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International Journal of Žižek Studies. Volume Two, Number Two  “The Hegelian “Night of the World”: Žižek on Subjectivity, Negativity, and Universality”  Robert Sinnerbrink – Macquarie University (Australia)

Hegel’s 1805- 6 Jenaer Realphilosophie manuscripts, the enigmatic “night of the world” passage:

The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything in its simplicity—an unending wealth of many representations, images, of which none belongs to him—or which are not present. This night, the interior of nature, that exists here—pure self—in phantasmagorical representations, is night all around it, in which here shoots a bloody head — there another white ghastly apparition, suddenly here before it, and just so disappears. One catches sight of this night when one looks human beings in the eye—into a night that becomes awful (Hegel 1974: 204; quoted in Verene 1985: 7-8).

Žižek goes on to link the Hegelian ‘night of the world’ with Schelling’s conception of the subject as “pure night of the Self”, “infinite lack of Being”; the “violent gesture of contraction” that also forms the basis of Hegel’s account of madness as the cutting of all links with external reality, which Hegel then construes as the subject’s regression to the level of the “animal soul” still unreflectively immersed in its immediate natural environment (Žižek 1997: 8; 1999: 34-35).

Where Žižek differs from Hegel, however, is in arguing that this withdrawal from the world, the subject’s contraction and severing of all links with the Umwelt, [Umwelt German, ‘environment’] is rather the founding gesture of ‘humanization’, indeed the emergence of subjectivity itself (1997: 8).

The passage through madness is thus an ontological necessity; there is no subjectivity without this experience of radical negativity, this cutting of links with the Umwelt, which is then followed by the construction of a symbolic universe of meaning (1997: 9; 1996: 78).

The question, psychoanalytically, is not so much how the fall into madness is possible, but rather how the subject is able to attain “normalcy” by climbing out of madness — for Hegel, this radical withdrawal from the world—in order to reconstitute social reality through symbolic mediation.

Indeed, rather than a metaphysical tract on the ‘totalising’ Subject of absolute idealism, Hegel’s famous passage can be read as an account of the radical finitude of the Subject; the constitutive negativity that both makes possible and delimits autonomous subjectivity. To quote Hegel:

Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast to what is dead requires the greatest strength. Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then, having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject … (Hegel 1977: 19).

What is striking in this celebrated passage is the way that experiences of finitude—of death, negativity, absence, loss—are all presented as constitutive of the power of the self-conscious Subject as Geist.

Subjectivity is thus constituted through a negative self-relation: a relation to itself that is necessarily a relation to the Other; a mediated self-relation in which the self finds itself precisely in and through its relation to the Other. At the same time, this self-relation through the Other is made possible only because of a violent rending of the immediate self-feeling and immersion of this seemingly isolated proto-subject within its natural environment. The subject is not only negative self-relation, a relation to the Other, it is also a self-relating negativity: that which wins its truth (its self-identity in otherness) only through the experience of radical negativity or the freedom to negate itself,  to say ‘no!’ to everything, even itself; or as Hegel puts it, through the experience of finding itself in and through “utter dismemberment”.

Once again, for Hegel this negativity is constitutive, ontological rather than ontic, as Heidegger would say. Self-conscious Spirit is this power of self-relating negativity, which is to say free subjectivity, only through “tarrying with the negative”. Indeed, this fundamental moment of negativity, we should note, is a decisive feature of every key experience in the phenomenological journey of consciousness and self-consciousness (the most famous example being the life-and-death struggle and experience of mastery and servitude, not to mention the alienated ‘freedom’ of self-consciousness in stoicism, scepticism, and the unhappy consciousness, or the radical affirmation of freedom in the French revolution and subsequent negative moment of Terror as the ‘violence’ of abstract universality). This power of radical negativity, this “abyss of freedom,” is precisely what for Hegel defines and determines “the Subject” (8).

In The Ticklish Subject as well as elsewhere, Žižek’s analysis of the Hegelian “night of the world”is explicitly linked with the question of abstract negativity and its relationship with concrete universal. In an argument charged with political resonances, Žižek shows how the radical negativity of subjectivity—the capacity to negate all our finite, particular determinations—enables the dialectical passage from abstract to concrete universality. In practical terms, this means there is a dimension of violence, conflict, or antagonism that cannot be eliminated in historical and socio-political experience. Far from rehearsing the cliché of Hegel’s reconciliationist stance towards the state, Žižek claims that the radical negativity of the subject—the ‘night of the world’ — means that there can be no concrete universal without the historico-political passage through madness, violence, even revolutionary terror (as in Hegel’s famous analysis of the post-revolutionary Jacobin Terror, an abstract negativity that ushered in the modern bourgeois state (Hegel 1977: 355-363)). This Hegelian argument concerning abstract negativity and concrete universality provides an essential backdrop, frequently misunderstood, to Žižek’s critique of various contemporary forms of ‘post-political’ ethical resistance to the state (most recently, Simon Critchley’s ethically grounded neo-anarchism (see Critchley 2007; Žižek 2006: 332-334; Žižek 2008: 339-350).

