hegel – Page 12 – objet (a)

immanence antagonism

Laclau, Ernesto. “Can Immanence Explain Social Struggles?” Diacritics. 31:4. 2001. pp. 3-10.

What is important, however, in reference to these theological debates are the alternatives that remain in case the immanent route is not followed. For in that case evil is not the appearance of a rationality underlying and explaining it but a brute and irreducible fact. As the chasm separating good and evil is strictly constitutive and there is no ground reducing to its immanent development the totality of what exists, there is an element of negativity which cannot be eliminated either through dialectical mediation or through Nietzschean assertiveness (5).

In the same way that, with modernity, immanence ceased to be a theological concept and became fully secularized, the religious notion of evil becomes, with the modern turn, the kernel of what we can call “social antagonism.” What the latter retains from the former is the notion of a radical disjuncture — radical in the sense that it cannot be reabsorbed by any deeper objectivity which would reduce the terms of the antagonism to moments of its own internal movement — for example, the development of productive forces or any other form of immanence. Now, I would contend that it is only by accepting such a notion of antagonism — and its corollary, which is radical social division — that we are confronted with forms of social action that can truly be called political (5).

In the words of Marx: “By proclaiming the dissolution of the hitherto world order the proletariat merely states the secret of its own existence, for it is in fact the dissolution of that world order.” To put it in terms close to Hardt and Negri’s: the universality of the proletariat fully depends on its immanence within an objective social order which is entirely the product of capitalism—which is, in turn, a moment in the universal development of the productive forces. But, precisely for that reason, the universality of the revolutionary subject entails the end of politics—that is, the beginning of the withering away of the State and the transition (according to the Saint-Simonian motto adopted by Marxism) from the government of men to the administration of things.

As for the second revolution—the political one—its distinctive feature is, for Marx, an essential asymmetry: that between the universality of the task and the particularism of the agent carrying it out. Marx describes this asymmetry in nonequivocal terms: a certain regime is felt as universal oppression, and that allows the particular social force able to lead the struggle against it to present itself as a universal liberator — universalizing, thus, its particular objectives.

Here we find the real theoretical watershed in contemporary discussions: either we assert the possibility of a universality which is not politically constructed and mediated, or we assert that all universality is precarious and depends on a historical construction out of heterogeneous elements. Hardt and Negri accept the first alternative without hesitation. If, conversely, we accept the second, we are on the threshold of the Gramscian conception of hegemony. (Gramsci is another thinker for whom—understandably, given their premises—Hardt and Negri show little sympathy.) (5)

Laclau, Ernesto.”The Future of Radical Democracy.” Tonder, Lars. Lasse Thomassen. Radical Democracy: Politics between abundance and lack. Manchester UP. 2005. pp. 256-262).

… antagonism is irreducible, in which case social objectivity cannot be fully constituted. This explains why antagonisms cannot be conceived as dialectical contradictions. For the latter, negativity is only present to be superseded by a higher form of objectivity. Hegel’s Absolute Spirit and Marx’s classless society are the names of a fullness which makes it possible to detect the ultimate meaning of all previous stages and thus, to transform negativity in the apparential form of a deeper objectivity. What happens if, instead, we avoid this reductionist operation and take antagonisms at face value. In that case … what cannot be fully constituted is objectivity as such (257).

Every identity is a threatened identity … If an identity was not threatened by an antagonistic relation, it would be what it is as a pure objective datum. Between what it ontically is and the ontological fact that it is, there would be no distance. It would be mere positivity, closed in itself. Antagonism is what creates a gap between these two dimensions.

This distance between fullness of being and actual being is what we call lack. Representation of that distance, however, requires not only the discursive presence of actual being but also of the fullness of being.

