New Centennial Review New Centennial Review Volume 15 Number 1 Spring 2015 Special Issue On Derrida and French Hegelianism 1

Editors’ Note
CR: The New Centennial Review is devoted to comparative studies of the

Americas. The journal’s primary emphasis is on the opening up of the
possibilities for a future Americas that does not amount to a mere reiteration of
its past. We seek interventions, provocations, and, indeed, insurgencies that
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Such work may be explicitly concerned with the Americas, or it may be broader,
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v
vi Centennial Review
The essays included in this issue of CR were first presented at the “Derrida
and French Hegelianism” conference held at the Instituto de Humanidades of
the Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile, in November 2013. We
thank Mauro Senatore, who organized the conference, for suggesting that we
publish the papers and for organizing the issue. In addition, we would like to
thank the Instituto de Humanidades (UDP)—and its director, Juan Manuel
Garrido—for financing the translations of two of the texts.
We currently are soliciting work for Special Issues and Special Sections on
the following topics, among others:
Indigenous Aesthetics
Auto-Affection
Biopolitics
Time
Style
One Coming before the Other?
On Jean Wahl and Jacques Derrida
Rodolphe Gasché
State University of New York at Buffalo
AFTER THE DISCOVERY OF HEGEL’S EARLY THEOLOGICAL WRITINGS, WHICH
were subsequently published in 1907 by a student of Wilhelm Dilthey—Herman

Nohl—Dilthey remarks in Die Jugendgeschichte Hegels (1905) that not only has
Hegel “not written anything more beautiful” than these theological and historical
fragments, but that in them “the whole historical genius of Hegel reveals itself in
its prime vigor [ersten Frische], and still free from the fetters of the system”
(Dilthey 1921, 68). The very beauty of Hegel’s early writings and their vital
freshness is a function of their unfinishedness and of their fragmentary, rather
than systematic, nature. These early writings by Hegel serve Dilthey to force-
fully make the case that “in the intellectual history of Hegel clearly distin-
guishable stages must be separated from one another” (Dilthey 1921, 3).
It has been noted that Dilthey, indeed, was the first to make a distinction
between an early and a late Hegel, thus laying the groundwork for a “historical
development [Entwicklungsgeschichte]” of his thought (Pillen 2003, 58). As
CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 15, No. 1, 2015, pp. 1–24. ISSN 1532-687X.
© 2015 Michigan State University. All rights reserved.
1
2 One Coming before the Other?
Dilthey avers, how, precisely, “the ideas of the period that he has covered [in
his study] have determined the development toward the final system” (Dilthey
1921, 4) can, of course, only be elucidated by way of a description of Hegel’s
subsequent development. But his distinction of Hegel’s thought in the histor-
ical and theological writings from its mature stages, where it submits to the
“fetters of the system,” not only shows his conception of the history of the
development of a thinker’s thought to be modeled after the biological schema
of the life cycle of a human being, this approach also suggests the possibility of
entirely separating both stages from one another and of eventually setting
Hegel’s early thought entirely apart from the alleged calcifications that it
undergoes in his later thought.
In Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel—that is, Jean
Wahl’s highly influential book from 1929 for the reception of Hegel’s thought
in France that was based on an exclusive familiarity with Hegel’s later system-
atic work, particularly the Encyclopedia—Dilthey’s distinction between an
early and late Hegel is Wahl’s starting point. The aim of his study consists in
exacerbating the difference between Hegel’s early theological and historical
thought and later mature systematic work to such an extent that the unity of
Hegel’s work is radically put into question. Furthermore, Wahl considers
Hegel’s early writings to be much richer than what the thinker accomplished
in his mature work. He remarks that however rich the Hegelian system in its
definite shape may be, “it is not rich enough to comprehend within the mul-
tiplicity of its thoughts, the imaginations, hopes, and despairs of the young
Hegel” (Wahl 1991, vii). With the early German Romantics in view, Wahl’s
assessment of the richness of Hegel’s youthful writings is the result of what he
qualifies as their fragmentary nature. But Hegel’s theological political writ-
ings are not fragments like those published in the Athenaeum by the early
Romantics. They are just drafts of parts of a still incomplete whole. Some of
them are even of considerable length.
Scholars are in full agreement that Wahl’s study represents a crucial
turning point in the reception of Hegel in France. Bernard Bourgeois notes
that “with Jean Wahl . . . Hegel gained a real and permanent acceptance in the
French university of the 20th century” (Bourgeois 2007, 77). But to character-
ize the real impact that Wahl’s study had at the time, I turn to Jean Hyppolite,
Rodolphe Gasché 3
who, in his own interpretation of Hegel (in particular, “of absolute knowledge
as the ‘disquiet of life’”) can be seen to follow Wahl.1 Hyppolite recalls that the
latter’s book “was bewildering to us [bouleversante]. It revealed to us a Roman-
tic Hegel precisely at the time we imagined Hegel as a manufacturer of sys-
tems” (Hyppolite 1971, 233). Indeed, as the title of Wahl’s book from 1929
already indicates, the Hegel that is being presented here, on the basis of Nohl’s
publication of Hegel’s Theologische Jugendschriften, “is another Hegel than the
one, who for a full century before had been discovered for the French in a
fleeting way by Victor Cousin” (Bourgeois 2007, 78). As Hyppolite remarks,
Wahl’s publication caused French Hegel scholars no longer to turn to the
Encyclopedia but especially “to the work from 1807, that is, to the Phenomenol-
ogy, which in philosophical literature is a rather amazing work, and which,
obfuscated by the works and the system of Hegel’s mature phase, had perhaps
never truly and authentically been commentated, and which Hegel himself
had been at the point of repudiating” (Hyppolite 1971, 234–35). According to
Hyppolite, a lasting achievement of Wahl’s book is that it directed French
Hegel scholarship toward the Phenomenology.
To understand how Wahl’s study made it possible for French Hegel scholars
to discover not only Hegel’s early writings (especially The Phenomenology of Spirit)
and to demarcate the writings of this period from the mature system, it is impor-
tant to recall Dilthey’s observation that “the essential features of the famous
portrayal of unhappy consciousness” (Dilthey 1921, 32) that Hegel elaborated in
The Phenomenology of Spirit as a determinate phase of human development
are already present in the fragmentary writings of Hegel’s early work.
Dilthey’s diagnosis of the presence of all the elements constitutive of the
problematic of unhappy consciousness in Hegel’s early analyses of Judaism
and Christianity’s turn away from the world toward an objectified godhead, to
which Hegel also devotes a whole chapter in The Phenomenology of Spirit, leads
Wahl to construe this chapter as the pilot chapter for any reading of this work.
He also concludes that because of this chapter, the Phenomenology is actually
the culmination of what had been at issue in Hegel’s historical theological
fragments. Rather than an introduction to his doctrine, Hegel’s work from
1807 is “the narration and the conclusion of his formative years and journey
through the systems” (Wahl 1991, v).
The theme of unhappy consciousness is thus seen to form the core of

Hegel’s oeuvre (“au center même de l’oeuvre,” says Wahl) and to provide the
key for the interpretation of Hegel’s dialectical thought in all its aspects. If
unhappy consciousness enjoys such an eminent role in Wahl’s interpretation,
it is also because of what he terms its synthetic nature. He writes:
If one clearly sees what it is that Hegel examines in the Phenomenology under
the rubric of stoicism and skepticism, it is evident that what he is concerned
with in the stage that follows [that is, the stage of unhappy consciousness] is
not exactly the same. Is the consciousness of contradictions that he studies at
that moment not something essential to Hegel’s mind which finds itself inces-
santly in the presence of antinomies and antitheses, and only arrives by way of
hard labor, which echoes the universal labor of the “negative,” at a synthesis of
these contradictions? (Wahl 1991, vi)
According to Wahl, all the antinomies and contradictions of the stages pre-
ceding unhappy consciousness as the synthesis of skepticism and stoicism
continue to replicate themselves in it rather than being sublated. With Ki-
erkegaard in mind, he contends that unhappy consciousness is not only “the
soul of Hegel himself” (Wahl 1949, 134) but the very soul of existence, which is
“an immense contradiction” (146). Wahl asserts that unhappy consciousness
as the very foundation of Hegel’s philosophy is “a tragic, romantic, and reli-
gious element” (Wahl 1991, v), and that, even though it would be wrong to turn
it into the central point of Hegel’s philosophy, it still colors it entirely.
Furthermore, the elements in Hegel’s thought that correspond to the
original liveliness of his early thinking can still be found alive in the mature
work, “even though they threaten to blow apart the armature of the system.”
Wahl adds that they do so “because they are perhaps more precious than the
system” (Wahl 1991, 194). Not only that: according to Wahl, the early fragments
anticipate many of the ideas that have become directed against the later
Hegel, first and foremost by Kierkegaard. In the aftermath of Wahl’s book, The
Phenomenology of Spirit became in the French academy from the thirties on
Hegel’s signature work. But, as should be clear by now, this accomplishment
of Wahl’s study was brought about at the price of privileging Hegel’s early
Rodolphe Gasché 5
writings as opposed to those of the systematic thinker, thus driving a wedge

into the unity of his work by singling out a problematic—the unhappy con-
sciousness—and setting it up against the systematic concerns of Hegel’s
thought. More precisely, in distinction from the thought of the systematic
thinker, the theme of unhappy consciousness serves Wahl to depict He-
gel’s early thought, up to the Phenomenology, as rooted in an essentially
tragic view of human experience, a conception that still has numerous
adherents today.
But it should be noted that Wahl’s work is not the work of a Hegelian. I do
not refer here to the highly problematic operation of singling out one theme or
moment in Hegel’s speculative philosophy to highlight the tragic nature of
Hegelian dialectical thought, nor to the numerous inadequacies, misrepre-
sentations, and even blunt errors in Wahl’s interpretation of Hegel to which
scholars have repeatedly drawn attention.2 Rather, what I am alluding to is
Wahl’s existentialist interpretation of Hegel, predicated on a rather small
portion of the latter’s work: the early theological writings and the Phenome-
nology. It is the very motive of unhappy consciousness in Hegel’s early work
that, according to Wahl, invites such an existential interpretation of the
philosopher. If, as Gwendoline Jarczyk and Pierre-Jean Labarrière remark,
“Jean Wahl, more than anyone else has contributed to giving French Hegelian-
ism its existential, if not existentialist, coloration” (Jarczyk and Labarrière
1996, 27), it is, indeed, not so much because of Wahl’s scholarly exegesis of
Hegel’s early work but primarily because of his commitment to an emerging
existential, if not existentialist, thought.
Stefanos Geroulanos has argued that it is, in particular, through Wahl’s
book Vers le concret from 1932 that one can glean what he is after in his earlier
book on Hegel from 1929. What is at stake in the existential thrust of his
reading of the early Hegel and the Phenomenology is nothing less than what
Wahl, in Vers le concret, refers to as “the rights of the immediate,” and “the
‘concreteness’ hidden in experience and the immediacy through which we
sense it” (Wahl 1932, 3).3 From the start, the aim of the emphasis on the motive
of unhappy consciousness, and the interpretation Wahl provides of it, is to
bring Hegel into close proximity with Kierkegaard. To put Wahl’s existential
approach in his account of the historical and theological fragments more
forcefully into relief, I turn to the preface of Le malheur de la conscience, which

he opens with the contention that
Hegel’s philosophy cannot be reduced to a number of logical formulae. Or,

rather, these formulae cover something that is not of purely logical origin. The
dialectic, before it became a method, is an experience through which Hegel
proceeds from one idea to the other. Negativity is the very movement of a mind
by means of which it always goes beyond what is. (Wahl 1991, v)
In other words, in its early stages Hegel’s thought is based on lived experience
rather than being driven by logical concerns. We are not witnessing a primar-
ily intellectual approach to philosophical thought, but we are in the presence
of “the man Hegel,” who, as Wahl remarks, “destroys his system at the same
time that he explains it” (Wahl 1991, vii). If he insists on characterizing Hegel’s
early thought as that of a theologian, it is to argue that Hegel is not at heart a
rationalist and that he aims at something that cannot be comprehended by
the concept in a narrow sense, namely, the concrete or the lived-in lived
experience.
What makes Hegel’s thought proceed from one idea to another is not only
interaction with the world but the living mind’s restless movement of tran-
scendence. Wahl asserts that Hegel’s criticism of the concept as an ab-
stract product of the understanding that remains disjoined from what it
seeks to dominate demonstrates that Hegel’s concepts of that period are
“very close to feelings. The ideas of separation and union, before the first is
transformed into the idea of analysis and understanding, and the second,
into that of synthesis and Concept [or notion, as Wahl translates Begriff in
the mature works], were felt” (Wahl 1991, vi). Hegel’s conceptual language,
Wahl continues, “is not a language passively inherited from previous thinkers.
Its concepts have been recast, remodeled, recreated through contact with an
inner flame” (Wahl 1991, vii).
What is the relation of this interpretation of Hegelian thought on the basis
of Hegel’s early fragments from Tübingen, Bern, and Frankfurt to Jacques
Derrida’s account of Hegelian philosophy in Glas, which also devotes signifi-
cant attention to the historical and theological fragments? It is not Wahl’s
Rodolphe Gasché 7
elaboration on these fragments in the spirit of existential, or existentialist,

philosophy that stood model for Derrida’s investigation of them. But is there
any reason to assume that Derrida would have taken issue with Wahl’s type of
“Hegelianism” to begin with? Indeed, except for two references in “Violence
and Metaphysics” to Wahl’s Etudes Kierkegaardiennes from 1938, and to the
expression of trans-ascendance that Emmanuel Levinas borrows from an
essay by Wahl, I have not found any other reference to Wahl in Derrida’s
writings that I have consulted.4 The only explicit reference in Glas to second-
ary literature on Hegel is Bernard Bourgeois’s Hegel à Francfort ou Judaïsme,
Christianisme, Hégélianisme from 1970. And yet, the lack of any explicit refer-
ence to Wahl’s study on Hegel does not necessarily mean that there is no
acknowledgment in Glas of Wahl’s work on Hegel. While discussing the relation of
Christianity as a religion that according to Hegel is naturally speculative, to
dialectical speculative philosophy, which can be understood as the truth and
the accomplishment of the religious representation of speculative thought,
Derrida remarks that “this explains how Hegelian philosophy—through and
through a philosophy of religion—could be read as an effect of Christianity as
well as an implacable atheism” (Derrida 1990, 32). The implicit references here
are unmistakably to Alexandre Kojève, but most likely also to Jean Wahl.
Indeed, in light of the importance that Le malheur de la conscience played in
the French reception of Hegel, can one not safely assume that, at one time or
another, Derrida must have had knowledge of it? Furthermore, Glas, in the
same way as Wahl’s study, devotes considerable space to the discussion of
Hegel’s youthful writings, particularly to “The Spirit of Christianity and Its
Fate.”
Let me speculate for a moment on what in Wahl’s approach to Hegel could
have possibly shaped Derrida’s reading of Hegel in Glas. Wahl had been one of
the first in France to have underlined the literary references throughout
Hegel’s early writings, thus pleasing the French, who, as Hyppolite notes, “like
to link philosophy to literature” (Hyppolite 1971, 235). But Wahl’s contention
regarding the nonlogical nature of at least the young Hegel’s conceptuality
may also have been the origin of Derrida’s attention throughout Glas to the
rhetorical aspect of Hegelian argumentation, the status of the image in his
thought, and the problematic of metaphoricity in his writings. Furthermore,
Wahl’s systematic linkage of Hegel’s philosophy to Christian religiosity, and

discussion of how Hegel’s affirmative reinterpretation of Christianity in the
fragments has shaped his own thought, could also be seen as a motivation for
Derrida’s close scrutiny in Glas of the passage from Judaism to Christianity
and discussion of the difference between religion and absolute knowledge.
As Angelika Pillen has pointed out, Wahl’s analysis of Hegel’s youthful
thought “draws attention to a dimension in Hegel’s thought that is lost from
sight when one seeks orientation [with respect to his thought] exclusively
through the figure of the thought of ‘reconciliation,’ or synthesis” (Pillen 2003,
77–78). The dimension in question is that of unhappiness, but as Pillen adds,
also of difference, both of which are tied to such a degree to reconciliation and
happiness that they become indistinguishable from it.
Derrida does not thematize this difference in terms of the tragic as Wahl
has done because his own approach to Hegel is no longer experiential and
existential. And yet, is it not possible to argue that his own analysis of the
complexities of Aufhebung could be related to Wahl’s emphasis on the unre-
lenting repetition of contradiction and antinomies in all reconciliation or
synthesis?
The argument I wish to make in the following is that Derrida’s analysis of
Hegel in Glas, whether or not he has taken account of Wahl’s work on unhappy
consciousness, can be shown to be thoroughly critical of certain fundamental
presuppositions of the latter’s interpretation. By making this point, I also seek
to bring into relief one thread, in particular, of the many interwoven threads in
the column devoted to Hegel in this difficult book. Glas is, first of all, a book
about reading, interpreting, and deciphering Hegel. It is an inquiry into “how
Hegel [is] meant to be read,” into “what in the text called Hegelian imposes [a
particular] rule of reading” (Derrida 1990, 105) and into “how the Hegelian
system commands that it be read” (107) in a way in which “the categories of
reading . . . bend to” (83) a certain rhythm. The question of how Hegel must be
read is posed from numerous angles in Glas. For now, however, I will focus on
only one particular aspect of it raised by Wahl’s interpretation of Hegel’s
thought in Le malheur de la conscience.
Glas is an investigation of the modalities of a Hegelian reading of Hegel,
that is, a reading that bends to the demand of all the aspects of the Hegelian
Rodolphe Gasché 9
system, and that, therefore, distinguishes itself from certain Hegelian read-
ings of the philosopher that yield only to certain demands of speculative
thought as opposed to non-Hegelian readings that remain entirely exterior to
its intrinsic circularity, and anti-Hegelian readings of his work. Although
Derrida insists on the fact that any “commentary is disqualified that, as a
commentary would not follow [the Hegelian text’s] prescription or would
hang about hesitating between explication or rupture, within all the opposi-
tional couples generally maintaining the history of the historians of philoso-
phy,” Glas also aims at a displacement of “what in the text called Hegelian
imposes [its] rule of reading, say a displacement that itself escapes the dialec-
tic law and its strict rhythm” (Derrida 1990, 107). Glas is, thus, also an attempt
at what Derrida designates as “an active interpretation, verily a critical dis-
placement (supposing that is rigorously possible)” (5); in other words, a de-
constructive reading of Hegel. Throughout Glas, Derrida suggests that so-
called Hegelian and non-Hegelian readings of Hegel are in complicity with one
another, and that even in their most radical opposition to the thinker they are
much closer to Hegel than they admit.5 By contrast, an active interpretation of
Hegel seeks to transcend both types of readings and presupposes a reading of
Hegel that is in full compliance with his thought.
As we have seen, Bourgeois’s work is the only explicit reference to Hegel
scholarship in Glas. But this reference is of special importance since it con-
cerns a certain kind of reading of Hegel that seems to be exemplary of a strictly
Hegelian reading of Hegel. Wahl is not mentioned here directly, but he may be
an indirect target of Derrida’s double-pronged elaborations on Bourgeois’s
method of approaching Hegel, even though his reading diverges in a signifi-
cant way from that of Bourgeois. Let me now cite a lengthy passage from Glas:
To speak of several states of Hegelian thought, of a youthful Hegel or an

accomplished Hegel, is at once both Hegelian and anti-Hegelian. Thus Bour-
geois’ book on Hegel at Frankfurt applies Hegel’s most preformationist cate-
gories to its subject. It opposes to be sure, the “arrival of the mature Hegelianism” to
the “incipient [naissant] Hegelianism,” but precisely states that the latter “is
engaged on the path of Hegelianism properly so called, on which he will
formulate at Jena the ingenious intuition in writing that the absolute must be
conceived as the ‘identity of identity and nonidentity.’” In this one sees Hegel
“anticipating . . . future themes,” “the philosophy of the concept; that is, of
Hegelianism,” of “Hegelianism itself”—“Hegelianism,” the title of the book’s
third chapter being presented as the conclusion of a syllogism in which “Juda-
ism” and “Christianity” (the other two titles) would be the first two terms.
“Early Hegelianism,” “incipient Hegelianism,” “mature Hegelianism,” “accom-
plished Hegelianism,” “Hegelian philosophy properly so called,” “Hegel be-
come fully adult as a speculative philosopher,” realizing what he “aspired to
since his adolescence,” and so on—all these categories reflect, double Hegel’s
teleological discourse. It is normal, the truth of Hegelianism being conceived
only at the end of the course, that philosophical narration be produced in the
future. Bourgeois’ book says all the time: Hegel will think, Hegel will have to,
Hegel will come to, and so on. Frankfurt is only the to-come of the completed
system. It is also normal that the logical reading be constantly accompanied by
a biographical narrative [récit] (the young Hegel, the adult Hegel, etc.).
Nothing more Hegelian. But nothing less Hegelian: in distinguishing the
old from the young, one sometimes dissembles [dissimule] the systematic
chains of the “first” texts; and above all one applies a dissociating and formal
analysis, the viewpoint of the understanding in a narration that risks missing
the living unity of the discourse; how does one distinguish philosophically a
before from an after, if the circularity of the movement makes the beginning
the end of the end? And reciprocally? The Hegelian tree is also turned over; the
old Hegel is the young Hegel’s father only to have been his son, his great-
grandson. (Derrida 1990, 84)
Dilthey’s distinction between the young and the mature Hegel (as the
basis for a historical account of how the history of religions sketched out in the
historical and theological fragments prepares Hegel’s mature procedure for
understanding the historical world and the realm of Sittlichkeit) seems in
Bourgeois’s reading not only to be in full conformity with a Hegelian reading of
Hegel but even to be prescribed by Hegel’s thought itself. The early stages
must be read as anticipations of the insights and conceptions of the mature
work; they are its first and most immediate moments. But to “go back toward
the works of the young Hegel, toward the so-called youthful works, toward the
Rodolphe Gasché 11
philosophy of love and life in the texts on Christianity” to elucidate the mature
work, is, as Derrida remarks, also “a first methodological temptation” (Derrida
1990, 20).
It is tempting to construe the early works as preparations of the later
works because themes such as love and life are much more concrete and thus
promise to render the mature texts more transparent. To proceed this way is
tempting, because by showing that the later works are the development and
exposition of what the early texts contain in still abstract fashion has all the
looks of a methodological faithfulness to Hegelian thought. On the other
hand, to read Hegel’s early work merely in light of its end is to disregard its
own systematic coherence and completion and is thus unfaithful to the spec-
ulative nature of his work.6 Indeed, what characterizes speculative philosophy
is that the beginning is the end, that what comes before is what comes after. To
understand Hegel’s early works merely as anticipations of his mature system-
atic thought is not only to disregard their own intrinsic systematic nature, it
also makes no internal or conceptual sense, because it ignores the circularity
of that thought. Rather than simply anticipating the mature system, the
historical and theological fragments by the young Hegel must be the same as
the former. Just as “the old Hegel is the young Hegel’s father,” so, conversely,
the young Hegel’s son. Ultimately, the early writings must be indistinguish-
able from the systematic end result of Hegel’s thought. They must already be
(and not simply contain in nuce) the system itself if the Wesenseinheit of
Hegelian thought is the unity of beginning and end, archae and telos, antici-
pation and fulfillment, the finite and the infinite. Even though it seems per-
fectly in line with Hegel’s thought to construe the early work as the germ of the
later developments, the relations that obtain between the early and the late
Hegel are such that it is also, strictly speaking, un-Hegelian to hold that
one comes before the other. To do so is to overlook in the early works the
presence of the full set of “the system’s invariant traits.” Derrida adds that
“between the germ [represented by the youthful writings] and the adult con-
cept something does not change and lets itself be identified without any
possible doubt” (Derrida 1990, 20–21). One of the main objectives of Glas is an
elucidation of core traits constitutive of the systematic nature of Hegel’s
speculative thought, which remain identical in Hegel’s early and late writings.
By holding that the old Hegel is the young Hegel’s father and conversely, the
young Hegel’s son, the suggestion is that Hegel’s thought is a family affair.
Derrida’s focus on what is neither simply a concept, a metaphor, figure, or
theme, namely, the family, a notion that gathers all the traits common to
Hegel’s early and the late writings, makes it strictly impossible to read them in
a chronological or narrative fashion.
Derrida’s thesis that faithfulness to the internal nature of Hegelian
thought precludes the possibility of distinguishing between an early and a
mature Hegel is bent to draw the wrath of Hegel scholarship. Is it not obvious
that, beginning with the first system fragment from Jena, which according to
Bourgeois, is a first mature text, the mature Hegel abandons a variety of
positions held in the writings from Frankfurt? Bourgeois evokes Hegel’s soft-
ening of his hitherto intransigent critique of the separating power of the
understanding (and hence also of Judaism), or of his uncompromising dis-
crimination of Christianity as an age of unhappiness in the name of the
beautiful totality of Greece, to reconceive the separating power of the under-
standing as a moment only within speculative thought itself and to highlight
Christianity’s capital progress over a devalued Hellenism. Is it not also an
undisputable fact that certain themes affirmed in the writings from Frankfurt,
such as the topic of political freedom, acquire an entirely new meaning in the
later writings when they become integrated into the dialectics of absolute
idealism?7 However, these unquestionable philological facts that unmistak-
ably point to an evolution of Hegelian thought may also blind one to a “kernel”
in Hegelian thought that programs the evolution of Hegel’s thought, and that
ultimately makes it impossible to neatly distinguish between an early and
mature Hegel.
In his commentary of a fragment from the fall of 1798 entitled “Grund-
konzept zum Geist des Christentums,” significantly labeled “The Fundamen-
tal Fragment [Das Grundfragment],” Dilthey brings up Hegel’s discussion of
the transition from love to religion, a passage necessitated by the remaining
separations that still exist in the most lively unification of the human being.8
Religion, by contrast, does not know anymore the limits of love in that it lives
“in the ideal that fully unifies” (Dilthey 1921, 80). This unity is itself völlig seiend,
fully present, in full being, and is no longer in opposition to reality. What this
Rodolphe Gasché 13
passage from love to religion involves is, as Hegel points out, a radical trans-
formation of Jesus’ relation to God, one that changes entirely “his metaphys-
ical consciousness” (80) as it were.
According to Hegel, once the Jewish objective Law has been overcome by
Jesus, and God is no longer a foreign power, there are no longer two sub-
stances in an opposition of master and slave. He writes:
God and the human being must consequently be one—but the human being
[as] the son and God [as] the father; the human being not as an independent
being, and standing within himself, but as being only insofar as he is posited
over against, that is, insofar as he is a modification, and, therefore, the father is
also in him; within this son are also his disciples; they too are one with him; a
true transubstantiation, a real inhabiting of the father in the son, and of the
son in his disciples—all these are no longer substances, that is, absolutely
separated substances solely unified through general concepts, but, on the
contrary, like the winestock and its wines: a living life of the deity within them.
(Hegel 1971, 304)
In his commentary, Dilthey stresses that this passage from the Grundfragment
shows that the religion of Jesus is, as “the experience of the unity of the human
and the divine spirit,” “the religion of love.” “Love is within what is separated
the unification, and the dissolution of the opposites in the unity” (Dilthey 1921,
81). Although Dilthey does not use the term “family,” by showing that the unity
between the human being and God in the religion of love is the unity of the
human being as the son and God as the father, it becomes clear not only that
this unity is structured in accordance with family relations but is also inti-
mately tied up with the way Hegel conceives the unity of the system seen as
early as in the theological fragments.
All active interpretation of Hegel’s thought requires a preliminary patient
deciphering of his excruciatingly difficult text. Such deciphering is also inev-
itably a violent intervention in the text that is never innocent in that it always
proceeds on the basis of the choice of a theme, concept, or moment. In the case
of Glas, the moment is the family in the Hegelian systematic. It is a violent
intervention notwithstanding the central importance that the concept of the
family enjoys in the whole of Hegel’s work. To this concept of the family, which
“very rigorously inscribes itself in the system: within the Encyclopedia and the
Philosophy of Right, those final forms that are subsequent to the great Logic”
(Derrida 1990, 5), no one else has (to my knowledge) paid as much attention as
Derrida. As Bourgeois submits, although the theme of the family is broached
by Hegel in the context of his discussion of Judaism, the theme in question
“seems to him to be more powerfully emphasized in the texts posterior to
Hegel’s treatment of Judaism in the writings from Francfort” (Bourgeois 1970,
116).
The problematic of the family is elaborately treated in the systematic
works in which it represents the first moment (followed by civil society and
the state) in the dialectical syllogism of Sittlichkeit, which itself is preceded by
the moments of abstract right and morality. The family thus represents the
synthesis of the formal objectivity of law and the abstract subjectivity of
morality. Does this mean that to discuss the theme of the family one should
turn, first and foremost, to those final forms that are Hegel’s systematic texts?
If, in Glas, Derrida looks for this concept or theme in Hegel’s early works, it is
because the historical and theological fragments already devote much atten-
tion to this motif and thus seem to anticipate the mature elaborations on the
family. In contradistinction from Bourgeois, who asserts that it is only in the
writings of the Jena period that Hegel reveals himself to be the speculative
thinker he was to become, the theme of the family that is present in Hegel’s
writings from the beginning is for Derrida proof of the speculative character of
Hegel’s thought from the very beginning. In “The Spirit of Christianity and Its
Fate,” in particular, the theme of a God who has taken on human shape, and on
the basis of which Christianity can proclaim the identity of the infinite and
finite spirit, the motif of the family not only characterizes the early work as
already fully speculative but also puts a rigorous distinction of periods in
Hegel’s thought into question. The concept or theme of the family does not
simply prefigure but already fosters an interconnectedness of moments and a
passage through Aufhebung to higher syntheses, which in these early works
has already the full force of the accomplished system. Hence, Derrida can
argue that, apart from the role that the concept of the family plays on all levels
Rodolphe Gasché 15
and spheres of the system, the Hegelian family bears on any reading of Hegel
and, ultimately, determines what is and what is not a Hegelian reading.
Upon having introduced the problematic of the family at the beginning of
Glas, Derrida poses the following question: “Must the analysis [of the moment of
the family] be limited to [its] final and systematic placement? The analysis can be
limited in two ways. One could be satisfied with making the most of these last
texts, or one could consider that we can read everything preceding as a develop-
ment teleologically oriented, without rupture, without essential displacement,
toward this final accomplishment” (Derrida 1990, 5). Let me point out that both
ways of proceeding to read the problematic of the family are characterized as
limitations of an analysis of the Hegelian family. In other words, the treatment
to which Derrida subjects the problematic of the family in Hegel will be an
attempt to avoid both limits, which “as a matter of fact are only one” (5).
Their common limit is that they do not respect the internal circular nature
of Hegel’s thought. This is not only the case of an analysis of the family that
restricts itself to the end result of Hegel’s speculations on the family, but as we
have seen in the case of Bourgeois, also of a reading that retraces the result to
the beginning as its germ. Both types of analyses are one-sided. To read the
Hegelian family in such a manner where everything in Hegel’s work is teleo-
logically geared toward the full completion of this theme in the mature works
not only presupposes the distinction between an early and a mature Hegel
(and the project of an Entwicklungsgeschichte that required such a distinction)
but also makes its teleological thrust blind to the movement of Hegel’s (circu-
lar) thought, which far from being smooth proceeds through jolts and leaps.9
In addition, a teleological and preformationist reading of the problematic
of the family in Hegel’s thought is unaware that to account for the maturing of
this theme, concept, or moment throughout Hegel’s work, such a reading
must itself already be structured in terms of the problematic of the family that
it seeks to analyze. It must presuppose what is to be analyzed in the analysis.
Without this, the reading remains un-Hegelian despite all appearances to the
contrary. The young Hegel must be understood in relation to the mature
Hegel, relating to him as a son to a father, to the father that he is bent to
become, and in the process of which he will already have fathered himself, and
be one with the father in himself. It is in this sense only that such a teleological
reading of Hegel’s problematic of the family could be held to be an intrinsically

Hegelian reading.
While discussing Bourgeois’s preformationist explanation of Hegelian
thought, Derrida held that while such a reading has all the allures of a thor-
oughly Hegelian reading, it is at the same time also profoundly un-Hegelian. I
quote again: “in distinguishing the old from the young, one sometimes dis-
sembles [dissimule, that is, dissimulates] the systematic chains of the ‘first’
texts; and above all one applies a dissociating and formal analysis, the view-
point of the understanding in a narration that risks missing the living unity of
the discourse.” Two points are made here: first, by distinguishing between a
young and an old Hegel, the very problematic of the teleological orientation of
the early work toward the later work dissimulates the systematically intercon-
nected nature of the early texts, thus betraying Hegel for whose thought the
living interlinkage of themes and concepts is a hallmark; and second, by
distinguishing the young Hegel from the old, a separation between moments
is violently imposed on a living process of thought, deadening the life of truth.
If such an approach is un-Hegelian, it is because it remains within the limits of
the understanding. From an intrinsically Hegelian perspective, it is a Kantian
(in short, a Jewish) reading, that is, on the basis of Hegel’s developments in the
early writings, a proto-Kantian reading of Hegel. As Hegel does not tire of
arguing, especially in “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate,” the separation
by the understanding of opposites, the freezing of them as mere entities of
thought into irreconcilable abstract opposites, presupposes and brings about
a tearing apart of an originary unity. Such an approach misses out on the
essence of Christianity, its doctrine of love and life, its understanding of being
as a family affair, and remains within an abstract logic of reflection in which
the objective stands in a relation of absolute difference to the subjective. This,
according to Hegel, characterizes the slavelike submission of the Jew to the
divine Law. For him, “Kant is Jewish,” as Derrida notes in Glas, because Kant
professes a similar understanding of the relation of the Law to the individual
(Derrida 1990, 213).
In the passage from Glas about the teleological reading of the relation
between the young and the mature Hegel offered by Bourgeois, Derrida noted
that even though such a reading seems to be in conformity with certain
Rodolphe Gasché 17
Hegelian exigencies, in such an approach one sometimes dissimulates to

oneself the systematic chains of the “first” texts, and consequently runs the
risk of not reading Hegel in a Hegelian manner. Although Wahl is not men-
tioned in this context, could it not be that beyond Bourgeois’s distinction
between an early and a late Hegel, the real target of Derrida’s critical observa-
tions is Wahl, whose agenda, in Le malheur de la conscience, is to radically
uncouple the youthful Hegel from the mature systematic thinker? A teleolog-
ical reading is not entirely absent from Wahl’s work from 1929, but for him,
Hegel’s youthful thought does not reach any fruitful maturity in the system.
On the contrary, it is in the system that it loses all of its original vigor and
becomes ossified in the sphere of knowledge. Wahl’s interpretation of the
fragmentary writings of Hegel’s youth thus radically opposes the young Hegel
to the late Hegel in a kind of Entwicklungsgeschichte in reverse—a history of
the decay of what has been so promising in early Hegelian thought but be-
comes petrified within the strictures of the system. While a teleological read-
ing that is more concerned with processes than with structures runs the risk
of neglecting the systematic interconnectedness of the early works, Wahl’s
own genetic method celebrates this shortcoming, turning the lack of system-
aticity, that is, the early works’ so-called fragmentary and unfinished nature,
into what is most valuable about them. However, by thus postulating a radical
difference between Hegel’s early and allegedly more romantic and more theo-
logical writings and his systematic thought, Wahl’s interpretation falls under
Hegel’s jurisdiction concerning the abstraction of Kant’s philosophy of reflec-
tion, and hence, appears as an un-Hegelian reading of Hegel. Furthermore, if
one takes into account that Le malheur de la conscience was conceived to bring
the early Hegel into proximity with Kierkegaard—a point that is made even
more forcefully in Wahl’s Etudes Kierkegaardiennes, where he states that his
aim is to investigate “whether there are not certain aspects of Hegel’s thought,
especially in the writings of his youth, by means of which it could be seen to
agree with that of Kierkegaard, and whether, beyond the ‘system,’ we cannot
discover between the two thinkers, similarities” (Wahl 1949, 86–87)—the
un-Hegelian thrust of Wahl’s interpretation becomes all the more obvious.
Finally, by portraying Kierkegaard as the champion of the irrationality of
existence, the irreducible independence of the individual, and the unyielding
rights of his subjectivity in relation to the system, and as rejecting all possible
mediation as contrary to Christianity, this Christian thinker becomes, para-
doxically, a Jew of sorts, that is, a proto-Kant.10
Whether Derrida’s reservations regarding a teleological reading of Hegel
pertain to Bourgeois, or to Wahl, the risk of being oblivious to the systematic
chains within the so-called “first” texts brings to light that the deciphering of
Hegel’s work required for “an active interpretation, verily a critical displace-
ment (supposing that is rigorously possible)” must be systematic. In other
words, it must, at all times and on all levels, construct the chains by which
concepts and themes are systematically, differentially, synchronically inter-
woven. But this does not mean that such a reading should “proceed passively,
faithfully, narrate, recite (erzählen) what [one] believes [one] sees, to enumer-
ate a certain number of predicates that come to meet” (Derrida 1990, 98) one.
To exclude anticipation altogether is the gesture of the empiricist. Notwith-
standing the fact that Derrida does not simply reject the empirico-
chronological approach to the corpus of Hegel’s writings, from the outset of
Glas it is made clear that “anticipation or precipitancy (the risk of the preci-
pice and the fall [chute]) is an irreducible structure of reading” (6).11 Even
though Derrida thus acknowledges an inevitable need to anticipate, his read-
ing of Hegel in Glas is an immanent structural study that respects the internal
articulation of philosophical discourse.12 Glas is not a study of the develop-
ment of Hegel’s thought in a Diltheyan sense, nor is it a historical study of
philosophy.13 Undoubtedly, Wahl’s reading of the fragments in disjunction
from the system—as if such reading amounted already to reading them in and
for themselves—seems, at first, to do justice to their specificity, but his em-
phasis on their fragmentary and unfinished nature also blinds him to the
inner articulation and consistency at work in them.
To conclude, I would like to briefly show that the immanent structural
study of Hegelian thought proposed in Glas, which leaves the dialectic and
complicity of Hegelian and un-Hegelian readings of Hegel behind, is not only
the precondition for any attempt at a critical displacement of Hegel’s thought
but also meets this condition only by being extremely faithful to the internal
circularity of his thought. Such exorbitant respect for the internal articulation
of Hegel’s text is the condition under which a critical displacement or decon-
Rodolphe Gasché 19
struction alone of his thought can make sense. To show in a most economical
way on how Derrida’s approach to Hegel meets this condition, I will briefly
focus on what Glas establishes as to the nature of the copula in a dialectical
syllogism.
First, however, I wish to quote several lines from Etudes Kierkegaardiennes
that concern Kierkegaard but also the young Hegel as opposed to the old
Hegel, given the proximity between both that Wahl argues for. He writes that,
whereas the absolute is for the mature Hegel “that which unifies absolutely, it
is for Kierkegaard, or is at least first and foremost that which separates
absolutely. . . . It is the religious and no longer the metaphysical. . . . The
thought of Kierkegaard is the sword that separates; the internal is not the
external; reason is not history; the subjective is not the objective; culture is not
religion” (Wahl 1949, 131).
Apart from the Kantian thrust of the abyssal nature of a thinking that
consists in such radical severing, I wish to highlight more precisely the nega-
tive determination of the copula and its negation in Wahl’s statements. The
importance, if not centrality, enjoyed by the copula in Hegel’s speculative
thought never becomes an issue. Rather than connecting opposites by being
negated, the copula, or the lack of it, drives the opposites apart to such a
degree that they become heterogeneous and incommensurable. As a result,
the originary unity that precedes the severing is lost from sight. From Wahl’s
works it follows that such severing thought is the same as the unhappy
consciousness. Unhappy consciousness is not only what brings Kierkegaard
and the early Hegel into some proximity but also, according to Wahl, what
distinguishes, beyond all doubt, the early from the mature Hegel.
While reading Hegel’s early writings in Glas, Derrida remarks that through
them
one enters the analyses of Christianity and of the Christian family elaborated
by the young Hegel as the conceptual matrix of the whole systematic scene to
come. There are engendered not only the whole philosophy of religion, the
description of revealed religion in The Phenomenology of Spirit, certain funda-
mental interpretations of the Philosophy of Right, and so on . . . the question of
the bearing (démarche), the teleology or not of the reading, does not let itself
be evaded. And it finds itself already [déjà] posed, within the ‘younger’ elabo-
rations, precisely as an ontolological question, a question of the ontological.
It is the question of the Wesen (essence) and of the copula is as a question,
the relation or name of father-to-son.
To know for example whether the “later” texts can be treated as the
descendant and akin consequence, filiation, the product, the son of the youth-
ful elaborations that would be the system’s paternal seed; to know whether the
second, following, consequent or consecutive texts are or are not the same, the
development of the same text, this question is posed in advance, reflected in
advance in the analysis of Christianity. It is the question itself of Christianity
staged as the Last Supper scene (mise en scène).
The Father is the Son, the Son is the Father; and the Wesen, the essential
energy of this copulation, its unity, the Weseneinheit of the first and the
second, is the essence of the Christian Last Supper scene. The spirit of Chris-
tianity is rather the revelation of the essentiality of the essence that permits in
general copulating in the is, saying is. Unification, conciliation (Vereinigung),
and being (Sein) have the same sense, are equivalent in their signification
(gleichbedeutend). And in every proposition (Satz), the binding, agglutinating,
ligamentary position of the copula (Bindewort) is conciliates the subject and
the predicate, laces one around the other, entwines one around the other, to
form one single being (Sein). The Sein is constituted, reconstituted starting
from its primordial division (Urteil) by letting itself be thought in a Bindewort.
(Derrida 1990, 55–56)
From these lines, it follows that the question of how to proceed with
respect to Hegel’s youthful writings is already (déjà) posed within these writ-
ings themselves.14 It is already posed in them as the ontological question, or as
a question concerning being. This ontological question is one and the same as
the question of the family. As opposed to a genetic account of the early
fragments that either rushes to construe them as the seed from which the later
work evolves into full maturity or as entirely distinct from the system to come,
the attention paid in an immanent reading of what is established about
Christianity and the Christian family in these early texts brings to light a
relation of father and son in Christianity, that is, of the family, which deter-
Rodolphe Gasché 21
mines being in light of the copulation and unification that takes place through
the copula when the family is determined as the unity of father and son. Being
(or life) is a relation of copulation by which father and son, subject and
predicate, beginning and result, and so forth, become interchangeable. With
this problematic, a conceptual matrix is brought into view anterior to the
question of whether the early texts anticipate in teleological fashion the
systematic thinker, or whether in distinction from what the mature Hegel
develops, these youthful texts contain the formulation of an intense, lived,
tragic experience lost in the final work. Indeed, if in Christianity the question
of ontology cannot be uncoupled from that of the family, or if “for Hegel, at
least, no ontology is possible before the Gospel or outside it” (Derrida 1990,
56), and if this question finds its most appropriate articulation in a discourse
on the family, then, to distinguish between youthful and mature texts inevita-
bly brings the problematic of father and son to bear on this distinction. As a
result, there is a unity between both, not only because the later, more system-
atic developments are already fully present in the early texts but also because
the youthful elaborations continue to reverberate in the final systematic
treatise. As a consequence, “all the ‘youthful works’ elaborate the demonstra-
tion of the father’s presence in the son, the end of the opposition in the heart
[le sein] of the divine, the necessity of the copula in the following proposition
stating the possibility of the speculative family, such as it will be maintained in
its concept up to the Philosophy of Right: ‘The child is the parents them-
selves,’ or ‘the united beings separate again, but in the child the conciliat-
ing unification (Vereinigung) has become unseparated (ungetrennt)’”
(Derrida 1990, 56).
NOTES
1. See Butler (1987, 83).

2. See, in particular, Jarczyk and Labarrière (1996, 26–58).
3. See Geroulanos (2010, 72).
4. See Derrida (1978, 139, 143).
5. See Derrida (1978, 99).
6. See in this context also Derrida (1978), where he associates the rejection of finalism in
reading with “the most precious and original intention of structuralism,” namely, that of a
respect for “the coherence and completion of each totality at its own level” (26).
7. See Bourgeois (1970, 113–22).
8. This fragment is missing in Hegel (1948).
9. See Derrida (1990, 105–6).
10. See Derrida (1990, 90).
11. Derrida adds: “And teleology does not only or always have the appeasing character one
wants to give it. It can be questioned, denounced as a lure or an effect, but its threat cannot
be reduced.” He concludes: “So we can neither avoid nor accept as rule or principle
teleological anticipation, neither accept nor avoid as rule or principle the empirico-
chronological delay of the narrative, the récit. A bastard course” (Derrida 1990, 6).
12. To some extent at least, he follows the method of Martial Gueroult’s interpretations of
Descartes or Spinoza, of which Derrida has spoken in rather favorable terms.
13. See Kambouchner (2007, 143–53).
14. On several occasions Derrida italicizes already (déjà) in the Hegel column in order to signify
here one of his signature arguments. In other words, he signs it. Italicized, déjà is an
abbreviation of Derrida, Jacques.
REFERENCES
Bourgeois, Bernard. 1970. Hegel à Francfort ou Judaïsme-Christianisme-Hegelianisme. Paris: Vrin.

