LTN 197: Hegel was right to point out again and again that, when one talks, one always dwells in the universal—which means that, with its entry into language, the subject loses its roots in the concrete life-world. To put it in more pathetic terms, the moment I start to talk, I am no longer the sensually-concrete I, since I am caught into an impersonal mechanism which always makes me say something different from what I wanted to say—as the early Lacan liked to say, I am not speaking, I am being spoken by language. This is one of the ways to understand what Lacan called ‘symbolic castration’: the price the subject pays for its ‘transubstantiation’ from the agent of a direct animal vitality to the speaking subject whose identity is kept apart from the direct vitality of passions.
the Servant’s secured particular/finite identity is unsettled when, in experiencing the fear of death during his confrontation with the Master, he gets the whiff of the infinite power of negativity; through this experience, the Servant is forced to accept the worthlessness of his particular Self:
For this consciousness was not in peril and fear for this element or that, nor for this or that moment of time, it was afraid for its entire being; it felt the fear of death, the sovereign master. It has been in that experience melted to its inmost soul, has trembled throughout its every fibre, and all that was fixed and steadfast has quaked within it. This complete perturbation of its entire substance, this absolute dissolution of all its stability into fluent continuity, is, however, the simple, ultimate nature of self-consciousness, absolute negativity, pure self-relating existence, which consequently is involved in this type of consciousness.6
What, then, does the Servant get in exchange for renouncing
How, then, does the truly historical thought break with such universalized ‘mobilism’? In what precise sense is it historical and not simply the rejection of ‘mobilism’ on behalf of some eternal Principles exempted from the flow of generation and corruption?
Here, one should again differentiate historicity proper from organic evolution.
organic evolugion: In the latter, a universal Principle is slowly and gradually differentiating itself; as such, it remains the calm underlying all-encompassing ground that unifies the bustling activity of struggling individuals, their endless process of generation and corruption that is the ‘cycle of life’.
In history proper, on the contrary, the universal Principle is caught into the ‘infinite’ struggle with itself, i.e., the struggle is each time the struggle for the fate of the universality itself. This is why the eminently ‘historical’ moments are those of great collisions when a whole form of life is threatened, when the reference to the established social and cultural norms no longer guarantees the minimum of stability and cohesion; in such open situations, a new form of life has to be invented, and it is at this point that Hegel locates the role of great heroes. They operate in a pre-legal, stateless, zone: their violence is not bound by the usual moral rules, they enforce a new order with the subterranean vitality which shatters all established forms. According to the usual doxa on Hegel, heroes follow their instinctual passions, their true motifs and goals are not clear to themselves, they are unconscious instruments of the deeper historical necessity of giving birth to a new spiritual life form—however, as Lebrun points out, one should not impute to Hegel the standard teleological notion of a hidden Reason which pulls the strings of the historical process, following a plan established in advance and using individuals’ passions as the instruments of its implementation.
First, since the meaning of one’s acts is a priori inaccessible to individuals who accomplish them, heroes included, there is no ‘science of politics’ able to predict the course of events: ‘nobody has ever the right to declare himself depositary of the Spirit’s self-knowledge’17, and this impossibility ‘spares Hegel the fanaticism of ‘objective responsibility’’18 — in other words, here is no place in Hegel for the Marxist-Stalinist figure of the Communist revolutionary who knows the historical necessity and posits himself as the instrument of its implementation. However, it is crucial to add a further twist here: if we merely assert this impossibility, we are still ‘conceiving the Absolute as Substance, not as Subject’— we still surmise that there is some pre-existing Spirit imposing its substantial Necessity on history, we just accept that the insight into this Necessity is inaccessible to us.
From a consequent Hegelian standpoint, one should go a crucial step further and realize that no historical Necessity pre-exists the contingent process of its actualization, i.e., that the historical process is also in itself ‘open’, undecided — this confused mixture ‘generates sense insofar as it unravels itself’:
[…]
LTN 218: This is how one should read Hegel’s thesis that, in the course of the dialectical development, things ‘become what they are’: it is not that a temporal deployment merely actualizes some pre-existing atemporal conceptual structure — this atemporal conceptual structure itself is the result of contingent temporal decisions.
But why shouldn’t we then say that there is simply no atemporal conceptual structure, that all there is is the gradual temporal deployment?
Here we encounter the properly dialectical paradox which defines true historicity as opposed to evolutionist historicism, and which was much later, in French structuralism, formulated as the ‘primacy of synchrony over diachrony’. Usually, this primacy was taken to mean the ultimate denial of historicity in structuralism: a historical development can be reduced to the (imperfect) temporal deployment of a pre-existing atemporal matrix of all possible variations/combinations.
