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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 June 2015
In an early text on Bataille, Derrida notes that Bataille's reinterpretation of Hegel “is a simulated repetition of Hegelian discourse. In the course of this repetition a barely perceptible displacement disjoints all the articulations and penetrates all the points welded together by the imitated discourse. A trembling spreads out which then makes the entire old shell crack.” There is no doubt that this remark refers not just to Bataille's reading of Hegel, but also to the way in which deconstruction intends to make the old shell of Hegelianism, and hence of the history of philosophy in general, tremble. By doing this, deconstruction can be said to open up a way of reflecting on contemporary culture that from Plato onwards had been foreclosed by the predominant tendency of philosophy.
According to a famous saying by Hegel, philosophy grasps its own time in thought. This is to say that philosophy explicitly articulates the implicit self-understanding of the culture to which it belongs and out of which it emerges. If contemporary philosophy still faces the task of comprehending its own time, then it should develop a logic which is as philosophical as Hegel's, but which distinguishes itself from the latter by addressing the radical finitude of any effort to bring about meaning, truth, presence, harmony, stability, or justice. Such a logic should respond to the experience that the moments in which human life threatens to lose its dignity are not cancelled out by what is commonly called ‘progress’. To my mind, it is precisely this experience that deconstruction seeks to grasp in thought. I understand deconstruction as drawing attention to that which allows something — for instance a culture — to constitute itself, yet at the same time threatens to make it fall apart. Whereas philosophy can be said to have always shied away from the insight into the radical instability of whatever human beings may venture, Derrida, on the other hand, can be considered to take this very instability as the guiding principle of his philosophy. On the basis of such a principle, the ways in which human life organizes itself will no longer be interpreted in terms of increasing self-actualization, autonomy, or control, but rather by addressing the conflicts from which the various modes of human self-organization may not be able to disentangle themselves.
1 Derrida, J., ‘De l'économie restreint à l'économie générale’, In: L'écriture et la différence (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967), p. 382 Google Scholar / ‘From restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve’, in: Writing and Difference, translated by Bass, A. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 260 Google Scholar, hereafter referred to as ‘WD’, followed by the page numbers of the French and English editions respectively.
2 Hegel, G.W.F., Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), eds. Moldenhauer, E. and Michel, K.M., p. 26 Google Scholar / Elements of the Philosophy of Right, translated by Nisbet, H.B. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 21 Google Scholar.
3 WD 381 / 259. Cf: “The blind spot of Hegelianism, around which can be organized the representation of meaning, is the point at which destruction, suppression, death and sacrifice constitute so irreversible an expenditure, so radical a negativity […] that they can no longer be determined as negativity in a process or a system.” (WD 380 / 259).
4 In Glas Derrida addresses this issue as follows: “As soon as the difference is determined as opposition, no longer can the phantasm […] be avoided: to wit, a phantasm of infinite mastery of the two sides of the oppositional relation […] All the oppositions that link themselves around the difference as opposition (active/passive, reason/heart, beyond/here-below, and so on) have as cause and effect the immaculate maintenance of each of the terms, their independence, and consequently their absolute mastery.” Derrida, J., Glas (Paris: Galilée, 1974), p. 250a Google Scholar / Glas, translated by Leavey, J.P. and Rand, R. (Lincoln and London: Nebraska University Press, 1986), p. 223a Google Scholar.
5 WD 381 / 259. According to Hegel, “Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it.” Hegel, G.W.F., Phänomenologie des Geistes (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1988), p. 26 Google Scholar / Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by Miller, A.V. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 19 Google Scholar, hereafter referred to as ‘Phen’. The nature of this looking is such, however, that it transforms the negative into a mode of negativity which, as Hegel himself puts it, “converts this negative into being” (ibid). Whereas Hegel holds that the “tremendous power of the negative” brings about true positivity, Derrida, not unlike Adorno in this respect, unearths a negativity rather defined by the lack of power to convert itself into positivity. In his recent book On Germans and other Greeks: Tragedy and Ethical Life (Bloomington / Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001)Google Scholar, Dennis Schmidt considers it the supreme challenge of thinking “to grasp the tragedy of spirit speculatively, that is, as a unity which is a unity precisely because it is lodged in the antinomy of its own contradictions […] And so the question becomes whether or not spirit can take the idea of the tragic into itself without thereby extinguishing the truth of the tragic” (90). Although Derrida rarely uses terms like ‘the tragic’, he would answer this question, when put in terms of negativity, in the negative.
