Re-reading Hegel:
Meaning and Subjectivity in the
Phenomenology of Spirit
WILLIAM J. URBAN
NOTES
1 Citations to the Phenomenology will be made by paragraph number as per A. V. Miller’s translation. All citations in this paper with italic script represent the author’s original emphasis.
2 E.g., ‘[T]he interpretation of knowledge, still prevalent today, as a “relation between subject and object”,… contains about as much “truth” as it does vacuity. But subject and object are not the same as Da-sein and world.’ (Heidegger: 56). Gadamer further reminds us how Heidegger ‘was both attracted and repulsed by’ Hegel’s analysis of the experiencing consciousness. (Gadamer: 354) Following Heidegger, Gadamer’s own philosophical hermeneutics has as its task ‘to retrace the path of Hegel’s phenomenology of mind until we discover in all that is subjective the substantiality that determines it.’ (ibid 302)
3 Cf. especially §83–5.
4 We shall see how Hegel recognizes that when we are testing the truth of a statement, we are always also testing the standard of testing, so that if the test fails, the standard should also be problematized. (Žižek 2005d: 139)
5 §90–1. In particular: ‘Consciousness, for its part, is in this certainty only as a pure “I.”’
6 Although only part of the subtitle, it is worth noting that Hegel often refers back to this first chapter simply as ‘meaning.’ (eg., §165, 233, 238, 240)
7 ‘Therein resides Hegel’s properly dialectical insight: the stumbling block to the true-infinite activity of Thought in the representational name is not its external appearance but the very fixed universality of its inner meaning.’ (Žižek 2005b: 197)
8 We should note how this is in sharp contrast to modern thinking after the ‘linguistic turn:’ Hegel’s dialectical reflection is the opposite of the approach which considers how language, constituting the horizon of possible meaning into which we are thrown, ‘functions as the transcendental condition of possibility of all our experience of reality. Here, then, “signified falls into the signifier,” i.e., signified is an effect of the signifier.’ (Žižek 2009b: 128) Contra Hegel, meaning would then be derivable from its transcendentally constitutive condition, the symbolic order.
9 For an examination of the Phenomenology through the place Hegel as come to occupy for us, cf. Dolar (2006).
10 Allison has dubbed this Kant’s ‘incorporation thesis.’ (Allison 1996: 130)
11 This is an important lesson indeed, for ‘[l]anguage is, of course, the very medium of the “journey of consciousness’ in Phenomenology, to such a point that it would be possible to define every stage of this journey, every “figure of consciousness,” by a specific modality of language.’ (Žižek 1989: 210)
12 Expressing this logic in more Kantian terms, we note that ‘although the suprasensible Idea/Thing cannot be represented in a direct, immediate way,... what the chaotic shapelessness of sublime phenomena renders visible, on the contrary, is the very impossibility of representing the suprasensible Idea/Thing.’ (Žižek 1992: 164)
13 If space permitted, we could also take up the paradoxes surrounding the subject qua minimal gap between two signifiers whose perceived ‘One-ness’ is merely fleeting, for ‘[t]hese paradoxes were already explored in detail by Hegel in the second chapter of the Phenomenology on “Perception, or, the Thing and Deception.”’ (Žižek 2004: 68)
14 This formulates Hegel’s fully mature speculative philosophy, his position of the absolute immanence of transcendence, a position which can only be grasped if the subject first makes the (Kantian) error of asserting transcendence in an apophatic way, by conceiving phenomenal immanence (ie, appearance) as that which must be overcome, as that which inherently points beyond itself to a noumenal transcendence (ie, essence); then, this overcoming is posited by the subject as thoroughly immanent so ‘what is beyond immediate reality is not another higher reality, but the movement of its negation as such.’ (Žižek 2009a: 107n134) In the end, in-itself entities are brought about through the subject’s hypostatization of its own activity of epistemologically engaging with the phenomenal/noumenal split of reality, thereby generating the illusion of a supersensible beyond.
