Zizek applies Hegel to examples

 In all these cases, universality islocated in the enchainment or overlapping of particularities: A and B are not parts (species) of their encompassing universality; A cannot fully become A, actualize its notion, without passing into B, which is formally its subspecies, but a subspecies which undermines the very species under which it is formally subsumed. Every species contains asubspecies which, precisely insofar as it effectively realizes the notion of this species, explodes its frame: the space opera is "a Western at the level of its notion" and, for that very reason, no longer a Western. Instead of a universality subdivided into two species, we thus get a particular species which generates another species as its own subspecies,and true ("concrete") universality is nothing but this movement in the course of which a species engenders a subspecies which negates its own species. The same dialectical mediation between the universal and the particular can also be formulated in terms of a universal notion and its examples. The difference between the idealist and the materialistuse of examples is that, in the Platonic-idealist approach, examples are always imperfect, they never perfectly render what they are supposed to exemplify, while for a materialist there is always more in the example than in what it exemplifies, in other words, the example always threatens to undermine what it is supposed to exemplify since it givesbody to what the exemplified notion itself represses or is unable to cope with. (Therein resides Hegel's materialist procedure in the Phenomenology: each "figure of consciousness" is first exemplified and then undermined through its own example.) This is why the idealist approach always demands a multitude of examples—since no single examplereally fits, one has to enumerate a great many of them in order to indicate the transcendent wealth of the Idea they exemplify, the Idea being the fixed point of reference for the floating examples. A materialist, on the contrary, tends to return obsessively to one and the same example: it is the particular example which remains the same in all symbolicuniverses, while the universal notion it is supposed to exemplify continually changes its shape, so that we get a multitude of universal notions circulating around a single example. Is this not what Lacan does, returning to the same exemplary cases (the guessing-game with five hats, the dream of Irma's injection, etc.), each time providing a newinterpretation? The materialist example is thus a universal Singular: a singular entity which persists as the universal through the multitude of its interpretations