{"id":9590,"date":"2012-10-21T00:36:45","date_gmt":"2012-10-21T05:36:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=9590"},"modified":"2012-12-10T15:36:16","modified_gmt":"2012-12-10T20:36:16","slug":"hegel-death-drive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/10\/21\/hegel-death-drive\/","title":{"rendered":"hegel death drive"},"content":{"rendered":"

LTN 197:<\/strong> Hegel was right to point out again and again that, when one talks, one always dwells in the universal\u2014which 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\u2014as the early Lacan liked to say, I am not speaking, I am being spoken by language<\/strong>. This is one of the ways to understand what Lacan called \u2018symbolic castration\u2019: the price the subject pays for its \u2018transubstantiation\u2019 from the agent of a direct animal vitality to the speaking subject whose identity is kept apart from the direct vitality of passions.<\/p>\n

the Servant\u2019s 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:<\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n

What, then, does the Servant get in exchange for renouncing<\/p>\n

How, then, does the truly historical thought break with such universalized \u2018mobilism\u2019? In what precise sense is it historical and not simply the rejection of \u2018mobilism\u2019 on behalf of some eternal Principles exempted from the flow of generation and corruption?<\/p>\n

Here, one should again differentiate historicity proper from organic evolution.<\/p>\n

organic evolugion: <\/strong>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 \u2018cycle of life\u2019.<\/p>\n

In history proper<\/strong>, on the contrary, the universal Principle is caught into the \u2018infinite\u2019 struggle with itself, i.e., the struggle is each time the struggle for the fate of the universality itself. This is why the eminently \u2018historical\u2019 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\u2014however, 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\u2019 passions as the instruments of its implementation.<\/p>\n

First, since the meaning of one\u2019s acts is a priori inaccessible to individuals who accomplish them, heroes included, there is no \u2018science of politics\u2019 able to predict the course of events: \u2018nobody has ever the right to declare himself depositary of the Spirit\u2019s self-knowledge\u2019<\/span>17, and this impossibility \u2018spares Hegel the fanaticism of \u2018objective responsibility\u2019\u201918 \u2014 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 \u2018conceiving the Absolute as Substance, not as Subject\u2019\u2014 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<\/span>.<\/p>\n

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 \u2018open\u2019, undecided \u2014 this confused mixture \u2018generates sense insofar as it unravels itself\u2019:<\/span><\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

LTN 218<\/strong>:\u00a0 This is how one should read Hegel\u2019s thesis that, in the course of the dialectical development, things \u2018become what they are\u2019: it is not that a temporal deployment merely actualizes some pre-existing atemporal conceptual structure \u2014 this atemporal conceptual structure itself is the result of contingent temporal decisions.<\/p>\n

But why shouldn\u2019t we then say that there is simply no atemporal conceptual structure, that all there is is the gradual temporal deployment?<\/p>\n

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 \u2018primacy of synchrony over diachrony\u2019. 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.<\/p>\n

This simplistic notion of the \u2018primacy of synchrony over diachrony\u2019 overlooks the (properly dialectical) point, made long ago by (among others) T.S. Eliot in his \u2018Tradition and Individual Talent\u2019,on how each truly new artistic phenomenon not only designates a break from the entire past, but retroactively changes this past itself<\/span>.<\/p>\n

At every historical conjuncture, present is not only present, it also encompasses a perspective on the past immanent to it \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2018totality\u2019or what structuralism calls \u2018synchronic structure\u2019:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Gerard Lebrun whom \u017d loves but disagrees with in spots<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is, however, at this very point, after fully conceding Hegel\u2019s radical break with traditional metaphysical theodicy, that Lebrun\u2019s makes his critical move. The fundamental Nietzschean strategy of Lebrun is first to admit the radicality of Hegel\u2019s 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\u2019s 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. \u2014 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 (\u2018retroactively\u2019 and \u2018contingently\u2019as much as one wants) reconstitutes the Sense of the preceding process.<\/p>\n

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 \u2018transubstantiation\u2019 from the individual stuck onto his particularity to the universal subject who recognizes in the State the substance of his own being.<\/span> The mirror-obverse of this mortification of individuality as the price to be paid for the rise of the \u2018truly\u2019 free universal subject is that the state\u2019s power retains its full authority\u2014what 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.<\/p>\n

