{"id":5287,"date":"2010-03-20T19:23:13","date_gmt":"2010-03-20T23:23:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=5287"},"modified":"2012-11-28T00:39:26","modified_gmt":"2012-11-28T05:39:26","slug":"z","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2010\/03\/20\/z\/","title":{"rendered":"sinnerbrink on \u017di\u017eek on Hegel"},"content":{"rendered":"

International Journal of \u017di\u017eek Studies<\/em>. Volume Two, Number Two<\/a>\u00a0 “The Hegelian “Night of the World”<\/span>: \u017di\u017eek on Subjectivity, Negativity, and Universality”\u00a0 Robert Sinnerbrink – Macquarie University (Australia)<\/p>\n

Hegel\u2019s 1805- 6 Jenaer Realphilosophie<\/em> manuscripts, the enigmatic “night of the world”<\/span> passage:<\/p>\n

The human being is this night<\/span>, this empty nothing, that contains everything in its simplicity\u2014an unending wealth of many representations, images, of which none belongs to him\u2014or which are not present. This night<\/span>, the interior of nature, that exists here\u2014pure self\u2014in phantasmagorical representations, is night<\/span> all around it, in which here shoots a bloody head<\/span> \u2014 there another white ghastly apparition, suddenly here before it, and just so disappears. One catches sight of this night<\/span> when one looks human beings in the eye\u2014into a night<\/span> that becomes awful<\/strong> (Hegel 1974: 204; quoted in Verene 1985: 7-8).<\/p>\n

\u017di\u017eek goes on to link the Hegelian ‘night of the world’<\/span> with Schelling\u2019s conception of the subject as \u201cpure night of the Self\u201d, \u201cinfinite lack of Being\u201d; the \u201cviolent gesture of contraction\u201d that also forms the basis of Hegel\u2019s account of madness as the cutting of all links with external reality, which Hegel then construes as the subject\u2019s regression to the level of the \u201canimal soul\u201d still unreflectively immersed in its immediate natural environment (\u017di\u017eek 1997: 8; 1999: 34-35).<\/p>\n

Where \u017di\u017eek differs from Hegel, however, is in arguing that this withdrawal from the world, the subject\u2019s contraction and severing of all links with the Umwelt, [Umwelt<\/em> German, ‘environment’] is rather the founding gesture of \u2018humanization\u2019,<\/strong> indeed the emergence of subjectivity itself (1997: 8).<\/p>\n

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). <\/span><\/p>\n

The question, psychoanalytically, is not so much how the fall into madness is possible, but rather how the subject is able to attain \u201cnormalcy\u201d by climbing out of madness \u2014 for Hegel, this radical withdrawal from the world\u2014in order to reconstitute social reality through symbolic mediation<\/span>.<\/p>\n

Indeed, rather than a metaphysical tract on the \u2018totalising\u2019 Subject of absolute idealism, Hegel\u2019s 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:<\/p>\n

Death<\/span>, 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<\/strong> by devastation<\/strong>, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself.<\/span> 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<\/span> \u2026 (Hegel 1977: 19).<\/p>\n

What is striking in this celebrated passage is the way that experiences of finitude\u2014of death, negativity, absence, loss\u2014are all presented as constitutive of the power of the self-conscious Subject as Geist.<\/span><\/p>\n

Subjectivity is thus constituted through a <\/span>negative self-relation<\/em><\/strong>: 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<\/span>. The subject is not only negative self-relation, a relation to the Other, it is also a self-relating negativity<\/em><\/strong>: that which wins its truth (its self-identity in otherness) only through the experience of radical negativity or the freedom to negate itself,\u00a0 to say \u2018no!\u2019 to everything, even itself;<\/span> or as Hegel puts it, through the experience of finding itself in and through \u201cutter dismemberment\u201d.<\/p>\n

Once again, for Hegel this negativity is constitutive, ontological rather than ontic<\/strong>, as Heidegger would say. Self-conscious Spirit is this power of self-relating negativity, which is to say free subjectivity, only through \u201ctarrying with the negative\u201d. 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<\/strong> and experience of mastery and servitude, not to mention the alienated \u2018freedom\u2019 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 \u2018violence\u2019 of abstract universality). This power of radical negativity, this \u201cabyss of freedom,\u201d is precisely what for Hegel defines and determines \u201cthe Subject\u201d <\/strong>(8).<\/p>\n

