Ever since
Alexandre Kojève’s famous seminars on the Phenomenology of Spirit during
the 1930s, Hegel has served as a central reference point throughout the
philosophical developments occurring in twentieth-century France. Such luminaries as Sartre, Merleau-Ponty,
and Lacan absorbed Hegel through Kojève, making the now-familiar themes of
dialectics, negativity, and alterity into key pieces of their own intellectual
edifices. Later, Jean Hyppolite became
the principle scholar and disseminator of Hegelian ideas in Paris, translating
Hegel’s works and publishing commentaries that set the tone of discussions of
Hegel for another generation of French thinkers. Jacques Derrida is by far one of Hyppolite’s most famous and
successful students. However, Derrida’s
relation to Hegel is extremely complex and colored by a great deal of
ambivalence.

Despite the
many striking similarities between dialectical method and deconstruction—for
instance, Derrida’s procedure for dissolving oppositions often appears to be a
version of what Hegel refers to as the “convergence of opposites”—Derrida and
Derrideans alike vehemently insist that this resemblance is deceitful. In essence, if one is to believe their
objections, there are two crucial distinguishing features setting Derrida apart
from Hegelianism: first, once a
distinction has been deconstructed, it isn’t possible to reconcile the
collapsed binary unit through recourse to a “higher” third term (i.e., the
process of “sublation” [Aufhebung] is denied); second, following from
this, deconstruction cannot be employed in the labor of assembling a systematic
whole, in the endeavor to conceptualize things in a “totalizing” fashion. Although he acknowledges his significant
debts to Hegel, Derrida, starting with “From Restricted to General
Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve”
(itself also heavily indebted to George Bataille’s reading of Hegel) from the
1967 collection of essays Writing and Difference, continually strives to
demonstrate that the alleged systematic closure sought after by Hegel is
utterly impossible to obtain. One of
Derrida’s strategies is to locate points of resistance to the movement of the
dialectic, to pinpoint undialecticizable remainders that silently drop out from
the construction of a conceptual totality (thereby refuting the claims of “the
Idea” [Begriff] to have encompassed the world in full, with nothing left
out of the picture). Of course, the
harsh edge of this critical stance relies upon the assumption that Hegel
purports to offer an exhaustive system, aiming to compose a completed catalogue
of knowledge in the form of a philosophical grand narrative.

Jean-Luc
Nancy is one of Derrida’s best-known students. 
Hence, one might anticipate that a book by him on Hegel would involve
extending the above trajectory of Derridean anti-dialectical criticism. Surprisingly, Nancy pursues another project
altogether. He sets about dismantling
the straw man version of Hegel so frequently railed against by those presenting
themselves as the voices of postmodern sensibility. Instead of the quasi-Platonic prophet of an authoritarian Geist
with its “absolute knowledge”—Nancy’s text makes clear why the conclusion of
the Phenomenology involves absolute “knowing” as a verb/process, rather
than the erroneous treatment of Hegelian “knowledge” as a noun/content—readers
here encounter Hegel as a thinker devoting himself to the most concrete of
particularities, to the immanent fluctuations of an always shifting and
unstable reality. In short, Nancy
maintains, as his subtitle hints, that negativity (i.e., the “restlessness” of
movement, change, metamorphosis, dissolution, etc.) constitutes the very heart
and soul of Hegel’s philosophy.

Early on in
the course of his exposition, Nancy stipulates that when Hegel uses the word
“subject,” it doesn’t mean what it typically does in philosophical
parlance—“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… In a word: 
the Hegelian subject is in no way the self all to itself” (pg.
4-5). Subjectivity is an activity and
not a thing or entity. It functions as
a dynamic process unfolding a series of moments, with mental interiority,
selfhood, personal identity, and so on being nothing more than merely
transitory phases of this movement. 
Nancy argues that an understanding of subjectivity as a cognitive
capacity for forming ideational representations prevents the interpreter from
grasping even the most basic and rudimentary features of Hegel’s
philosophy. The notorious “Absolute
Subject” of Hegelianism is nothing other than pure negativity, activity with no
firm anchoring in any determinate contents or givens (including the
psychologistic coordinates of self-identity).

