Edit: yes, I meant "unconscious." Who knows why I wrote subconscious.

To meet the necessary demand for me to expand a bit, let me say this, I understand that the Alexandre Kojéve lectures drove absolute negativity as constitutive of consciousness pretty firmly and, we know, that those lectures had a large impact on Lacan, Sarte, Althussar, etc. So, that has helped give me a framework for approaching the Lacanian unconscious. I am (mis)understanding it as an energetic, almost non-existent, force of conditioning. It seems as if it takes a sort of faith, as the unconscious in Lacan is discussed with little concretizing language. Is there something like a metaphysics of the unconscious for Lacan? Does it have agency? Or, is it some alien force?

P.s. I have read through a substantial amount of Derrida, Foucault, D&G, and structuralist and post-strucuralism more broadly, but I've kept Lacan at bay precisely because of a somewhat lacking background in psychoanalysis. Read some Freud and Kristeva, but not a whole lot. Thanks again!