In The Ticklish Subject<\/em> as well as elsewhere, \u017di\u017eek\u2019s analysis of the Hegelian “night of the world”<\/span>is explicitly linked with the question of abstract negativity and its relationship with concrete universal<\/span>. In an argument charged with political resonances, \u017di\u017eek shows how the radical negativity of subjectivity<\/strong>\u2014the capacity to negate all our finite, particular determinations\u2014enables the dialectical passage from abstract to concrete universality<\/span>. In practical terms, this means there is a dimension of violence, conflict, or antagonism that cannot be eliminated in historical and socio-political experience.<\/strong> Far from rehearsing the clich\u00e9 of Hegel\u2019s reconciliationist stance towards the state, \u017di\u017eek claims that the radical negativity of the subject\u2014the ‘night of the world’ <\/span>\u2014 means that there can be no concrete universal<\/span> without the historico-political passage through madness, violence, even revolutionary terror<\/strong> (as in Hegel\u2019s 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<\/span> provides an essential backdrop, frequently misunderstood, to \u017di\u017eek\u2019s critique of various contemporary forms of \u2018post-political\u2019 ethical resistance to the state (most recently, Simon Critchley\u2019s ethically grounded neo-anarchism (see Critchley 2007; \u017di\u017eek 2006: 332-334; \u017di\u017eek 2008: 339-350).<\/p>\n

\u017di\u017eek returns again and again to the Hegelian distinction between abstract and<\/strong> concrete universality<\/span>. What does it mean? Against the prevailing stereotype of Hegel\u2019s subordinating of particularity to universality, \u017di\u017eek points out that universality in its concrete dimension is realised through individualisation<\/em><\/span>; that is, the concrete universal<\/span> is embodied in the individual.<\/strong> As \u017di\u017eek observes, Hegel was the first thinker to argue that the \u201cproperly modern notion of individualisation\u201d 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).<\/p>\n

It is only once one\u2019s primary identifications with one\u2019s \u2018organic\u2019 community are broken that one becomes an \u201cindividual,\u201d<\/span> namely by asserting one\u2019s autonomy through identification with a secondary community that is also universal and \u2018artificial\u2019; 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) (\u017di\u017eek 1999: 90).<\/p>\n

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 \u201cmodes of appearance\u201d of my secondary identifications (\u017di\u017eek 1999: 90).<\/p>\n

\u017di\u017eek then further complicates this account of concrete universality, \u2018crossbreeding\u2019 it with Hegel\u2019s distinction between neutral \u201cpositive\u201d Universality and differentiated \u201cactual\u201dUniversality<\/strong> (1999: 90). The former refers to the \u201cimpassive\/neutral medium of the coexistence of its particular content\u201d; the latter to the actual existence of Universality, \u201cwhich is individuality<\/em>, the assertion of the subject as unique and irreducible to the particular concrete totality into which he is inserted\u201d (\u017di\u017eek 1999: 91). The Universal as neutral \u2018container\u2019 that is indifferent towards the particulars it subsumes is contrasted with the Universal as \u201cthe power of negativity that undermines the fixity of every particular constellation<\/strong>\u201d (\u017di\u017eek 1999: 91). The latter is the Universality of the individuated subject as power of the negative<\/strong>; the power to oppose and negate all particular determinate content. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Indeed the passage from abstract to<\/strong> concrete universal<\/span>, \u017di\u017eek argues, proceeds thanks to the power of abstract negativity<\/strong>; phenomenologically speaking, this power of the negative \u201ccomes into existence in the guise of the individual\u2019s absolute egotist self-contraction\u201d (\u017di\u017eek 1999: 91)\u2014via what the Phenomenology <\/em>will later describe, with reference to the discursive understanding, as the subject\u2019s power to “tarry with the negative”<\/span>.<\/p>\n

The striking conclusion \u017di\u017eek draws from this analysis is that the only way to make the passage from abstract to concrete universality<\/span> is via \u201cthe full assertion\u201d 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<\/em>; we must lose immediate reality in the self contraction of the “night of the world”<\/span> 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 \u201ctotality of Reason\u201d (\u017di\u017eek 1999: 92).<\/p>\n

Here the standard objection to the Hegelian Aufhebung <\/em>looms, much rehearsed by poststructuralist readers of Hegel (see \u017di\u017eek 1991: 31-38); namely that Hegel allows the moment of radical negativity, recognises \u201cthe horror of the psychotic self-contraction,\u201d the radical dismemberment in which Spirit finds itself, but only in order to dialectically recuperate this negativity in the name of the \u201creconstituted organic whole\u201d (\u017di\u017eek 1999: 92-3).<\/p>\n

