Re-reading Hegel:
Meaning and Subjectivity in the
Phenomenology of Spirit
WILLIAM J. URBAN
The Absolute Knowing of Meaning: A Conclusion
We have examined how Hegel propels the Phenomenology forward by exploiting the fact that any position consciousness takes with respect to reality is always already part of that reality. But is ‘the Calvary of absolute Spirit’ [die Schädelstättedes absoluten Geistes] in the final paragraph a point which somehow freezes the restless dialectical movement, announcing that we have arrived at the long-awaited synchronism of subject and object? (§808) The answer is no:25 the literal translation of Schädelstätte as ‘the site of skulls’ cannot fail to immediately evoke in us the logic of the infinite judgment which frustrates any notion that a stable body of knowledge has been consolidated once and for all. Instead, ‘what is revealed to the Spirit in the backwards-gaze of its Er-Innerung, inwardizing memory, are the scattered skulls of the past “figures of consciousness.” The worn-out Hegelian formula according to which the Result, in its abstraction from the path leading to it, is a corpse, has to be inversed once again: this “path” itself is punctuated by scattered skulls.’ (Žižek 1993: 269n43) What Hegel has presented for us is a series of failed attempts by the subject to define the Absolute, the failure which is the very impetus of dialectical progress. But this progress never achieves rational totalization; rather, Hegel’s wager concerns a ‘”squared totalization”: the possibility of “making a system” out of the very series of failed totalizations, to enchain them in a rational way, to discern the strange “logic” that regulates the process by which the breakdown of a totalization itself begets another totalization.’ (Žižek 2002: 99) The path of the Phenomenology thus involves the Spirit’s progressive remembering of its entire history, which is to be read as the counterpart to the subject’s process of forgetting which we examined above as the gradual emptying of its being of all meaningful content. This path culminates in consciousness qua Absolute Knowing, a paradoxical point of absolute non-knowledge in which the subject experiences how ‘the true Absolute is nothing but the logical disposition of its previous failed attempts to conceive the Absolute’ and realizes the impossibility of occupying a neutral position outside of its position of enunciation which would allow complete knowledge. (ibid 100) It is for this reason that das absolute Wissen is best translated as Absolute Know-ing insofar as it involves insight into the interminability of the dialectical movement. Such a point is in contrast to those occupied by all the previous figures of consciousness which directly subordinate their epistemological pursuits to their engaged subjective position (i.e., truth), thus disavowing the gap that separates knowledge from truth. For only with Absolute Knowing is the insight achieved into how the path towards truth – that is, the way consciousness arrived at it, its ‘formal aspect’ (§87) – coincides with truth itself. (Žižek 2002: 163) This is why the problem we initially raised in our Introduction is a pseudo-problem, for Hegel’s explicit criticism of the philosopher exclusively concerned with epistemology is not inconsistent with his actual deployment of the subject-object schema throughout the Phenomenology. By the end of the text, the gap between Hegel’s theoretical position and his position of enunciation is embodied as such. This could itself be expressed through an infinite judgment which paradoxically conjoins the universal system of Absolute Knowing with an accidental singularity – the individual named G. W. F. Hegel.
