Condemned to the Absolute, or, How Hegel Can Help Us across Borders

Author(s): Todd McGowan

Source: The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association , Spring, 1997, Vol.
30, No. 1/2, Borders (Spring, 1997), pp. 114-130
Published by: Midwest Modern Language Association

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/1315430

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 Condemned to the Absolute, Or,
How Hegel Can Help Us Across Borders
Todd McGowan

Today we are aware, as perhaps never before, that all interpretat

involves crossing a border. It is thus a dangerous business, because w
ever we cross a border - be it a physical border or an epistemic one
run the risk of appropriating what is on the other side. Criticism has no
course, been blind to the problem of appropriation. The critical resp
to this risk has often been an ethical one -as reflected in the emerge
various theoretical attempts to maintain distance from appropriation
such move is the attempt to form a "local" criticism, one which avoi
totalizing gestures of Western metaphysics (gestures often conside
synonymous with the name "Hegel") and which pays strict attention to t
specificity of every object of study.' In her call for "local, political analy
which generates theoretical categories from within the situation and
text being analysed" (73), Chandra Mohanty provides an example o
desire. Mohanty seeks an immanent criticism, one emanating from
object of study rather than imposed upon it. In contrast to the universa
ing claims of theories such Marxism or psychoanalysis, an immanent
cism seeks to respect the singularity and difference of every contex
Clearly, local or immanent criticism seems less open to the charg
"appropriation" or "epistemic violence."2 Let us look at one exampl
criticism which claims to be immanent: Henry Louis Gates's The Signify
Monkey. In this work, Gates aims to create a theory for African-Am
literature which emerges organically from African-American litera

After several active years of work applying literary theory to African a

Afro-American literatures, I realized that what had early on seemed to me
be the fulfillment of my project as a would-be theorist of black literature w
in fact, only a moment in a progression. The challenge of my project, if no
exactly to invent a black theory, was to locate and identify how the "black tr
dition" had theorized about itself. (ix)

Rather than continue to "apply" white theory to black literature, Gates

The Signifying Monkey as a turning point for himself- the end of appli
tion and the beginning of immanence (what Mohanty would surely l
more "local" kind of theorizing).
Later, Gates continues the discussion of immanence, noting that
theory "is not the only theory appropriate to the texts of our tradit
[but] I would like to think [it] arises from the black tradition itself"

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The hesitancy in Gates's own language suggests that he is aware that some-
thing may not ring true in this claim. His theory of "Signifyin(g)" - which is,
without question, "appropriate to the texts" Gates discusses - owes an ack-
nowledged debt to contemporary novelist Ishmael Reed and to contempo-
rary thinkers such as Jacques Derrida. So far, so good-except for one
thing: this means that Gates's reading of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes
Were Watching God is only possible fifty years after the book was written,
after poststructuralism arrived on the critical scene. It is the advent of
poststructuralism which makes possible the claim that (for instance) "Hur-
ston's novel is a Signifyin(g) structure because it seems to be so concerned
to represent Signifyin(g) rituals for their own sake" (216). For Gates, Their
Eyes Were Watching God fits into a tradition of "Signifyin(g)" which is mani-
fested immanently in the novel. This tradition, however, only exists retro-
actively, through Gates's positing of it (which doesn't mean that it's not a
tradition, but it does mean that it, like every other tradition, isn't an imma-
nent tradition).3 The claim of an immanent or local criticism necessarily
forgets, to put it in Hegelian language, the act whereby we posit our pre-
suppositions. It assumes, on the contrary, that presuppositions are some-
thing found "out there" and exist apart from the uncovering of them. To put
it differently: "local" criticism forgets that there is something irreducible
about the universalizing violence of knowing. It is in the "Sense-Certainty"
section of the Phenomenology that Hegel makes most clear the problem
with this attempt to create immanent local categories of criticism. Such
local criticism attempts to respect the singularity of the object of study, but
any effort to talk about singularity involves universals, because it involves
language. According to Hegel, "When I say: 'a single thing,' I am really say-
ing what it is from a wholly universal point of view, for everything is a
single thing; and likewise 'this thing' is anything you like. If we describe it
more exactly as 'this bit of paper,' then each and every bit of paper is 'this
bit of paper,' and I have only uttered the universal all the time" (66). In
other words, no matter how I go about describing the object of study, if I
use language, I necessarily use universals. There is, as Hegel indicates, no
local language.
Even if one acknowledges the impossibility of a local language, one can
still attempt to gain distance from the appropriation involved in knowing -
thus the recent emergence of what I will call the ethics of distance. Because
appropriation is the means whereby power expands itself through violently
taking possession of the other, increasing one's distance from appropria-
tion seems like a good idea. It increases one's distance from a fundamental
violence. Though a minimum of appropriation inheres in the very act of
interpretation - I cannot think the other without the I-I can achieve dis-
tance from myself; I can show my own awareness of this appropriation.
This distance from one's self, from one's interpretation, from one's con-
cept, functions today as the predominant mode of resistance to appropria-