But this creates an immediate problem, for fullness of being is that which is constitutively absent. The difficulty can be summarised in the following terms: the distance between full and actual being needs to be represented — which involves the two poles being somehow present in such representation — but one of the two cannot have a DIRECT representation because it operates through its very absence. Actual beings are the only means of representation. In such conditions, representation of the fullness of being can only take place if there is an essential unevenness among actual beings — that is, if an ontic particularity becomes the body through which an incommensurable fullness ‘positivises’ itself. This means that one element assumes an ontolgical function, which far exceeds, its ontic content. This is the moment of EXCESS. As we see, we are not dealing with an excess which is opposed to lack, but with one which directly results from the latter.

status and formation of the subject

Butler, Judith. “Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism.” Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek. New York: Verso, 2000. 11-43.

[S]hould not the incompletion of subject-formation be linked to the democratic contestation over signifiers? Can the ahistorical recourse to the Lacanian bar be reconciled with the strategic question that hegemony poses, or does it stand as a quasi-transcendental limitation on all possible subject-formations and strategies and, hence, as fundamentally indifferent to the political field it is said to condition (12-13).

Moreover, if we accept the notion that all historical struggle is nothing other than a vain effort to displace a founding limit that is structural in status …

If hegemony denotes the historical possibilities for articulation that emerge within a given political horizon, then it will make a significant difference whether we understand that field as historically revisable and transformable, or whether it is given as a field whose integrity is secured by certain structurally identifiable limits and exclusions (13).

Power is not stable or static, but is remade at various junctures within everyday life; it constitutes our tenuous sense of common sense, and is ensconced as the prevailing epistemes of a culture. Morevover, social transformation occurs not merely by rallying mass numbers in favour of a cause, but precisely through the ways in which daily social relations are rearticulated, and new conceptual horizons opened up by anomalous or subversive practices (13).

In the Greater Logic, Hegel gives the example of the person who thinks that he might learn how to swim by learning what is required before entering the water. The person does not realize tht one learns to swim only by entering the water and practising one’s strokes in the midst of the activity itself. Hegel implicitly likens the Kantian to one who seeks to know how to swim before actually swimming, and he counters this model of a self-possessed cognition with one that gives itself over to the activity itself, a form of knowing that is given over to the world it seeks to know. Although Hegel is often dubbed a philospher of ‘mastery’, we can see here … that the ek-static disposition of the self towards its world undoes cognitive mastery. Hegel’s own persistent references to ‘losing oneself’ and ‘giving oneself over’ only confirm the point that the knowing subject cannot be understood as one who imposes ready-made categories on a pre-given world. The categories are shaped by the world it seeks to know, just as the world is not known without the prior action of those categories. And just as Hegel insists on revising serveral times his very definition of ‘universality’, so he makes plain that the categories by which the world becomes available to us are continually remade by the encounter with the world that they facilitate.

We do not remain the same, and neither do our cognitive categories, as we enter into a knowing encounter with the world. Both the knowing subject and the world are undone and redone by the act of knowledge (19-20).

Butler’s relationship to Hegel

Moya Lloyd. Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics Polity 2007.

While thinkers prior to Hegel had examined the nature of desire, few, as Allan Megill notes, had thought that there might be ‘a constitutive relation between desire and subjectivity”, as Hegel did, and it is this constitutive relation that both interested his French critics and continues to interest Butler. Hegel’s Phenomenology, as stated, examines the way in which desire and self-consciousness emerge side by side (15).

ek-static subject, a subject outside itself, or to put it differently, a subject that is not self-identical. … it is the idea of ek-static subjectivity, derived, however loosely, from Hegel, continues to inspire Butler’s work to date, although the form it takes is one increasingly informed, in large part by psychoanalysis. For this reason, far from the comic subject of desire she attributes to Hegel, Butler’s subject is a melancholic figure (16).