From Abstract to<\/strong> Concrete Universality<\/span><\/p>\n

\u017di\u017eek\u2019s 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<\/strong> (\u017di\u017eek 1999: 93).<\/p>\n

Citing another favourite speculative passage from the Phenomenology<\/em>, \u017di\u017eek refers to the peculiar conjunction of opposites that Hegel observes in the case of the penis, a conjunction which Nature \u201cnaively expresses when it combines the organ of its highest fulfillment, the organ of generation, with the organ of urination<\/strong>\u201d (Hegel 1977: 210).<\/p>\n

It is not a matter of choosing insemination rather than urination<\/strong> (as though these comprise an abstract opposition, as representational consciousness would have it).<\/p>\n

Rather, we have to pass through the \u2018wrong choice\u2019 (biological excretion, urination) in order to attain the \u2018right choice\u2019 (biological conception, insemination, the reproduction of life): the speculative meaning \u2014 the Hegelian infinite judgment that articulates the co-existence of excretion\/elimination and conception\/reproduction, indeed the shift from biological conception to rational comprehension \u2014emerges only as an after-effect of the first, \u2018wrong\u2019 reading, which is contained within, indeed constitutive of, the speculative meaning (\u017di\u017eek 1999: 93).<\/p>\n

\u017di\u017eek\u2019s point here is to show that the movement from abstract to concrete universality requires this passage through radical negativity, that is to say the \u2018wrong\u2019 choice of the abstract negativity of conflict and violence is the only way to arrive historically at the \u2018right\u2019 choice of a stable, rational, democratic state<\/span>.<\/p>\n

At the level of social and political life, the attempt to bypass the negative and directly choose \u201cthe ‘concrete universality’<\/span> of a particular ethical life-world\u201d results in the even greater violence of a \u201cregression to premodern organic society\u201d; a denial of the \u201cinfinite right of subjectivity\u201d that, for Hegel, is the principle of modernity itself (\u017di\u017eek 1999: 93).<\/p>\n

The modern subject-citizen cannot accept being immersed within a particular determinate social role prescribed within an organic social Whole; rather, as in Hegel\u2019s famous analysis of the French revolution, it is only by passing through the \u201chorror of revolutionary Terror\u201d that the constraints of the premodern organic ‘concrete universality’<\/span> are destroyed and the \u201cinfinite right of subjectivity in its abstract negativity\u201d can thus be asserted (\u017di\u017eek 1999: 93).<\/p>\n

Again, \u017di\u017eek questions the standard reading of Hegel\u2019s famous analysis in the Phenomenology<\/em> of abstract freedom and Terror, according to which the revolutionary project, with its \u201cdirect assertion of abstract Universal reason,\u201d perishes in \u201cself-destructive fury\u201d because it fails to organise its revolutionary energy into a stable and differentiated social order (1999: 93).<\/p>\n

Hegel\u2019s point, rather, as \u017di\u017eek 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 \u201ca premodern organic body and the revolutionary Terror which unleashes the destructive force of abstract negativity\u201d always involves an Hegelian forced choice:<\/p>\n

\u201cone has to choose Terror\u201d (the \u2018wrong\u2019 choice) against premodern organic community, in order to create the terrain for the \u2018right\u2019 choice; namely to create the conditions \u201cfor the new post-revolutionary reconciliation between the demands of social Order and the abstract freedom of the individual\u201d (\u017di\u017eek 1999: 94).<\/span><\/p>\n

The destruction of organic community, the subject\u2019s \u2018irrational\u2019 insistence on some \u2018abstract\u2019 feature of the whole that disrupts its harmonious unity, is the very movement by which the subject is historically actualised \u2014 or to put it in Hegelese, the manner in which<\/span> substance also becomes subject.<\/span><\/p>\n

As \u017di\u017eek argues, the unity that emerges from this passage through negativity is thus no longer a substantial organic unity; rather it is a \u201csubstantially different Unity,\u201d a Unity grounded in negativity, one in which this movement of negativity assumes a positive existence (1999: 96)\u2014precisely in the modern political state, the formalised \u2018embodiment\u2019 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 \u2018negative\u2019 power of the state to both expose and administer the biological life of its citizens. 14<\/p>\n

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’<\/span>. Here one cannot help but make the comparison between Hegel\u2019s brutal observation concerning the guillotine\u2014the post-revolutionary reduction of death to a mechanical cut, \u201ca meaningless chopping off of a cabbage head\u201d (Hegel 1977: 360; \u017di\u017eek 2006: 43)\u2014and the archaic revival of \u2018sacrificial\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

