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Derrida, Hegel, and the Language of Finitude
*Jan Mieszkowski
Reed College
mieszkow@reed.edu
(c) 2005 Jan Mieszkowski.
All rights reserved.
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1. From his earliest essays to his final lectures, Jacques Derrida
endeavored to come to terms with the legacy of German Idealist
philosophy. First and foremost, this involved a sustained
engagement with the work of G.W.F. Hegel, a thinker who makes
extraordinary claims for the self-grounding, self-explicating
authority of his project. Seemingly resistant to the usual
interpretive strategies, Hegel is notorious for presenting his
readers with unique challenges, or threats. There is a widespread
sense, as William James put it more than a century ago, that the
Hegelian "system resembles a mousetrap, in which if you once pass
the door you may be lost forever. Safety lies in not entering"
(275). As the history of Hegel scholarship attests, grappling with
a philosopher by steadfastly refusing to do so is a chaotic
endeavor at best. Of course, Derrida has inspired somewhat similar
reactions. Like Hegel, he is frequently accused of redefining the
standards of argumentation to such a degree that he cannot help
but have the last word, pre-empting commentary or criticism before
it is ever formulated. Does this mean that the only recourse one
has in the face of the Hegelian monolith is to seek to outdo it by
undertaking an even more radical transformation of conceptuality,
or is it simply the case that Derrida was profoundly influenced by
his Idealist predecessor?
2. Derrida wrote a great deal about his relationship with Hegel. What
I want to argue in this essay, however, is that some of Derrida's
most important contributions on Hegel are in texts that never cite
him by name. In particular, Derrida's account of linguistic
performance--an analysis developed across a host of essays on
different literary and philosophical figures--offers insights into
the more radical dimensions of Hegel's understanding of language
and subjectivity. The result is a call to view language not as an
infinite resource of signification or performance, formation or
destruction, but as a dynamic whose transgressive potential
paradoxically depends precisely on its essentially finite
character. It is only from this perspective, Derrida suggests,
that a full evaluation of Hegel's theory of praxis is possible.
3. Although he is sometimes described as "transcending" Hegel, if not
rendering him obsolete, Derrida himself avoids such gestures. On
the contrary, Hegel is to be championed, for his work shows "that
the positive infinite must be thought through . . . in order that
the indefiniteness of /différance/ appear /as such/" (Speech
101-2). At the same time, Derrida stresses the need to at least
attempt to mark one's departure, even if it is only
infinitesimally slight, from the Hegelian project: "/Différance/
(at a point of almost absolute proximity to Hegel . . . ) must
sign the point at which one breaks with the system of the
/Aufhebung/ and with speculative dialectics" (Positions 44). To
attempt to "break" with a system founded on the capacity to
mobilize the conceptual authority of breaks is already to enter
into an extremely complex "mousetrap" in which a discourse's
ability to assert a reflexive relationship to its own
presuppositions and procedures is at once a demonstration of
self-affirmation and of abnegation. In the simplest terms, it is
very much an open question whether a "break" with Hegel can be
effected at all.[1 <#foot1>]
4. The influence of Derrida's work on contemporary Hegel scholarship
provides a good starting point from which to consider the
challenges of interpreting a philosophy that claims always already
to have interpreted itself. Self-described "deconstructive"
commentators have sought to reveal "cracks" or "flaws" in the
Hegelian system, locating passages with which to argue that he is
not a thinker of mastery because he understands subjectivity as a
constant process of abandoning oneself and that he is not a
thinker of totality and of pure self-presence because he treats
discord and privation as constitutive of any position. To some
degree, these demonstrations must be welcomed given the
all-too-common impression that Hegel is a purveyor of
reconciliation who strives to "mediate" between extremes, employs
negativity to "erase" negativity, and offers us unlimited optimism
in the form of a system that can only make progress in its quest
for the truth of absolute knowledge.[2 <#foot2>] Unfortunately,
such efforts to locate instabilities internal to the Hegelian
system may lack a broader interpretive significance. As Derrida
never tires of reminding us, merely reversing the terms of an
oppositional hierarchy does not necessarily even alter the dynamic
at work, much less explain why it takes the form it does or what
its pretensions to a totalizing authority may be. To highlight a
passage in which it is revealed that identity is difference rather
than the other way around may help counter some clichés about
Hegel's "monolithic" idealism, but in a corpus in which the
relationship between part and whole is subject to unparalleled
scrutiny, the stakes in when and how one intervenes in the
analysis cannot be higher.
5. It is also not obvious that the goals of Hegel's project can be
assessed by isolating a single moment in the argument and
elevating it to the status of a truism to be celebrated or
debunked--"everything is mediated"/"the slave is the master"--a
point Derrida attributes to Georges Bataille (see "From a
Restricted to a General Economy" 253). At every stage in his
reading of Hegel, then, Derrida asks to what extent the system
under examination already accounts for and explains itself far
more completely than any "external" argument can hope to do. One
of the best-known Hegelians of the twentieth century, Theodor W.
Adorno, describes the challenge in the following way:
Like other closed systems of thought, Hegel's philosophy
avails itself of the dubious advantage of not having to allow
any criticism whatsoever. All criticism of the details,
according to Hegel, remains partial and misses the whole,
which in any case takes this criticism into account.
Conversely, criticizing the whole as a whole is abstract,
"unmediated," and ignores the fundamental motif of Hegelian
philosophy: that it cannot be distilled into any "maxim" or
general principle and proves its worth only as a totality, in
the concrete interconnections of all its moments. (Three
Studies 2)
The bind in which Adorno situates the would-be explicator of Hegel
must be taken seriously. To suggest, as Derrida repeatedly does,
that Hegel's text is "not of a piece" and that it can be read
"against" itself can invite one to make a great deal out of
individual tensions, "hiccups" that ostensibly trouble the smooth
modulations of the dialectic. The problem is that from the
perspective of the whole, the dialectic is driven by nothing but
interruption and resistance. When Derrida calls for us to
reexamine Hegel's work, "that is, the movement by means of which
his text exceeds its meaning, permits itself to be turned away
from, to return to, and to repeat itself outside its
self-identity," one cannot help but feel that Derrida is basically
just summarizing the account that Hegel's philosophy offers of its
own operations (Positions 78-9).
6. On the other hand, an attack on the viability of dialectical
analysis as such is bound to reduce the content of Hegel's thought
to a set of slogans--"being is nothing," "the rational is the
real"--thereby negating the object of study in the course of
analyzing it (and ironically repeating the very dialectical
gesture from which one is seeking to break). These efforts to
critique Hegel only end up confirming his authority, which is one
reason that Hegelian scholarship has a tendency to assume an
almost comical form in which one commentator after another accuses
his peers of unwittingly quoting Hegelian doctrine at the very
moment they claim to take leave of it.[3 <#foot3>]
7. For Derrida, the way in which the Hegelian system anticipates the
criticisms to which it is subject must be considered in terms of
Hegel's account of the history of spirit as the story of an
essentially self-interpreting entity. Hegel writes:
The history of spirit is its own act (/Tat/); for spirit is
only what it does, and its act is to make itself--in this case
as spirit--the object of its own consciousness, and to
comprehend itself in its interpretation of itself to itself.
