Quora Answer: Slavoj Žižek: Was Lacan really just spouting warmed over Hegalianism?
No. But unfortunately Zizek is the only one who has made Lacan understandable and his project is to reduce Lacan to Hegel and at the same time reduce Hegel to Lacan. He is hoping that if this mutual reduction succeeds the real Zizek will shine through. This however is unlikely. A better way to look at Hegel is through the lens of Plotnitsk who wrote In the Shadow of Hegel which questions the systemically of Hegel’s philosophy. If we see the unconscious in society through the lens of Bataile’s Accursed Share and realize that it is a general economy rather than a restricted economy which Plotnitsky explains in his work Complentarity then we start to see the arena in which Zizek is playing. Lacan’s semiotic and structural unconscious is that playground. One of the first philosophers to start exploring in this direction was Baudrillard in his Towards a Critique of the Economy of the Sign in which Value and Sign are seen as being chiasmicly related due to the complementarities of the General Economy. Zizek has taken this argument to the limit and applied it to everything under the sun.