In the latter case, however, this abstract negativity or political violence is not in the service of \u201cAbsolute Freedom,\u201d as was the case, from Hegel\u2019s perspective, with the post-French revolutionary Terror.7 Rather, Islamist terrorism is more akin to a violent abstract negation of the modern \u2018right of individual subjectivity\u2019: a simultaneously \u2018pre- and post-modern\u2019, technologically primitive (knives, boxcutters) and sophisticated (internet and communicational media), attempt to negate the \u2018morally decadent\u2019 liberal democratic capitalist order that makes this right of subjectivity possible.<\/p>\n

The point of Hegel\u2019s 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. \u017di\u017eek\u2019s claim is that such violence is nonetheless historically unavoidable as the way in which the transition from abstract to concrete universality<\/span> is effected.<\/p>\n

Here I return to my earlier question concerning the relationship between imagination and understanding: the contrast between the \u2018romantic\u2019 reading of Hegel that gives priority to the \u2018pre-synthetic\u2019 imagination of the ‘night of the world’<\/span> (abstract negation) versus the \u2018idealist\u2019 reading that emphasises the \u201cpower of the negative\u201d articulated through the discursive understanding (determinate negation).<\/p>\n

\u017di\u017eek combines the two forms of negativity (abstract and determinate) in a Schellingian manner<\/strong>, arguing that they are two aspects of the same power of negativity<\/strong>. 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.<\/p>\n

For Hegel, the abstract negativity of revolutionary violence must be aufgehoben<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n

Must we say, however, with \u017di\u017eek that abstract negation is the only way that concrete universality<\/span> \u2014 the freedom of subjectivity\u2014 can be historically realised?<\/span><\/p>\n

Global Capitalism: \u2018End of History\u2019 or \u2018History of Violence\u2019?<\/strong><\/p>\n

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 \u2014 given popular expression in Fukuyama\u2019s The End of History and the Last Man (1992) \u2014 tends to the conclusion that liberal democratic capitalist modernity is here to stay; we have effectively reached the \u2018end of history\u2019 in which radical revolutionary political transformations are no longer likely or even possible.<\/p>\n

This \u2018Fukuyamaian\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

The point, for \u017di\u017eek, is that both moral-religious conservative and libertarian-postmodernist positions share the \u2018Fukuyamaian\u2019 thesis: that capitalist liberal democracy is here to stay, hence needs to be either resisted or reformed. \u201cThe dominant ethos today,\u201d as \u017di\u017eek remarks, \u201cis \u2018Fukuyamaian\u2019: 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\u201d (2008: 421).<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 Hegelian but also Marxist-Leninist in inspiration\u2014 that \u017di\u017eek argues for in his most recent tome, In Defense of Lost Causes<\/em> (2008).<\/p>\n

For \u017di\u017eek, we must first of all question and theoretically reject the \u2018Fukuyamaian\u2019 liberal democratic consensus: capitalist liberal democracy is not necessarily the \u2018universal and homogeneous\u2019 form of the state, as Koj\u00e8ve put it, in which the atomised post-historical animals of the species homo sapiens will privately enjoy their narcissistic consumer pleasures (Koj\u00e8ve 1969: 157-162).<\/p>\n

Rather, the contradictory dynamics of contemporary global capitalism\u2014 we need only mention global credit, fuel, oil, and Third World food crises, and the stark reality of ecological and environmental limits to growth\u2014suggest that it is possible that Western societies may be entering a period of instability, uncertainty, even decline.<\/p>\n

\u017di\u017eek cites four key antagonisms that are relevant here:<\/p>\n

1. the ecological crisis (global warming, \u2018peak oil\u2019);<\/strong><\/p>\n

2. the challenge to concepts of private property posed by new forms of \u2018intellectual property\u2019;<\/strong><\/p>\n

3. the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (biogenetics); and <\/strong><\/p>\n

4. new forms of apartheid, particularly the proliferation of slums, separated communities, non-state governed zones of disorder<\/strong> (2008: 421-427).<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u017di\u017eek\u2019s radical Hegelian-Marxist wager is directed primarily against contemporary liberal democratic but also \u2018postmodernist\u2019 politics that depoliticise the economy\u2014\u2018naturalising\u2019 it as the unquestioned background of society, culture, and politics\u2014and thereby displace political conflict to the sphere of culture and subjectivity. One could argue that the displacement of political radicalism to the cultural sphere\u2014our contemporary\u2018aestheticisation of politics\u2019\u2014is an ideological disavowal of the real source of the antagonisms afflicting modern liberal democracies.<\/p>\n

