BENJAMIN BAS

A German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends: “Let’s establish a code: if a letter you will get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter, written in blue ink: “Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theaters show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair — the only thing unavailable is red ink.

As with any good joke, to explain it is to ruin it, so allow me to ruin this joke with the goal of extracting a deeper meaning. The rest of this essay will be nothing more and nothing less than an overly theoretical explanation of the joke above with the help of Hegelian idealism.

In order for us to do this, we must first get a basic understanding of the German idealist tradition to give us the background that can help in understanding Hegel’s ideas. After this, the concept of the Hegelian subject will be explained in relation to the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant. Then we will look at Hegel’s concept of the absolute subject through Theodor Adorno’s criticism that accuses it of being an abstract universal. Next, we will try to show how Adorno’s criticism was unjust via the means of Slavoj Žižek’s interpretation of the Hegelian dialectic. And finally, we will see how this all relates back to the joke above.

Žižek often gets accused of being at best an unserious, chaotic writer and at worst capitalism’s court jester. In part, the goal of this essay is to take Žižek seriously and show how, especially with regard to his Hegelianism, his ideas are worth discussing. Žižek’s Hegelianism is often fused with the psychoanalytic work of Jacques Lacan, in this essay I will try to isolate his Hegelianism from his Lacanianism, as it is often hard to tell where Žižek’s Hegel ends en where his Lacan begins. Through this isolation, the focus will remain on what I want to show in this essay, namely how Žižek’s Hegelianism can be used to give an answer to the commonly brought-up critique about the nature of the Hegelian dialectic; that it doesn’t take the negative seriously enough.

The role of the negative in the subject

German idealism

Hegel is a thinker from the tradition of German idealism, a philosophical movement that emerged in the late 18th and early 19th century. German idealism was born as a reaction to the modernist philosophies of Hume, Locke, Descartes, Hobbes and others. This modern philosophical period was characterized by gaps between different camps that stood diametrically opposed to each other: rationalism versus empiricism and materialism versus dualism. In the time of the enlightenment, the need of resolving this opposition in philosophy was growing. Because historically there was a need for a unified system of philosophy that could explain reason, truth, and reality without reverting to materialism, and with that its consequence, determinism. German philosopher Immanuel Kant tried to achieve this by bridging the gap between rationalism and empiricism through his own system of transcendental idealism. Idealism, in the broadest sense, is the conclusion that the properties that we discover in objects are determined by the way those objects appear to us. This means that if we want to understand what we can know, we need to revert our gaze inwards. This was what was called Kant’s Copernican turn, it is the representation that makes the object possible; not the object that makes the representation possible. We need to look at the human mind as the active origin of experience.

This transcendental idealism is not the same as Platonic idealism. The traditional metaphysical divide of Plato is the division between essence (the ideal form) and appearance. The world of truth outside the cave and the world of illusion of the shadows on the wall inside the cave. This divide downgrades the world of appearance to a devalued version of the truth, a mere representation of these truths that are in a realm of their own. Kant with his Copernican turn makes it so that the truth is no longer out there, outside the cave. The subject must no longer conform to the way that objects appear in the world, the objects must conform to the subject, to the structure of the subject’s mental activity. Even space and time, the stages of the real, now become intuitions of the subject’s mind, something that the mind projects. We can only know a thing via what we put into it through our a priori toolkit of understanding. We can not know anything outside of this toolkit because it is the very medium of our understanding. With this conclusion, our knowledge now becomes limited to the realm of appearance, which Kant calls the phenomenal realm. This leaves the question: what is there beyond the phenomenal; what is the realm of the unmediated things in themselves? According to Kant, we can not say anything about this beyond that it exists; he calls this the noumenal realm. This is the way that things are without a subject that experiences them. So with Kant, we are now left with this residual x of which we can not know anything; it is exactly this appendage of Kant’s system that other German idealists try to get rid of. Kant throws up this veil or limit of reason, behind which lies something unknowable that we can only reach, according to him, through a leap of faith. Hegel’s solution to this will be to say that there is nothing behind the realm of appearance. Essence or the truth is not barred by appearance, but is made manifest through it. Essence is only in appearance. This is what will be made clear in the following chapter.

Hegels system of idealism

With this background, we can now start to delve into Hegel’s system and see how it functions in relation to Kant’s transcendental idealism. Hegel is trying to rid Kant’s system of this residual x, he tries to do this by getting rid of the rigid ground of essence and finding the unity of the system in a developing movement. A good way of understanding this movement is to look at what Truth is for Hegel. Knowledge of the Truth, for Hegel, is not concerned with the binary distinction of truth and falsity that a lot of philosophy gets hung up on. The Truth with a capital T can not be captured within this binary as it is dynamic and not static, the Truth gradually unfolds. The example he gives is that of a flower.