This simplistic notion of the ‘primacy of synchrony over diachrony’ overlooks the (properly dialectical) point, made long ago by (among others) T.S. Eliot in his ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’,on how each truly new artistic phenomenon not only designates a break from the entire past, but retroactively changes this past itself.
At every historical conjuncture, present is not only present, it also encompasses a perspective on the past immanent to it — say, after the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, the October Revolution is no longer the same historical event, i.e., it is (for the triumphant liberal-capitalist view) no longer the beginning of a new progressive epoch in the history of humanity, but the beginning of a catastrophic mis-direction of history which reached its end in 1991.
Or, back to Caesar, once he crossed Rubicon, his previous life appeared in a new way, as a preparation for his later world-historical role, i.e., it was transformed into the part of a totally different lifestory. This is what Hegel calls ‘totality’or what structuralism calls ‘synchronic structure’:
a historical moment which is not limited to the present but includes its own past and future, i.e., the way the past and the future appeared to and from this moment.
Gerard Lebrun whom Ž loves but disagrees with in spots
It is, however, at this very point, after fully conceding Hegel’s radical break with traditional metaphysical theodicy, that Lebrun’s makes his critical move. The fundamental Nietzschean strategy of Lebrun is first to admit the radicality of Hegel’s undermining of the traditional metaphysics, but then, in the crucial second step, to demonstrate how this very radical sacrifice of the metaphysical content saves the minimal form of metaphysics. The accusations which concern Hegel’s theodicy, of course, fall too short: there is no substantial God who writes in advance the script of History and watches over its realization, the situation is open, truth emerges only through the very process of its deployment, etc., etc. — but what Hegel nonetheless maintains is the much deeper presupposition that, at the end, when the dusk falls over the events of the day, the Owl of Minerva will take flight, i.e., that there always is a story to be told at the end, the story which (‘retroactively’ and ‘contingently’as much as one wants) reconstitutes the Sense of the preceding process.
Or, with regard to domination, Hegel is of course against every form of despotic domination, so the critique of his thought as the divinization of the Prussian monarchy is ridiculous; however, his assertion of subjective freedom comes with a catch: it is the freedom of the subject who undergoes a violent ‘transubstantiation’ from the individual stuck onto his particularity to the universal subject who recognizes in the State the substance of his own being. The mirror-obverse of this mortification of individuality as the price to be paid for the rise of the ‘truly’ free universal subject is that the state’s power retains its full authority—what only changes is that this authority (as in the entire tradition from Plato onwards) loses its tyrannical-contingent character and becomes a rationally-justified power.
Is there nonetheless not a grain of truth in Lebrun’s critical point—does Hegel effectively not presuppose that, contingent and open as the history may be, a consistent story can always be told afterwards? Or, to put it in Lacan’s terms, is the entire edifice of the Hegelian historiography not based on the premise that, no matter how confused the events, a subject supposed to know will emerge at the end, magically converting nonsense into sense, chaos into new order?
Recall just his philosophy of history with its narrative of world history as the story of the progress of freedom …. And is it not true that, if there is a lesson of the twentieth century, it is that all the extreme phenomena that took place in it cannot ever be unified in a single encompassing philosophical narrative?
One simply cannot write a ‘phenomenology of the twentieth century Spirit’, uniting technological progress, the rise of democracy, the failed Communist attempt with its Stalinist catastrophe, the horrors of Fascism, the gradual end of colonialism …. But why not? Is it really so?
What if, precisely, one can and should write a Hegelian history of the twentieth century, this ‘age of extremes’ (Eric Hobsbawm), as a global narrative delimited by two epochal constellation: the (relatively) long peaceful period of capitalist expansion from 1848 till 1914 as its substantial starting point whose subterranean antagonisms then exploded with the First World War, and the ongoing global-capitalist ‘New World Order’ emerging after 1990 as its conclusion, the return to a new all-encompassing system signaling to some a Hegelian ‘end of history’, but whose antagonisms already announce new explosions?
Are the great reversals and unexpected explosions of the topsy-turvy twentieth century, its numerous ‘coincidences of the opposites’—the reversal of liberal capitalism into Fascism, the even more weird reversal of the October Revolution into the Stalinist nightmare — not the very privileged stuff which seems to call for a Hegelian reading? What would Hegel have made of today’s struggle of Liberalism against fundamentalist Faith? One thing is sure: he would not simply take side of liberalism, but would have insisted on the ‘mediation’of the opposites.