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tion. This critical ethos manifests itself in its banal form every day: fore-
grounding the situatedness of my own subject position ("as a gay white
male, I.. ."). A more sophisticated form of this ethos foregrounds the limits
of the particular interpretive methodology ("I will be giving a feminist read-
ing of .. ." or "this reading stresses only certain aspects of this text, other
readings will . . ."). Interpretation is a dangerous ground because it is so
clearly a moment of speaking for the other, of, to put it simply, saying what
the other says.4 Foregrounding one's own limitations provides distance
from this "speaking for the other," and thus becomes an ethical gesture.
Through the attempt to sustain this ethics of distance, criticism today
retains a debt to deconstruction, even though deconstruction no longer
seems to command the following it once did in the American academy.
But critics are no longer deconstructionists not because deconstruction
has been abandoned as a critical methodology, but precisely because it- or
rather, some of its central concerns-has been so wholly accepted: for
instance, a certain wariness about "the problem of appropriation."5 And it
is on the level of ethics that the deconstructive spirit remains most clearly
the critical orthodoxy. Thus, it should be no surprise that today's ethics of
distance gets its clearest expression in a book by Jacques Derrida. In Of
Spirit, Derrida takes up the question of Heidegger's Nazism, making it one
of his works most openly devoted to ethics. Through tracing Heidegger's
use of the terms "spirit" (Geist) and "spiritual" (Geistig, Geistlich) between
1927 and 1953 (a period which includes Heidegger's open identification
with the Nazi Party and his assumption of the university rectorship under
Nazi rule), Derrida attempts to address the question at the heart of the
"Heidegger controversy": in what way is Heidegger's Nazism implicitly
present in his philosophy? Now, few dispute that Heidegger's Rectorship
Address, "The Self-Assertion of the German University," is complicit with
the ideology of Nazism. One doesn't have to read too far to come across a
sentence like this: "The will to essence of the German university is the will
to science as the will to the historical spiritual mission of the German Volk
as a Volk that knows itself in its state" (30). When Heidegger invokes the
"spiritual mission of the German Volk," even his defenders stop defend-
ing. But this is not a controversial point; it is certainly not the "Heidegger
Controversy." The controversy stems from a question of contamination, of
the degree to which the rest of Heidegger's thought bears the traces of the
open Nazism of the Rectorship Address. This is the point at which
Derrida's Of Spirit intervenes. By following the changing employment of
the concept of "spirit" and the "spiritual" in Heidegger's writing, Derrida
reveals how the move to Nazism represents a violation of Heidegger's own
thought, a closing of what had been an openness, both before and after
that move.6
Derrida readily admits that spirit doesn't seem to be at the fore of Hei-
degger's thought. It appears, in a word, marginal to that thought; or, as

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Derrida puts it, "it is not his theme" (3). Even though spirit is not his theme,
even though in Being and Time he explicitly sets out to avoid the concept of
spirit, Heidegger's work "nonetheless lets itself be magnetized, from its
first to its last word, by that very thing" (3). Heidegger wants to avoid
"spirit" because the concept is at the heart of a metaphysical tradition-a
specifically Western tradition-which refuses temporality by opposing
spirit to time. In this tradition, in its "everyday conception of time," spirit
falls into time-thus implying an original disjunction or opposition
between the two. Heidegger's genius here, according to Derrida, is his
ability to see this conception of spirit as a through-line running from
Descartes to Hegel and beyond:

the essence of spirit [. . ..] is indeed a logical formalization of the Cartesian

cogito, i.e. of consciousness as cogito me cogitare rem, grasping of self as grasp-
ing of non-self. The Hegelian determination of spirit indeed remains ordered,
prescribed, ruled by the epoch of the Cartesian cogito. It therefore calls for
the same deconstruction. Did not Hegel hail Descartes as the Christopher
Columbus of philosophical modernity? (26)

Hegel accepts as a pre-given a conception of spirit as external to time, on

the basis of which an inquiry into spirit - the Hegelian phenomenology or
Cartesian radical doubt - is possible. Spirit is here the possibility of ques-
tioning, the impossibility of closure. But it is precisely because Hegel (and
Descartes) ontologizes spirit-opposes it to time-that he forecloses the
originary temporality which makes questioning possible. Hence, Heideg-
ger aims to deconstruct this vestige of metaphysical humanism-spirit
conceived external to time - in Hegel.
Precisely because of this metaphysical implication of the word "spirit,"
Heidegger set out in Being and Time to avoid its use. However, according to
Derrida, Heidegger also sets out to rehabilitate spirit, to free it "from the
Cartesian-Hegelian metaphysics of subjectivity" (23). "Spirit" here comes
to mean not a subject opposed to temporality but a "subject" which is not a
subject precisely because it experiences temporality as itself, rather than
as that which (as in Hegel) it falls into. Heidegger's "spirit" is the origin of
temporality itself, the originary temporality which is the possibility of the
question which Dasein directs towards Being- the ontological question,
what is Being? This is the point - the point of the reappearance of spirit in
Being and Time-at which Derrida introduces the question of ethics.
Despite Heidegger's (inevitable) failure to avoid the term he set out to
avoid, Derrida recognizes an ethical dimension to the discussion of "spirit"
in Being and Time, a dimension which, seven years later in the Rectorship
Address, would disappear altogether. What is distinctive about Heidegger's
use of the word "spirit" in 1926-27 is the manner of its presentation:

Heidegger does not take up as his own the word 'spirit'; he barely gives it shel-
ter. At any rate, the hospitality offered is not without reservation. Even when

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 it is admitted, the word is contained at the doorstep or held at the frontier,
flanked with discriminatory signs, held at a distance by the procedure of quo-
tation marks. Through these artifices of writing it is, to be sure, the same
word, but also another. (29)

Quotation marks serve to make clear that though he uses the word "spirit,"
though he must use the word "spirit," the word is not wholly Heidegger's.
The word is, as Derrida puts it, "held at a distance." And this distance indi-
cates the refusal to close off questioning, the refusal to arrest temporality.
Though it is the basis upon which we think temporality, spirit arrests tem-
porality because it is a conceptualization of temporality. Heidegger
employs the quotation marks in order to suggest the inadequacy of "spirit,"
the failure of the word in the very gesture of using the word. The word
"spirit" fails, as every word does, because as a symbol it derives its mean-
ing synchronically. Finally, it is this synchronicity of the symbol which
both Heidegger and Derrida are committed to resisting, a synchronicity
which not only denies temporality, but also - and here is where this ethics
becomes more clear - the existence of the other as other.
Quotation marks seek to affirm temporality and the other, to resist the
foreclosure of the synchronic; they are, for Derrida, the attempt at an oxy-
moronic gesture: the diachronic concept. Quotation marks resist the con-
cept's inevitable closure by keeping things open:

It's the law of quotation marks. Two by two they stand guard: at the frontier
or before the door, assigned to the threshold in any case, and these places are
always dramatic. The apparatus lends itself to theatricalization, and also to
the hallucination of the stage and its machinery: two pairs of pegs hold in sus-
pension a sort of drape, a veil or a curtain. Not closed, just slightly open. (31)

In 1933, however, with the "Self-Assertion of the German University," this

curtain gets fully raised and spirit appeared undaunted by the quotation
marks of Being and Time. In the Rectorship Address, the word "spirit" loses
its quotation marks. In fact, the Rectorship Address is "an exaltation of the
spiritual. It is an elevation" (37). The distance from "spirit" which the
quotation marks had affirmed evaporates in the Rectorship Address and in
the Introduction to Metaphysics (1935), works which coincide with Heideg-
ger's political investment in Nazism. Because it lacks the distance from
spirit provided by the quotation marks, the Address "capitalizes on the
worst, that is on both evils at once: the sanctioning of nazism, and the ges-
ture that is still metaphysical" (40).7 For Derrida, these evils are not
unrelated, but inextricably linked: they are the twin poles of Western
existence, opposed to each other and yet inevitably linked together. Der-
rida says, "Nazism was not born in a desert"; spirituality is part of the
"European forest" in which Nazism grew (109).
Derrida's ethics of distance employs quotation marks so often- and they

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acquire such importance -because they provide a way of saying that fore-
closure isn't the last word on the word within them. Foreclosure stops time
and hypostatizes the other, forcing both into the rigidity of a conceptual-
ization, the conceptualization of spirit. According to this ethics, the vio-
lence of conceptual closure - what we often call "epistemic violence" - is
linked logically to the authoritarian violence of Nazism. Both do a funda-
mental violence both to time and to the other.8 And it is this violence that
the entirety of deconstruction is committed to resisting. This is also the
point at which, perhaps not surprisingly, Derrida's private obsession
intersects with his public work. In an interview with Mitchell Stephens,
Derrida revealed this obsession: "It is true that I'm obsessed with death. I
am every minute attentive to the possibility that in the following hour I
will be dead, and the person I am with will say, 'I was just in the room with
him, and now he is dead.' This film is constantly in front of my eyes" (25).
Derrida himself makes clear the link between this obsession and his work.
He says elsewhere in the interview, "All my writing is on death .... If I
don't reach the place where I can be reconciled with death, then I will have
failed. If I have one goal, it is to accept death and dying" (25). This effort is
clearly visible in the resistance which Derrida directs toward the synchro-
nicity of the concept. In his attempt to simultaneously use and refuse the
concept, he attempts to accept his own death, to give himself over to tem-
porality and to the other. Even the valorization of quotation marks must
be reevaluated in this light: they are nothing but the attempt to resist the
refusal of death and the other - the great refusal which animates the entire
tradition that Derrida calls "metaphysical," a refusal which necessitates
deconstruction. Deconstruction is thus, for Derrida, both an ethics and
(which is to say the same thing) a mode of being-towards-death. And both
are achieved only through distancing, making the use of quotation marks
perhaps the Derridean ethical gesture par excellence.
Since spirit-and what is spirit but the gesture of conceptualization
itself?-is a way of thinking the other and, hence, a way of negating the
otherness of the other, distance from spirit, quotation marks around the
word "spirit," indicates a remove from this violence. Derrida recognizes
that even though spirit is a violence toward the other, avoiding the word
"spirit" would be akin to avoiding speaking as such; it is a necessary vio-
lence. In order to oppose Nazism at all, we must have at least some
recourse to "spirit"; we must, in other words, speak up. But the necessity of
this violence doesn't remove the blood from spirit's path. For Derrida, the
"progress" of spirit through history has provided, if not the engine for
Western imperialism, colonialism, and fascism, then at least the soil in
which these modes of violence grew. When one lives within this history,
quotation marks become part of a non-fascist way of living. Derrida sees
this distancing (exemplified by the quotation marks "standing guard"),
which he calls deconstruction, as a hysterical response to identitarian