This comprehension is its being and principle, and the
completion of an act of comprehension is at the same time its
alienation and transition.[(Elements 372)[4 <#foot4>]
The subject of Hegelian thought only /is/ insofar as it is engaged
in the process of interpreting itself, even as this act of
self-comprehension, the product of its own being /as/
self-interpretation, is equally an act of self-alienation, the
relentless exposure of itself to yet another interpretive
revision. To enter into an evaluation of this dynamic is
necessarily to become part of a process in which meaning and the
act of making something meaningful are supposed to coincide in the
praxis of a self that aims to grasp itself as an entity with an
unlimited interpretive grasp. The discourse of spirit is the
discourse in which signification becomes both possible and actual
in and through self-referential self-clarification.
8. This dimension of Hegel's thought--which may in one sense be its
only dimension--is an attempt to explore the full implications of
J.G. Fichte's foundational claim that the self "is at once the
agent and the product of action; the active, and what the activity
brings about; action (/Handlung/) and act (/Tat/) are one and the
same, and hence I am is the expression of a deed (/Ausdruck einer
Tathandlung/), and the only one possible" (97). For Hegel, the
"expression" of a deed ("and the only deed possible") is the
expression of the very condition of performance such that the acts
of the self can facilitate its own self-interpretive presentation
of itself to itself as itself. The expression of a deed is the act
of coming to know oneself as the one who renders one's own
meaningfulness meaningful. Historical praxis is this, and nothing
else.
9. Because "the completion of an act of comprehension is at the same
time [spirit's] alienation and transition," the self is never
finished making itself into the subject and object of the acts by
which it establishes itself as the standard of all agency.
Paradoxically, the much-disparaged drive to totality in Hegel's
system stems from its frankness about its own incompleteness, its
tireless self-exposure to everything that has not yet become
conscious of the fact that its own significance will stem from
this auto-interpretive onto-logic. Hegel's text holds out the
promise of a system to end all systems because it is permanently
open to the readings to which it has yet to submit itself, and
which will in turn be submitted to it. This is a philosophy that
pre-reads and pre-writes all its future encounters as events that
will only become meaningful in their own right insofar as they
come to know themselves as subjects--in both senses of the
word--of the spirit's self-interpretive dynamic.[5 <#foot5>]
10. As the attempt to control the difference (or lack thereof) between
reference and signification where its process of auto-confirmation
is concerned, Hegel's work anticipates what Derrida calls "the
figures of its beyond, all the forms and resources of its
exterior" ("Restricted" 252). Hegel offers the promise of
systematicity as such, the promise of a systematizing force that
can pre-posit all the standards on the basis of which it will call
itself meaningful and be called meaningful by its other.
Importantly, this system does not just prefigure the evaluations
it will inspire; it pre-judges them, as well. To prove that you
have really begun to read Hegel, you have to be able to
demonstrate that he has been expecting you. In other words, you
confirm your ability to say something about Hegel by becoming part
of a process in which the very possibility of making sense of your
own activities depends on the extent to which you can show that
you are always-already written and read by your object text, by
the text you--perhaps fancifully--imagine that you selected,
rather than the other way around.
11. Even to aim at willfully misunderstanding Hegel in order to elude
the self-interpretive dynamic with which he confronts us does not
help. In Glas, Derrida reflects on the paradox that since any
finite misreading is already anticipated by the Hegelian text, one
can never miss by enough to confound the system's ability to take
one's commentary into account. Hegel's interpretation of his own
work is "too conscientious," says Derrida; it leaves no place for
an acolyte or a detractor to make his or her mark ("Restricted"
260). One can choose either to salute Hegel or to reject him, but
one should not be deluded into thinking that one's decision is of
any consequence for (or surprise to) his system: "Dialectics is
always that which has finished us, because it is always that which
/takes into account/ our rejection of it. As it does our
affirmation" ("Theater" 246). Among other things, this means that
one does not have the luxury of electing first to take up the task
of understanding Hegel's philosophy and only later, having
garnered some command of the material, deciding whether or not to
embrace it. Even to engage minimally with this thought is already
to become part of its own auto-evaluating structure.
12. The challenge, then, is to adopt a stance that neither misses the
whole nor the concrete interconnection of the moments and yet that
allows one to do more than play the role of Hegel's puppet.
Derrida's most important reflections on these difficulties may lie
in his analysis of linguistic performance. Thanks to his polemic
with John Searle, Derrida's work on iterability in J.L. Austin is
eminently familiar to his allies and detractors alike.[6 <#foot6>]
Indeed, many projects concerned with the significance of Hegelian
thought for contemporary debates about ethnic and gender
identities take Derrida's discussions of repetition as their
starting point.[7 <#foot7>] It is equally critical, however, to
recognize that Derrida does not simply think about speech acts
with reference to the conventions or codes that ostensibly give an
utterance such as "I do" its authority at the altar. Derrida is
equally concerned to ask about the ways in which a language of
acts--like the discourse of Hegel's spirit--claims to institute
its own conditions of possibility. How, inquires Derrida in his
reading of Franz Kafka's "Before the Law," are "the conditions of
a performative . . . established," that is, how are they
originally possible, prior to the formulation of any empirical
rules or regulations (216)? The topic is vast, encompassing a host
of questions about the linguistic dimensions of contracts and
compacts that have occupied philosophers and political theorists
since the eighteenth century. In much of his later work on law and
justice, Derrida grapples with the issue of performance in
precisely these terms.
13. Where the relationship between performance and self-interpretation
in Hegel is concerned, Derrida's discussions of Paul de Man's work
on performativity--part of the two critics' extensive debate about
Rousseau--are crucial.[8 <#foot8>] Is it the case, inquires
Derrida, that all utterances are preceded by a pre-formative, a
promise--to use the figure on which de Man dwells--to be language,
a promise on the part of language to perform meaningfully, a
promise that is itself neither simply constative nor
performative?[9 <#foot9>] Although Hegel is rarely present by
name, he is clearly the guiding figure for much of what Derrida
has to say about proto-performative acts of language in a series
of texts that, like his Kafka piece, focus primarily on literary
works. In his analysis of the end of Ulysses, for example, Derrida
takes up the Fichtean notion of self-positing and argues:
Before the /Ich/ in /Ich bin/ affirms or negates, it poses
itself or pre-poses itself: not as /ego/, as the conscious or
unconscious self, as masculine or feminine subject, spirit or
flesh, but as a pre-performative force which, for example, in
the form of the "I" marks that "I" as addressing itself to the
other, however undetermined he or she is: "Yes-I" or
"Yes-I-say-to-the-other," even if I says /no/ and even if I
addresses itself without speaking. (298)
Before positing itself as a content, before even presupposing the
announcement--"I am"-- that will become its self-inaugural
declaration, the language of the self must pre-pose a
mark--"yes"--that refers to nothing outside of language, a
"quasi-act," as Derrida also describes it, that shows nothing,
states nothing, and ultimately says nothing, yet which constitutes
language's own minimal assertion that language will happen. "Yes"
is language's avowal that a statement can be a performance rather
than a mere instance of a code, that an utterance can be active or
productive rather than just passive and mimetic, that a verbal
event can be an end as well as a means. In the beginning there is
what Derrida terms the "transcendental adverbiality" of "yes," the
condition of possibility for any speech act, the pre-formative on
which the ecstatic quality of language--its power to posit the
very possibility of positing--depends (297).
