Nancy's Hegel: Touching the Negative

Wow, I wrote this last semester and already there is so much I would change. First of all, I don't think I've understood Nancy very well at all, but rather have interpreted him as just another take on dialectics, which he most decidedly is not. So I apologize, but I think the paper is still worth uploading, even if only for personal reasons.

Nancy's Hegel: Touching the Negative

Negativity is that which moves of itself, annihilating every given through its irresistible logic, and at the same time the dissolution thereof. Nowhere is the brute fact safe from the power of non-identity, the power of the “think again!” and of the “be again!”. There is nothing in Heaven or on Earth that is not utterly mediated, hence negative. The following essay is based on the two thinkers GWF Hegel and Jean-Luc Nancy. The latter's book Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative contains a loose rereading of both Hegel's major works, The Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic (among other works Nancy includes in the appendices). It is perhaps not too great a claim to make that Hegel's immense labor of the negative is the most influential take on negativity and mediation in the philosophical world. With Hegelian negativity as its starting point, Nancy's thought in Hegel proceeds to reconceptualize many of Hegel's most important claims, primarily about the totality, thought and Spirit, the master-slave dialectic, and the ever-present and all-important negativity.

Such negativity, such mediation, however, can be taken to signify myriad things, and the specific object or function of negativity and negation is not always clear. Indeed, the concept of the negative must be explored in relation to our shared horizon of meaning—negativity given or posited as merely in itself can have startling and confusing results for theory given the dominant logic of identification. This, however, is not a problem for Nancy, for whom the loss of the whole, called the “end of the world” in The Sense of the World, is felt acutely. This is not to say that the negative act or the negative originary pre-symbolic being-affected, such as the trembling of the slave in the presence of the true master that is death, is unimportant—far from it. Rather, the concept must give way before the act of its own accord, or else we have nothing.

It is only with this in mind that we can do philosophy as it relates to the negative and therefore as it relates to truly critical theory; both “critical” and “theory” have as their preconditions the transcendence of metaphysics and of uncritical philosophy effected on their very borders, at the limits of discourse. There can be, we must insist, no new foundational gestures, which would of course only result in yet another object of critique. While causing difficulties of presentation and writing, this seems to me to be the only truly effective strategy today; pretending oneself out of aporias will get us nowhere. As Theodor Adorno wrote, “Unity alone can transcend unity” (Negative Dialectics 158). In other words, transcendence of the concept can only truly be effected by and through the concept. We may abstract from Adorno's language and come to the conclusion that, convoluted as it may be, discourse alone can transcend discourse, and discourse is necessarily within the despotic realm of the symbolic. However, that discourse can hold a non-signifying function, it can make the motion of transcending the symbolic, and this precarious limit-space is exactly where Nancy will locate the majority of his thought. Whereas Adorno wrote above of the concept, we must here turn our attention to the given more generally. The transition must occur due to the nature of our undertaking, wherein we are dealing with negativity as ontological non-identity, not simply non-identity as what overflows the given symbolic system, as the particularity that cannot wholly be absorbed and this thus defined against that symbolic system. The given is, taken by itself, problematic in its inability to provide for the ground that is in each case the precondition of the given. Following Hegel in the opening sections of The Phenomenology of Spirit, we can say that given immediacy cannot be the whole picture. In other words—and this will become clear—the given cannot give that by which it is given; this latter thing is fundamentally ungiveable. Thus, Hegel's thought is “what happens to thought in itself and for itself as soon as sense are truth are not presented to it as given” (Nancy 30). This givenness is not given for both logical and historical reasons, the former as presented by Hegel and the latter as developed by Nancy, not that Nancy ignores the former of course.

The reason for this primary focus on subverting identification, which I believe to be very important, is twofold: identification and a denial of difference or particularity is the dominant logic of the capitalist system; and the search for a ground always runs the risk of finding that ground. With regard to the first, the abstract identification of diverse labors, the law of value, while ontologically requiring the diversity of those labors to begin with, is the objective state of affairs of the world as it stands today. This state of affairs is not only one that exists—rather, it is one that perpetuates itself as real illusion.