The bud disappears in the bursting forth of the blossom, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of it instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another, they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity…

The bud of a flower is not refuted by the blossom as being false and when the fruit emerges the blossom is not shown as being a false representation of the plant. No, there is an organic unity in the plant, of which its moments are not false but necessary in its development. The Truth works the same way, the Truth is not this fixed content for Hegel but a form. Truth can not be represented to us as content but only as form, and in order for us to get an understanding of this Truth we have to know it in its becoming.

The only element of Truth in existence for Hegel is what he calls Begriffe which is something that is always in development. Why does Hegel make this move? After Kant, there is still a gap between the subject (the realm of appearance) and essence. Philosophers after Kant, who we can call intuitionists, try to bridge this gap by trying to mend the connection between subject and what used to be the realm of God or the divine. For the intuitionists, Truth lies only in what can be called intuition, an immediate sensation of the absolute, which is not supposed to be comprehended but only felt. There is no Begriffe of it, only a feeling. We desperately want to keep feeling this connection to the divine, which is why these intuitionists are profusely trying to mend it. Hegel says:

The Spirit shows itself as so impoverished that, like a wanderer in the desert craving for a mere mouthful of water, it seems to crave for its refreshments only the bare feeling of the divine in general. By the little which now satisfies Spirit, we can measure the extent of its loss.

This forcible mending of the severance of subject and essence is what Hegel calls edification. Philosophy has to not give in to his thirst for divinity and the hazy, vague and structureless unity that it represents. Knowledge of the world does not belong in this realm, but in the realm of scientific discursive knowledge. In order for us to have knowledge of the world, we need to unfold the truth of the world ourselves. If we do not develop it and fold it out, it has the risk of getting stuck in a simple begriffe of some esoteric divine absolute that can only be intuited. This simple begriffe, Hegel represents with the tautological identity of A=A. For Hegel this doesn’t do justice to the absolute, the absolute here becomes “the night in which all cows are black”. Instead of hurling things into the vacuity of a tautological identity, we need a universality that is concrete. We have to grasp and express the Truth as subject and substance. Instead of mending the gap between subject and essence, Hegel tries to show that we must think of them as two moments that form a unity. These moments are in a dialectical relation with each other, where the subject, an active agency, is thus always already involved with substance, a rigid essence. How is this possible?

He describes it as follows:

The living substance is being, which is in truth subject, is in truth actual only insofar as it is the movement of positing itself or is the mediation of itself othering with itself.

The Hegelian subject

Subject/substance posits itself in actuality, but at the same time posits itself as other from itself. It determines itself and by that determination calls into actuality that-what-is-other to it. It is only through this self-othering motion of negativity, that Truth of self can have activity. The subject/substance’s being is this pure, simple negativity. It puts itself forward, but at the same time negates itself (others itself) without just vanishing. It is a doubling that sets up an opposition, a tension. This tension is antithesis in every sense of the word, a being set at odds with each other. At the same time, the subject/substance is overcoming this antithesis through the movement of self-restoring sameness. And via this process, we come back to a unity. This is what Truth is, this process in its becoming. Becoming because it has its end, unity, as its goal, but it also has its end as its beginning. So this movement is not a threefold movement but essentially fourfold, where 1 and 4 are the same but different. 4 is the sublated Begriffe or the Aufhebung of 1. That is what preserves, changes and advances, this is the logic of the dialectic. All of this is internal to the Begriffe and folds out of it via its self-negation. This is the role of the negative, it is the motor of the system and creates movement within the unity. This negativity is not something external, but internal to Truth. It is this negativity that we have to stay with. We can not throw externals at a developing Begriffe. You can not say that this particular notion of the truth is false because that particular idea over there is correct. You have to see how its own internal contradictions arise, you have to give it enough rope to hang itself. This is how a system of science develops, and it is only through this system that knowledge of the Truth can be possible.

Now we can make the step to the Truth of self.

The subject has to make itself its object of thought, and then recognize this object as itself. The subject thus goes through three moments: the undifferentiated unity, simple identity with itself, the difference between itself as the subject and itself as the object of knowledge, and finally a conscious, differentiated unity with itself. Hegel calls this self-referential structure subjectivity, also because it is productive, creates differences.

What Hegel essentially does is he takes the gap between reason and intuition that Kant tried to bridge and transposes it into the subject itself. There is no object before this gap; there is no truth behind the world except this gap. The concept of intuition itself is always already mediated by the subject through reason, Kant saw this as a problem. Hegel in a way radicalizes Kant and says that this is the only way that intuition exists, through the mediation of reason.