Žižek returns again and again to the Hegelian distinction between abstract and concrete universality. What does it mean? Against the prevailing stereotype of Hegel’s subordinating of particularity to universality, Žižek points out that universality in its concrete dimension is realised through individualisation; that is, the concrete universal is embodied in the individual. As Žižek observes, Hegel was the first thinker to argue that the “properly modern notion of individualisation” occurs through secondary identification (1999: 90). The individual is initially immersed in its immediate milieu, the particular life-form into which he or she is born (family, local community).

It is only once one’s primary identifications with one’s ‘organic’ community are broken that one becomes an “individual,” namely by asserting one’s autonomy through identification with a secondary community that is also universal and ‘artificial’; that is, mediated and sustained through the free activity of independent subjects (profession, nation, independent peer-group versus traditional apprenticeship, organic community, prescribed social role, and so on) (Žižek 1999: 90).

The abstract opposition between primary and secondary identifications (where primary identifications are rejected in favour of secondary identifications) is suspended once the primary identifications are reintegrated and experienced as the “modes of appearance” of my secondary identifications (Žižek 1999: 90).

Žižek then further complicates this account of concrete universality, ‘crossbreeding’ it with Hegel’s distinction between neutral “positive” Universality and differentiated “actual”Universality (1999: 90). The former refers to the “impassive/neutral medium of the coexistence of its particular content”; the latter to the actual existence of Universality, “which is individuality, the assertion of the subject as unique and irreducible to the particular concrete totality into which he is inserted” (Žižek 1999: 91). The Universal as neutral ‘container’ that is indifferent towards the particulars it subsumes is contrasted with the Universal as “the power of negativity that undermines the fixity of every particular constellation” (Žižek 1999: 91). The latter is the Universality of the individuated subject as power of the negative; the power to oppose and negate all particular determinate content.

Indeed the passage from abstract to concrete universal, Žižek argues, proceeds thanks to the power of abstract negativity; phenomenologically speaking, this power of the negative “comes into existence in the guise of the individual’s absolute egotist self-contraction” (Žižek 1999: 91)—via what the Phenomenology will later describe, with reference to the discursive understanding, as the subject’s power to “tarry with the negative”.

The striking conclusion Žižek draws from this analysis is that the only way to make the passage from abstract to concrete universality is via “the full assertion” of this power of radical negativity, the negation of all particular content (1999: 92). At one level this would seem to be an instance of the famous Hegelian Aufhebung; we must lose immediate reality in the self contraction of the “night of the world” in order to regain it as social reality, symbolically mediated by the subject; or we must renounce the immediate organic whole, submitting ourselves to the activity of the understanding, in order to regain it at a higher, mediated level as the “totality of Reason” (Žižek 1999: 92).

Here the standard objection to the Hegelian Aufhebung looms, much rehearsed by poststructuralist readers of Hegel (see Žižek 1991: 31-38); namely that Hegel allows the moment of radical negativity, recognises “the horror of the psychotic self-contraction,” the radical dismemberment in which Spirit finds itself, but only in order to dialectically recuperate this negativity in the name of the “reconstituted organic whole” (Žižek 1999: 92-3).

From Abstract to Concrete Universality

Žižek’s radical reading of Hegel challenges this orthodoxy: the passage through negativity, from abstract to concrete universality, is not about avoiding the moment of radical negativity in favour of the rational totality. Rather, it claims that this passage is unavoidable; the passage to the high passes through the low, the direct choice of the higher is precisely the way to miss it (Žižek 1999: 93).

Citing another favourite speculative passage from the Phenomenology, Žižek refers to the peculiar conjunction of opposites that Hegel observes in the case of the penis, a conjunction which Nature “naively expresses when it combines the organ of its highest fulfillment, the organ of generation, with the organ of urination” (Hegel 1977: 210).

It is not a matter of choosing insemination rather than urination (as though these comprise an abstract opposition, as representational consciousness would have it).