To think that identification, and to think beyond and through that identification into non-identity—to think an immanent critique in other words, while still recognizing, through our analysis, our own socially necessary complicity in evil—is the goal. Second, the search for a ground is not a meaningless or senseless one. Far from it, the search for ground is carried out not only by the human subject, but effectively by all reality. However, it will soon become apparent that the search for a ground, the striving for singularity, cannot truly be achieved. Instead, we are often left with the appearance of having succeeded, and it will be seen that this is the most dangerous thing of all, despite the actual impossibility of such a success, despite the always already plural, differentiated, and particular character of being and beings.

In the following section, I will provide a brief discussion of Hegel's master-slave dialectic, and then proceed to an explication of the radical theory of the self put forth by Nancy, which will be seen as basing itself on a problematization of the stable categories of self and other found in Hegel. In section III, the problem of thought and manifestation will be examined, especially specifically as it relates to what I will call the appearance of essence and appearance. In section four, the question of immanence and transcendence will be broached, and we will see that Nancy dodges the dichotomy in important ways, e.g. through his thought of infinity. Finally, in section V, I will examine the objective reality of identification and the possibilities for the critique thereof.

II. The Void That Is the Self

In this section, I will briefly discuss Hegel's master-slave dialectic, specifically its implications for a negative theory of the self. Then, I will turn to Jean-Luc Nancy's related theory of negative self-relation and self-differentiation, which I will argue is in fact the ontological precondition for both identity and difference. The negativity of this self-relation will finally be examined in depth.

The master-slave dialectic is perhaps the most important moment in the entire Phenomenology of Spirit, consisting in the all-important transition from animal consciousness to properly human self-consciousness. As such, it is the pivotal point in Hegel's project, since he must be able to describe the development of self-consciousness from its very first beginning in order to adequately theorize the historical dialectic of Geist's coming to perfect self-knowledge. The master-slave dialectic proceeds as follows:

Primitive human consciousness relates to the world negatively, in the sense that hunger is sated by “negating” some other, in that case food. Put more generally, consciousness negates a given other in its assimilation of that other; the brute fact is negatively related to consciousness, and henceforth the thing that was immediate to consciousness becomes mediated. However, in animal consciousness the negation is an instantaneous one—the thing negated is more or less immediately destroyed or absolutely negated. The important thing is that what is negated is not seen to be any more than the brute fact, the other. All this changes, however, when multiple consciousnesses interact. Two consciousness, each seeking to negate the other, meet in what can only for Hegel be a bloody battle. The two consciousnesses fight it out, the end result of which may be one of two things: one combatant may die, and in this case the dialectic does not progress; or the victorious combatant may allow the loser to live, in which case the winner becomes a master and the loser a slave.

It is this second case that is interesting, because in it there lies dormant an important development of self-consciousness. The master, who was perhaps after recognition (this teleological goal is in fact not necessary, but it is very important to Hegel), finds that he cannot get it from such a lowly slave, who is by that account more animal than human. Since the master does not recognize the slave's consciousness, the slave is in turn not in a position to recognize the master's. In reality, there must be a mutual recognition for self-consciousness to exist. All is not lost, however, and in fact the slave undergoes a major transformation: the slave is penetrated with the fear of death, the absolute negation of consciousness. The slave experiences in its innermost being the trembling that unsettles all sureness and all ground. However, the slave does not die but rather lives in fear of death, and thus lives with some idea of the truth of absolute negation, of the loss of self that death must bring: “This complete perturbation of [the slave's] entire substance, this absolute dissolution of all its stability into fluent continuity, is, however, the simple, ultimate nature of self-consciousness, absolute negativity, pure self-referent existence...” (Hegel 237).

Furthermore, the slave labors for the master, creating mediated products that the master consumes in an only immediate relation, e.g., the slave prepares the food which the master eats. The slave thus determinately negates things, whereas the master only absolutely negates them. The labor of the slave transforms the way it relates to objects: “The negative relation to the object passes into the form of the object, into something that is permanent and remains; because it is just for the labourer that the object has independence” (Hegel 238). In other words, the negations carried out by the slave in labor become mediations of the absolute negativity of death and the other: “But this objective negative element is precisely the alien, external reality, before which it trembled. Now, however, it destroys this extraneous alien negative, affirms and sets itself up as a negative in the element of permanence, and thereby becomes for itself a self-existent being” (Hegel 239). The slave assimilates the given other into itself in a new way, a way based not upon abstract negation but upon what I will call a standing negation, a more or less permanent relation to objects. Thus, the result of the master-slave dialectic is an understanding of the self as negativity, namely that which has lived the absolute negativity which shook it loose from an immediate relation to objects and which thus labors in a way that brings the given other into itself.