. 2007. Jean Wahl als Leser von Hegel. In Der französische Hegel, ed. U. J.Schneider, 77–
89. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
Butler, Judith. 1987. Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
. 1990. Glas, trans. John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press.
Dilthey, Wilhelm. 1921. Gesammelte Schiften. Vol. 4, Die Jugendgeschichte Hegels und andere
Abhandlungen zur Geschichte des deutschen Idealism. Leipzig: Verlag von B. G.
Teubner.
Geroulanos, Stefanos. 2010. An Atheism That is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Hegel, Gottfried Wilhelm Friedrich. 1948. Hegel’s Early Theological Writings, trans. T. M. Knox.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
. 1971. Werke in zwanzig Bänden. Vol. 1, Frühe Schriften. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Hyppolite, Jean. 1971. La Phénoménologie de Hegel et la pensée française contemporaine. In
Figures de la pensée philosophique, Vol. 1, 231–41 Paris: PUF.
Jarczyk, Gwendoline; and Pierre-Jean Labarrière. 1996. De Kojève a Hegel. 150 ans de pensée
hégélienne en France. Paris: Albin Michel.
Rodolphe Gasché 23
Kambouchner, Denis. 2007. Hegel unter Dekonstruktion. In Der französische Hegel, ed. U. J.
Schneider, 143–53. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
Pillen, Angelika. 2003. Hegel in Frankreich. Vom unglücklichen Bewusstsein zur Unvernunft.
Freiburg: Alber Verlag.
Wahl, Jean. 1932. Vers le concret: Etudes d’histoire de la philosophie contemporaine. Paris: Vrin.
. 1949. Etudes Kierkegaardiennes. Paris: PUF.
. 1991. Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel. Paris: PUF.
The Dialecticity of
Mathematical Concepts and the
Problem of the Origin of
Geometry
Cavaillès avec Derrida
Juan Manuel Garrido

Alberto Hurtado University, Santiago, Chile
Comment tenir dans le même champ (ce champ où se meut dans une ubiquité
fondamentale le regard philosophique) le sens inaugurale où s’instaure l’déalité,
et l’autorité apodictique des systèmes d’énoncés qui l’expriment?
(Desanti 1968, 125)
I.
In the long and brilliant introduction to his translation of Husserl’s posthu-

mously published text on the origin of geometry, Jacques Derrida systemati-
25
26 Cavaillès avec Derrida
cally develops the principles, methods, and tools of a historical phenomenol-

ogy. According to Derrida, the appendix of the Krisis inaugurated a new kind
of historical questioning, unprecedented so far in Husserl and, in fact, in the
history of philosophy. “The singularity of our text,” he explains, depends on its
articulation of “a new scheme [un dessein inédit]: on the one hand, it brings to
light a new type or profundity of historicity; on the other hand, and correla-
tively, it determines the new tools and original direction of historic reflection”
(1989, 26; 1962, 4).1 Derrida understands the novelty of this conception to
result from the problem that Husserl addressed in the text, namely, the origin
of ideality, and in particular that of geometrical (and mathematical) objective
ideality. The terms that are combined in the formulation of the problem—the
origin of ideality—lead us to leave behind Platonism (for which there could be
no origin, hence construction and constitution, but only revelation, of ideali-
ties) and transcendental phenomenology (insofar as we are questioning a
historical becoming, not the constitution of an object of conscious experi-
ence), as well as, needless to say, historical empiricism and psychologism
(because unless ideality is denied, the essence of ideality cannot be reduced to
mere facts, whether natural or psychological).
Idealities are not here seized as mere illusions or mistakes and will not die.
How did the objective, necessary, and universal truths of atemporal idealities
arise in history, that is, in time and contingency? How could geometry, and
science in general, and the history of science emerge in the first place? That is,
how are we to think the necessarily historical genesis of ostensibly atemporal
idealities? Out of the work upon this formidable problem, in the wake of
Husserl’s late reflections on the origin of geometry, one of the major philoso-
phies of the second half the twentieth century arises. It is the program of
understanding ideality as constituted by historical becoming itself, which
certainly would then be “historical” in an unexpected sense (historique en un
sens insolite) (1989, 1; 1962, 4). One has to find the means of considering the
factuality of becoming and temporality as preceding and conditioning the
production of ideality. All sciences, including and above all those that concern
mathematical idealities and their application (exact and natural sciences),
are produced and constituted in their historical movement. History, there-
fore, is not the inevitable and implacable human degradation of ideal entities,
Juan Manuel Garrido 27
which are or subsist by themselves apart from their historical decay. On the
contrary, such ideal entities, their substantiality and ideality are a production
of historical becoming. “The historicity of ideal objectivities, i.e., their origin
and tradition . . . , obeys very unusual rules [règles insolites], which are neither
the factual interconnections of empirical history, nor an ideal and ahistoric
adding on. The birth and development of science must then be accessible to
an unheard-of style of historical intuition in which the intentional reactiva-
tion of sense should—de jure—precede and condition the empirical determi-
nation of fact” (1989, 26; 1962, 4–5). As is well known by anyone acquainted
with Derrida’s subsequent work, language, and specifically “writing” (écriture
or archi-écriture), will be the means to reach such unusual rules and such an
unheard-of style of historical intuition, since no ideality is thinkable beyond its
inscription in the space and time of an originary communication.
And yet it is uncertain that a historical phenomenology, even one rebuilt
and radicalized by Derrida, actually clarifies the historical structure of geo-
metrical idealities, let alone solves the problem—at the heart of any phenom-
enological program—of the foundation of mathematical knowledge and that
of the mode of existence of idealities covered by it. The reason is that the type
of interrogations and analyses proper to a phenomenology of this kind gain
access to the so-called “origin” only at the cost of emptying “geometry” of any
concrete theoretical sense and of considering it as a too general and abstract
horizon of sense. “Geometry” is not one particular theory of space, historically
built and identifiable by a system of propositions defining its field of objects
and of specific problems; nor should it be confused with a traditional system,
for instance, “the Euclidean geometry,” established as the paradigm or regu-
lative idea that would guide geometric research. Indeed, Derrida denies that
the Hilbertian notions of definite nomology and exhaustive deductivity, “that
Husserl in fact determined,” in Formal and Transcendental Logic, “as the ideal
orienting geometrical practice” (1989, 52; 1962, 39), may be understood as the
true unity of sense of the geometrical.2 He dismisses, therefore, the scope of
Cavaillès’s criticisms, which Derrida interprets (wrongly, as we shall see) as
concerning the historical caducity of the concept of mathematical knowledge
that Husserl forms against the background of Hilbert’s program, insofar as
this program will be partially contested by Gödel’s results from 1931 concern-
ing the incompleteness of arithmetics (we shall return to this later) (Cavaillès
1947, 70ff.). Derrida argues, to the contrary, that a phenomenological-
historical investigation must apprehend “the geometrical” beyond all theoret-
ical debates, which precisely “presupposes” that there is a source of unifying
sense of the geometrical for an “infinite totality” of experiences, not only past
experiences but also those yet to come (Derrida 1989, 52; 1962, 36). There
would be no progression or transformation whatsoever in the history of
geometry, Derrida thinks, if there had not been previously given the opening
of “something like the geometrical or mathematical science, whose unity is
still to come on the basis of what is announced in its origin” (Derrida 1989, 53;
1962, 36). Derrida wants to understand the emergence of “the unity of sense” of
that which, in history, “is to be thought of as the geometrical science,” or the
unity “of a traditional geometrical sense infinitely open to all its own revolu-
tions” (1989, 52; 1962, 36). We would certainly not be wrong in seeing in all this
one of the first occurrences of a concept that will have a central place in
Derrida’s later reflections on historical event, namely, the pure coming or
“to-come” (à-venir). Those who are familiar with the subsequent work of
Derrida would expect us to warn, of course, that the à-venir is nonetheless an
event that cannot be circumscribed within any regulative horizon (as that of
“the geometrical,” e.g.), nor within any horizon of possible experience in
general.
The unity of the geometrical, Derrida explains, cannot be the general
essence extracted or abstracted from theoretical formations that occur in the
history of geometry. “This unity of geometry’s sense, such as it is announced in
the Origin, is not a general concept that is extracted or abstracted from
various known geometries” (1989, 52; 1962, 36). This is so not only because the
unity of geometry’s sense must be able to ensure the unity of transformations
that are unforeseen or to come but also because the advent of the geometrical
is the only thing “that makes such a generalizing operation possible” (1989, 52;
1962, 36). This last statement shows that for Derrida it is simply a question of
the human power of idealization in general. Henceforth the mathematical
ideality may not play any other role than that of a mere example, abstract and
arbitrary, of such a general idealizing power. The mathematical object, Der-
rida claims in one of the few definitions that he provides, “is thoroughly
transparent and exhausted by its phenomenality. Absolutely objective, i.e.,

totally rid of empirical subjectivity, it nevertheless is only what it appears to
be” (1989, 27; 1962, 6). Such an object, which has no mathematical specificity,
and that one may be tempted to denounce as arranged beforehand to suit
what eventually will be destroyed or deconstructed, gives no clue to under-
stand the mode of existence and the logic of the formation of mathematical
knowledge itself. The concept of an “infinite set of points” is neither more nor
less ideal in the Derridean sense than that of the “real continuous interval”
noted (0, 1), and yet these two objects are in no way exactly the same thing;
they neither have the same theoretical applications nor the same method-
ological scope. Different definitions of functions can play totally different
roles in the formation of mathematical concepts, and yet their ideality in the
Derridean sense does not vary at all. A function can be represented either as a
formula for assigning numerical values to the domain (the variable “x”) or the
set of ordered pairs that define a subset of the product of the domain and the
codomain, each of these alternative definitions having totally different appli-
cations to totally different problems (the former in calculus or the application
of calculus, the latter in algebra). Any number a = | b − c | is neither less nor
more ideal whether it appears within the context of an arithmetical problem
or whether it expresses a physical measure (a temperature difference, e.g.).
1
This holds as well for the objects –1, 3 , 冑2, (0, 1), or 冑⫺1, whose construction
requires very different theoretical and operational fields, yet they do not
“appear” in different degrees of opacity.
Phenomenological investigation concerns the nature and the historicity
of the ideality of the true and objective object in general. This ideality, Derrida
explains in the wake of Husserl, is that of the object as considered beyond the
contingency of its enunciation, including, of course, its mathematical enunci-
ation (1989, 72–76; 1962, 34–37). As Husserl explains in a passage from The
Origin of Geometry, “the idealities of geometrical words, sentences, theories—
considered purely as linguistic formations—are not the idealities that make
up what is expressed and brought to validity as truth in geometry; the latter
are ideal geometrical objects, states of affairs, etc. Wherever something is
asserted, one can distinguish what is thematic, that about which it is said (its
sense), from the assertion, which itself, during the asserting, is never and can
never be thematic” (Derrida 1989, 75; 1962, 68). Geometrical idealities are thus
nothing but mere examples of true and objective idealities. “That which ori-
ents Husserl’s reflection” is, “specifically, the fully freed ideality and absolute
Objectivity of sense, for which mathematics is the model” (1989, 94, emphasis
mine; 1962, 78). But an example is the singular case to which one can attach
signification with universal scope or that at least can be extrapolated to a class
of cases, and what the geometrical “example” lacks in Derrida’s (and Hus-
serl’s) work is precisely the study of such a paradigmatic singularity. Follow-
ing Husserl, Derrida speaks about geometrical ideality as one speaks, in gen-
eral, about the ideality “of all sciences.” 3 In order that the alleged
“exemplarity” of geometrical idealities does not join the emptiness of the
definition of ideality given above, it must be shown what in mathematical
knowledge possesses the rank of exemplary object from the point of view of
the study of the origin and nature of our idealizing capacity in general. Other-
wise the phenomenological-historical analysis of mathematical idealities, as
well as their deconstruction or proto-deconstruction, will be irrelevant and
epistemologically sterile.
This is exactly what happens with the analyses of primordial temporality.
They destroy and then rebuild “ideality” simply by means of structures that
are too abstract and general from the point of view of the question concerning
the production and becoming of mathematical objects. Against what seems to
be Derrida’s presumption, however, temporality does not explain the origin,
the formation, and the becoming of mathematical knowledge and mathemat-
ical objects. One could even assign to the deconstruction or proto-
deconstruction of ideality the same limits that Jean-Toussaint Desanti assigns
to any attempt to explain the constitution of mathematical idealities only
with the help of the structures of the internal and primordial temporality of
consciousness (Desanti 1968, 130–33, 264–270). These structures provide no
clue for understanding the formation of idealities at an operative and theoret-
ical level, where they are and should remain precisely timeless (in the sense of
the constituted mathematical objects described by Husserl at Hua X, 1969, §§
44–45). In vain will we discover and describe that the timelessness of idealities
is constituted through primordial temporality, original flux against the back-
ground of which the formation of an ideal “again and again” (immer wieder)
became possible. The specific dialectics of mathematical knowledge and ob-

jects will thereby remain untouched. Only the mathematical properties of
idealities can explain the formation and transformation of mathematical
knowledge and objects. The temporality that makes possible ideality in gen-
eral does not determine the production and becoming of such concrete math-
ematical properties. Specific theoretical properties, such as those that deter-
mine the logical successivity in a demonstrative chain, or those operating in
the deployment of a numerical sequence, do not follow from the mere fact that
consciousness constitutes itself in an original flux. Otherwise those mathe-
matical properties would be connatural to any activity of consciousness,
which is far from being the case. This is not to suggest that the analysis of
primordial temporality has no value per se but rather that such an analysis
acquires its relevance in quite a different order of investigation (a phenome-
nological investigation about the self-constitution of consciousness) than
that concerning the historicity of mathematical idealities.
The problem is that the fact of mathematical and geometrical knowledge
is not something externally given that one could “reduce” while questioning
the constituting historicity of ideality. This fact is, on the contrary, the only
solid ground that would allow for grasping correctly the nature of the becom-
ing and of the dialecticity of mathematical idealities: that is to say, precisely,
what historical phenomenology claims to find after having “reduced” every-
thing that it will assume as the extrinsic and empirical contents of history. We
could not reduce the fact of knowledge without at the same time disabling
historicity in all the senses of the word, extrinsic or intrinsic as well as empir-
ical or transcendental, and without opposing, to the contingency of the his-
tory that is thus reduced or reducible, the static consistency of an “idea” that
provides the abstract and in itself empty unity of sense of the infinite totality of
mathematical experiences. “The” geometrical or “the” mathematical, as reg-
ulative horizons or “ideas in the Kantian sense,” are likely to become Ideas in
the Platonic sense, that is, as detached from their content and as the objects of
an intuition that spares us the mediation of historical becoming. The sole
reality or substance of mathematical knowledge can only be its concrete
production and progression, and unless we are able to identify the particular-
ities of such a production and progression, it will be vain to speak of the
becoming of mathematical idealities. Becoming must actually and factually

become to be what it is. “The” geometrical does not exist apart from concrete
formations and transformations of geometrical knowledge and research, and
it is only grasping the necessities that govern the production and progression
of this same knowledge and research that we would be able to make apparent
the historical constitution of its “idea.”
II.
That is why the objections raised by Derrida against Cavaillès, for whom the
study of the production and progression of knowledge is the whole purpose of
the philosophy of mathematics, are surprising and may reflect a still insuffi-
cient understanding of the phenomenon of history. “The dialectical genesis
that Cavaillès opposes to the ‘activity’ of Husserlian consciousness,” Derrida
claims, “is described precisely and copiously by Husserl on various levels,
although the word is never mentioned” (1989, 157–58; 1962, 157–58). But the
dialecticity allegedly explained by Husserl and to which Derrida refers is only
that of the primordial time of consciousness, the pure self-temporalization of
the Living Present, which could not give a concrete representation of the logic
of conceptual production and transformation in mathematical knowledge.
“We have seen how much this ‘activity’ of consciousness was both anterior
and posterior to passivity; that the movement of primordial temporalization
(the ultimate ground of all constitution) was dialectical through and through;
and that (as every authentic dialecticity wants) this movement was only the
dialectic between the dialectical (the indefinite mutual and irreducible impli-
cation of protentions and retentions) and the nondialectical (the absolute and
concrete identity of the Living Present, the universal form of all conscious-
ness)” (1989, 157–58; see as well 148ff., 158–59, 165, 170–71). For Cavaillès, on the
contrary, the mathematical is rather a realm of problems, procedures, tech-
niques, objects, and operations that are ineluctably led to their own transfor-
mation according to the necessities created by these very same transforma-
tions. Contrary to the Cartesian and Husserlian dream of reconstructing the
scientific edifice from scratch, the research expected from the historian-
epistemologist cannot be abstracted from the details of the becoming. There
is no way to gain access to the essence of knowledge from some an-historical

or supra-historical consciousness, which would recover itself untouched be-
hind or beyond its own intrinsic historical transformations. On the contrary,
the knowing consciousness, if there is such a thing, has developed itself only
through the development of science. Therefore, consciousness can only know
itself insofar as it studies its own historical formation through the historical
transformations of its objects. Consciousness cannot elude the mediation of
history in the task of understanding itself in its present. In other words, the
factual processes of objectivation are primordial and inescapable, and no
immediate or absolute access of consciousness to itself, beyond the historical
becoming of such processes of objectivation, is possible. Mathematical knowl-
edge—its factual becoming—is the absolute and primordial medium of self-
consciousness; but mathematical knowledge, like any other knowledge, is
governed by the fatality of having to deal with problems no less inherited than
the means—methods, objects, concepts, tools—to solve them.
Since self-consciousness cannot access itself while reducing the factuality
of history, which means objective knowledge is the absolute medium of any
self-relation, the starting point for the analysis must be the assumption of the
present theoretical and practical situation in which consciousness finds itself
carrying out its own activities of thinking and objectivation. As far as it
concerns the main publications of Cavaillès on the history of mathematics,
the present situation (the mid-1930s) is determined simultaneously by the
axiomatization of set theory, the finitist program of mathematical founda-
tion, and the crisis inaugurated by Gödel’s result concerning the incomplete-
ness of arithmetic, on the one hand; and, on the other hand, by successes in the
application of set theory in general topology (Fréchet), algebraic combinato-
rics, and theory of integration (Borel, Lebesgue, Denjoy), successes that take
place even though the problem of foundations “is less close than ever to a
solution” (Cavaillès 1938, 26). There is no way to give an account of the
mathematical realm and of the secrets of its instrumental power without
going over the technical avatars of such a crisis, from what prepared the
paradoxes discovered between 1890 and 1904 to the present. Here we cannot
go through all the historical and mathematical details of Cavaillès’s argumen-
tations, but we can summarize some results in the hope of giving a clear
picture of his philosophical insight concerning the primordiality of the histor-

ical production of mathematical idealities.
The necessity of increased abstraction and formalization during the nine-
teenth century, which led to the emergence of set theory, is not due to the
doctrinal triumph of an idea or to the social, academic, or psychological
installation of a new paradigm. Such necessity was raised by research itself.
The theoretical work on operative procedures, due to the developments of the
Analysis, tends gradually to isolate the formal structures from the objects. The
consciousness of the formal, Cavaillès explains, increases progressively, first
from the logical analyses of numerical concepts by Dedekind (1938, 53ff.), then
in Hilbert’s program (1938, 96ff.). To explain the extension of number systems,
from the natural numbers to the creation of irrational and complex numbers,
the “principle of permanence” of the rules of arithmetic operations in different
numerical systems, formulated by Hankel following Peacock, appears as in-
sufficient, a merely negative tool (Cavaillès 1938, 53). One must also explain
what kind of necessity is implied by arithmetic operations when they require
us to extend the realm of objects to which they apply (from the natural to the
rational, real, or complex numbers). This extension may entail deep transfor-
mation of initial definitions and the creation of totally new objects. For in-
stance, even though the initial signification of the power theory seems to
imply that the exponents must be integers, the theorem of the addition of the
exponents, that is, xa+b = xa · xb, proves in practice to be universally valid (1938,
54). The rules and properties governing the operation with exponents escape
or precede the kind of objects in which they may have been initially proven.
Consider, following this very same line of thought, Dedekind’s under-
standing of the creation of arithmetical continuity and of irrational numbers.
The set of rational numbers is a field or numerical body (Zahlkörper) that is
built in relation to the four arithmetic operations (addition, multiplication,
subtraction, division). The numerical body of rational numbers form an infi-
nite field (unendliche Gebiet), well ordered (wohlgeordnet) in the sense that its
elements are comparable with each other (being either smaller or greater),
and one-dimensional with two opposed directions that progress infinitely
(Dedekind 1872, § 1, 318). These properties seem geometrical (i.e., “intuitive”)
only at first glance. As a matter of fact, they have strict arithmetic correlates
(thereby they correspond to “laws of thought”).4 One of the laws governing the
construction of such correlates concerns the ability of the system of rational
numbers to be cut at any number (or “at any point,” to use the analogy with the
line) into two different and infinite subsystems or subsets, the number that rep-
resents the cut being in either of the two subsets (as the greatest in the first subset
or as the smallest in the second one). It is at this moment that we can see how the
creative “inner dynamism of mathematics” proceeds (Cavaillès 1938, 55). The
creative power of mathematical understanding is compelled to intervene and
new “mathematical idealities” emerge as soon as it becomes apparent that
there are cuts to which no rational element corresponds, because they can be
put in neither of the two subsets created by the cut, and the necessity of
arithmetic continuity, along with the field of “irrational numbers,” will even-
tually impose itself in the arithmetical realm (Dedekind 1872, §§ 3 and 4).
In 1899, Hilbert opposes the axiomatic method, which he had used in
geometry and which he will henceforth propose for the construction of num-
ber theory, to what he describes as Dedekind’s “genetical” method (Hilbert
1900a, 180). He claims that the axiomatic method avoids the difficulties asso-
ciated with the idea of a system of all real numbers. Real numbers can be
handled as a system of things whose mutual relation is completely given
through a finite system of axioms from which one can deduce valid proposi-
tions by dint of a small number of logical steps. “By the set of real numbers, we
must understand not a totality of all possible laws according to which the
elements of a fundamental sequence progress, but rather a system of things
whose mutual relationship is given by a finite and closed system of axi-
oms . . . and from which new propositions can obtain validity only insofar as
one can deduce them through a finite number of logical inferences” (1900a,
184). The opposition that Hilbert draws between his axiomatic method and
Dedekind’s genetical approach can certainly be relativized. Dedekind does
consider the formation of numerical systems from successive extensions of
natural integers, thus “genetically,” but his definitions of integers and rational
and real numbers are clearly established axiomatically, by setting a system of
conditions and rules allowing logical deductions (Sinaceur 2008, 31). The
“principle” of continuity of real numbers, for instance, works as an axiom “that
can be used as basis for actual deductions” (Dedekind 1872, § 3, 322). There is
a much more relevant sense, however, in which Dedekind’s “axiomatic” con-

struction of real numbers can be judged as anticipating the method upheld by
Hilbert. The operations upon numbers are formal structures that “precede”
numbers themselves (Cavaillès 1938, 96). They are free from any “extrinsic
conditions” determining their use; the “new objects” are engendered as “cor-
relates of operations that are acknowledged in their autonomy” (1938, 172).
Axiomatization provides an operative unity for number theory. An axiom is
nothing but “the characteristic of an operative procedure” (1938, 79), an ab-
stract and formal structure reached through reflection upon the very manip-
ulation of numbers. “Axiomatisation,” explains Pierre Cassou-Noguèz, “is a
reflection within mathematics upon mathematical operations. Axiomatisa-
tion isolates and purifies procedures that form the core of the theory. In such
a reflective turn, mathematics contributes to the progress and extension of
mathematics. This reflection of mathematics upon itself constitutes one of
the drivers of its development” (Cassou-Noguèz 2002, 99).
The emphasis on the formal structure and the logical power of operations as
the driving force of inner and autonomous progression in mathematics leads to a
comprehension of mathematical knowledge that is profoundly historical. Math-
ematical concepts and objects are created essentially while mathematicians op-
erate with them, while they manipulate them. All nineteenth-century movement
of the arithmetization of analysis, all the efforts to discover the logical structure of
mathematical objects, the construction of number theory, the creation of set
theory, the axiomatization of it, and so forth, attest, on Cavaillès’s account, to an
increasing consciousness that mathematical objects and concepts (in sum, math-
ematical “idealities”) are thought of as existing in their making, that is, as corre-
lates of mathematical practice. They are not created by a solitary act of conscious-
ness, a reflecting power that could be isolated from the historical details of
problem and theory formation. The factual existence of mathematical theories,
the factual progression of mathematical problems and concepts, the factual cre-
ation of definitions and objects—they are the whole and ultimate reality of math-
ematical knowledge. There is no way to put all that into brackets to consider it as
a given object of an immanent self-given consciousness. Mathematical factual
becoming renders it arbitrary and meaningless to fix, as Husserl does in Formal
and Transcendental Logic, the logical power of mathematical activity in one par-
ticular figure, namely that which Hilbert’s finitist program had offered of the
axiomatization of theories, and which depends on the principles of the indepen-
dency of axioms, of theoretical consistency (noncontradiction) and of the satura-
tion of the system. Such was the main target of Cavaillès’s criticisms of Husserl’s
philosophy of mathematics. In idealizing such a figure of axiomatics, which is, by
the way, exceptional for a mathematical theory (neither real numbers nor inte-
gers eventually satisfy its conditions), one ceases to explain the creative and
transforming power of mathematical activity. On the contrary, one must recover
the logical power of axiomatics on the basis of its operative existence, beyond the
idea (merely regulative from the point of view of the mathematician’s Lebenswelt)
of a definite nomology and exhaustive deductivity.
III.
Mathematical idealities are much more than mere abstract thought obeying
purely logical laws: they are objects, absolutely objective objects or ideal
objectualities (Gegenständlichkeiten, objectités) that oppose themselves to
pure subjectivity and pure thought. To exist, to combine, to produce new
objects and knowledge, they must include an extra-logical element, an ele-
ment that opposes itself to merely logical form, which Cavaillès calls—com-
menting on Hilbert and referring to Kant—a material element (Cavaillès 1938,
91). A mathematical object is something with which one can operate, that is,
something that is both something given to intuition and something that
embodies logical properties and definitions. Such concrete and material exis-
tence of mathematical objects is the mathematical sign. This is a Hilbertian
theme that, according to Cavaillès, survives the historical overcoming of the
finitist program (the logical-mathematical program on which Hilbert placed
the possibility of a foundation of arithmetic), namely, then, the results of
Gödel theorem (Cavaillès 1938, 99), and that Cavaillès adapts to his treatment
of the question concerning the historical formation of mathematical con-
cepts. Mathematical signs, Hilbert taught insistently, are not mere empirical
correlates, graphic reproductions of thought entities; they are the objects
themselves that mathematicians manipulate and by means of which they
reason (see, e.g., Hilbert 1900b, 295–96).
From a Hilbertian point of view, mathematical signs embody definitions,

properties, theorems, and combinatory rules. Consequently, the bars |, ||, |||,
which also may be written, to render explicit the intuitive meaning of their
spatial disposition and addition, | + | + | + . . . , as well as the signs = meaning
equality (as ||| + | = | + |||), or > and < that mean inequalities, and → the
implication, s an element of (僆) the set S, and so forth; all of these “mathemat-
ical signs” constitute in themselves the objects of mathematical knowledge.
As such, all these signs are not mere sensitive figures given to intuition but
intellectual objects that are fully given to logical understanding. There is
more. As Cavaillès explains, the problem at stake in Hilbert’s considerations of
the sign is not only to provide a material support for supposedly nonintuitive
objects, as if we were dealing with two different objects that must collaborate
with each other to render the act of mathematical knowledge possible. What
is at stake is not, either, the problem of the referentiality of mathematical (as
purely logical) concepts to spatially and temporally given reality, which would
protect us from the sterility of logic insofar as it renders possible the applica-
bility of mathematical knowledge. The problem at stake is, Cavaillès claims
while commenting on Hilbert, to ensure the very thoroughness and strictness
of logical reasoning, because logical or mathematico-logical knowledge relies
on signs.5 Needless to say, signs and their reciprocal relationships are intui-
tively given and constitute objects fully apprehended, but in no case are they
to be conceived as things in themselves, that is, given exactly as they would be if
someone could consider them independently of the conditions that render pos-
sible their being given and known. Evidently, it is not possible to consider any
object, of whatever kind, independently of the conditions that render possible this
very consideration, which means that the object of knowledge (of whatever kind)
is nothing in itself, that is, beyond the historical, or linguistic, or logical, or theo-
retical, or phenomenological, and so forth, conditions for its appearing. But then
what are the conditions for the appearing of mathematical objects?
Cavaillès adapts Hilbertian considerations about mathematical signs to
answer this question properly. He is suspicious of any kind of intuitivism and
emphasizes the historical-theoretical a priori structures of sign formation.
Hilbert’s program seems to presuppose that one should find an elementary
mathematical theory that could ultimately be grounded upon immediate
intuition. But even the “bars” that we have previously drawn are already
mathematical objects, that is, objects given and understood by means of
historical-theoretical mediation:
The sign is not an object from the world, but it does not refer, either, to
anything different from itself, which it would be representing. It refers to the
very acts that manipulate it. The undefined regression is in this case essential.
All the comparisons that one can make between mathematics and spatial
manipulation find a limit in this fundamental character of mathematical
symbols, numbers, figures, even bars: they are there only as parts or applica-
tions, as the bases of an activity that already is mathematical: the symbol is
internal to acts, and therefore it is neither their beginning nor their end (which
are, such ends, the production of other acts). The definition of a complete
formalism, therefore, is not compatible with such a sensitive barrier: what
such definition takes as an absolute beginning is in fact the surreptitious
evocation of previous acts and concatenations. (Cavaillès 1947, 38–39)
Bars or any other sign, instead of being the instance of an actual givenness
of the object to intuition, embody an implicit mathematical practice and
system of rules, definitions, and operations. They are already, in fact, arithmet-
ical signs. Desanti addresses a similar criticism to Husserl’s requirement of an
immediate intuitive fulfillment of the object as original ground for the forma-
tion of mathematical concepts (1984, VI, § 18). According to this view, an
arithmetical proposition such as (53)4 should ultimately refer, through analyt-
ical regression, to immediate intuitions: (53)4 = 53 · 53 · 53 · 53, 53 = 5 · 5 · 5, 5 = 4 +
1, 4 = 3 + 1, 3 = 2 + 1, 2 = 1 + 1. “But this ultimate intuition,” Desanti explains, “is
already given on the basis of another signitive structure [structure signitive],
which is itself oriented towards another signitive intuition. In what field can I
dispose a verifying intuition of (23)5? I have to count on the system of integers,
on the power operation, and therefore on a certain intra-theoretical horizon:
precisely that of arithmetic” (Desanti 2010, 26). The analytical regression is
here infinite and essential. Thus, if signs are the ultimate elements for the consti-
tution of mathematical idealities, this is not insofar as they bear the immediacy of
an intuition, but quite on the contrary, because they refer to the network of rules,
definitions, operations, theorems, and so forth. That is why the progression of

mathematical knowledge should not be considered as teleologically dependent
on an Idea in the Kantian sense or on a horizon of experience that would provide
the eidetic unity of its development. All mathematical multiplicity is fully intra-
mathematical. Mathematical progression is not governed by an infinite task, but
delivered to the a-teleological play of its symbols. “The very essence of mathemat-
ics consists in a regulated play of symbols [jeu réglé de symboles], which are not
mere memory adjuvants, but define a sort of abstract space with as many dimen-
sions as there are different degrees of freedom in the concrete and unpredictable
operation of combination” (Cavaillès 1938, 93).
Unless ideal objects are formulated, or signified, that is, embodied in
concrete and specific signs or symbols, which pertain to historical-theoretical
networks, there is no chance of giving them mathematical existence. All the
existence of mathematical objects is exhausted in the always unpredictable
operative possibilities of the “written” object. Thus, a “function” may be “in-
scribed” by two parallel lists that are related according to some determined
law. With totally different theoretical possibilities, it can also be expressed by
an algebraic formula that regulates two sets of variables (x and y in the
Cartesian plane), thereby offering an essential tool for resolving certain prob-
lems of applied mathematics. A function can also be defined-inscribed as a set
of ordered pairs that pertain to the product of the domain and the codomain
(a function f from A to B, denoted f : A → B, is a subset F 僆 A × B such that for
each a 僆 A there is one and only one pair (a, b) 僆 F), in which case it may
become useful to verify whether two sets have or have not the same quantity of
elements or whether two groups are identical. There is no function “in itself,”
apart from its symbolic inscriptions. At every moment the combinatory space
is configured and operates differently, regardless of the meaning allegedly
present to and meant by the consciousness of mathematical essences. There
is no way of forming a horizon of mathematical experience, a totality for the
open and progressive system of signs, which then could be subordinated
under one single idea: “there is no system of all signs with a delimited inter-
section of all the intuitive regions that could be present” (1938, 94). Nothing
other than the infinite set of effective and possible concatenations of signs
within the open and autonomous spacing of their “play” renders possible the
objectivation and progression of mathematical idealities in history. This au-

tonomous development of mathematics is the very “life” of mathematical
objects, a life with no historical origin and with no eidetic telos, irreducible to
the “life” (Erlebnis) of consciousness.
It is not due to its corporeal reality that the symbol is a conditio sine qua
non for the production of mathematical knowledge. The mere “act of writing”
(Derrida 1989, 88–89), which constitutes ideality, is defined regardless of the
operative and theoretical network that produces the progression of mathe-
matical objects and concepts. However, when the question is reduced to
understanding the “constitution” of mathematical idealities, we eventually
put into brackets the historical-theoretical system to which they pertain
intrinsically, turning the analysis toward isolated and general structures of
intuition. We can understand how mathematical symbols produce mathe-
matical progression only insofar as we never leave their historical-theoretical
constitution. Only thus can historicity truly take over intentionality. Mathe-
matical texts bear historical sedimentations of operative and theoretical pos-
sibilities, not traces of earlier living experiences of the living world. The math-
ematical text is the historical-theoretical horizon for the unpredictable
formation of problems, methods, concepts, objects; it forms the “autonomous
space” of mathematical research (Cavaillès 1994, 626). To put it into brackets
would be eo ipso to abandon mathematical objectivity.
The historicity of the play of symbols in mathematical history corresponds
to what Derrida describes as the structural “equivocity” of intentional sense.
This equivocity destroys any pretended ahistorical and atemporal identity of
the sense that one would assign to objectivity. The univocity of sense “is
always relative, because it is always inscribed within a mobile system of
relations and takes its source in an infinitely open project of acquisition”
(Derrida 1989, 104; 1962, 107–8). On the contrary, the structural equivocity of
sense is the very element of the indefinite and never-ending progression of
objectivity. “There is a sort of pure equivocity here, which grows in the very
rhythm of science” (Derrida 1989, 104; 1962, 108), without ever fully completing
the ideal of an absolute objectivity. The practice of the mathematician is
thereby seized and surpassed by the infinite progression of the historical
equivocity of symbols, which he or she would never be able to “reactivate” and
bring fully into the present (1989, 105; 1962, 109). Nevertheless, as we just have
seen, if mathematical symbols truly concatenate historically and if they truly
produce historicity, then they cannot be considered as merely inhabiting the
abstraction of a reduced and void temporal structure (inner temporality of con-
sciousness), reached by means of putting into brackets historical progression and
change, as well as objective and intersubjective time. Mathematical symbols
progress by an unpredictable path and are historical, only insofar as they embody
regional and specific problems, theories, definitions, concepts, or objects.
IV.
Cavaillès’s criticisms of the determination of mathematics as “defined nomolo-

gies” in Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic neither rely upon alleged
scientific achievements (Gödel’s results from 1931) nor declare the historical ca-
ducity of an interpretation of mathematics that is built upon Hilbert’s finitist
program. Cavaillès’s insistence upon the historical-theoretical determination of
mathematical knowledge could have led us—albeit mistakenly—to think so. But
if such were the sense of his criticisms, one could easily reply that Husserl was
dealing either with a normative and regulative ideal of mathematical practice
(Suzanne Bachelard’s response in 1968, 54–55), or that the essence of mathemat-
ics is the unity of a pure coming (Derrida’s response in 1989, 52; 1962, 36). What
Cavaillès seems interested in criticizing in Husserl is rather simply that the phe-
nomenologist has failed to grasp the originary dimension (which is theoretical) of
mathematical progression. Husserl would have indefectibly subdued mathemat-
ical becoming to static figures, namely that of defined nomology, which deter-
mine the essence of a unitary horizon or infinite task that could be considered
“apart from” the multiplicity of the becoming of mathematical facts.
To Cavaillès’s eyes, it is certainly not by accident that Husserl uses the figure
of defined nomologies and deductive systems to determine the essence of formal
ontologies. This choice suggests a parti pris concerning the problem of the history
of mathematical knowledge. Defined nomologies offer, according to Cavaillès, a
tautological and ahistorical understanding of mathematics. A complete or satu-
rated axiomatic system entails the illusion of a formal knowledge whose develop-
ment would be a mere analytical explicitation (in the sense of Kant’s “analytical
judgments”), a mere juxtaposition of results, regardless of any proper content and

any internal necessity of mathematical development. That is why Cavaillès im-
putes to Husserl “the thesis of empirical logicism, that mathematics has no proper
epistemic content. It is the organization or combination of what is already
there . . . and one can make or unmake its intertwining without increasing or
diminishing what is known” (1976, 69). Thus mathematical knowledge would be
a simple analytical explicitation fully given in the present of a consciousness
that actualizes its contents at its sole discretion and at any time of its histor-
ical development. As Cavaillès explains, commenting on the Husserlian proj-
ect: “at any stage it is possible to stop,” thinking embraces all developments
and technicities must disappear (Cavaillès 1976, 71). On the contrary, the truth
is that “mathematical concatenation possesses a firm internal cohesion: the
progressive character is essential and the decisions that neglect it are lost in
the void” (1976, 70). History is the becoming of the mathematical fact, the
progression of mathematical knowledge. Consciousness itself, when inquir-
ing absolute mathematical progression, can but start from given objectiva-
tions. Consciousness finds itself already “worked” and “seized” by the play of
symbols that it helps to transform. The very idea of searching for an “origin of
geometry” by means of the mere reflective and thematizing power of con-
sciousness is therefore naive. It falls prey to “the myth of return to the past”
(1976, 77). Consciousness finds no mean to thematize and self-thematize imme-
diately or immanently, that is, without the mediation of its own factual history. It has
itself become along with the becoming of concrete objective forms. Consciousness
possessesaprogressivity,adialecticitythatdevelopswiththedevelopmentofscience;
it is self-formation in the progression of the concept:
One of the essential problems of the theory of science is precisely that progress
is not the mere augmentation of volume by juxtaposition, the prior coexisting
with the new, but perpetual revision of the contents by deepening and
crossing-out. What comes after is more than what was before, not because it
contains it or continues it, but because it comes necessarily out from it, and
brings in it the singular mark of its superiority. There is in it more conscious-
ness—and another consciousness . . . Progress is material, given between sin-
gular essences, and its engine is the requirement of overcoming each one of
them. This is not a philosophy of consciousness, but a philosophy of concept

which can give rise to a doctrine of science. (1976, 78)
Far from having signaled the positive overcoming of Husserl’s idealization

of deductive systems, Gödel’s results, Cavaillès argues, only attest to the open
character of mathematical development. They have rendered illusory the
“finitist” dream of the formalist program. We do not have the right to trans-
form defined nomologies into the paradigms of mathematical knowledge. Not
only because to fix and to abstract a moment of the historical development, to
consider it as an idea or a horizon, implies, in general, to disregard the very
substance of history. Moreover, defined nomologies, in particular, deny the
theoretical interdependence of deductive systems themselves, whereas—as
in fact Gödel’s results have shown—the noncontradiction of a theory “can
only be proved within a more powerful theory” (1976, 73). A mathematical
theory is always the introduction of the nonfinite or the nondefined. It pre-
supposes procedures that are not reduced to the (finite) manipulation of
elements given to consciousness. It relies on the constraints and possibilities
of inherited operative procedures—methods, definitions, concepts, objects.
With the defeat of the finite—and Gödel’s reintroduction of the infinite—
history takes all its rights, thus coming and becoming reappear as fundamen-
tal dimensions of knowledge. The Husserlian illusion is not a scientific but a
philosophical mistake. To say it provocatively, it is the mistake of having
forgotten the operative and technical origin of mathematical knowledge—of
methods, concepts, theories; it is the mistake of having forgotten the originar-
ity of the “technical forgetting” of modern exact science.6
NOTES
This paper takes part in the FONDECYT Project 1140112 (Government of Chile). I thank
Rodolphe Gasché, Stefanos Geroulanos, David Johnson, Mauro Senatore, and Francesco
Vitale for comments on an earlier version of this text.
1. English translations are occasionally slightly and silently modified.
2. Husserl 1974, § 31. As Derrida observes, such an ideal was prefigured in the first of volume of
Logical Investigations (§ 70) and in Ideas I (§ 72). For an excellent explanation of the role
played by deductive systems in Husserl’s argument, see S. Bachelard (1968) (in particular,
the chapter on the “Theory of Deductive Systems and Theory of Multiplicities”).
3. Husserl explains: “Our problem now concerns precisely the ideal objectivities which are
thematic in geometry: how does geometrical ideality (just like that of all sciences) proceed
from its primary intrapersonal origin?” (1976, 369; Derrida 1962, 69; Derrida 1989, 76).
4. See Dedekind 1872, § 1. Let a, b 僆 Q. If a and b represent the same rational number, we say
that a = b and that b = a. If a and b represent different numbers, the result of a – b is either
a positive or a negative number. If this difference is positive, we say that a > b; if it is negative,
that a < b. Unequal numbers are subject to three laws for their order, regardless of what
geometrical intuition may suggest. 1) If a > b and b > c, then a > c. 2) If a, b are different, the
interval (a, b) is dense or contains an infinity of rational numbers. 3) If a 僆 Q, then it is
possible to build two infinite subsets, A1, A2 債 Q, such that all the elements of A1 are smaller
than a, and all the elements of A2 are greater, the number a pertaining to either subset,
a1 僆 A1 < a < a2 僆 A2.
5. “Si la logique veut être assurée, elle doit porter sur des objets embrassables du regard sous
toutes les faces, tels que leurs signes distinctifs, leurs relations réciproques soient intuitive-
ment données avec eux, comme quelque chose qui ne se laisse réduire par rien d’autre et
n’en a pas besoin” (D. Hilbert, Neubegründung der Mathematik [1922], quoted in Cavaillès
1938, 100).
6. This is the text we are commenting on: “Seules les théories plus petites que l’arithmétique,
c’est-à-dire les théories qu’on peut appeler quasi finies, peuvent être nomologiques: leur
développement est bien d’ordre combinatoire, leur domination par la seul considération
des axiomes effective. Mais avec l’infini commece la véritable mathématique.
L’incorporation d’une théorie à une théorie plus vaste est évidemment soumise à la seule
condition de non contradiction mais, en vertu du même résultat de Gödel, la non-
contradiction d’une théorie ne peut être démontrée qu’au sein d’une théorie plus puissante.
La démonstration garde son intérêt, qui est de concentrer sur un seul procédé, ou système
canonique de procédés, les doutes étalés sur une polymorphie indéterminée de procédés
enchevêtrables. Mais il n’y a plus cette assurance apodictique au départ. Il faut se confier au
procédé canonique, à l’itération indéfinie de son emploi. Ainsi l’enchaînement déductif
est-il essentiellement créateur des contenus qu’il atteint: la possibilité de rassembler à
l’origine quelques énoncés privilégiés est source d’illusion si l’on oublie les règles opéra-
toires qui seules leur donnent un sens. Les axiomatiques concrètes, comme celle de Hilbert
pour la géométrie, sont en partie responsables de l’erreur par leur référence à des notions
connues. Enlevés les indéterminés, point, droite, plan, entre, etc., les axiomes ont encore un
sens, un aspect d’assertion qui suggérait l’idée de définition exhaustive. Avec les axioma-
tiques abstraites apparaît en pleine lumière ce qui vaut pour les uns et les autres, savoir que
la seule réalité posée initialement et constituant l’unité du système est l’opération ou le
système d’opérations qui ont mission de fixer simultanément énoncé et règles. Mais ici
encore la définition n’est pas exhaustive: elle suppose—avec leurs caractères et leur résul-
tats—les opérations constitutives des systèmes antérieurs, elle appelle aussi d’autres
opérations qui fixent d’autres unités théoriques. Le corps d’une théorie est une certaine
homogénéité opératoire—que décrit la présentation axiomatique—mais lorsqu’elle em-
porte l’infini, l’itération et les complications fournissent des résultats et un système intel-
ligible de contenus impossibles à dominer et une nécessité interne l’oblige à se dépasser par
un élargissement, d’ailleurs imprévisible et qui n’apparaît élargissement qu’après coup. Il
n’y a pas plus de juxtaposition que de fixation initiale, c’est le corps entiers des mathéma-
tiques qui se développe d’un seul mouvement à travers étapes et sous formes diverses, c’est
lui également qui tout entier, y compris artifices techniques, accomplit ou non la même
fonction de connaissance” (1947, 73–74).
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The Spirit of the Time
Derrida’s Reading of Hegel in the 1964–65 Lecture Course
Peter Gratton
Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada
If there were a definition of différance, it would be precisely the limit, the inter-
ruption, the destruction of the Hegelian relève [aufgeben] wherever it operates.
What is at stake here is enormous.
—Jacques Derrida, Positions
Pure difference is not absolutely different (from nondifference). Hegel’s critique of

the concept of pure difference is for us here, doubtless, the most uncircumventable
theme. Hegel thought absolute difference, and showed that it can be pure only by
being impure.
—Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics”
THE SPECTER THAT HAUNTS ALL OF DERRIDA’S WORK IS THE SPECTER OF
Hegel’s Geist. Derrida considered Hegel as summing up the Western onto-

theological tradition but also as someone whose dialectic would always al-
49
50 The Spirit of the Time
ready outflank any full-frontal confrontation with his logic, since any coun-
termove would only be sublated (relève) by the dialectic itself. Like Foucault
and other readers of Hyppolite, Derrida argues that to think Western meta-
physics to its end is to presume that one’s move of opposition or critique
would already be a moment in the Hegelian system, and thus any philosopher
after Hegel must work through the fantasy of absolute systematicity. Taking
up Derrida’s reception of Hegel means considering how one speaks to a ghost
that haunts all of twentieth-century French philosophy after Kojève’s lectures
of the 1930s. And like the ghost that, as Derrida noted in Specters of Marx
(1994), disrupts any coherence to questioning its presence or absence, its
identity or heterogeneity, and so on, the identity of the Hegel whose specter
haunts Derrida’s works is multiple: his earliest writings, including his 1964–65
lecture course, which will be the focus of this essay, target Kojève’s anthropo-
centric version of Hegel, disrupt the sovereignty and partial reading of Ba-
taille’s Hegel, and finally take on the view of Hegelian “whole” informed by his
engagement with Hyppolite, with whom he had an intellectually close profes-
sional relationship in the 1960s. While Bataille and Kojève read Hegel, as did
Sartre and others, through the master-slave dialectic, Derrida joins Hyppolite
in privileging his writings on logic and history, all as part of an overall move
toward the antihumanism for which the sixties generation became known
(Hyppolite 1997, 177–78). But more importantly, Hegel became the lens
through which Derrida understood his own reading of Heidegger—a figure, as
is well known, whose reception in France changed radically not least due to
Derrida’s own writings in the 1960s. While Derrida’s 1964–65 lecture course
Heidegger: la question de l’Être et l’Histoire at the l’ENS-Ulm is largely dedi-
cated to Heidegger, it reveals how indebted “deconstruction,” a term used by
Derrida for the first time in these pages, is to thinking the relation between
Heideggerian “Destruktion” and Hegelian “Aufhebung.”1 In sum, deconstruc-
tion gets under way in Derrida’s thought by thinking the difference between
Hegelian and Heideggerian modes of thought—strikingly reading one in terms of
㛭 “The Ends of
the other throughout these lectures (and in “Ousia and Gramme,”
Man,” and other crucial early works). For Derrida, Hegel is not simply the
ultimate thinker of totalization and homogeneity—as, say, Jean-François Lyo-
tard would depict him in The Postmodern Condition (Lyotard 1984, 33–34)—
Peter Gratton 51
but is also the tradition’s preeminent thinker of difference and relationality.