Nancy proceeds
to debunk the exegetical biases leading people to presume that the Weltgeist
delineated by Hegel is something like Plato’s heaven of the Ideas, namely, a
transcendent, supersensible realm floating above the nitty-gritty materiality
of everyday experience—“This ‘life of the spirit’ is not something separate; it
is not a spirituality that floats above and beyond materiality” (pg. 19). If one pays close attention to what happens
to the notion of “nature” in post-Kantian German idealism, especially in the
work of F.W.J. Schelling that Hegel himself draws from in his early writings,
one realizes that the two-tiered ontology deployed by Plato on the basis of his
primarily epistemological distinctions between the formality of ideas and the
materiality of contents is completely dispended with by Hegel. For Hegel, as for Schelling, nature isn’t a
name designating the ontologically homogenous sum total of inert “stuff,” a
mechanistically regulated field of causal interactions between chunks of
matter. Instead, the material world of
nature is always-already agitated by a series of movements immanently contained
within it; nature is primordially at odds with itself, and its internal
antagonisms are driving motors leading to subsequent stages of the dialectic.  That is to say, “spirit” emerges from
“substance.” Speaking of spirit, Nancy
observes that, “it is the unsettling of matter inseparable from matter itself… It names the restlessness and awakening of
the world, immanence always already tense, extended and distended within itself
as well as outside itself” (pg. 19).

After a few
brief remarks on the relation between Kant and Hegel, Nancy proposes that,
unlike the distinction between phenomenal objects-as-appearances and noumenal
things-in-themselves, the interplay between the manifest and the non-manifest
in Hegel occurs at the level of the manifest itself (a formulation displaying a
paradoxical structure similar to “the identity of identity and difference”
spoken of by the young Hegel starting in his 1801 Difference between
Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy). Negativity, as that which relates appearances to each other and
surpasses all givens without ever being captured as an appearance itself, is an
intrinsic, immanent part of the very manifestation of appearances. As those familiar with Hegel’s Kant critique
as well as his arguments about the “inverted world” from the Phenomenology
know, Hegel rejects appealing to anything that would enjoy the status of being
a hidden, unknowable depth, a mysterious substantiality beyond the limits of
cognition. Nancy diagnoses this
tendency of philosophers to posit such depths as symptomatic of a “laziness and
repose of thought.” He implies that
there’s a sort of habitual inclination on the part of thought to invoke
something along the lines of Kant’s noumenal sphere of
things-in-themselves. From this
perspective, Hegel challenges philosophy to investigate the manifest without
having recourse, either from its inception or at its conclusion, to anything
even vaguely “other worldly.”

Nancy
clarifies a few of Hegel’s key technical terms in light of this interpretation
of Hegel as a philosopher devoted to what one could call the “manifest as
manifest” (rather than as appearance). 
“Form” is “content,” namely, form is the manner in which content reveals
itself as manifestation. And, the
“idea” is, as Nancy puts it, the “power of appropriating form.” The basic upshot here is that the
content-form-idea triad, which sounds as though it lays out a hierarchical sequence
(wherein content gives rise to form, which is then seized or grasped by the
activity of the idea), operates entirely within or upon the surface of
manifestation itself. Not only does
Hegel treat form as a moment of manifestation (instead of being something like
a conceptual template superimposed over sensible intuitions), but, given
Hegel’s bulldozing of the subject/object distinction, the idea qua
capacity for apprehending form is no longer to be separated from the thing thus
apprehended. The idea is no longer to
be relegated to a self-subject’s mind. 
In this way, one could dub Hegel, without a hint of disparagement, a
philosopher of the absolutely superficial.

In the
later chapters of the book, Nancy takes up the themes of identity, desire, and
freedom. Returning to the
(non-)connection between subjectivity and selfhood, Nancy writes, “self is what
does not find itself. Self is
negation of self, negatively for itself” (pg. 56). In a subsequent paragraph, he asserts that, “I cannot confuse
myself with any ‘self’” (pg. 56). 
Although these claims about a negativity internally thwarting any
attempt at establishing a self through introspective, reflexive consciousness
are imputed to Hegel as original insights, one could argue that this is the
theoretical culmination of an important caveat articulated by Descartes in the
second of his Meditations. After
establishing the indubitable existence of the Cogito, Descartes pauses
to express a slight degree of uncertainty—“But I do not yet understand sufficiently
what I am—I, who now necessarily exist” (René Descartes, Meditations on
First Philosophy [trans. Donald A. Cress], Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993, pg.
18). The fact that the “I” as thinker
necessarily exists whenever there is thought has been established; what this
“I” is, how it might be positively characterized, has yet to be
determined. A few pages later,
Descartes contends that the Cogito cannot be equated with any of the
contents cognized by it through its own thinking activity—“For I would indeed
be simulating were I to ‘imagine’ that I was something, because imagining is
merely the contemplating of the shape or image of a corporeal thing” (pg.
20). Simply put, thinking as an
activity, verb, or process cannot be imaginarily captured or encapsulated in
any of the content-products of thought made possible by this same
activity. One could say that Kant’s
criticisms of the illegitimate hypostatization leading to the standard notion
of the Cartesian res cogitans as a reified substance entails being more
Cartesian than Descartes himself by developing in full the implications of
Descartes’ prohibition of equivocating between the Cogito as active
possibility condition for all cognitive states and the self as a set of images,
marks, signs, and ideas identified with as the emblems of a “personality” or
“soul.” Hegel follows this line of
analysis, with the additional qualification that not only is the subject not a
self in the typical sense of the word, but that subjectivity resides precisely
in the very failure of each and every attempt at self-identification via
“mirroring” by some manner of mediating representational content. Nancy brings out the fact that Hegel’s
innovation regarding this topic, if it can be put this way, amounts to strangely
transforming the inadequacy of selfhood into one of the hallmarks of
subjectivity.