Taking leave of Hegel's text and turning to Alexandre Kojève's reading, we might say that the key element in the master-slave dialectic is desire, as that which can be escape the given: “Now, the only thing that goes beyond the given reality is Desire itself” (5). This going-beyond reality finds its fullest expression in self-consciousness, which can be thought of as the desire of desire. One desires not just a given thing, not just some object, whether a product of labor or not, but the desire of the other, e.g., one desires to be the object of another's love. This relation is of one negating-negativity to another, and decidedly not to a positive given. The mutual recognition here conceived is the logical and historical development of the master-slave dialectic, what both Kojève and Hegel believe to be the truly human aspect of consciousness. This is the standing negation not only between a slave and his works, but between two or more negating-negativities, each recognizing the negativity of the other as desire.

Nancy's subject, despite his origins in deconstruction, is not written in erasure, but rather occupies a central place in his philosophy. However, far from a stable ground, the self is restless: “'Self' cannot precede itself, because 'self' is precisely the form and movement of a relation to self, of a going to self and a coming to self” (Nancy 4). The self or subject for Nancy is negating-negativity, but this in a way quite different from that in Hegel's own theory. Nancy's subject is rather “what (or the one who) dissolves all substance” (5). This negating-negativity is thus not one that assimilates the given, or even whose desire is related to the desire of another, but one that destroys all givens without thereby making the given its own; rather, negation is carried out “in order to make [the given other] a nongiven-other” (Nancy 58). The moment of synthesis is thus de-emphasized, and indeed the unsettling mediation is carried out in both cases by the act of constituting self-hood, be it that of a traditional Kantian subject or that of Nancy's world-as-self, which I will return to in section III.

Instead of a prior act of identification which produces the non-identical as that which cannot be assimilated into the conceptual or otherwise symbolic scheme, there is in Nancy rather an act that is both self-differentiation and the striving to overcome that differentiation. In other words, there is not identity but similarity, a failed identity: “In order to be in truth, and to have or to make sense, self must be self as such: and it must be so in taking distance in order to posit itself as something like what it is” (Nancy 43). The act of self-positing is thus fundamentally an act of similarity, wherein self-differentiation is the precondition for that similarity. The result is a striving for being-what-one-is, where that identity of the self is fundamentally unattainable. Importantly, the goal of the self is not given, but rather posited and thus always already caught up in restlessness, always already mediated. This is the subject's negativity, it's always being ungiven. For Hegel, the subject experienced the void of negating-negativity, e.g., in the experience of death as the absolute master. For Nancy, there is no subject as a separate persisting entity that could experience its negating-negativity as a disembodied watcher. In other words, the subject is constituted in the action of negation for Nancy in a way that is not present for Hegel—this is the step beyond Hegel that Nancy takes in his destabilization of the concrete given, even as it is found in someone as radical and negative as Hegel.

This discussion of the subject leads us to the activity of the subject in its interaction with the world, in which activity it is constituted. The name for this transcendental precondition and fundamental activity is sense: “[Sense] is the appropriation of being by the subject, as subject” (Nancy 50). This means that sense is a passage, a movement, a relation. It is all these things, but it is also the horizon of being. The details of this concept must be left to section V, although suffice it to say that sense as plane of immanent contact will be a recurring theme throughout the remainder of this paper.

III. Thought & Manifestation

The negativity of the subject having been explored, we now turn to the difficult place of thought in such a scheme. It will be seen that thought is a particularly important form of negation, as it is in thought that the problem of manifestation, the dichotomy of essence and appearance, appears as necessity. To this end, I will first examine the status of the world as a self and thus as its own self-diremption. Then, I will elaborate the related problems of manifestation and thought, each inseparably bound to the other.