When we see something as missing, it is already a determinate reflection of the thing itself, it is then already existing through the awareness that it is not there. This is the-identity-of-identity-and-non-identity. Hegel looks at the form of the gap between reason and intuition and affirms this gap, this seemingly missing content, as content itself, this is the dialectical trick. It is through the failure of bridging the gap that the subject can exist, the unity becomes apparent through difference.

Positive dialectics

With this understanding of the Hegelian subjectivity, we can now understand a commonly brought up critique on the Hegelian subject that we will represent through Theodor Adorno’s variation of it. Adorno, although agreeing with most of Hegel’s dialectical logic, criticizes him on a crucial point. The dialectic of the subject/object was supposed to be devoid of any abstraction, its goal was to be concrete. But at the same time, it is what Hegel refers to as “the life of absolute Spirit”, for Adorno this is a contradiction. This life of absolute Spirit is, according to Adorno, abstract. Why? This step to the unity of absolute Spirit is a step where the unity becomes “one closed self identical whole”, this unity must therefore be an abstraction of the particulars that it contains. It is that to which nothing is other, thereby violently making everything self-same to it.

What tolerates nothing that would not be like itself, thwarts the reconciliation for which it mistakes itself. The act of violence of making something the same reproduces the contradiction which it stamps out.

This totality that Spirit becomes is thus not mediated by anything other to it or outside itself. This conflicts with Hegel’s idea of the dialectic, in which concepts need this differentiation from themselves in order to have determination. Without this determination, Spirit stays abstract. Adorno further explains:

The equation of the negation of the negation with positivity is the quintessence of identification, the formal principle reduced to its purest form. With it the anti-dialectical principle wins the upper hand in the innermost core of dialectics, that traditional logic, which more arithmetico [Latin: in mathematical terms] books minus times minus as a plus. It was borrowed from that mathematics, against which Hegel otherwise so idiosyncratically reacted. If the whole is the bane, the negative, then the negation of the particularities which have their epitome in that whole remains negative. Its positive would be solely the determinate negation, critique, not a circumventing result, which the affirmation could happily hold in its hand.

Adorno accuses Hegel of adhering to a positive dialectic, where negation is negated into a determination that can be held up as some abstract unity. Hegel does not radicalize the negative enough and still gives in to the pressure of positive negation, according to Adorno. Now the question becomes; can we save Hegel from this allegation of positivity and return to a Hegel of negativity? A dark Hegel.

The Night of the world

The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything in its simplicity — an unending wealth of many representations, images, of which none belongs to him — or which are not present. This night, the interior of nature, that exists here — pure self — in phantasmagorical representations, is night all around it, in which here shoots a bloody head — there another white ghastly apparition, suddenly here before it, and just so disappears. One catches sight of this night when one looks human beings in the eye — into a night that becomes awful.

Slavoj Žižek uses this quote from a younger Hegel to emphasize that Hegel saw the subject’s imaginative power as radically negative. This passage shows the pre-subjective experience of the production of representations, bloody heads and white ghastly apparitions. This will form the basis of subjectivity, which we can see when we look human beings in the eye. This is the negativity of the subject that violently shreds the real apart through the power of imagination. Žižek says:

What better description could one offer of the power of imagination in its negative, disruptive, decomposing aspect, as the power that disperses continuous reality into a confused multitude of ‘partial objects’, spectral apparitions of what in reality is effective only as part of a larger organism?

The imagination here becomes something that is not only constructive, as it was in Kant, but destructive, “the power to dismember what immediate perception puts together”. The subject is no longer this light of reason, but the night of the world. The same negativity of the subject is also explained in the preface of the Phenomenology of Spirit, where Hegel talks about “tarrying with the negative”. He even calls the power of the negative the “absolute power”. The life of the subject is here represented by the life of Spirit, Spirit possesses this power of negativity and is constituted only through a negative self-relation. Žižek’s claim is that this night of the world of Spirit, is a pre-synthetic multitude, this

…pre-synthetic Real, its pure, not-yet-fashioned multitude not yet synthesized by a minimum of transcendental imagination, is, stricto sensu, impossible: a level that must be retroactively presupposed, but can never actually be encountered.

This negativity itself is the ground of the subject. This is all very abstract, so I will try to illustrate this better with the help of two examples.