6 Hegel, G.W.F, ‘Über die wissenschaftlichen Behandlungsarten des Naturrechts, seine Stelle in der praktischen Philosophie und sein Verhaltnis zu den positiven Wissenschaften’, in: Jenaer Schriften 1801-1807 (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 1970)Google Scholar / Natural Law: The Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, its Place in Moral Philosophy, and its Relation to the Positive Sciences of Law, translated by Knox, T.M. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975)Google Scholar, hereafter referred to as ‘NL’. In Tragödie im Sittlichen. Gerechtigkeit und Freiheit nach Hegel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996)Google Scholar Christoph Menke also argues that Hegel's reflections on tragedy and the tragic, although intended to develop a philosophy of reconciliation, can be deployed to develop a critical, non-metaphysical theory of the tragic conflicts characteristic of modernity (25). He considers the tragic conflict between the general and the particular to have reemerged in modernity as the conflict between social justice and authenticity. Although the title of his book is taken from Hegel's essay on natural law, Menke hardly discusses this text and focuses instead on Hegel's readings of Antigone. This may be due to the fact that he takes Hegel's early remarks on tragedy to pertain to modernity (243) and not to the two opposed moments of Greek ethical life and hence to ethical life as such.
7 “Thus, two classes are formed in accordance with the absolute necessity of the ethical. One is the class of the free, the individual of absolute ethical life, of which the organs constitute the single individuals […] The other class consists of those who are not free; it exists in the difference of need and work.” (NL 489 / 99-100, tr. mod.).
8 “As a result of the supersession of this confusion of principles, and their established and conscious separation, each of them is done justice.” The reality of ethical life has now been brought about both as absolute indifference and as the — relative — opposition between the two ethical principles, in such a way “that the second is restrained (bezwungen) by the first.” (NL 494 / 104, tr. mod.).
9 “In absolute ethical life, infinity — or form as the absolutely negative — is nothing other than the subjugation […] taken up into its absolute concept.” (NL 481 / 93, tr. mod.).
10 NL 494 / 104, tr. mod.
11 Miguel de Beistegui addresses this issue in his interesting article ‘Hegel: or the Tragedy of Thinking’ (in: de Beistegui, M. and Sparks, S. (eds.), Philosophy and Tragedy (London / New York: (Routledge, 2000)Google Scholar. He does not distinguish, however, between the ancient and modern forms of the inorganic nature of ethical life (18).
12 Contrary to the predominant interest in Hegel's reading of Sophocles' Antigone, Kaufmann, Walter argues in Tragedy and Philosophy (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1968)Google Scholar that “the tragic poet whose worldview most closely resembled Hegel's was Aeschylus. One could not wish for more perfect illustrations of collisions in which neither side is simply wicked […] than we find in the Oresteia and Prometheus” (203). At the same time, Kaufmann considers Aeschylus the most optimistic of the tragic poets and therefore in a way — not unlike Hegel — anti-tragic (165, cf. 176f.). Kaufmann resolves this paradox by arguing that “what is decisive is not the end but whether we participate in tremendous, terrifying suffering” (181). To my mind, this (Aristotelian) emphasis on the psychological effect of tragedies forecloses a philosophical understanding of the diversity of Greek tragedies.
13 Aeschylus, , ‘Agamemnon’, translated by Lattimore, R., in: Grene, D. and Lattimore, R. (eds.), The Complete Greek Tragedies (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1959). 1. 1575Google Scholar.
14 At the end of The Libation Bearers the chorus asks whether Orestes will become the savior of Argos or will bring death and destruction: “Third is for the savior. He came. Shall I call it that, or death? Where is the end? Where shall the fury of fate be stilled to sleep, be done with?” (11.1072-76).
15 Aeschylus, ‘The Eumenides’, in: ibid., 1. 325.
16 Cf. Phen 305-08, 310-11 / 280-82, 285.
17 I therefore regard the conflict between the sphere of the family and the sphere of the state as represented in Sophocles' Antigone to concern primarily the collision of these two determinations of justice, rather than that between woman and man (who in ancient Greek culture were ‘naturally’ identified with the spheres of the family and the state).