The world is not a subsisting, static reality, but rather is always a going-into-other: “...it is because the world undergoes itself as a world of separation that its experience takes the form of the self” (4). Echoes of Hegel's theory of the Absolute as subject are here perceivable, but we must remember that Nancy's self is not one that is human or would have its boundaries defined and hence exist all to itself as a stable ground. Rather, the world in its becoming is nothing but infinite self-relation, referring to nothing outside itself. The self-identity of the world is only constituted in its utter going-out-of-self, and indeed the absolute is “equal to self and, consequently, in absolute repose—but it is so only thus, quite exactly, as nonrepose” (Nancy 12); this is Hegel's bacchanalian revel, the condition of Spirit itself. This Spirit, which for Hegel was both the act of the world coming to ultimate self-consciousness and that self-consciousness as result, becomes for Nancy somewhat the opposite: “Spirit is not something separate... because it itself is nothing other than separation. It is separation as the opening of relation” (19). The originary (although beginningless) self-differentiation is what is important, not the closing of relation that could declare its own ending as the absolute ending of difference. Spirit is instead the totality of the world in its aspect of infinity: “[Spirit] names infinite relation itself, the step out of self into the other of all reality” (Nancy 19).

However, this other only exists within the world itself, as its other. The totality of all-related-to-all forms one giant closed system that is however opened by its own difference from itself. The objectivity of negation consists in this, that the world, not being grounded in something outside itself, is always already caught up in itself, in its own groundlessness. No longer being a thing separated from sense and thus able to have sense, the world has rather become sense, and this sense is nothing but its own self-differentiation.

The relation between essence and appearance can never again be thought as that between transcendent-unmanifest and immanent-manifested. Rather, manifestation constantly destroys its own ground: “The singularity of manifestation, or of the world: it is that singularity manifests itself to nothing other than itself, or to nothing. Manifestation surges up out of nothing, into nothing” (Nancy 33). Characteristic here is what I will term “iterative manifestation”, wherein there is an endless deferral of essence: each thing is forced into the act of being an essence, which of course is a burden that absolutely cannot be shouldered. However, this impossibility does not just stand as it is, but rather each essence, in a necessary act, appears. This appearance is thereafter forced to become the essence of a further thing, because it too must participate in the infinity of essences which constitutes restlessness.

In other words, there is a continual move from essence to appearance, a continual process of manifestation where each thing's becoming has no end goal that would absolve it of being an essence, that would solidify the essence-appearance relation. Teleological unfolding is thus a reality of manifestation that however does not have an end goal: “One cannot rest content with reducing Hegel to his well-known, too well known, sentences on the truth of the acorn in the oak. For the tree itself is still a passage, and it also has its truth in a fallen and crushed acorn that will never take root, simple disseminated concretion” (Nancy 15). Each moment of becoming is not wholly unrelated but the movement of an endless teleology, in which the goal is only the starting point for another such process, and so on ad infinitum. It is however not as clean and neat as all that, because as Nancy notes, each process is absolutely not just that single process: each striving for the goal at the same time puts out a great mass of different and irreducible strivings, a splintering of teleology as it were. In the winding self-inversions of the infinite dissemination of manifestation, no single aspect remains as it was, nothing remains unchanged.

We now turn to thought, an especially difficult aspect of Nancy's philosophy. For Nancy, thought is the act which unsettles substance: “If thought was not separated from things, it would not be thought, nor would there be restlessness. Thought, to the contrary, is the separation of things and the ordeal of this separation” (13). From this we glean two perhaps controversial claims: thought has what initially appears to be a different status from non-thought in its ability to separate and to be constituted in separation; and the separation effected by thought is a painful one. It must be kept in mind, however, that Nancy's world is a self and is in fact Spirit and therefore thought; the human subject has no monopoly on these terms, and indeed abstraction is carried out in every objective social identification as discussed in section V. With this clarification, I will deal with each of the preceding claims in turn.