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thinking. That is, in the manner of the hysteric, Derrida says to every
statement of identity, "This is not it." Despite all the pejorative implica-
tions the word "hysteria" has come to acquire, it is, as Lacan has shown, a
primary mode of resistance to ideological interpellation, because the hys-
teric responds to ideological interpellation with a question. Unlike the
"normal" subject (who thinks ideology has provided for us pretty well), the
hysteric finds the ideological role unsatisfying, prompting the hysteric's
question: "why am I what you are telling me that I am?" This questioning,
this refusal of identity (of "spirit"), is precisely what Derrida wants to sus-
tain. It is the moment of diff~rance which must not be incorporated into
identitarian thinking. The ethical imperative of deconstruction runs
something like this: whatever you do, however you speak, don't ontolo-
gize diffprance. The difficulty, however, consists in the question of how we
sustain the hysterical position.
Unlike the hysteric, the obsessional, of course, finds too much satisfac-
tion in identity and thus wants to do everything possible to avoid losing it.
This is why the standard obsessional fear is the fear of death: death is the
moment of the absolute dissolution of identity. On what grounds, then,
can we link deconstruction, a refusal of identity, to obsession, the refusal
to give it up? Perhaps language itself can provide a suitable answer. In
Read My Desire, Joan Copjec describes the necessity of both the syn-
chronic and the diachronic aspects of language for meaning to be possible.
In contrast, deconstruction - and Copjec sees this largely as a response to
the structuralist privileging of the synchronic - proceeds as if one can side-
step the synchronic requirement of language - which demands a totaliza-
tion for meaning to be possible. Copjec explains the interrelations of the
synchronic and diachronic requirements:

[the] rule of language enjoins us not only to believe in the inexhaustibility of

the process of meaning, in the fact that there will always be another signifier
to determine retroactively the meaning of all that have come before [the side
acknowledged by deconstruction], it also requires us to presuppose "all the
other signifiers," the total milieu that is necessary for the meaning of the one.
The completeness of the system of signifiers is both demanded and precluded
by the same rule of language. Without the totality of the system of signifiers
there can be no determination of meaning, and yet the very totality would
prevent the successive consideration of signifiers that the rule requires. (205,
Copjec's emphasis)

This double aspect of language - synchronic and diachronic - indicates

its contradictory nature. Language must be both synchronic (a complete
totality without openness) and diachronic (a system without limit on
meaning, on the slippage of the signifier). Deconstruction's energy, of
course, has always remained on the side on the diachronic, in the attempt
to reveal how every synchronic totalization-like that of the signifier
"spirit," to take an exemplary instance-is always haunted by a certain

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ghost, or, as Derrida puts it in his book on Marx, a specter. What decon-
struction resists, however, is the inevitability of the synchronic, its haunt-
ing of every insistence upon the diachronic. The diachronic can never be
formulated except synchronically. This is why deconstruction is still a
metaphysics or a totalizing position. No matter how many "stratagems" I
use to reveal that something exceeds my totalization, this effort itself
remains a totalization. Thus, when I try to show the limitations of my
authority, I must do so in a way which establishes my authority. This
inevitability of language itself provides the key to understanding how a
seemingly hysterical position can serve to mask a wholly obsessional one.9
Despite the quotation marks, despite all the efforts to distance himself
from identification with a concept and to resist its totalization of the field
of signification, the synchronic demand of language enjoins Derrida, so
long as he remains within language, to totalize. This totalization happens
not only in spite of (Derrida readily admits this) but also because of each
effort to maintain distance from totalization.'0 Each successive distancing
from the violence of spirit further insulates the synchronic from the dia-
chronic, though Derrida believes he is doing precisely the opposite. In
other words, deconstruction and the larger ethics of distance represent an
attempt to postpone the encounter with the diachronic, to resist the loss of
the stability of identity to time and to the other. It is true, as Derrida puts
it, that a specter always haunts every invocation of spirit (i.e., the noncon-
ceptual haunts every conceptual totalization, every synchronic moment),
but this specter only appears with spirit. Thus, the effort to distance one-
self from spirit also distances one from spectrality as well. This distance
avoids spectrality. To put it simply: the more I try to limit my authority
through statements acknowledging its limitations, the more I increase my
authority. The commonplace gesture of foregrounding one's own subject
position forgets, as does deconstruction, that such a gesture always occurs
within language. And, as Lacan has made clear, within language the point
of enunciation of a statement and the point of its enunciated content can-
not coincide. Language severs the subject from itself; it is because of lan-
guage that Lacan conceives the subject as split. I can't speak about myself-
or even deconstruct myself -not because I can never quite get it right, but
because it isn't the same I: "It is not a question of knowing whether I speak
of myself in a way that conforms to what I am, but rather of knowing
whether I am the same as that of which I speak" (Ecrits 165). To put it fur-
ther in Lacanian language: I never speak to you from the point at which I
am. When I acknowledge my own limitations, for instance, I am always
beyond this acknowledgment, at the point from which the acknowledg-
ment is made. Hence, such an acknowledgment- or any gesture of dis-
tancing- can only serve to increase the authority of the I of the enuncia-
tion, even as it denigrates the authority of the enunciated I."
This fundamental disjunction between the position of enunciation and