Is there nonetheless not a grain of truth in Lebrun\u2019s critical point\u2014does 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\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n

Recall just his philosophy of history with its narrative of world history as the story of the progress of freedom \u2026. 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?<\/p>\n

One simply cannot write a \u2018phenomenology of the twentieth century Spirit\u2019, uniting technological progress, the rise of democracy, the failed Communist attempt with its Stalinist catastrophe, the horrors of Fascism, the gradual end of colonialism \u2026. But why not? Is it really so?<\/p>\n

What if, precisely, one can and should write a Hegelian history of the twentieth century, this \u2018age of extremes\u2019 (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 \u2018New World Order\u2019 emerging after 1990 as its conclusion, the return to a new all-encompassing system signaling to some a Hegelian \u2018end of history\u2019, but whose antagonisms already announce new explosions?<\/p>\n

Are the great reversals and unexpected explosions of the topsy-turvy twentieth century, its numerous \u2018coincidences of the opposites\u2019\u2014the reversal of liberal capitalism into Fascism, the even more weird reversal of the October Revolution into the Stalinist nightmare \u2014 not the very privileged stuff which seems to call for a Hegelian reading? What would Hegel have made of today\u2019s struggle of Liberalism against fundamentalist Faith? One thing is sure: he would not simply take side of liberalism, but would have insisted on the \u2018mediation\u2019of the opposites.<\/p>\n

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 \u2018saturated\u2019 set of categories, with no place for contingency and indeterminacy, i.e., in Hegel\u2019s 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 \u2018saturated\u2019 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

This is how one should read Marx\u2019s well-known statement, from his introduction to the Grundrisse manuscripts, about the anatomy of man as a key to the anatomy of ape<\/span>: it is profoundly materialist, i.e., it does not involve any teleology (man is \u2018in germ\u2019 already present in ape, ape immanently tends towards man). It is precisely because the passage from ape to man is radically contingent\/impr\u00e9visible, because there is no inherent \u2018progress\u2019 in it, that one can only retroactively determine\/discern the conditions<\/p>\n

(not \u2018sufficient reasons\u2019) for man in ape. And, again, it is crucial to bear in mind here that the non-All is ontological, not only epistemological<\/span>: when we stumble upon \u2018indeterminacy\u2019 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 \u2018higher\u2019 reason at work here, but, on the contrary, that we demonstrated the ability of our mind to grasp the non-All of reality: …<\/p>\n

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 \u2018become what they already are\u2019 (or, rather, were from all eternity)?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

This is (also, among other things) what \u2018to conceive substance as subject\u2019 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Therein resides what Hegel calls the \u2018monstrosity\u2019 of Christ: the insertion of Christ between God and man is strictly equivalent to the fact that \u2018there is no big Other\u2019\u2014Christ is inserted as the singular contingency on which the universal necessity of the \u2018big Other\u2019 itself hinges.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Christ is such a figure which \u2018inserts itself \u2019 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\u2014there 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, \u2018life doesn\u2019t have history because it is totalising only externally\u2019\u2014it 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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 \u2018transubstantiation\u2019 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\u2019s outrageously \u2018speculative\u2019 formulations about Spirit as its own result, a product of itself: while \u2018Spirit has its beginnings in nature in general\u2019, 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<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

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 [\u2026] 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<\/p>\n

If, then, \u2018it is only as a result of itself that it is spirit\u2019, 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:<\/p>\n

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<\/span>. In a subjective process, there is no \u2018absolute subject\u2019, 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 \u2014 previously its subordinated moment \u2014 which re-totalizes it.<\/p>\n

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 \u2018return to itself \u2019 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.<\/p>\n

MARX QUOTATION<\/p>\n

…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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

[http:\/\/www.marxists.org\/archive\/marx\/works\/1867-c1\/ch04.htm.]<\/p>\n

\u017di\u017eek’s Commentary:<\/p>\n

Note how Hegelian references abound here: with capitalism, value is not a mere abstract \u2018mute\u2019 universality, a substantial link between the multiplicity of commodities; from the passive medium of exchange, it turns into the \u2018active factor\u2019 of the entire process.<\/p>\n