Thought thinks the thing, and in doing so penetrates into the thing, into its ground. However, this ground is only the void: “The thing thought is the thing hollowed out...” (Nancy 22). There is no stable essence which would be found at the depth. Thought is the very presence of this absence, the being-there of the nothingness that exists at the innermost center of the thing. Thinking thus changes everything, it destroys any givenness of the other, positing instead the other-as-mediated. This alteration cannot be avoided, because even what appears to be the thought of pure identity must move between the things identified—it must think them, and therefore alter them irreparably. Thought is thus the action of negating-negativity carried out upon the objects of the world, constituted as such by the differentiation of that thought itself. On the other hand, it is not only the object of thought that is penetrated: “The one who penetrates is himself penetrated, for thought is the thought of being itself, and not 'mine'” (Nancy 17). Thought must think the concreteness of the object, and it cannot do this by remaining in its abstract self-equality, for “Thought will therefore be equality that takes leave of itself in order to enter into the inequality of the thing” (Nancy 21). Thought must not be the unpenetrated, for that would turn it into a bad positivity, the refusal of thought to be the thought of being, to be thought thinking itself. This positivity is bad because its refusal to acknowledge its own self-relation which alone is that by which it is constituted. Without this reflexive relation, the mutual penetration of thought and thing, thought has not come into its full expression, does not deserve to even be called “thought”. Thus, thought is the relation constitutive of the self, which was earlier discussed as Spirit, as the opening of relation (to self). In the last analysis, then, thought as mutual penetration is seen to be the activity constantly carried out by the world itself—the world does not believe in its own reason, and this in the name of reason itself, where reason is the movement whereby thought hollows out the thing.

We come here to the question of knowledge, to the struggle between presentation and representation. For Nancy, knowledge is decidedly presentation, “and consequently the negation of every and all given presence, be it that of an 'object' or 'subject'. Not given presence, but the gift of presence—such are the stakes” (11). It is interesting that presentation here is not taken in a positive sense, and that presentation in fact negates all presence. This point may be interpreted as affirming the nothingness which is at the heart of manifestation. All presence is negated just as all absence is negated, and what is left is the relation of presentation itself: “Neither purely present (and thus evanescent) presence, nor purely absent (and thus imposing) absence, but the absolute of presentation” (Nancy 23). Thought, in conforming with the thing in its very self-separation, “represents” nothing, and this in two ways: it is not a representation of an outside thing of which it would be the knowledge or truth; and insofar as it is a representation, it is the representation of the nothingness at the center of every manifestation.

Thus, in an important sense, the presentation-representation dichotomy is irreparably transformed by the act of penetration. There is striving for representation in all thought, but at the same time thought separates itself from what it would represent, in order to enter into a relation of representation with that thing. The transformation of the dichotomy is thus carried out in an optimistic gesture that at the same time, if one looks closely enough, betrays its own caustic sarcasm. This is the meaning of Nancy's second claim in his definition of thought given above, namely that thought is the ordeal of its own separation from things. This is, I believe, predicated on the claim of thought to be representation, which thereby, as stated above, is an impossibility as far as the success of that representation is concerned.

One last important point in Nancy's rereading of Hegel is that of trembling, already encountered in the context of Hegel's master-slave dialectic. There, we saw that the trembling of the slave in the face of abject negativity was indispensable for the formation of the subject, of self-consciousness. For Nancy, trembling takes on a more all-pervasive function: “Trembling is the act of being-affected—a passive acting that merely makes the body vibrate, that unsettles substance” (44). The action of negativity upon the concrete is a causing-to-tremble: “Negativity makes all determinateness tremble” (Nancy 45). The mutual penetration produced in thought is inseparable from mutual trembling. For Hegel, the unsettling of substance that is trembling was produced in abstract recognition; for Nancy, recognition becomes a touching, always already trembling: “I only recognize myself recognized by the other to the extent that this recognition of the other alters me: it is desire, it is what trembles in desire” (64). The desiring of the other's desire is not a disconnected happening but a touching, a sharing of sense that is thus a contact-between. Desiring is a relation wherein neither term remains unchanged, but rather both, in their recognition and therefore in their self-constitutions, become thereby self-differentiated as described above in the section on self.

IV. Immanence & Transcendence: The Infinite Sense of Self-Relation

The question of immanence and transcendence in Nancy's philosophy must now be broached. In this section, I will first explicate Nancy's transcendental immanence of sense. Then, I will briefly discuss its relation to transcendence and to immanence commonly understood. In that discussion, the question of negative immanence will be raised and answered.