While of course the difference between difference and identity is sublated
under identity in the Hegelian logic, Derrida recognizes Hegel, as he put in
famously in Of Grammatology, as the last philosopher of the book and the first
thinker of writing. “The horizon of absolute knowledge,” Derrida writes, “is the
effacement of writing in the logos . . . the reappropriation of difference” (Der-
rida 1976, 26). Nevertheless, “all that Hegel thought within this horizon, all that
is except eschatology”—which Derrida’s thinking of finitude must reject for
reasons discussed below, since any eschatology is a determination of the
future from the present—“may be reread as a meditation on writing” (26).
Thus, “Hegel is also the thinker of absolute difference” (26). In what follows, I
proceed in three phases: first, I detail Derrida’s main project in the 1964–65
lecture course, first going through his reading of Heidegger, then describing
how he follows on the heels of Heidegger’s own rendering of Hegel. Second, I
note the ways in which this Hegel becomes the term of art in Derrida’s early
and later writings for onto-theology, and the most thorough one at that. But
last, I move away from this early lecture course to discuss how Derrida dis-
places a certain Heideggerian version of Hegel, one who is too often only a
thinker of totality and presence. In this last section, I discuss how Derrida
reads through Hegel a thinking of time not subsumed under presence, one
that a reading of the Heideggerian type disallows, and that then places Hegel
as the hinge figure between (absolute) metaphysics and its yonder—a thinker,
yes, of totality (the book) but also of difference and dissemination, that is, a
thinker of writing and the trace.
Given at the time in which he was writing Of Grammatology (published in
1967), one can read through the 1964–65 lectures contemporary arguments
over the legacies of the three H’s (Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger), arguments
that are largely left in the background when Of Grammatology is published two
years later. The deep readings of the three on the meaning of history, the
question of the cloture of Western metaphysics, as well as their mutual inter-
relation are generally left aside and taken for granted in that crucial book, and
before long one is deep in the weeds of Levi-Strauss’s structuralism, Sau-
ssure’s accounts of signification, and Rousseau’s dangerous supplement. Be-
ginning readers thus have to rely on the introduction of Gayatri Spivak in the
English edition to paint just some of the background out of which Derrida’s
text is intervening. That Derrida at one point before 1967 considered publish-
ing the course (Janicaud 2001, 96) means perhaps a missed opportunity in the
reception of his work, since what was at stake in Of Grammatology and the
other works of 1967, Voice and Phenomenon and Writing and Difference, was
less the enunciation of a theory of texts, that is, a “literary theory” in the most
reduced sense, than an attempt to tease out central questions relating to
Heidegger’s task of a Destruktion of the history of ontology (with an emphasis
and interrogation of each one of these terms). This history of ontology is first
and foremost represented and offered by Hegel. I’m not denying the impor-
tance of semiology in Derrida’s early writings and teachings, but this part of
his thinking arose by critiquing those moves within structuralism and others
to remove from a given historicity a transcendental signified their works
should otherwise have disallowed, a move in these lectures he identifies also
as the metaphysical attempts of Hegel and Husserl to find an ahistorical
signified beyond temporalization and the structure of the trace (Derrida 2013,
226–27). What he aims to show is that Hegel’s eschatology is a move to a
presence that itself must be absolved from the movement of the dialectic and
historicity. “Every ontology,” Derrida writes, “has implicitly chosen as its guide
such and such a type of being without making its choice a theme or a prob-
lem,” including at times, Hegel’s (Derrida 2013, 123). Derrida’s early reception
in literary theory took up just one thread of a multifaceted trajectory, leaving
to the side his rereadings of classical questions concerning the meaning of
Being and the question of history that are central to his 1960s work (Gratton
2014, 201–15)—and deriving from Heidegger’s project of thinking Being as
time and Hegel’s attempt to think irreducible difference.
Given during his first year as caïman at l’ENS-Ulm beginning November 16,
1964 and ending nine classes later on March 29, 1965, Heidegger: la question de
l’Être et l’Histoire is important for considering the Derridean reception of
Hegel for at least four reasons: 1) Hegel and Heidegger’s writings had been
largely taken up within France—Hyppolite’s focus on the Logos and sense
notwithstanding—in terms of a vague anthropology on loan from selective
readings of the Phenomenology of Spirit and Being and Time, and Derrida’s
lectures look to sever Hegel and Heidegger from the violent readings of Kojève,
Peter Gratton 53
Sartre, and others (Derrida 2013, 283–84). 2) Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (1927)
suffered from an intermittent and incomplete set of translations since its
publication, which had its own mark on Heidegger’s reception in France.
Derrida’s lectures, during which he translated many German passages him-
self, aimed in part to re-introduce Heidegger to the French academy, reorient-
ing Heidegger studies away from the grips of existentialist renderings (e.g.,
Derrida spends little time on Dasein’s care structure from Division I of Sein
und Zeit) toward Heidegger’s Destruktion of the history of ontology and its
relation to the German Idealism represented by Hegel. Derrida will refuse as
misreadings attempts to create a mélange of Hegel and Heidegger in the
manner of Kojève and Sartre that only manages to repeat the dogmatic meta-
physical gestures critiqued by both Hegel and Heidegger (e.g., Derrida 2013,
139). 3) In light of his Destruktion of the history of ontology, Heidegger’s
reading of Hegel will be—both in the course and for the purposes of this
essay—crucial. It is certainly true that at times Hegel becomes in Derrida the
proper name for metaphysics tout court, and that the mere mention of his
name, say, in proximity to a discussion of Husserl is enough for the reader to
understand that Husserl was implicated in a metaphysics he presumed he had
surpassed (Derrida 2013, 20). This is also a maneuver he reproduces through-
out his career, for example, in aligning Heidegger to a certain Hegelianism,
such as from the very title forward in Of Spirit (1989). Yet we see through the
lectures and other early writings how he shifts crucial ways of receiving
Hegel’s writings on history. 4) Finally, we should note the politics of the ENS in
the mid-sixties. Althusser and his followers were returning to Spinoza to think
a Marxism unallied to the “power of the negative” found in the supposed
Hegelianism of Marx’s early writings—this matching a supposed “anti-
Hegelianism,” however ambiguous, of much 1960s French philosophy. In
striking passages, while not mentioning Althusser, Derrida argues that to
understand Marx’s work on labor, for example, one must return and reread
Hegel critically on precisely these points—not dismiss him (Derrida 2013,
286–88). Derrida’s long engagements with Hegel—he is either the subject of or
cited heavily in just about every essay Derrida published in the 1960s—show
the import of Hegelian negativity for deconstruction, however much that
went against a certain spirit of the time.
On the other hand, Derrida sets out to displace—one can think of Sartre’s
later work here in the Critique of Dialectic Reason—those who took Hegelian
totalization as providing a concrete telos to history the left should be looking
for. Against these supposed radical political programs, Derrida’s course
makes clear his view that the most radical dis-assembling of the history of
ontology and the latter-day politics to which it gave rise springs not from
reinvigorating a moribund Marxism or to dismiss dialectic and difference in
toto to interpolate class apparatuses. For Derrida, all the key terms thrown
around in that era, from “materialism” to “structure” to “metaphysics” to
“history” to “totalization” and so on, are to be rethought by way of a long
engagement and deconstruction of the Heideggerian Hegel (and vice versa).
Of course, much of the lectures are given over to step-by-step analyses of
Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, as well as ancillary writings up to the time in which
Derrida was lecturing. Derrida’s approach is to concentrate on those passages
in Heidegger that call for a rethinking of history and for reopening the ques-
tion of being—along with those passages that portend the foreclosure of a
once-promised third division. His reading of Heidegger is, for the most part,
sympathetic, and all of his important later readings of Heidegger, such as in
㛭 Of Spirit, and Aporias, among numerous other places,
“Ousia and Gramme,”
are set up here. Yet the text begins with a consideration of what “refutation”
means in light of taking up the legacy of a given thinker, especially as it
pertains to the writings of Hegel, given the work of Aufheben, which neither
refutes nor simply abandons any term or idea. That is, he is thinking of
Heidegger’s relation to the metaphysics represented by Hegel, noting that
neither simply affirming nor abandoning a term, as in Hegel, is of absolute
proximity to the Destruktion of the history of ontology in Heidegger’s work,
which must take on, in both senses of the phrase, a given conceptual legacy—
neither refuting metaphysics nor simply standing in opposition to it. For
Derrida, it is Hegel who sets up Heidegger’s discussions of the end of the West
and so on: “The philosophy of Hegel as last philosophy has been the philoso-
phy that has thought in itself the essence of the last philosophy in general, of
what the last would mean in philosophy” (Derrida 2013, 28), which is why
Hegel is invoked, Derrida argues, from the very first paragraph of Heidegger’s
magnum opus to its last pages. And it is why Hegel himself cannot be sublated
Peter Gratton 55
toward a “beyond” of metaphysics, to another last figure, not least since for
Derrida Hegel is the thinker of history and thus what any “beyond” would
mean. Rather Heidegger must, as the preface to Being and Time makes clear,
maintain a movement that neither strictly repeats Hegelianism nor leaves it
unscathed, producing a “trembling” that “says nothing else after the Hegelian,
that is to say, Occidental ontology that it is going to destroy. . . . [Heidegger]
does not propose another ontology, another theme, another metaphysics”—
here we read Derrida’s scathing criticisms of a whole generation of writing on
Heidegger, in France and beyond—“Heideggerian destruction is neither a
criticism of an error nor simply the negative exclusion of the past of philoso-
phy. It’s a destruction, that is to say, a deconstruction [c’est-à-dire, une décon-
struction], that is to say, de-structuration . . . in order to bring forth [Occiden-
tal ontology’s] structures, strata, and its system of sedimentation” (Derrida
2013, 34). Here in his first recorded use of this now historic term, Derrida links
“deconstruction” to a consideration of the “nothing” that Heidegger adds to
Hegel, arguing that it’s in the “difference between” the two that the questions
of the seminar take shape (30). For Derrida, Heidegger, while saying nothing
other than Hegel, will nevertheless have produced a “radical affirmation of an
essential link between being and history” (30). Of course, history as such was
never better formulated than in Hegel’s lectures on the topic, and no one
would deny that the epochality of Heidegger’s own history of ontology owes
much to Hegel’s own historicization (and eschatology) of philosophical
method. But Derrida will argue in the lectures that Hegel, like Husserl after
him, attempts to think absolute historicity while himself forcing a pivot out of
the stream of history to an eternal stance—a classical metaphysical move:
Ontology has always been constituted by a gesture of extraction [arrachement] from

historicity and from temporality, even for Hegel for whom the history of the manifes-
tation of an absolute and eternal concept, of a divine subjectivity which, in its origin
and in its end, appears to totalize infinitely its historicity, that is to say, live in the total
presence of being with itself, that is to say, in non-historicity. (Derrida 2013, 50)
Where Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit teases out the relation between Being and
history, Hegel’s mediation of both in terms of the concept means that he
“ultimately reduces the thought of being to the concept of being” and his
Idealism “determines the whole of being as free subjectivity (founded on
Cartesianism) and the volition of volition [volonté de la volonté]” (Derrida
2013, 47). For Heidegger, despite all manner of complications, these both
follow from Hegel’s elucidation of time as the “negation of the negation” in
Philosophy of Nature, part 2 of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences
(Hegel 2004, 34), as well as his view that “Hegel’s conception of time presents
the most radical way in which the ordinary understanding of time has been
given form conceptually,” and this thinking of time informs both his and
Derrida’s readings (Heidegger 1962, 482).
In § 82 of Sein und Zeit, Heidegger sets out to demonstrate that Hegel’s
view of time follows from the “vulgar” view on loan from a tradition dating at
least to Aristotle. But also true to Aristotle’s treatment of time, found in the
Physics, Hegel’s analysis of time has its focus in the philosophy of nature, a
crucial error, for Heidegger, since it will mean that Hegel cannot think of time
in terms of the ecstatic structure of Dasein, that is to say, he can only think
time in terms of the now points that have given us the ticktock of the not-so-
modern clock. The “negation of negation” of Hegel’s time means nothing
other than a “punctuality,” a spatialization of time in terms of a chain of
externally related “nows” that are “present to hand” (Heidegger 1962, 432). Put
more simply, the negation is the spatialization or separatedness of each now,
and the negation of the latter negation is the ordering of those now in a given
line. Hegel’s view of time would be precisely an abstraction—perhaps a repe-
tition of the very first abstraction that allowed concepts, as it were, to move
outside of time in the theoretical glance—from the ecstases of past and future
of the being-in-the-world of Dasein. Hegel writes: “Time, as the negative unity
of self-externality, is similarly an out-and-out abstract, ideal being. It is that
being which, inasmuch as it is, is not, and inasmuch as it is not, is; it is purely
Becoming intuited [das angeschaute Werden]” (Hegel 2004, 34). But as purely
intuited, as the nonsensuous sensuous, “in its Notion, time itself is eter-
nal . . . absolute Presence . . . The Idea, spirit transcends time because it is
itself the Notion of time; it is eternal, in and for itself, and it is not dragged into
the time process because it does not lose itself in one side of the process” (37).
In this way, Hegel will, on Heidegger’s view, depict Spirit as “falling into time”
Peter Gratton 57
(Heidegger 1962, 428), therefore understanding Spirit as having an external

relation to time, even as that relation is said to be the relation of Spirit to itself.
Spirit becomes concrete and enters into the finite world only as it becomes
revealed as a process in time, which in turn is understood only in terms of a
“world-time” leveled-out and fallen from the temporality of Dasein’s being-in-
the-world. For Heidegger, Spirit does not fall into time and thus provide for
the concreteness of Dasein’s factical existence. Rather, Dasein itself is what
falls from primordiality into the public time that Hegel in turn reifies into the
time of nature in the second volume of the Encyclopaedia.
At key points in the 1964–65 lecture course, Derrida appears to repeat this
reading of Hegel, especially Heidegger’s view that Hegelianism is but a Carte-
sianism writ large. Heidegger is thus guilty of isolating but one moment in a
system that is itself an aufheben of another opposition, in some sense reifying
and abstracting a moment that is part of a developmental system—a reading
as one-sided as those that think all human relations in Hegel through the
master-slave dialectic. In short if we abstract one moment—however abstract
it calls itself, as Hegel does about time—we play into the (re)presentational
logic Heidegger is calling into question in the first place. “Metaphysics,” Der-
rida writes, “determines the world as an object and therefore as available
[disponible] for an action and a conception” (Derrida 2013, 200). In the lecture
course, Derrida leaves open whether there is a Hegel beyond the “literal and
conventional” (59), one who is not just the thinker of the nonhistorical becom-
ing of the Spirit to itself as absolute knowing and substance, of pure presence,
that is, the God of Hegel’s History lectures. In this way, Derrida will critique, as
he does Michel Henry (271), Husserl (among many places, 193), and at points
Heidegger as producing “Hegelian conclusions,” despite their supposed criti-
cisms, when they recommence his thinking of the self-present auto-affection
of the being for itself (268). This Hegelianism is nothing other than a synonym
for the metaphysics of presence, based on the supposition of a time beyond
time, of the ever presence of an eternity of which the passing “now” is but a
shadow. This thinking of presence allows Hegel to think the absolute avail-
ability of being since the past is always approachable only from the present—
and so too the future. Against this, Derrida’s whole thinking of the trace is
precisely of a past that can never be made present (Derrida 1982a, 21). Yet for
Hegel, “there is only historicity inasmuch as the past and the origin can be
rendered present . . . Presence would be therefore the condition of historicity
and its form” (Derrida 2013, 211). This metaphysics of presence would be part
of a desire for seizing all, of all being available to Spirit, even its death. But,
“the certitude of the living present, as the absolute form of experience and
absolute source of meaning [sens], presupposes as such the neutralization
of my birth and my death. . . . The Present is by essence what could never
end. It is in-itself ahistorical” (214). Thus absolute knowing, as the telos of
Hegelian thought, would be a totalization that is less spatial than tempo-
ral—that is, an all-at-once in the eternal moment of absolute availability of
one and all, beyond or before all death, thus obliterating death in the first
and last moment of philosophy (224). “In spite of the immense Hegelian
revolution,” Derrida writes, “to think of death within the horizon of the
infinite and presence [la parousie] in an absolute fashion, which is pure
life” is a work that “sublimates death” (292).
What one could oppose to the presence of the now in time would be a
thinking based on its temporal modification, the eternal presence outside of
time of ahistoricity—a move familiar since Plato, which uses the inherent
contradictions of positing the now to oppose it to the eternity of pure presence
beyond time. But is there another course? What could one oppose to this false
option given by the metaphysics of presence, if the evidence of evidence, its
temporal mode, has always been a presence-to? What needs to be countered
to this self-evident temporal form, again this “evidence of evidence,” is not
“another form of evidence,” which could only be metaphysical, Derrida ar-
gues, but “historicity itself” (2013, 213). But this historicity would not be a
“becoming” (145), which itself would be a form of temporalization, suggesting
a continuity—say, in the form of a line—that can always be represented and is,
of course, the central moment in the Hegelian dialectic, since it is the very
form of movement from being to nothingness, from one thing to another. For
Derrida, one would have to think a historicity that would involve a past that
could not be made present—and also a future beyond the future present. Such
is the consideration of the trace structure of Derrida’s work from these lec-
tures to his last writings.
Peter Gratton 59
Since the trace is not a presence but the simulacrum of a presence that
dislocates itself, displaces itself, refers itself, it properly has no site—erasure
belongs to its structure [emphasis mine; we will see how Derrida reads this
through Hegel in a moment]. And only the erasure which must always able to
overtake it (without which it would not be a trace but an indestructible and
monumental substance), but also the erasure which constitutes it from the
outset as a trace. . . . The paradox of such a structure, in the language of
metaphysics, is an inversion of metaphysical concepts, which produces the
following effect: the present becomes the sign of the sign, the trace of the trace.
(Derrida 1982a, 24)
In almost a “somnambulant style,” one could, Derrida warns, repeat a

“powerless” and “juvenile” style of aggression found too often with regard to
metaphysics and transcendental phenomenology. But this move, in which
one considers one’s “privilege” that one is in a Western epoch that is closing in
on itself and opening onto something else, is precisely “the Hegelian moment”
and gesture (Derrida 2013, 228). This would be Derrida’s critique of all consid-
erations of postmodernity, whose very name suggests one can posit oneself as
both within a given epoch (the modern, the metaphysical, and so on) and
erase that very historicity to think some beyond glimmering over the horizon
(231).
Soliciting Hegel would not seek merely to move aside his work and all that
it represents but would pay attention to those moments where Hegel unworks
the very systematicity for which he is the proper name—where his famed
“presuppositionless” is taken to its end to unground any metaphysical foun-
dation. To put it another way, to allow Hegel to be the last metaphysical
thinker, to assume his absolute systematicity that one is critiquing, is to give a
certain Hegel the final victory, a point, for example, that underlies Derrida’s
reading of Hegel’s early writings on Christianity and the family in Glas (1973).
One then merely represents oneself as an opponent that is outside a “whole”
that would be Hegelian thought, reifying what was supposed to be in conten-
tion, and thus one would make of Hegel merely a repeater of what has been
vulgar throughout the West, specifically its concept of time (Derrida 2013,
317–19). Beyond this vulgar Hegel is a reading of the Derridean type, one that,
for example, Jean-Luc Nancy, who studied Hegel with Derrida, would find in
The Restlessness of the Negative while attuned to Hegel’s “infinite negativity of
the present,” and Catherine Malabou (1996), another student of Derrida, finds
in his notion of plasticity (Nancy 2002, 9).
It is precisely the question of vulgarity that Derrida takes up in “Ousia and
㛭 based, it’s clear, in large part on the lectures discussed above.
Gramme,”
Published first in 1968 and collected in Margins of Philosophy, Derrida’s essay
concentrates on the longest footnote in Sein und Zeit, from § 82, where
Heidegger encircles Hegel within a thinking of time going back to Aristotle.
㛭 is given over to a complex reading of Aristotle’s
Much of “Ousia and Gramme”
Physics (IV 10–14), as Derrida questions the distinction made by Heidegger
between a “vulgar” concept of time and a primordial temporality from which
it has fallen. In the vulgar concept of time, time comes as a repetition of nows as
Dasein is lost in its very concerns, in the “They” of everydayness. As he notes both
㛭 there can be no concept of the fall
in the lecture course and “Ousia and Gramme,”
outside an “ethico-theological orb” (Derrida 1982b, 45), but more to the point,
Derrida argues that any “concept of time belongs in all its aspects to meta-
physics [since] it names the domination of presence” (63), and for similar
reasons he will argue that he will not provide another ontology in the 1964–65
course but rather extend its deconstruction (Derrida 2013, 1–3). The target of
Derrida’s reading is less concerned with Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle than
Heidegger’s reading of Hegel, whom Heidegger had said merely repeated and
“paraphrased” Aristotle’s vulgarism of time—thus opening Heidegger up for a
critique of his notion of primordial time as well as what it means to read Hegel
differentially. Citing key passages from Hegel in the longest footnotes in “Ousia
㛭 Derrida notes that one can both “confirm” and “challenge” the
and Gramme,”
interpretation of Hegel in Sein und Zeit.
Derrida writes that Heidegger’s reading is based only on Hegel’s philoso-
phy of nature, as if that view of time could pass “unchanged into a ‘philosophy
of spirit’ or into a ‘philosophy of history’” (1982b, 46 n. 22). As Derrida notes—
in passages, admittedly, as opaque as any in his early writings, though filled in
now by relevant discussions in the lecture course—one can only do so by way
of a vulgar reading of Hegel himself: “time is also this passage” from nature to
history or spirit, since “time” is the “first relation of nature itself, the first
Peter Gratton 61
emergence of its for-itself, spirit relating itself to itself” (43), that is, time is the
self-externalization, on Hegel’s account, of any thing (say nature) from itself.
What Heidegger writes about Hegel’s view of time is “of limited pertinence due
to the relevant (cf. aufheben) structure of the relations between nature and
non-nature in speculative dialectics” (43). There is no simple nature and
therefore “time” (of nature) in Hegel, since “nature is outside spirit itself, as the
position of its proper being-outside itself” (43). Moreover, as the index of
exteriority as such, “at each stage of the negation, each time that the Aufhe-
bung produced the truth of the previous determination, time was requisite”
(42), even if Hegel were given, as he does in the Philosophy of Nature, to equate
the natural with time and the spiritual with the eternal in a Platonist trope
(Hegel 2004, 35). One cannot think, then, dialectics without the differential
structure of time and the trace.
Let me cite where Derrida both moves near and far from Heidegger’s
㛭
reading of Hegel in “Ousia and Gramme”:
Hegel calls the telos that puts movement in motion, and that orients becoming
toward itself, the absolute concept or subject. The transformation of parousia
in self-presence, and the transformation of the supreme being into a subject
thinking itself, does not interrupt the fundamental tradition of Aristotelian-
ism. The concept as absolute subjectivity itself thinks itself, is for itself and
near itself, has no exterior, and it assembles, erasing them, its time and its
difference in self-presence. (Derrida 1982b, 52)
In this way, Derrida writes in a footnote attached to the above, “if time has
a meaning in general, it is difficult to see how it could be extracted from
onto-theo-teleology” as in Hegel (53 n. 32). Because time means ultimately,
in metaphysics, its erasure, it “has been suppressed at the moment one
asks the question of its meaning, when one relates it to appearing, truth,
presence, or essence in general” (52, n. 32). If the meaning of time is its
presence outside of time—here, we can think in everyday terms of its
reducibility to a repeatable, eternal form: circle, line, point—then time is
only realized in its self-erasure; it can only be thought, that is brought
within the concept, as a “negative unity of self-externality.” As Hegel
writes, “It is that being which, inasmuch as it is, is not, and inasmuch as it
is not, is,” a “nonsensuous sensuousness,” and “empty intuition,” and so on
(Hegel 2004, 34). As Derrida rightly puts it, “The question asked at this
moment is that of time’s realization,” that is, time’s reality (or coming to
reality) outside a given concept, which can only be thought within a Hegelian
milieu, however, in which “being outside oneself,” for example, has any mean-
ing. Derrida continues: “Perhaps this is why there is no other possible answer
to the question or the meaning of Being of time [which had been, recall, the
entire project of Heidegger’s followed in Derrida’s 1964–65 lecture course]
than the one given at the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit: time is that which
erases [tilgt] time” (Derrida 1982b, 53 n. 32). This erasure, though, is also a
“writing which gives time to be read, and maintains it in suppressing it” (53 n.
32). But by erasing time while writing it, the dialectic then, like the writing of
㛭 all the theology and
the trace in Derrida’s works, upsets any telos or arche,
teleology and all that a certain Hegel would be said to represent, even if, in the
end, time, differentiation, and the becoming-space of externalization that is
negativity itself could no longer be represented. Ultimately this marks a cru-
cial place of incursion by Derrida into Hyppolite’s rendering of Hegel. Recall
that for Hyppolite, Hegel’s key move is to render the absolute sensible—as
opposed, say, to Schelling’s prius, which must always be before intelligibility—
and also to claim that language is the very space of the Logos. This is a point
that Derrida makes central in the 1964–65 lectures, noting that both in Hegel
and Heidegger the coming to language of sense, of meaning, is the very place of
historicity, a point made by Hyppolite as well, and he weds Heidegger’s ac-
count of the “house of being” to Hegel’s account of the logos (Derrida 2013,
86–88), even if Heidegger himself reduces Hegel’s dialectic to a question of
presence to consciousness (222–23). Hyppolite writes:
The dialectical demonstration is intimately united to the reality that inter-

prets itself and reflects itself in meaningful language . . . Actuality understand-
ing itself and expressing itself as human language is what Hegel calls the
concept or sense already immanent to the being of absolute knowl-
edge. . . . Human language, the Logos, is this reflection of being into itself
which always leads back to being, which always closes back on itself indefi-
Peter Gratton 63
nitely, without ever positing or postulating a transcendence distinct from this

internal [read: to the system, not to an individual subject] reflection. (Hyppo-
lite 1997, 4)
In sum, then, “human language” is the “very medium of the dialectic”

(6), or as Derrida puts in his own reading of Hegel and Heidegger, “there is
no historicity without language” (Derrida 2013, 83). Hyppolite’s formula-
tion, of course, would be crucial to structuralism and poststructuralism to
follow, since historical instantiations of spirit and the sense of being are
productive of given forms of specific individual consciousnesses—against,
say, the voluntarist conceptions of Sartre—or rather, there is no language
without sense and vice versa (Hyppolite 1997, 21). Derrida’s intervention, at
this point, is to ask after the question of language and the privileging of the
presence of the speaking subject that is the linguistic analog of the privileging
of temporal presence, as Heidegger reads Hegel (Derrida 2013, 247, 320). If
language, as Derrida argues, is presuppositionless—without an outside guar-
antor, or transcendental signified—then one should wed this account to the
presuppositionlessness of Hegel’s dialectic, no longer present to an “outside”
of a given subject or eternal being. In this way, the dialectic becomes, as with
Saussurean semiology, a thinking of difference that is always related nega-
tively to every other moment of the system, a groundless ground trembling at
its nonexit from metaphysics, while testifying to its very limit. This means not
inventing, as Derrida makes clear in the 1964–65 lecture course and in “Ousia
㛭 another thinking of time, since “time” itself, as Hegel demon-
and Gramme,”
strates, only has a meaning “within” its self-differentiation from the trace of
metaphysical determinants that give it sense in the first place. Here we can
link, then, the erasure of time in the writing of Hegel to what Derrida describes
above as the writing and erasure of the trace: the absolute is the presence/
absence of the becoming-space of time (and vice versa), where writing is what
Jean-Luc Nancy calls excription (Nancy 2008, 17–19), a becoming and writing
of sense in the Derridean meaning of écriture not present to a given being (e.g.,
the human) and not precisely present in the temporal sense either. This is not
a “phantom of the ineffable,” as Hyppolite puts it, but the nonpresent logic of
différance tracing itself out in the thought of Derrida and Hegel. In this way, no
system, even Hegel’s, can be presented “all-at-once,” here and now, and thus
available present to hand, as Heidegger wished to do. Thus it awaits its
invention and future beyond the Hegelian holisms of the oft-cited caricature.
NOTES
1. In his translation of Heidegger’s Destruktion, Derrida notes in the lectures his preference for
solliciter to translate this notion, derived from the Latin solus (whole) and ciere (to move) to
mean to make an entire thing tremble, as in the Western tradition read through his work.
See Derrida (1982a, 21; and 2013, 209).
REFERENCES
Derrida, J. 1973. Glas, trans. J. P. Leavey and R. Rand. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1990.
. 1976. Of Grammatology, trans. G. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
. 1978. Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas. In
Writing and Difference, 79–153. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
. 1981. Positions, trans. A. Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
. 1982a. Différance. In Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass, 1–28. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
㛭
. 1982b. Ousia and Gramme. In Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass, 29–68. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
. 1982c. The Ends of Man. In Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass, 109–36. Chicago:
. 1989. Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby.
. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New
International, trans. P. Kamuf. New York: Routledge.
. 2013. Heidegger: la question de l’Être et l’Histoire: Cours de l’ENS-Ulm 1964–1965, ed. T.
Dutoit. Paris: Galilée.
Gratton, Peter. 2014. Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects. London: Bloomsbury.
Hegel, G. W. F. 2004. Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Part 2, Philosophy of Nature,
trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Heidegger, M. 1962. Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. San Francisco:
Harper Collins.
Hyppolite, J. 1997. Logic and Existence, trans. L. Lawlor and A. Sen. Albany: State University of
New York Press.
Janicaud, D. 2001. Heidegger en France. Paris: A. Michel.
Peter Gratton 65
Lyotard, J.-F. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Malabou, C. 1996. L’avenir de Hegel: plasticité, temporalité, dialectique. Paris: J. Vrin.
Nancy, J.-L. 2002. Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, trans. J. E. Smith and S. Miller.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
. 2008. Corpus, trans. R. Rand. New York: Fordham University Press.
Of Seminal Differance
Dissemination and Philosophy of Nature
Mauro Senatore
Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile
If it is precisely at this point that we recall that Artaud died of cancer of the
rectum, we do not do so in order to have the exception prove the rule, but because
we think that the status (still to be found) of this remark, and of other similar ones,
must not be that of the so-called “biographical reference.” The new status—to be
found—is that of the relations between existence and the text, between these two
forms of textuality and the generalized writing within whose play they are articulated.
—J. Derrida, Writing and Difference (1978, 420)
THE SEED AND THE GENETIC PROGRAM
In the final pages of the preface to Dissemination (1972), entitled

“Outwork. Prefaces,” drawing attention to Novalis’s fragmentary project of
Encyclopedia, Jacques Derrida appeals to the relation between the textual
preface and the Book as follows: “The question of the genetic pro-gram or the
67
68 Of Seminal Differance
textual preface can no longer be eluded. Which does not mean that Novalis
does not in the final analysis reinstall [rengainera] the seed in the logos sper-
matikos of philosophy” (Derrida 1981a, 66).1 Hence, the genetic program and
the seed (or the seminal differance).2 How can we think of the seed, as the
genetic program in general, as the minimal structure of genesis, in a fashion
that is altogether different from the logos spermatikos of philosophy? These
are the stakes of the reading of Derrida’s early texts that I am attempting to
develop here.
In the footnote to the quoted passage Derrida demarcates dissemination
from the philosophy of the seed as it is analyzed by Gaston Bachelard in The
Formation of the Scientific Mind (1938) by referring the former back to the
project of conceiving of the program (namely, the possibility of inscription in
general) as the structure of genesis in general, which is announced at the
beginning of Of Grammatology (1967). Derrida writes:
It is for this reason that the philosophy of the seed, conceived as an enrichment
in the return-to-self, is always substantialist, and also derives from a romantic
metaphorism and a myth of semantic depth, from that ideology which Bache-
lard analyzes (when he isn’t giving in to it himself) in La formation de l’ésprit
scientifique, in reference to sperm and gold. (A seminal differance: not only the
seed, but the egg.) The treatment which they undergo in dissemination should
break away from all mythological panspermism and all alchemical metallurgy.
It is rather a question of broaching an articulation with the movement of
genetic science and with the genetic movement of science, wherever science
should take into account, more than metaphorically, the problems of writing
and difference, of seminal differance (cf. Of Grammatology, p. 9). Elliptically,
we cite this sentence by Freud, which should always be kept in mind [dont il ne
faut perdre le cap]: “All our provisional ideas in psychology will presumably
some day be based on an organic substructure” (“On Narcissism: An Introduc-
tion,” in Standard Edition, trans. James Strachey, [London: Hogarth Press,
1957], XIV, 78). (Derrida 1981a, 50)
Chapter 10 of The Formation of the Scientific Mind gives an exemplary account

of the ideology evoked by Derrida, that of a “substantial panspermy” by which
Mauro Senatore 69
the diverse seeds refer to “a unique principle,” that is, the “universal seed”
(Bachelard 2002, 203–4). It would be possible to demonstrate that, for Der-
rida, this ideology is at work in philosophy itself, at least from Plato to Hegel.
For instance, one may recall the relation between the father and the instance
of the logos as it is analyzed in the section of “Plato’s Pharmacy” (1968) entitled
“The Father of Logos.”3 For a reading of Hegel, I refer to Derrida’s engagement
with the final sections of the Philosophy of Nature in Glas (1974) in the follow-
ing pages.
Dissemination breaks with the logos spermatikos of philosophy insofar as
it brings to fulfillment the grammatological project of thinking the genetic
program in general, which would explain—more than metaphorically—the
genesis of sense in general, from the properly called genetic program within
the living cell to the program of the cybernetic machine.4 Derrida conjures up
the initial section of Of Grammatology, entitled “The Program,” in which he
understands the program itself “as the medium, or the irreducible atom, of the
arche-synthesis in general, of what one must forbid oneself to define within
the system of oppositions of metaphysics, of what consequently one should
not even call experience in general, that is to say the origin of meaning in
general” (Derrida 1974, 9). In dissemination, the seed (or seminal differance)
consists in the program, in the genetic program in general. This relation
between the seed and the program is considered across Derrida’s early writ-
ings since “Force and Signification” (1963). One may reread the entire essay as
an attempt to rethink the inscription as the structure of the most general
genesis of sense, that is, of engendering in general.5 Finally, the footnote ends
with an elliptical reference to Freud that, on my reading, insists on the more-
than-metaphorical relation between the grammatological project of the ge-
netic program in general and the concepts of the seed and the program.
Derrida seems to suggest that the properly called genetic program could be
taken as the required, organic support provided by contemporary biology to
the tentative, grammatological concept of inscription.6
In the following pages of the preface, Derrida sketches out a thought of the
self-explanation of dissemination. Again, he marks a rupture with the logos
spermatikos that unfolds itself in the Book’s reappropriation of its genetic
program (textual preface, signifying precipitation, heterological effraction,
seminal differance, etc.) and, thus, in its self-reappropriation and full pres-
ence. “It is a Bible, then,” he observes “as seminal reason explaining itself,
ambitious to render an exhaustive account, one with nothing left out, of its
own genetic production, its order and usage. (Dissemination also explains
itself (‘the apparatus explains itself’) but quite differently” (Derrida 1981a, 52).
One cannot think of this self-explanation in light of the logos spermatikos
(self-return and substantialism). One must engage with the question of the
genetic program, that is, of seminal differance, in an altogether other fashion.
The seed displays a programmatic structure that cannot be understood from
a formalistic perspective insofar as it does not close upon itself—it is some-
how infinite or broken—but not in that it is reappropriated by the book.
Derrida continues between parentheses:
As the heterogeneity and absolute exteriority of the seed, seminal differance

does constitute itself into a program, but it is a program that cannot be
formalized. For reasons that can be formalized. The infinity of its code, its rift
[sa rupture], then, does not take a form saturated with self-presence [la forme
saturée de la presence à soi] in the encyclopedic circle. It is attached, so to
speak, to the incessant falling of a supplement to the code [supplement de code].
Formalism no longer fails before an empirical richness but before a queue or
tail. Whose self-bite [se-mordre] is neither specular nor symbolic). (Derrida
1981a, 52)
We can find here the formalization of the genetic program in general. The
seed-program (for instance, the properly called genetic program) constitutes
its own code in an unpredictable fashion, and, thus, is absolutely self-
referential, idiomatic, untranslatable. However, at the same time, it must refer
to another seed insofar as it retains the element—in the terminology of Of
Grammatology—the “space of inscription,” “the opening to the emission and
to the spatial distribution of the signs,” “the regulated play of differences,”
differance itself,7 that permits its translation into another code and, thus, the
production of another seed (for instance, the translation of the genetic pro-
gram into the synthesis of proteins). One can wonder if Derrida is not implic-
itly pointing to an organic and biological support for the self-explanation of
Mauro Senatore 71
dissemination: what is this queue that prevents the seed-program to return to

itself and, thus, stands for differance?8 Dissemination is the formalization of
the structure of the seed-program as open and determinate at once, and, thus,
as unable to refer only to itself, like a seminal reason.9
THE GERM OF DEATH
Dissemination is the achievement of grammatology to the extent that the

seed-program accounts for the minimal structure of genesis. It is from this
perspective that I propose to read Derrida’s explicit confrontation with He-
gel’s philosophy of nature in Glas. I refer to his commentary on the last
sections of the Jena Philosophy of Nature (JPN), 1805–6, and of the third edition
of the Philosophy of Nature of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences (EPN),
1817–30, those of the animal organic dedicated to the generic process, which
mark the transition from nature to spirit and, thus, the accomplishment of the
concept of the philosophy of nature. At the very beginning of his commentary,
Derrida illustrates that concept by presenting the relation between nature
and the idea in terms that resonate with the relation between genetic produc-
tion and logos spermatikos. Pushing this analogy further, one might anticipate
that the relation nature/idea (engendering in general and self-engendering, as
we will see) is precisely what is at stake in the ineludible question of the
genetic program. But let me first read Derrida’s exordium:
Consciousness is the Idea’s or absolute being’s return to self. Absolute being

takes itself back, it is sich zurücknehmend, it retracts itself and contracts itself,
reassumes and reassembles itself, surrounds and envelops itself with itself
after its death in nature, after it lost itself, “fell,” Hegel literally says, outside
itself (in)to nature. The philosophy of nature is the system of this fall [chute]
and this dissociation in(to) exteriority. The philosophy of spirit is the system of
the relief of the idea that calls and thinks itself in the ideal element of univer-
sality. (Derrida 1986, 108)
Derrida explains that “the transition [from nature to spirit] signifying violent
auto-destruction and passage to the opposite, the relief of the natural life
in(to) spiritual life necessarily comes about through disease and death” (Der-
rida 1986, 108). He refers to the final paragraphs of the final chapter of JPN in
which Hegel conceives of the disease of the animal as the operation of transi-
tion. The emphasis is put on the account of disease as “dissolution of the
whole” (Auflosung des Ganzen), “negative force” (negative Kraft, Hegel 1987,
167), and “critical dissociation” (kritische Ausscheiden, 168). Derrida speaks of
the disease as “dissolution of natural [that is, a little below, ‘biological’] life”
and “dissociation of the natural organization,” in which “the spirit reveals
itself” (Derrida 1986, 108–9). Therefore, the condition of transition and, thus,
of the self-return of the spirit is the destruction of biological and natural
organization. Here I recall Derrida’s reading of Artaud’s thought of the organic
differentiation in “La Parole Soufflée” (1965), in which the “organization” is
seen at the same time as “the membering and the dismembering of my (body)
proper” (Derrida 1978, 234, translation modified). For Derrida’s Artaud, the
reappropriation of my body requires “the reduction of the organic structure”
(235). One might ask whether the concept of the philosophy of nature, of the
reduction of natural and biological life, underlies this thought and, more
generally, a certain metaphysics of life in Artaud.10
The operation of transition is identical in EPN, the last sections of which
are equally devoted to disease and death. “This joint [conjuncture] will assure,
in the circle of the Encyclopedia, the circle itself, the return to the philosophy of
spirit,” Derrida remarks (Derrida 1986, 109). Therefore, the self-return of the
spirit in the encyclopedic circle is precisely at play when nature, that is, the
genetic program in general, destroys itself. Here the reading of the last sec-
tions of the organic, which are grouped under the heading of “The Process of
the Genus” (§§ 367–75), begins. Paraphrasing the opening section of this part
of the organic, Derrida presents the genus as the simple universality that is
close to itself within each singular subject and, thus, aims at removing the
originary separation in which it produces itself (and from which the division
arises) and at returning to itself through the negation of the natural living
being. He remarks on the constitutive trait of separation and on the fragmen-
tation that derives from it by writing about “the necessary differentiation of
the genus” (Derrida 1986, 109). The text reads:
Mauro Senatore 73
Genus designates the simple unity that remains (close) by itself in each singu-
lar subject, in each representative or example of itself. But as this simple
universality is produced in judgment, in the primordial separation (Urteil), it
tends to go out of itself in order to escape morseling, division, and to find, meet
itself again back home, as subjective universality. This process of reassem-
bling, of regrouping, denies the natural universality that tends to lose itself and
divide itself. The natural living one must then die. (Derrida 1986, 109)11
In the addition to the section, Hegel points out that, since “the genus is related
to the individual in a variety of ways,” the genus-process takes on different
forms or processes (division into species; sex-relation; disease and natural
death) that amount to “the different ways in which the living creature meets
its death” (Hegel 1970, 411). In the first case, the genus is divided into species
that distinguish themselves the one from the other through their reciprocal
negation.12 Derrida explains that, in this case, “the genus produces itself
through its violent auto-destruction” (Derrida 1986, 126). However, the genus
is not only a hostile relation between singularities but also the positive rela-
tion of the singularity with itself, which is called sex-relation. As Hegel puts it,
“the genus is also an essentially affirmative relation of the singularity to itself
in it; so that while the latter, as an individual, excludes another individual, it
continues itself in this other and in this other feels its own self” (Hegel 1970,
411).13 Sex-relation consists of the following moments: (a) it begins with a
“need” and a “feeling of lack” because of the originary and constitutive sepa-
ration between the singular individual and the genus immanent in it; (b) the
genus operates in the individual singular as a tension to resolve its inadequa-
tion and, thus, as a striving to integrate itself with the genus, to close the latter
with itself and bring it into existence; (c) the accomplishment of this opera-
tion is copulation (Begattung).14 In paraphrasing the description of copulation,
Derrida anticipates the result of sex-relation, that is, the originary separation
and the constitutive self-inequality of the genus. “In the same stroke,” he
observes, “pressure [la poussée] tends to accomplish just what it strictly re-
duces, the gap of the individual to the genus, of genus to itself in the individual,
the Urteil, the primordial division and judgment” (Derrida 1986, 110).
A long addition follows the section of EPN dedicated to sex-relation. “In it