14. At first glance, this might seem like a simplistic exercise in
unearthing layer upon layer of conditions of possibility--"A
positing is made possible by a pre-positing, which is in turn made
possible by a pre-pre-positing, etc."--as if each stage in the
expansion of our meta-(meta-)language necessarily constituted a
corresponding advance in understanding. Derrida insists, however,
that to ask about the conditions of possibility of linguistic
performance is necessarily to call the possibility of a
meta-language into question because any discourse about language
"will itself assume the event of a /yes/ [a pre-performative
force] which it will fail to comprehend" (299). Prior to saying
anything in particular, all language must assume that it has
always already said "yes" to language and "yes" to its own status
as the producer of possibilities; but no language is capable of
making this proto-active "yes" into a content that it could then
recognize as the product of the activity of itself or of an
other.[10 <#foot10>] Language necessarily assumes that it has said
"yes" to its own ability to affirm itself, but no language can
actually state this assumption as an affirmative claim. In other
words, any proposition--be it part of a discourse about language
or not--presupposes a pre-positional force that never takes the
form of a subject or object of representation. No instance of
language can present its own promissory "yes" as the formative act
or pre-act that it "pre-supposedly" is. Far from confirming
language's self-identity, "yes" reveals language to be anything
but present-to-self, suggesting, among other things, that it is by
no means clear whether or not the Hegelian subject can ever make
good on its commitment to fashion a self-meaningful discourse in
which constation and performance coincide.
15. The reflexivity of linguistic concepts and the self-representation
of language are among the most challenging problems in
contemporary theory. For the purposes of our discussion, the
question is whether the issues Derrida raises about pre- or
proto-performance constitute a genuine stumbling block for the
self-interpretive praxis of the Hegelian subject, fundamentally
challenging either its ability to be a discourse about the self or
its ability to be a self-interpretive discourse. In other words,
is the problem that the self cannot /comprehend/ itself--that its
acts of self-reflection can never catch up with its acts of
self-positing--or is the problem that the self cannot comprehend
/itself/ and is fated to discover that its models of semantic
coherence apply to anything but its own determinations? To
evaluate the full significance of Derrida's argument, we have to
look more closely at Hegel's own account of the relationship
between language and subjectivity. To this end, it will be helpful
to turn to the theory of poetry he offers in his Lectures on
Aesthetics.
16. Hegel declares that poetry is supreme among the arts, combining
music's apprehension of the inner life of the mind with the
determinate phenomenal character of sculpture and painting.[11
<#foot11>] In contrast to many of his contemporaries who make
similar claims, however, Hegel never wavers in insisting that
poetry is the crisis of art as much as it is its triumph. Poetry's
uniqueness stems from the fact that the subject and the object of
poetry, the medium and the message, are one and the same. Unlike
painting or sculpture, poetry can deal with any and every topic in
any and every fashion because in the final analysis what poetry
really expresses is the mind's apprehension of itself to itself in
itself.[12 <#foot12>] The medium of poetry is the imagination, and
"its proper material is also the imagination, that universal
foundation of all the particular art-forms and the individual
arts" (Aesthetics 967). Cut off from any material restraints, any
restrictions on form and content, poetry
appear[s] as that particular art in which art itself begins .
. . to dissolve . . . . [P]oetry destroys the fusion of
spiritual inwardness with external existence to an extent that
begins to be incompatible with the original conception of art,
with the result that poetry runs the risk of losing itself in
a transition from the region of sense into that of the spirit.
(968)
No longer comprehensible in terms of a connection between a
material medium and an intelligible meaning, poetry is the highest
achievement of art as the confirmation of spirit's pure
self-apprehension, but this triumph is equally art's demise. The
ultimate articulation of the sensible with the intelligible, of
the world of appearances with the world of ideas, poetry's success
leads it astray--in its autonomy, it threatens to abandon its
mediating role and evacuate itself of any representational duties
whatsoever.
17. The pinnacle of art and its collapse, poetry forces Hegel to
rethink his account of self-determination as linguistic praxis.
Predictably, this occurs in his discussion of lyric, traditionally
the verse of the self and the first member of his tripartite genre
scheme, which is rounded out by epic and drama. Having stressed
that it makes no difference whether we read or hear poetry since
its medium--language--is essentially non-phenomenal, Hegel
nonetheless insists that because lyric is the highpoint of
artistic subjectivity, the expression of interiority as such, it
must be grasped as an /act/ of a self in a way that epic and drama
cannot be. The important thing to realize is that a lyric act of
self, unlike the deeds of the self-interpretive spirit described
in the Philosophy of History or the Philosophy of Right, must
remain stillborn. Lyric praxis, writes Hegel, cannot "be so far
continued as to display the subject's heart and passion in
practical activity and action, i.e., in the subject's return to
himself in his actual deed" (Aesthetics 1112). For the model of
self-interpretive subjectivity, the self is nothing other than its
own acts of self-interpretation, yet lyric, the poetry of the
self, must be language that acts in such a way that the action can
never be grasped as the coordination of a self and an act. Lyric
acts without becoming someone's action. To think about this even
as a claim for the agency of language replacing the agency of a
willful entity would be misleading. The lyric poet, the poet of
poets, the poet whose discourse will articulate the very
subjectivity of poetry as the discourse of spirit itself, acts by
losing his power to articulate a language that would tell its own
story, the story of language's coming into meaningfulness by its
own hand, the story of language being able to make sense of its
own promissory "yes." Lyric is the last language in which an act
and the explanation of that act will coincide in the
self-signification of an auto-interpretive process.
18. In setting the imagination free, poetry reveals that the
imagination talks only to itself. Poetry, says Hegel, "must
emphasize . . . the spiritual idea (/geistige Vorstellung/), the
imagination which speaks to the inner imagination (/die Phantasie,
die zur inneren Phantasie spricht/)" (Aesthetics 969). The point
is not that the lyrical imagination speaks nonsense (or remains
silent). With the simultaneous triumph and dissolution of art in
poetry, we encounter a language that, in contradistinction to the
prose of spirit, does not present itself as a discourse that
understands itself in and as its own acts of self-understanding.
This is a language that never offers a grammar or syntax that
could serve as a model for relations between agents and their
deeds or between subjects and objects. With lyric, says Hegel, the
imagination "is essentially distinguished from thinking by reason
of the fact that . . . it allows particular ideas to subsist
alongside one another without being related, whereas thinking
demands and produces dependence of things on one another,
reciprocal relations, logical judgments, syllogisms, etc." (1035).