In our interactions with the world, we are always being-toward that world. This means that objects, phenomena, signifiers, and so on, all already make sense in some way. Sense is the transcendental precondition by which individual fields or groupings of activities may take place. Sense can be conceived as the field of immanence, the self-relation of totality thus being the infinite relation of sense. This infinity is the same in principle as Hegel's true infinity—in other words, it is the infinitude of all finitude, and as such is achieved through self-relation rather than through indefinite extension. However, this infinitude is not, as it might seem, a positivity: “But the act of the infinite is anything but a given. It is, indeed, rather that by which the given is given” (Nancy 25). The transcendental condition of the given is seen here to be pure mediation, the pure non-givenness of the always open totality. Signification is in this case a hierarchical appearance that occurs only after the horizontal opening of sense, which is therefore a relation between. Things only appear (perhaps necessarily) as transcendent, and their very transcending is provided for by immanent relation. The way that Nancean concepts are developed in the rereading of Hegel is instructive as to this fact: what appear to be definitions of concepts in terms of other concepts, straightforward equivalences, are actually ways to get thought moving (Morin 5).

The connection to Hegel's method is clear, in that Hegel's Logic is nothing but a mass of speculative equivalences which are not for that reason static. The development of Hegel's categories proceeds by the working-out of implications whose differences only become apparent in their being made equivalent. For Nancy's immanence, this means that the sliding of the signifier, or of the concept, creates or opens sense rather than signification. The working-out of the concept could not be a true transcendence, but rather is a movement across a sort of transcendental space. Thought is thus an interesting case in relation to this trans-immanence, in that, as noted above, it is always a presentation (Darstellung). For Hegel, too, thought as form could not be truly separated from its content, the Concept (or Notion) being that category in which the moments of going-into-other became explicitly recognized. The experience of sense is thus always already movement of thought in this case, or of the self-differentiation which is the precondition of self.

In any case, the negativity of Nancy's immanence should by now be apparent. A given opacity nowhere comes into the picture, sense always being a movement-between, a point of contact which does not become a static term. All is motion, restless becoming, and as such is completely lacking in that pseudo-concretion produced by the incessant insistence of “being-there” or “dasein”. Infinity cannot be extracted from relation and from plurality, as if such a process could yield the concrete singularity which was singular in or as itself. On the contrary, there can be nothing in itself, because of the necessary plurality of “self” itself. Thus the infinite singularity of the point of contact, the passage that is sense, is at the same time the failure of that singularity to be truly singular—rather, it too is a plurality, try as it might to be otherwise. This is a prerequisite and a symptom of the bottomlessness of manifestation and of course of being itself.

V. Reflections on Identity

Finally, we can address the problem of identity within Nancy's theory of negative immanence and manifestation. Identification is carried out constantly in thought and in social practice, and this necessary but impossible process must be explored. In this section, I will first recapitulate the impossibility of identity and the nonetheless frequently-made move of identification. Then I will elaborate on the previously-mentioned theme of similarity as a way to understand the failure of identity. Finally, I will discuss the possibilities of an escape from identity and a Nancean ethics.

Identity is an impossibility because to be the same as oneself, one must be different, must undergo differentiation that opens the possibility of self-relation. It is, as noted, an act of positing, and hence finds its theoretical ancestry in Hegel's doctrine of the positedness of all things, which he equated with thought or Spirit. The striving for identity that would, In Hegel, culminate in Absolute Spirit, or at least the ordered totality of all relations in its thus constituted self-relation, cannot however be accepted by us today. Spirit, which was the dialectical agent of identification as process and at the same time the absolutely undialectical success of that very identification, has been rightly criticized elsewhere. Nancy would rather revive the critique of the teleological starting-point-and-result (they necessarily go together in Hegel) while keeping the process of identification intact: “Thus 'I=I' means nothing, or only this: passage and leap into the other of what was never in itself. This leap is unsettling twice over: in the agitation of its movement, where there is no continuity that would not also be the laceration of a burst of light, and in the nonknowing of the other that thus makes up all of self-knowing” (Nancy 39).

Identity is the movement of the always-already moved, and is thus a necessary movement. At the same time, it is only movement, and it is paradoxically movement between things which were never self-identical, eternally unable to become self-identical since relation is always already open. In other words, one cannot pass from infinite self-relation, which is reality, to anything less than that, to anything that would be merely finite or unself-related and hence self-identical (if such a thing even makes sense). Every thought, furthermore, is an identification, yet again this is nothing but a movement-between—when I say something “is” something else, thought passes between the two things dynamically. This movement, when considered only representationally, entails a violence towards the particularities of the things in question. However, for an ontologically presentational theory of thinking, the result is first of all movement-into-other, and only second does the appearance of representation take place. This second moment is that of successful identification, of identity itself, but we have already seen why this is impossible.