Hegel treats of the sexual difference” (Derrida 1986, 110), Derrida points out.
Hegel explains that the union of sexes, or copulation, consists in the develop-
ment of the simple universality that is implicit in them, the genus itself, and,
thus, in the highest degree of universality an animal can feel. However, this
universality neither becomes the object of a theoretical intuition such as
thought or consciousness nor does the animal reach the free existence of the
spirit. The addition explains:
The process consists in this, that they become in reality what they are in
themselves, namely, one genus, the same subjective vitality. Here the Idea of
Nature is actual in the male and female couple; their identity and their being-
for-self, which up till now were only for us in our reflection, are now, in the
infinite reflection into self of the two sexes felt by themselves. This feeling of
universality is the highest to which the animal can attain; but its concrete
universality never becomes for it a theoretical object of intuition: else it would
be Thought, Consciousness, in which alone the genus attains a free existence.
The contradiction is therefore, that the universality of the genus, the identity
of individuals is distinct from their particular individuality; the individual is
only one of two, and does not exist as unity but only as a singular. The activity
of the animal is to sublate this difference. (Hegel 1970, 412)
Derrida’s reading focuses on the contradiction brought to light by Hegel at the

end of the passage. That contradiction has to do with sexual difference (“in-
herent in the difference of sexes,” Derrida notes) insofar as the universality of
the genus, which is the same as the identity of the individuals, because of the
primordial separation, is distinct from the particular individuality, that is, one
of the two, or a (sexually differentiated) singularity. As Derrida observes,
sexual difference and the contradiction inherent in it are a constitutive trait of
the primordial separation. “Sexual difference opposes unity to singularity and
thereby introduces contradiction into genus or into the process of Urteil, into
what produces and lets itself be constituted by this contradiction” (Derrida
1986, 111). Through copulation the animal relieves the difference.15 In the
following section dedicated to sex-relation, Hegel explains that the “product”
Mauro Senatore 75
of copulation (as “the negative identity of the differentiated individuals”) is

the “realized genus” and, thus, “an asexual life” (Hegel 1970, 414), namely, the
Aufhebung of the contradiction brought about by sexual difference. However,
this occurs only in principle, he adds, because “the product . . . is itself an
immediate singular, destined to develop into the same natural individuality,
into the same difference and perishable existence” (I emphasize the “and” that
accounts for the irreducible articulation of sexual difference and natural or
biological life) (414). From this perspective, the generic process develops
through a “spurious infinite process” without being able to liberate itself from
its primordial and constitutive separation. In the addition to the section,
Hegel demarcates the genus from the spirit that “preserves itself” and “exists
in and for itself in its eternity” (414). Therefore, the very concept of the philos-
ophy of nature, that is, the transition from natural and biological life to
spiritual life, implies the liberation from the sex-relation inherent in the
primordial process of Urteil and the related differentiation. Spirit must repro-
duce itself by itself, like the logos spermatikos.
After the sections on the division into species and sex-relation, Hegel
proceeds to analyze the third form of genus-process and, thus, the third way in
which the animal dies and the transition from nature to spirit occurs. “An-
other negativity works (over) the indefinite reproduction of the genus, the
nonhistoricity and the faulty infinite of natural life,” Derrida notes. “The genus
observes itself only through the decline and the death of individuals: old age,
disease and spontaneous death” (Derrida 1986, 115). In what follows, I focus on
Hegel’s account of the natural death of natural life and on Derrida’s remarks
on it. Hegel’s argument is that, apart from the inequalities caused by disease,
there is a self-inequality of the animal that cannot be overcome—the opposi-
tion between implicit universality and natural singularity, sexual difference,
its very being natural, and so forth—and that operates as a negativity within
the animal itself. The text reads:
The animal, in overcoming and ridding itself of particular inadequacies, does

not put an end to the general inadequacy which is inherent in it, namely, that
its Idea is only the immediate Idea, that, as animal, it stands within Nature, and
its subjectivity is only implicitly the Notion but is not for its own self the Notion.
The inner universality therefore remains opposed to the natural singularity of

the living being as the negative power from which the animal suffers violence
and perishes, because natural existence (Dasein) as such does not itself con-
tain this universality and is not therefore the reality which corresponds to it.
(Hegel 1970, 440)
Therefore, as Hegel explains in the addition, the “necessity of death” does not
lie on a particular cause but on the “necessity of the transition of individuality
into universality” the genus-process consists in (Hegel 1970, 441).16 Natural
and biological life must die because of the constitutive self-inequality that
works in it like spirit, like its own essence or truth. Following the Hegelian
argument, Derrida concludes that there is a natural death of natural life and
gives it the name of classification. “There is natural death,” he writes, “it is
inevitable for natural life, since it produces itself in finite individual totalities.
These totalities are inadequate to the universal genus and they die from this.
Death is this inadequation of the individual to generality: death is the classifi-
cation itself, life’s inequality to (it)self [l’inegalité à soi de la vie]” (Derrida 1986,
116). Permit me to linger for a while on this passage and, in particular, on the
emphasized concept of classification. Hegel treats classification in the Re-
mark and the addition that follow the section on the particularization of
genus into species. It is understood as a main concern of zoology that searches
for “sure and simple signs of classes, orders, etc., of animals [and, thus, as he
explains a sentence below, of “artificial systems”] for the purpose of a subjec-
tive recognition of them” (Derrida 1986, 423). However, classification is a
difficult task, Hegel explains, to the extent that nature is the self-externality of
the idea and, thus, the existence of the idea in nature is determined by mani-
fold conditions and circumstances and can present itself in the most inade-
quate forms.17
In Derrida’s quoted passage classification has to do with the self-
inequality of natural and biological life, the constitutive process of Urteil,
the inherent sexual difference, and the further differentiation that follows
from it. I propose to reconsider the concept in light of its occurrence in Of
Grammatology: in particular, I refer to the treatment of classification in the
section dedicated to Levi-Strauss’s reading of the battle of the proper names
Mauro Senatore 77
among the Nambikwara. A few pages before that section, Derrida conceives of
classification as espacement, as the regulated system and play of differences
and metaphors, as metaphoricity or differance itself, from which no genesis
(to begin with biological and natural generation) can be detached. At the same
time, the idea of the absolute parousia of the sense proper is precisely obtained
through (the dream of) that detachment. Indeed, it would be possible to show
that the thought of classification already accounts for the self-inequality of
biological and natural life, while (what Derrida calls) metaphysics presup-
poses the concept of the self-preservation or full presence of spirit, that is, of
the philosophy of nature as the transition from nature to spirit (from the seed
to the seminal reason, etc.). Derrida writes:
Thus the name, especially the so-called proper name, is always caught in a
chain or a system of differences. It becomes an appellation only to the extent
that it may inscribe itself within a figuration. Whether it be linked by its origin
to the representations of things in space or whether it remains caught in a
system of phonic differences or social classifications apparently released from
ordinary space, the proper-ness of the name does not escape spacing. Meta-
phor shapes and undermines the proper name. The literal (propre) meaning
does not exist, its “appearance” is a necessary function and must be analyzed
as such-in the system of differences and metaphors. The absolute parousia of
the literal meaning [sens propre], as the presence to the self of the logos within
its voice, in the absolute hearing-itself-speak, should be situated as a function
responding to an indestructible but relative necessity, within a system that
encompasses it. That amounts to situating the metaphysics or the onto theol-
ogy of the logos. (Derrida 1974, 89)18
Derrida recalls this thought of classification at the very beginning of his

reading of the battle of the proper names: “It is because the proper name was
never possible except through its functioning within a classification and
therefore within a system of differences, within a writing retaining the traces
of difference, that . . . ” (Derrida 1974, 109). Returning to the passage quoted
above from Glas, I suggest, then, to read classification as a system or text of
traces (seeds, genetic programs, etc.)—life’s inequality to itself, indeed—
which the philosophy of nature by definition wishes to reduce. But let me

follow Derrida’s text as it develops and, thus, focus on the reading of the next
section of EPN, which is dedicated to “The Self-Induced Destruction of the
Individual.” Holding on to the conclusions of the previous section, Hegel
identifies the inequality immanent in the animal (that of its singularity to the
implicit universality of the genus) as a constitutive inequality and, thus, as a
prescription of death: “the disparity between its finitude and universality is its
original disease and the inborn germ of death, and the removal of this dispar-
ity is itself the accomplishment of this destiny” (Hegel 1970, 441). Now, as
Derrida points out, that constitutive inequality bears within itself sexual
difference and copulation; therefore, one should refer the determinations of
originary disease and germ of death also to them. They “inhabit the same
space” (Derrida 1986, 116), Derrida observes, the space of life’s inequality to
itself, perhaps, I dare to add, space tout court. Furthermore, if we understand
the germ as, by definition, situated in that space, that is, the space of inequal-
ity, of the primordial separation, sexual difference, copulation, disease, death,
namely, of natural and biological life, then, Derrida suggests, “germ of death is
a tautological expression” (Derrida 1986, 116). The germ, as the individual
singular that is inadequate, sexually differentiated, classified, and so forth, is
always the germ of death. From this perspective, dissemination consists in the
circulation of the seed, or the germ, in the space of natural and biological life
(or in space tout court). Derrida writes:
At the bottom of the germ, such as it circulates in the gap [écart] of the sexual
difference, that is, as the finite germ, death is prescribed, as germ in the germ
[en germe dans le germe]. An infinite germ, spirit or God engendering or
inseminating itself naturally, does not tolerate sexual difference. Spirit-germ
disseminates itself only by feint. In this feint, it is immortal. (Derrida 1986,
116–17)
Spirit, or God, as the name of spiritual and eternal life, that is, of self-
preservation, full presence, and absolute parousia, cannot be a germ, with all
the implications that it would bear within itself: it cannot circulate in the
space of natural and biological life. For this reason, Derrida observes that it
Mauro Senatore 79
“disseminates itself only by feint.” Here, I suggest, he recalls an expression

from Feuerbach’s “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy” (1831), which
was translated and published by Althusser in the collection of Feuerbach’s
essays entitled Manifestes philosophiques (1960). The text is already quoted by
Derrida in various earlier works since the “Introduction” to the Origin of
Geometry (1962). In particular, it recurs in a decisive footnote of the preface to
Dissemination, in which Derrida observes that Feuerbach turns back against
Hegel the accusations of speculative empiricism and formalism (in Feuer-
bach’s words, of “feint” and “play”). The passage quoted from Feuerbach
reads:
Hegelian philosophy presents a contradiction between truth and scientific

spirit, between the essential and the formal, between thought and writing.
Formally, the absolute idea is certainly not presupposed, but in essence it
is . . . The estrangement (Entausserung) of the idea is, so to speak, only a feint
[une feinte]; it makes believe, but it produces not in earnest; it is playing.
(Derrida 1981a, 40)
For Feuerbach, the feint accounts for an alienation that dissolves into comedy
(one could also think here of Bataille’s laughing at the comedy of the sacri-
fice).19 Moreover, the reference to a double germ could suggest that there is a
metaphorical relation between the natural germ and the spiritual one, or, in
other words, as Derrida puts it in “White Mythology” (in the wake of Hegel’s
Aesthetics, 1971) when accounting for the philosophical process of metaphori-
zation, that the sensible signification has been relieved by the spiritual one.20
But this would imply the accomplishment of the dialectics of nature, which is
precisely at stake in the transition from a natural germ to a spiritual one. It is
on the basis of this (Hegelian) theory of the metaphor that, I believe, Derrida
concludes: “the value of the metaphor would be impotent to decide this [that
is, whether one germ is the metaphor of another] if the value of the metaphor
was not itself reconstructed from this question” (Derrida 1986, 134). Therefore,
the question of dissemination is inscribed in the question of the metaphorical.
As a final remark on Derrida’s reading of the Hegelian germ of death, I recall
that, since the opening of the philosophy of nature, Hegel ties the relation
between nature and idea to that between dissemination (or the circulation of
the seed) and the parousia of the spirit-germ. In the introduction to EPN,
Hegel conceives of Nature as a seed inscribed in the space of classification (as
a genetic program): “In Christ, the contradiction is posited and overcome, as
His life, passion, and resurrection: Nature is the son of God, but not as the Son
but as abiding in otherness—the divine Idea as held fast for a moment outside
the divine love” (Hegel 1970, 14).21
Derrida’s reading of the transition from nature to spirit in Hegel’s philos-
ophy of nature ends with a paraphrasis of the beautiful last two paragraphs of
the Hegelian text. The concept of the philosophy of nature, Hegel concludes,
consists in the liberation from nature and, thus, from its necessity, on the
basis of which, although the forms worn by nature are forms of the idea and
are grounded in it, the latter is never fully present to itself in nature. The
difficulty of the philosophy of nature lies in that “the material element is so
refractory towards the unity of the idea” and “spirit has to deal with an
ever-increasing wealth of details.” But reason must believe that the true form
of the idea will reveal itself to it. To this extent “the aim of these lectures,”
Hegel points out, “has been to give a picture of Nature in order to submit [zu
bezwingen] this Proteus: to find in this externality only the mirror of ourselves,
to see in Nature a free reflex of spirit” (Hegel 1970, 445). Leaving the emphasis
on mirror and reflex aside—does not dissemination write itself on the back of
a certain mirror?22—I remark that, in his paraphrasis, Derrida rewrites the
character of Proteus in terms of “a polimorphy [forms, indeed] that needs to
be reduced” (Derrida 1986, 117). At this point, we could think Proteus (that is,
natural and biological life) as a system or a text of seeds-programs and its
restriction as the dream of the logos spermatikos.
THE WORK OF PSYCHIC WRITING
It is time to go back to Derrida’s reading of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams in

the second section of “Freud and the Scene of Writing” (1966), entitled “The
Print and the Original Supplement.” My hypothesis is that what Derrida calls
there the work of writing could shed further light on the programmatic struc-
ture of the seed and, more generally, on dissemination.
Mauro Senatore 81
Before starting to read the section, I want to draw attention to an over-

looked passage from the final remarks of the essay in which we find an explicit
formulation of the distinction between dissemination and the philosophy of
the seed (that takes on the form of the Hegelian philosophy of nature). Derrida
seems to suggest that the trace, qua the minimal structure of engendering, is
not an incorruptible substance but a seed that circulates in the space of
natural and biological life, a seed that is by definition disseminated. The text
reads:
The trace is the erasure of selfhood, of one’s own presence, and is constituted
by the threat or anguish of its irremediable disappearance, of the disappear-
ance of its disappearance. An unerasable trace is not a trace, it is a full
presence, an immobile and uncorruptible substance, a son of God, a sign of
parousia and not a seed, that is, a mortal germ. (Derrida 1978, 289)
Not only does Derrida already tie together the seed and the germ of death—as
in the later reading of Hegel mobilized in Glas—but he also inscribes the trace
(and, thus, genesis in general) in nature, as it is conceived of by Hegel since the
beginning of his Philosophy of Nature, that is, in relation to the son of God, the
self-reproduction of the infinite germ, and so forth. Therefore, the thought of
the trace is already dissemination, thought of the seed qua genetic program in
general. From this perspective, I propose, Derrida’s engagement with Freud’s
Interpretation of Dreams could give us a key to reread the pages of the preface
to Dissemination.
Derrida’s reading of Freud’s text begins with sharing the latter’s assump-
tion that “dreams generally follow old facilitations [frayages]” and thus that
the “regression in dreams” must be understood “as a path back into a land-
scape of writing” (Derrida 1978, 259). Derrida’s hypothesis is that in the Inter-
pretation Freud understands writing in the sense of any writing in general,
that is, as constitutive with respect to the genesis of sense in general (with all
the implications that it brings about). From the beginning, Derrida rejects the
concept of transcription: “not a writing which simply transcribes, a stony echo
of muted words,” he explains, “but a lithography before words” (Derrida 1978,
259). The line of demarcation between a transcriptive sense of writing and a
constitutive one is drawn in chapter 1 of Of Grammatology, in particular, in the

path that goes from the first to the second section (entitled “The Signifier and
the Truth”). The first section ends by recalling, within the movement through
which language has been comprehended by a more fundamental and primary
writing, the contemporary practices of information in which the message
does not work as “the ‘written’ translation [namely, the transcription] of a
language, the transporting of a signified which could remain spoken in its
integrity” (Derrida 1974, 10).23 Then, at the beginning of the second section,
Derrida exemplifies the conception of writing as transcription by interpreting
the semiology that Aristotle develops at the opening of On Interpretation. In a
decisive moment of his interpretation Derrida demarcates that conception
from a constitutive sense of writing. He explains:
All signifiers, and first and foremost the written signifier, are derivative with
regard to what would wed the voice indissolubly to the mind or to the thought
of the signified sense, indeed to the thing itself (whether it is done in the
Aristotelian manner that we have just indicated or in the manner of medieval
theology, determining the res as a thing created from its eidos, from its sense
thought in the logos or in the infinite understanding of God). The written
signifier is always technical and representative. It has no constitutive meaning.
(Derrida 1974, 11, emphasis mine)
Returning to the reading of Freud’s Interpretation, I remark that, for Derrida,

the question of the sense of writing in general is precisely at stake when Freud,
in the methodological observations that inaugurate chapter 2, rejects both the
popular method of Traumdeutung and that of scientific psychology. They
seem to be resting on a transcriptive sense of writing, as Freud points out by
referring to the replaceable content of the dream, on the one hand, and to the
permanent code of decipherment, on the other.24 Now, “the Freudian break”
(coupure), as Derrida puts it, does not only consist in claiming “a model of
writing irreducible to speech which would include, like hieroglyphics, picto-
graphic, ideogrammatic, and phonetic elements.” For Derrida, Freud con-
ceives of writing as “so originary a production” that it “cannot be read in terms
of any code.” Rather, writing produces its own code and, thus, preserves an
Mauro Senatore 83
irreducible rest: “the dreamer invents his own grammar” (262), Derrida notes.
In the methodological pages of chapter 2, Freud explains that his procedure
starts from a concept of psychic writing as purely idiomatic and referring to a
meaning that changes according to people and context.25 It is precisely in the
Freudian break and, thus, in the concept of psychic writing that underlies the
break that Derrida finds the sense of any writing—what I called the constitu-
tive sense of writing—at work. This sense questions the difference between
signifier and signified that makes writing into a transcription and grants the
possibility of translation in general. Therefore, Derrida suggests:
The absence of an exhaustive and absolutely infallible code means that in

psychic writing, which thus prefigures the meaning of writing in general, the
difference between signifier and signified is never radical. Unconscious expe-
rience, prior to the dream which “follows old facilitations,” does not borrow
but produces its own signifiers; does not create them in their materiality, of
course, but produces their status-as-meaningful (signifiance). (Derrida 1974,
263)
The constitutive sense of writing is that writing is the genetic program in

general, the minimal structure of the genesis of sense. “Constituted—writ-
ten—meaning [le sense constitué—écrit]” (Derrida 1978, 12), as Derrida puts it
in “Force and Signification,” in which the inscription is thought to account for
any genesis of sense, from biological and natural engendering to literary
creation.26
At this point Derrida displaces the inquiry after Freud’s thought of consti-
tutive writing from the order of the interpretation of dreams, and, thus, of the
(im)possibility of their translation into another language to that of the
becoming-conscious of the unconscious thoughts, that is, of the (im)possibil-
ity of their translation within the psychical apparatus. He explains that “the
horizontal impossibility of translation without loss has its basis in a vertical
impossibility”; indeed, he continues, “we are wrong . . . to speak of translation
or transcription in describing the transition of unconscious thoughts through
the preconscious toward consciousness” (Derrida 1978, 264). How is it possi-
ble to think of a transition that is not a translation, to the extent that it is not
granted by a transcriptive writing? To address this question Derrida draws

attention to the last chapter of the Interpretation. Freud explains that the
becoming-conscious of the unconscious thought cannot be understood as a
relation of transcription between two present texts (the original text and the
conscious one). The text, quoted by Derrida, reads:
Thus, we may speak of an unconscious thought seeking to convey itself into

the preconscious so as to be able then to force its way through into conscious-
ness. What we have in mind here is not the forming of a second thought
situated in a new place, like a transcription which continues to exist alongside
the original; and the notion of forcing a way through into consciousness must
be kept carefully free from any idea of a change of locality. (Freud 2010, 605)
Holding on to Freud’s rejection of the image of transcription, Derrida suggests

rethinking the structure of the text and the movement of the becoming-
conscious. First, he recalls the constitutive sense of the unconscious text and,
thus, the impossibility for the latter of being present, that is, of the being
present of a signified that could exist independently. The genesis of sense in
general has a reproductive structure. “The unconscious text is already a weave
of pure traces, differences,” Derrida remarks, “a text nowhere present. . . . Ev-
erything begins with reproduction. Always already: repositories of a meaning
which was never present” (Derrida 1978, 265–66). But this already implies that
the unconscious text is inscribed in a regulated system of differences and
substitutions and, thus, allows the possibility of translation or of becoming
conscious. For this reason, I suggest, Derrida speaks of a system of writing or
a space of circulation (dissemination?) that permits the transition from the
unconscious to the conscious: “The labor of the writing [ce travail d’écriture]
which circulated like psychical energy between the unconscious and the
conscious” (Derrida 1978, 266). Second, Derrida recognizes that the conscious
text is, in turn, constitutive with respect to sense, that is, a weave of traces, an
originary reproduction, and so forth. Coming after the unconscious thought
and being a trace, a genetic program, do not exclude each other. “It occurs in
an original manner and, in its very secondariness, is originary and irreduc-
ible,” Derrida writes (1978, 266). Perhaps one could conceive of the relation
Mauro Senatore 85
between the unconscious text and the conscious one in the terms of a trans-
formation (rather than a transcription), which would take place within a work
or a system of writing.27
When accounting for the latter in terms of energetic circulation, Derrida
anticipates Freud’s formulation in Interpretation that “what we are doing here
is once again to replace a topographical way of representing things by a
dynamic one” (Freud 2010, 605). He takes this program as a point of departure
to bring into focus another element that, indeed, has been involved since the
beginning in the work of writing, namely, force (the force of any genesis, if,
again, one holds to a certain reading of “Force and Signification”). What is at
stake between the two representations of the psychical apparatus is again the
sense of writing in general. If we think of the transition from the unconscious
text to the conscious one in terms of transcription, then, we must admit the
independent presence of force and of the signified. But this does not occur in
the psychical apparatus insofar as we are speaking of constitutive writing, of
the work of writing, of a transformation in a system of differences, of traces,
and so forth. Derrida points out that:
The metaphor of translation as the transcription of an original text would

separate force and extension, maintaining the simple exteriority of the
translated and the translating. This very exteriority, the static and topo-
logical bias of the metaphor, would assure the transparency of a neutral
translation, of a phoronomic and nonmetabolic process. Freud empha-
sizes this: psychic writing does not lend itself to translation because it is a
single energetic system (however differentiated it may be), and because it
covers the entirety of the psychical apparatus. . . . Here energy cannot be
reduced; it does not limit meaning, but rather produces it. (Derrida 1978,
267–68, emphasis mine)
From the perspective of the constitutive sense of writing, force can be thought
only on the basis of the trace, which is the minimal structure of genesis, and,
thus, only as inscribed in a system that allows for its transformation, a unique,
however differentiated, energetic system. As the exergue chosen for my study
suggests, by referring to the articulation of differential layers within the gen-
eral text, here Derrida seems to suppose a differentiated system of transfor-

mations in which, only, a seed-program can be thought, even if that implies
the impossibility to formalize the seed itself. The unconscious text (any text) is
constitutive with respect to sense in that it produces its own code and is
irreducible to translation, and yet, at the same time, qua language, it already
refers to another text in an articulated play of translations. To this extent, the
name that Derrida gives here to this general structure of text is that of the
becoming-language of the idiom or of transgression. Perhaps one could imag-
ine that this irreducible transgression accounts for the infinity or the rupture
that affects the code of any genetic program (and, thus, of any seed or germ of
death), the supplement of code, the nonspeculative and nonsymbolic tail, the
reference to another text, the work of writing, and so forth. Derrida remarks:
Force produces meaning (and space) through the power of “repetition” alone,
which inhabits it originarily as its death. This power, that is, this lack of power,
which opens and limits the labor of force, institutes translatability, makes
possible what we call “language,” transforms an absolute idiom into a limit
which is always already transgressed: a pure idiom is not language; it becomes
so only through repetition; repetition always already divides the point of
departure of the first time. Despite appearances, this does not contradict what
we said earlier about untranslatability. At that time it was a question of
recalling the origin of the movement of transgression, the origin of repetition,
and the becoming-language of the idiom. (Derrida 1978, 268)
NOTES
This study is a result of the postdoctoral research project on Derrida and French Hegelian-
ism I have been working on at the Instituto de Humanidades of the Universidad Diego
Portales in Santiago, Chile (CONICYT FONDECYT / POSTDOCTORADO No. 3130344). My
thanks are to Matias Bascuñan, Juan Manuel Garrido, Rodolphe Gasché, David Johnson,
Azeen Khan, and Francesco Vitale for our priceless conversations. Finally, this is dedicated
to B.
Mauro Senatore 87
1. Since “Force and Signification” (1963) Derrida thinks of the logos spermatikos as an anthro-
pomorphic concept of engendering according to which natural generation consists in the
operation of consciousness. Retracing the literary theory of emboîtement back to biological
preformationism he writes: “A theory of encasement was at the center of preformationism
which today makes us smile. But what are we smiling at? At the adult in miniature,
doubtless, but also at the attributing of something more than finality to natural life—
providence in action and art conscious of its works. But when one is concerned with an art
that does not imitate nature, when the artist is a man, and when it is consciousness that
engenders, preformationism no longer makes us smile. Logos spermatikos is in its proper
element, is no longer an export, for it is an anthropomorphic concept” (Derrida 1978,
26–27).
2. On the relation between seed and seminal differance see Derrida (1981a, 44–45): “This
reminder ought also to introduce us into the question of the preface as seed. According to
the X (The chiasmus) (which can be considered a quick thematic diagram of dissemina-
tion), the preface, as semen, is just as likely to be left out, to well up and get lost as a seminal
differance, as it is to be reappropriated into the sublimity of the father. As the preface to a
book, it is the word of a father assisting and admiring his work, answering for his son, losing
his breath in sustaining, retaining, idealizing, reinternalizing, and mastering his seed. The
scene would be acted out, if such were possible, between father and son alone: autoinsemi-
nation, homoinsemination, reinsemination.”
3. See, for instance, Derrida (1981a, 80), in which he explains: “One would then say that the
origin or cause of logos is being compared to what we know to be the cause of a living son,
his father. One would understand or imagine the birth and development of logos from the
standpoint of a domain foreign to it, the transmission of life or the generative relation. But
the father is not the generator or procreator in any ‘real’ sense prior to or outside all relation
to language. In what way, indeed, is the father/son relation distinguishable from a mere
cause/effect or generator/engendered relation, if not by the instance of logos? Only a power
of speech can have a father.”
4. Derrida writes: “It is also in this sense that the contemporary biologist speaks of writing and
pro-gram in relation to the most elementary processes of information within the living cell.
And, finally, whether it has essential limits or not, the entire field covered by the cybernetic
program will be the field of writing” (Derrida 1974, 9). For a reading of this passage and of
Derrida’s relationship with contemporary biology and the information sciences, see Vitale
(2014).
5. Cf. Derrida (1978, 23): “The force of the work, the force of genius, the force, too, of that which
engenders in general is precisely that which resists geometrical metaphorization and is the
proper object of literary criticism” (emphasis mine).
6. On this point it is worth recalling, I believe, a recent essay by Adrian Johnston, “The
Weakness of Nature: Hegel, Freud, Lacan, and Negativity Materialized” (2011), in which,
referring to Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he denounces those anti-naturalist readers that
reject Freud’s search for a biological support of his psychological concepts. “Beyond the
Pleasure Principle also manifests a certain pervasive Freudian penchant widely lamented
by his readers, especially those approaching him through the interpretive lenses of Conti-
nental European psychoanalytic and philosophical orientations. Specifically, Freud therein
and elsewhere indulges in a biologistic naturalism (in keeping with his long-standing
ambitions for and anticipations of a scientific grounding of analytic theory) as part of his
speculations concerning the Todestrieb; with reference to, among others, the pre-Socratic
Greek thinker Empedocles, he wonders aloud about a cosmic clash between the forces of
life and death saturating all layers and levels of material being. For those whose views of
psychoanalysis are shaped by their understandings of French styles of metapsychological
theorizing, the purported primacy of language and all of the social, cultural, and historical
mediation it entails ostensibly require dismissing Freud’s appeals to the natural sciences as
a self-misunderstanding on his part” (Johnston 2011, 160–61). What those readers would be
unable to acknowledge, according to Johnston, is the image of a weak nature (to reawaken
an axiom of the Hegelian philosophy of nature) in which much of an organism remains
undetermined by a preestablished program (Johnston 2011, 163–64). As I attempt to dem-
onstrate in my study, this is not the case of Derrida and of his thought of the seed-program.
7. For these concepts see the treatment of Saussure’s notion of the arbitrariness of the sign in
Derrida (1974, 44–51).
8. On the metaphor of the self-biting snake as the movement of the impossibility of the
auto-insemination, Derrida writes in “Qual Quelle” (1971): “The circle turns in order to
annul the cut, and therefore, by the same token, unwittingly signifies it. The snake bites its
tail, from which above all it does not follow that it finally rejoins itself without harm in this
successful auto-fellatio of which we have been speaking all along, in truth” (Derrida 1982,
289).
9. See, for instance, Derrida 1981a, 203 (“there would be a certain imprudence in believing that
one could, at last, stop at a textual seed or principle of life referring only to itself”) and 304
(“The term, the atomic element, engenders by division, grafting, proliferation. It is a seed
and not an absolute term”).
10. As I propose in a forthcoming study on Derrida’s Artaud, the latter is at once a thinker of
dissemination and of the logos spermatikos. In the last pages of his essay Derrida demar-
cates the two sides of Artaud’s text: “one entire side . . . destroys a tradition which lives
within difference, alienation, and negativity without seeing their origin and necessity,”
while, on the other one, “to reawaken this tradition, Artaud, in sum, recalls it to its own
motifs: self-presence, unity, self-identity, the proper, etc.” (Derrida 1978, 244).
11. Cf. Hegel (1970, 410).
12. See Hegel (1970, 415): “the genus particularizes itself, divides itself into its species; and these
species, behaving as mutually opposed individuals, are, at the same time, nonorganic
nature as the genus against individuality-death by violence.”
13. Derrida paraphrases EPN as follows: “The bellicose and morseling operation of the generic
process (Gattungsprozess) doubles itself with an affirmative reappropriation. The singular-
ity rejoins, repairs, or reconciles itself with itself within the genus. The individual ‘continues
itself’ in another, feels and experiences itself in another” (Derrida 1986, 110).
Mauro Senatore 89
14. Cf. Hegel (1970, 411). On Begattung Derrida writes: “the operation of genus (Gattung), the
generic and generative operation” (Derrida 1986, 110).
15. On this point Derrida observes: “the process of copulation aims at preserving, while annul-
ling, this difference. Copulation relieves the difference: Aufhebung is very precisely the
relation of copulation and the sexual difference” (Derrida 1986, 127).
16. Hegel points out that “the genus is the movement of just sublating the individual, merely
immediate (seiende) self, and then relapsing into this sublation—a process in which the
merely immediate singular perishes” (Hegel 1970, 441).
17. Cf. Hegel (1970, 417–18): “If we admit that the works of man are sometimes defective, then
the works of Nature must contain still more imperfections, for Nature is the Idea in the
guise of externality. . . . In Nature, it is external conditions which distort the forms of living
creatures; but these conditions produce these effects because life is indeterminate and
receives its particular determinations also from these externalities. The forms of Nature,
therefore, cannot be brought into an absolute system, and this implies that the species of
animals are exposed to contingency.”
18. In Positions (1972) Derrida recalls that Saussure recurs to the concept of classification to
account for a semiotic code in general (“language and in general every semiotic code—
which Saussure define as ‘classifications’” [Derrida 1981b, 28]). Saussure writes: “Language,
on the contrary, is a self-contained whole and a principle of classification. As soon as we
give language first place among the facts of speech, we introduce a natural order into a mass
that lends itself to no other classification” (Saussure 1959, 9).
19. For Bataille’s laughter, see Derrida (1978, 325–26).
20. See Derrida (1982, 224–26), in which Derrida discusses Hegel’s remarks on the process of
metaphorization that underlies the concept of concept. He observes that Hegel “defines our
problem, or rather determines the problem with an answer indistinguishable from the
proposition of his own speculative and dialectical logic” (225), that is, by conceiving of
metaphorization as the movement of idealization.
21. By implicitly evoking this passage from EPN, in the above-mentioned essay, Johnston
writes that “there is only a weak nature as the sole creator, and all things spiritual are its
monstrous progeny: out-of control specters whose very existences bear witness to this
impotent creator’s lack of absolute authority” (Johnston 2011, 175–76). For a reading of the
Hegelian passage from within the context of the most recent Hegel scholarship, see Ferrini
(2011).
22. Let me quote the whole passage from the preface to Dissemination, which ties the
question of reflection to that of the genetic program: “The breakthrough [effraction, or
as Derrida puts it in the footnote, frayage hétérologique] toward radical otherness (with
respect to the philosophical concept—of the concept) always takes, within philosophy,
the form of an a posteriority or an empiricism. But this is an effect of the specular
nature of philosophical reflection, philosophy being incapable of inscribing (compre-
hending) what is outside it otherwise than through the appropriating assimilation of a
negative image of it, and dissemination is written on the back—the tain—of that
mirror” (Derrida 1981a, 33).
23. This observation could be related back to Derrida’s elaboration, in “Force and Signifi-
cation,” of the birth of language as a writing liberated from its signalizing function: “It is
when that which is written is deceased [défunt] as a sign-signal that it is born as
language; for then it says what is, thereby referring only to itself, a sign without
signification, a game or pure functioning, since it ceased to be utilized as natural,
biological, or technical information, or as the transition from one existent to another,
from a signifier to a signified” (Derrida 1978, 13).
24. Derrida writes: “Popular tradition may err, of course, when according to a ‘symbolical’
procedure, it treats dream content as an indivisible and unarticulated whole, for which a
second, possibly prophetic whole may be substituted. But Freud is not far from accepting
the ‘other popular method’: ‘It might be described as the ‘decoding’ method (Chiffriermeth-
ode), since it treats dreams as a kind of cryptography (Geheimschrift) in which each sign can
be translated into another sign having a known meaning, in accordance with a fixed key
(Schlüssel)’ (IV, 97). Let us retain the allusion to a permanent code: it is the weakness of a
method to which Freud attributes, nevertheless, the merit of being analytic and of spelling
out the elements of meaning one by one” (Derrida 1978, 260).
25. See Freud (2010, 129–30): “My procedure is not so convenient as the popular decoding
method which translates any given piece of a dream’s content by a fixed key. I, on the
contrary, am prepared to find that the same piece of content may conceal a different
meaning when it occurs in various people or in various contexts.”
26. Derrida points out that Saussure’s notion of sign as coupling signifier and signified is
equally unable to account for the constitutive sense of writing. Cf. Derrida (1978, 263): “even
if, along with Saussure, we envisage the distinction between signified and signifier only as
the two sides of a sheet of paper, nothing is changed. Originary writing, if there is one, must
produce the space and the materiality of the sheet itself.”
27. On the proposal to think of transition as transformation, see Derrida (1981b, 20): “But if this
difference [between signifier and signified] is never pure, no more so is translation, and for
the notion of translation we would have to substitute a notion of transformation: a regu-
lated transformation of one language by another, of one text by another. We will have never,
and in fact never have had, to do with some ‘transport’ of pure signifieds from one language
to another, or within one and the same language, that the signifying instrument would leave
virgin and untouched.”
REFERENCES
Bachelard, Gaston. 2002. The Formation of the Scientific Mind, trans. Mary McAllester Jones.
Manchester: Clinamen Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1974. Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri C. Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins
University Press.
. 1978. Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge and Keagan Paul.
. 1981a. Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
. 1981b. Positions, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mauro Senatore 91
. 1982. Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass. Brighton, England: Harvester Press.
. 1986. Glas, trans. J. P. Leavey Jr. and R. Rand. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Ferrini, Cinzia. 2011. Hegel on Nature and Spirit: Some Systematic Remarks. In Hegel-Studien.
Vol. 46, 117–50. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag.
Feuerbach, Ludwig. 1960. Manifestes philosophiques: textes choisis (1839–1845), trans. Louis
Althusser. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Freud, Sigmund. 2010. The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey. New York: Basic
Books.
Hegel, G. W. F. 1970. Philosophy of Nature, ed. Arthur V. Miller. New York: Oxford University
Press.
. 1987. Jenaer Systementwürfe III. Naturphilosophie und Philosophie des Geistes, ed. Rolf-
Peter Horstmann. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag.
Johnston, Adrian. 2011. The Weakness of Nature: Hegel, Freud, Lacan, and Negativity
Materialized. In Hegel and the Infinite, ed. S. Žižek, C. Crockett, and C. Davis, 159–79.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1959. Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin. New York:
Philosophical Library.
Vitale, Francesco. 2014. The Text and the Living: Jacques Derrida between Biology and
Deconstruction. Oxford Literary Review 36, no. 1: 95–114.
Life Death and Differance
Philosophies of Life between Hegel and Derrida
Francesco Vitale
University of Salerno, Italy
The Man “appears” as a being that is always conscious of its death, often accepts
it freely and, sometimes, gives it to himself voluntarily. Therefore, the “dialectical”
or anthropological philosophy of Hegel is, ultimately, a philosophy of death.
—A. Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (1947, 537)
By associating it with sacrifice and, thereby, with the primary theme of represen-
tation (in art, in festivals, in performances), I have sought to demonstrate that
Hegel’s reaction is fundamental human behavior . . . it is par excellence the ex-
pression endlessly repeated by tradition . . . it was essential for Hegel to gain
consciousness of negativity as such, to capture its horror— here the horror of
death— by upholding and by looking the work of death right in the face. Hegel, in
this way, is less opposed to those who “recoil” than to those who say: “it is nothing.”
He seems to distance himself most from those who react with gaiety.
—G. Bataille, Hegel, Death and Sacrifice (1990, 24)
93
94 Life Death and Differance
The Idea, immediate and natural life, relieves, abolishes and preserves, itself, dies
in raising itself to the spiritual life. So life develops itself in contradiction and
negativity; the metaphor between the two lives is only this movement of relieving
negativity. . . . The same movement in the Encyclopedia, at the end, concerning
Sa [absolute Spirit]. The third term returning to immediacy, this return to sim-
plicity being brought about by the relief [rélève: Aufhebung] of difference and
mediation, natural life occupies both the end and the beginning. In their ontolog-
ical sense, the metaphors are always of life; they put rhythm into the imperturb-
able equality of life, of being, of truth, of filiation: physis. Thus the Hegelian system
commands that it be read as a book of life.
—J. Derrida, Glas (1986, 83)
THE EXERGUES OF MY ARTICLE ARE THREE “F R E N C H ” DEFINITIONS OF THE
Hegelian philosophy, from Kojève, Bataille, and Derrida. To prevent myself

and you from being tempted to recognize in those exergues the triadic move-
ment of dialectics, let me remark that what follows is a fourth and longer
exergue for a work in progress on Derrida and life, in between science and
philosophy.
For Kojève, the Hegelian philosophy would be a philosophy of death; for
Derrida, a philosophy of life—or rather, the difference is subtle but decisive—a
book of life. Between the two stands Bataille, for whom it would be the
philosophical translation of the fundamental attitude of man before death,
that is, recoiling.
To grasp the implications of Derrida’s reading—with respect to the legacy
of Kojève and Bataille from within the context of the French Hegelianism, and
with respect to the Hegelian philosophy, but, above all, from within decon-
struction itself—a long detour is required. I will not refer further to Kojève and
Bataille, but, keeping in mind their definitions, I hope that, at the end of the
detour, it will be clear that not only does Derrida propose a different interpre-
tation of the logic at work in the Hegelian philosophy, but also he brings forth
an interpretation that no longer appeals to logic itself or, at least, appeals to
another logic. From this perspective, I will focus on the third stake, the one
that interests me more, that is, the role that the deconstruction of the Hege-
Francesco Vitale 95
lian philosophy of life plays within the development of deconstruction itself,

with Hegel, but far beyond him.
I have been working on the question of life in Derrida’s oeuvre for years
tracing out a risky hypothesis. This question would be the red thread of
deconstruction, more or less hidden, and the genesis and structure of differ-
ance should be thought on the basis of it. Furthermore, the very issues of the
survival, the auto-immunity, the animal, and, more generally, the interpreta-
tion of literature, of psychoanalysis, and of the political would be inscribed in
that question.1
The point of departure of my work is the reading of the unpublished
seminar La vie la mort, which Derrida gave in 1975, and whose final part, “To
Speculate—on Freud,” was published in The Postcard. The first part is devoted
to the biology of the time and, in particular, to the reading of François Jacob’s
The Logic of Life, a book in which Derrida finds the resources to account for the
genesis and structure of the living in terms of trace and text.2 The seminar
begins under the aegis of Hegel, whose authority would consist in giving the
most accomplished formulation of the philosophical concept of life. It is with
Hegel that one must engage to formulate a different concept of life, freed from
the metaphysical presuppositions that, to begin with the opposition between
life and death, could secretly influence, once again, the sciences of life. This is
what is at stake in contemporary biology, which aims at emancipating itself
from philosophy, as well as in the deconstruction of the concept of life.
Since the opening of the seminar, as it happens in the text from Glas that I
quoted as exergue, Derrida draws attention on the double position of life in
the Hegelian philosophy, at the beginning and at the end, that is, in the
Philosophy of Nature, in the transition from nature to subjective spirit, and in
the first moment of the last syllogism of the Science of Logic, in which life is the
first determination of the absolute Idea. This is not by accident: we could
easily suppose that, when referring elsewhere for a discussion of the problem,
Derrida alludes precisely to Glas:
In saying “life death” I do not mean to identify life and death, to say that life is
death, pro-position that, as you know, can be recalled in multiple forms,
through several, well known ways. The white trait between life and death does
not come about to replace neither an et nor an est. In the dialectical logic of
Hegel, the est of judgment comes here, as the place of the contradiction and of
its Aufhebung, to enunciate that life is death, that it posits itself in its syllogism
through the mediation of death, that, according to the dynamic and produc-
tive meaning of the word est, est is the process of death (the death of natural life
qua the birth of spiritual life) through which the est becomes itself Life, the
being of the est becomes again Life in a dissymmetry that I have attempted to
analyze elsewhere and in which life is marked twice, as a moment of the
process of the Idea and of being and, then, without death, which remains
always natural, at the moment of the absolute Idea, at the end of the great logic,
when Hegel writes “only the absolute idea is being, imperishable life, the truth
that knows itself and is entirely truth.” At this moment, the last moment, life
has no longer opposition, opposite, the opposition took place in it, for it to
reappropriate itself, but life has no longer an other before itself. The est of life
death is of life, being is life, death cannot be thought at all. Here it is where the
oppositional logic leads us, when it gives the greatest attention to death (it is
the case of Hegel): to the suppression of the opposition, to the relief in the
elevation of one term and in the process of its reappropriation. Life is this reappro-
priation of being, it is being: only the absolute Idea is being, imperishable life
(nondeath). Between the opposition (et) and the copulatory identification (est)
there is no opposition, the opposition is the process of identification or reappro-
priation of being as life or of life as being. (Derrida 1975, s. 1, 3)
In this passage, which would deserve a long analysis, I must remark that, for
Derrida, death appears in the Hegelian system only as opposed to life, as the
other of life, to be relieved—Aufgehebt—in the infinite and imperishable life of
the absolute spirit. Death, qua opposed to life, is only thought in view of life, it
is a moment of life, that Hegel wishes as well determined at the level of natural
life and that would allow for the transition to the imperishable life of the
absolute spirit. From this perspective, if in the system death is always thought
in view of life and of a determination of life as absolute life, a life without death,
one could easily suspect that also the determination of natural and biological
life is affected from that determination. Hence for Derrida—and this is what I
intend to prove here—in the Hegelian system there is no death, death would
Francesco Vitale 97
be, against the Kojèvian evidence, the unthought-of, with the unavoidable
consequence that there would be no thinking of life, of life as irreducibly
affected by death, of natural and biological life, insofar as, in the system, that
life is determined to render the thinking of the Idea, of the absolute spirit qua
imperishable life, possible.
Therefore, the whole question depends on verifying which determination
of natural and biological life authorizes Hegel to determine the absolute Idea,
and thus the absolute spirit as life, but as life without death.
However, there is much more in the seminar. Derrida pushes himself to
say that not only the Hegelian system but the entire philosophical tradition, of
which the former would be the relieving accomplishment, would be con-
structed to protect itself from, or rather, through the removal of, the irreduc-
ible implication of life and death at the biological and natural level. Therefore,
the syntagm la vie la mort would point to another thinking of life that, finally,
would be able to account for that irreducible implication, but this must go
through the deconstruction of the hierarchized opposition of life and death.
Let me quote again a long passage from the seminar:
If you follow the great syllogism of life at the end of the great logic of Hegel, you
will see how life, which is essentially a position (Setzung), the position of the
Idea positing itself through its three oppositions, namely, “the living individ-
ual,” the process of the genus and species (Gattung), reappropriates itself as
life, according to a movement that is marked thoroughly in Hegel and to which
we will have to go back. Just to allude to it, I wanted to remark three points: on
one hand, the and of the juxtaposition should not only be questioned and thus
suspended, the time for asking if the relations between being and death fall
within [relève bien de] what is called opposition or contradiction; but, more
radically, if what we believe to understand under the concept of position,
opposition or juxtaposition, that is, of contradiction, is not constructed by a
logic of “life death” that would dissimulate itself—in view of which interest,
this is the question—under a positional (oppositional, juxtapositional, dialec-
tic) scheme, as if (I cannot recur here to the as if, since neither I want nor I can
oppose a logic to a logic of opposition), as if the whole logic of opposi-
tion . . . were a ruse, a putting forward, through “life death,” in order to dissim-
ulate, preserve, shelter, accommodate or forget something. What? Something