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the position of the enunciated content allows us to rethink the ethics of dis-
tance. Though an abdication of mastery by the enunciated I, distance is a
gesture of mastery on the part of the I of the enunciation, because that I is
situated in a beyond of language-in a transcendental position. The dis-
tanced I of the enunciation is precisely a refusal of the limitation of the
other or of temporality-of the diachrony of language. The attempt to
resist synchronic totalization on the level of the enunciated reaffirms it on
the level of the enunciation. One cannot speak, one cannot have meaning,
without this moment of totalization or of presence. The entire effort of
deconstruction, however, predicates itself upon the possibility of mean-
ing without this synchronic requirement, which results in the unending
attempts to show how every totalization unravels itself through its exclu-
sionary logic (how can a totalization exclude?). What deconstruction (and
the ethics of distance) thus misses is that the synchronic totalization
occurs on the level of the enunciation, which is why it is fundamentally
undeconstructable. One can never deconstruct oneself deconstructing.
One can never achieve distance from this totalization, because every
deconstruction or distancing is itself a totalization. And what is more, this
distancing decreases the possibility that the position of the enuniciation
will have its mastery questioned. Thus, distancing reflects a obsessional
economy rather than a hysterical one, because it attempts to preserve the
identity of enunciation. One refuses mastery not through distance from
the enunciated position, but through over-identification with it. Only by
over-identifying with one's position-by making its logic Absolute, by
effecting completely the moment of synchronic totalization-does one
give oneself over to diachrony. Through fully inhabiting the synchronic
moment (which is always a moment of absolute mastery), I give myself
wholly to the other because I hold nothing in reserve. It is a gesture of
appropriation without reserve. And only when appropriation proceeds
without reserve does it have the possibility of turning into its opposite - of
ceasing to be appropriation.
In order to make clear how this reversal takes place, let us again turn to
the example of Derridean deconstruction, which is always grappling with
the problem of conceptual appropriation. Derrida himself has a paradoxi-
cal relationship to appropriation. On the one hand, he makes clear its
impossibility. What are the many deconstructions of the most prominent
thinkers of Western metaphysics if not a series of claims about the impos-
sibility of appropriation? On the other hand, Derrida argues against appro-
priation, seeking its prohibition. This paradoxical logic-the prohibition
of an impossibility - is at work in his discussions of Hegel and the Hegel-
ian Aufhebung. In his essay on Hegel in Writing and Difference, "From
Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism Without Reserve," Der-
rida points out that even though Hegel "bet against play, against chance"
and chose meaning (i.e., appropriation), play nevertheless wins out in the

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end. In other words, despite Hegel's "bet" on meaning, play wins; it always
surpasses meaning and meaning's attempt to arrest it. This is what Hegel
fails to recognize: "he has blinded himself to the possibility of his own bet,
to the fact that the conscientious suspension of play [.. ..] was itself a phase
of play; and to the fact that play includes the work of meaning or the mean-
ing of work" (260, Derrida's emphasis). The appropriative and totalizing
gesture of meaning always fails because it ocdurs within play; "meaning is
a function of play" (260), as Derrida puts it. At the same time, however,
Derrida sees Hegelian meaning as a risk which deconstruction constantly
runs. In the effort to write diffrance without eliding it, deconstruction

risks making sense, risks agreeing to the reasonableness of reason, of philos-

ophy, of Hegel, who is always right as soon as one opens one's mouth in order
to articulate meaning. In order to run this risk within language, in order to
save that which does not want to be saved-the possibility of play and of
absolute risk-we must redouble language and have recourse to ruses, to
stratagems, to simulacra. (263, Derrida's emphasis)

By constituting Hegelian meaning as a risk, Derrida lays down the funda-

mental deconstructive prohibition - don't make play meaningful. And yet,
hasn't he already made clear that, even in Hegel (who bets everything on
meaning), play always wins? If meaning never has the mastery over play it
thinks it has, since meaning is itself impossible, why does Derrida make it
the prohibition of deconstruction?'2
According to Slavoj Zizek, one prohibits the impossible in order to mask
its impossibility, to make it seem as if only the barrier of prohibition
stands between you and the impossible thing. In Tarrying with the Nega-
tive, Zizek explains that "the very function of the prohibition ... consists of
course in the fact that, as soon as it is conceived as prohibited, the real-
impossible changes into something possible, i.e., into something that can-
not be reached, not because of its inherent impossibility but simply
because access to it is hindered by the external barrier of a prohibition"
(116). The prohibition, rather than sustaining the impossible as impossible
(as it claims to do), actually serves to "possibilize" the impossible. Or, in
other words, the Derridean prohibition on making play meaningful con-
verts play into the discourse of meaning. According to Zizek, "the logic of
this reversal is that of the transmutation of Real into symbolic: the impos-
sible-real changes into an object of symbolic prohibition" (116). The at-
tempt to avoid appropriation, to prohibit the conceptualization of the
other, is itself a mode of appropriation, because it places the other within a
field of meaning-even as it denies access to the other. Every attempt
within language to limit this appropriation cannot but expand it. Zizek
explains this in terms of Lacan's impossible Real: "Every demarcation
between the Symbolic and the Real, every exclusion of the Real qua the
prohibited-inviolable, is a symbolic act par excellence; such an inversion

