Hegel and the Infinite

Religion, Politics, and Dialectic

Slavoj Žižek, Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780231512879
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Deconstruction in Philosophy

Catherine Malabou, Antonio Negri, John D. Caputo, Bruno Bosteels, Mark C. Taylor, and Slavoj Zizek join seven others—including William Desmond, Katrin Pahl, Adrian Johnston, Edith Wyschogrod, and Thomas A. Lewis—to apply Hegel's thought to twenty-first-century philosophy, politics, and religion. Doing away with claims that the evolution of thought and history is at an end, these thinkers safeguard Hegel's innovations against irrelevance and, importantly, reset the distinction of secular and sacred.

These original contributions focus on Hegelian analysis and the transformative value of the philosopher's thought in relation to our current "turn to religion." Malabou develops Hegel's motif of confession in relation to forgiveness; Negri writes of Hegel's philosophy of right; Caputo reaffirms the radical theology made possible by Hegel; and Bosteels critiques fashionable readings of the philosopher and argues against the reducibility of his dialectic. Taylor reclaims Hegel's absolute as a process of infinite restlessness, and Zizek revisits the religious implications of Hegel's concept of letting go. Mirroring the philosopher's own trajectory, these essays progress dialectically through politics, theology, art, literature, philosophy, and science, traversing cutting-edge theoretical discourse and illuminating the ways in which Hegel inhabits them.

1

IS CONFESSION THE ACCOMPLISHMENT OF RECOGNITION?

Rousseau and the Unthought of Religion in the Phenomenology of Spirit

CATHERINE MALABOU

Is confession the accomplishment of recognition? This is one of the fundamental political questions that traverse the Phenomenology of Spirit.¹ I have chosen to expand upon it here according to one of its possible lines of interpretation, which concerns the divided and contradictory character of the figure of Rousseau in Hegelian discourse. This dual character is due to the following: it is the same philosopher, Rousseau, who is the author of both The Social Contract and The Confessions. Not that these two works would be incompatible with regard to their content or style. Hegel is much too subtle a philosopher to pick out just any old separation between the philosophical and the literary. No. For Hegel, the dialectical tension that comes to be established between these two works indicates a properly political contradiction. This contradiction is related, eminently, to the motif of recognition. Rousseau has posed, following Hegel’s reading, two possible types of recognition: contractual and personal. And these two types of recognition pass through two types of institutional form: the contract and literature.

Now, if there is a contradiction between these two forms—contradictory in themselves—this is not because the contract would have nothing to do with the literary institution. Quite the reverse, the contract has everything to do with the literary institution, insofar as it is the same question that sustains them both: What is the language of recognition? In what language does one demand to be recognized? In what language does one accede to recognition? Rousseau, according to Hegel, was never able to answer these questions because he constantly made use of two languages to approach the problem of language itself: the judicial and the fictional, thus producing a major political aporia.

This aporia, as Hegel will show in the last part of section VI (“Spirit That Is Certain of Itself. Morality”: “Conscience. The ‘Beautiful Soul,’ Evil and Its Forgiveness”) as well as in the last part of section VII (“The Revealed Religion”), only finds its resolution in the religious sphere of Spirit. Our initial question (is confession the accomplishment of recognition?) might imply that the social and political motif of recognition is dialectically sublated by a religious motif—confession. Surprisingly though, according to Hegel, recognition and confession both suffer, in their immediate forms, from the same excess of abstraction. They both have to be confronted about their hidden and unconscious religious content to gain their genuine speculative meaning. According to Hegel, Rousseau is in search of two main conceptual figures: that of the Witness (in confession) and that of Forgiveness (in politics), which both exceed the spheres of morality and contractual political philosophy.

In the first part of this essay, I would like to situate and clarify this problematic in order to show, subsequently, that it still has an effect on our contemporary philosophical and political scene. The dialectic of the recognition of consciousnesses is not only set out in the second section of the Phenomenology, “Self-Consciousness.” The theme of recognition is treated throughout the work until the very end with the issue of reconciliation, which appears to be the dialectical transition from Religion to Absolute Knowledge. I will first linger over the role that recognition plays in the third part of the section of the work entitled “Spirit,” in the chapter entitled “Spirit that is certain of itself. Morality.” In this chapter, Hegel exposes the two central aspects of Rousseau’s thought and introduces the reader to the split between the contract and the confession. In the global introduction to this section, Hegel demonstrates the teleological sense of all previous development by insisting on the diverse types of Self that have been met previously: the abstract person (in “Ethical Order”), the revolutionary citizen (in “Culture”), and finally the moral will (in “Morality”). During these three moments, the motif of recognition is present. This no longer concerns the encounter between two self-consciousnesses, but rather the political community. “The Ethical Order” exposes the recognition of the particular self that becomes politically “actual”; the second part, “Culture,” which is the moment of the social contract as such, marks the emergence of the general will. “Through this process,” Hegel writes, “the universal becomes united with [individual] existence in general.”² The third and last development, “Morality,” is the moment of self-certainty, that is, of singularity, of self-consciousness.