15 What we have here is ‘a kind of double inversion by means of which these suprasensible ideas themselves assume again sensible form, so that the very sensible world is redoubled: as if, by the side of our ordinary sensible world, there exists another world of “spiritual materiality.”’ (Žižek 1993: 138) Inversely and put more simply, the supersensible ‘is something that appears when reality... is itself copied.’ (Žižek 2009b: 133)
16 Hegel thus undermines what the subject ‘means to say’ (a transcendent entity beyond appearance) with the truth of what the subject ‘actually said’ (the procedure by which he posits the appearance as such). (Žižek 2002: 161)
17 For example, Kojève argues that ‘the profound basis of Hegelian anthropology is formed by this idea that Man is not a Being that is in an eternal identity to itself... but a Nothingness that nihilates’ and that ‘the Hegelian conception of Man = Action = Negativity,’ so that the ‘suprasensible entity... is in reality nothing but the negating... Action realized by Man.’ (Kojève 48; 155;71) Or consider Nancy who quite simply states that for Hegel, ‘[t]he self is in itself negativity.’ (Nancy: 55)
18 Although in the philosophical domain it is only in Kant’s ‘transcendental object’ we find a concept corresponding to this paradoxical object, this does not lessen the necessity of positing it as existent in Hegel. (Žižek 1994:33)
19 Of course distortions in our phenomenal field have meaning as such, but the argument here remains unthinkable for the hermeneutical phenomenologist, namely, ‘that meaning as such results from a certain distortion.’ (Žižek 1994: 27)
20 Nancy equally insists on a similar distinction: ’The Hegelian subject is not to be confused with subjectivity as a separate and one-sided agency for synthesizing representations, nor with subjectivity as the exclusive interiority of a personality... The reader of Hegel who does not understand this understands nothing.’ (Nancy: 4–5)
21 At once we see how Badiou is correct to emphasize ‘the non-hermeneutic status of truth,... [of] the impossibility of the conjunction of meaning and truth.’ (Žižek 2006c: 347–8)
22 This rhetorical figure perhaps most clearly renders manifest the way Hegel undermines a theoretical position (the enunciated, its meaning) by staging what must remain unspoken (the position of enunciation, its being) if that theoretical position is to maintain consistency. Once consciousness takes cognizance of the gap between the two, it passes to its next figuration and Hegel’s text moves forward. Regarding the ascetic, his enunciated position of indifference toward bodily life is subverted by his actual preoccupation with mortifying his body. The particular dramatization we find in the final paragraphs of the fourth chapter thus concerns the conversion from the denial of the body into the embodied denial as the ascetic’s solution to the deadlock he faces, as he can only deny his body to the point of death. The logic here at once also shows the subversive use of exemplification employed by Hegel throughout the Phenomenology: a figure of consciousness is not to be viewed as an imperfect illustration of the theoretical notion; rather, such ‘examples’ subvert the very notion they exemplify. (Žižek 2002: 142–3)
23 See, for example, Hyppolite (159) and Kojève (37). We can, of course, easily criticize the French interpretations of Hegel which elevate a particular determinate figure of the dialectical process into the matrix of the entire process as being much too narrow in scope. Thus Wahl is rightly criticized for so privileging the unhappy consciousness in the 1920s, Kojève for the Master/Slave dialectic in the 1930s and Hyppolite for extending Wahl’s project in the 1940s since, as he says, the ‘[u]nhappy consciousness is the fundamental theme... present in various forms throughout the Phenomenology.’ (Hyppolite 190) But we should not overlook the Hegelian lesson here of ‘concrete universality’ which entails the logic employed to undermine one figure to the next, spoken of above: the examples of Wahl et. al. are perfect instantiations of how ‘the universal frame of the process becomes part of (or, rather, drawn into) the particular content.’ (Žižek 2001a: 23–4) More to our immediate purposes, Dolar argues that for all the faults of the French interpreters, they properly highlight desire ‘as something irreducibly heterogeneous and dislocated, a process in which its subject lost the ground of self-reflexive conceptuality.’ (Dolar 2006: 154n13)
24 The split often causes the subjective experience of being alienated in language, the logic of which we examined above in the first section on sense-certainty. Using the terminology of the third chapter on the understanding, this object is that which causes self-identical essence to relate to itself as a self-sundering moment. (§162)
25 This should already be obvious from the foregoing analysis. As we saw, for Hegel the subject-object couple is never a simple duality as the first term is structurally split into two: the subject which opposes/forms the object and the subject as that which emerges in the domain of objectivity, qua void of negativity.
26 Again, the two moments are not on the same level since subject is nothing but the non-identity-with-itself of substance. (Žižek 2002: 119)
27 In Kantian terms, we have here a ‘splitting of the noumenal itself into the In-itself and the way this In-itself appears to us finite subjects’ and this is precisely the way ‘substance becomes subject.’ (Žižek 1994: 51n7)
28 In other words, Absolute Knowing is ‘an attempt at delineating the radical closure/finitude of a knowledge grounded in its historical constellation... [whereby] the limitations of our knowledge are correlated to the limitations of the known constellation itself, its “absolute” character thus emerging from the intersection of these two limitations.’ (Žižek 2004: 60) This implies the acceptance of the irreducible incompleteness not only of the human understanding of the universe, but of the universe itself, as well as the recognition of the impossibility of accordance between knowledge and being.
Lacanian-themed puzzles