18 One might argue that Heraclitus, on the other hand, is still far better able to articulate the essentially tragic character of reality. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche sees Socrates as the first philosopher to have shied away from the destructive character of the tragic. Socrates' eye “was debarred from ever looking with pleasure into the abysses of the Dionysiac.” Nietzsche, F., Die Geburt der Tragödie, Sämtliche Werke I, (Berlin / New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1980), p. 92 Google Scholar / The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, translated by Speirs, R. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 68 Google Scholar. Cf.: “Socrates, the dialectical hero in Platonic drama, recalls the related nature of the Euripidean hero who must defend his actions with reasons and counter-reasons and thereby is often in danger of losing our tragic sympathy; for who could fail to notice the optimistic element in the essence of dialectics, which celebrates jubilantly at each conclusion reached, and which can only breathe where there is cool clarity and consciousness.” (94 / 96-70). In On Germans and other Greeks Dennis Schmidt distinguishes between tragedy as a “form of art in which […] human life is liquid contradiction confronting the weight of destiny” and “philosophy which searches for a way to stabilize this liquidity of human life, thereby assimilating and taming the elemental claims of tragic art” (op.cit. 274). Such a clear-cut distinction does not take into account that the tendency to tame and stabilize the conflicts that tragedies address is a tendency inherent in these tragedies themselves.
19 However, Hegel takes into account that natural ethical life does not permit of a complete reconciliation between its opposed tendencies. The concrete realization of ethical life manifests its absolute idea — the movement of absolute negativity — as yet “in a distorted way“ (499 / 108).
20 Rational ethical life “has all at once recognized the right of inorganic ethical life and cleansed itself of it” (NL 495 / 104).
21 The few passages referring to the entanglement of the two modes of ethical life are somewhat ambiguous. Hegel maintains that “ethical nature divides off its inorganic nature itself in order not to become entangled with it.” (NL 496 / 105). The first part of the sentence suggests that the entanglement of the two natures of ethical life is primordial, the second that it is preceded by their undifferentiated unity, In another passage Hegel considers the rational mode of ethical life to bring about their reconciliation by “facing and objectifying the entanglement in the inorganic” (494-95 / 104), thereby also suggesting that this entanglement is primordial.
22 This is also the way Hegel's philosophy of nature conceives of the relation between inorganic nature and the absolute principle of organic nature (i.e., self-determination): inorganic nature actually manifests itself before organic nature, whereas from the outset it harbours the absolute principle of organic nature. From a logical perspective this principle itself precedes its first and poorest manifestation.
23 In The Eumenides the Furies claim repeatedly that they deserve to be honoured because of their old age. They call Apollo a “young god” who has “ridden down powers gray with age” by taking Orestes away from them (op. cit. 1. 150, cf. 11. 728, 778-79). One might see the conflict between Apollo and the Furies as mirroring, among others, the primal conflict between Cronus and his son Zeus: the son seeks to seize power so as to be no longer the second, and in order to prevent this the father attempts to kill his son. Were he to succeed, however, he would no longer be able to define himself as the one who came first. Cronus can only become the first by getting a son, but he thereby causes his own downfall. The Furies once allude to this myth (11. 641-42). Cf. also Oedipus the King, where Laius is told by the oracle that he would be killed by his son were he to have one.
24 It is no coincidence that the Greek term aporia occurs both in Greek tragedies and in Derrida's thought. Cf. Derrida, J., ‘Apories. Mourir — s'attendre aux “limites de la vérité’’, in: Le passage des frontières. Autour du travail de Jacques Derrida (Paris, Éditions Galilée, 1994), esp. pp. 312, 337 Google Scholar. Derrida, however, is not so much concerned with the possibility or impossibility of a way out of the aporia as with the dynamic that necessarily threatens to make impossible any way out.
25 Derrida, J., Spectres de Marx (Paris: Galilée, 1993), pp. 46, 51 Google Scholar / Specters of Marx, translated by Kamuf, P. (New York: Routledge, 1994) pp. 21, 25 Google Scholar.