’s characterization of the lamella in Lacan’s work and its Hegelian antecedent (particularly evident in the famous reading of Alexandre Kojève), as well as bringing the thought of Georges Bataille, a significant interlocutor for Lacan, to bear on the formation and ramifications of the idea. Most importantly, I would like to investigate the question of sexual difference as it has bearing on the lamella (and on subjectivity) as a result, and to suggest a feminine aspect to its image that has perhaps gone unnoticed.