(And please don’t worry about being a “legitimate” Hegelian or whatnot – this is a scratchpad site for draft concepts – everything I post here is “fraudulent” in the sense you describe…)

Thanks very much for your remarks.

I feel I ought to respond: not because I have some counter-argument on some point, but rather because when it comes to Hegel I feel a bit of a fraud.

The truth is, while I love Hegel and think he’s very important to come to terms with, my Hegel is, I suspect, quite idiosyncratic. When in the company of Hegelians, I can’t help but feel a little awkward and embarrassed, a bit out of place. Part of the reason for this is the fact that I’ve never finished the Phenomenology — I skipped the section on Religion (and probably a chunk out of Spirit, too!). In fact, the only of Hegel’s works that I read from cover to cover is the Logic from the Encyclopaedia. My Hegel is comprised of his Introductions and Prefaces, chunks of The Science of Logic and his Lectures on Aesthetics. So I know that my Hegel is missing something, and that were I to show him to real Hegelians I would rightly be the object of ridicule.

The other part of the reason for my discomfort is that my Hegel derives from a deliberate attempt both to make sense of and to be faithful to the “ethics” of contemporary continental philosophy (esp. Derrida). Consequently, my Hegel is neither the clod-hopping sublimator nor well-grounded logician that he is sometimes taken for. My Hegel is, I’ll admit, very Derridean, which isn’t to say my Hegel’s not Hegel, but he’s not particularly consistent with Hegel, either. To that extent, he’s probably also not as idiosyncratic as I make out.

In any case, I make my confession thus, because it’s precisely with regard to the question of “of thinking these two [i.e. the Phenomenology and the Logic] together, maintaining their difference, but also their reciprocal presupposition”, that I see Hegel stumbling, and necessarily so. About ten years ago I wrote a long (long, long; about 17,000 words long) paper on precisely this question, which for me arose in the following form: why does Hegel, in the Science of Logic, begin with an Introduction before the question of beginning (“Womit muß der Anfang der Wissenschaft gemacht werden?“)?

It’s the sort of paper that is terribly disloyal to Hegel (in the sense that it reads particular passages against convention interpretations) and is characterised by a kind of parapractic paranthesism and a magisterial tone that, today, I am rather embarrassed about. But it’s actually the stumbling that the paper traces that I have in mind when I say that Hegel’s Science of Logic compels me to think similar thoughts as those that have been raised in this and other topics.

So, to make the counter-point that I just said I had no desire to make, for me it’s precisely on account of the obstacle to that reciprocal presupposition that the question of history (though not only of history) breaks into the Logic. But it needs to be remembered that this counter-point comes from a self-confessed ignoramus.

Cheers

If you’re reluctant to break into the other thread, but want to develop some of what you were thinking on Hegel, you’re welcome to lob comments into one of those older threads – aside from being interesting conversation, it would be helpful for me, in trying to get myself back into that thought-space. (Not that you have any obligation to help me clear my head But just to encourage you to contribute thoughts on the subject if you fond yourself in the mood in the next few weeks.) There are a number of posts in this sequence, but the mains ones are on the lord-bondsman relationship and the Preface (you can see how much of a backlog I have, if I’m intending to write on the Phenomenology as a whole… ;-P)

The reading of Marx is a sort of hybrid between things I’ve been scrambling around with, and a reading developed in Postone’s works. This is actually the first time I’ve tried writing publicly about this interpretation, so I’m still fumbling around with how to explain what I’m doing, and to communicate why it might be useful. I still need to develop a much clearer exposition of what I’m on about with this “real abstraction” jargon – and of why I think it might be useful, might provide a non-reductive way of thinking about the historicity of thought and practice, to think about what was articulated in the thread above in terms of the “notional content of practice”… Ugly term. Sometimes I think half my conceptual struggle relates to finding the right words – of course, that problem always itself points back to my not being clear yet in my own concepts…

I do want to say that I’m impressed with what I’ve been reading on this blog, and that I think I will (if you have no objections) stay awhile. Reading your exchange with Sinthome in the “Immediate Reactions” thread helped me realise why I like what I see: Hegel. I didn’t want to break into that exchange, but it struck me as interesting that Sinthome declared his/her allegiance (wrong word) to the Logic as though that marked a point of distinction from your own connections with Hegel. Hegel is, for me too, the Logic — or, to be more specific, the Science of Logic — and yet I’ve not found any reason to object to any of your substantive points in that topic. Indeed, my reading of the Science of Logic compels me to think similar thoughts.