The way one usually reads the Hegelian relationship between necessity and freedom is that they ultimately coincide: for Hegel, true freedom has nothing to do with capricious choices; it means the priority of self-relating to relating-to-other, i.e., an entity is free when it can deploy its immanent potentials without being impeded by any external obstacle. From here, it is easy to develop the standard argument against Hegel: his system is a fully ‘saturated’ set of categories, with no place for contingency and indeterminacy, i.e., in Hegel’s logic, each category follows with inexorable immanent-logical necessity from the preceding one, and the entire series of categories forms a self-enclosed Whole… We can see now what this argument misses: the Hegelian dialectical process is not such a ‘saturated’ self-contained necessary Whole, but the open-contingent process through which such a Whole forms itself. In other words, the reproach confuses being with becoming: it perceives as a fixed order of Being (the network of categories) what is for Hegel the process of Becoming which, retroactively, engenders its necessity.
[…]
This is how one should read Marx’s well-known statement, from his introduction to the Grundrisse manuscripts, about the anatomy of man as a key to the anatomy of ape: it is profoundly materialist, i.e., it does not involve any teleology (man is ‘in germ’ already present in ape, ape immanently tends towards man). It is precisely because the passage from ape to man is radically contingent/imprévisible, because there is no inherent ‘progress’ in it, that one can only retroactively determine/discern the conditions
(not ‘sufficient reasons’) for man in ape. And, again, it is crucial to bear in mind here that the non-All is ontological, not only epistemological: when we stumble upon ‘indeterminacy’ in nature, when the rise of the New cannot be fully accounted for by the set of its preexisting conditions, this does not mean that we encountered the limitation of our knowledge, our inability to understand the ‘higher’ reason at work here, but, on the contrary, that we demonstrated the ability of our mind to grasp the non-All of reality: …
For us Hegelians the crucial question here is: where is Hegel with regard to this distinction between potentiality and virtuality? In a first approach, there is massive evidence that Hegel is the philosopher of potentiality: is not the whole point of the dialectical development as the development from In-itself to For-itself that, in the process of becoming, things merely ‘become what they already are’ (or, rather, were from all eternity)?
Is the dialectical process not the temporal deployment of an eternal set of potentialities, which is why the Hegelian System is a self-enclosed set of necessary passages? However, this mirage of overwhelming evidence dissipates the moment we fully take into account the radical RETROACTIVITY of the dialectical process: the process of becoming is not in itself necessary, but the BECOMING (the gradual contingent emergence) OF NECESSITY ITSELF.
This is (also, among other things) what ‘to conceive substance as subject’ means: subject as the Void, the Nothingness of self-relating negativity, is the very NIHIL out of which every new figure emerges, i.e., every dialectical passage/reversal is a passage in which the new figure emerges ex nihilo and retroactively posits/creates its necessity.
The key question is thus: is the Holy Spirit still a figure of the big Other, or is it possible to conceive it outside this frame? If the dead God were to morph directly into the Holy Ghost, then we would still have the symbolic big Other. But the monstrosity of Christ, this contingent singularity interceding between God and man, is the proof that the Holy Ghost is not the big Other which survives as the spirit of the community after the death of the substantial God, but a collective link of love without any support in the big Other. Therein resides the properly Hegelian paradox of the death of God: if God dies directly, as God, he survives as the virtualized big Other; only if he dies in the guise of Christ, his earthly embodiment, he also disintegrates as the big Other.
Therein resides what Hegel calls the ‘monstrosity’ of Christ: the insertion of Christ between God and man is strictly equivalent to the fact that ‘there is no big Other’—Christ is inserted as the singular contingency on which the universal necessity of the ‘big Other’ itself hinges.
[…]
Christ is such a figure which ‘inserts itself ’ between God and its creation. Natural development is dominated-regulated by a principle, arkhe, which remains the same through the movement of its actualization, be it the development of an organism from its conception to its maturity or the continuity of a species through generation and decay of its individual members—there is no tension here between the universal principle and its exemplification, the universal principle is the calm universal force which totalizes/encompasses the wealth of its particular content; however, ‘life doesn’t have history because it is totalising only externally’—it is a universal genus which encompasses the multitude of individuals who struggle, but this unity is not posited in an individual. In spiritual history, on the contrary, this totalization occurs for itself, it is posited as such in the singular figures which embody universality against its own particular content.