… the subject is an ek-static subject; one that is always outside —or other to— itself. It is this understanding of the subject and its relation to the other … that underpins, amongst other things, Butler’s examination of the differential values placed on disparate lives and deaths; her treatment of what counts as a liveable life, her exploration of the constitutive role of mourning in the production of the psyche; and her discussion of the precariousness of all life (18).

heteronormativity: institutions, modes of understanding, norms and discourss that treat heterosexuality as naural to humanity

butler psychic life Hegel

disavowal of the body because it represents the terror of death. Through the imposition of ethical norms,

subject is then subordinated to norms, and the norms are subjectivating, that is, they give an ethical shape to the reflexivity of this emerging subject. The subjection that takes place under the sign of the ethical is a flight from fear, and so is constituted as a kind of flight and denial, a fearful flight from fear … (43)

flight from fear, is a flight from the body … vacating the body and “clinging to what appears to be most disembodied: thought”

Sadism towards the other directed back upon itself

desire and formation of subject

Butler, J. The Psychic Life of Power Stanford UP. 1997.

🙂 SUBJECTION: to be subjected to a form of power external to oneself, this is familiar form that subjection takes. JB adds that the very formation of the subject is dependent on that power. The power that subordinates also produces the subject. So far, so good.

[Yes power subordinates, yes that’s a fair description] But if, following Foucault, we understand power as forming the subject as well, as providing the very condition of its existence and the trajectory of its desire, then power is not simply what we oppose but also, in a strong sense, what we depend on for our existence … Subjection consists precisely in this fundamental dependency on a discourse we never chose but that, paradoxically, initiates and sustains our agency. (2)

Subjection signifies the process of becoming subordinated to power as well as the process of becoming a subject Foucault doesn’t theorize the psychic nature of this subordination to power. What are the specific mechanisms of how the subject is formed in submission. What is the psychic form that power takes?

Not only does the entire domain of the psyche remain largely unremarked in his theory, but power in this double valence of subordinating and producing remains unexplored.” (2)

Thinking the theory of power together with a theory of the psyche

… the question of subjection, of how the subject is formed in subordination, preoccupies the section of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit that traces the slave’s approach to freedom and his disappointing fall into the “unhappy consciousness.” The master, who at first appears to be “external” to the slave, reemerges as the slave’s own conscience. The unhappiness of the consciousness that emerges is its own self-beratement, the effect of the transmutation of the master into a psychic reality.

The self-mortifications that seek to redress the insistent corporeality of self-consciousness institute bad conscience. This figure of consciousness turned back upon itself prefigures Nietzsche’s account, in On the Genealogy of Morals, not only of how repression and regulation form the overlapping phenomena of conscience and bad conscience, but also of how the latter become essential to the formation, persistence, and continuity of the subject. In each case, power that at first appears as external, pressed upon the subject, pressing the subject into subordination, assumes a psychic form that constitutes the subject’s self-identity. (3)

:)This idea of an external power crushing down on us, ending up as our own conscience, a power external that is hits us bears down on us, but also is turned back on itself and forms our conscience, a self-beratement that makes sure we stay in line, adhere to the rules or else. The unhappy consciousness was this ethical imperative of the slave fearing for its life, clinging to life at all costs, internalizing the prohibitions and dictates of the overbearing lord, that now becomes the conscience of the slave as it tries to take flight from its body. Butler tries to say if Hegel were consistent he would have shown how every attempt, for example how he shows in stoicism and skepticism that both reinforce that which it tries to negate. Except when the priest enters the scene then all it lost.

Turning Back: tropological inauguration of the subject

We cannot presume a subject who performs an internalization if the formation of the subject is in need of explanation . The figure to which we refer has not yeet acquired existence and is not part fo a verifiable explanation, yet our reference continues to make a certain kind of sense. The paradox of subjection implies a paradox of referentiality: namely, that we must refer to what does not yet exist. 4

Althusser’s ISA and Interpellation

Althusser’s essay ISA, poses interpellation, as a discursive construction of the subject. An example of interpellation is the hailing of a person by a cop. Butler asks why does the guy turn around when the cop says “hey you!”.