Rather, we have to pass through the ‘wrong choice’ (biological excretion, urination) in order to attain the ‘right choice’ (biological conception, insemination, the reproduction of life): the speculative meaning — the Hegelian infinite judgment that articulates the co-existence of excretion/elimination and conception/reproduction, indeed the shift from biological conception to rational comprehension —emerges only as an after-effect of the first, ‘wrong’ reading, which is contained within, indeed constitutive of, the speculative meaning (Žižek 1999: 93).

Žižek’s point here is to show that the movement from abstract to concrete universality requires this passage through radical negativity, that is to say the ‘wrong’ choice of the abstract negativity of conflict and violence is the only way to arrive historically at the ‘right’ choice of a stable, rational, democratic state.

At the level of social and political life, the attempt to bypass the negative and directly choose “the ‘concrete universality’ of a particular ethical life-world” results in the even greater violence of a “regression to premodern organic society”; a denial of the “infinite right of subjectivity” that, for Hegel, is the principle of modernity itself (Žižek 1999: 93).

The modern subject-citizen cannot accept being immersed within a particular determinate social role prescribed within an organic social Whole; rather, as in Hegel’s famous analysis of the French revolution, it is only by passing through the “horror of revolutionary Terror” that the constraints of the premodern organic ‘concrete universality’ are destroyed and the “infinite right of subjectivity in its abstract negativity” can thus be asserted (Žižek 1999: 93).

Again, Žižek questions the standard reading of Hegel’s famous analysis in the Phenomenology of abstract freedom and Terror, according to which the revolutionary project, with its “direct assertion of abstract Universal reason,” perishes in “self-destructive fury” because it fails to organise its revolutionary energy into a stable and differentiated social order (1999: 93).

Hegel’s point, rather, as Žižek argues, is to show how the revolutionary Terror, despite being an historical deadlock, is nonetheless necessary in order to effect the historical passage towards the modern rational state (1999: 93). The historical situation that opposes “a premodern organic body and the revolutionary Terror which unleashes the destructive force of abstract negativity” always involves an Hegelian forced choice:

“one has to choose Terror” (the ‘wrong’ choice) against premodern organic community, in order to create the terrain for the ‘right’ choice; namely to create the conditions “for the new post-revolutionary reconciliation between the demands of social Order and the abstract freedom of the individual” (Žižek 1999: 94).

The destruction of organic community, the subject’s ‘irrational’ insistence on some ‘abstract’ feature of the whole that disrupts its harmonious unity, is the very movement by which the subject is historically actualised — or to put it in Hegelese, the manner in which substance also becomes subject.

As Žižek argues, the unity that emerges from this passage through negativity is thus no longer a substantial organic unity; rather it is a “substantially different Unity,” a Unity grounded in negativity, one in which this movement of negativity assumes a positive existence (1999: 96)—precisely in the modern political state, the formalised ‘embodiment’ of negativity that nonetheless retains the trace of this violent power to expose the life of its citizens. Hegel thus anticipates the Foucaultian-Agambenian theme of biopolitics, the ‘negative’ power of the state to both expose and administer the biological life of its citizens. 14

Revolutionary violence disrupts social reality through the exercise of abstract negativity, temporarily returning the subject to the elemental level of proto-subjectivity, the dismembering violence of the ‘night of the world’. Here one cannot help but make the comparison between Hegel’s brutal observation concerning the guillotine—the post-revolutionary reduction of death to a mechanical cut, “a meaningless chopping off of a cabbage head” (Hegel 1977: 360; Žižek 2006: 43)—and the archaic revival of ‘sacrificial’ beheadings practised by Islamist terrorists. Such beheadings occur through knife-wielding executioner rather than the impersonal operation of the guillotine; and while performed in secret they are video recorded in order to be disseminated via Jihadist propaganda websites for a globally dispersed audience.

In the latter case, however, this abstract negativity or political violence is not in the service of “Absolute Freedom,” as was the case, from Hegel’s perspective, with the post-French revolutionary Terror.7 Rather, Islamist terrorism is more akin to a violent abstract negation of the modern ‘right of individual subjectivity’: a simultaneously ‘pre- and post-modern’, technologically primitive (knives, boxcutters) and sophisticated (internet and communicational media), attempt to negate the ‘morally decadent’ liberal democratic capitalist order that makes this right of subjectivity possible.

The point of Hegel’s analysis, it must be said, is to show that this revolutionary Terror is fundamentally self-undermining; that it cannot reconcile the drive towards (abstractly conceived) Absolute Freedom with the historically achieved norms of freedom and subjectivity that define the institutions of modernity. Žižek’s claim is that such violence is nonetheless historically unavoidable as the way in which the transition from abstract to concrete universality is effected.