The inactive praxis of lyric confronts us with a paratactic
discourse in which hierarchy and synthesis have no place. In the
final instance, it is a war against both art and thinking: "Lyric
. . . becomes the outpouring of a soul, fighting and struggling
with itself, which in its ferment does violence to both art and
thought because it oversteps one sphere without being, or being
able to be, at home in the other" (1128). The language of radical
non-self-understanding, lyric poetry cannot self-clarify or
self-interpret in the course of articulating itself as the product
of its own articulations. Where lyric subjectivity is concerned,
the self's expression of itself to itself is as destructive as it
is creative. Lyric presents the subject as that which does
violence to itself, but not, as the commonplaces about subject
philosophy would have it, by treating itself as an object. Lyric
fails to demonstrate that its own self-interpretation begins and
ends with the acts by which it makes its own significance
self-evidently meaningful to itself. On the most basic level, this
means that the self-interest of self--the notion of the self as
even minimally self-related or self-concerned--has lost its
inevitability.
19. If lyric, the pinnacle of subjective expressivity, turns out to be
a discourse in which both /self/-interpretation and
self-/interpretation/ are in jeopardy, this does not simply
mean--again, as the clichés about Hegel and Derrida would have
it--that identity is irremediably compromised by the force of
difference. Interpretation and attempts to coordinate reference
and signification continue unabated in poetry, but it is no longer
evident that such efforts are primarily waged in the service of a
self that performs them. The question for our study of the
relationship between Hegel and Derrida is whether the negativity
at work in this dynamic requires us to alter our customary picture
of dialectical negation. Is lyric praxis an example of what
Derrida describes in Bataille's reading of Hegel as a negativity
that is no longer part of the semantic work of the concept
"because it literally can no longer /labor/ and let itself be
interrogated as the 'work of the negative'" ("Restricted" 260)?
According to Hegel's Aesthetics, lyric poetry occurs as an event
that does not reflexively tell the story of its own emergence as a
semantic agent, and in this respect, it challenges the
understanding of poetry as "productive" if that term necessarily
implies the appearance of a product that can be known as the
effect of its producer. At the same time, is it clear that lyric's
repeated acts of non-self-understanding could not be recuperated
via the inversion whereby subjectivity, brought to its radical
extreme, would coincide with its other and thus confirm its
implicit sovereignty after all? Hegel's theory of art provides the
resources for a more radical vision of self-expressive activity
than is normally attributed to him, but ultimately, Derrida is
interested in pushing the account of lyric even further. In
"Shibboleth: for Paul Celan," one of relatively few of his texts
that is primarily devoted to verse, Derrida writes about the way
in which Celan's work effects a break with the very idea of agency
as self-expression. The voice that speaks in his oeuvre is in
retreat from the paradigm of self-determination as
self-representation; and subjectivity, such as it appears, makes
no claim to being either the cause or the effect of the
referential powers of language. For the philosophical project,
argues Derrida, the encounter with Celan is the "/experience of
language,/ an experience always as poetic, or literary, as it is
philosophical" ("Shibboleth" 48). For Derrida, this experience is
the experience of linguistic finitude. This does not mean that it
is an encounter with a discourse that fails to refer to or perform
anything and everything. Rather, it is an engagement with a
language that--unlike the self-interpretive dynamic of Hegel's
historical spirit--no longer presents itself as the deciding
instance in virtue of which all past, present, and future
utterances become meaningful through the evaluation to which this
language subjects them. This is the experience of a language in
which all reading and writing are no longer always-already
pre-written and pre-read by its own self-confirming conditions of
signification, a language in which the resources of the "yes"
Derrida reads in Joyce are not necessarily inexhaustible.
20. It is around the question of finitude that the challenges posed by
Hegel's lyric intersect with Derrida's work on the notion of the
event (/Ereignis/) in Martin Heidegger. A true event, argues
Derrida, is entirely unforeseeable; it is a pure surprise,
something impossible to accommodate through existing norms or
schemas, something that literally comes upon us out of nowhere and
overwhelms our ability to process it. In this sense, a
confrontation with an event is an encounter with the experience of
a limit of experience, an encounter with the very impossibility of
fully understanding or appropriating that with which we are
faced.[13 <#foot13>] Importantly, this experience of limits as
limits of experience does not itself become a definite border,
something that one can "tackle head on" and thereby overcome. For
Derrida, the experience of a limit is simultaneously the
experience of the limit of limits, an experience of the way in
which something that is truly limited, something that is not
simply a temporary delimitation that can facilitate its own
supersession, fails to manifest itself as decidedly determined or
determining. It is in these terms that Derrida invites us to think
about the event of Hegelian lyric as an irreducibly finite act.
Such a lyric "happens" by exposing the limits of
auto-interpretation, by questioning whether the self-interpretive
project is inherently self-compromising, and this occurs,
moreover, in such a way that the limits never become a fixed
border to be transgressed, as if the act of self-interpretation
could interpret itself as self-limiting and, having confirmed that
the limitation was wholly its own, surpass it. Such a lyric points
beyond itself, calling out for description and comprehension, but
it never verifies that this call is the promise of its own
meaningfulness. Language's self-avowing "yes" can never completely
say "yes" to "yes."
21. From this standpoint, Derrida is demanding nothing less than a
reconceptualization of the classical opposition between the finite
and the infinite. Finitude, claims Hegel, is a matter of
boundaries that are themselves endpoints, boundaries that in
marking completion, termination, or death reveal themselves to be
true restrictions rather than thresholds, conclusions rather than
bridges to something new. One should thus understand finitude as
that which is ceasing to be: as a positively extant phenomenon,
finitude /is/ only insofar as it is becoming something that
always-already no longer is. Finite things, writes Hegel, "are not
merely limited . . . but on the contrary non-being constitutes
their nature and being" (Science 129). To say that something is
finite means that non-being, the negative determination organizing
the opposition between being and nothing, constitutes its
existence without rendering it purely indifferent to what is or is
not. In a slightly more dramatic formulation, where finite things
are concerned, "the hour of their birth is the hour of their
death" (Science 129).
22. Approached in this fashion, finitude is the condition of
always-already being through, yet ironically, even this may not be
finite enough. If something is to be truly finite, its limits must
be absolutely limiting /and/ limited, but the moment limitation is
invoked as a category with which to explain finitude, the
resulting boundary between what is and is not finite potentially
opposes itself to finitude--it is the /other/ of finitude, the
frontier at which finitude confronts something beyond itself--at
which point the finite is no longer merely terminal. In other
words, the negativity characteristic of finitude is permanently at
risk of serving as the grounds for a self-relation that will
implicate the finite in a dynamic of self and other. The
consequence is that the exposition of finitude can become an
exercise in determining a series of transitions--alterations, as
Hegel calls them--between different finite entities, each of which
is shown to be a "something" in its own right that is limited by
yet another change via expiration, and so forth: "We lay down a
limit; then we pass it; next we have a limit once more, and so on
for ever" (Encyclopedia 138). Either an infinite regression
emerges--each finitude produces yet another finitude, ad
infinitum--or else what has been described is a straightforward
double negation--"the limit is limited in such a way that it is
not just limited"--that becomes the ground of an unlimited field
of finite phenomena. Both alternatives leave us with what Hegel
famously calls a "bad" or "wrong" infinity, an interminably
repeated negation of the finite that never actually completes the
task of negating it.