that is no longer posited nor opposed and that would no longer be something
in the sense of position. (Derrida 1975, s. 1, 1)
Before following the reference to Glas to search for an answer to this abyssal
question, and, above all, to see how, within the Hegelian system, death is
neutralized or removed by being posited in opposition to life and how this
occurs in the transition from natural life to absolute spirit, it is necessary to
step back and acknowledge that Derrida inherits from Bataille the idea, for-
mulated against the Kojèvian evidence, that death has never been present in
the system and thus remains the unthought-of or the blind spot of the Hege-
lian philosophy.
In “From Restricted to General Economy,” his essay on Bataille written in
1965, when treating of the struggle for recognition—Der Kampf um Anerken-
nung—between the master and the slave, Derrida remarks that Bataille dis-
tances himself from Kojève by proposing a displacement of tone in the reading
of the Hegelian expression Daransetzen des Lebens, putting life in play. Bataille
would be the first to point out that putting life in play is a play, a show, a
mise-en-scène also in the theatrical meaning of the expression (one plays
death), while life is not effectively put in play, risked. One puts life at stake
precisely to avoid risking it seriously. According to Bataille, to find the pro-
found motivations of this play, we should address the experience of sacrifice
and thus find in the representation of death the sleight of hand that allows for
recoiling before death qua an absolute loss without reserve. I quote a long
passage from Derrida’s reading, which discusses the implications that this
perspective bears with itself for the interpretation of the struggle for recogni-
tion but also for the general economy of the system. Let me remark also that
the first occurrence of the problem of the survival in Derrida’s work can be
found here:
Hegel clearly had proclaimed the necessity of the master’s retaining the life
that he exposes to risk. Without this economy of life, the “trial by death,
however, cancels both the truth which was to result from it, and therewith the
certainty of self altogether.” To rush headlong into death pure and simple is
Francesco Vitale 99
thus to risk the absolute loss of meaning, in the extent to which meaning
necessarily traverses the truth of the master and of self-consciousness. One
risks losing the effect and profit of meaning which were the very stakes one
hoped to win. Hegel called this mute and nonproductive death, this death pure
and simple, abstract negativity, in opposition to “the negation characteristic
of consciousness, which cancels in such a way that it preserves and maintains
what is sublated (Die Negation des Bewusstseins welches so aufhebt, dass es das
Aufgehobene aufbewahrt and erhält), and thereby survives its being sublated
(und hiemit sein Aufgehoben-werden überlebt). In this experience self-
consciousness becomes aware that life is as essential to it as pure self-
consciousness.” Burst of laughter from Bataille. Through a ruse of life, that is,
of reason, life has thus stayed alive. Another concept of life had been surrepti-
tiously put in its place, to remain there, never to be exceeded, any more than
reason is ever exceeded. This life is not natural life, the biological existence put
at stake in lordship, but an essential life that is welded to the first one, holding
it back, making it work for the constitution of self-consciousness, truth, and
meaning. Such is the truth of life. Through this recourse to the Aufhebung,
which conserves the stakes, remains in control of the play, limiting it and
elaborating it by giving it form and meaning (Die Arbeit . . . bildet), this econ-
omy of life restricts itself to conservation, to circulation and self-reproduction
as the reproduction of meaning; henceforth, everything covered by the name
lordship collapses into comedy. The independence of self-consciousness be-
comes laughable at the moment when it liberates itself by enslaving itself,
when it starts to work, that is, when it enters into dialectics. Laughter alone
exceeds dialectics and the dialectician: it bursts out only on the basis of an
absolute renunciation of meaning, an absolute risking of death, what Hegel
calls abstract negativity. A negativity that never takes place, that never pres-
ents itself, because in doing so it would start to work again. (Derrida 2002, 32)
Here Derrida finds in the question of life the stakes of the removal of death at
work in the Hegelian system, a removal of death that is at the same time a
removal of life, of natural and biological life, which would take place through
the surreptitious introduction of another concept of life replacing the former.
The logic of this other life, which is not the natural and biological one, is the
reproduction and conservation of the self. It is the same law that the biologist
Jacob enunciates as the principle of the logic of the living. Therefore, one can
understand why the seminar La vie la mort begins with Hegel. Biology, whose
decisive progresses are recognized by Derrida, must pay attention to its secret
philosophical heritage that would bring it back to its metaphysical past.
In the wake of Bataille, Derrida had already identified the blind spot of
Hegelianism (and, thus, the distance between Bataille and Kojève):
The blind spot of Hegelianism, around which can be organized the represen-
tation of meaning, is the point at which destruction, suppression, death and
sacrifice constitute so irreversible an expenditure, so radical a negativity—
here we would have to say an expenditure and a negativity without reserve—
that they can no longer be determined as negativity in a process or a system. In
discourse (the unity of process and system), negativity is always the underside
and accomplice of positivity. . . . For negativity is a resource. In naming the
without-reserve of absolute expenditure “abstract negativity,” Hegel, through
precipitation, blinded himself to that which he had laid bare under the rubric
of negativity. And did so through precipitation toward the seriousness of
meaning and the security of knowledge. (Derrida 2002, 327–28)
We can go back to Glas, in which Derrida simply develops Bataille’s insight—

the removal of death qua absolute loss and its submission to Aufhebung—by
finding it at work throughout the system. In particular, this is evident in those
passages dedicated to the struggle for recognition in which Derrida brings the
economical lexicon already adopted in Bataille’s essay at its limits:
This putting (in play, at pawn) must, as every investment, amortize itself and
produce a profit; it works at my recognition by/through the other, at the
posit(ion)ing of my living consciousness, my living freedom, my living mas-
tery. Now death being in the program, since I must actually risk it. I can always
lose the profit of the operation: if I die, but just as well if I live. Life cannot stay in
the incessant imminence of death. So I lose every time, with every blow, with every
throw [à tous les coup]. The supreme contradiction that Hegel marks with less
circumspection than he will in the Phenomenology. (Derrida 1986, 139)
Francesco Vitale 101
Derrida chose to treat of the struggle for recognition by recurring to the Jena
Philosophy of Spirit since it is in this text that we can grasp the whole dialecti-
cal process the struggle belongs to: the two consciousnesses must accept that,
to be recognized, they must renounce their being absolute, singular con-
sciousnesses in favor of a third term, that is, of people, of the community that
becomes the state, and, thus, they must avoid the struggle and death, not even
risk it. Derrida never refers to Kojève in these passages from Glas, but a
demystification of the latter’s reading (as holding on the opposition between
the master and the slave) is evidently at stake.
Let me quote from Glas the conclusion of Derrida’s analysis:
From that moment on, death, suicide, loss, through the passage to the people-
spirit as absolute spirit, amortize themselves every time, with every blow, with
every coup, in the political: at the end of operation, the absolute spirit records
a profit in any case, death included [la mort comprise]. (Derrida 1986, 141)
It is time to recall what for Derrida is at play in this determination of death qua
opposed to life, that allows for the overcoming, Aufhebung, of death itself in the
absolute life of the absolute spirit. Given that in the Science of Logic natural life
is the first and immediate determination of the absolute Idea, which determi-
nation of natural and biological life permits the dialectical transition to the
determination of the absolute Idea as life, life without death? Which hidden
interest orients Aufhebung or the removal of the biological death, death as
absolute loss?
We must start by recognizing the systematic necessity of what in the Logic
would appear as a simply illustrative metaphor: the germ, the seed as a
botanic metaphor that helps us conceive of the absolute Idea as a living form:
To this extent, it is the individuality of life itself, no longer generated out of its
concept but out of the actual idea. At first, it is itself only the concept that still
has to objectify itself, but a concept which is actual—the germ of a living
individual. To ordinary perception what the concept is, and that the subjective
concept has external actuality, are visibly present in it. For the germ of the
living being is the complete concretion of individuality: it is where all the living
being’s diverse sides, its properties and articulated differences, are contained
in their entire determinateness; where the at first immaterial, subjective totality
is present undeveloped, simple and non-sensuous. Thus the germ is the whole
living being in the inner form of the concept. (Hegel 2010, 687)
Derrida remarks that, throughout his life and system, Hegel recurs to exam-
ples drawn from botanic to describe the genesis and structure of the spirit and
to determine it as life: germ, seed, tree, plant, from “The Spirit of Christianity”
to the Science of Logic, passing by the Encyclopedia and the Philosophy of
Nature. This can be explained neither as an accident nor as an illustrative
metaphor.
To understand the recourse to the botanic metaphors, we should take into
account the role that the vegetal organism plays in the Philosophy of Nature, as
the second moment of the last section, the “Organic Physics”:
§ 337. The real totality of body as the infinite process in which individuality
determines itself to particularity or finitude, and equally negates this and
returns into itself, re-establishing itself at the end of the process as its begin-
ning, is thus an elevation into the first ideality of Nature, but an ideality which
is fulfilled (erfüllt), and as self-related negative unity, has essentially developed
the nature of self and become subjective. This accomplished, the Idea has
entered into existence, at first an immediate existence, Life. This is: first, as
Shape, the universal image of Life, the geological organism; second, as partic-
ular, formal subjectivity, the vegetable organism; third, as individual, concrete
subjectivity, the animal organism. The Idea has truth and actuality only in so
far as it is determined as subjective (§ 215); Life, as only the immediate Idea, is
therefore external to itself, is nonlife, only the corpse of the life-process, the
organism as totality of inanimately existing, mechanical and physical Nature.
Distinguished from this stage is the beginning of subjective vitality, the living
organism in the vegetable kingdom: the individual, but, as external to itself, still
falling apart into its members which are themselves individuals. It is first in the
animal organism that the differences of Shape are so developed as to exist
essentially only as its members, thereby constituting it subject. (Hegel 1970,
273)
The first determination of life is nature itself, the geological organism, as the
totality of the physical world, and, however, this is only an immediate and abstract
determination, insofar as it encompasses nature as the whole in which there is no
distinction yet between the living and the nonliving. Hence, the vegetal organism
is the first determination of biological life as such and, thus, the first moment of
natural life as well as the first moment of the Idea: the plant, indeed, as the living
individual, is the first manifestation of the dialectical structure of subjectivity in
nature. From this perspective, the absolute life of the spirit represents the accom-
plishment of a dialectical process that finds in the life of the vegetal organism its
first moment and in the life of the animal organism, and, thus, of man, the middle
term. Therefore, at the end of this process of sublation or Aufhebung, the absolute
life of the spirit is accomplished according to the formal, subjective structure of
the vegetal organism, developed in its dialectical content according to the deter-
mination of the life of the animal organism that the life of the spirit retains in itself
as the middle term.
It is worth asking on what this distribution of life in the Philosophy of Nature is
grounded: Why is the vegetal organism found in this privileged position from the
point of view of the formal structure? Why does the animal organism only consist
in a concrete development of the “differences of its formation”? And will it be
sublated in the life of the spirit, which is achieved (in itself and for itself) according
the structure anticipated in the still immediate life of the vegetal organism (in
itself) and through the mediation of the animal life (the being for an other)? Is the
reason of this distribution wholly inherent in the dialectic of nature or does it
respond to a more general speculative interest?
Derrida analyzes a text whose title would be The determination of the spirit,
which, in truth, is included in the introduction to the lectures on The Philoso-
phy of History and thus belongs to the so-called mature stage of the system.
Hegel recurs again to the example of the seed to show that the spirit is the
subject that engenders itself by itself and accomplishes itself by exteriorizing
itself in view of self-return:
Spirit is essentially the result of its own activity: its activity is the transcending
of immediate, simple, unreflected existence—the negation of that existence,
and the returning into itself. We may compare it with the seed; for with this the
plant begins, yet it is also the result of the plant’s entire life. But the weak side
of life is exhibited in the fact that the commencement and the result are
disjoined from each other. (Hegel 1991, 95)
Therefore, the seed and the plant describe a form of life that engenders and
develops itself by itself, whose identity would be at the same time the beginning
and the result, thus, an identity that does not need the other to produce itself and
that is opposed to the other only from itself and in view of accomplishing itself as
self-identity. If this form of natural life can only represent the life of the spirit
without being it, that is precisely because of its natural limit: the plant produces a
seed that is identical to the one that produced it but is another individual, there is
no self-return here, whereas the spirit reproduces always itself and is the product
of its production. This limit is properly the limit of nature; it affects also the
natural life of the animal, and thus the human living as animal, and binds it to
death. Later, it will be necessary to look at the transition that closes the Philosophy
of Nature, and announces the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit.
For now I remark that Derrida singles out the distinctive traits that regu-
late the recourse to the example of the seed in the Hegelian system as follows,
and, at the same time, he sheds light on the trace that one should follow to
grasp the more profound reason of that recourse:
The figure of the seed (let us call it thus provisionally) is immediately deter-
mined: (1) as the best representation of the spirit’s relation to self, (2) as the
circular path of a return to itself. And in the description of the spirit that
returns to itself through its own proper product, after it lost itself there, there
is more than a simple rhetorical convenience in giving to the spirit the name
father. Likewise, the advent of the Christian Trinity is more than an empiric
event in the spirit’s history. (Derrida 1986, 28)
In The Philosophy of History, as well as throughout the system, Hegel conceives

of the Christian Trinity as the highest accomplishment of the life of the spirit
reached by man in the speculative dialectic: the infinite god—the father—
posits himself in the finite—the son—and returns to himself without losing
himself in the finitude—the death of the son.
One should follow Derrida’s long analysis; I limit myself to quote just the
conclusion that deduces the implications of the apparently metaphorical
passage from the life of the plant to the one of the spirit:
The infinite father gives himself, by self-fellation, self-insemination, and self-

conception, a finite son who, in order to posit himself there and incarnate
himself as the son of God, becomes infinite, dies as the finite son, lets himself
be buried, clapsed in bandages he will soon undo for the infinite son to be
reborn. (Derrida 1986, 31)
Therefore, a certain determination of the life of the plant permits us to think of

the infinite life of the determination of the spirit, through the representation
of the trinitarian relation in Christianism. This was already at work, as Derrida
remarks, at the beginning of the system, in particular, in “The Spirit of Chris-
tianity,” which, therefore, to follow the Hegelian logic at stake here, could be
considered the germ of the system, even if it is not developed yet in all its parts.
Indeed, the botanic metaphor recurs three times and always to illustrate
the relation of filiation between God the father and his son as infinite life. Let
me quote the last occurrence:
It is true only of objects, of things lifeless, that the whole is other than the parts; in
the living thing, on the other hand, the part of the whole is one and the same as the
whole. . . . What is a contradiction in the realm of the dead is not one in the realm
of life. A tree which has three branches makes up with them one tree; but every
“son” of the tree, every branch (and also its other “children,” leaves and blossoms)
is itself a tree. The fibers bringing sap to the branch from the stem are of the same
nature as the roots. If a [cutting from certain types of] tree is set in the ground
upside down it will put forth leaves out of the roots in the air, and the boughs will
root themselves in the ground. And it is just as true to say that there is only one tree
here as to say that there are three. (Hegel 1971, 260)
It would be worth following the reading that brings to light the role played by
John’s evangel in the context of this interpretation of the Christian Trinity as
infinite life. The values of life (zoé), light (phos), truth (aletheia), are regularly
associated there. But, at this point, we wonder where this determination of the
life of the plant as reproducing itself by itself, as identical to itself in its other is.
Determination that allows Hegel to define in those terms the immediate
determination of natural and biological life in view of its speculative relief in
the infinite life of the spirit; that allows him to posit the life of the animals, and,
thus, of man as a middle term, necessary to the operation of that relief.
Here is the answer: from biology. In the Philosophy of Nature, Hegel ana-
lyzes and translates into speculative terms the biology of his time. His practice in
this regard remains unchanged from the early writings to the later ones, where we
find also a description that recalls the examples of the overturned tree:
But there is no more familiar fact than that each branch and twig is a complete
plant which has its root in the plant as in the soil; if it is broken off from the
plant and put as a slip into the ground, it puts out roots and is a complete plant.
This also happens when branches are accidentally severed from the plant.
(Hegel 1970, 313)
Therefore, we should recognize in the Hegelian conception of the germ the

legacy of the naturalistic theories of preformationism, which were elaborated
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and whose influence is still very
strong in the age of Hegel:
The germ is the unexplicated being which is the entire Notion; the nature of
the plant which, however, is not yet Idea because it is still without reality.
In the grain of seed the plant appears as a simple, immediate unity of the self
and the genus. . . . The development of the germ is at first mere growth, mere
increase; it is already in itself the whole plant, the whole tree, etc., in miniature.
The parts are already fully formed, receive only an enlargement, a formal
repetition, a hardening, and so on. For what is to become, already is; or the
becoming is this merely superficial movement. But it is no less also a qualita-
tive articulation. (Hegel 1970, 323–24)
According to preformationism, the adult animal, with organs and hereditary

characters, is already present in miniature in the germ, that is, in the egg or the
spermatozoon. Against the theory of the preformationism there was the one
of the epigenesist, according to which, conversely, the embryo is developed on
the basis of an undifferentiated germ, through the progressive formation of the
various parts of the organism. In 1694, Nicolas Hartsoeker advanced the
hypothesis that the whole fetus, a “homunculus” that is the microscopic
duplication of the being in gestation, is located in the spermatozoon, with its
encephalic extremity in the head of the speramtozoon itself. Both preforma-
tionisms, ovism and spermism, are based on the relevance of reproduction for
the study of the living beings and share the theory according to which the
adult animal is found already preformed in the germinal cells. Preformation-
ism was enunciated first by the Dutch Jan Swammerdam, who, in a volume
with a quite meaningful title, Miraculum naturae sive uteri muliebris fabrica
(1672), denied that there is a true metamorphosis in insects. For Swammer-
dam, for instance, the butterfly is entirely present, with its organs being
already distinguished, in the egg of the worm. He argued that all germs have
existed since the beginning of the world insofar as Creation is a unique act.
Therefore, in the moment of Creation, in the ovaries of Eve, there were already
in miniature the human beings that are bound to be born up to the end of the
world. The development of these beings is nothing but an explication (in Latin
evolution) of the parts packed in the germ, through successive, qualitative
mutations (growing and enlarging).
Among the followers of preformationism, there are Leibniz, Bonnet, and Spal-
lanzani, who are sources of the Philosophy of Nature. Moreover, Encyclopédie of
Diderot and d’Alembert deemed preformationism the most reliable hypothesis.3
A passage from “Force et signification” testifies Derrida’s knowledge of the
preformationism, at least since 1963. Further, in the passage, Derrida already
recognizes the theologico-metaphysical presupposition of preformationism,
and, hence, the persistence of this presupposition in the “finalism” that rep-
resents the most refined theoretical development of that theory. “Finalism”
and, thus, Kant and Hegel:
By preformationism we indeed mean preformationism: the well known biological

doctrine, opposed to epigenesis, according to which the totality of hereditary
characteristics is enveloped in the germ, and is already in action in reduced
dimensions that nevertheless respect the forms and proportions of the future
adult. A theory of encasement was at the center of preformationism which today
makes us smile. But what are we smiling at? At the adult in miniature, doubtless,
but also at the attributing of something more than finality to natural life-
providence in action and art conscious of its works. (Derrida 2002, 26)
Given that preformationism was invented to legitimate, within the sciences of

life, the unity of Creation in line with the Christian dogma and that, ultimately,
this theory rests on Aristotle’s texts, it is possible to understand the compli-
cated relations between Christian religion, philosophy, and biology that are at
stake here and that are necessary to loosen here in view of a deconstruction of
the notion of life.
In particular, in the context of the debate among naturalists, Hegel shares
the position of Trevinarius, for whom the reproduction of the plant does not
imply sexual difference, and, thus, consists in a pure self-reproduction, with-
out difference or opposition to an other that is different from the self but of the
same species as occurs in the animal, sexual reproduction:
This reproduction is not mediated by opposition therefore, it is not a unified

emergence, although the plant can also rise to this. The emergence of true
separation in the opposition of the sex relationship belongs to the power of the
animal however. (Hegel 1970, 55)
Therefore, Hegel limits himself to speculate on what he receives from the

sciences of life of his age, even if, it is worth remarking at this point, he takes a
precise position while being aware of the botanic theories by which the repro-
duction of the vegetal organism is a sexual reproduction. Goethe, whose
Metamorphosis of the Plants is an essential source for Hegel, perhaps, the most
decisive for the section of the Philosophy of Nature dedicated to the vegetal
organism, is a firm supporter of those theories. However, Hegel simply re-
mains silent on this point.
This passage is decisive for Derrida: to determine the self-reproduction of
the spirit as the form of life that contains in itself the determinations of the
natural life as its sublated moments, Hegel must affirm, against empirical
evidence and scientific theories, that the reproduction of the vegetal organism
does not go through sexual difference: “There would be no sexual difference in
the plants” (Derrida 1986, 114).
However, when Hegel addresses the theories of sexual reproduction, to
deny their legitimacy, the stakes of the position taken in the field of the
botanic sciences appear evident:
(c) Now though this compels us to admit the occurrence of an actual fertilization,
there still remains the third question, whether it is necessary. Since buds are
complete individuals, and plants propagate themselves by stolons, and leaves and
branches need only come into contact with the earth in order to be themselves
fertile as distinct individuals (§ 345, Zus., p. 313), it follows that the production of a
new individual through the union of the two sexes—generation—is a play, a
luxury, a superfluity for propagation; for the preservation of the plant is itself only
a multiplication of itself. Fertilization by sexual union is not necessary, since the
plant organism, because it is the whole individuality is already fertilized on its own
account even without being touched by another plant. (Hegel 1970, 345–46)
Hegel seems to fall into the logic of the cauldron with a hole in it, in which
Freud recognized the symptoms of an unaccomplished removal. According to
this logic, one supports contradictory arguments to affirm an unsustainable
removal: 1) the reproduction of the vegetal organism does not imply a sexual
difference, 2) the reproduction of the vegetal organism can imply a sexual
difference, 3) sexual differentiation is in any case superfluous for the repro-
duction of the vegetal organism.
Whether we are before a removal or a fidelity to a petition principle, one can
find here the condition of natural life that is necessary to remove in order that the
infinite life of the spirit is accomplished as an imperishable self-reproduction
without death: sexual difference, that is, difference, the relation to the other that
irreducibly conditions the life of the living, not only that of the animals and of man,
the most evolved form that life rejoins within the boundaries of nature.
The final moment of the Philosophy of Nature unfolds the generic process in
the animal life and ends with the death of the individual. To reproduce itself the
animal individual needs to copulate with an individual of the other sex, and thus
the product of reproduction is another individual different from the two generat-
ing it: there is no self-return in the natural, sexual reproduction, no Aufhebung, no
self-reproduction. Rather, there is dissemination, as Derrida himself suggests.
Above all, it is worth remarking that the irreducible difference between the living
individual and its concept, determined by sexual difference, also brings about the
inborn death, as Hegel puts it, of the natural individual:
§ 375. Universality, in the face of which the animal as a singularity is a finite

existence, shows itself in the animal as the abstract power in the passing out of
that which, in its preceding process (§ 356), is itself abstract. The original
disease of the animal, and the inborn germ of death, is its being inadequate to
universality. The annulment of this inadequacy is in itself the full maturing of
this germ, and it is by imagining the universality of its singularity, that the
individual effects this annulment. By this however, and in so far as the univer-
sality is abstract and immediate, the individual only achieves an abstract
objectivity. (Hegel 1970, 441)
I quote the final paragraphs of Derrida’s commentary:
There is a natural death; it is inevitable for natural life, since it produces itself
in finite individual totalities. These totalities are inadequate to the universal
genus and they die from this. Death is this inadequation of the individual to
generality . . . Inadequation—classification and abstraction—of the generic
syllogism: it has been demonstrated that inadequation placed in motion sex-
ual difference and copulation. So sexual difference and copulation inhabit the
same space; they have the same possibility and the same limit as natural death.
And if the “inadequation to universality” is the “original disease (ursprüngliche
Krankheit)” of the individual, as much ought to be able to be said of sexual
difference. And if the inadequation to universality is for the individual its
“inborn germ of death (Keim des Todes),” this must also be understood of
sexual difference, and not only by “metaphor,” by some figure whose sense
would be completed by the word “death.” Germ of death is almost tautological.
At the bottom of the germ, such as it circulates in the gap [écart] of the sexual
difference, that is, as the finite germ, death is prescribed, as germ in the germ.
An infinite germ, spirit or God engendering or inseminating itself naturally,
does not tolerate sexual difference. Spirit-germ disseminates itself only by

feint. In this feint, it is immortal. (Derrida 1986, 116)
We understand now why the dialectical relief of the life of the animal organ-
ism is at the same time a recoiling, a removal of natural life, that is the
irreducible condition of a finite living; why this relief is mise-en-scène, a feint.
Above all, we understand which interest produced that scene: removing the
difference as the irreducible condition of the life of the living, not just of its
death but also of its life, as Hegel demonstrated when treating of sexual
difference as the condition of the animal reproduction, just before letting the
curtain fall over natural life. Finally, to affirm that the life of the spirit is an
infinite life, infinite self-reproduction, pure identity able to retain difference in
itself, namely, death, as a simple moment, Hegel hides or removes the possi-
bility of the thought of a natural life, our life, which would account for differ-
ence as its irreducible condition of possibility.
If we admit that difference is the irreducible, nonrelievable condition of
the life and death of the living, then we also understand the choice of the
syntagm la vie la mort to allude to this dynamic of difference. This syntagm
stands for recognizing the difference at the heart of the life of the living. On its
basis we should think of another philosophy of life as well as of another
science of life, given that biology goes on to conceive of the logic of the living in
terms of self-reproduction, as it is the case in Jacob and his book, which is
finally given to reading and deconstruction.
NOTES
1. The first traces of this work in progress can be found in Vitale (2014).
2. I thank Mme Marguerite Derrida for allowing me to publish and translate parts of Derrida’s
seminar.
3. The entry “Génération” in Diderot and d’Alembert (1757, 563ff.).
REFERENCES
Bataille, Georges. 1990. Hegel, Death and Sacrifice. Yale French Studies 78: 9–28.
Derrida, Jacques. 1975. La vie la mort. Unpublished seminar, Archive-Derrida, IMEC, DRR 173.
Press.
. 2002. Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass. London: Routledge and Keagan Paul.
Diderot, Denis; and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert. 1757. Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des
sciences, des arts et des métiers. Vol. 7. Paris: André le Breton, Michel-Antoine David,
Laurent Durand, and Antoine-Claude Briasson.
Hartsoeker, Nicolaas. 1694. Essay de dioptrique. Paris: Imprimerie Royale.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1970. Philosophy of Nature, ed. A. V. Miller. New York: Oxford
University Press.
. 1971. On Christianity: Early Theological Writings, trans. T. M. Knox. New York: Harper
and Brothers.
. 1991. The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree. Kitchener, ON: Batoche Books.
. 2010. Science of Logic, trans. George Di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Jacob, François. 1973. The Logic of Life, trans. Betty E. Spillmann. New York: Pantheon Books.
Kojève, Alexandre. 1947. Introduction à la lecture de Hegel. Paris: Gallimard.
Swammerdam, Jan. 1672. Miraculum naturae sive uteri muliebris fabrica. Amsterdam: Van
Horne.
Vitale, Francesco. 2014. The Text and the Living: Jacques Derrida between Biology and
Deconstruction. Oxford Literary Review 36, no. 1: 95–114.
Lévinas after Hegel
An Other Philosophy of Spirit?
Francis Guibal
Université Marc Bloch, Strasbourg, France
Translated by Donald Cross
IF EMMANUEL LÉVINAS CEASELESSLY DISTANCES HIMSELF FROM THE
dominant orientations of our philosophical tradition, it is, as has been justly

observed, in order “to bring to light an other philosophy of spirit” (Housset
2012, 244). It is indeed for him a matter, mainly in Otherwise than Being, of
centering his meditation on the interhuman link and the question of the
“between us,” while trying to escape the power of unification, of collection,
and of gathering,1 which precisely characterizes spirit as German Idealism
inherits it from Greek thought. It is possible to consider, from this point of
view, the Hegelian system as the most significant example of the speculative
totalization to which Lévinas intends to oppose his “search for the infinite
beyond being” (Peperzak 2010, 83).2 Lévinas, moreover, did not fail to recog-
nize Hegel’s “synthetic genius” (Lévinas 1981, 20), which makes Hegel “proba-
bly the greatest thinker of all time” (Lévinas 1997, 238).3 He thus does not
hesitate to affirm that, for those seeking to set out an original philosophical
113
114 Lévinas after Hegel
discourse, it is important to begin by “setting his positions on Hegel” (Lévinas

2003, 95).4 I will therefore first retrace the broad strokes of the Hegelian
philosophy of spirit before following Lévinas in his description of the prophet-
ically inspired psyche and the upheavals that this inevitably entails in human
interlocution: a way of seeking to “leave the System, even if we do so by moving
backwards, through the very door by which Hegel thinks we enter it” (Lévinas
1997, 238).
THE DEPLOYMENT OF FREEDOM
For Hegel, “the knowledge of spirit is . . . the highest and the most difficult”
(2007a, § 377). Indeed, the very meaning of reality is presented there but in
“a return” to itself “out of nature” (2007a, § 381), which is posited as its
other. Neither withdrawn into the purity of an ideal interiority, nor lost in
the opacity without return of a contingent exteriority, spirit reveals itself
as activity or the process of generation and of self-sublation in the “utter
dismemberment” of itself (Hegel 1977, 19). The “infinite pain” is therefore
always at work at the heart of its energy; it is the absolute negativity of freedom
that gives it the force to “maintain itself affirmatively” in the contradiction
(2007a, § 382)5 and thus to achieve a being-close-to-oneself that ceaselessly
gathers in itself its exit out of itself.6 Everything happens here as if spirit were
destined to give itself over to the test of a painful gestation that tears it away
from the burdens of natural and historical finitude, but this ethical and
practical adventure of freedom finds itself always already ordered, finally, by
the presence-to-self of a knowledge that leaves nothing outside itself.
a) Subjective Spirit
Because it emerges out of nature, spirit is first natural spirit (cf. Hegel
2007a, § 385). And the sensitive soul, whether it is opened to the “ideality
devoid of inwardness” of light or to the “pure inwardness of the corporal” in
sonorous vibration (2007a, § 401, 74),7 remains immersed in the sleep of a
suffered immediacy. In passing from sensing to feeling or from sensation to
sentiment, this soul does indeed become the “genius” of an individual subjec-
Francis Guibal 115
tivity but always in the dominant mode of passivity; in the grip of the foreign-
ness of an internal duality that “sets it in vibration” (2007a, § 405), delivered
over to the “evil genius” of the heart (Gemüt) or of an unbridled sensibility, the
self risks sinking into the delirium or madness of mental alienation or “de-
rangement” (2007a, § 408, 115).8 It must inscribe its fragility in the repeated
exercises of habit toward a “bodiliness [that] has been thoroughly trained”
(2007a, § 411), that expresses and signifies it most exactly: the soul becomes
actual only when consciousness “awakes” (2007a, § 387) in it on the basis of a
living body rendered capable of speech, language alone being able to give
“straightaway its more perfect expression” to this “first appearance” of spirit
that the upright and upward posture of the “human figure” is.9
As the Kantian moment of spiritual subjectivity (cf. 2007a, § 415, Remark),
consciousness appears under the sign of a reflexive division that struggles to
resorb itself. Felt, perceived, understood, the lived world is revealed relative to
consciousness of self, a consciousness that is such only in the desire of a
shared life. Humanity is sought through violence and combat;10 it comes to
itself only by letting a relation of reciprocal recognition be dug into itself and
into the heart of its members, which potentially raises it to the rational
universality of spirit, “the unity of the different independent self-conscious-
nesses . . . : ‘I’ that is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I’” (Hegel 1977, 110).11 But the
consciousness that “posits itself as reason” (2007a, § 387), if it indeed raises
itself to the “absolute negativity” of the I that surmounts the exclusivity of its
particularity,12 is still only “the concept of spirit” (2007a, § 417, 146)13 and not the
actuality of its life.
The rational awakening of consciousness nevertheless ends up giving birth
to vigilance in an act of “free” or “actual” spirit (2007a, § 482, 215).14 All the
human faculties, as much the theoretical (intuition, representation, imagina-
tion and memory, understanding) as the practical (sentiment, tendencies,
free will), tend to gather and to conjugate their lively forces in the “free will”
(2007a, § 481), thinking and acting, of an individual straining toward the
universality of meaning. Language, in particular, here proves to be the power
of ordering, of intelligible mastery, and of mutual accord through “an achieved
community of minds” (Hegel 1977, 43).15 Nothing is fixed in this spiritual
exercise in which subjectivity ceaselessly denies its own abstraction by ratio-

nally inscribing itself in the objective reality of spirit.
b) Objective Spirit
It is because, in truth, spiritual objectivity precedes the subjective freedom

that it forms and that works it. Still on the foundation of the arbitrary violence
of a nature from which “one ought to depart” (Hegel 2007a, § 502), spirit first
takes place in the form of worlds and of cultures, of languages and of institu-
tions: freedom, certainly, but one that can register the patience of its advances
only in the density of a substantial being-there. Hegel ceaselessly assumes in
this regard the Greek heritage according to which the actual reality of this
second nature, which is ethical life, is first with respect to the life of individu-
als. But he also wants to grant the modern, and in particular Kantian, emer-
gence of “infinite subjectivity of freedom, which now has being for itself” and
autonomous freedom (Hegel 1991,§ 104). There results, then, an ethical re-
newal in which the legal party and the moral subject give way to the ethical
member: the negativity of duty and the positivity of virtue are reconciled in the
world’s “spirit living and present,” and “only thus does the substance of spirit
begin to exist as spirit” (1991, § 151, 195) conscious of itself, “the truth of
subjective and objective spirit itself” (2007a, § 513, 228).16
This ethico-spiritual life finds its modern accomplishment in the state of
freedom, that is to say, in the institutions forged by citizens that intend to give
the reciprocal recognition of each and every one the shape of actuality. Orga-
nized as a responsible subject, the political community is the “true ground” of
the two “ethical root[s]” (Hegel 1991, §§ 255–56)17 that family love and social
labor constitute: “The state is the self-conscious ethical substance,—the unifi-
cation of the principle of the family and the principle of civil society” (Hegel
2007a, § 535, 236), the site of a living-well-together, where “the free will . . . wills
the free will” (1991, § 27), where the I of singular individuals is in concrete
agreement with the universal We of spiritual sovereignty.
However, even the most justly advanced state still remains one among
others. This inevitable particularity inscribes it in the objective finitude of the
shared condition; it makes it the limited protagonist of a “history of nations
Francis Guibal 117
with a land and a state” (Lévinas 2003, 97). One can and should no doubt think
this world history as a history of liberation in which the spirit of the world is
the ultimate, actualized Subject,18 a history that culminates in a world finally
penetrated by spirit.19 But this grasp can escape the vertigo of bad infinity only
if the temporal linearity shows itself “assembled in a present” (Lévinas 1981,
162),20 if it lets itself be bent and collected in the eternally glorious actuality of
an absolute self-knowledge. Spirit that thinks itself in and through the history
of the world then sheds the limits inherent to natural and historical necessity;
it “ascends to awareness of the absolute spirit, as the eternally actual truth in
which rational awareness is free for itself” (Hegel 2007a, § 552).21
c) Absolute Spirit
This journey, which carries self-consciousnesses to the “yes” of a “reciprocal

recognition which is absolute Spirit” (Hegel 1977, 408),22 is the “way in which
this aspect of reality or existence,” posited by (absolute) spirit as its condition
or its presupposition, “develops itself” (Hegel 2007a, § 553). In the end, in other
words, the whole concreteness of finite spirit, as much objective as subjective,
finds itself grasped again and taken back to its generative origin: the absolute
as spirit,23 for which and thanks to which “finding a world before it as a
presupposed world, generating a world as posited by itself, and gaining free-
dom from it and in it . . . are one and the same” (2007a, § 386).
The human and the divine are thus joined in the “supreme sphere” of a
“religion” that “is to be regarded as issuing from the subject and situated in the
subject, but is equally to be regarded as objectively issuing from the absolute
spirit, which as spirit is in its community” (2007a, § 554). At equal distance
from Greek immanence and Judaic transcendence, this “absolute” truth of
religion is located in the Christian revelation of reconciliation: “the spirit is
only spirit in so far as it is for the spirit, and in the absolute religion it is the
absolute spirit that no longer manifests abstract moments of itself, but its very
self” (2007a, § 564). God is here the absolute Spirit whose freedom is attested
to through a self-separation that is communicated without reserve or jealousy
to those that spirit thereby introduces into the depths of its self-certain life.24
The form that holds the at once conceptual and historical meaning of
this religious content, however, remains to be given. It is up to self-

conscious subjectivity to penetrate, sublate, and actualize the objective
substance of the Christian representation by showing how “the Self ac-
complishes the life of absolute Spirit” and brings it to its successful con-
clusion (Hegel 1977, 484).25 In the end, moreover, spirit’s freedom is thought
neither in the form of an external passage,26 nor even simply as (finite) reflec-
tion,27 but as conscious participation in the absolute freedom of “the eternal
Idea, the Idea that is in and for itself, eternally remains active, engenders and
enjoys itself as absolute spirit” (2007a, § 577, 276).28 This permits this specu-
lative theology to integrate the rupture of finitude and becoming into the “best
and eternal life”29 of a Spirit “that is a subject knowing itself absolutely”
(Lévinas 2000, 270).30
From his first essay on Lévinas, Derrida opposed the laborious economy
of a conceptual “articulation” (Derrida 1978, 148), which “accommodate[s]
duplicity and difference within speculation, within the very purity of philo-
sophical meaning” (113), to “the dream of a purely heterological thought at its
source” (151). Lévinas’s subsequent work had to take into account this warning
that invited him to measure better the power of a thought “into which all the
currents of the Western spirit have come to flow, and in which all its levels are
manifested” (Lévinas 1998, 139). Was it not, moreover, a properly ethical inspi-
ration that supported, in Hegel, “the search for recognition by the other man”
(Lévinas 1998, 119) and the advances of a history in search of spiritual recon-
ciliation?31 This applies no less to the “cordon of totality,” which can be
considered “a rope neither too short nor worn out” (Lévinas 1981, 95). This
clearly does not stop one from suspecting a tendency toward an eminently
ambiguous onto-theo-logization of spirit;32 the desire for recognition always
comes down to a necessary reciprocity33 and “an adventure of spirit” (1981,
137) accomplishing itself in “a great present of synopsis in which being shines
with all its radiance” (1981, 134): an ultimately stoic wisdom “of resignation
and sublimation,” where nothing is able to escape “the immanence without
exit of its play” (1981, 176). But the question then (re)poses itself, tormenting
and formidable: is Hegelianism—that thought of Subject-Spirit that cease-
lessly gives itself up to the “play of essence” (1981, 175) to evoke and bring back
Francis Guibal 119
to itself all alterity34—not the very fate of philosophy? Is wanting to speak

against it not inevitably to confirm it, to have already confirmed it?35
THE PSYCHE’S PNEUMA
One can object, true enough, that our “after Hegel” comes simply from an “event in
thinking” that imposes itself on us, but that is a question of an ambiguous fact,
“concerning which we do not know if it is indicative of a catastrophe that still is
crippling us or a deliverance whose glory we dare not celebrate” (Ricoeur 1990,
203 [emphasis Ricoeur’s, omitted in the English translation]). To “[break] up
the assembling, the recollection or the present of essence,” to escape the
speculative advances of Spirit, the Lévinas of Otherwise than Being operates,
for his part, a critical and vertiginous reduction by exploring the abyssal
depths of subjectivity otherwise (Lévinas 1981, 14). Instead of accompanying
freedom in the epic conquests that open for it a triumphal access to all reality
and meaning, it is a question of surprising and revealing in and before subjectivity,
at the heart of a psyche always already inhabited by irreducible alterity, “a disequi-
librium, a delirium overtaking the origin, rising earlier than the origin, prior to the
␣’ ␳␹␩ 㛭 at the beginning” (Lévinas 2000, 173–74).36
´ [arche], If there is in fact an
experience of spirit in this respect, it is no longer that of a sovereignty magis-
terially weaving its threads in the meanderings of history but that of a para-
doxical inspiration that “paralyzes essence” (Lévinas 1981, 181 [emphasis Lévi-
nas’s, omitted in the English translation]), suspends its game, and literally
takes its breath away.
a) The Nudity of a Vulnerable Sensibility
One must indeed, therefore, begin with the question of subjectivity insofar as
it is both “a node and a denouement”—the node or the denouement—“of
essence and essence’s other” (Lévinas 1981, 10). Within speculative thought, in
fact, it is a question of a central site of articulation and reflection, which,
however, ends up forgotten when reabsorbed in the whole of the system: “An
ineluctable moment of becoming by which being comes out of its obscurity”
(Lévinas 2006, 17), a constitutive but ephemeral “moment of the life of the
Spirit, that is, of Being-totality” (Lévinas 1981, 28).37 This is not the case here, in
which the Self designates a “breaking point where essence is exceeded by the
infinite” (1981, 12),38 that is, “a null-site on the hither side of the negativity
which is always speculatively recuperable, an outside of the absolute” (1981,
17).39 We are not on the level of freedom and its self-consciousness, shaken or
resolute, reasonable or existential, which always ends up being “absorbed in
the said” (1981, 135)40 of an identity full of itself. The subject—“not an act or a
movement, or any sort of cultural gesture” (1981, 144), not even “an attitude
taken in regard to a being, close in its face” (1981, 154)”41—is “nothing” (1981,
56),42 nothing but a stripped ex-posure, without residence or protection,
without settling in or withdrawal, to the arid burning of an “outside where
nothing covers anything” (1981, 179 [emphasis Lévinas’s, omitted in the Eng-
lish translation]):43 neither material entropy nor a vital momentum but dis-
inter-ested heteronomy, a “deep breathing even in the breath cut short by the
wind of alterity” (1981, 180), an “effort . . . beyond freedom” (1981, 8) and its still
overly self-assured risks.
It is impossible, therefore, to dream here of a psyche with access to the full
mastery of itself. If subjectivity does indeed experience itself, it is marked by a
division that ceaselessly widens in subjectivity: the other-in-the-same, the
same is always already, irremediably, and mortally affected and touched,
inhabited and wounded by intimate alterity. Lévinas names this prereflexive
iteration, this relentless or obsessive blow that forbids any reposing in a self,
“recurrence”: “O muffled strokes heard from no one and Destined to break up
the thousand year old silt” (Morel 2000, 58). In the grip of an “obses-
sion . . . stronger than negativity” (Lévinas 1981, 84), breath runs out: “Noth-
ing . . . resembles self-consciousness” (1981, 103) in this breathlessness or this
“panting” (1981, 180)44 that precedes even “any glimmer of consciousness”
(Lévinas 2000, 174) and makes any goal of sublation, of agreement or rational
mastery, appear derisory. It is nevertheless in this alterity inscribed in the self’s
intimacy that one must search, according to Lévinas, for “the heart, and the
goodness, of the same, the inspiration or the very psyche in the soul” (1981, 109).
Before all reflexivity and all consciousness, recurrence operates in the
sensible or sensitive soul the passivity of a corporal feeling. But the psyche of
“the body animated by the soul” (Lévinas 1981, 67) is not first of all that of a
Francis Guibal 121
body mastered thanks to habitual exercise but, rather, that of a carnal sensi-
bility that, enjoying and suffering, immediately feels itself opened to the other,
destined to the other: “Maternity, vulnerability, . . . proximity, contact” (1981,
76) of a “having-the-other-in-one’s-skin” (1981, 115) or of a “a traumatic hold of
the other on the same” (1981, 141).45 This is not, of course, without the possi-
bility of sensibility “los[ing] its signification, be[ing] affirmated as an animal in
its conatus and its joy” (1981, 79). But, even in this possible complacency,
sensibility still testifies to a vulnerability exposed to the meaning of the other;
it “remains for the other, despite itself, non-act, signification for the other and
not for self” (1981, 80); it refers despite itself to “all the gravity of the body
extirpated from its conatus essendi in the possibility of giving” (1981, 142 [em-
phasis Lévinas’s, omitted in the English translation]) the bread taken from its
mouth.
b) Otherwise than Nature/Reason/Freedom
By searching for the first manifestation of spirit’s breath in the quiverings of