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of impossibility into prohibition-exclusion occults the inherent deadlock of
the Real" (129, Zizek's emphasis). The only way to sustain the impossibility
of the Real (or, in our terms, to resist the appropriation of the other) is to
show this impossibility through appropriation itself. Only when one
appropriates without reserve does one demonstrate the failure of appro-
priation, the way in which every appropriation fails. Only when appro-
priation becomes absolute does it begin to become ethical.
It is Hegel, of course, who conceives of an absolute appropriation, an
appropriation in which the other only exists as an objectification of the
self. This occurs, for example, at the end of the Logic, when the Notion
becomes absolute Idea: "in its other [the Notion] has its own objectivity for
its object. All else is error, confusion, opinion, endeavour, caprice and tran-
sitoriness; the absolute Idea alone is being, imperishable life, self-knowing
truth, and is all truth" (824, Hegel's emphasis). When the Notion becomes
absolute, all otherness within it completely vanishes and the Notion
knows only itself as objectification. At this point, even a good Hegelian
could understand why someone might be troubled by this formulation. It
exemplifies "epistemic violence," and it does so seemingly without apol-
ogy. But Hegel's point here is more nuanced than his critics would have us
believe. Though it comes at the end of the Logic (and the Phenomenology) as
the final product of Hegelian thinking, the absolute is at the same time the
beginning of thought as well. Thought doesn't begin-as, say, the Phenome-
nology does-with sense certainty, perception, and understanding, and
then become more and more mediated, finally culminating in absolute
knowledge. On the contrary, thought begins with Hegel's endpoint-the
absolute. In the Logic, Hegel is clear about this: "every beginning must be
made with the absolute, just as all advance is merely the exposition of it, in
so far as it in-itself is the Notion" (829, Hegel's emphasis). Even the sup-
posed apprehension of immediacy is always already implicated in the
absolute Idea. Hence, rather than offering a description of the historical
evolution of thought, the Phenomenology recounts the mythology of
thought, the presuppositions that thought itself posits as its history. In his
Hegel's Idealism, Robert Pippin explains that "the determinacy of any
[finite] object requires a conceptual structure not limited to a series of
immediate qualities, but one that makes possible the various contrastive
relations necessary for such determinacy" (199). From the beginning, the
absolute has the immediate in its web, and we are condemned, by virtue
of this, to speak always from the standpoint of the absolute.
Hegel's recognition of the inescapability of totalization leads him to
what Gillian Rose calls a "politics in the severe style." According to Rose,
Hegel knew that he ran the risk of being misunderstood, "but he also knew
that, like any thinker, he had to present his thought in propositional form"
(48). Propositional form- or "identitarian thinking" - is not a shackle that
one can remove from thought but the very movement of thought itself.

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Hence, we cannot acknowledge the limitations of thought except within
thought, except in a way which increases the mastery of thought. Because
Hegel understands this paradox of thought, he conceives the statement of
absolute identity as a way of speaking the limitation of thought without
speaking it. ' The statement of absolute identity - Rose takes her primary
example from the Philosophy of Right: "the real is the rational"-reveals,
through its hyperbolic failure, a lack of identity between subject and
predicate, if such statements are read "speculatively," as "speculative
propositions" rather than ordinary propositions. Whereas an ordinary
proposition simply affirms identity (a= b), a speculative proposition also
affirms-because of its hyperbolic quality-a failure of identity. Rose
claims, "To read a proposition 'speculatively' means that the identity
which is affirmed between subject and predicate is seen equally to affirm a
lack of identity between subject and predicate" (48-49). In short, despite
the totalitarian ring to it, the articulation of absolute knowledge is Hegel's
way of admitting the limitation of thought, rather than proclaiming its vic-
tory over otherness.
The absolute thus has an ethical dimension to it. Derrida, however, sees
in the absolute the very opposite of ethics: because its totalization indi-
cates a negation of the other's negation, an Aufhebung of otherness, the
absolute is a violence directed towards the other. But just as it is a violence
towards the other, the absolute is also a mode of ceding oneself to the
other. In absolutely taking up the moment of synchronic totalization, one
leaves nothing of oneself in reserve; one opens oneself completely to the
gaze of the other. Therein lies the ethical dimension of the absolute: it
involves a renunciation of conceptual authority precisely because it fully
inhabits that authority, without any authority kept in reserve. By fully
assuming authority, by acting out conceptual mastery, one reveals the
imposture of this authority.14 Epistemic authority only exists so long as we
hold something back, so long as it is not fully exercised. According to Zizek
in For they know not what they do, this is the paradox of power: "we possess
power, we are 'in' it, only in so far as we do not put it to use thoroughly, in
so far as we keep it in reserve, as a threat - in short: in so far as we econo-
mize" (250, Zizek's emphasis). Hence, only by appropriating without
reserve do we begin to reveal ourselves as we really are - as limited vis-a-
vis the other. This involves, on the most fundamental level, not qualifying
our interpretation, but exaggerating it and over-identifying with it.
Of course, fascism without reserve is still fascism. This conception of
the absolute indicates the quantity of interpretation but seems to say noth-
ing about the quality of interpretation. In other words, the absolute
doesn't make clear what kind of interpretation is appropriate. Or so it
seems. Since this concept of the absolute derives from Hegel, perhaps he
can provide a way out of this aporia. Because I have snuck the terms
"quantity" and "quality"- both prominent, of course, in Hegel's Logic- into