23. In the Science of Logic and the first volume of the Encyclopedia,
Hegel devotes a great deal of energy to confirming the possibility
of articulating an infinitude that can be distinguished from this
"bad" infinity.[14 <#foot14>] At the same time, he more than hints
that finitude offers a resistance to thought that is not the
customary resistance of negation:
The thought of the finitude of things brings this sadness
(/Trauer/) with it because it is qualitative negation pushed
to its extreme, and in the singleness of such determination,
there is no longer left to things an affirmative being
/distinct/ from their destiny to perish. Because of this
qualitative singleness of the negation, which has gone back to
the abstract opposition of nothing and ceasing-to-be as
opposed to being, finitude is the most stubborn category of
the understanding; negation in general, constitution and
limit, reconcile themselves with their other, with determinate
being; and even nothing, taken abstractly as such, is given up
as an abstraction; but finitude is the negation as /fixed in
itself/, and it therefore stands in abrupt contrast to the
affirmative. The finite, it is true, lets itself be brought
into flux, it is itself this, to be determined or destined to
its end, but /only/ to its end--or rather, it is the refusal
to let itself be brought affirmatively to its affirmative, to
the infinite, and to let itself be united with it. (Science
129-30)
Finitude's refusal to yield to the negation of its negative
stance, its refusal to be brought "affirmatively to its
affirmative," is equally its refusal to yield to the positivity of
its negative stance, hence, finitude literally has no posture that
could be called its own. Foreign to both determinate being and
abstraction, finitude is not really a determination at all, and
yet, it is not indeterminate, either. "The most stubborn category
of the understanding," finitude "stands in abrupt contrast to the
affirmative" because it presents us with a negation taken "to its
extreme," but for once, this radicalization of negativity does not
subject finitude to a reversal whereby it would become an
affirmative positing in its own right. Finitude is a negation that
refuses to be in-itself or for-itself. It is a negation with
neither a positive nor a negative valence.
24. The first question to ask is whether the interruptive, even
paralyzing function of finitude has always already been re-written
and re-read as part of a larger reflective process that sits in
judgment on any effort to "radicalize" the argument by tarrying
with this disruption. If the concept of finitude is to be ascribed
a broader significance, it will have to be shown that it in some
way forces Hegel to alter his account of signification itself. To
move in this direction, it could be argued that the thought of
finitude brings with it a sadness or mourning (/Trauer/) not
simply because mortal entities die, but because once finitude is
invoked, the usual procedures of thought--determination, negation,
determination as negation--are themselves at risk of being
revealed as essentially limited, too. Hegel stresses that the
experience of the concept of finitude is an encounter with
something that is not precisely of the order of being or nothing,
and he appears to acknowledge that what is lost in the transition
from the finite to the infinite is not just finitude, but the
possibility of another kind of thinking, a possibility he declines
to explore.[15 <#foot15>] Thought, we might say, never gets over
its brush with the finite, however dexterous the ensuing
presentation of the infinite proves to be, however ardently it is
maintained that the infinite carries the finite within it.
Mourning (/Trauer/) becomes melancholia, and finitude is
transcended only at the price of thought--in contradiction to the
most basic tenet of Idealism--showing itself to be finite rather
than infinite. This is the concern Hegel expresses in the
Encyclopedia when he cautions against doing exactly what he does
in the greater Logic, namely, juxtapose the finite and the
infinite in a stark opposition, thereby implicitly granting that
the infinite is limited rather than unlimited, bounded rather than
boundless.
25. At this juncture, it might be clarifying to distinguish the finite
from the concept of finitude by arguing that the latter always
bears a mark of the generality of thought that contravenes the
singularity that is its ostensible substance. In slightly
different terms, if the articulation of finitude as a concept in a
discourse invariably betrays what we mean by the finite, then can
we speak about the emergence of finitude as an event whereby the
universality organizing any act of reference or signification is
compromised in being exposed to a limit? Hegel seems to go in this
direction when he argues that finitude is the expression of the
nothing as something limited and hence as not merely nothing.
Hardly just another way of facilitating the reversal of the finite
into the infinite, the expression of finitude betrays a
contradiction in expressivity itself. Finitude interrupts the
smooth modulation from the act of representation to the content of
what is represented, as if once you represent finitude, you no
longer know precisely what representation is or does. In this
respect, the language that purports to express finitude challenges
its own ability to continue to be language; it confronts itself
not as a self-grounding force that posits its own conditions of
possibility, but as something restricted, fragmentary, or even
mortal. At least for the moment, "yes" is only a half-hearted
"more or less 'yes.'"
26. If the expression of finitude renders expression finite, it is
still unclear whether this fundamentally alters the Hegelian model
of self-signification. The language of Hegelian lyric praxis may
constitute a genuine alternative to spirit as auto-interpretation,
but we need to say more about finitude's peculiar "refusal," as
Hegel puts it, to play along with affirmation and negation alike.
One way that Derrida tries to describe this "other" negation can
be found in his discussion of totalization in Claude Lévi-Strauss:
Totalization can be judged impossible in the classical style:
one then refers to the empirical endeavor of a subject or of a
finite discourse in a vain and breathless quest of an infinite
richness which it can never master. There is too much, more
than one can say. But nontotalization can also be determined
in another way: no longer from the standpoint of a concept of
finitude as relegation to the empirical, but from the
standpoint of the concept of /play./ If totalization no longer
has any meaning, it is not because the infiniteness of a field
cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse,
but because the nature of the field--that is, language and a
finite language--excludes totalization. This field is in
effect that of /play/, that is to say, a field of infinite
substitutions only because it is finite, that is to say,
because instead of being an inexhaustible field, as in the
classical hypothesis, instead of being too large, there is
something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds
the play of substitutions. One could say . . . that this
movement of play, permitted by the lack or absence of a center
or origin, is the movement of supplementarity. One cannot
determine the center and exhaust totalization because the sign
which replaces the center, which supplements it, taking the
center's place in its absence--this sign is added, occurs as a
surplus, as a supplement. ("Structure" 289; translation modified)
This passage is part of a larger argument made in Of Grammatology
and Speech and Phenomena about signification in Rousseau, Edmund
Husserl, and Saussure. With each of these authors, Derrida shows
that the attempt to describe the logic of the sign reveals that
the referent it "announces" or "substitutes for" is always already
implicated in a broader semiosis. With respect to its
presence-to-self, an object of reference is thus invoked only via
a process that exposes it as fundamentally empty or lacking.[16
<#foot16>] The result is that expression can no longer be
understood as the articulation of something that exists
independently of expression. Every signifier marks the difference
between a signifier and a signified, but no signifier can signify
that what it signifies is actually a signified rather than just
another signifier.