corporal sensibility, however, does one not risk reducing spirit’s breath to a
fact of nature? Is respiration not, after all, with its double, constitutive scan-
sion (inspire and expire, receive and return), the simple and natural affirma-
tion of vitality? Unless, Lévinas retorts, “animality is only the soul’s still being
too short of breath,” unless “in human breathing . . . we have to already hear
the breathlessness of an inspiration” that is excessive (1981, 181).46 A “surpris-
ing” (181) reversal that pierces through life and goes beyond being, spirit in
man makes of him, on this account, “the living being capable of the longest
breath in inspiration, without a stopping point, and in expiration, without
return” (182).47 “Transcendence in the form of opening up” (181)48 the respira-
tion heard under significant reduction would come from and would carry
further than all identity; it would reveal “all its meaning only in the relation-
ship with the other,” through the “crushing charge” that makes “the be-
yond . . . of alterity” (181) weigh on everyone.
For Lévinas, indeed, what makes meaning “spiritual” is not sensibility as
such (no more than freedom, reason, or consciousness) but what, in sensibil-
ity, strikes and resounds, what makes sensibility tremble and vibrate.49 This
enigmatic and obsessive alterity, which “concerns me” and “orders me” before
all recognition, which “assigns me before I designate him” (1981, 87), is the
disturbing strangeness in the intimacies of the heart, preceding all empirical
factuality, of a “neighbor bearing the trace of a withdrawal that orders it as a
face” (121). The “meaning of language, before language scatters into words,
into themes” (151) that betray as much as express it, lies in this paradoxical
approach, this immediate contact, where the overwhelming breath of an
original language, “prior to language” (16),50 crosses. In this “saying out of
breath or retaining its breath,” in this “breathlessness of the spirit expiring
without inspiring,” it is perhaps “the extreme possibility of the spirit, its very
epoché” (14), that is given to be experienced by falling upon him in whom it
resounds, by waking and deepening in him the mad uniqueness, “outside of
concepts,” of a “me under assignation” (142):51 “I am unique and chosen; the
election is in the subjection” (127).52
Inseparable from a context of violence that it is important to face to
surmount it, the summons is not chosen by the subject that it invests and that
bears it: chosen “in persecution” and “without assuming the choice” (Lévinas
1981, 56), “despite-me, for-another” (11),53 the advent of the creature takes
place here in “a depth of anarchical passivity” (113), in an intrigue of “total
gratuity, breaking with interest . . . outside of any preestablished system” (96–
97). Never first, never in a position or in a situation of mastery, the subject is
ceaselessly driven out, “expelled from his place” with “nothing in the world on
which to rest his head” (121): such is the un-condition of being hostage,
charged “to the extent of substitution” (148), reduced to punctual authority
[instance] or to relentless obsession without recourse to a self or “a subjectiv-
ity that suffers and offers itself before taking a foothold in being. It is . . . wholly
a supporting [supporter]” (180).
Let’s not, however, be mistaken on this point: this insistence on alterity and
making-passive—or “turning inside out,” “a concave without a convex [Envers
sans endroit]” (1981, 49)—that results for the chosen subject does not lead to
any resignation and is not at all an apology for self-alienation or enslavement.
Recall Lévinas’s major formulations: “The psyche is the other in the same,
without alienating the same” (1981, 112), and the election signifies nothing
other than “alteration without alienation” (1981, 141).54 If there is abasement or
Francis Guibal 123
humiliation in the superb human, this kenosis comes with elevation or exal-
tation: “Inspiration, heteronomy, is the very pneuma of the psyche. Freedom is
borne by the responsibility it could not shoulder, an elevation and inspiration
without complacency” (1981, 124).55 The call that enjoins arouses the courage
of ordered freedom: “Whoever is summoned must go. Whoever is called must
respond” (Péguy 1993, 182) and “respond with responsibility: me, that is, here I
am for the others” (Lévinas 1981, 185). Even so, the prophetic sting of the alterity
for which one cannot take responsibility and that strikes those that are cho-
sen, throws them outside and inflicts upon them “always . . . one degree of
responsibility more” (1981, 117),56 does not cease.
THE INFINITE OF RESPONSIBILITY
It is time for a brief review. If I have chosen to begin with spirit’s speculative
freedom to move back to the heteronomous inspiration of the psyche, it is to put
into relief the eminently critical meaning of the hyperbolic reduction operated by
Otherwise than Being. And this itself can allow an initial question to emerge: if it is
true that “one has to say something about it, say something, before saying only the
saying itself, before making signs, before making oneself a sign” (Lévinas 1981,
198),57 does the Lévinasian gesture not presuppose the Hegelian actuality that
it attempts to escape? Thus the question formerly posed by Derrida could
return, otherwise: in passing from the exteriority of the Face to the obsession
of the one-for-the-other, has one not left an empiricism of alterity for a poetics
or a rhetoric of subjectivity,58 but in a renunciation equivalent to the coher-
ence of rational language? Lévinas, however, intends less than ever to aban-
don the Greek heritage and fall into the facility of pure protestation or an
antiphilosophical testimonial. It is important for him, no doubt, to put into
relief the irreducibility of the provocation inherent in “prophetic” saying
while, however, remaining within an argumentative discourse careful “to give
form to this suspense that takes one’s breath away.”59 Reason must learn to let
itself be surprised or overtaken by the arrival of the other and to listen for what
it can only welcome rather than master; it is equally up to reason to see to it
that the anarchical does not re-establish, in its way, a sort of kingdom.60 To
avoid being fixed in a sovereign principle, the excess of saying must accept
being inscribed—otherwise than in the mode of a “sublation”—in the pa-

tience, the labor, and the pain of an interlocution endlessly taken up and
rectified.61
a) Saids Under Surveillance
One must therefore set off again from the empirical precedence of a “world in
which a language is spoken objectively, in which one is already with a third
party” (Lévinas 1981, 198). Rationality and freedom seem to work together
toward the institution of “reciprocal recognition, that is, . . . equality” (Lévinas
1969, 64), and to justify in this way the speculative optimism that uncovers in
history a “progressive universalization, bearing on both meaning and condi-
tions” (Morel 1968, 113). These advances rest upon the very violence that they
channel and claim to follow, the violence of the objective labor of a spirit
supposed to have “reason over every alterity” (Lévinas 1998, 139). But they
cannot prevent the return of the skeptic “ghost” that troubles the dogmatic
assurance of logos: beneath the veils of the state and historico-cultural prog-
ress, is it not the “buzzing” (Lévinas 1981, 163) and the dark cruelty of the “there
is” that lets itself be felt? Spirit’s alleged freedom, in this case, poorly hides our
condition as slaves locked up with the chains of being: “not a break in the
business [train] carried on by essence, not a distraction” (1981, 183).62
All that can escape this vertigo of nonsense is “the meaning of the other,” a
“voice . . . from the other shore”63 that “falls upward” and evokes the “for-the-
other”64 of an ethical subjectivity irreducible to freedom conscious of itself.
Only the least bit of the “I” reduced to its hostage uncondition remains to bear
the extreme violence of the “there is,” “to break through the wall of meaning
said” by returning to “the hither side of civilization” (Lévinas 1981, 198 [empha-
sis Lévinas’s, omitted in the English translation]), which is the saying of
responsibility. For the human condition, however, to avoid being consumed
by this fire of saintliness, a reversal takes place, “thanks to God” (158),65 “of the
incomparable subject into a member of society” (158).66 Inscribed “as the third
party” on the very Face of the other, human coexistence comes inevitably to
trouble and to rectify the unilateral orientation of ethical asymmetry:
impossible to escape the “comparison between incomparables” (16).67 The
Francis Guibal 125
responsibility for the other finds itself obliged to extend to all others, thus
accepting to invest heavily, at the risk of losing itself or of being translated, at
the risk of betraying itself, in battles for justice that must really be fought
“within the totality and history, within experience” (Lévinas 1969, 23).68
Does this conversion of saying into “thematization and . . . said” (1981,
191)69 not come down to putting the one-for-the-other (back) into a position of
㛭 from which innerworldly “praxis and knowledge” (xlviii)70
“arche,” would
derive and that would end up justifying being and imposing its meaning upon
it?71 Of course not, since this return to thematization and to contextualization
is not due to a subject’s decision but to the intervention or the interposition of
the third party: “In the proximity of the other, all the others than the other
obsess me, and already this obsession cries out for justice” (158).72 However
wholly affected and inhabited by a thirdness and by plural faces, the for-the-
other still remains in a unique position of support and orientation: “the
contemporaneousness of the multiple is tied about the diachrony of two”
(159). But this is, precisely, a critical position of the sharp sting and of what
unsettles, the just equality that searches for universality finding itself con-
stantly carried off, (re)awakened, and relaunched “by my inequality, the sur-
plus of my duties over my rights” (159).73 And “the ancillary or angelic order of
justice” (161)74 that results is by that very gesture stripped of all assurance
founded in pure rationality, whether objective or subjective: justice itself
prophetically inspired,75 which ceaselessly “passes” justice through and in
“my responsibility for the other,”76 which always trembles and shivers with
responsible fragility (185)77 in its search that is never assured of “fraternity or
complicity,” a search “without finality and without end” (140). The present of
totalized and comprehended history gives way to a history lived and judged, a
history returned “to the precarious and to the transitory, and to this un-
clothed state that properly constitutes the condition man” (Péguy 1957, 1522).
b) The Irrevealed of the Religious
Hegel, true enough, does not confine himself to spirit’s objective finitude but
finds support in shared ethical life for a religious elevation to the life of the
absolute; to that end, he relies upon, moreover, the auto-revelation of God
becoming Spirit certain of itself in the reconciled community of manifest

(Christian) religion. Lévinas does not fail to recognize this and even poses the
question as to whether this religious life could not testify, in its own way, to a
“necessary interruption of the Infinite being fixed in structures, community
and totality” (1981, 160).78 But by insisting on a faith that wants, believes, and
claims to know and that thus takes on the explicative form of an integrating
theo-onto-logy,79 does one not forget that the religious confession of “the
stronger than me in me” again comes down to finitude and to the responsibil-
ity risked by the statement’s subject and can always be “but a word,” “an
abusive word,” “nothing but . . . [a] word” (156)?80
This presumptuous assurance of a believing-knowing strengthened by its
belonging to Spirit’s absolute is in any case opposed, in Lévinas, to the sheer
test of a being-required, “the spirit holding its breath” (1981, 5), for a word of
response “addressed to the other man, in the ethics of the welcome” (Lévinas
1998, 151).81 In this provocation to responsibility, where freedom could not be
“primary” or “initial” (1981, 124), “the impossibility of escaping God” is experi-
enced,82 that is, the impossibility of escaping “the Goodness of the Good”83
that “invests freedom” (1981, 187) without the latter playing a role in the choice
that elects it. There is here an ethical intrigue that precedes and exceeds all
particular religious positivity but finds the paradoxical statement that suits it
in the prophetic language of inspiration and testimonial: “Here I am” here
means “send me”;84 the subject of responsibility is experienced as a “wit-
ness”—or trace, or glory—“of the Infinite” (1981, 146), of an Infinite that,
moreover, only “speak[s] in man” (154) or between men by declining the desire
that moves toward Him and inclining it toward this nondesirable, that is, “the
stranger in the neighbor” (123).
In a certain way, then, everything happens on the simply (inter)human
plane of the subjective response to an interpellation that lets itself be heard
only in the echo that it causes.85 The register is less that of a positive revelation
than that of an enigmatic intrigue in which “the breathless spirit retains a
fading echo” (44), in which I surprise myself as “the author of what had been
breathed in unbeknownst to me, . . . having received, one knows not from
where, that of which I am the author” (148–49 [emphasis Lévinas’s, omitted in
the English translation]).86 If one insists on naming—cautiously—this un-
Francis Guibal 127
known provenance, one risks evoking glory “without a principle, without a

beginning,” “anarchy” (144) of an Infinite whose “blinking light” (154) “orders
to me the neighbor as a face, without being exposed to me” (150), without even
appearing to “him that bears witness to it” (146). A “transcendence [that] is
not convertible into immanence” (140), such an Infinite does not reign; it
sends and commands, passes by without settling in, shows itself only as
“Kavyakhol”—“So to speak. Like an otherwise said. Like an otherwise than being”
(Malka 2006, 187)—through traces that it excels at blurring (Lévinas 1981,
12–13). Il, Ille, or Illeity will be the (pro)noun87 of what philosophically respects
the Unseizable in the transcendence that “requires ambiguity” (1981, 152).
c) Wisdom’s Angelic Ancillarity
At the end of the speculative journey that gathers up “the whole spiritual
adventure of being” (Lévinas 1981, 99), the Hegelian system ends up “seat[ing]
the religious on a philosophy of the unity and totality of being called Spirit”
(95). History accesses the eternity of Spirit, of a Spirit whose active infinity
now knows itself to be absolute or without other: “knowing . . . remains the
norm of the spiritual, and transcendence is excluded both from intelligibility
and from philosophy” (96). Consciously refusing this absorption in the abso-
luteness of speculative immanence and resolutely holding itself on the an-
thropological ground of ethical interlocution, Lévinasian thought does not for
all that deny “the indiscretion with regard to the unsayable, which is probably
the very task of philosophy” (7).88 But this ambiguous fervor is not fulfilled by
the conceptual grasp of the Whole but, rather, by the exercise of an “anarchic”
(166) reason that lets itself open up to listen for the irreducible alterity of one’s
neighbor and to the endlessly renewed testimonial of an “infinition,” that is,
the “glory of the infinite” (93–94)89 and its inordinateness.
Truth, from this perspective, cannot be grasped in the systematicity of a
totalizing discourse; it can be approached only “in several times,” according to
a diachronic scansion without sublation, analogous to that of “breathing”
(183). The philosophical effort will certainly be inscribed, then, in the coherent
articulation and argumentation of the careful saids of discourse and rational
universalization but while letting this adventure of interlocution endlessly
reopen the question of enigmatic saying that provokes it and whose trace is
inscribed in every response. However, the testimonial of this saying with-
out the said, precisely to escape sovereignty no less than evanescence,
cannot fail to surrender to the risk of translation/betrayal from a thema-
tization imposed by sharing a common world. Proximity and justice,
saying and said(s), inordinateness [démesure] of breath and the modera-
tion [mésure] of judgment in this way ceaselessly refer to and intensify one
another in a “spiralling” (44) movement, in the “ladder-proof equivoca-
tion” (169), of endlessly unsaying [dédits sans fin]. Without the right to the
“last word” making philosophical discourse forget the angelic ancillarity
that orders its work to listen for, to welcome, and to relaunch the “first
sense”:90 “the wisdom of love” (161) or of Desire “at the service of love” (162),
philosophy “remains the servant of the saying” (162) that it fails to translate
adequately in the writing of its saids.
FROM THE NOETIC TO THE PNEUMATIC: AN INTERMINABLE

AND RECIPROCAL OPENING [ENTAME]?
Two thoughts of spirit, of its manifestation and its meaning, thus proceed in
opposed ways. Hegel advances from the abstract to the concrete, gathering up
and integrating all the aspects and all the dimensions of the real, as much
subjective as objective, inside an encompassing absolute that leaves nothing
outside itself. Lévinas, for his part, detaches himself from this dogmatic massif
by going back critically toward a sort of irreducible transcendental: the inter-
human link of the one-for-the-other, saying “absolute” otherwise, the excess of
which upsets, overwhelms, and exceeds all of rationality’s positive saids. But,
if it is true that different philosophies are never anything but “the storerooms
and barns that share the harvests of thought” (Péguy 1957, 1420), one can
perhaps indicate cultural and religious bases to this conceptual differend.
Hegelian sublation, indeed, confesses to taking support from the Christian
revelation of a reconciliation that sublation tends, moreover, to interpret
through inspirations from the Greeks’ “noo-logical”91 understanding. While
Lévinas, by taking note of Jewish history and spirituality that resist the inte-
grating claims of “the history of the world” and “absolute thought”92 and by
Francis Guibal 129
wondering “whether the meaning does not stem from the Scriptures that
renew it” (Lévinas 1997, 238), refers to a “volcano” that is “more ancient” than
the “quiet topsoil” of Greek logos and invites us to turn “toward an exhalation,
toward a prophetic speech already emitted [soufflé] . . . inside the Greek ori-
gin, close to the other of the Greek” (Derrida 1978, 82).93
One will not for all that forget that certain links, even a certain chiasmus,
can take place between these nevertheless irreducibly distinct orientations.94
It is clear, indeed, that one can find in Hegel that which would perhaps be
capable of troubling and exceeding the presence-to-self of absolute spirit:
violence and patience, even dissymmetry and transcendence.95 And Lévinas,
for his part, is forced to let emerge, as we saw, at the very heart of proximity,
the communal, equality and reciprocity.96 This is true to such an extent that,
“in intersubjective relations, moments of symmetry and dissymmetry” or
tendencies of assembling and of spacing out “play in an irreducible way”
(Bertram 2010, 127).97 Between the Greek logos and the Hebraic ruah, is it not
necessary to let a dialogue “be interminably opened [s’entamer]”98 without
sectarianism or eclecticism, a dialogue that works and opens each, inviting
both reason to a listening-for that endlessly carries it outside itself and re-
sponsibility to graft always anew its anxiety onto the body in the development
of and passion for historical reality?99 This is perhaps a task that still remains
before us.100
NOTES
[The original version of this text was presented at the colloquium on Lévinas’s Otherwise
than Being, organized by Danielle Cohen-Lévinas and Alexander Schnell and held at the
ENS Paris in November 2012. The problems of translating the French “esprit,” like the
German “Geist,” are well known. Although it means both “mind” and “spirit,” the term has
been systematically translated here as “spirit” and, for the sake of consistency, all transla-
tions of Hegel and, on occasion, Lévinas have been changed accordingly.]
1. Recalling that spirit is, for German idealism, “one of the names of collecting and gathering”
(Derrida 1989, 9), Jacques Derrida refers to its Heideggerian “definition”: “eine ursprünglich
einigende, verpflichtende geistige Macht,” that is, “a spiritual power that originally unites and
engages, assigns, obliges” (65).
2. For Peperzak, “monist, ‘totalizing’ thought is a, perhaps the, temptation of occidental

thought,” and Peperzak sees a “much better example” in Hegel than in Heidegger of that
“European philosophy of totality” (Peperzak 2010, 82) against which Lévinas fights.
3. Hegel appears in this way as he that “speaks” the ultimate “truth” of everything and about
everything (Lévinas 1997, 238).
4. This initial positioning, Lévinas specifies, “is like a weaver setting up his loom for the
weaving he will string on it, and work, and rework” (Lévinas 2003, 95).
5. This possibility of being torn away from the exteriority that it traverses and of “endur[ing] the
negation of its individual immediacy” (2007a, § 382) confers upon spirit its infinite power of
universalization; Hegel notes that it is merely a question here of “disclos[ing] . . . the sense”
(2007a, § 378) of Aristotle’s Peri Psuchès (On the Soul).
6. The Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion also think spirit as “the activity of self-
manifesting,” that is, of “becoming for an other” and of “taking its former, initial manifesta-
tion back into itself, sublating it” in order to “com[e] to its own self, becom[e] and [be]
explicitly the way it is” (Hegel 2007b, 102–3).
7. Hegel outlines a “psychical physiology” attentive to all the significant manifestations of the
sensorial, in which the voice (Stimme), in particular, through which man expresses his
mood (Stimmung), has its place beside “tears, . . . speech, . . . sighs” (2007a, § 401, 72).
8. Lévinas, as we will see again, is here very close to Hegel but in a rigorously opposed
orientation: “The soul is the other in me. The psyche, the-one-for-the-other, can be a
possession and a psychosis; the soul is already a seed of folly” (Lévinas 1981, 191).
9. In this way, Hegel marks the limits of any simply physiognomic approach to the human:
“The cultured individual does not need to be lavish with looks and gestures; he possesses in
talk the worthiest and most suitable means of expressing himself” (2007a, § 408, 139).
10. One must remember that, for Hegel, the struggle for recognition is indeed the “beginning as
it appears” but not the “substantial principle” of “man’s social life” (2007a, § 433, 160) as it
unfolds in the political reality of states.
11. Spirit, “absolute substance,” assures in this sense “perfect freedom and independence”
(Hegel 1977, 110) for the diverse self-consciousnesses of which it is the life.
12. Cf. 2007a, § 413, 142: “I, as this absolute negativity, is implicitly identity in otherness; I is itself
and extends over the object as an object implicitly sublated, I is one side of the relationship
and the whole relationship—the light, that manifests itself and an Other too.”
13. The Phenomenology of Spirit already indicated the division between this “concept of spirit”
and the “experience” that consciousness must still make of it in order to complete its
journey.
14. From anthropology (of the soul) to psychology (of mind [esprit]), passing through phenom-
enology (of consciousness), the philosophy of the subjective spirit in the Encyclopedia
reduces to its essential kernel of intelligibility the route of experience that led the Phenom-
enology of Spirit from consciousness to reason, then to (true) spirit, through the mediation
of (self) consciousness.
15. On this meaning of language in Hegel, I refer, if I may, to Guibal (1997, 265–97).
16. I presented this dynamic of spiritual objectivity in Hegel in Guibal (2001).
Francis Guibal 131
17. 1991, §§ 255 and 256 invite the distinction between social base and political foundation.
18. The Volksgeister, indeed, cannot escape a dialectic of finitude, which puts the totality of
historical peoples on trial (cf. 2007a, § 548, 246) and in this way operates a return to primary
power of Weltgeist or of spirit “that does not just hover over history as over the waters, but
weaves in it and is the sole moving force” (2007a, § 549, 249).
19. This culmination is due, according to Hegel, to the Christian-Protestant “principle” that
ends up “penetrat[ing] the worldly sphere immanently” (2007a, § 552, 253): “the Spiritual is
no longer an element foreign to the State. Freedom has found the means of realizing its
Ideal—its true existence. This is the ultimate result which the process of History is intended
to accomplish” (Hegel 1944, 109–10). On this problematic, I refer to Guibal (2000, 161–85).
20. Spirit’s “double, linear, and circular structure” (Morel 1968, 232) is experienced and thought
in the present conscious of itself, in the always active joining of historical (linear) reality and
its absolute (circular) sense.
21. The passage ends with the superb (Pauline) metaphor of clay and glory: “necessity, nature
and history are only servants of its revelation and vessels of its honour.”
22. For this, self-consciousnesses must renounce their respective one-sidedness (thought/
action) and mutually grant each other reconciliatory forgiveness that expands each “into a
duality” (Hegel 1977, 409) of internal alterity.
23. “The absolute is spirit. This is the highest definition of the absolute” (2007a, § 384, 18).
24. In the form of a triple syllogism (2007a, §§ 566–71, 264–66), Hegel lays out this trinitarian
life that exits itself (creation/incarnation) in order to sublate and return to itself. He refers
in particular to the Pauline affirmations concerning “the Spirit” that “searcheth all things,
yea, the deep things of God” (cf. 1 Cor. 2:10ff.) and that “beareth witness with our spirit, that
we are the children of God” (Rom. 8:16).
25. This actualization of absolute spirit’s life is translated, then, by a double movement of
departure and return, of exteriorization and interiorization: “Spirit . . . has shown itself to
us to be neither merely the withdrawal of self-consciousness into its pure inwardness, nor
the mere submergence of self-consciousness into substance . . . but Spirit is this movement
of the Self which empties itself of itself and sinks itself into its substance, and also, as
Subject, has gone out of that substance into itself, making the substance into an object and
a content at the same time as it cancels this difference between objectivity and content”
(Hegel 1977, 490).
26. According to the factual successivity simply announcing that “the logical becomes nature
and nature becomes spirit” (2007a, § 575, 276).
27. The movement is therefore that of the spirit that “presupposes nature and joins it together
with the logical” (2007a, § 576, 276).
28. It is a question of the third and final syllogism, where “the Idea of philosophy” is presented:
what is split and reunited is indeed, then, “the concept, the nature of the subject-matter,
that moves onwards and develops,” but “this movement is equally the activity of cognition”
(2007a, § 577, 276).
29. It is well known that Hegel concludes the Encyclopedia (2007a, § 577, 276–77) with the
famous citation of Aristotle (Metaphysics, bk. 12, pt. 7) inviting the admiration in God of “an
eternal living thing” that finds its joy in the immanent activity of a noetic auto-
contemplation.
30. Lévinas points out precisely that, “for Hegel, this unity of being and nothingness is a biblical
thought, which for him means a Christian thought” (Lévinas 2000, 77). This at once Chris-
tian and Greek interpretation of the biblical message cannot fail to raise questions.
31. Hegel stresses, indeed, that “it is . . . futile to look for genuine religion and religiosity”—and,
therefore, an “absolute” meaning of history—“outside the ethical spirit” (2007a, § 552, 250).
32. Paul Ricoeur speaks of an “ontologization of Geist” in which the “network of interactions”
(Ricoeur 1991a, 204 and 244) are reabsorbed between subjects whose consciousness can
nevertheless give shelter to “the spirit . . . [that] has fled the now-criminal institutions”
(Ricoeur 1994, 256). And he aims equally at the anthropo-theo-logical ambiguity of a “Spirit,
concerning which we do not really know whether it is man or God” (Ricoeur 1990, 203).
33. If “man is recognition,” if he is “necessarily recognized and recognizing” (Hegel 1969, 206),
what place can be made for the exceptional uniqueness of a responsibility capable of taking
the risk of confronting misrecognition? In this respect, it seems indeed that Hegelian
phenomenology has not seen within its horizon “true princes, slaves-masters, that do not
give in order to receive, that can give without receiving,” that can desire recognition and
work toward its realization without for all that making it “the absolute condition of their
own trust” (Morel 1976, 302).
34. Agent and milieu of “the relief [la relève]” or of the return to the origin, spirit is the absolute
power of reappropriation: “The ‘its other’ is the very syntagm of the Hegelian proper; it
constitutes negativity in the service of the proper” (Derrida 1986, 83a, my italics).
35. This was one of the major interrogations of “Violence and Metaphysics”: if it is not possible
to “think the false, nor even choose the false, without paying homage to the anteriority and
the superiority of the true,” must one not admit that, “as soon as he speaks against Hegel,
Lévinas can only confirm Hegel, has confirmed him already” (Derrida 1978, 120)?
36. Lévinas 2000, 173–74.
37. On occasion, Lévinas evokes even more precisely the integrating drama of this intrigue in
which the uniqueness of singular individuals disappear in Spirit’s life: simple “bits of dust
collected by its movement or drops of sweat glistening on its forehead because of the labor
of the negative it will have accomplished. They would be forgettable moments of which
what counts is only their identities due to their positions in the system, which are reab-
sorbed into the whole of the system” (1981, 104).
38. This point can also be called “the point outside of being, the point of disinterestedness”
(1981, 136) or the “pure sensible point” (1981, 164), sensible to the suffering and the weight of
being that it must support.
39. This subjective un-condition of the creature “precedes this empirical order, which is a part of
being, of the universe, of the State, and is already conditioned in a system” (1981, 116).
40. The implicit reference is to Hegel’s speculative freedom in particular, but it can be ex-
tended, in our space of thought, to the fixedness of Kant’s transcendental I or to the
self-willing of creative life in Nietzsche, to Heidegger’s heroic resolution or to Weil’s free-
Francis Guibal 133
dom capable of reason. Without being a question, evidently, of relying upon substance or
returning to the interior citadel of the ancients.
41. The formulation is already announced in 1981, 143 (“without any ‘taking up of attitudes’”). It
is clearly an allusion to Weil’s distinction between category and attitude.
42. “[T]here is nothing that is named I,” because “the I is said by him that speaks” (1981, 56), the
subject of a statement that only means “here I am, answering for everything and for
everyone” (1981, 114).
43. Aninheritance,nodoubt,ofthebiblicaltribulationsofanomadic,exodic,orexilicexistenceinwhich
an outside breath can be “the caress of the wind or the threat of storms” (1981, 180).
44. Cf. (1981, 180): “a panting, a trembling of substantiality, a hither side of the here.” [Emphasis
Lévinas’s, omitted in the English translation.]
45. Lévinas emphasizes that “through this alteration the soul animates the object; it is the very
pneuma of the psyche [psuchè]. The psyche signifies the claiming of the same by the other.”
One can equally say that “the animation of a body by a soul only articulates the-one-for-
the-other in subjectivity” (1981, 79). The Aristotelian conception of body and soul and its
interpretative reworking by Hegel are here oriented in a completely different way.
46. Lévinas thinks this “breathlessness of the spirit, or the spirit holding its breath,” as “the
extreme possibility of the Spirit, bearing a sense of what is beyond the essence” (1981, 5).
47. Lévinas even speaks of an “inspiration that is already expiration, that ‘rends the soul’” (1981, 182).
48. The “pneumatism,” in this sense, “is not nonbeing; it is disinterestedness, excluded middle
of essence, besides being and non being” (1981, 181). [Emphasis Lévinas’s, omitted in the
English translation.]
49. Lévinasatfirstattributedthisopeninginwhichthe“gloryoftheotherevent”(Lévinas2009, II, 92) or
the “glory of an other being” (90) is signaled to the resonance of sound as “resounding-
vibration” (2009, I, 166), before discovering in the exteriority of the face and of speech
(Totality and Infinity) this interruption that makes the same tremble by being inscribed in it
(Otherwise than Being). On this point, see Cohen-Lévinas (2012) and Arbib (2012).
50. The passage specifies that, without this first language, “no language, as a transmission of
messages, would be possible.”
51. This “me [moi],” which is not “an Ego [Moi]” in general, does not exclude the disturbing
alterity of madness from the self: “psyche, . . . a seed of folly, already a psychosis” (1981, 142).
52. Without reducing to a theoretical universalization, this elect uniqueness is not reserved for
some but concerns “virtually” everyone as “chosen . . . , called to leave in his turn, or without
awaiting his turn, the concept of the ego, its extension in the people” (1981, 185).
53. Analogously, Péguy speaks of the chosen as a “victim invested despite himself” (Péguy 1993,
182–83). [This passage and the others cited later are omitted in the abridged translation of
Notre jeunesse in Temporal and Eternal (Péguy 1958).]
54. It seems difficult to me not to see in the clarity of this formulation a remnant or an echo of
the strong Hegelian distinction between Entäusserung and Entfremdung.
55. And Lévinas specifies: “The for-the-other characteristic of the subject can be interpreted
neither as a guilt complex (which presupposes an initial freedom), nor as a natural benev-
olence or divine ‘instinct,’ nor as some love or some tendency to sacrifice” (1981, 124).
56. I follow this hyperbolic crescendo, which empties out the subject to the point of reducing it
to a pure instance of responsibility, more closely in the second part—“L’infini de la respon-
sabilité”—of Lévinas (2004, 43–71).
57. Impossible, then, to hold on to the “absolute” purity of saying. On this point, I refer, if I may, to
the second part (“Intelligibilité paradoxale”) of Guibal 2009, in particular to chapters 5 (“Une
pratique philosophique de l’excès,” 109–23) and 6 (“Le logos à l’épreuve de l’altérité,”
125–45).
58. The importance for Lévinas of a hyperbolic rhetoric or a writing of “‘excess’ [surenchère]” (1981,
187) in exposing the superlative of a “saying without the said” is well known. But one then
risks, as Lévinas is aware, simply “mak[ing] signs in the night” (1981, 198) by being content
with an evanescent language to evoke a subject without actuality and an ethereal spirit.
59. [Actu Philosophia, “Entretien avec Jean-Luc Nancy (2): Autour de Dans quels mondes vivons-
nous?” May 4, 2012. Available at www.actu-philosophia.com/spip.php?article377 (accessed
January 8, 2014). For an English translation, see Nancy (2014).]
60. Cf. (1981, 194): “If the anarchical were not signalled in consciousness, it would reign in its
own way. The anarchical is possible only when contested by language [discours], which
betrays, but conveys [traduit], its anarchy, without abolishing it, by an abuse of language.”
[Emphasis Lévinas’s, omitted in the English translation.]
61. This “spiralling” (1981, 44) movement in which “inspiration by the other is also expiation for
the other, the psyche by which consciousness itself would come to signify” (1981, 145), in
which saying and said(s) are ceaselessly articulated in unsaid(s) [dédit(s)] with “ladder-
proof equivocation [équivoque indémaillable]” (1981, 169), might not be entirely irrelevant to
the best of a dialectic careful to let negativity inscribe itself “in its extension” and “equally in
its depth” (Hegel 1977, 493) or careful concerning a method that would know how to
conjugate resources of “retrogression” and the Idea’s process of moving “forward”; by that
very gesture, however, the division is marked between a “system of totality” (Hegel, 2010,
748–49) and a thought able to testify to the Infinite only through a diachrony without
sublation.
62. Everything occurs as if, in the struggle against violence, calculative rationality were forced
to a strategic ruse that can scarcely avoid “the institution of violence out of this very
struggle” (1981, 177).
63. Cf. (1981, 183): “Only the meaning of the other is irrecusable, and forbids the reclusion and
reentry into the shell of the self. A voice comes from the other shore. A voice interrupts the
saying of the already said.”
64. Cf. (1981, 183–84): “Height is heaven. The kingdom of heaven is ethical. This hyperbole, this
excellence, is but the for-the-other in its disterestedness”; this hyperbole “breaks up and
falls upward, into the human.” [The English translation mistakenly replaces désintéresse-
ment with “interestedness.”]
65. J. Rolland has justly entitled “De l’anarchie ou grâce à Dieu” the chapter from Rolland
(2000) in which he refers to the famous scene of Exod. 33:12–23, commented upon with the
help of Rachi: neither wanting nor able “to make” Moses “see His glory,” only “his back,” God
Francis Guibal 135
“ponders the mercy of interposing a third between them and thusly inaugurates justice”
(226).
66. The one-for-the-other proves also to be one-among-others, within a world of complexity
that it is important to judge and to order.
67. A call, then, to a “reason” that dares “to judge” as justly as possible.
68. It is there, indeed, on the common ground of the human condition that responsible subjects
must accede and give place to the irruption and testimonial of a “a surplus always exterior to
the totality” (Lévinas 1969, 22). On the ensemble of this problematic and its orientation, I
refer to my La gloire en exil, the third part in particular (“La mesure de la justice”).
69. Lévinas here declares that the saying “becomes [se fait] a thematization and a said” (my italics).
In this way, all the saids of classical rationality (justice, prudence, wisdom, . . . ) return.
70. Lévinas here speaks of “deriv[ing] praxis and knowledge in the world from this nonassum-
able susceptibility.”
71. Cf. (1981, 26): “Being signifies on the basis of the one-for-the-other” that supports it, orients
it, and makes it just.
72. One will notice the force of this “cry” that stretches the passivity and passion of obsession to
practical rationality in love with justice. For the Christian Charles Péguy, the Jew B. Lazare,
carrier of all “Jewish anxiety and modern anxiety” (Péguy 1993, 269), was a “heart that bled
in all of the world’s ghettos” (175).
73. There is therefore a sort of interlacing here, a structure or an articulation, in constant
disequilibrium, that ceaselessly takes new forms under the pressure of the elsewhere and
the future.
74. The entirety of justice’s articulated language—the said—finds itself sent off, addressed and
ordered (or subordinated) by the inspiration-language of saying.
75. Still with respect to B. Lazare, Péguy invokes “the fire in the heart, an ardent [ardente] head,
and the blazing [ardente] coal on the prophet’s lip” (Péguy 1993, 176).
76. In this way, the fragility risked by this responsibility, equidistant from ideal purity and a
pragmatic rut, invades the entire field of common politico-historic reality. This does not, of
course, make a thought out of action, power, and the state, but it can inspire an ethic of
anxiety and civil resistance.
77. Cf. (1981, 185): “in the just war waged against war to tremble or shudder at every instant because
of this very justice. This weakness is needed” so that “the little humanity that adorns the
earth” is not lost. [Emphasis Lévinas’s, omitted in the English translation.]
78. This objectification within the limits of the said can be meaningful to the very extent that it
responds to the rectification that the saying obliges due to the common thirdness and the
visibility of faces.
79. Is this not the tendency inherent in the religious confession of God as absolute Subject or as
the Whole? Lévinas does not deny it but proposes an ethical rectification: “The Good as the
infinite has no other, not because it would be the whole, but because it is Good and nothing
escapes its goodness” (1981, 187).
80. On the question of God in Lévinas’s thought, I refer, if I may, to “Dieu sans le savoir,” chapter
3 of Guibal (2009, 45–68).
81. For Lévinas, there, and only there, does one find “the first religious service, the first prayer,
the first liturgy” (Lévinas 1998, 151). Since 1964, Derrida clearly saw in “the ethical rela-
tion”—that trial that takes one’s breath away and makes the responsible subject’s heart
pound—“a religions relation. . . . Not a religion, but the religion, the religiosity of the reli-
gious” (Derrida 1978, 96).
82. Cf. (1981, 128): “The impossibility of escaping God lies in the depths of myself as a self, as an
absolute passivity.”
83. Cf. (1981, 122): “This antecedence of responsibility to freedom would signify the Goodness of
the Good: the necessity that the Good choose me first before I can be in a position to choose,
that is, welcome its choice.”
84. Cf. (1981, 199), which refers to Isaiah 6:8. If “all of man’s spirituality” should, according to
Lévinas, be called “prophetic” (1981, 149), it is by respecting “the anachronism of inspiration
or of prophecy” in which “obedience preced[es] the hearing of the order” (150) that it
invokes.
85. Cf. (1981, 149): “the appeal is understood in the response, the ‘provocation’ coming from God
is in my invocation.”
86. Further on, Lévinas speaks of a voice “com[ing] from I know not where” (1981, 150). And God
Who Comes to Mind also invokes an “intrigue of infinity in which I make myself the author
of what I hear” (Lévinas 1998, 76).
87. The last page of 1981 evokes this unutterable pronoun that “marks with its seal all that a
noun can convey” (185). [Il is the French pronoun for he, ille the Latin pronoun for he, and
illeity (illéité) is therefore a certain “he-ness.”]
88. Impossible, indeed, to forgo the risk of betrayal that accompanies all translation. But if “the
unsayable saying lends itself to the said, to the ancillary indiscretion of the abusive lan-
guage that divulges or profanes the unsayable,” this language must nevertheless let “itself
be reduced, without effacing the unsaying in the ambiguity or the enigma of the transcen-
dent, in which the breathless spirit retains a fading echo” (1981, 44).
89. Lévinas opposes to the Hegelian critique and sublation of bad infinity (2007a, § 93–94, cited
in 1981, 193), “not a Sollen, which is always asymptotic, but glory” (1981, 193), the glory of an
approach in which distance grows on the very same scale as proximity: “The more I answer
the more I am responsible; the more I approach the neighbor with which I am encharged
the further away I am. This debit which increases is infinity as an infinition of the infinite, as
glory” (1981, 93).
90. On this point, see chapter 4 (“Le dernier mot et le premier sens,” 71–107) and chapter 6 (“Le
logos à l’épreuve de l’altérité,” 125–45) in Guibal (2009).
91. The qualification comes from L. B. Puntel, who applies it to the entirety of the
Hegelian philosophy of spirit. In fact, I have already indicated the cross-reference of
subjective spirit to Aristotle’s Peri Psuchès (n. 10) and the citation of Metaphysics, bk. 12,
with which the Encyclopedia concludes (n. 36), and what Hegel places under the
heading of spirit’s objectivity obviously owes much to the Greek sense of political
“substance.”
Francis Guibal 137
92. Lévinas wonders here, not without a certain irony, “whether absolute thought is capable of
encompassing Moses and the prophets”; the same passage opposes “a spirituality or a
principle of solidarity or a reason for living” that was, “in any case, the cause of death for
millions of . . . contemporaries” to Hegelian sublation (1997, 237–38). Later, with respect to
Sartre’s discovery of the historical originality of Judaism, Lévinas will make himself clearer
still: “if Jewish history exists, Hegel was wrong. Well, Jewish history does exist” (“When
Sartre Discovers Holy History,” in Lévinas 2003, 97).
93. Derrida immediately adds (and this is the whole question of his essay): Can “the other of the
Greek . . . be named the non Greek?” (Derrida 1978, 82).
94. With his normal rigor, Derrida already noted in 1964 that Lévinas is no doubt “very close to
Hegel, much closer than he admits, and at the very moment when he is apparently opposed
to Hegel in the most radical fashion” (Derrida 1978, 99).
95. Recalling, still in his 1964 essay, that the economy of recognition cannot fail to put both
(transcendental) symmetry and (empirical) asymmetry together into play without the
reduction of either, Derrida adds: “Where have these movements been better described
than in The Phenomenology of the Mind?” (Derrida 1978, 126).
96. In other words, what Ricoeur, in a similar language, calls the “reciprocity of unsubsti-
tutables” (Ricoeur 1991b, 258).
97. I take this formulation from the conclusion of Bertram 2010, 127. And I refer to my review of
this work in the Archives de Philosophie.
98. I take my inspiration from Derrida’s beautiful formulation that evokes a “strange dialogue
of speech and silence” and considers, on this point, that logical articulation and prophetic
breath “can open [entamer] a dialogue interminably, be opened [s’entamer] in it, calling each
other to silence” (Derrida 1978, 133).
99. It is well known that this question of grafting (“a wild olive tree . . . graffed” on “the olive tree”) is
at the heart of the Pauline meditation on Israel and the universal meaning of its election (Rom.
11:17; see 9–11, esp. 11:16–24). Charles Péguy has taken up this question wonderfully, pointing out
that “Jesus could graft the Jewish anxiety onto the Christian body” but without “grafting the
Jewish patience on the Christian body” (Péguy 1957, 1373). Previously, with respect to and
following B. Lazare and this joining, at the heart of “the universal soul,” of “the Jewish soul
and the Hellenic soul” (Péguy 1993, 199), Péguy had equally shown that “the burden of Jewish
anxiety” came to be coupled with “the burden of modern anxiety” (269).
100. In a recent work on La responsabilité: une nouvelle catégorie morale?, Nathalie Maillard
considers that, in order to inscribe the anxiety of dis-inter-estedness in our world’s reality,
one should perhaps learn to conjugate the vulnerable subject’s patience with the capable
man’s action, which leads her to wonder if it is not necessary “‘to graft’ here Ricoeur’s
thought on that of Lévinas” (Maillard 2011, 358).
REFERENCES
Arbib, Dan. 2012. De la phénoménologie du son à la phénoménologie du visage. In Lévinas: au-

delà du visible, 101–24. Caen, France: Presses universitaires de Caen.
Bertram, Georg W. 2010. Anspruch auf Anerkennung. In Hegel und Lévinas, 111–27. Munich:
Verlag Karl Alber.
Cohen-Lévinas, Danielle. 2012. La phénoménologie et son double. Le son parle, la parole sonne. In
Lévinas: au-delà du visible, 85–101. Caen, France: Presses universitaires de Caen.
Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
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. 1989. Of Spirit, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Guibal, Francis. 1997. Le signe hégélien. Economie sacrificielle et relève dialectique. Archives de
Philosophie 60, no. 2: 265–97.
. 2000. Histoire et Esprit, le devenir-philosophie du monde selon Hegel. In Autour de
Hegel: Hommage à Bernard Bourgeois, 161–86. Paris: Vrin.
. 2001. Le négatif au travail ou la “seconde nature” de l’esprit. Cahiers philosophiques de
Strasbourg 11: 233–56.
. 2009. Emmanuel Lévinas—Le sens de la transcendance, autrement. Paris: PUF.
Hegel, G. W. F. 1944. The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree. New York: Wiley.
. 1969. Jenaer Realphilosophie. Hamburg: F. Meiner Verlag.
. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
. 1991. Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
. 2007a. Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Part 3, The Philosophy of Mind,
trans. W. Wallace and A. V. Miller, rev. M. J. Inwood. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
. 2007b. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, ed. Peter C. Hodgson. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
. 2010. The Science of Logic, trans. George Di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Housset, Emmanuel. 2012. Le monde cassé et le moi comme exil. In Lévinas: au-delà du visible,
229–52. Caen, France: Presses Universitaires de Caen.
Lévinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis.
Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
. 1981. Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press.
. 1997. Hegel and the Jews. In Difficult Freedom, trans. Sean Hand, 235–38. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
. 1998. The Thinking of Being and the Question of the Other. In Of God who Comes to
Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo, 111–21. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
. 2000. God, Death, and Time, trans. Bettina Bergo. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
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. 2003. A Language Familiar to Us (1980). In Unforeseen History, trans. Nidra Poller, 92–
95. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
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. 2004. La gloire en exil. Paris: Cerf.