Let me say, too, that I love the reading of Marx in that thread. If you’ll excuse the horribly reductive and unjust observation, it’s Marx stumbling onto (Derrida’s) iterability or (Deleuze and Guattari’s) de- & re-territorialisation 150 years before their time.

Cheers

I think these issues take everyone to the limits of thought and expression (and I seem to write a lot when I’m at a loss for words, as well… ;-P).

It’s interesting that you frame my use of the term “intersubjectivity” as a matter of my being “forced” – good call: I’ve actually been very hesitant about this term, but have been using it recently because it’s in common use in a number of… er… contexts in which I’ve been having theoretical discussions, and so it’s been a convenient shorthand. And it does have certain advantages, particularly in focussing attention away from the individual and foregrounding that we’re at least trying not to operate on the terrain of the subject-object divide. It also, though, carries the disadvantage you mention, of – at least by itself – making it difficult to thematise both any “structural” elements that might exist within a context, as well as fissures or incoherences within a context, etc. And some of the same issues can arise as do with the concept of “culture” – problems thematising historical change and such. (Sorry to be so gestural here – it’s been a long day, and so I’m not putting my most rigorous thought forward here… But yes: I do agree that there is a cost – and it’s therefore not an accident that I tend to reach for other terms – although I’m often not happy with those, either – when I’m developing lines of argument that hug more closely to my own theoretical work…)

On obscurity: no need to worry, really I may or may not have a working familiarity with the traditions that interest you, but I am very far from having any reflex negative reaction against obscure (or even, for that matter, obscurantist ;-P) authors…

I don’t know how clear or useful what I may have to say or recommend would be, though, seeing as much of it will inevitably owe its logic to philosophers and philosophies that are regularly attacked for being “obscure”. Moreover, the relevance of any recommendations is undoubtedly dependent upon a whole network of intertexts, etc., that have informed my reading of your arguments, but to which you might not be privy.

At any rate, much of what you’ve written here and in other posts (e.g. “Gesturing…” and “Immediate Reactions”) resonates so strongly with me because it is a much more direct statement than I was ever able to manage of a question or problem that I have spent a great deal of time thinking about (albeit, in a discontinuous fashion).

So, at the risk of distracting you with potential irrelevancies, I’ll suggest one further book: Peggy Kamuf’s The Division of Literature, Or the University in Deconstruction. As a taste of what’s at stake in the book and as a test of its relevance to your concerns, allow me to quote an extended passage. The passage follows a critique of a proposal by Gerald Graff, in response to the “culture wars” in the US, to “teach the conflicts” over literature and theory:

The principal reason Graff’s account cannot prevent this repetition of the error he diagnoses [i.e. believing in "the myth of consensus"] seems to lie in his conception of the institution — i.e., the university — as … a kind of umbrella. According to this conception, the university as institution is of purely functional design and its principal function is to define a space within which to disagree, among other things, about the meaning and importance of literature. By means of this notion of a neutral frmae that is not part of what it frames, Graff draws a limit around this conflictual space and designates, in effect, a point at which the conflict is neutralized, at which partisan discord dissolves into a common ground without division. His own discourse strives less to represent this point or ground … than to occupy it, to speak for or from that point while claiming that his is not just a position among others. Such a positionless position that comprehends all others is, of course, the ground that any discourse will strive to occupy in order to prevail over adversaries and impose itself, not as interpretation but as something like reason itself. But it may be that, if Graff’s recommendations sound reasonable, it is because they preserve a certain interpretation of the institution and the university as ground of consensus upon which division and dissent are merely staged as theatre. Such a theatre would contain and limit this division; it would put in place an effective barrier to division beyond a certain point of indivisibility. Which is to say that, as one might naturally expect, this interpretation seeks above all to preserve itself from conflict with a contrary notion, such as the one proposed here, according to which any apparent institutional “neutrality” results from the effacements of marks of division. (pp.18-9)

The rest of the book presents “an attempt to glimpse how [the institutional] history [of literature] will have itself been inscribed within “literature” understood as a transformational relation to the future” (p.39).