The social reality of identity is nothing but the proclamation that such identity has been reached and the social effects following from this proclamation. The example of socially necessary abstract labor time found in Marx is here instructive. Concrete, particular labors are abstracted by the capitalist mode of production to yield a homogeneous labor that can thereby be measured against all (or nearly all) other capitalist labor. The diverse concrete labors are of course not the same, but they are treated as if they were by economic processes, and therefore their identity becomes a sort of truth as far as objective social determination is concerned. The power of limiting and controlling labors is predicated on this ability to proclaim, and even to convince oneself and others, that socially necessary abstract labor is the real quantity underlying productive processes, the quantity that thereby controls the movement of capital. In this manner does the illusion become reality, does it become “real illusion” as Marx has called it. Of course, it is not only socially necessary abstract labor time that undergoes the process of social identification, becoming real illusion; sexual identity, race, gender, &c., i.e., any institutionalized and therefore socially objective abstraction-making process produces the appearance of identity. So it is important to understand that the impossibility of identity does not in objective fact deny its influence, only its ontological or metaphysical status, and this is why it is “illusion” that is nonetheless real in its effects and power to organize human relations.

What could be the possibility of an escape from identity? Ignoring overtly practical considerations, we may rather ask as to the possibility of a Nancean ethics. Indeed, Nancy's thinking of freedom and of the “we” provides just such a thing. Freedom for Nancy is not produced by pure determinacy (and there is nothing that is not determined) but is the act of infinite determination itself, of the non-given infinite (74). Freedom is not a decision between two givens, and indeed the self as a thing or as given cannot by that token be considered free. Furthermore, the subject cannot escape its involvement with the world, its being-toward as decisiveness: “I do not therefore decide in favor of things proposed as possible, because I exist as 'me' only in my decision” (Nancy 74). Freedom is non-given and, more importantly, ungiveable. Thus, the subject as such cannot be free, and indeed no concrete being can be free, because freedom is abstract negativity, the void at the heart of the subject. Freedom, in other words, is brought about in the very penetration of negativity into thought, and of thought into negativity: “The freedom of decision is the very thing that thought, in order to begin or end, has to penetrate” (Nancy 74). This is quite a curious phrase, as we know that Nancy does not take kindly to either beginnings or endings. However, this is simply saying, in the usual paradoxical but straightforward style, that

Nancy is very emphatic that the true subject of sense is not an “I” but a “we”: “A subject of sense, this means first off: a sense for each and every one, coming back to the one only insofar as it passes to the other. If 'I' surge up each time, as the identity of the universal and the singular... this takes place only insofar as 'I' is shared out equally between everyone” (37). To have or to be sense is to share sense; sense is always a sharing, and a sharing of being. It is a touching, a contact, and for this reason cannot be made into property. The “we” is the expression of this fundamental being-with that makes up the possibility of sense itself. Indeed, Nancy goes so far as to say, “The absolute is between us. It is there in itself and for itself, and, one might say, the self itself is between us” (78). The act of sharing sense is the constitutive thing here, and it's name is the “we”, or even the “absolute”, which, it is interesting to note, Nancy does not put in inverted commas. While Nancy does not, in Hegel, stray too far in this direction, it is nonetheless an interesting counterpart to Hegel's conclusions about the merging of subject and object and of Geist as self-consciousness.