This of course does not mean that Hegel makes the absurd claim to ‘know it all.’ In no way does the Phenomenology venture into the noumenal realm of the Thing-in-itself prohibited by Kant through an articulation of a logic that reflects how the Absolute itself appears to itself in the thought of a finite subject. Rather, when Hegel tells us in the Preface how ‘everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject,’ we are to place these two terms in the form of the infinite judgment ‘Substance is... Subject,’ as is effectively done a paragraph later. (§17–8) Far from revealing the subject as the ultimate ground of the substance of reality or indicating how the Absolute qua transcendent subject has made the finite subject into its medium through which the Absolute contemplates itself, the speculative identity of substance and subject instead expresses ‘their very lack of identity26 – that is to say, the way their non-identity (the gap separating the Subject from the Substance) is strictly correlative to the inherent non-identity, split of the Substance itself.’ (Žižek 2002: 105) In fact, Hegel is quite explicit in articulating how the Kantian external gaze of the subject upon the enigmatic substance is simultaneously the gaze by means of which the substance appears to itself as an inscrutable mystery: ‘Now, although this negative appears at first as a disparity between the “I” and its object, it is just as much the disparity of the substance with itself. Thus what seems to happen outside of it, to be an activity directed against it, is really its own doing, and Substance shows itself to be essentially Subject.’27 (§37) In other words, as we scheme to attain exalted contemplation of the Absolute, we actually participate at the level of the Absolute by means of the very gap which separates us from it. So when Hegel writes that the Absolute ‘would surely laugh our little ruse to scorn, if it were not with us, in and for itself, all along, and of its own volition,’ this is not to be read that the Absolute is always with us, nor that it will be with us in the final reconciliation. (§73) Rather, it expresses ‘the experience of how it always-already was with us. Our experience of the “loss,” of the fissure between us (the subject) and the Absolute, is the very way the Absolute is already with us.’ (Žižek 2002: 91)
The final moment of the dialectical process should thus be read as a radical loss in which the subject purifies itself of every positive presupposition of meaningful being. While alienated consciousness suffers from the loss of the object, consciousness qua Absolute Knowing experiences a ‘loss of loss,’ recognizing the priority of the loss over the object and how the given object is sublime in its attempt to fill in the empty place of this loss. (Žižek 2005c: 52) This empty place is the self-relating of pure negativity and Hegel asserts that the subject can recognize itself in this capacity ‘only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it.’ (§32) The transubstantiation achieved here is what distinguishes subject from substance, for ‘Hegel’s whole point is that the subject does not survive the ordeal of negativity: he effectively loses his very essence... ”Subject” designates that X which is able to survive the loss of its very substantial identity and to continue to live as the “empty shell of its former self.”’ (Žižek 2005a: 217) The Hegelian subject is therefore thoroughly non-hermeneutical, emerging as pure self-relating negativity as it sacrifices all its inner substantial spiritual content and thus ‘wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself’ as a life which endures and maintains itself in devastation. (§32) Hence Nancy’s contention that Hegel is the inaugural thinker of our fragmented contemporary world who recognizes that because the transcendent has distanced itself in the void of abstraction, we can never again entertain raising ourselves to a supreme signification. Rather, we must today face up to the possibility of the death of signification itself. (§590) For if the Hegelian world is our world, a world from which life withdraws and gives way to the endless displacement from one term to the next which can neither be sustained nor gathered in an identity of meaning, those that try ‘to restore its dignity lose it that much more surely in sentimentality, or in the fanaticism of pretensions to posit the Absolute here and now.’ (Nancy: 3–4)
The outcome, however, is not utter despair but a new hope. For we have seen that the subject’s self-evacuation of substantial identity does not permit it to abstractly contemplate the universe as a self-sufficient mechanism, thereby relieving the subject of all responsibility. Rather, at each moment the self-enclosed subject is called upon to work through the reflexive process and to shift to the realm of the universal where there is nothing that it is not responsible for: to recognize its position of enunciation in the gaze through which it constructs the world, to acknowledge the formal part it plays when it conceives the world in its imperfections – to even consciously assume responsibility for the ‘substantive’ historical and cultural conditions which supposedly constitute its being. In today’s championing of ‘the deep meaning of life processes’ said to be irreducible to dialectical movement, any universal claim like Absolute Knowing is immediately dismissed as ludicrous. How could Hegel, these critics ask, who readily acknowledges that we must conceive ourselves as completely immersed in history, pretend to pass final judgment on history from a point somehow exempted from it? But as the Hegelian logic articulated in this paper makes clear, it is precisely because we are absorbed into history without remainder that we are obligated to speak from the standpoint of the end of history. For Absolute Knowing ‘is nothing other than the explication of this historically specified field that absolutely limits our horizon as such, it is “finite,” it can be contained in a finite book.’28 (Žižek 2002: 218) The book we have examined is such a book and the ‘we’ that it addresses is not the enlightened universal class of academics who imagine themselves having reached an elevated philosophical knowledge through external reflection on the text. Rather, the opening pages of the Preface make clear that although philosophy must initially posit itself as an abstract, separate knowledge – possibly contained in a book quite difficult to read – its culminating moments will only be grasped on a second reading which effaces the externally reflected first, since ‘rereading, as a separate act, is never not indispensible to the experience of truth.’ (Nancy: 77) The speculative philosophy of Hegel’s Phenomenology thus offers us a radical break with the past, but only on condition that we wager the imaginary content of our subjectivity while (re)reading it.
Lacanian-themed puzzles