It represents a politically debilitating attempt to transpose the abstract negativity of revolutionary struggles to the \u2018sublimated\u2019 sphere of culture (as in the familiar \u2018culture wars\u2019 that pit social and religious conservatives against secular liberals and libertarian \u2018postmodernists\u2019 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 \u2018base\u2019 of these morally driven forms of sociocultural struggle: the economic dynamics of global capitalism.<\/p>\n

This is why \u017di\u017eek\u2019s has recently argued\u2014notably in In Defense of Lost Causes<\/em>\u2014for a refusal of the liberal democratic \u2018moral blackmail\u2019 that condemns in advance any form of radical politics as \u2018totalitarian\u2019 or \u2018terroristic,\u2019 and why he now advocates an active reclaiming of the historical and political revolutionary heritage of the Left.<\/p>\n

\u017di\u017eek\u2019s radical Hegelian-Marxist proposal would entail acknowledging the power of negativity defining modern subjectivity,<\/strong> a recognition of the suppressed ‘night of the world’<\/span> or abstract negativity that continues to haunt the precarious \u2018imaginary community\u2019 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’<\/span>.<\/p>\n

Are there more determinate forms of negation \u2014of social and political struggle against the normative orders of capitalism\u2014 that might disturb the liberal democratic \u2018moral consensus\u2019 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 \u2014the spectre of Marx, if one will\u2014 be reanimated without repeating this history of violence? \u017di\u017eek\u2019s Hegelianism and his Marxist-Leninism pull in different directions precisely on this issue.<\/p>\n

The Hegelian answer would be that the abstract negativity of revolutionary violence must be aufgehoben<\/strong> 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\u2014a \u2018negation of the negation\u2019\u2014that 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.<\/p>\n

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. \u017di\u017eek 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 \u2018ideological\u2019 comprehension?<\/p>\n

One response would be to suggest that \u017di\u017eek is simply pointing to the unavoidability of the moment of negativity in any theorisation<\/strong> \u2014and political practice\u2014 of the historical realisation of free subjectivity. He reminds us that the Left forgets this Hegelian lesson at its peril.<\/p>\n

For in that case it either assents to the \u2018Fukuyamaist\u2019 consensus that there is \u2018nothing to be done\u2019 since we\u2019ve already arrived at the (liberal-capitalist democratic) \u2018end of history\u2019; or else it naively asserts the need for a renewed romantic-revolutionary response that demands a violent (abstract) negation of the status quo.<\/p>\n

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 \u2018violent\u2019 negation of modern liberal-democratic institutions but rather a determinate negation of the normative consensus \u2014 the implicit background of economic neo-liberalism \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

\u017di\u017eek\u2019s 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 \u2018lost\u2019 of causes \u2014 the Leftist revolutionary tradition committed to the concrete universality of freedom.<\/p>\n

\u017di\u017eek, S. (1991). For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor<\/p>\n

\u017di\u017eek, S. (1992\/2001). Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out, Revised Edition, New York\/London: Routledge.<\/p>\n

\u017di\u017eek, S. (1993). Tarrying With the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology,<\/p>\n

\u017di\u017eek, S. (1994). The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality,<\/p>\n

\u017di\u017eek, S. (1996). The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters,<\/p>\n

\u017di\u017eek, S\/F. W. J. von Schelling (1997). The Abyss of Freedom\/Ages of the World.<\/p>\n

An Essay by Slavoj \u017di\u017eek with the text of Schelling\u2019s Die Weltalter (second draft, 1813), in English translation by Judith Norman, Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press.<\/p>\n

\u017di\u017eek, S. (1999). The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology,<\/p>\n

\u017di\u017eek, S. (2006). The Parallax View,<\/p>\n

\u017di\u017eek, S. (2008). In Defense of Lost Causes<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

International Journal of \u017di\u017eek Studies. Volume Two, Number Two\u00a0 “The Hegelian “Night of the World”: \u017di\u017eek on Subjectivity, Negativity, and Universality”\u00a0 Robert Sinnerbrink – Macquarie University (Australia) Hegel\u2019s 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\u2014an … Continue reading “sinnerbrink on \u017di\u017eek on Hegel”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,65,38,100,142,15,20],"tags":[109],"class_list":["post-5287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-concrete_universal","category-dia-mat","category-ethics","category-hegel","category-nightworld","category-subjectivity","category-zizek","tag-whoa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5287"}],"version-history":[{"count":31,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5287\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5308,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5287\/revisions\/5308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}