Nancy's “we”, as might be guessed, is a far cry from Hegel's Sittlichkeit. Where in Hegel there existed the ordered whole of community as result, in Nancy it is a state of diffraction, reaching far beyond the concept of self-consciousness. Indeed, far from being a result, community is not even a predicate, and there is no passing-over from the non-communal to the communal (Morin 28). Thus, for Nancy, there was never a development of community, where for Hegel this was perhaps a major point of development. To this effect, Nancy writes that “we” means “the knowing that is 'for us' is knowing that is not merely 'for consciousness'” (76). We are not consciousness, conceived symbolically or otherwise—we are so much more. This more is of course our being-self, which is constituted in our contact with the other, in our sharing of sense. We are subjects of sense (in both sense of the term “subject”) long before we are consciousnesses, and even longer before we are self-consciousnesses. Nancy likens our relation to sense, our experience of sense, to a rhythm wherein our being-self or being-other (and more accurately both of these at once) is punctuated, discontinuously forming and deforming based on the point of contact: “The Nancean self, then, emerges as nothing other than this syncopated rhythm of successive instances of exposure to sense” (James 49). Consequently, this “we” is the recognition of existence, the beating out of the sharing of sense and the recognition thereof. Further, the rhythm that is always a sharing—everyone can hear the beat—is a further example of Nancy's negative thinking as an escape from the temptations of hypostasis, which is most tempting in the case of the subject even as it is perhaps the least acceptable. There is, put another way, no subject and no subjects outside of their exposure to sense; the subject is nothing but this exposure to sense, this making-oneself-available to sense and thus to truth.

VI. Conclusion

Nancy's rereading of Hegel's project can thus be seen to rely on three conceptual reconfigurations: the subject is interpreted as a fundamental being-with, always a self-diremption and therefore a self-relation; thought and manifestation are exposed in their positedness; and Hegel's completed transcendence is replaced with a striving for transcendence, with a transcending, a teleology without end or goal. Finally, all these lead to a very different interpretation of identity and the problems thereof. Nancy can be seen to be continuing what he considers the core of Hegel's project, namely the labor of the negative. This labor is one that is carried out under the auspices of the Maoist dictum “one divides into two”, a model altogether different from the traditional dialectic developed and utilized by Hegel.

First, the master-slave dialectic takes on a new form, that of dissolution of self and other, of all substance and all being. The importance of this cannot be overstressed—what is implied is nothing but the absence of the other as anything but myself: “This is why desire cannot become what it is in an object, in a given determination. It is desire of the other self-consciousness. The subject is desire of the subject, and there is no object of desire. Desire is appropriative becoming in the other” (Nancy 61). In other words, the interesting thing is that subjects confront subjects in a relation that cannot be described in terms of the old polar subject-object schema. Rather, there is a towardness in the relationship—for Nancy, being is neither an in-itself or a for-itself, but fundamentally a being-toward. We are toward the other, but this does not solidify us in an opposition. On the other hand, we are in an opposition nonetheless: “The concretion of negativity begins with the other” (Nancy 57). Difference is always such only under the aspect of similarity.

Second, Nancy's ontology moves beyond the conceptual or symbolic prison in which Hegel's philosophy was trapped. Here there is no presupposition of the conceptual nature of all reality, and in fact Nancy's philosophy is a rebellion against this conceptual or, more relevant for his intellectual milieu, the symbolic order. His post-phenomenological views of being-with and being-towards are here instructive. Further, Nancy's subject offers an escape from the cynical subject of psychoanalysis, being actually quite optimistic in comparison.

Third, Nancy opens up the possibility of striving and of what can only be a beautiful failure, the failure of identity. Rather than an untying of elements, a letting-loose of the content of his philosophy, Nancy thinks always under the aspect of failure. In other words, he feels acutely the loss of the whole, the loss of the totality as it could exist for Hegel. Nancy is the theorist of loss and failure for our age much as Walter Benjamin was for his.

A future study of Nancy would do well to take a number of things into account not contained in the present paper: the problematic nature of being-with and its possible lack of critical power, which problem however I believe to be solvable; the relation of Nancy's ontology to various concrete social structures, and the related problem of ideology critique that seems in danger of being lost (of course it is already lost in its traditional form, but perhaps it is possible to be recuperated); the possibilities of revolutionary practice that follow from Nancy's philosophy, as Nancy is committed to the loosely-defined far left (having written something, for example, for the conference “The Communist Horizon”); and, perhaps most interesting, the various intersections and contradictions between Nancy's thinking of negativity and that of Theodor Adorno's negative dialectics, as well as the related position of positivity, which is typically preferred in contemporary theories of immanence and difference.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E. B. Ashton. Seabury Press, 1973. Print.

Hegel, G. W. F. The Phenomenology of Mind. Trans. J. B. Baillie. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1967. Print.

James, Ian. The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006. Print.

Morin, Marie-Eve. Jean-Luc Nancy. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012. Print.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative. Trans. Jason Smith & Steven Miller. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Print.