I can't seem to let it go ... "Negation and preservation" is the meaning of "sublation" as such. Anything successfully "sublated" will have been both "negated" in some sense and "preserved" in some sense. Within Hegel's definition of the term "sublation", the achievement of "negation-AND-preservation" IS "elevation". The successful negation-and-preservation is nothing but this elevation, and the successful elevation will have achieved precisely negation-and-preservation. "Negation-AND-preservation" and "elevation" are two ways of expressing the same thing. N&P = E. Thus, again, the notion of sublation is composed of actual sublation, of the overcoming of the opposition "negation/preservation" by a movement of "elevation", a movement itself defined as the overcoming of the opposition "negation/preservation".

One more little stab at it: If we think of sublation as containing three moments, "negate" and "preserve" and "elevate", as our "natural" consciousness is wont to do, we risk missing that it's structurally just two moments, as is any process of sublation: there's the immediate moment of opposition in its apparent givenness, and then there's the achievement of a mediated moment of sublation which raises the opposition itself to a higher level. Thus the term sublation itself begins with "negate-vs-preserve" in their opposition, while the recognition of their unity is represented by "elevate". The first two terms both exist as opposites on the same level at the beginning, which is why they would simply cancel each other out if we didn't move to a higher level that comprehends them both together. Hegel's notion of sublation itself contains a sublation; it demonstrates itself.

This was a first attempt to articulate something that occurred to me recently. It was triggered by a comment in a book on Hegel, but I don't believe I've ever seen it spelled out quite this way. What I'm trying to get at is that within the very notion of sublation as Hegel conceives it is contained an actual sublation, an actual dialectical movement of thinking. By understanding how the term works, you can understand what the idea is. If "sublation" in general means "raising a phenomenon to a higher level" and can potentially transform any phenomenon divided by inner conflict, an analysis of the very notion of sublation reveals that its third term, "elevation", in fact refers to the sublation of the first two opposed terms, "negation" and "preservation"! That is, the notion of sublation itself, just like any proposed sublation of any phenomenon whatsoever, is comprised of two moments: a moment of opposition (in the notion of "sublation", this is when "negation" and "preservation" are conceived as mutually negating) and a moment of sublation, which represents the achievement of the new conceptual level (again, in the notion of "sublation" itself, this is the moment of "elevation", which both negates and preserves the opposition between negation and preservation). The negation of the opposition between the two sides of the notion of Aufhebung itself ("negate" vs, "preserve") and their sublation in a new ("elevated") conceptual level is the same as in the case of any apparent opposition in any phenomenon. The "elevated" position allows us to conceive of the phenomenon as an internally differentiated whole, which means at once negating the initial opposition on its own level while preserving it on the higher, sublated level. (And, as I said above, thereby forming a new position destined to find itself "opposed" to another and thus requiring further "sublation".)