Self-Othering

Self-othering (Sichanderswerden) names the dialectical process by which a subject or substance becomes what it is through a movement of self-externalization — a becoming-other that is simultaneously a becoming-itself. As Dolar frames it in the context of Hegel's critique of substantiality, this is not a process in which an already-constituted subject merely encounters an external other, but one in which otherness is generated from within: the subject produces its own alterity as the very motor of its self-determination. The Hegelian formula 'substance is subject' condenses this: substance is not a fixed underlying ground but is itself a process of self-differentiation, of going outside itself and returning to itself through that exteriority. Self-othering is the name for this departure-as-return.

The concept is theoretically indispensable to Dolar's argument because it designates the hinge between Hegelian idealism and a materialism that the idealist move paradoxically opens. By showing that matter (Gedankending) is itself an abstraction produced by thought, Hegel does not sublate matter into Idea but dissolves the framework that would posit matter as an inert, self-identical substance. What remains after this dissolution — the residue of self-othering that cannot be reabsorbed into conceptual self-return — is precisely the site Dolar identifies with the Lacanian objet petit a: not a correlate of consciousness but the subject's inscription into the Real, the point where self-othering fails to close into seamless self-identity.

In subject-lessons-hegel-lacan-and-the-future-of-materialism-northwestern-universit, self-othering appears at a pivotal moment in Dolar's argument that Hegel harbors a latent materialism. It functions as the single Hegelian word that encapsulates the entire logical structure he is tracing: the movement by which thought, in demonstrating that substance is subject, unworks the very notion of self-identical substance. This positions the concept within the corpus's broader engagement with the canonical concepts of Dialectics, Essence, Concept, and Abstract. Self-othering can be read as a specification of dialectics: it names the internal mechanism — self-externalization — that drives the dialectical movement, rather than merely describing the formal structure of thesis/antithesis. It also directly engages essence, since Hegel's claim that essence is reflexively constituted through appearing (essence as "what has been") presupposes that whatever grounds a thing first passes through self-othering before returning as essence. The concept equally touches Concept (Begriff) as Dolar's description overlaps with the Concept's self-moving, self-determining character, and Abstract, since the Gedankending — matter as abstraction — is one product of this self-othering of thought.

What makes self-othering a novel intervention rather than mere repetition of existing terms is its condensation of the materialist stakes: it marks the exact point where Hegel's idealist dialectic tips into what Dolar argues is a proto-materialist gesture, linking the structure of self-othering to the Lacanian objet petit a as the irreducible remainder when the process fails to complete its circular return. The concept thus bridges the Hegelian and Lacanian registers that the entire source text is designed to put in dialogue.

Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of MaterialismRussell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · 2020 (p.45)

if there is a single Hegelian word that one can take as a guideline for this process, that word would be Sichanderswerden, quite appropriately rendered as 'self-othering.'

The phrase is theoretically loaded in two respects: first, "Sichanderswerden" — literally "becoming-otherwise-of-itself" — grammatically encodes the reflexivity of the process (the sich, the self, is already folded into the becoming-other), making it impossible to read as mere external transformation; second, Dolar's gloss "quite appropriately rendered" signals that the German compound is not incidental but is the precise, irreplaceable name for a logical structure that ordinary vocabulary would distort, anchoring the entire argument about substance, subject, and latent materialism to this single word.