As far as
the notions of desire and freedom are concerned, it isn’t lost on Nancy that
the preceding portrayal of the subject forces some rather counterintuitive redefinitions. Desires are no longer states, properties, or
attributes of a subject. On the
contrary, the desiring self is an instance of desire, and not vice versa—“The
self, insofar as it is for itself, does not have a desire or desires, but is
desire” (pg. 61). If one throws in here
the motif of the “desire for recognition,” one has a better, more accurate
sense of the famous “master-slave” dialectic. 
The master and the slave are not pre-given subject-positions who then
subsequently develop their desires for recognition. They are who they are as subjects by virtue of how they decide to
relate to this desire; in other words, the master becomes master by (to borrow
a Lacanian turn of phrase) “not giving way” on his desire for recognition,
whereas the slave is he who capitulates at a certain point in the mutual
struggle (i.e., he surrenders his desire for recognition out of a desire for
sheer physical survival, and hence becomes a slave through this gesture of
surrender). Desire functions as the
principle term in this Hegelian structure, with subject-positions being
instances or by-products of it.

Nancy’s
remarks on freedom ring with the same vagueness as those of Heidegger on this
motif (in fact, another of Nancy’s books, The Experience of Freedom, is quite
Heideggerian). Consistent with his
previous claims, he insists that, “One cannot say that the self is free, for
such a being is in itself the negation of freedom” (pg. 70). As with desire, freedom isn’t something
possessed by an individual. Heidegger
expresses this same idea when he states, in his 1936 seminar on Schelling’s Philosophical
Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom, that, “freedom is here, not the
property of man, but the other way around: 
Man is at best the property of freedom” (Martin Heidegger, Schelling’s
Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom [trans. Joan Stambaugh],
Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985,
pg. 9). Any sort of self-identity is a
residual, overdetermined result of the movement of dynamic negativity, and it
thus shouldn’t be declared “free.” 
Along the same lines, Nancy utilizes a distinction between “being” and
“having” (something also familiar to readers of Lacan)—“you ask to have a
freedom, whereas you have to become it” (pg. 70). Freedom cannot be defined as a list of “rights” owned by people
like pieces of property or personal possessions. However, concretely speaking, what does this amount to? What does it mean as far as practices are
concerned? Should lawmakers scrap the
existing legal code, based, as it is, on a conception of freedom as a set of
guaranteed rights? Or, is this a
difference that makes no everyday difference? 
Should the status quo remain the same, with the attendant
qualification that greater semantic care is taken to distinguish between freedom
and the specified entitlements of individuals living under a state? Unfortunately, the brevity of Nancy’s
book—his own writing, minus the translators’ preface and an appendix of
excerpts from Hegel’s corpus, occupies a mere seventy-six pages—leaves the
reader with a plethora of questions such as these unanswered. Perhaps this is deliberate enticement
intended to encourage those interested enough to read more books by Nancy.

Nancy’s Hegel
shouldn’t be approached as a piece of historical Hegel scholarship. Evaluated in those terms, it wouldn’t be
very satisfying. Not only is it much
too short—one is reminded of Gilles Deleuze’s incredible chutzpah in purporting
to summarize all three of Kant’s Critiques in under eighty pages—but it
doesn’t provide specific, detailed references to Hegel’s texts. At times, one wonders whether what is being
said applies to the entirety of the Hegelian oeuvre, or whether only a certain
text or period is at issue. The safe
assumption with the “French Hegel” is usually that if no text is specified,
it’s probably the Phenomenology of Spirit that’s in question. Furthermore, besides a couple of paragraphs
on Kant, there is virtually no discussion of Hegel’s relations with other
philosophical figures (either those preceding him or his contemporaries). What makes Nancy’s book interesting is the
fact that, from within what one could risk designating as “deconstructionism,”
he dismantles a long-standing Gallic caricature of Hegel. Nancy convincingly shows through this work of
exegesis that many of the “post” movements, with so much of their inflated
sense of novelty and distinctiveness predicated upon a sweeping repudiation of
previous intellectual history, cannot take the amount of distance from Hegel
that they have hastily presumed possible.

© 2002 Adrian Johnston

Adrian
Johnston, Ph.D. will take up a position as interdisciplinary research
fellow in psychoanalysis at Emory University this fall.

Categories: Philosophical