27. The inscription of the infinite within an inherently incomplete
field coupled with the suggestion that the inexhaustibility of the
field stems precisely from its constitutively deficient state
fundamentally alters the way in which we must understand language
as limited or unlimited. Instead of speaking of a discourse's
inability to refer to or perform anything and everything--even
when that anything and everything is the discourse itself--the
very possibility of language as a signifying force is now said to
rest on its inherently unfinished status: "The /overabundance/ of
the signifier," writes Derrida, "its /supplementary/ character, is
thus the result of a finitude, that is to say, the result of a
lack which must be /supplemented/" ("Structure" 290). The point is
not just that any act of language misfires or fails to constitute
itself in the form it promises. Understood as a system of
signification, language acts by disrupting the grounds for
identifying the infinite with totality or completion. Conversely,
it is no longer possible to speak of the finite as terminal or as
the antithesis of open-ended. By radicalizing the idea of
limitation and its role in effecting semantic determinations in
general, Derrida reveals that the classical opposition between the
finite and the infinite is incompatible with his understanding of
linguistic performance.[17 <#foot17>]
28. This argument has enormous consequences for the study of Idealism
and Romanticism since both are routinely characterized as
celebrating the unlimited authority of language as a force of
creation or destruction. Following Derrida's analysis of
Lévi-Strauss, the power we accord language can no longer be
evaluated in terms of language's ability to supersede boundaries,
even its own, and must instead depend on the manner in which
language proves to be irremediably self-compromising--a misprision
that cannot be inscribed within the polarities of complete and
incomplete or of fragment and whole. Still, if we are to link the
dynamic of supplementarity to the logic of proto-performance
Derrida interrogated as the pre-positional mark enabling the /I
am/ to establish itself as the archetypal utterance of subjective
self-actualization, we need a more precise picture of the
negativity at work in this theory of linguistic finitude. Derrida
has written extensively on the subject of negation, perhaps most
famously in response to the charge that deconstruction is merely a
version of negative theology (see "How to Avoid Speaking"). One of
his central concerns is whether any negation is invariably treated
as somehow derivative of an affirmation, i.e., as the
"counter-position" to a pre-existing assertion. What would it mean
to understand negativity as a power in its own right, a power that
may be constitutive of all determinations, positive or
negative?[18 <#foot18>] Derrida pursues this question by examining
the French negating particle /pas/ (which is, of course, also the
word for "step"), and we may be able to work in parallel with his
argument by considering the term /not. / If /not/ is to be read as
the mark of the compromising expression of a finite discourse that
cannot be governed by the auto-practical subject of
self-interpretation, /not/ must first and foremost be
disassociated from any representation of lack or incompletion,
which can always be recuperated as the presentation of something
positively given as a signified or referent. Like the compromised
figure of Hegelian finitude that interests Derrida, /not/ hovers
uneasily between the poles of being and non-being, but perhaps
even more importantly, it puts strain on the categories on which
we customarily rely when we talk about the elements of a sentence.
Like all adverbs, /not/ modifies verbs, yet it is the "limit" case
of an adverb--ad-verbal to the point of annulling the very nature
of what verbs, if not all words, do. Unique to language, /not/
changes what we understand by linguistic acts. Insofar as it is
dependent on the proposition of which it is a part, it cannot be
said to confirm the power of language to perform or posit (like
Derrida's "yes"); and it cannot be understood as the self-elision
of language by language (as the "transcendental adverbiality" of
"no"), either. If anything, /not/ seems to be the point at which
language speaks to itself about what it is not doing and cannot
ever do: "I do not promise" / "I do not take thee as my lawful
wedded wife."
29. In On Interpretation, one of the founding texts of dialectical
logic in the West, Aristotle famously declares the basic
linguistic utterance to be a proposition (/logos apophantikos/)
that is either true or false. The paradigmatic form of speech is
thus established as "a statement that possesses a meaning,
affirming or denying the presence of some other thing in a subject
in time past or present or future," or more simply, it is a
"statement of one thing concerning another thing" (17). This
doctrine has been enormously influential for a host of attempts to
describe the relationship between language and the things about
which language speaks. It is less often noted, however, that
Aristotle's commitment to an apophantic model of predicative
expression is paralleled by his insistence that any proposition is
permanently exposed to the authority of /not/ (/ou/). "He is a
man," to use his example, conforms to the paradigmatic form of
language only insofar as it is equally plausible to say, "He is
not a man." We may readily assent that from a logical perspective
any affirmation is structurally exposed to the possibility of its
denial and vice versa, but it is precisely the condition of
possibility of such a "logical perspective" that is at stake. The
very opportunity for an utterance to become a proposition, to say
something about something, rests on the utterance's openness to
/not/, its openness to the possibility that language may equally
well pronounce, truly or falsely, that the contrary is the case.
/Not/ marks language's minimal autonomy from that about which it
speaks; it reveals that a proposition is never entirely reducible
to what it refers to or signifies. In this sense, /not/ is a
proto-logical condition, fundamental to and yet never explained by
the accounts of syllogistic reasoning that follow in On
Interpretation.
30. If basic utterance is conceivable only on the condition of its
exposure to /not/, then even when /not/ is not uttered, the fact
that it could potentially pop up at any moment ensures that its
impact is felt. In this way, /not/ underscores its own
independence from any act of negation (or, in its absence,
affirmation) in which it participates. /Not/, the para-word of
words, literalizes the potential of any statement to be ironic,
that is, the ability of all language to say one thing and
nonetheless mean the opposite. Any instance of language may or may
not say "not," whether or not it says so, and yet no given
statement can assert its control over this possibility, since one
can always add or subtract one more /not/ and reverse the
proposal: /not/ is (not) the condition of possibility of (not)
saying "not." Understood as a referential statement about what is
or is not, the function of /not/ amounts to nothing more than a
definition of contingency. Expressed as a condition of possibility
of discourse, however, the authority of /not/ marks the absolute
disjunction between what words say and how they are (or are not)
meaningful. /Not/ is the moment language says something about
itself, and what it says is that language can /not/ exhaustively
refer to its own capacity to signify (or not) as something it does
(or does not) meaningfully perform. It is along these lines that
Derridean supplementarity can be recast as a theory of linguistic
finitude.
31. Uncertainty about /not/ and the operations it does or does not
facilitate is legible throughout the history of Western
philosophy. When it is explicitly identified as an issue in its
own right, /not/ is usually subordinated to the discussion of
negation and of nothing, but each time this happens, there is a
hint that /not/ is less derivative than we are being asked to
believe. The problem could be explored in G.E. Leibniz's
consideration of why there is something rather than nothing; in
Fichte's description of the primordial co-positing of I and not-I;
and in Heidegger's declaration that "the nothing is more original
than negation and the 'not,'" a claim immediately followed by the
qualification that only in the revelation that they are beings and
/not/ nothing do beings become aware of their own radical finitude
(99). For each of these thinkers--and many similar examples could
be given--the word /not/ is never simply an expression of alterity
or a reference to contingency, limitation, or mortality. /Not/
always also names a failure peculiar to itself, the failure of the
word /not/ to become a force of self-reflexive self-determination
in its own right. /Not/ cannot guarantee the performance of the
negations it announces, which is also to say that /not/ is not a
performative failure that lays the grounds for a future success.
In this regard, /not/ does not facilitate the self-transcendence
of the finite. It does not impel language to establish itself as
inherently self-transgressing.