. 2006. Humanism of the Other, trans. Nidra Poller. Urbana-Champaign: University of
Illinois Press.
. 2009. Œuvres 2: Parole et Silence. Paris: Grasset and Fasquelle.
Maillard, Nathalie. 2011. La responsabilité: une nouvelle catégorie morale? Paris: Labor and Fides.
Malka, Salomon. 2006. Emmanuel Lévinas: His Life and Legacy, trans. Michael Kigel and Sonja
M. Embree. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
Morel, Georges. 1968. Problèmes actuels de religion. Paris: Aubier Montaigne.
. 1976. Conflits de la modernité. Paris: Aubier Montaigne.
. 2000. Lignes sans retour. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2014. What’s These Worlds Coming To?, trans. Travis Holloway and Flor
Méchain. Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press.
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. 1958. Temporal and Eternal, trans. Alexander Dru. New York: Harper.
. 1993. Notre Jeunesse. Paris: Gallimard.
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. 1991a. From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John
B. Thompson. Chicago: Northwestern University Press.
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Rolland, Jacques. 2000. Parcours de l’autrement. Paris: PUF.
Restless Negativity
Blanchot’s Hegelianism
L Felipe Alarcón
There is a night in the night.

—Joë Bousquet, Traduit du silence (1968, 12)
INTRODUCTION
Let us begin by recalling a series of dates. The first one is 1962, when Derrida’s
translation of Husserl’s Origin of Geometry first appeared. What will attract
our attention is a footnote in the long introduction written by Derrida; more
precisely, the one stating that the “linguistic neutralization of existence” is a
point of “profound convergence of Hegelian and Husserlian thought” (1989, 67
n. 62). To show us more clearly this convergence point, Derrida quotes Hegel’s
System of 1803–1804, which may not be a surprise. Nevertheless, and this what
we would like to retain, Derrida does not quote Hegel directly but through
someone else: “cited by Maurice Blanchot in La Part du feu (Paris: Gallimard,
141
142 Restless Negativity
1949), p. 325” (Derrida 1989, 67 n. 62). Now, if we pay attention to the page
number, we will realize that the text referred to by Derrida is none but “Liter-
ature and the Right to Death,” the last article from Blanchot’s 1949 compila-
tion. A second date that we would like to recall is 2003: in a colloquium in
homage to Blanchot, who had just passed away, Derrida reads a text entitled
“Maurice Blanchot Is Dead.” The presentation, as published in the collected
papers of the colloquium, contains two parts; the first one is completely
dedicated, once again, to “Literature and the Right to Death.” There are other
dates, like 1978–79, when Derrida directed a seminar entitled “Of the Right to
Literature/From the Right to Literature” that, according to him, “passed in
particular through an interpretation of ‘Literature and the Right to Death’”
(2011, 5). We recall particularly those two dates—1962 and 2003—to show that
Derrida had in mind Blanchot’s article his entire career, or at least from one of
his very first texts to one of his final public presentations. We will just an-
nounce, for now, that what links both of Derrida’s texts is the question of
death, or negativity. If in the introduction to Origin of Geometry Blanchot’s
quote is related to the possibility of annihilation operated by the simple act of
naming (which is, for Blanchot, a “deferred assassination” [Blanchot 1995a,
323]), “Maurice Blanchot Is Dead” deals with the death penalty. When some-
one talks about the death penalty in Blanchot’s article, he or she is engaged in
a political reading: the death of which he or she is talking about is the revolu-
tionary one, the one executed on the guillotine. Political death, in short.
Derrida writes in 2003: “Even if it is abusive to conclude that Maurice Blanchot
is for a literature solidary with death penalty, the tenor and the movement of
his text bans an opposite conclusion. They exclude that Blanchot were against
death penalty at that time” (301). Is it fair to say so? Fair or not, it is certainly
Blanchot who allows that approach, as he writes, for example: “Every citizen
has a right to death so to speak: death is not a sentence passed on him, it is his
most essential right; he is not suppressed as a guilty person—he needs death
so that he can proclaim himself a citizen” (1995a, 319).
We can indeed understand these statements, as they coincide with a
certain Hegelianism, as a declaration “for” the death penalty. However, at this
point the question of dates reappears: Derrida shows that the publication of
“Literature and the Right to Death” coincides with two major dates: “1948, year
L Felipe Alarcón 143
of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which at least begin to disqual-

ify the principle of death penalty, even if the Declaration did not proscribe it.
That was exactly a century after Hugo’s abolitionist vote” (Derrida 2003, 318).
Following these indications, Vanghélis Bitsoris opposes Derrida and Blan-
chot. The text we are thinking of is in fact entitled “Blanchot, Derrida: From
the Right to Death to the Right to Life.” Derrida would thus support life while
Blanchot would support death. Even if this reading is at first glance quite
simplistic, Bitsoris give us a clear example of what is nowadays the most
common interpretation of Blanchot’s text. This interpretation, that we have
already called political, is the one that puts into play a set of dates around the
death penalty. However, does “Literature and the Right to Death” coincide
with Hugo’s speech centenary? The answer is, at the same time, yes and no.
Yes, because even when The Work of Fire was published in 1949, the last
chapter first appeared as an article in 1948. No, because the first part of that
chapter was published in 1947 in Critique as “The Animal Kingdom of the
Spirit” (“Le règne animale de l’esprit”). This minimal yet considerable differ-
ence introduces a major issue: 1947 is the year Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Mind by Jean Hyppolite appeared in French, and it is also
the year Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, by Alexandre Kojève, was first
published. At a certain degree, and following a certain reading, Blanchot’s text
is a meditation on Hegel based on two sources: on one hand, Hyppolite’s
comments on the section “The Spiritual Animal Kingdom and Deceit, or the
‘Matter in Hand’ Itself” of Hegel’s Phenomenology; on the other, the concept of
work and death developed by Kojève in his Introduction. Blanchot made that
explicit, as the first footnote of the text refers to Hyppolite while the second
and the third ones refer to Kojève. This reading (one may say, this second set
of dates) that undoubtedly Derrida did not ignore is the one I propose to
develop in what follows. I will consequently center my analysis in the first part
of Blanchot’s text, that is, from page 300 to 320 of Lydia Davis’s translation
into English.1
Before starting with our analysis of Blanchot’s text, we would like to point
out some details about its interpretative context. First, “Literature and the
Right to Death” is, among Blanchot’s oeuvre, a privileged text. No scholar may
neglect it if he or she is about to perform an analysis of his entire work.2 This is,
in the first place, because it is one of the most representative texts of what
Marlène Zarader has called “the first moment” of “the confrontation with
Hegel” (2001, 47–49). Indeed, this confrontation—if there is one—begins long
before 1947, and one must track it in seminal Blanchot articles, even in those
that Blanchot wrote before his first book and did not include in any of the
following compilations. Nevertheless, what turns crucial “Literature and the
Right to Death” is that we can find the first explicit confrontation with Hege-
lian text there, that is to say, the first time Blanchot quotes, discusses, and
develops the Hegelian text and not just some ideas inspired on him, so to
speak. Before, in 1946, for example, Blanchot mentioned Hegel, but there was
neither a single documented quote nor a “systematical” treatment of Hegelian
text. Second, even when “Literature and the Right to Death” follows some
considerations on the double status of language that he had already devel-
oped in Faux pas (1943), this time Blanchot analyzes this duality as a concept
(so to speak) and not, as he did before, as it appears in a particular author or
fictional piece. From this point of view, and following a traditional distinction
we really do not agree with, “Literature and the Right to Death” has a twofold
significance: critical and philosophical. Scholars who want to grasp what
Blanchot means by “double status of language” when he talks about writing
may find in “Literature and the Right to Death” a significant insight that they
may not be able to find in the so-called critical texts. Scholars rather con-
cerned with philosophical treatment of Blanchot may find many clues of
Blanchot’s conceptual framework. That being said, the interpretation per-
formed by Derrida in “Maurice Blanchot Is Dead” is not just original but
disruptive: it breaks the “technical” frame most scholars had applied until that
time.
But does the text itself allow this twofold reading? Multiple, if one is to
speak seriously. With Blanchot, there is always more than one way to enter the
text, more than one way to read his texts. Nevertheless, “Literature and the
Right to Death” offers an unusual and hard to manage overlap of reading
possibilities. Just to illustrate, the “Terror” Blanchot talks about refers, on one
hand, to Hegelian analysis of French revolution, but on the other hand, it
refers to the concept “Terror in literature” as exposed by Jean Paulhan (2006).
Both references are not just demonstrable—and even self-evident—but they
overlap. One can even expand the overlapping effect by pointing out that
Dyonis Mascolo, a very close friend of Blanchot, wrote his introduction to
Saint-Just’s complete works in 1946. In this sense, we agree with Leslie Hill
when he criticizes one of the major works on Blanchot: “like several other
commentators, however, Schulte Nordholt falls into the trap of attempting to
systematize Blanchot’s text” (1997, 245 n. 3). We will then try not to system-
atize Blanchot but to offer a possibility of reading that may be—and has to
be—confronted and complemented with others.
I. “THIS MAD GAME OF WRITING”
As we have said before, most commentators agree that Blanchot’s “The Ani-
mal Kingdom of the Spirit” is a meditation on the Hegelian text. The title itself,
as the reader may have already noticed, is the title of a section of Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Mind, more precisely section C of the fifth chapter: “Das
geistige Tierreich und der Betrug, oder die Sache selbst,” or “The Spiritual
Animal Kingdom and Deceit, or the ‘Matter in Hand’ Itself,” as Miller trans-
lates it. In fact, the first part of Blanchot’s text describes a series of phases or
moments displayed by a writer that seem to coincide with the three moments
of individuality in Hegel’s dialectic of action. Those are in fact the moments we
will try to analyze, following—as Blanchot recommends—the comments and
the translation made by Jean Hyppolite. At this point, we have to admit that
most scholars recognize Kojève’s Introduction as the major source. Annelise
Schulte Nordholt, in her acclaimed study on Blanchot, for example, develops
the concepts of negativity and death solely based on Kojève’s reading, while
Marlène Zarader, who dedicates nearly 40 pages to the confrontation be-
tween Hegel and Blanchot, does not mention Hyppolite a single time and
bases her analysis only on Kojève’s Introduction. To say this is, of course, not a
criticism or a disqualification of their important works, mainly because Blan-
chot’s text may in fact be read as a meditation based only on (and against)
Kojève’s interpretations. What we would like to emphasize by following Hyp-
polite—and therefore not basing all analysis on Kojève’s interpretations—is
that those readings underestimate his influence, as they also underestimate
the reading Blanchot himself made (not to mention the discussion with Sartre
that Stefanos Geroulanos, among others, has made explicit [Geroulanos 2010,
259]).
Let us now attempt to describe and analyze the moments experienced by
a writer according to Blanchot. The first moment, in a Hegelian sense of the
word, consists on the difficulty faced by every writer at the very beginning of
his work: “In order to write, he must have the talent to write. But gifts in
themselves are nothing. As long as he has not yet sat down at his table and
written a work, the writer is not a writer and does not know if he has the
capacity to become one. He has no talent until he has written, but he needs
talent in order to write” (Blanchot 1995a, 303). It is not hard to find examples of
what Blanchot has just described. In most diaries, interviews, and speeches
made by writers we can find similar experiences. Blanchot himself gives us at
least two: Franz Kafka and Paul Valéry. Maybe it was also the experience
Blanchot lived through, especially on that prolific time that goes from 1946 to
1949, when he wrote and published The Most High and Death Sentence and
prepared as well a second version of Thomas the Obscure. But this is just the
first moment of a wider movement; it is a circle the writer has to break, and
can only break by writing: “the writer only finds himself only realizes himself,
through his work; Before his work exists, not only does he not know who he is,
but he is nothing” (Blanchot 1995a, 303). If all what is to be written were
already in his mind, he or she would have no need to write it. But, in that case,
the writer could not test his or her talents and could thus not escape from the
circle shaped by talent and writing. According to Blanchot, what happens is
rather that “realizing that the work cannot be planned, but only carried
out . . . he will begin to write, but starting from nothing and with nothing in
mind” (Blanchot 1995a, 304). Let us notice that this “starting from nothing and
with nothing in mind” implies in fact the unity of his or her “circumstances
and talents” and his or her “interests,” that is to say, the force that has put him
or her in front of his or her desk.3 Blanchot adds, in a polemical fashion: “Every
work is an occasional work [œuvre de circonstance]: this simply means that
each work has a beginning, that it begins at a certain moment in time and that
that moment in time is part of the work, since without it the work would have
been only an insurmountable problem, nothing more than the impossibility of
writing it” (1995a, 305).
The writer may not wait for anything; simply writing is what he or she has
to do. But that “simply write”—as it puts into game a set of circumstances,
talents, ends, and interests—appears as a faithful translation of what the
writer is. We are now in the middle of the writer’s phase of enjoyment, of the
“pure and perfect joy” someone experiences in front of a written sentence
(Blanchot 1995a, 305). Blanchot, echoing back Hegel, states that this feeling
comes from “the certainty that what bursts into the light is none other than
what was sleeping in the night” (1995a, 305). The circle is hence broken with
the action achieved by the writer, that is, simply with the act of writing a
sentence. At that very moment, the writer begins to be a writer. This first
moment, we claim, corresponds to the one Hyppolite calls “the work as truth
of Individuality” (1974, 300–4); this circle is none but the one described by
Hegel: “the individual who is going to act seems, therefore, to find himself in a
circle where each moment already presupposes the other, and thus he seems
unable to find a beginning” (1977, 240).
Nevertheless, this passage from night to daytime, from possibility to pres-
ence, implies that others can read the sentence. The enjoyment experienced
in front of the mere existence of the sentence is also the beginning of unhap-
piness, since “it is not just his sentence, but a sentence that belongs to other
people, people who can read it—it is a universal sentence” (Blanchot 1995a,
305–6). His or her work, that work that is nothing but his or her reflection—for
only through it the writer is a writer—begins to interest other people, but in a
very different way than it interested the writer. We have all passed through
this experience: one writes, there is nothing left to do, but once that writing
comes to light and, in general, anyone can read it, then the sentence is open to
different and multiple readings. Why is it that, for the writer, the “universal-
ization” of the sentence is an unhappy moment? Because the work has be-
come something different from the “pure expression of himself” (Blanchot
1995a, 306). Work then—in the first sense of the movement, that it to say, as an
expression or translation—disappears. It becomes the work of everyone since
everyone can be interested, reflected, represented; it is the work of anyone
since no particular individual can claim exclusiveness, no one can say, “it is
me, not you, who is there represented.” On the disappearance of the work as
“faithful translation” of oneself, Blanchot writes: “he exists only in his work,
but his work exists only when it has become this public, alien reality . . . So he
really is inside the work, but the work itself has disappeared” (1995a, 306,
translation slightly modified). Hegel, thinking of disappearance, says: “if, how-
ever, we consider the content of this experience in its completeness, it is seen
to be the vanishing work. What is preserved is not the vanishing: the vanishing
is itself actual and is bound up with the work” (1977, 245).
Here is a capital moment. Disappearance is the destiny of the work, but the
writer would devote himself or herself to save it—and thus save himself or
herself, as the disappearance of the work also implies his or her own disap-
pearance as an author—by making the operation itself his task and not, as he
or she did before, the writing of a particular sentence. Now the task is the
simple game of writing, and not the content of the written piece; now the aim
of the writer is not the product but the process. Here, at this moment, ap-
pears—into this sort of consciousness the writer is—the technical deceit: “A
writer who claims he is concerned only with how the work comes into being
sees his concern get sucked into the world, lose itself in the whole of history;
because the work is also made outside of him, and all the rigor he put into the
consciousness of his deliberate actions, his careful rhetoric, is soon absorbed
into the workings of a vital contingency which he cannot control or even
observe” (Blanchot 1995a, 307).
The deceit becomes self-evident, and the writer can no longer maintain it,
but the experience is not useless since it makes possible the appearance of the
“Thing itself.” We are now at the second moment of Hegel’s dialectic of action;
the one Hyppolite calls, in fact, “the Thing itself” (la Chose elle-même, die Sache
selbst).4 A writer must go through this experience to realize that what matters
is neither a particular sentence nor technical concerns but the disappearance
of the work. Indeed, what matters at this phase is that the aim of the writer
ceases to be this or that contingency—“this” book, “that” sentence—but
something beyond that contingency. The book is never completed because
“the Thing itself,” the affair, in writing is not the contingency of a sentence (or
a group of sentences, as perfect as they can be) but the movement of disap-
pearance. In this sense, it does not matter if we call this “beyond,” truth of the
work, ideal of beauty, or set of values. What matters, for Blanchot, is that
breaking the deadlock of contingency and technical concerns means to affirm
the disappearance of the work: “but what if the book does not even manage to
be born, what if it remains a pure nothing? Well, this is still better: silence and
nothingness are the essence of literature, ‘the Thing Itself’” (Blanchot 1995a,
309). Let us dwell on this argument. On one hand, sometimes a writer says his
or her aim is elsewhere, that is to say, not the creation of a particular book or
paper but a political transformation, the restoration or transmutation of
certain values, and so forth. By hearing those statements, one may think that
he or she is being honest (and this may be true), that he or she devotes himself
or herself to a just (or unjust) cause. This is in fact what political literature
does: an engaged writer does not write because he or she writes well, he or she
writes to spread a message. But there is no such honesty, there is just what
Hegel calls “deceit” (Betrug). After the writer realizes others recognize them-
selves in his or her work, that it disappears as a faithful translation and
becomes a work for—and by—others, begins a hide-and-seek game. A game
that consists in saying, “that is not me; you better not think you can recognize
me. I am not that book; I am the truth hidden behind that book.” It is what
Blanchot, following Hegel, calls mystification. Then, and far more important,
the Thing itself plays, for Blanchot, “a vital role in the literary undertaking”
(1995a, 308). We may now ask ourselves what exactly “the Thing itself” is
beyond its intuitive signification. Hyppolite writes: “Thus the true work is not
this or that ephemeral work, this or that objective reality (in the materialist
sense of the word), but the higher unity that we have been seeking since our
discussion of the concept of thing (Ding), a unity of being and self-
consciousness” (1974, 309). He adds immediately, in a footnote: “in the onto-
logical logic, what Hegel means by the thing itself (die Sache selbst) is the unity
of thought and being” (1974, 309 n. 8). Blanchot’s interpretation, without
contradicting Hyppolite’s statement, introduces something else. In “Litera-
ture and the Right to Death,” we discover that the Thing itself is the point
where “the individual who writes—a force of creative negation—seems to join
with the work in motion through which this force of negation and surpassing
asserts itself” (Blanchot 1995a, 308). Now, what is Blanchot meaning by “cre-
ative negation” and “work in motion”? This, we suggest, is an interpretation of
a passage at the beginning of section C of the fifth chapter of Hegel’s Phenom-
enology of Mind: “individuality appears on the scene as an original determi-
nate nature: original, for it is implicit; originally determinate, for the negative
moment is present in the in-itself and this latter is thus a quality. This limita-
tion of being, however, cannot limit the action [Tun] of consciousness, for here
consciousness is a relation purely of itself to itself: relation to an other, which
would he a limitation of it, has been eliminated” (1977, 238).
In a crucial footnote, Hyppolite clarifies that from his point of view there
are two negativities at work: one in the being, another in the action (operation,
Tat) itself. While the first is negativity only in the sense of determination
(omnis determination est negation), the second is universal. In our opinion, it is
clear that Blanchot understands the Thing itself as the point of convergence
between those two negativities. This interpretation allows him to say, for
example, that a writer is “a nothingness working in nothingness” (Blanchot
1995a, 304). Now, as we can see in the quote from Hegel’s Phenomenology, at
this phase or moment the “relation to an other” is eliminated.5 This is, in our
opinion, what allows Blanchot to talk about a spiritual animal kingdom.6
Animal life, indeed, preserves his unity, has no contact with others (autrui), it
“breathes the breath of life . . . into the element of water, or air or
earth . . . steeping its entire nature in them, and yet keeping that nature under
its own control, and preserving itself as a unity” (Hegel 1977, 238). The exit
from animal kingdom, from self-enclosed animal life, is in fact the third
moment of dialectic of action: the “play of individualities” (Hegel 1977, 250)
that Hyppolite calls “transition to universal self-consciousness.” Here, at this
moment, emerges human work as such and “ethical” consciousness: “individ-
uality has transcended the particular nature where it seemed to be enclosed; it
has risen to self as universal self” (Hyppolite 1974, 315). This is in short the
moment of Universal that, at a certain degree, corresponds to Truth. This is
precisely the absent moment in Blanchot’s explanation, and in this sense,
there is no dialectic but rather a pseudodialectic “that knows not an infinite
number of mediated and graduated positions, but only two: All or Nothing”
(Hill 1997, 107). “All” being, in our interpretation, the “unreal world, with which
I come into contact by reading, not by my ability to live,” that is to say, the
fictional world (Blanchot 1995b, 75). Also in this sense, the writer “condemns
himself to belong to the ‘animal kingdom of the mind’” (Blanchot 1995a, 302),
that is to say, he or she does not transcend his or her particular nature. This, of
course, makes arise the question of human work as such that Kojève explicitly
addresses, but if our analysis is correct then the writer also condemns himself
or herself to the solitude of the work. Indeed, Blanchot will later talk about it,
as he says, for example, that the writer “belongs to the risk of this solitude [of
the work]” (1982, 21).
II. A “FICTUAL” DEATH?
In what follows, we would like to outline some consequences of the reading we

have just developed (and we have to insist on his partial nature, his need to be
complemented and overlapped with others). First, by reading Blanchot’s “Litera-
ture and the Right to Death” we face a dialectic with no exit from the animal
kingdom of the spirit; that is to say, with no resolution, with no passage to Univer-
sal (the passage, if there is one, rather leads to the unreal world mentioned above).
This means that there is no such thing as “absorption” of negativity, that there is
no reconciliation. Bataille, in his well-known letter to X (Kojève, presumably) also
approaches this problem as he writes “if action (‘doing’) is—as Hegel says—
negativity, the question arises as to whether the negativity of one who has ‘noth-
ing more to do’ disappears or remains in a state of ‘unemployed negativity’” (1997,
296). For Blanchot, “a writer’s activity must be recognized as the highest form of
work” (Blanchot 1995a, 313), that is to say, that there is no “unemployed nega-
tivity” but rather a restless negativity. In a way, Bataille and Blanchot con-
verge, but it is important to underline the lexical difference.
We would like to quote once again Blanchot just to show how the so-called
pseudodialectic works:
A writer’s influence is linked to this privilege of being master of everything. But

he is only master of everything, he possesses only the infinite; he lacks the
finite, limit escapes him. Now, one cannot act in the infinite, one cannot
accomplish anything in the unlimited, so that if a writer acts in quite a real way
as he produces this real thing which is called a book, he is also discrediting all
action by this action, because he is substituting for the world of determined
things and defined work a world in which everything is instantly given and
there is nothing left to do but read it and enjoy it. (1995a, 316)
The instantly given world where there is nothing left to do is none but the
world of fiction, as we had already pointed out. Let us recall that Blanchot says
elsewhere that the world a récit displays is “an unreal world, with which I come
into contact by reading, not by my ability to live” (1995b, 75). The “everything”
alluded to by Blanchot in the long quote above is therefore, in our opinion, the
world of fiction. We think it is possible to understand the whole issue of “world
disappearance” starting from this point but also the disappearance of the “I”
(Je) associated with the substitution of “I” (Je) by “He” (Il), as in Kakfa’s
operation. If the writer is, in a sense, already dead—as Blanchot insists—it is
because there is “a perhaps irremediable incompatibility between the appear-
ing of language in its being and the consciousness of the self in its identity”
(Foucault 1998, 149). Consequently, there, where work (œuvre) “is,” the indi-
vidual is not, he or she cannot recognize himself or herself on it anymore;
there, were the individual “is,” there is no work (œuvre) but only a book, a
sentence, a mere contingency.
Second—and we go back to the beginning—we think that it is now possi-
ble to read the question of death in Blanchot’s text as a fictional death and not
a political one (this is not the accurate formulation; we will later come back to
this). We will quote Blanchot in extenso:
The writer senses that he is in the grasp of an impersonal power that does not
let him either live or die: the irresponsibility he cannot surmount becomes the
expression of that death without death which awaits him at the edge of noth-
ingness; literary immortality is the very movement by which the nausea of a
survival which is not a survival, a death which does not end anything, insinuates
itself into the world, a world sapped by crude existence. The writer who writes
a work eliminates himself as he writes that work and at the same time affirms
himself in it. (1995a, 340, emphasis mine)
When we read “a death which does not end anything,” we cannot but think of
Saint-Just and Robespierre, for it is almost the same formulation Blanchot
applies to Terror: “when the blade falls on Saint-Just and Robespierre in a
sense it executes no one . . . [in Terror] each person dies, but everyone is alive,
and that really also means everyone is dead” (1995a, 319–20). The subject of
deferral death, of course, opens up a whole issue, and Derrida himself took
care of it (in Demeure, for instance [2000]). We will only point out that
assassination committed by language is not real but “ideal (literary)” (Blan-
chot 1995a, 320); it is an “ideal negation” (Blanchot 1995a, 323). In fact, Blan-
chot firmly states, “my language does not kill anyone” (1995a, 323). Maybe the
key to understanding this sort of analogy between Terrorists and writers is in
a footnote at the beginning of Blanchot’s text: “in this argument, Hegel is
considering human work in general. It should be understood that the remarks
that follow are quite remote from the text of the Phenomenology and make no
attempt to illuminate it” (1995a, 302 n). Blanchot does not consider “human
work in general,” as we have already indicated, but only the work of “who has
chosen to be a man of letters” (Blanchot 1995a, 302).
Indeed, as Derrida remarks, Blanchot “does not sing the praises of death
penalty as such” (2003, 601, emphasis mine); he rather describes a temptation
that is “essential to literature, a temptation that is constitutive of literature’s
project of writing” (Derrida 2003, 601). By doing so, by framing his statements
under the sign of “temptation,” Blanchot seems to avoid the identification
between these statements and his actual positions. Let us recall that by
temptation Blanchot means a “way of thinking that a writer adopts for rea-
sons he believes he has thought out carefully, but which only literature has
thought out in him” (Blanchot 1995a, 317).7 It is therefore literature that
speaks, not Blanchot. He restricts himself to “analyze, describe, ratify . . . he
analyzes a temptation without necessarily subscribing to it completely” (Der-
rida 2003, 601). The temptation of which Derrida talks about is the one out-
lined by Blanchot at the very beginning of the section about Revolution and
“Terror.” Here is the whole passage:
But there is one other temptation. Let us acknowledge that in writer there is a
movement which proceeds without pause, and almost without transition,
from nothingness to everything. Let us see in him that negation that is not
satisfied with the unreality in which it exists, because it wishes to realize itself
and can do so only by negating something real, more real than words, more
true than the isolated individual in control [l’individu isolé dont elle dispose]: it
therefore keeps urging him toward a worldly life and a public existence in
order to induce him to conceive how, even as he writes, he can become that
very existence. (Blanchot 1995a, 318)
We believe that it is in this particular sense that Revolution and literature

coincide, that there is a link “between literature and the revolutionary Terror
that puts [people] to death” (Derrida 2003, 601). Let us now further elaborate
on Blanchot’s argument: literature urges the writer to become nothing but a
public existence because, as we said before, words need to become universal
to exist. They need their negation to be global, and this would only be possible
if words negate “something real, more real than words” but, more important,
this would only be possible if the writer makes them public (Blanchot 1995a,
315, 318). Literature induces the writer to become public, to break out the
isolation that bounds his or her existence to exist universally. Everything must
be published, words need to reach a public existence through the figure of
writer. Hence, by this very movement is also negated—eliminated or assassi-
nated, one must say—the one who writes; the particular reality of his life is
negated by the universal existence of words. The writer is now not an individ-
ual but a pure nothingness. By the same movement he or she acquires public
existence, he or she loses private existence. Nicanor Parra, for instance, writes:
“poets have no biography,” and he is right (2006, 182). It is then a sort of literary
death that takes place in the scene of writing, and it is negativity “in” the work
(œuvre) that commands it. Likewise, Derrida also observes this necessity of
public existence in a significant passage of Literature in Secret: “Every text
given over to the public space, relatively legible or intelligible, but of which the
content, the meaning, the reference, the signatory and the addressee are not
fully determinable realities, realities at the same time non-fictive or pure of all
fiction, realities handed over [livrées], as such, by an intuition, to some deter-
minative judgment, can become a literary thing” (2008, 7, emphasis mine).
There is a sort of “linguistic neutralization of existence” then, in Blanchot
as well as in Derrida. If Hegel “had amply explored” this idea, Blanchot had
drawn the consequences for fiction and literature (Derrida 1989, 67 n. 62).
From our point of view, what Derrida suggests when he says Blanchot is
“perhaps” for the death penalty is the very temptation of literature, which is to
become real. There is always a risk, for literature, in wanting to become real:
“any writer who is not induced by the very fact of writing to think, ‘I am the
revolution, only freedom allows me to write,’ is not really writing” (Blanchot
1995a, 321). Let us emphasize the word “induced” (conduit). It is the mad game
of writing that induces the identification between writer and revolutionary, or
terrorist in the revolutionary sense of the word. A connoisseur of Blanchot’s
political texts may detect that he was not far from that temptation, as in the
sixties he wrote: “literature is perhaps essentially (I am not saying uniquely or
manifestly) a power of contestation: contestation of the established power,
contestation of what is (and of the fact of being)” (1997b, 67). That connoisseur
may also think of the utilization of the word “refusal” at the same period. This
is true but it is also true that contestation—as negativity—is a restless move-
ment: literature is “finally contestation of itself as power” (Blanchot 1997b, 67).
A power without power, if we would like to talk in a Blanchotian fashion.
Finally, the issue with literature and death seems to be what Ginette
Michaud has called “fictual” (fictuel) (2006, 60), something between fictional
and factual, or—as Derrida writes—something that “exceeds the opposition
between real and unreal, actual and virtual, factual and fictional” (2000, 91).
With Blanchot’s “Literature and the Right to Death” we face the moment
where “the border between literature and its other becomes undecidable”
(Derrida 2000, 92). We cannot decide and, what is worse, we cannot avoid this
sort of spectral risk, since it is a matter of “the most discreet, invisible and
perhaps the most troubling operation of literature: the power of making
happen a certain reality, an unreal reality, a potentiality more real than real-
ity” (Michaud 2006, 92). This is why neither Derrida nor we (nor anyone) can
decide if Blanchot is talking about actual death or fictional death, and there-
fore if he is “for” or “against” the death penalty. Even if he states—as he
does—that Terror is all about an ideal or literary death, we cannot decide. A
fictual death? Maybe. What matters for us is that undecidable is, so to speak,
produced by the condemnation to the animal kingdom of the spirit. Let us
recall that for Blanchot the writer does not pass to universal self-
consciousness, that—in a Hegelian fashion—the individuality of the writer
does not transcend his or her particular nature, it does not rise as Universal.
That is to say, the writer does not gain access to Truth, but rather creates a
world where other truths may emerge. At this final point, we have to underline
that the world of fiction is not a topos hyperuranios that “is not another world”
but the same world “estranged from all order and, as it were, the outside of all
world” (Blanchot 1997a, 191). This is what Blanchot once called “the Outside”
(le Dehors), and we have called, following Michaud, the “fictual.” “Imagina-
tion” is, perhaps, just another name for “negativity.”
To conclude, we would just like to repeat the question Foucault once
asked: “can any philosophy continue to exist that is no longer Hegelian?”
(1972, 235).
NOTES
1. Pages 293–311 of the French edition (Blanchot 1949). A detailed bibliography of almost every
text written by Maurice Blanchot can be found in Partenaire invisible (Bident 1998). Espace
Maurice Blanchot’s website (http://blanchot.fr) offers an updated bibliography based on the
one Bident made in 1998.
2. See Collin (1986); Schulte Nordholt (1995); Hill (1997); Bident (1998); and Zarader (2001).
3. Blanchot better describes this unity when he talks about Valéry: “that commission [Eupa-
linos] was the beginning of that talent, was that talent itself, but we must also add that that
commission only became real, only became a true project through Valery’s existence, his
talent, his conversations in the world, and the interest he had already shown in this sort of
subject” (Blanchot 1995a, 304–5, emphasis mine).
4. Even when both words means “thing,” in this particular context Sache (thing in the sense of
affair or matter) is not be confused with Ding (thing in the sense of object).
5. Hegel’s sentence is, in fact, “die Beziehung auf Anderes ist aufgehoben.” The German word
aufheben or aufhebung has several meanings, one of them being “sublated,” but both Miller
and Hyppolite translate it as “eliminated” (supprimé, in the case of Hyppolite).
6. There is, of course, a possible interpretation starting from Kojève’s lectures. We are not
trying to undermine his influence but to explore different approaches.
7. According to Blanchot, there are three more temptations, all of them borrowed from
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind: stoicism, skepticism, and the unhappy consciousness
(Blanchot 1995a, 317–18).
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and Scott Wilson, 296–300. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
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Blanchot, Maurice. 1949. La littérature et le droit à la mort. In La part du feu, 293–331. Paris:
Gallimard.
. 1982. The Space of Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
. 1995a. Literature and the Right to Death. In The Work of Fire, 300–344. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
. 1995b. The Work of Fire. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
. 1997a. The Detour toward Simplicity. In Friendship, 188–200. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
. 1997b. The Great Reducers. In Friendship, 62–72. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.
Bousquet, Joë. 1968. Traduit du silence. Paris: Gallimard coll. L’imaginaire.
Collin, Françoise. 1986. Maurice Blanchot et la question de l’écriture. Paris: Gallimard coll. Tel.
Derrida, Jacques. 1989. Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press.
. 2000. Demeure: Fiction and Testimony. In The Instant of My Death/Demeure: Fiction
and Testimony, ed. Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, 13–103. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
. 2003. Maurice Blanchot est mort. In Maurice Blanchot. Récits critiques, ed. Christophe
Bident and Pierre Vilar, 595–623. Tours, France: Editions Farrago.
. 2008. The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
. 2011. Parages. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Discourse on Language. In The Archaeology of Knowledge and the
Discourse on Language, 215–37. New York: Pantheon Books.
. 1998. The Thought of the Outside. In Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D.
Faubion, 147–70. New York: New Press.
Geroulanos, Stefanos. 2010. An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Hegel, G. W. F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hill, Leslie. 1997. Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary. London: Routledge.
Hyppolite, Jean. 1974. Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Evanston, IL:
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Paulhan, Jean. 2006. The Flowers of Tarbes: or, Terror in Literature. Champaign, IL: University of
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The Question of the Other in the
Dialectics of Time
The Problem of Intersubjectivity in Derrida’s Reading of Husserl
María Victoria Londoño-Becerra

Yet the enchainment of past and future

Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time.
—T. S. Eliot
AFTER WHAT IS CONSIDERED TO BE HIS EARLY WORK, DERRIDA WOULD
never again devote any of his texts exclusively to the study of phenomenology,
appealing to it only to illuminate his particular readings about other authors
159
160 The Question of the Other in the Dialectics of Time
and problems.1 However, it is also true, as Derrida himself admitted, that

phenomenology had been crucial to his way of thinking. In an interview given
in 1999 Derrida points out: “it was Husserl who taught me a technique, a
method, a discipline, and who has never left me” (quoted in Tymieniecka 2002,
461). Considering this kind of affirmation, one could find, in some of Derrida’s
early writings about phenomenology, a sort of genesis of some of his later
assertions. In this essay I will attempt to show that within what Derrida calls
“the dialectics of living present” there is a movement that already brings to
light some of his later concerns; particularly those in which the other acquires
a co-originary status in relation to the same.2 For reasons of time and space,
the following pages shall not be attached to the analysis of the link between
Derrida’s early and later writings. Rather, our purpose is to address the gene-
sis of Derrida’s thought of the other in his early work on phenomenology. This
attempt will be particularly focused on three of his early writings, namely: The
Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, the “Introduction” to Husserl’s
Origin of Geometry, and Speech and Phenomena.
X X X
In the introduction to Speech and Phenomena, Derrida points out that the
descriptions of both temporality and intersubjectivity would lead the phe-
nomenological intuitionist principle to its own limit. This means that if for
Husserl the adequate knowledge of a phenomenon depends on the possibility
of perceiving it in an originary and present intuition, then the account of time
and intersubjectivity will put on stage the impossibility of accessing this
original intuition. Derrida writes:
Phenomenology seems to us tormented, if not contested from within, by its

own descriptions of the movement of temporalization and of the constitution
of intersubjectivity. At the heart of what ties together these two decisive
moments of description we recognize an irreducible nonpresence as having a
constituting value and with it a nonlife, a nonpresence or nonself-belonging of
the living present, an ineradicable nonprimordiality. (Derrida 1973, 6)
The quote suggests, as we have already mentioned, that time and inter-
María Victoria Londoño-Becerra 161
subjectivity will confront Husserl’s philosophy with its own crisis. But what is
more remarkable is that for Derrida what haunts phenomenology is not each
of these descriptions taken separately but “what ties together these two deci-
sive moments” (Derrida 1973, 7). But what binds temporality and the intersub-
jectivity together? What is the specificity of the link that brings in the non-
presence or nonself-belonging of the living present? Derrida’s statement
remains enigmatic. By taking up each of these two movements separately, one
may find that the link between them is the nonoriginary presence that they
both entail. However, I would like to suggest that Derrida’s assumption is
perhaps riskier. In fact, it is possible to think of a certain kind of structure, or
infrastructure,3 that ties both temporality and intersubjectivity together in the
same movement throughout Derrida’s early writings on phenomenology. I
would like to call this structure—perhaps somehow arbitrarily for the mo-
ment—the question of the other in the dialectics of time.
To understand this knotted movement we shall begin by clarifying the
importance Derrida gives to the concept of the present in phenomenology.
Supported by Husserl’s own assertions in Ideas I, Derrida suggests that the
keystone of phenomenology is the present, that is, the consciousness’s origi-
nary intuition of a given object in a present experience. As Husserl notes: “No
conceivable theory can make us err with respect to the principle of all princi-
ples: that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition,
that everything originarily (so to speak, in its “personal” actuality) offered to us
in “intuition” is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being” (Husserl
1983, § 24). What Husserl would be forced to maintain throughout all his
descriptions is nothing but this intuitionist principle.
X X X
In Cartesian Meditation V Husserl addresses the question of the possibility of

engendering in oneself the experience of something that is neither I nor an
object of my intentionality: “How can my ego, within his peculiar ownness,
constitute under the name, ‘experience of something other,’ precisely some-
thing other—something, that is, with a sense that excludes the constituted
from the concrete make-up of the sense-constituting I-myself, as somehow
the latter’s analogue?” (Husserl 1982, § 44). Once he has suspended the natural
attitude, and led us to the sphere of the transcendental ego, he notes that not
only the potentialities, actualities, and habitualities of the temporal flux be-
long to consciousness (cf. Husserl 1982, §§ 46–47) but also all those experi-
ences that we have of transcendental objects, that is to say, the experiences we
have of the objects given to us in an objective world. The problem arises
initially when we try to figure out how all of the objects that transcend us, that
go beyond the apodictic experience of the self, can be given.
It is clear that the experience we have of ourselves seems to be indubitable.
But it is also true that the approach to the world, which is constituted as an
experience of an objective world, and of the objects that belong to that world,
is to some extent also produced by us or, more precisely, by our intentionali-
ties. As we can see, up to this point, Husserl is only concerned about “the
manner in which it [the experience of an object] bestows sense, the manner in
which it can occur as experience and become verified as evidence relating to
an actual existent with an explicable essence of its own, which is not my own
essence and has no place as a constituent part thereof, though it nevertheless
can acquire sense and verification only in my essence” (Husserl 1982, § 48). But
in these explanations, Husserl has still not addressed the question regarding
the experience of the other as another human being. If for phenomenology,
“the experience is original consciousness,” then the other as the other human
being must be given to the subject in the present and, therefore, as original
experience. But as Husserl points out, this experience is radically different
from the experience of the objective world and its objects. I have an original
experience of the other but I cannot access the original experiences of him or
her. The actual experiences of the other are restricted to me.
Nevertheless, the experience of the other is also given as an appresenta-
tion, like any experience of the world. This means that when an object is given
to me I can only perceive some of its faces but not the complete unity of the
object: “appresentation occurs even in external experience, since the strictly
seen front of a physical thing always and necessarily appresents a rear aspect
and prescribes for it a more or less determinate content” (Husserl 1982, § 50).
It is also true that to the nature of the appresentantion also belongs the
possibility of having a complete experience of the object’s unity. This is what
Husserl calls the possibility of verification by a corresponding fulfilling pre-
sentation. But in the case of the experience of the other, this possibility of
verification is impossible. I cannot have access to the other’s original sphere.
In “Violence and Metaphysics,” Derrida emphasizes this point: “in the case of
the other as transcendent thing, the principled possibility of an originary and
original presentation of the hidden visage is always open, in principle and a
priori. This possibility is absolutely rejected in the case of Others [which
implies] a more profound dimension of nonoriginality—the radical impossi-
bility of going around to see things from the other side” (Derrida 2001, 155).
The possibility of verification, that is, the possibility of having a complete
presentation of the other, would mean that I could put myself in the position
of the other and would have access to his or her actual living experiences. If
that were possible, “if what belongs to the other’s own essence were directly
accessible,” Husserl explains, “it would be merely a moment of my own es-
sence, and ultimately he himself and I myself would be the same” (Husserl
1982, § 50). Accordingly, there must be a certain mediacy of intentionality. The
way by which it is possible to have an experience of the other is through what
Husserl calls an analogical appresentation.
The first experience I have of the other is as an organic body. His or her
body is an index of his or her psychic experiences. The physical body of the
other allows me to ascribe it a certain kind of behavior in correspondence with
my expectations. Then, the analogical appresentation presupposes two mo-
ments: 1) all physical organic body is apprehended as an organic body similar
to mine, and in that way the initial sense is attributed by me, in my original
experiences of that body; and 2) nevertheless, the special character of this
appresentation, inhibits “by virtue of the aforesaid analogizing can never
attain actual presence, never become an object of perception proper” (Husserl
1982, § 51). Qua body, the other is given as an original experience that, at the
same time, is inaccessible originaliter. The experience I have of the other is
always a mediated one; thus the necessary immediacy of the present required
for an original intuition is frustrated. As Derrida notes,
Husserl’s most central affirmation concerns the irreducibly mediate na-

ture of the intentionality aiming at the other as other. It is evident, by an
essential, absolute and definitive self evidence that the other as transcen-
dental other (other absolute origin and other zero point in the orientation
of the world), can never be given to me in an original way and in person.
(Derrida 2001, 154)
In Speech and Phenomena, Derrida suggests that this situation puts on

stage the nonaccomplishment of the intuitionist phenomenological prin-
ciple. The impossibility of access to other’s experiences, and that these
experiences are only given to me as mediated signs of his or her body
manifestations, introduces in Husserl’s descriptions the frustration of the
principle of all principles. However, what I think allows Derrida to link the
problem of both intersubjectivity and temporality is a particular assertion
of Husserl=s Cartesian Meditation V. Once Husserl has told us “how an-
other monad becomes constituted appresentatively in mine,” he points
out that this experience occurs in a similar way to the experience of the
consciousness’s inner time: “Similarly (to draw an instructive compari-
son), within my ownness and moreover within / the sphere of its living
present, my past is given only by memory and is characterized in memory
as my past, a past present that is: an intentional modification” (Husserl
1982, § 52). Both experiences, the relation with other human beings and the
inner time consciousness, transcend my sphere of ownness; in both cases I
cannot have an original intuition.
At this point, I would like to briefly recall that in On the Phenomenology
of Consciousness of Internal Time, Husserl is concerned with the temporal
constitution of data given to the subject. The elucidation is focused nei-
ther in the time of the objective world nor in a time that is purely subjec-
tive. Instead, the question aims to clarify how a unified impression of an
object with a temporal elapse is possible. Husserl’s inquiry has to do with
the consciousness of an object understood as a temporal object. He uses
the example of a melody:
The matter seems very simple at first: we hear the melody, that is, we
perceive it, for hearing is indeed perceiving. However, the first tone sounds,
then comes the second tone, then the third, and so on. Must we not say:
When the second tone sounds, I hear it, but I no longer hear the first tone,
etc.? In truth, then, I do not hear the melody but only the single present
tone. (Husserl 1991, § 7)
Given that there is only consciousness of the present, Husserl is going to