Or, to put it in a different way, in organic life, substance (the universal Life) is the encompassing unity of the interplay of its subordinate moments, that which remains the same through the eternal process of generation and corruption, that which returns to itself through this movement; with subjectivity, however, PREDICATE PASSES INTO SUBJECT: substance doesn’t return to itself, it is re-totalized by what was at the beginning its predicate, its subordinated moment. This is how the key moment in a dialectical process is the ‘transubstantiation’ of its focal point: what was first just a predicate, a subordinate moment of the process (say, money in the development of capitalism), becomes its central moment, retroactively degrading its presuppositions, the elements out of which it emerged, into its subordinate moments, elements of its self-propelling circulation. And this is also how one should approach Hegel’s outrageously ‘speculative’ formulations about Spirit as its own result, a product of itself: while ‘Spirit has its beginnings in nature in general’, the extreme to which spirit tends is its freedom, its infinity, its being in and for itself. These are the two aspects but if we ask what Spirit is, the immediate answer is that it is this motion, this process of proceeding from, of freeing itself from, nature; this is the being, the substance of spirit itself. 31
Spirit is thus radically de-substantialized: Spirit is not a positive counter-force to nature, a different substance which gradually breaks and shines through the inert natural stuff, it is nothing but this process of freeing-itself-from. Hegel directly disowns the notion of Spirit as some kind of positive Agent which underlies the process:
Spirit is usually spoken of as subject, as doing something, and apart from what it does, as this motion, this process, as still something particular, its activity being more or less contingent […] it is of the very nature of spirit to be this absolute liveliness, this process, to proceed forth from naturality, immediacy, to sublate, to quit its naturality, and to come to itself, and to free itself, it being itself only as it comes to itself as such a product of itself; its actuality being merely that it has made itself into what it is.32
If, then, ‘it is only as a result of itself that it is spirit’, this means that the standard talk about the Hegelian Spirit which alienates itself to itself and then recognizes itself in its otherness and thus reappropriates its content, is deeply misleading:
the Self to which spirit returns is produced in the very movement of this return, or, that to which the process of return is returning to is produced by the very process of returning. In a subjective process, there is no ‘absolute subject’, no permanent central agent which plays with itself the game of alienation and disalienation, losing/dispersing itself and then reappropriating its alienated content: after a substantial totality is dispersed, it is another agent — previously its subordinated moment — which re-totalizes it.
It is this shifting of the center of the process from one to another moment which distinguishes a dialectical process from the circular movement of alienation and its overcoming; it is because of this shift that the ‘return to itself ’ coincides with accomplished alienation (when a subject re-totalizes the process, its substantial unity is fully lost). In this precise sense, substance returns to itself as subject, and this trans-substantiation is what substantial life cannot accomplish.
MARX QUOTATION
…in the circulation M-C-M, both the money and the commodity represent only different modes of existence of value itself, the money its general mode, and the commodity its particular, or, so to say, disguised mode. It is constantly changing from one form to the other without thereby becoming lost, and thus assumes an automatically active character. If now we take in turn each of the two different forms which self-expanding value successively assumes in the course of its life, we then arrive at these two propositions: Capital is money: Capital is commodities. In truth, however, value is here the active factor in a process, in which, while constantly assuming the form in turn of money and commodities, it at the same time changes in magnitude, differentiates itself by throwing off surplus-value from itself; the original value, in other words, expands spontaneously. For the movement, in the course of which it adds surplus-value, is its own movement, its expansion, therefore, is automatic expansion. Because it is value, it has acquired the occult quality of being able to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.
Value, therefore, being the active factor in such a process, and assuming at one time the form of money, at another that of commodities, but through all these changes preserving itself and expanding, it requires some independent form, by means of which its identity may at any time be established. And this form it possesses only in the shape of money. It is under the form of money that value begins and ends, and begins again, every act of its own spontaneous generation.
[http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch04.htm.]
Žižek’s Commentary:
Note how Hegelian references abound here: with capitalism, value is not a mere abstract ‘mute’ universality, a substantial link between the multiplicity of commodities; from the passive medium of exchange, it turns into the ‘active factor’ of the entire process.
Instead of only passively assuming the two different forms of its actual existence (money—commodity), it appears as the subject ‘endowed with a motion of its own, passing through a life-process of its own’: it differentiates itself from itself, positing its otherness, and then again overcomes this difference—the entire movement is ITS OWN movement. In this precise sense, ‘instead of simply representing the relations of commodities, it enters […] into private relations with itself ’: the ‘truth’ of its relating to its otherness is its self-relating, i.e., in its self-movement, the capital retroactively ‘sublates’ its own material conditions, changing them into subordinate moments of its own ‘spontaneous expansion’—in pure Hegelese, it posits its own presuppositions.