Instead of only passively assuming the two different forms of its actual existence (money\u2014commodity), it appears as the subject \u2018endowed with a motion of its own, passing through a life-process of its own\u2019: it differentiates itself from itself, positing its otherness, and then again overcomes this difference\u2014the entire movement is ITS OWN movement. In this precise sense, \u2018instead of simply representing the relations of commodities, it enters [\u2026] into private relations with itself \u2019: the \u2018truth\u2019 of its relating to its otherness is its self-relating, i.e., in its self-movement, the capital retroactively \u2018sublates\u2019 its own material conditions, changing them into subordinate moments of its own \u2018spontaneous expansion\u2019\u2014in pure Hegelese, it posits its own presuppositions.<\/p>\n

Crucial in the quoted passage is the expression \u2018an automatically active character\u2019, an inadequate translation of the German words used by Marx to characterize capital as \u2018automatischem Subjekt\u2019, an \u2018automatic subject\u2019, the oxymoron uniting living subjectivity and dead automatism. This is what capital is: a subject, but an automatic one, not a living one<\/span> \u2014 and, again, can Hegel think this \u2018monstrous mixture\u2019, a process of subjective self-mediation and retroactive positing of presuppositions which as it were gets caught in a substantial \u2018spurious infinity\u2019, a subject which itself becomes an alienated substance? (This, perhaps, is also the reason why Marx\u2019s reference to Hegel\u2019s dialectics in his \u2018critique of political economy\u2019 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.)<\/p>\n

DEATH DRIVE<\/p>\n

But there is a paradox which complicates this critique of Hegel: is the absolute negativity, this central notion of Hegel\u2019s thought, not precisely a philosophical figure of what Freud called \u2018death drive\u2019? Is, then, insofar as\u2014following Lacan\u2014the core of Kant\u2019s thought can be defined as the \u2018critique of pure desire\u2019, the passage from Kant to Hegel not precisely the passage from desire to drive? Do the very concluding lines of Hegel\u2019s 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\u2014\u2018But why does dialectical process always go on? Why does dialectical mediation always continue its work?\u2019\u2014not precisely the eppur si muove of pure drive? This structure of negativity also accounts for the quasi-\u2019automatic\u2019 character of the dialectical process\u2014one often reproaches Hegel the \u2018mechanical\u2019 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 \u2026.<\/p>\n

The underlying true problem is the following one: the standard \u2018Hegelian\u2019 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 \u2018synthesis\u2019, death in its \u2018abstract negativity\u2019 forever remains as a threat, an excess which cannot be economized.<\/p>\n

In social life, this means that Kant\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Does this mean that we are back at the standard topos of the excess of negativity which cannot be \u2018sublated\u2019 in any reconciling \u2018synthesis\u2019, or even at the na\u00efve Engelsian view of the alleged contradiction between the openness of Hegel\u2019s \u2018method\u2019 and the enforced closure of his \u2018system\u2019? There are indications which point in this direction: as was noted by many perspicuous commentators, Hegel\u2019s \u2018conservative\u2019 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 \u2018abstract\u2019 freedom of the civil society at the expense of the State\u2019s 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 \u2018abstract\u2019 negativity as the only path to a higher stage of freedom? Furthermore, do Hegel\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n

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 \u2026. In this organic order, universality and particular interests appear reconciled: the \u2018infinite right\u2019 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: \u2018Can the sentiment of the Universal be dissociated from this appeasement?\u2019 Against Lebrun, our answer should be:<\/p>\n

yes, and this is why war is necessary\u2014in 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 \u2018spurious infinity\u2019 of the eternal oscillation between stable civic life and wartime perturbations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

LTN 197: Hegel was right to point out again and again that, when one talks, one always dwells in the universal\u2014which 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 … Continue reading “hegel death drive”<\/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":[125,100,142,103,20],"tags":[116],"class_list":["post-9590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drive","category-hegel","category-nightworld","category-universal","category-zizek","tag-ltn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9590","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=9590"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9590\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9592,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9590\/revisions\/9592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}