32. To appreciate the full implications of this "alternative"
dimension of negation and its significance for Derrida's
rethinking of the relationship between finite and infinite
discourse, it will be useful to look briefly at one example of how
Derrida's work differs from another well-known call for a
transformation of our understanding of language. In his 1916 essay
"On language as such and on the language of man," Benjamin
inveighs against what he terms the "bourgeois" strategy of
reducing language to its instrumental function, completely
subordinate to the ends to which it is employed by those who use
it to communicate. Benjamin thus invites us to distinguish between
the customary, that is, the reductive, sense of communicating
/through/ language and a new notion of communicating /in/
language. Rejecting the assumption that a word is a means for
relating something to an addressee, he argues that language has no
content but imparts itself /in/ itself. The condition of
possibility for any instrumental language is this idea of language
as the communication of the possibility of communication,
communicability (/Mitteilbarkeit/) as such, prior to any
particular instance of mediation or information transfer. This is
a language of pure means that can never fully be grasped as a
collection of means to ends.[19 <#foot19>]
33. In recent years, Benjamin's work has been extremely influential in
prompting critics to ask what it would mean to think about
language without relying on the instrumentality inevitably
ascribed to it in even the minimal gesture of conceptualizing it
as an object of study. At the same time, there is a crucial
respect in which Benjamin's essay is still governed by the
classical opposition of the finite and the infinite Derrida seeks
to unsettle. Benjamin re-describes the relationship between the
bourgeois and non-bourgeois understandings of language as a fall
from the discourse of Adamic naming into its mere parody, the
instrumental human word, which always refers to something beyond
language: "The Fall marks the birth of the human word, in which
name no longer lives intact and which has stepped out of
name-language, the language of knowledge . . . . The [human] word
must communicate something (other than itself)" (71). Accordingly,
even the proper names in human language, the very "frontier"
between "finite and infinite language," have to be understood as
"limited and analytic in nature in comparison to the absolutely
unlimited and creative infinity of the divine word" (69-70). In
contrast to these formulations, Derrida's reading of Hegel
suggests that the power of a discourse may lie in its limited
rather than its unlimited character. Derrida and Benjamin differ
on this point because the latter's critique of the
instrumentalization of language remains committed to one of the
most traditional gestures in Western linguistic theory, the
absolute privileging of the noun or name, the /onoma/, as the key
to semantic dynamics. In its most canonical form, the move is
readily legible in Aristotle's definition of metaphor as the
transfer (/epiphora/) of the name (/onomatos/) of one thing to
something else (/allotriou/), a structure of analogy based on the
transposition of words that presents changes in meaning as
patterns of substitutions of one unit for another (Poetics 57b 7-9).
34. Naturally, we should not underestimate the radicality of
denomination. At the very least, it can be argued that naming is a
linguistic act that breaks with the tropological model of language
to which, thanks to Aristotle, it owes its preeminence. At the
same time, it is not by chance that in "White Mythology" a
sustained exposition of the Aristotelian doctrine of metaphor
leads Derrida to a discussion of catachresis in which "the order
of the noun is largely surpassed" as we begin to speak of the
"metaphor-catachreses of prepositions" (256). Derrida urges us to
think about linguistic finitude in terms of the syntactic
resistance of a /not/ that traverses the Hegelian discourse of
self-interpretation without becoming just one more resource of
/self/-negation. Perhaps, then, we can describe /not/ as the
metaphor-catachresis of ad-verbiality that confounds any effort to
explain performativity with a model in which, as in Benjamin,
denomination would be the formative schema of linguistic praxis
and the noun the paradigmatic linguistic unit.
35. From this perspective, we can see why Benjamin's transformation of
linguistic theory remains limited by not being limited enough,
that is, it is committed to the traditional understanding of the
infinite resources of language and the creative authority of
divine naming. At the same time, we should not miss the polemical
import of Benjamin's argument. His analysis warns that in our
efforts to characterize a finite discourse that will counter the
absolute semantic rule of the auto-interpretive Hegelian spirit,
we risk returning to the most old-fashioned instrumental
conception of signification in which words passively do what they
are used to do. It is therefore essential that the problems we
have explored in Derrida not be mistaken for an announcement of
the death of verbal creativity and the demise of coordination
between an utterance and its effects. The language of finitude and
the discourse of /not/ suggest that no speech act can entirely
make good on its promise to be meaningful. This is not, however, a
claim about the impossibility of performance /per se./ Rather, it
is an injunction to conceptualize linguistic events less in terms
of agents who act and more with reference to modalities of
expression--adverbial or adjectival--that are impossible to
assimilate to a traditional logic of constative affirmations.
36. Revealing language to be a dynamic whose finite resources are not
unfailingly devoted to its own self-determination, Derrida
provides both a new picture of self-interpretive agency in Hegel
and a vantage point from which to assess the limits of any project
that would base its critical authority on its own
self-reflexivity. In this respect, Derrida's interrogation of
discursive finitude is a far-reaching challenge to the humanist
enterprises that valorize introspection as the grounds of analysis
and insight. As the importance of Derrida's work for contemporary
social and political thought is debated in the decades to come,
these issues may well prove to be an increasingly central
dimension of his legacy.
German Department
Reed College
mieszkow@reed.edu
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Notes
1 <#ref1>. Derrida says that this break with speculative thought
may only be a break from a "certain" (as the familiar
qualification runs) reading of Hegel, a "certain" Hegelianism, for
Hegel's corpus offers considerable resources to the operations
that seek to oppose it: "I emphasize the Hegelian /Aufhebung/,
such as it is interpreted by a certain Hegelian discourse, for it
goes without saying that the double meaning of /Aufhebung/ could
be written otherwise. Whence its proximity to all the operations
conducted /against/ Hegel's dialectical speculation" (Positions
40-1). Hegel can be pitted against the inheritors who celebrate
him as their own--Hegel the idealist can be matched against Hegel
the realist, Hegel the formalist can war with Hegel the
nominalist, and so on--assuming it is still clear what conflict
means in this context.
2 <#ref2>. Hegel is frequently accused of being overly abstruse,
if not downright obscurantist, yet the ferocity of these charges
appears to be inversely proportional to the accuracy with which
his arguments are popularized. Far more than with Immanuel Kant or
Friedrich Schelling--hardly easy reads--it is the caricatures of
Hegel's thought that hold sway, even at an advanced level of
scholarship. It seems that we constantly need to be reminded that
in Hegel the disruption that inevitably manifests itself within a
concept is not unambiguously an opportunity for an advance in
insight. Each "negation of negation" is as much a confirmation of
the incoherence of the prior stages of the argument as it is a
resolution of confusion, which is simply to say that Hegel's
philosophy does not inexorably build skyward on increasingly solid
ground. It would be equally accurate to maintain that things get
shakier every step of the way, a point that has been emphasized by
much of the criticism that takes its cue from Derrida's work.