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the discussion, it may seem apparent what direction this Hegelian turn
will take: the sublation of quantity into quality, a dialectical movement in
which the "absolutization" of quantity transforms quantity into quality. In
the typical way of thinking about these terms, we often consider that after
a certain point is reached, quantitative change becomes qualitative. How-
ever, in the Logic itself the priority of quantity and quality is exactly
reversed. Contrary to common sense, quantity, for Hegel, is more deter-
minate than quality, because unlike quantity, quality has nothing to dis-
tinguish itself in relation to. Hegel puts it this way: "quantity is ... no
longer an immediate determinateness of the determinately existent some-
thing [quality], but is posited as self-repelling, as in fact having the rela-
tion-to-self as a determinateness in another something" (185). Its relation
to "another something" - a relation that the immediacy of quality lacks -
gives quantity its greater determinateness vis-a-vis quality. Hence, for
Hegel, quality already exists as sublated within quantity, which means
that the answer to the question "what kind of interpretation?" must be
found inhering in the question "how much interpretation?"
The absolute is Hegel's attempt to come up against a limitation of
thought, to make this limitation explicit. Absolute knowledge is, finally,
nothing but the knowledge of this limitation. In the "Absolute Knowledge"
chapter of the Phenomenology, Hegel says, "the self-knowing Spirit knows
not only itself but also the negative of itself, or its limit" (492). Immediately
afterward, Hegel makes clear what this means for "the self-knowing
Spirit": "to know one's limit is to know how to sacrifice oneself" (492).
According to Hegel's own formulation, then, absolute knowledge is not
about epistemically taking possession of the other of knowledge, but of
giving oneself over to this other. For Lacan, this other of knowledge and of
conceptualization has a precise name: the Real. The world of knowledge -
the symbolic order, in Lacan's terms - cannot include the Real because its
very structure is a defense against it. As Copjec puts it, we set up "the sym-
bolic as rampart against the real; the symbolic shields us from the terrify-
ing real" (120, Copjec's emphasis). This is why Hegelian absolute knowl-
edge cannot be the incorporation of everything into the world of meaning
(as Derrida would have it) but must be the recognition of a limit to this
incorporation, a limit internal to knowledge itself. The absolute repre-
sents Hegel's attempt to sustain the trauma of the real, to bring knowledge
up against its own failure. Rather than elide or incorporate this trauma,
the absolute attempts to make it felt.
Hence, absolute interpretation-or appropriation without reserve-
must keep alive the trauma of the real in the interpretation. This is the rea-
son why absolute interpretation can never be fascist interpretation. Fascism
wants no part of the Real; instead, it wants symbolization "returned" to a
harmonious balance, without the threat that the Real constantly provides.
Fascism wants no Real encounters. Absolute interpretation, on the other

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hand, works to sustain the Real's trauma. Through its emphasis on a quan-
tity of interpretation, the absolute thus also demands a certain quality. In
answer to the question "what kind of interpretation?" the absolute
responds with its own categorical imperative: interpret so that the trauma
is sustained. We can see an example of this practice in Lacan's interpreta-
tion of Hans Holbein's painting The Ambassadors in The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. He directs his interpretation toward the Real
point in The Ambassadors, the most extreme point of the otherness of the
other. However, rather than trying to avoid naming-and thus "appro-
priating" or "domesticating" - the traumatic Real indicated by this painting
(the skull in the middle which only appears as a skull when we are "look-
ing awry" at it), Lacan names it directly. He says, "the secret of this picture
is given at the moment when, moving slightly away, little by little, to the
left, then turning around, we see what the magical floating object signifies.
It reflects our own nothingness, in the figure of the death's head" (92).
Through this interpretive gesture, Lacan attempts to mark the Real sym-
bolically; he attempts, in other words, the impossible (insofar as the Real
"resists symbolization absolutely"). This impossibility, however, only
becomes visible in the attempt at it. Only by attempting to mark the Real
does the Real emerge, because it is nothing but the point at which knowl-
edge fails. We sustain the Real through our continuing effort-and our
continuing failure - to say just what the Real is.
What the example of Lacan's interpretation makes clear is that what is
on the other side of every border is our own dissolution, which is why the
impulse always exists to recoil from this otherness. Absolute interpretation
is the attempt - and it is attempting the impossible - to refuse this impulse to
recoil. When we hold something of ourselves in reserve by foregrounding
the limitations of our own symbolic identity (our ethnicity, our gender,
our class .. .), we are not, though this is surely the intent, respecting the
otherness of the other, but instead we are preserving the constitutive
dimension of our symbolic identity, the security which it offers. Absolute
interpretation seeks out the point of this identity's dissolution on the other
side of the border and insists upon this point, and through this insistence it
opens up what is perhaps the most important of all possibilities for an
interpretation - the possibility that it might be wrong.