Here I return to my earlier question concerning the relationship between imagination and understanding: the contrast between the ‘romantic’ reading of Hegel that gives priority to the ‘pre-synthetic’ imagination of the ‘night of the world’ (abstract negation) versus the ‘idealist’ reading that emphasises the “power of the negative” articulated through the discursive understanding (determinate negation).

Žižek combines the two forms of negativity (abstract and determinate) in a Schellingian manner, arguing that they are two aspects of the same power of negativity. This move, however, exposes him to the criticism that his account of revolutionary Terror flirts with a political romanticism that valorises the abstract negativity of revolutionary struggle over the determinate negation that results in the rational social and political institutions of the modern state.

For Hegel, the abstract negativity of revolutionary violence must be aufgehoben in the rational organisation of the self-reforming social and political institutions of modernity. We only revert to the abstract negativity of revolutionary violence when these norms and institutions have utterly broken down, lost all legitimacy and normative authority, that is, when the (violent) historical transition to a new configuration of Spirit is already well underway.

Must we say, however, with Žižek that abstract negation is the only way that concrete universality — the freedom of subjectivity— can be historically realised?

Global Capitalism: ‘End of History’ or ‘History of Violence’?

The question for us today, then, is to ask what happens when this rational totality (Western neoliberal democracy) becomes disturbed by the contradictory dynamics of global capitalism. There are at least two distinct Hegelian responses: one is to point to the role of the self-reforming institutions of modernity, those of capitalist liberal democracy, to effectively pacify, manage, or control these contradictory dynamics without entirely eliminating them. This line of thought — given popular expression in Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992) — tends to the conclusion that liberal democratic capitalist modernity is here to stay; we have effectively reached the ‘end of history’ in which radical revolutionary political transformations are no longer likely or even possible.

This ‘Fukuyamaian’ line then cleaves into at least two opposing positions: the moral or religious conservative position arguing for a return to traditional values to offset the deracinating effects of neoliberalism, a desperate attempt to refound the disturbed Sittlichkeit of multicultural liberal democracies; and the libertarian-postmodernist position that displaces political radicalism to the contested sphere of culture, arguing for a cultural politics of difference, utopian multiculturalism, radical affirmation of the Other, and so on, as ways of affirming ethical forms of freedom and plural modes of subjectivity made possible by capitalist liberal democracy.

The point, for Žižek, is that both moral-religious conservative and libertarian-postmodernist positions share the ‘Fukuyamaian’ thesis: that capitalist liberal democracy is here to stay, hence needs to be either resisted or reformed. “The dominant ethos today,” as Žižek remarks, “is ‘Fukuyamaian’: liberal-democratic capitalism is accepted as the finally found formula of the best possible society, all one can do is render it more just, tolerant, and so forth” (2008: 421).

On the other hand, there is the romantic, revolutionary position, which argues for a retrieval of the abstract negativity of the revolutionary tradition in order to perform a destructive negation that would disrupt the capitalist economico-political system. This is the line of thought — Hegelian but also Marxist-Leninist in inspiration— that Žižek argues for in his most recent tome, In Defense of Lost Causes (2008).

For Žižek, we must first of all question and theoretically reject the ‘Fukuyamaian’ liberal democratic consensus: capitalist liberal democracy is not necessarily the ‘universal and homogeneous’ form of the state, as Kojève put it, in which the atomised post-historical animals of the species homo sapiens will privately enjoy their narcissistic consumer pleasures (Kojève 1969: 157-162).

Rather, the contradictory dynamics of contemporary global capitalism— we need only mention global credit, fuel, oil, and Third World food crises, and the stark reality of ecological and environmental limits to growth—suggest that it is possible that Western societies may be entering a period of instability, uncertainty, even decline.

Žižek cites four key antagonisms that are relevant here:

1. the ecological crisis (global warming, ‘peak oil’);

2. the challenge to concepts of private property posed by new forms of ‘intellectual property’;

3. the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (biogenetics); and

4. new forms of apartheid, particularly the proliferation of slums, separated communities, non-state governed zones of disorder (2008: 421-427).

In light of these intersecting antagonisms confronting global capitalism, the historical question of whether it is possible to redeem the failed revolutionary attempts of the past (Benjamin) may not yet be entirely closed.