The motif of confession appears here. There is no self-certainty without confession. Rousseau plays an important role in the last two moments, which correspond to the drawing up, and then to the consequences, of the social contract: the emergence of the will to confess. Considering this development, we can see very clearly that confession, according to Hegel, is nothing private, secluded from the political sphere. On the contrary, it is a political achievement. Confession is the postcontractual expression of the will. In what sense? Through the drawing up of the contract, “the power of the individual conforms itself to its substance, externalizes its own self and thus establishes itself as substance that has an objective existence.”³ With the social contract, the individual “acquires an acknowledged, real existence.”⁴ However, this process of recognition lacks something essential. Each consciousness, writes Hegel, stays alien to itself.

Hegel insists upon the inherent contradiction in the principle of the social contract, which he had already raised in the The Jena Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit of 1805–1806: “One imagines the constitution of the general will as if all the citizens gathered together and deliberated, as if the plurality of voices made the general will.”⁵ One imagines in this way the movement by which the individual ascends to the universal thanks to the negation of self. And yet, the general will appears to the individual as an alien will, not as an expression of her own. Why? “The general will must first of all constitute itself from the will of individuals and constitute itself as general, in such a way that the individual will appears to be the principle and the element, but it is on the contrary the general will which is the first term and the essence.”⁶ So if the general will appears first of all to the individual, not as a realization of her individual will, but as a foreign or alien will, it is because the individual as such is the result, and not the origin, of the general will, and this is why she does not recognize herself in it. She needs to invent herself. The confession, as the very form of this self-invention, constitutes in this sense the achievement of political recognition.

The motif of confession appears in the Phenomenology of Spirit with the evocation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, the “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul,” and then with Rousseau’s Confessions. This is the moment of the moral consequences of the social contract, where the individual who does not recognize herself in the general will firmly maintains her conviction, in the need to express her self-certainty: the self understands itself as well as it is understood by others. Again, the expression of this self-certainty is the confession, the accomplished form of the individual’s self-recognition. I quote here a passage from Jean Hyppolite’s commentary in Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit:

How can one not think, before this text, of an entire literature which runs from the Confessions of Rousseau to the Confessions of a Beautiful Soul, passing by the Sorrows of Young Werther? What is important is not what the self has achieved, because this determined action is not necessarily recognized, but rather the assurance that he gives to have acted according to his conviction. “It is this self-assuredness within himself which in these Confessions or in these Sorrows, in all this literature of the self, shows through outwardly and becomes actual: It is this form which is to be established as actual: it is the self which as such is actual in language, which declares itself to be the truth, and just by doing so acknowledges all other selves and is acknowledged by them.”⁷

“What is important is not what the self has achieved”: what the self has achieved is the contract. Hegel means to say that what is important here is no longer the act of deliberation and agreement by which the self commits itself contractually, but rather the feeling of having acted according to his or her conviction. How can we understand this? If it is true that the individual is not the origin but the result of the social contract, the product of the general will, if it is true that the general will precedes, in its truth, the individual will, then the abstract political recognition that takes place in and by the contract must be pursued, concluded, and accomplished, the truth of the individual must be produced and recognized, and it is the role of confession to allow this recognition. Confession appears as a social contract between self and self. If we follow Hegel on this point, then it is necessary to insist once again upon the fact that confession, that is, the act of producing oneself as truth, is a fundamental dimension of political life. Confession is even fundamentally caught up in public life, since it produces the private sense of the public, without which the public would be senseless.

How can Hegel carry out such an inversion: the general will precedes the individual will? Is this not a reversal which threatens to ruin Rousseau’s entire theory for which there is no doubt that the general will is a product of the union of individual wills? To answer these questions, we have to examine the role of language in this process.

We are familiar with the Hegelian critique of the contract and contractual ideologies. But the essential reason for this critique is perhaps not always well understood, this being precisely that contract theory in general presents a relationship between the individual and the community that is not ordered in conformity with the concept, since this theory affirms that there are first individuals and then the social body. We know, moreover, the fact that, for Hegel, this general will is obtained in contract theory and, particularly in Rousseau, by the exchange of particular abstract wills, without substance, and that, therefore, the contract remains purely formal. The community that results remains, as we have seen, alien to itself.

Why this accusation of formalism? One of the more difficult problems that Hegel reproaches Rousseau for having left unresolved is that of knowing in which language the contract is worded. Rousseau neglects to specify the essential thing, that is, that the contract is first of all a linguistic act. Rousseau states the formula of the contract as if it were ready-made, issued straight from a universal philosophical language, beyond any particularities belonging to a nation-state, as if its idiomatic dimension were evaded from the outset. This is to say that what is hidden, passed over in silence, is the moment of the access to sense, the access of the general will, and consequently of the community, to its own sense.

The linguistic community precedes the political community. Language is always, originally, the expression of an impersonal social order that carries the individual beyond herself, meaning that language is the first social contract, preceding by right and in fact the second. But what Rousseau obscures is precisely the fact that the social contract is the doubling of an earlier contract. Sense is obtained from this doubling whose philo...