3 <#ref3>. Over the last fifteen years, this charge has frequently
been leveled at Derrida by Slavoj Žižek:
Derrida incessantly varies the motif of how full
identity-with-itself is impossible; how it is always,
constitutively, deferred, split; how the condition of its
possibility is the condition of its impossibility; how there
is no identity without reference to an outside which
always-already truncates it, and so on, and so on. Yet what
eludes him is the Hegelian inversion of /identity qua
impossible/ into /identity itself as a name for a certain
radical impossibility./ The impossibility unearthed by Derrida
through the hard work of deconstructive reading supposed to
subvert identity constitutes the very definition of identity
[in Hegel]. (37)
What is notable is that Žižek--who is fond of quoting his subject
matter at considerable length--almost never offers even a
phrase-length citation of Derrida, and in the extended discussion
of Derrida and Hegel from which this passage is taken, there is
not so much as a single reference to any of Derrida's numerous
published writings on Hegel. In accusing Derrida of working with a
straw-man Hegel ("identity is privileged over difference," "the
self reigns supreme over the other"), Žižek is himself working
with a straw-man Derrida, ("self-presence is impossible," "all
binary oppositions auto-deconstruct"). In fact, upon closer
examination it becomes obvious that Žižek's account of Derrida's
understanding of Hegel takes as its primary source not a book or
essay by Derrida, but a book about Derrida, Rodolphe Gasché's The
Tain of the Mirror. In a curiously ambiguous gesture, Žižek relies
on Gasché as his reference for condemning Derrida's analyses at
the same time as he goes out of his way to accuse Gasché of the
error he attributes to Derrida: "Gasché presents as specifically
'Derridean' a whole series of propositions which sound as if they
were taken from Hegel's Logic" (74). For Žižek, the would-be
critic of Hegel--Gasché, Derrida--is unable to recognize that his
"refinements" of Hegel simply are Hegel's positions. Remembering
the interpretive bind described by Adorno, it is perhaps
inevitable that Gasché responds to this critique by arguing that
Žižek has erred by taking one section of the greater Logic on
identity and reflection as Hegel's last word on the topic and
ignoring the broader teleological parameters of his thought. His
assertions about the radicalism of Hegelian reflexivity
notwithstanding, Žižek is said to lapse into an extremely
primitive oppositional model. (Gasché adds that "in Žižek's theory
of identity, socio-psychological and psychoanalytic concepts have
become mixed up with [identity's] philosophical concept"
[Inventions 278-9 n14].)
4 <#ref4>. This section of the Philosophy of Right condenses an
argument made at greater length in the opening section of Hegel's
Philosophy of History.
5 <#ref5>. For two important discussions of the way in which a
truly totalizing system is never done totalizing, never done
anticipating (and co-opting) its future readers, see Hamacher's
Pleroma (esp. 1-81) and Part II of Warminski's Readings in
Interpretation, "Reading Hegel" (95-182).
6 <#ref6>. See in particular "Signature, Even, Context" and
Limited Inc.
7 <#ref7>. In this context, Judith Butler's work has been
enormously influential for attempts to assess the Derridean
understanding of linguistic performance and its importance for the
understanding of identity "after" Hegel.
8 <#ref8>. See Mémoires for Paul de Man (esp. Chapter 3, "Acts")
and "Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)."
9 <#ref9>. Hamacher has written extensively on the promise and its
importance for Kantian thought (see Premises) and has explored
this dimension of Derrida's project and its intersections with his
own work in "Lingua Amissa."
10 <#ref10>. Fynsk explores the presuppositional structure of
language in detail in Language and Relation: ... that there is
language. See also Agamben's Potentialities, especially §13,
"/Pardes/: The Writing of Potentiality."
11 <#ref11>. As /poiesis/, the discourse of productivity as such,
poetry should be the place where the auto-generative act of
self-interpretation and the product of that act, the discourse of
self-creation, coincide. Of course, a glance at almost any
nineteenth-century thinker reveals that the productive powers of
the artistic self are not easily coordinated with the forms this
productivity assumes. While there is widespread consensus in
post-Kantian thought that poetry distinguishes itself by its
ability to give full expressive range to the
imagination--literally setting it free, as Kant himself says in
the third Critique--this does not simply mean that poetry gives
the mind a forum in which to run wild with ever more novel
creations. Rather, poetry liberates the imagination from the
requirement that it be defined by its capacity to synthesize a
product. To put this slightly differently, radical creative
autonomy would appear to imply at least a degree of independence
from self-creation as the sole standard of autonomy. The discourse
of /poiesis/ is thus ironically the field in which the mind is
emancipated from the requirement that it be /poietic/; it is the
discourse in which producer and product are revealed to co-exist
in an indifferent rather than a mutually reinforcing relationship.
12 <#ref12>. Hegel writes that "/den Geist mit allen seinen
Konzeptionen der Phantasie und Kunst . . . für den Geist
ausspricht/" (225).
13 <#ref13>. Derrida explains:
The event is what comes and, in coming, comes to surprise me,
to surprise and to suspend comprehension: the event is first
of all /that which/ I do not first of all comprehend. It
consists in /that, that/ I do not comprehend: /that which/ I
do not comprehend and first of all /that/ I do not comprehend,
the fact that I do not comprehend: my incomprehension. That is
the limit, at once internal and external, on which I would
like to insist here: although the experience of an event, the
mode according to which it affects us, calls for a movement of
appropriation (comprehension, recognition, identification,
description, determination, interpretation on the basis of a
horizon of anticipation, knowledge, naming and so on),
although this movement of appropriation is irreducible and
ineluctable, there is no event worthy of its name except
insofar as this appropriation /falters/ at some border or
frontier. A frontier, however, with neither front nor
confrontation, one that incomprehension does not run into head
on since it does not take the form of a solid front: it
escapes, remains evasive, open, undecided, indeterminable.
(Philosophy in a Time of Terror 90-1)
14 <#ref14>. In the greater Logic, Hegel's response to the
quandaries we have been describing is to offer a complex argument
about the finite's doubly negative relation to its limit as both
the determination of what it is and is not. This line of
discussion culminates in the conclusion that the finite, "in
ceasing-to be, in this negation of itself, actually attains a
being-in-itself [and] is united with itself" as the negation of
the finite, or the infinite (Science 136). One need only compare
this demonstration with the treatment of the transition from the
finite to the infinite in the Encyclopedia Logic, however, to
recognize that the entire topic leaves Hegel uneasy.
15 <#ref15>. For an effort to explore this "other" thinking, see
Nancy's A Finite Thinking and Hegel: The Restlessness of the
Negative.
16 <#ref16>. Derrida writes: "The supplement adds itself, it is a
surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude"; but the
supplement "adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates
itself /in-the-place-of/; if it fills, it is as if one fills a
void. If it represents and makes an image, it is by the anterior
default of a presence. Compensatory and vicarious, the supplement
is an adjunct, a subaltern instance which /takes-(the)-place/" (Of
Grammatology 144-45).
17 <#ref17>. In Speech and Phenomena, the discussion of
supplementarity leads to the explicit claim that différance
explodes the classical opposition of the finite and the infinite
(cf. Speech 101-102).
18 <#ref18>. On this question, see in particular Derrida's "Pas."
19 <#ref19>. Following Derrida's "Force of Law: The 'Mystical
Foundation of Authority'" (1989), discussions of pure means in
Benjamin have proliferated, largely as part of an ongoing study of
the Benjamin essay Derrida analyzes there, "The Critique of
Violence." For an account of the political stakes of these
arguments and in particular their connections with Benjamin's
theory of language, see Hamacher's "Afformative, Strike."
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