Crucial in the quoted passage is the expression ‘an automatically active character’, an inadequate translation of the German words used by Marx to characterize capital as ‘automatischem Subjekt’, an ‘automatic subject’, the oxymoron uniting living subjectivity and dead automatism. This is what capital is: a subject, but an automatic one, not a living one — and, again, can Hegel think this ‘monstrous mixture’, a process of subjective self-mediation and retroactive positing of presuppositions which as it were gets caught in a substantial ‘spurious infinity’, a subject which itself becomes an alienated substance? (This, perhaps, is also the reason why Marx’s reference to Hegel’s dialectics in his ‘critique of political economy’ is ambiguous, oscillating between taking it as the model for the revolutionary process of emancipation and taking it as the mystified expression of the logic of the Capital.)
DEATH DRIVE
But there is a paradox which complicates this critique of Hegel: is the absolute negativity, this central notion of Hegel’s thought, not precisely a philosophical figure of what Freud called ‘death drive’? Is, then, insofar as—following Lacan—the core of Kant’s thought can be defined as the ‘critique of pure desire’, the passage from Kant to Hegel not precisely the passage from desire to drive? Do the very concluding lines of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia (on the Idea which enjoys to repeatedly transverse its circle) not point in this direction? Is the answer to the standard critical question addressed to Hegel—‘But why does dialectical process always go on? Why does dialectical mediation always continue its work?’—not precisely the eppur si muove of pure drive? This structure of negativity also accounts for the quasi-’automatic’ character of the dialectical process—one often reproaches Hegel the ‘mechanical’ character of dialectics: belying all the assurances that dialectics is open to the true life of reality, the dialectical process is like a processing machine which indifferently swallows and processes all possible contents, from nature to history, from politics to art, delivering them packed in the same triadic form ….
The underlying true problem is the following one: the standard ‘Hegelian’ scheme of death (negativity) as the subordinate/mediating moment of Life can only be sustained if we remain within the category of Life whose dialectic is that of the self-mediating Substance returning to itself from its otherness. The moment we effectively pass from Life(-principle) to Death(-principle), there is no encompassing ‘synthesis’, death in its ‘abstract negativity’ forever remains as a threat, an excess which cannot be economized.
In social life, this means that Kant’s universal peace is a vain hope, that war forever remains a threat of total disruption of organized state Life; in individual subjective life, that MADNESS always lurks as a possibility.
Does this mean that we are back at the standard topos of the excess of negativity which cannot be ‘sublated’ in any reconciling ‘synthesis’, or even at the naïve Engelsian view of the alleged contradiction between the openness of Hegel’s ‘method’ and the enforced closure of his ‘system’? There are indications which point in this direction: as was noted by many perspicuous commentators, Hegel’s ‘conservative’ political writings of his last years (like his critique of the English Reform Bill) betray a fear of any further development which will assert the ‘abstract’ freedom of the civil society at the expense of the State’s organic unity, and open up a way to new revolutionary violence. 38 Why did Hegel shirk back here, why did he not dare to follow his basic dialectical rule, courageously embracing ‘abstract’ negativity as the only path to a higher stage of freedom? Furthermore, do Hegel’s clear indications of the historical limitations of his system (things to be discovered in natural sciences; the impossibility of grasping the spiritual essence of countries like North America and Russia which will deploy their potentials only in the next century) not point in the same direction?
Hegel may appear to celebrate the prosaic character of life in a well-organized modern state where the heroic disturbances are overcome in the tranquility of private rights and the security of the satisfaction of needs: private property is guaranteed, sexuality is restricted to marriage, the future is safe …. In this organic order, universality and particular interests appear reconciled: the ‘infinite right’ of subjective singularity is given its due, individuals no longer experience the objective state order as a foreign power intruding onto their rights, they recognize in it the substance and frame of their very freedom. Lebrun asks here the fateful question: ‘Can the sentiment of the Universal be dissociated from this appeasement?’ Against Lebrun, our answer should be:
yes, and this is why war is necessary—in war, universality reasserts its right against and over the concrete-organic appeasement in the prosaic social life. Is thus the necessity of war not the ultimate proof that, for Hegel, every social reconciliation is doomed to fail, that no organic social order can effectively contain the force of abstract-universal negativity? This is why social life is condemned to the ‘spurious infinity’ of the eternal oscillation between stable civic life and wartime perturbations.