Consequently, there are two reasons why I make the connection from your work to Kamuf’s: first, despite the focus on literature, Kamuf’s book examines the university as a site in and by which certain intellectual norms (and hence divisions) are “instituted”, while seeking to reflect on the possibility of a transformational relation to the future. Second — and here my remarks need to be read as highly hesitant and tentative — I can’t help but wonder about the appeal to “intersubjectivity” you’ve sometimes been forced to make. I’ve seen this appeal made in a number of spaces over the last few years, and so I’m not necessarily questioning your formulation of that appeal, but I wonder about the extent to which such an appeal must function (regardless of the good intentions of those who thus appeal) as a kind of ground without division, and thus “results from the effacements of marks of division”. Of course, that’s not for a second to deny the urgency of thinking through what you have at other times called “a broader context”. But I wonder about the costs of configuring that context in the form of “intersubjectivity”.

As I said, don’t take that last point as convicted criticism; I’m stammering here. The questions you raise here and elsewhere take me to the limits of thought and expression, and I am thus at a loss for words (not that one could tell, judging from the ramblings I’ve already produced).

Cheers

I’m actually desperately trying to come up with a clearer, more useful vocabulary for talking about these things at the moment, so comments, suggestions for further reading and such are always of high value.

I really enjoyed your tangential (understood in the most flattering sense possible) intervention within Scott Eric Kaufman’s paper (which I also enjoyed), not least of all because I’ve found myself forced, by repeated encounters with genealogies of the critical disposition (e.g. by Ian Hunter, Barry Hindess and others), to reflect and write on the issues you’ve raised. Two comments, in particular — one from the original piece, the other from one of your last comments — resonate strongly in this regard:

If we find that we can “see through” or gain some “outside” perspective on the limitations or distortions caused by particular institutions, then this perspective must also somehow be “inside” our historical context in some broader sense – suggesting that there is some position that is both historically embedded, and yet transcendent of particular institutional contexts.

he’ll [indeed, we'll] need first to become a bit less shy about admitting that he does actually invoke a normative standpoint and, second, think a bit more about how he conceptualises historical context.

These comments recall to my mind a whole series of texts which work in, on, and around this question. I have no idea whether you’re at all familiar with them, or would otherwise be sympathetic to them, but two in particular would enjoy acknowledgement. The first is Charles E. Scott’s The Question of Ethics: Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger, whose chapter on Foucault is especially relevant for the way that it reads the latter as undertaking precisely such a double historicisation (which Scott characterises as a “self-overcoming recoil”). The book’s also interesting, in this context, for the way that it sees the point (as it were) of such self-overcoming recoil to be the groping towards something like “a non–normative standpoint”.

The second book is Derrida’s Grammatology, and especially the chapter on “Grammatology as a Positive Science”. That chapter ends with a passage that I think anticipates Joseph Kugelmass’ reference to a “real, contemporary possibility of change”. After listing a whole series of ways in which writing intersects with questions of institution, science, history and power, Derrida refers to a “common and radical possibility that no determined science, no abstract discipline, can think as such”. He goes on:

The constitution of a science or philosophy of writing is a necessary and difficult task. But, a thought of the trace, of differance or reserves, having been arrived at these limits [of science, of philosophy, of "the closure of the epistémè"] and repeating them endlessly, must also point beyond the field of the epistémè…. [T]hought here is for me a perfectly neutral name, the blank part of the text [emphasis added], the necessarily indeterminate index of a future epoch of differance.

Of course, the fact that “deconstruction” is so readily inscribed as a theory within the situation that Scott (if I may) describes simply underscores the difficulty of the task.

Anyway, just wanted to say that I appreciate the work that’s taken place in this discussion. Apologies again for my (possibly unwelcome) intrusion.

Cheers