Chiasmic structure

We can try to make this system of radical negativity clear with the help of the concept of the chiasm. A chiasm is a grammatical structure of an inverted repetition in the form of A B B A, so for example “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” The idea is that the problem that Kant tries to resolve, which boils down to the problem of becoming, follows this chiasmic structure. Either essence (A) is what appearance (B) falls out of, or appearance (B) somehow appears out of nothing (A). The point Žižek is making is not to choose out of this binary, but to break out of it by noticing the middle point, the X in between the two sides (A B x B A). Both sides are merely reflexive illusions of an inner core, which is subjectivity itself. It is not that there was the darkness of the world from which the world came into being, and neither is it that there was heaven from which we have fallen. It is only within this subjectivity of being that this binary problem of becoming can exist. There is no presence before the mediation of subjectivity, presence is always already mediated. It is not just about subjectivity being mediated and negated into becoming, what we can call negative self-relating. Žižek wants to show us how this mediation of negative self-relating is itself a self-relation of a self-relating negativity. This is what the negation of the negation is, not the negation of nothing into something, nor the negation of something into nothing. It is not something dead becoming alive or something alive dying, it is the uncanny in-between of the undead that retroactively presupposes the dead and the living. This is the only way we can break out of this binary that we have imposed on ourselves.

The shattering of the vessel

Žižek has another example that makes the movement that we see happening here more clear. He looks at Walter Benjamin’s text The Task of the Translator. Benjamin says:

Of necessity, therefore, the demand for literalness, whose justification is obvious, whose legitimate ground is quite obscure, must be understood in a more meaningful context. Fragments of a vessel which are to be glued together must match one another in the smallest details, although they need not be like one another. In the same way a translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel.

What Benjamin is explaining here is that, usually, we think of a translation as something that needs to capture the meaning of the original text through a different language. For Benjamin, this is not the point of a translation, a translation should make itself and the original recognizable as parts of a greater language. Where the fragments from the translation are not identical to that of the original, but different to the point where they fit together to form a greater whole. We should not treat the original as the truth we must adhere to, we need to put the original and the translation at the same level of fragments that can form a greater whole. The point is that this greater whole is a retroactive illusion that makes itself necessary as always already being there only after the fact. The gap between the original and the translation, which is always imperfect, is transposed back into the original itself, where the original itself becomes the fragments of a broken vessel. In this way, the new goal of the translation is not copying the original but supplementing it to become a whole by treating it as already broken. This is the same movement that we see happening with the gap of essence and appearance, resulting in the retroactive illusion of the real. It is the gap that is the ground that retroactively presupposes the constitutive elements and their difference, in between which it can exist. This gap is the negativity of the subject. Subjectivity becomes here the materialisation of the immanent self-relating negativity that Hegel attributes to Spirit. This condition of Spirit is what Žižek in one of the titles of his books calls ‘Less than Nothing’.

A Dark Hegel

We can now hopefully see why Žižek wants to show that Hegel repeats again and again in the Phenomenology of Spirit that the story of the subject is a story of repeated failure. The subject is nothing other than pure negativity and not this absolute that swallows everything up within a unity as Adorno claims.

There is simply no such thing as absolute subject, since the Hegelian subject is nothing but the unilateral self-deception, of the hubris of positing oneself in one’s exclusive particularity, which necessarily turns against itself and ends in self-negation.

The universal principle that is posited is thus never external to the subject, but constitutive of it. The negation of the negation is not, 1+1=2, as Adorno claims, not a return to identity or a magic reversal. The negation of negation signals simply the unavoidable failure of the subject’s teleological activity.

Adorno’s critique of Hegel was in part rooted in the fact that within Hegel’s system, atrocious events like the holocaust would become a mere moment within the teleological journey of history, a necessary moment. Adorno, understandably, can’t live with this necessity because, for him and many others, the holocaust was a deadlock and not something that we can progress from. By introducing this absolute Spirit as a teleological end goal, every atrocity that happens on the path of its becoming becomes necessary, but as Žižek says: the predicament of the subject is that of failure and self-deception. Hegel mentions that from time to time war is necessary. War, not as a simple moment behind which the road to the teleological end goal becomes clear again. No, disaster must be allowed from time to time in order to let the subject regain the taste for its negativity. The holocaust is this moment that shakes the subject out of the full immersion of the concrete totality, its reflexive illusion. It is a total deadlock that symbolises the subject’s loss of “the night of the world”; its abstract negativity. Subjectivity died at Auschwitz and was only resuscitated by the recognition of its own death, not negated into something positive, but precisely negated back into the negativity that it is.

Ah Yes, the joke!

Žižek ends his joke with the following sentence:

And is this not our situation till now? We have all the freedoms one wants — the only thing missing is the “red ink”: we “feel free” because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.

He then makes the point of saying that we must give revolutionaries this red ink to properly express their freedom, but is the greater insight not that we can never truly acquire this language of the red ink? The subject will always lack the proper language of describing their own situation, and this is precisely where his freedom lies, forever searching for a place where nothing is lacking.