Žižek’s radical Hegelian-Marxist wager is directed primarily against contemporary liberal democratic but also ‘postmodernist’ politics that depoliticise the economy—‘naturalising’ it as the unquestioned background of society, culture, and politics—and thereby displace political conflict to the sphere of culture and subjectivity. One could argue that the displacement of political radicalism to the cultural sphere—our contemporary‘aestheticisation of politics’—is an ideological disavowal of the real source of the antagonisms afflicting modern liberal democracies.

It represents a politically debilitating attempt to transpose the abstract negativity of revolutionary struggles to the ‘sublimated’ sphere of culture (as in the familiar ‘culture wars’ that pit social and religious conservatives against secular liberals and libertarian ‘postmodernists’ in symbolic struggles over moral and cultural questions of subjectivity, identity, and values). The problem with this pseudo-Hegelian sublimation of politics into culture, however, is that it leaves untouched what Marx correctly identified as the ‘base’ of these morally driven forms of sociocultural struggle: the economic dynamics of global capitalism.

This is why Žižek’s has recently argued—notably in In Defense of Lost Causes—for a refusal of the liberal democratic ‘moral blackmail’ that condemns in advance any form of radical politics as ‘totalitarian’ or ‘terroristic,’ and why he now advocates an active reclaiming of the historical and political revolutionary heritage of the Left.

Žižek’s radical Hegelian-Marxist proposal would entail acknowledging the power of negativity defining modern subjectivity, a recognition of the suppressed ‘night of the world’ or abstract negativity that continues to haunt the precarious ‘imaginary community’ of liberal democracy. The question, however, is whether this can be done without relapsing into the nightmarish violence of the Hegelian ‘night of the world’.

Are there more determinate forms of negation —of social and political struggle against the normative orders of capitalism— that might disturb the liberal democratic ‘moral consensus’ that has so strikingly paralysed the Left? Does reclaiming the history of revolutionary activism also imply the risk of embracing forms of violence that have marred twentieth-century political history? Or can the revolutionary spirit —the spectre of Marx, if one will— be reanimated without repeating this history of violence? Žižek’s Hegelianism and his Marxist-Leninism pull in different directions precisely on this issue.

The Hegelian answer would be that the abstract negativity of revolutionary violence must be aufgehoben through the formation of rational social and political institutions capable of reconciling the deracinating effects of capitalism with the principle of individual subjectivity. The Marxist-Leninist response, on the other hand, would argue that such liberal-capitalist institutions themselves be subjected to revolutionary violence—a ‘negation of the negation’—that would create the historical conditions for future (communist) emancipation. We should note, though, that the Hegelian response is retrospective and descriptive; a conceptual comprehension of the underlying logic of the dynamics of modernity that would reconcile us to the vicissitudes of modern freedom.

The Marxist-Leninist response, by contrast, is prospective and prescriptive; a demand to translate theory into practice, overcoming this alienating opposition by means of revolutionary action. Žižek appears to argue for a synthesis of these distinct, seemingly incompatible, responses, which raises the following difficulty: how is the Hegelian account of the negativity involved in the transition from abstract to concrete universality to be reconciled with the Marxist-Leninist demand for revolutionary action that would negate all such merely ‘ideological’ comprehension?

One response would be to suggest that Žižek is simply pointing to the unavoidability of the moment of negativity in any theorisation —and political practice— of the historical realisation of free subjectivity. He reminds us that the Left forgets this Hegelian lesson at its peril.

For in that case it either assents to the ‘Fukuyamaist’ consensus that there is ‘nothing to be done’ since we’ve already arrived at the (liberal-capitalist democratic) ‘end of history’; or else it naively asserts the need for a renewed romantic-revolutionary response that demands a violent (abstract) negation of the status quo.

The Hegelian response, by contrast, would be to argue for the possibility of a retrieval of the revolutionary tradition that has also become historically reflective and socio-politically determinate: not simply an abstract ‘violent’ negation of modern liberal-democratic institutions but rather a determinate negation of the normative consensus — the implicit background of economic neo-liberalism — that sustains them; a productive negation that would both preserve their emancipatory potentials while also negating their alienating sociocultural effects. Such a task, of course, is easier said than done.

Žižek’s bold engagement with the relationship between the negativity of the (Hegelian) subject and the antagonisms defining global capitalism thus throws down the philosophico-political gauntlet. All the more so if one believes that social and political movements today should reclaim that seemingly most ‘lost’ of causes — the Leftist revolutionary tradition committed to the concrete universality of freedom.

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Žižek, S. (1993). Tarrying With the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology,

Žižek, S. (1994). The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality,

Žižek, S. (1996). The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters,

Žižek, S/F. W. J. von Schelling (1997). The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World.

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