Loyola Marymount University

Notes

1. For a good example of various attempts to address the possibility of local criti-
cism, see Barrett and Phillip's Destabilizing Theory.
2. The extreme version of local criticism include the refusal to read across any
border, in the belief that this would circumvent appropriation. It is existentialism
which shows the weakness of this position. It has, according to existentialism, at its

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essence an ontological impossibility. This position presupposes that one can effect
a relationship of pure indifference vis-a-vis the other. This would mean overcom-
ing what is, for everyone, an always already-one's being-in-the-world. The
attempt to refuse to engage "other" works of literature through an attitude of indif-
ference or neutrality always ends in failure, because I am always-already thrown
into a world with them, even in my refusal to even read them. My being-in-the-
world is constituted in a relation with these works, so far as they also exist in the
world.

3. This is not to say that Gates's thesis about the African-American literary tradi-
tion is incorrect, but simply to question the claim about its immanence.
4. Linda Alcoff explicitly takes up this question in her essay "The Problem of
Speaking for Others." Alcoff rightly sees the weaknesses of some popular responses
to this problem: namely, the impossibility of speaking just for oneself and the insu-
lating effect of foregrounding one's subject position. Rather than blanketly con-
demning all instances of speaking for others, Alcoff wants to evaluate on a case-by-
case basis. Her only dictum is that "anyone who speaks for others should only do so
out of a concrete analysis of the particular power relations and discursive effects
involved" (24).

5. In Cultural Capital, John Guillory points out that in some sense, all theory is
deconstructive: "Surely it is only in the popular media, in the somewhat hysterical
minds of the journalists, that deconstruction and theory are interchangeable terms.
But once again, to dismiss such a fact as merely hysterical or ill-informed is to miss
its symptomatic significance" (178).
6. Of Spirit is not, as the critics of deconstruction would have it, an attempt to
deconstruct Heidegger's Nazism for the purposes of exculpation. It is, on the con-
trary, an unequivocal indictment of Heidegger and simultaneously a refusal to
demonize him.

7. In an interview "Heidegger, the Philosopher's Hell," Derrida makes this point

even more clearly: "At the moment when his discourse situates itself in a spectacu-
lar fashion in the camp of Nazism (and what demanding reader ever believed that
the rectorship was an isolated and easily delimitable episode?), Heidegger takes up
again the word 'Spirit,' whose avoidance he had prescribed; he raises the quotation
marks with which he surrounded it. He limits the deconstructive movement that
he had begun earlier" (185).
8. It is Derrida who has made clear this link between the encounter with tempo-
rality and the encounter with the other. See especially his Aporias.
9. In his responses to critiques of deconstruction, we can see how Derrida's insist-
ence that deconstruction is not a metaphysics and not a method serve to protect the
status of deconstruction, to sustain deconstruction's authority. Deconstruction has
an elusive quality which enables Derrida to dismiss critiques for their failure to
name it accurately. In "Heidegger, the Philosopher's Hell," Derrida demonstrates
this: "one can no more speak of an'ontology' with regard to the deconstruction that I
try to put to work than one can speak, if one has read a little, of 'Heidegger's ontol-
ogy' or even'Heidegger's philosophy.' And 'deconstruction'- which does not 'culmi-
nate'- is certainly not a 'method' " (187).
10. It is important to avoid being reductive when discussing Derrida's position
here, since so often critiques of deconstruction end up criticizing a parody of
deconstruction. Derrida is well aware that a certain mastery is inevitable and that it

128 Hegel and Borders

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persists in acts of deconstruction despite the best efforts of deconstruction. How-
ever, what Derrida does not accept- and would, of course, contest-is the claim
that deconstruction actually serves to increase the mastery involved in knowing
and to avoid the encounter with the diachronic.

11. In the Phenomenology, Hegel notices precisely why any attempt at an abdica-
tion of mastery necessarily fails: because of the nature of language itself. He sees
that "language [.. ..] has the divine nature of directly reversing the meaning of what
is said, of making it into something else, and thus not letting what is meant get into
words at all" (66, Hegel's emphasis).

12. In "Diff6rance," it is clear that deconstruction is a practice that Derrida is argu-

ing for, rather than being something purely immanent in certain philosophical
texts: "Contrary to the metaphysical, dialectical, 'Hegelian' interpretation of the
economic movement of diff rance, we must conceive of a play in which whoever
loses wins, and in which one loses and wins on every turn" (20).
13. Hegel's speculative proposition is an attempt to forge a concept which points
toward-without explicitly articulating-its own limitation vis-a-vis time.
14. For Derrida, this aspect of the Aufhebung only gets revealed when it "is con-
strained to writing itself otherwise. Or perhaps simply into writing itself. Or, bet-
ter, into taking account of its consumption of writing" ("Diff6rance" 19). What Der-
rida misses is the way in which the unsubverted mastery of the Aufhebung subverts
itself. When we force it to "write" the subversion, we in effect unsubvert it - i.e., we
give it back the mastery it already lost.

Works Cited

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Copjec, Joan. Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists. Cambridge: The MIT P,
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Derrida, Jacques. Aporias. Trans. Thomas Dutoit. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993.
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Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary
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Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago:
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Mohanty, Chandra. "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Dis-
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130 Hegel and Borders

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