Is this a guilty subject and, if so, how did it become guilty? Might the theory of interpellation require a theory of conscience?

The interpellation of the subject through the inaugurative address of state authority presupposes not only that the inculcation of conscience already has taken place, but that conscience, understood as the psychic operation of a regulatory norm, constitutes a specifically psychic and social working of power on which interpellation depends but for which it can give no account. (5)

Passionate Attachments

:)Here we go in. This may sound rather bizarre as I try to scope out the key ingredients of Butler’s argument.

– The subject is effect of power that turns back on itself, power in recoil.

– The founding subordination is rigorously repressed, so this turning back is repressed, this repression means the subject emerges in tandem with the unconscious. Wow, does this mean the No! of the father counts as a founding subordination that is repressed? JB wouldn’t go for that.

– No subject emerges without developing a passionate attachment on those whom he is fundamentally dependent. Butler cites the example of child vulnerable,dependent and attached to its earliest caregivers. She seems to be arguing here of an attachment to those with whom we have an engagement with in our subordination.

… there is no formation of the subject without a passionate attachment to those by whom she or he is subordinated, [therefore] subordination proves central to the becoming of the subject. As the condition of becoming a subject, subordination implies being in a mandatory submission. Moreover, the desire to survive, “to be,” is a pervasively exploitable desire.

“I would rather exist in subordination than not exist” is one formulation of this predicament (where the risk of death is also possible) (7). This child must attach in order to persist in and as itself (8).

No subject can emerge without this attachment, formed in dependency, but no subject, in the course of its formation, can ever afford fully to “see” it. This attachment in its primary forms must both come to be and be denied, its coming to be must consist in its partial denial, for the subject to emerge. 8

:)How does JB go from the ‘desire to survive’ to unchecked desire to survive will lead to dissolution of the subject?

:)This mandatory submission and passionate attachment in one’s primary years to early caregivers, that one has no choice in the matter, one is subordinated to their care as desire to survive trumps any possibility of rejecting their provisioning of an environment in which to grow and get nourished. But this attachment is denied and repressed, what is repressed into the unconscious returns, through a neurotic repetition “the subject pursues its own dissolution.” How is this? In a footnote to this, Butler mentions the “death drive” as a further description or label one can attach to this dynamic in which the subject wills its own destruction.

An unchecked desire will lead to dissolution of the subject. The subject therefore acts against its own desire, frustrating it, otherwise the vexation of desire will prove to be its own undoing. Thus, the subject seeks to contain this desire by seeking out its own subordination.

🙂Desire is going to kill you, so you have to turn against it, embrace prohibition, regulation, suppression to stifle desire, but these are forms of power that also lead to the subject’s subordination.

Desire will aim at unraveling the subject, but be thwarted by precisely the subject in whose name it operates.

… for the subject to persist, the subject must thwart its own desire. And for desire to triumph, the subject must be threatened with dissolution. A subject turned against itself (its desire) appears, on this model, to be a condition of the persistence of the subject (9).

“To desire the conditions of one’s own subordination is thus required to persist as oneself.” (9)

What does it mean to embrace the very form of power —regulation, prohibition, suppression —that threatens one with dissolution in an effort, precisely, to persist in one’s own existence?

It is not simply that one requires the recognition of the other and that a form of recognition is conferred through subordination, but rather that one is dependent on power for one’s very formation, that that formation is impossible without dependency, and that the posture of the adult subject consists precisely in the denial and reenactment of this dependency. The “I” emerges upon the condition that it deny its formation in dependency, the conditions of its own possibility. The “I,” however, is threatened with disruption precisely by this denial, by its unconscious pursuit of its own dissolution through neurotic repetitions that restage the primary scenarios it not only refuses to see but cannot see, if it wishes to remain itself. This means, of course, that, predicated on what it refuses to know, it is separated from itself and can never quite become or remain itself. 9-10