A subject that forms the other in its own image remains locked in self-relation.

Evidence

However, if what is other to the self is only, from the subject’s point of view, an object to be formed according to its own image, the subject is in fact only in relation to itself: the other remains the same. The subject, as Hegel writes, possesses nothing more than ‘the thought of its self’. Ultimately, such a situation is the fate of the unhappy consciousness. Here the subject, lacking any objective and actual relation to the other, tests through its own experience ‘the Stoic independence of thought’. And this condition, passing through the journey of sceptical consciousness, ‘finds its truth in that shape we have called the unhappy consciousness’. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 772

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies why the merely fashioning subject still lacks genuine otherness and thus falls into unhappy consciousness.