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.