introduce the concept of the living present to conciliate, on one hand, the
possibility of a unified experience of an object with a duration and, on the
other, the necessary requirement of an original intuition. Following Husserl’s
descriptions, Derrida will show that the present contains in itself both the
past—retention—and the future—protention. However, retention and pro-
tention have nothing in common with memory and expectation. The latter are
intentional acts of consciousness through which the subject represents to
himself an object that is not present. By contrast, protention and retention are
present in one single intentional act, which means they both constantly con-
stitute the present instant of each intuition.4 As Dan Zahavi points out, “the
retention and the protention are not past or future in respect to the primal
impression, but ‘simultaneous’ with it. Every actual phase of consciousness
contains the structure primal impression, retention, and protention” (Zahavi
2003, 84). The temporal descriptions addressed by Husserl let us under-
stand how we can have a total presentation of an object. When we appre-
hend an object, we can make a “total image” by retaining and anticipating
in unison all of its possible faces. What Husserl calls the running-off
phenomena, that is, the experience of a temporal object, elapses as a
continuity of constant changes: “In the steady progression of the running-
off modes we then find the remarkable circumstance that each later
running-off phase is itself a continuity, a continuity that constantly ex-
pands, a continuity of pasts” (Husserl 1991, § 10).
In Speech and Phenonema, Derrida shows how the descriptions of inner
time consciousness make apparent to phenomenology that the living present
is constituted by something other than itself. At this point, again, the intu-
itionist principle becomes threatened: “If the punctuality of the instant is a
myth . . . if the present of self-presence is not simple, if it is constituted in a primor-
dial and irreducible synthesis, then the whole of Husserl’s argumentation is
threatened in its very principle” (Derrida 1973, 61). The self-presence that autho-
rizes the originary intuition is not a simple present but a constituted moment
where the present unfolds from an original past, a past that determines it and
makes it possible. This circumstance makes plain that if temporal elapse is
perceived as “a retention of a retention,” as a “continuity of pasts”—in which
each past is different from its previous—then the required original intuition
can only take place within this time stream of constant alteration.
Whereas in the experience of the other, my body becomes a sign, an
indication of the other’s body (cf. Husserl 1982, § 55), in the experience of the
inner time consciousness, the retention as a present intuition of the past is
also an indication of what we have already lived. In Cartesian Meditation V
Husserl explains that
Just as in my living present, in the domain of “internal perception,” my past

becomes constituted by virtue of the harmonious memories occurring in this
present, so in my primordial sphere, by means of appresentations occurring in it
and motivated by its contents, an ego other than mine can become constituted
accordingly, in non-originary presentations [in Vergegenwartigungen] of a new type,
which have a modificatum of a new kind as their correlate. (Husserl 1982, § 52)
The present experiences of the past are mediated indications of some-

thing that is not present. In both cases, regarding intersubjectivity as well as
temporality, I have an experience of something that transcends my present
intuition. Just as Lanei Rodemeyer points out:
In both situations, I am extending my consciousness beyond the moment of

being mine-now to a type of re-presentation that takes the experience to be
either not-originarily-now or not-me. In one sense, I exceed my present, reach-
ing into the past experiences in order to make some of them present in a
modified way; in the other, I reach beyond the present as mine and recognize
it as a present belonging to another subject as well as to me. (2006, 5)
What these descriptions of the nonaccomplishment of the intuitionist

principle will show for Derrida is not that the present does not constitute
the keystone of phenomenology but rather that nonpresence has always
already been contaminating the presence. This contamination is what
simultaneously conditions and makes possible the self-presence of living

present.
X X X
As mentioned above, Husserl’s analogy in Cartesian Meditation V between the

experience of the other and the temporality of the living present is what seems
to authorize Derrida’s analyses. In both situations a nonpresence or nonself-
belonging of the living present, an ineradicable nonprimordiality, seems to
stand out. In Speech and Phenomena Derrida claims:
Husserl himself evoked the analogy between the relation with the alter ego,
constituted within the absolute monad of the ego, and the relation with other
present, the past present, as constituted in the absolute actuality of the living
present (Husserl 1982, § 52). Does not this “dialectic”—in every sense of the
term and before any speculative subsumption of this concept—open up living
to difference? (Derrida 1973, 69)
This quote not only shows the imbrication between time and intersubjec-
tivity but it also suggests that the altering movement of the living present, that
is to say, the movement by which the nonpresence makes its appearance, should
be understood dialectically. Derrida has already said that the present is not sim-
ple, that according to Husserl=s descriptions the present emerges as a synthesis.
Despite the fact that in Speech and Phenomena Derrida actually provides some
hints addressing not only the relationship between temporality and intersubjec-
tivity but also the dialectical character of the living present, the problem at issue is
already found in the two previous phenomenological writings: The Problem of
Genesis and the “Introduction” to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry.
The first time that Derrida uses the term “dialectics” is in his master’s
mémoire entitled The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy. This text,
published almost 40 years after it was written, was concerned with the prob-
lem of the ideal objects’ genesis. The concept of dialectics appears in the midst
of a double determination of genesis: on the one hand, history or a certain
irreducible empirical kernel previous to the phenomenological reduction; on
the other hand, the structure, that is, the ideal and active constitution of the
objects. The concept of dialectics allows Derrida to understand the paradox at

which phenomenology arrives in facing the problem of genesis. While Husserl
points out that the transcendental attitude is a stage after the naïveté of the
natural attitude, it is also true that this last attitude, the natural one, can only
be understood after we have suspended it. However, once we suspend the
natural attitude, we also suspend all our worldly judgments and all of the
motivations that could have pushed us to the transcendental investigation.
Through this analysis Derrida will suggest that the possibility of transcenden-
tal consciousness will always be the natural attitude and its irreducible em-
pirical kernel. In Derrida’s own words: “The paradox is that in order to be
intelligible in its very ‘de-motivation’ and to give itself as intentional originar-
ity, it is, in its very actuality reduction ‘of’ something which was and still
effectively ‘already there’”; (Derrida 2003a, xxxi). Dialectics will be the move-
ment by means of which Derrida will address the paradox of genesis. Accord-
ingly, the question must be thought from a tension between the empirical and
the transcendental determination of genesis.
This problem, as Derrida himself points out, has been already addressed
by other authors. In particular, Tran-Duc-Thao and Jean Cavaillés had seen
the paradox throughout the movement of dialectic, but each of them took a
stand for one of the parts in tension. Tran-Duc-Thao recriminates Husserl’s
abandonment of the historical and material conditions, and in doing so, he
overlaps the material to the ideal. On the other side, Cavaillés takes the side of
the ideal genesis, on the basis that only a structural analysis, a logical one in
particular, would allow us for understanding the genesis of an ideal object.
Unlike the aforementioned positions, Derrida’s position will not take sides for
any polarity. Instead, he will opt to maintain the tension between them.
Derrida’s concept of dialectic does not involve an overcoming. Yet, it is a
staging of the tension between the ideal and the real. His project—and we will
return to this later—has to do with unveiling an aporia. For now it is worth
recalling, as Leonard Lawlor does, that:
Derrida’s dialectic therefore is “competitive.” It does not reduce the ideal to

the real like that of Tran-Duc-Thao’s dialectical materialism; while recogniz-
ing the essential solidarity between logic and sensation, Derrida’s dialectic
does not succumb to empiricism. Derrida’s dialectic is “adversarial.” It does

not absorb the real into the ideal like Cavaillès’s theory of science; while
recognizing the essential distinction between logic and sensation, Derrida’s
dialectic does not succumb to logicism. Instead, Derrida’s dialectic “bids over”
those of Tran-Duc-Thao and Cavaillès by simultaneously maintaining a dis-
tinction and a solidarity between the real and the ideal. (Lawlor 2006, 48)
This tension is already staged by the double sense carried by the concept
of genesis. On the one hand, genesis can be understood as the origin of
something, that is to say, as the absolute and isolated event by which some-
thing begins to be. But, on the other hand, genesis could be understood as the
process by means of which something becomes, by which “every genetic
product is produced by something other than itself; it is carried by a past,
called forth and oriented by a future” (Derrida 2003a, xxi).
The possibility of the transcendental consciousness is the reduction of the
natural attitude, but if we are to follow Derrida, this fact only shows that the
very possibility of the transcendental attitude is precisely the factual kernel
given in the natural attitude. Of course it could be argued that Husserl never
denies this first natural stage. In fact, he will call it a primitive one. This is why
we should suspend this first phase to gain access to its true essence. But once
again, Derrida addresses this paradox as follows:
What would be an essence of a real genesis that would not merge itself with the
very existence of this genesis? Just as it is difficult to seize what can be the
essence of a pure and simple existence as such, so it seems that every essence
of becoming may be in a certain measure the contrary of this becoming.
(Derrida 2003a, 32)
In order to understand the genesis as becoming we have to abandon a

genetic phenomenology and focus on the analyses of the genesis’s essence,
that is to say, comprehend it as a unitary continuity with a stable permanence.
This originary dialectic between the primitive and the originary already
stresses the paradox of genesis. On the one hand, there exists the claim to
reduce the primitive to the originary transcendental attitude—the position
adopted by Cavailles; on the other hand, we find the attempt to reduce the
comprehension of the genesis as a material evolution that will remove the
fundamental role of the original intuition in the phenomenological attitude—
the position taken by Tran-Duc-Thao.
When Derrida refers to dialectic, he is introducing a movement within
which both polarities—the factual or historical, and the transcendental or
ideal—are possible to the extent that they both relate to one another, contam-
inating themselves as well as in staging the impossibility of conceiving an
absolute origin. If we had to speak about an origin, we should do it as if it were
an original synthesis.
How can the originality of a foundation be an a priori synthesis? How can

everything start with a complication? If any genesis and any synthesis refer to
their constitution through an a priori synthesis, then has not the a priori
synthesis itself, when it appears to itself in a constituting, transcendental and
supposedly originary experience, already taken on sense, is it not always by
definition “already” constituted by another synthesis, and so on infinitely?
(Derrida 2003a, xxv)
Genesis is nothing more than the dialectic between history and structure,
becoming and event, primitive and originary. It is the contamination of antin-
omies between them. Furthermore, dialectic turns the origin into a contami-
nation in and of itself. The origin is a synthesis that, in turn, must be the origin
of another originary synthesis.5 The genesis is then the absolute delay of an
absolute origin. Thus, when Derrida employs the term “dialectics,” it is to
show the impossibility of finding a simple act of absolute beginning: “dialectic
as generally conceived is the very opposite of philosophy as permanent re-
course to the originary simplicity of an act or a being, of a truism or of an
intuition; in this sense, it seems that dialectic cannot be instituted except from
instances already constituted as such by a originary transcendental con-
sciousness” (Derrida 2003a, xli).
As the quote suggests, the problem of genesis opens up another question
about the originary experience. This question, as we have already seen, leads
us to the phenomenological principle of all principles, that is, the present
intuition qua originary experience. In his following writings on phenomenol-

ogy, Derrida restricts the use of dialectics to comprehend the inner movement
of the living present. Already in The Problem of Genesis, he identifies a dialectic
of temporality. As he notes:
It is because every absolute present is at the same time negation and assimi-
lation of the past moment in retention; it is because this retention itself is
immediately of a piece with a protention that preserves and denies the present
as future in the past, because all the movements of intentionality are consti-
tuted by this dialectic of time, that negation appears here as what essentially
animates any genesis. (Derrida 2003a, 117)
Derrida insists on the concept of dialectics to explain a certain kind of

movement that implies an originary alteration, a contamination of the origin,
rather, an origin as a contamination.
X X X
The problems that concern Derrida during his following texts on phenome-
nology are developed in the context of his interest on the status of writing. On
the one hand, in the “Introduction” Derrida focuses on how the means by
which the ideal object (the exemplary case would be the objects of geometry)
is historically propagated are not an added and outer layer but rather consti-
tute the ideal object itself. Writing would not be a mean added to a previously
given ideal objectivity, but its condition of possibility. The ideality of the
object will always be tied to some quantity of actuality, of worldliness. Al-
though Husserl repeatedly attempts to untie the genesis of the ideal object
from any empirical fact, Derrida nevertheless suggests that it is precisely the
empirical element of writing that will release the ideal object of all worldly
origin. On the other hand, in Speech and Phenomena, his inquiry will give an
account of 1) how the question about ideal objects opens up the problem of
writing as an iteration, and 2) how this repetitive structure is not only
constitutive of the ideal object but also of the subject. Yet, though Derrida
departs from his concerns on phenomenology in his following texts, he will
keep on using the concept of dialectics notwithstanding. In the same way
as in The Problem of Genesis, dialectics will lead us to the fact that every
origin, as a synthesis, is always remitted to a previous moment, which is, in
turn, a constituted synthesis.
Nevertheless, the dialectics of the living present will appear in different
contexts in both the “Introduction” and Speech and Phenomena. In the first
text, Derrida will bring up that dialectics is an analogy that permits us to
understand the process of traditional sedimentations that guarantee the
permanence and stability of science’s ideal objects:
The process is analogous, if not identical to that of internal time-consciousness to

described from the noematic view point in the 1904–10 Lectures. The present
appears neither as the rupture nor the effect of a past, but as the retention of a
present past, I.e., as the retention of a retention, and so forth. Since the retentional
power of living consciousness is finite, this consciousness preserves significations,
values, and past acts as habitualities (habitus) and sedimentations. Traditional
sedimentation in the communal world will have the function of going beyond the
retentional finitude of individual consciousness. (Derrida 1989, 57)
Just as happens within the experiences of a subject, the communitarian ob-

jective accumulation depends on a sedimentation that guarantees its perdurabil-
ity. In an analogous way each content that is given in an original intuition must be
tied to a retention. Without this condition, each present experience will be an
isolated and disjointed data. But once Derrida has told us about the analogy with
the living present, he goes on to explain that:
The latter [the living present], which is the primordial absolute of temporality,
is only the maintenance of what indeed must be called the dialectic of proten-
tion and retention, despite Husserl’s repugnance for that word. In the move-
ment of protention, the present is retained and gone beyond as past present, in
order to constitute another primordial and original Absolute, another Living
Present. (Derrida 1989, 58)
This quote not only singles out the proceeding of the movement of dialec-
tics but it also states something that cannot be found in The Problem of
Genesis. If there dialectics is the movement whereby every genesis must be

thought of as a nonabsolute originary moment, in the “Introduction” this
movement also implies that through dialectics, the living present alters it-
self—in the movement by means of which the present becomes a past pres-
ent—giving rise to an other living present.
This idea of a temporal dialectic echoes Hyppolite’s reading of Hegel.
Surely it is not a simple coincidence. We should remember that The
Problem of Genesis and the “Introduction” were both written by Derrida
under the guidance of Hyppolite in the decade of the fifties. It is possible to
find in Hyppolite’s Genesis and Structure a similar interpretation of the
dialectics of time:
We note a first dialectic of temporality here: in this movement negation arises

from the surge toward the future, which negates the now. This negation cul-
minates in the past which has been (gewesen) and which, therefore, becomes
essence. But in this manner a concrete unity which includes mediation within
itself is constituted by the negation of this negation. In the preface, Hegel
states that temporality is mediation itself (PE, I, I9; PG, 2I; PM, 82). (Hyppolite
1974, 98)
In the dialectics of time, the present, after being pure negativity, after being
negated by future and past, becomes positivity by means of a double negation.
Nevertheless, as Hyppolite points out, by this negation of the negation, the medi-
ation is introduced within the concrete unity. The negativity is already taking
place inside the present; the present always contains the presence of something
that is other than itself. This is the mediation that Hyppolite suggests. As is well
known, Hegel’s concept of negativity establishes the mediation within the Self.
“The living Substance is being which is in truth Subject, or, what is the same, is in
truth actual only in so far as it is the movement of positing itself, or is the media-
tion of its self-othering with itself. This Substance is, as Subject, pure, simple
negativity” (Hegel 2004, § 18). The negativity that the self contains does not
eliminate the other; instead the self is constituted carrying within itself the
other. Yet, we must remember that Derrida claims in Speech and Phenomena
that dialectics of living present must be thought before any speculative
subsumption of this concept. Looked at in a certain way, this assertion, I

would like to suggest, could be understood as referring to a dialectics
before Hegel. Still, it seems as if Derrida was not completely sure about the
“origin” of the concept of dialectics he refers to. In fact, in the problem of
genesis Derrida suggests that the concept of dialectics he is using has
nothing in common with the Hegelian one: “Nor is it [dialectics] that of
Hegel, which is brought to an end in Absolute knowledge, etc” (Derrida
2003a, 211). However, in the 1990 edition of the book, Derrida crossed out the
note. Derrida’s hesitation could provide us enough material for another text
exclusively devoted to this issue. Nevertheless, our attempt is trying to under-
stand how Derrida is employing the term “dialectics” and how the question of
the other stems from it.
Therefore, what is particular to Derrida’s employment of dialectics is that the
movement between the parts does not bring a final closure, which gathers the
parts into a totality. Dialectics, in this way, does not seek a final solution of the
contraposition, or a dissolution of the contradiction. Instead, as we have already
mentioned, it keeps and preserves the tension between the parts. In this sense,
Derrida’s dialectics works like an infrastructure. As Rodolph Gasché argues, it is
composed of “syntheses that do not erase contradiction and aporia. Such a syn-
thesis is originary precisely because it is not closed, and because it maintains
contradictory possibilities together” (Gasché 1997, 153). It produces a synthe-
sis—we should recall that for Derrida the living present is a constituted
synthesis—that shows itself as an originary contamination.
The present can no longer be conceived as a pure presence. We are not
talking about the advent of the other after the genesis of a subject. Instead, the
other is always already “present” as its condition of possibility. Through
dialectics, the living present is constituted as a movement between the pres-
ence of the self and the nonpresence that the other introduces. The other is
co-originary with the self.
X X X
Intersubjectivity is an altering movement that takes place, first, in the tempo-

ralization within the living present: “Intersubjectivity is first the nonempirical
relation of Ego to Ego, of my present present to other presents as such; i.e., as
others and as presents (as past presents). Intersubjectivity is the relation of an

absolute origin to other absolute origins, which are always my own, despite
their radical alterity” (Derrida 1989, 86). Intersubjectivity’s root is precisely
the possibility of constituting, within the living present, another absolute
origin, another now, and thereby, another living present. Dialectics is a move-
ment of alteration by means of which the living present differs from itself, thus
giving birth to an other. As Derrida points out, “temporal dialectics consti-
tutes alterity a priori in the absolute identity of the subject with itself. The
subject appears to itself originarily as tension of the Same and the Other”
(Derrida 2003a, 66). A priori intersubjectivity is the condition of possibility of
every other intersubjectivity in general. Any experience of the other, any
intersubjectivity, must presuppose my capacity of having been other for my-
self before my factual encounter with any other. The intersubjectivity within
the living present, which is the constant alteration that introduces the other,
is the condition of possibility of any possible encounter with the other. There
must be, thus, a transcendental intersubjectivity. Pointing to this same issue,
by following both Merleau Ponty’s and Derrida’s assumptions, Dan Zahavi
suggests that:
If intersubjectivity is to be possible, there must be a prior intrasubjectivity

alterity, that is a contamination of absolute self-presence and self-identity. If I
am to meet the Other as a self, I have to be able to face myself as an
Other. . . . The possibility of intersubjectivity has been provided for, already on
a very fundamental level, through the interplay of presence and absence found
in temporality. (Zahavi 1997, 319)
The use that Derrida does of dialectics implies two simultaneous movements.
On the one hand, a co-originality of the same and the other throughout temporal-
ization as the condition of possibility of the living present. On the other hand, this
movement does not end up with the final constitution of a totality; living present
is not a total unity resulting from dialectics. Instead, living present is the incessant
contamination of the same through the nonpresence that the other introduces.
As Derrida notes in Speech and Phenomena: “The living present springs forth out
of its nonidentity with itself and from the possibility of a retentional trace. It is
always already a trace. This trace cannot be thought out on the basis of a simple
present whose life would be within itself; the self of the living present is primordi-
ally a trace” (Derrida 1973, 85). Trace does not come after self-presence, it is not
an attribute: “Being-primordial must be thought on the basis of the trace”
(Derrida 1973, 85). Henceforth we should not only say that the living present
differs from itself through the movement of dialectics but, even more, dialec-
tics is anything but the movement by means of which the trace is always
already differing the pure presence. Dialectics introduces the Other, an-
nounces the openness to an exteriority and, with it, a sphere of what is not
one’s own property. The possibility of any intersubjectivity is the originary
trace that the other has always left on the same. Throughout this trace, the
living present is constituted as carrying within itself the a priori negativity and
mediation. Therefore, it is due to this movement of alteration that the living
present is already always in the process of differentiating itself from it itself as
well as from the other. The possibility of any alterity is this originary trace.
Gasché writes: “the arche-trace is the constituting possibility of this differen-
tial interplay between self and Other, in short, of what is traditionally under-
stood as difference” (Gasché 1997 187).
The dialectics of temporalization is, as Derrida argues, a “spacing” (Der-
rida 1973, 86). The space within the living present no longer allows us to think
of it as a closed entity. There is no absolute origin because the origin is always
already differing from itself: through the dialectics of temporalization the
presence is always delayed. In Speech and Phenomena Derrida calls the alter-
ation staged by dialectics différance, that is, that which “fissures and retards
presence” (Derrida 1973, 88). Through dialectics, the original presence that
Husserl claims to safeguard as the principle of all principles is opened up to
that which denies it and makes it possible simultaneously. Différance “pro-
duces sameness as self-relation within self-difference; it produces sameness
as the nonidentical” (Derrida 1973, 82).
X X X
However, Derrida rearticulates some of the statements that can be found

within these early writings on phenomenology. For instance, the concept
of dialectics will not be thought of anymore in relation to the movement of
différance. Derrida admits it in his preface to the 1999 edition of The

Problem of Genesis: “The word ‘dialectic’ finished either by totally disap-
pearing or even by designating that without which or separated from
which difference, originary supplement and trace had to be thought”
(Derrida 2003a, xv). Nevertheless, I believe that the concept of dialectics in
those early writings can be taken to be a certain genesis of some of Derrida’s
later statements. In using them, Derrida was already paving the road for the
appearance of a certain infrastructure that opened up the question regarding
the other. By means of this alteration the other appears as the condition of
possibility of the same. Through temporalization, that is, through the
movement in which the presence as a constituted synthesis is always
delayed, the present is opened up to an irreducible and originary relation
to the other. This relation is nothing but the contamination that makes
possible the difference.
NOTES
1. It is possible to find references to phenomenology throughout Derrida’s work, that is,

Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (1994)
and On Touching, Jean-Luc Nancy (2005), among others.
2. I am specifically thinking of texts such as Politics of Friendship (1994), Rogues (2003b), and
Monolingualism of the Other (1998), among others.
3. I will return on this point. For now it is worth noting that I refer to the approach to the concept
of infrastructure that Rodolphe Gasché develops his book The Tain of the Mirror (1997).
4. Recollection and expectation are those functions by means of which the consciousness appre-
hends an object. They both are intentional acts that allow me to bring to the present the
experience of an object given in the past. On the other hand, retention and protention are both
a passive process of consciousness that takes place without an active contribution. As Dan
Zahavi points out in his book Husserl’s Phenomenology, “if we compare the retention and the
recollection, the first is an intuition, even if it is an intuition of something absent, something that
has just existed (Hua 10/4I II8). The recollection, in contrast is a re-presenting intentional act
directed toward a completed past occurrence (Hua I0/333)” (2003, 83).
5. Derrida’s concern with the original synthesis “‘already’ constituted by another synthesis,
and so on infinitely” stages already some of his later statements about the “infinite task”
and the “infinitization.” See chapter 10 in Derrida 1989.
REFERENCES
Derrida, Jacques. 1973. Speech and Phenomena. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
. 1989. Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press.
. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New
International. New York: Routledge.
. 1994. Politics of Friendship. London: Verso.
. 1998. Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
. 2001. Writing and Difference. London: Routledge.
. 2003a. The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
. 2003b. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
. 2005. On Touching, Jean-Luc Nancy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Gasché, Rodolphe. 1997. The Tain of the Mirror. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hegel, G. W. F. 2004. Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Husserl, Edmund. 1982. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Boston: Kluwer.
. 1983. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy.
First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, Collected Works. Vol. 2.
Boston: Kluwer.
. 1991. On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, Collected Works. Vol.
4 (1893–1917). Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Hyppolite, Jean. 1974. Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit. Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press.
Lawlor, Leonard. 2006. Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Rodemeyer, Lanei. 2006. Intersubjective Temporality: It’s About Time. Dordrecht: Springer.
Tymieniencka, Anna-Teresa. 2002. Derrida’s Radical Questioning of Husserlian
Phenomenology. In Phenomenology World-Wide Foundation, ed. Anna-Teresa
Tymieniencka, 459–69. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Zahavi, Dan. 1997. Horizontal Intentionality and Transcendental Intersubjectivity. Tijdschrift
Voor Filosofie 59: 304–21.
. 2003. Husserl’s Phenomenology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
When Negativity Runs the Risk
of Meaning
Hegelian Heritages in Bataille and Derrida
A n d r e a P o t e s t à
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile
Translated by Matthew H. Anderson
More open, the mind discerns . . . the truth that silence alone does not betray.
—Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share
If there were a definition of différance, it would be precisely the limit, the inter-
ruption, the destruction of the Hegelian relève wherever it operates.
—Jacques Derrida, Positions1
HERITAGES
As the subtitle of my text indicates, I would like to speak of heritages. Of the

Hegelian heritage or heritages in the thought of Bataille and Derrida, and of
the heritage, in Derrida, of Bataille’s gesture toward Hegel.
179
180 When Negativity Runs the Risk of Meaning
I believe that this relation (filiation) is indeed a matter of heritage. A heritage,

in the most common sense of the word, is what one receives through someone’s
death. It is what one receives, and thus is a gift, but one that comes about through
or in death. So it is a rather particular gift, since it is perhaps the only kind of gift
that is not included in a real economy of the restitution of debt. No doubt, a
heritage cannot be given back (restituer): the one who gives does so through his
death, and the one who receives cannot really give thanks for having received the gift.
I would nonetheless like to try—paradoxically, if you will—to return (res-
tituer) this heritage. And to do so precisely by trying to reconsider the dynamic
of meaning before death, around which Bataille and Derrida enter into a
debate with Hegel, keeping him as a fundamental interlocutor in their differ-
ing “employment” of the negative. Bataille and Derrida inherit a concern for the
Hegelian thought of death, they inherit it in trying to welcome this heritage,
but they somehow do so without receiving it entirely: they maintain the essen-
tials of its structure, but without reproducing its meaning. More radically,
they try to think the fracture between signifying structure and meaning, or they
attempt to evaluate the testament’s expenditure, the suspension of the gift of
death, the broken relation of meaning in meaningless death.
Now, here, in the interplay of this heritage between Hegel, Bataille, and
Derrida, it is precisely a question of this death as suspended gift or suspension
of the gift, of the effect or its value. It is a question of a death that is worth
nothing. Or better still: it is a question of the death that gives nothing in return
(ne se restitue pas), and that, for that very reason, cannot be reproduced (ne
peut pas se restituer), made positive, or subjugated to a signifying dimension,
cannot become dialectical, or rendered useful. But it is also a question of an
empty testament or a suspended heritage, which is silently withheld to the
point of being paradoxical. A heritage that has only been dissimulated, which
appears to have been rightly received and that, secretly, betrays the Hegelian
succession or, to put it another way, squanders its patrimony.
TESTAMENTS
The element that is perhaps most central to Derrida’s and Bataille’s shared
heritage is the fascination surrounding the impossible, the fascination for a
A n d r e a P o t e s t à 181
figure that has no place in the economy of a closed system. Bataille, much like
Derrida, is deeply fascinated by the need to suspend the economy, to escape
the mechanism for the production of meaning in the Hegelian system. But
what is more specifically common to Bataille and Derrida is their absolute
clarity that this figure of excess in relation to the system would never actually
succeed in breaking the system’s enclosure (l’encerclement) but that it in some
way confirms it. Bataille and Derrida thus share the demand for a vertiginous
and paradoxical moment, one that is constitutively incomplete, wedged
against something unclassifiable but that, for all that, never makes it certain,
nor even palpably probable, that it will interrupt the progression of the ratio-
nal. And thus their suspension of the Hegelian system is not one. It is this
demand that is indeed common to them: faced with the Hegelian system, one
must call for its suspension without its negation, or negate it without oppos-
ing it. Or oppose it without pretending to have escaped the system. Or even to
escape from it, but in such a way that one cannot really know oneself to be (or
comfortably position oneself) outside of it.
This heritage can perhaps be more easily expressed by qualifying the
gesture of Bataille and Derrida as an absolute ambiguity or doubt: the most
profound doubt, shared by Bataille and Derrida, regarding the edge, the bor-
der, or the possibility of overcoming the limits of an absolute knowledge. They
do not question the need to overcome it, to interrupt the infinite devouring
that belongs to the rational within the Hegelian system, but they have a
profound doubt whether this need effectively translates into the concrete
possibility of interruption, and whether it would finally be possible to suspend
the digestion of the system.
Derrida is very clear regarding this doubt. In Glas he wonders, “what if
what cannot be assimilated, the absolute indigestible, played a fundamental
role in the system [?]” (1986, 151). In other words, Derrida, much like Bataille,
knows, before the Hegelian system of absolute knowledge, it is not possible to
simply point toward an abyss, an absolute negativity, since at its base, any
abyss, any negativity, would do little more than to reproduce and restart the
very dynamism of the system, its hidden force, its very momentum. Resis-
tance, any resistance and anything that is intended to be a remainder or
residue of the system’s assimilation (which is to say, even the most purely
negative, “the vomit of the system,” as Derrida puts it) is, in a sense, the very
force of the system, that which moves it toward its most clean affirmation.
In the presence of Hegel then, the doubt is to be faced with an infinite
spiral that can, precisely by virtue of its infinity, remain indifferent to any
given outcome. One can perhaps try to suspend the sensible economy of the
concept, but certainly not through a negation of its force, since all negation
does nothing but propel its economy. Gestures that seek to suspend, inter-
rupt, or exceed the system are in no way derived from an actual rupture of its
symmetry. (One cannot simply break the system or search for an exit from it,
since the rupture and the exit come to affirm it more profoundly.)
One must instead look for another gesture, one that is not allied with the
simple desire to escape from Hegelianism. What is needed is another kind of
elegance or finesse, a gesture that verges on being imperceptible, almost a
countergesture, an immobility, or a shudder and a convulsion that, far from
acting against the system (since any “against” is incorporated into it), instead
seek out another subtlety: a subtlety that is subtle to the point where it
becomes symmetrically confused with the coarseness or thickness of the pure
and hard dialectic, which devours everything and, with the utmost ease,
incorporates that which is given to thought as what cannot be incorporated.
The gesture sought by Bataille and Derrida is then also not the “other” of the
system that does not allow itself to be devoured: if all resistance to digestion
nourishes the dialectical stomach, if the dialectic feeds on its other, then what
is needed is a gesture that cannot be so clearly distinguished from it, which
resembles it to the point where one cannot know if it is separate.
FISSURES
It would seem that this is the trait that belongs most to heritage (to the
heritage that is somehow uninheritable), which draws a straight line between
Bataille and Derrida on Hegel: that of this finesse before the negative, which is
so fine that it no longer tries to dissociate itself from the positive, but instead
assumes the spiraling of meaning as a simple fact.
Heritage would then be the following: if there is no possibility of being
opposed to Hegel, since no “opposition” could ever be seriously anti-Hegelian,
insofar as speculation leaves nothing remaining (everything must be sur-

passed, relieved [relevé], nothing can remain outside), then what is required is
to somehow stop the battle. Declare defeat. Though this defeat is not the
negation of victory. It is instead a desertion (un abandon): if one does not leave
the text, the book, the system, one can just leave (abandonner) the text to its
impossible traverse (as in Glas, which is written precisely so that the reader
will get lost in it and abandon any intention of covering or crossing it). It is not
a matter of producing another text or one that is sensible in another way, but of
the demand to allow the text itself to give rise to the limits of conceptuality or
conceptualization. Here, in the textuality, in the intextuality of the textuality,
in the loss of the text’s linearity, in the fragmentation or the pluralization of
voices, that a breach opens, a breach that is not truly one but that somehow
splits or fissures the positive, abandoning it to a suspended negativity, to an
“unemployed negativity,” according to Bataille’s famous phrase, or to an “im-
possible possibility,” according to Derrida’s aporetic of différance.
Here then is the basic issue shared by Bataille and Derrida with regards to
Hegel: instead of a struggle (against Hegel), one must look for the ordeal (la
galère), difficulty, or infinite concern. Or infinite exhaustion. The never-
ending exhaustion that exhausts speculative ambition (where the expression
“never-ending” points to the irresolution of the task, the impossible accom-
plishment that must constantly be suspended, and that, no doubt, is reappro-
priated in the end, but that in this passing suspension, before being eclipsed in
the positive, nonetheless produces the experience of a resistance).
And so there arises a contradiction in the demand for two irreconcilable
and simultaneous presuppositions (Derrida’s double bind, if you will): On the
one hand, one must be aware that the sublation (la relève) has “always al-
ready” taken place, since only what can be sublated (relevé) is sensible, and it
is a priori paradoxical and impossible that anything that is remaining could
stay outside of or resist the movement of Aufhebung. But on the other hand—a
statement that contradicts the first and, in some way, animates it—one is
aware that, in Derrida’s words (in Positions), “Hegel’s text is necessarily fis-
sured; that it is something more and other than the circular closure of its
representation” (1981, 77). One knows then (through a knowledge that is
remote and somehow cannot be objectified) that it is necessary to resist, that
one must learn to hold on to (tenir)—to suffer, to receive—the fissure. That one
must find strategies that are capable of suspending or maintaining the negative,
even when we know that any genuine control (tenue) is destined to make it
positive.
It is a matter of creating another experience of the system. Derrida puts it in
the following manner: “I am interested in the experience, not the success or
the failure. The circle is not practicable; or avoidable” (1986, 19). This quote is
a good indication of his position on Hegel: of a desire for an experience that
does not exceed, but in some sense—in its disinterest for any success or
failure—transgresses the circularity. It is the desire to break with the undesir-
able encircling and closure, the finishing of the infinite, the auto-
condemnation of reason. The desire to transgress, but without having this
transgression give in to the still-dialectical—the most dialectical—tempta-
tion to escape and resolve difference.
In Glas, Derrida evokes the figure of an “encircled chiasm(us)”: he does so
with regard to Antigone’s double negativity, which, in Derrida’s reading,
would be the example of dissolution in the negative, and at the same time, of
the constitution of a meaning against this negative. Antigone gives expression
to a “Simultaneous effect of chiasm(us) and circle, of encircled chiasmus,”
according to Derrida (189). And, faced with this undecidability or infinite
contradiction, Derrida wonders: “Is it only a question of a homogeneous
relationship between two unequal forces, unequal but of the same nature? In
an uncovered, but open field in which darkness would only be a degree of
light?” (191). If darkness is nothing but a negation of light, then the endurance
of the negative is simply impossible. But as Derrida suggests here, perhaps one
can see or glimpse, in the darkness that is projected upon the very light of
Hegel’s absolute system, all of the suspensive dynamic of différance and all of
the unemployed workings of Bataille’s negative.
SUSPENSIONS
Now, as we know—it is worth recalling—that historically, the Derridean her-

itage of Bataille was brought about by Sartre. In 1943 Sartre wrote a critique of
Bataille. He said that a logic of “the loser wins” (qui perd gagne) lurked in
Bataille’s work, a strategy of loss and desolation with a view toward a martyr-
izing relief (Louette 1999, 22). What is sure is that, against all completion (of
calculation, of the logic of profit [gain], of the salvation of the conquered, of
utility), Bataille proclaims a profound attraction for the insufficient, a taste for
what is wasted. But in Sartre’s reading, Bataille’s position is quite simply
aligned with “a new mysticism” that would be naively dialectical.2
When Bataille responds to Sartre in 1945, far from wanting to explain to
Sartre that he has not understood his work, he only points out that Sartre had
read according to a rhythm that was not his. So the disagreement would be
around the matter of speed, or the time involved in the momentum of thought,
or rhythm. Sartre would be led astray over the question of the economy of
time. What does this mean?
For Bataille, Sartre would not have known how to take the time to get lost,
would not have known how to take the elongated path, he would not have
known how to abandon himself to the unproductiveness of the “slowness of
thought,” as Bataille calls it (1992, 182). To put it otherwise, he would not have
known how to remain without a plan, without an orientation, without aim, in
the “laceration” (la déchirure), in the “refuse” of the absolute system, since a
speculative haste would have forced him to stick to the “correct path,” which
is nearly impossible to find in Bataille’s work. Sartre, in looking for the right
path, would not have made mistakes: only, he would have been guided by an
erroneous rhythm, by precipitation.
I limit myself here to the question of rhythm and speed. And I would like to
draw a connection with what I said above about différance in Derrida, which
constitutes a momentary experience of resistance in the presence of absolute
knowledge, before falling back into the positive: Bataille insists on the need,
with respect to Hegel’s work, to “delay” (temporiser) Aufhebung in a different
way. One must know how to detain, defer the temporal momentum of the
dialectic, and this is what Sartre would be incapable of doing for a lack of
sensibility or rhythm.
And yet, what is it exactly that Sartre would have missed? The fact that
Bataille does not want to lose in order to win, or to win while believing that
he loses, as in the case of the martyr. On the contrary: in his gesture, in this
temporality of loss, there would be something that endures outside of the
economy, what Bataille calls the “laceration” of meaning. As Bataille

writes:
But if in this way, as if by contagion and by mime, I accomplish in myself

Hegel’s circular movement, I define—beyond the limits attained—no longer
an unknown, but an unknowable. Unknowable not on account of the insuffi-
ciency of reason, but by its nature . . . why must there be what I know? Why is it
a necessity? In this question is hidden—it doesn’t appear at first—an extreme
rupture [déchirure], so deep that only the silence of ecstasy answers it. (2010,
109)
There are a number of important elements here: Bataille says that, in losing,
that is, in accomplishing Hegel’s circular movement, in abandoning himself to
the system’s inevitability, he likewise comes into contact with something that
escapes its limits, with an unknowable. And he clarifies that this unknowable is
not a result of an “insufficiency” or an incapacity of reason (Hegelian reason is
by definition all-powerful and it digests everything that opposes it), but that
the unknowable consists instead in the very nature of reason. In short, Bataille
says that in losing his battle with Hegel, and precisely because he gives himself
over to defeat, he is able to let the devouring essence of reason come to the
surface (one could say that slowness reveals speed). Something is hidden in
loss, he says, that does not reveal itself at first glance: the most profound
rupture of an intimate silence, a rupture (déchirure) that escapes the inevita-
bilities of the system, an element that, in some way, tears, sinks, or gashes it.
This is what is at stake: One cannot simply hold onto the negative, as Sartre
apparently believed. One cannot negate the circular movement of Aufhebung.
On the contrary, one must carry it through, but, in doing so, one must push the
negative to a laceration more profound than any affirmation.
LACERATIONS
Now, if Bataille seeks “laceration,” if he seeks to lacerate the system by com-

pleting its circle, if he tries to be immanent to it, then it is in the name of an
element that is imperceptibly transcendent to its closure. Such is the com-
plexity of Bataille’s anti-Hegelian Hegelianism: he is aware that the imma-

nence of meaning can only be reached at its limit, in the unreserved experi-
ence of death, in the expenditure of life—because it only makes sense in
immanence. But he is also aware that in this immanence, there is also a push
toward absolute transcendence, or toward what Sartre had dubiously associ-
ated with mysticism: the circle of immanence does not completely close in
upon itself, because a pure silence is hidden in it, one that is impossible to
name, untouchable, unimaginable, and incommunicable.
And yet, it is true that Bataille is not concerned about separating this “pure
silence” from a mystic position. He does not shield himself from the risk of
confusing these two emptinesses (that of the negative laceration and that of a
mysticism that is once again positive). On the contrary, he constantly runs the
risk of valorizing silence, or turning it into something positive. This is seen in
an exemplary fashion in Bataille’s drive toward sacrifice. In sacrifice, Bataille
finds a rupture without any remedy or relief, without any salutary economy,
without any immunization.3 There is a desire, in Bataille, to play with the
ambiguity of the abyss, a desire to make the time of this abyssal ambivalence
endure.
For Bataille, this is the ultimate measure of thought, where it touches on
the incommensurable, the unknown, even the impossible. This is what Ba-
taille calls a “general economy,” of pure expenditure, which contradicts all the
axioms of the economy itself, the “restricted” economy. The general economy
is an economy that, in being generalized, finds itself deprived of—lacking—
the “power of the negative,” where non-knowledge or bare sacrifice are pre-
cisely what abolishes the logic of opposition, and it comes to an end in the “pure
gift” of death. In Bataille, the sacrifice is the figure of an excess (but without
being completely appropriate to the figure of excess, which would again too
readily follow Hegelian synthesis). At stake is an excess that does not entail a
surplus.4 The excess for Bataille is the force of insufficiency. An increase of
torment. It is the delay of meaning upon itself, its slowness, or—what for
Bataille amounts to the same thing—the fixed instant of torture, which re-
mains, during the moment of sacrifice, something that cannot be assimilated,
before being assimilated in the senseless meaning (le sens insensé) of sacrifi-
cial death.
It is in this sense that Bataille thinks the moment of sacrifice and death is
an unfaithful heritage to the Hegelian master and slave. If for Hegel (and
Kojève) the fundamental experience of finitude is indissociable from the
confrontation with the other (as Hegel says, “just as each stakes his own life, so
each must seek the other’s death” [1977, 114]), and if for Hegel it is a matter of
the economy of sovereign life that asserts itself against the life of the other out
of a desire to kill in which the subject asserts itself in a “life-and-death strug-
gle” for recognition, on the other hand, for Bataille, the sacrifice is the desire
for my own death, my death that is only sovereign to the extent that it lacks a
signifying and economic discourse.
This sacrifice would thus be a pure negativity, not in the sense that it would
bar or contradict positivity, but in the sense that it would be entirely indifferent
to it, which would, for an instant, slow down the moment of sacrifice, Hegel’s
“abstract negativity.” At stake is something that Bataille, in a letter to Kojève
from December 6, 1937 calls “unemployed negativity” (Hollier 1988, 90). Ba-
taille elsewhere offers a few clarifications regarding this negative:
The negation I introduce takes place only once the circle [of Hegel’s system] is
closed, beyond the domain of history and action. In fact the instant cannot be
“most important” except to the extent that man no longer has anything to do,
when he has found Hegelian gratification in which his own dissatisfaction is
no longer connected to the active negation of such and such determined form,
but to the negation, which no activity can absorb, of the human situation.
(1994, 95 n. 6)
ENDURANCES
This is where Derrida inherits Bataille’s heritage, in his turn being unfaithful—
unfaithful, like Bataille, to Hegel, but also unfaithful to Bataille himself. In a
way, Derrida emphasizes Bataille’s same anti-Hegelian authority, but he does
so by resisting the latter’s resistance. He denies the inheritance that views
sacrifice as the sovereign instant of death. For Derrida, the subject would be a
hidden game through which Bataille would end up simplifying the Hegelian
encirclement. In truth, Bataille would want to do two things at once (which,
according to Derrida, confuses the issue of resistance): on the one hand, he

would want not to be opposed to the system, to allow it to circulate, to annul all
opposition to it, but, on the other hand, he conceives of the sacrifice as a
negative suspension. And yet, for Derrida, one cannot do both at once (or one
cannot not notice the aporia governing this intention). One cannot come to a
standstill, as Bataille wants to do, upon the antithesis, and at the same time do
without the antithesis to think a pure or bare sacrifice (which would again
constitute a synthetic unity). Bataille seeks to affirm the empty or null
moment, the moment of nullity, even of the immediate, and at the same
time he exalts the hiatus or syncopation, the “anti-rhythmic” interruption
of succession.
To some extent, Derrida shares (for once—though one time does not make
it a habit) Sartre’s opinion: there is some “mystic” element in this pretension
to sovereign interruption. But, at the same time, Derrida’s argument is the
opposite of Sartre’s: if there is a still-dialectical haste that dominates in Sartre,
then on the contrary, Derrida seeks to more phlegmatically defer the resistance,
to infinitize Bataille slowness.
In an article from 1967 published in the journal L’arc, under the title “From
Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve” (later repub-
lished in Writing and Difference), Derrida sought to formalize this critique.
Bataille, in his “interminable explication with Hegel,” would have believed in
the possibility of an instant of absolute sovereignty, connected with the idea
that “nothing [is] definitely lost in death” (Derrida 2001, 320, 324). He would
have believed then in the possibility of apprehending (and enhancing) “the
point at which destruction, suppression, death and sacrifice constitute so
irreversible an expenditure, so radical a negativity” (327). But this intention
cannot come about, Derrida says, without
convulsively . . . tear[ing] apart the negative side, that which makes it the
reassuring other surface of the positive; and it is to exhibit within the negative,
in an instant, that which can no longer be called negative. And can no longer be
called negative precisely because it has no reserved underside, because it can
no longer permit itself to be converted into positivity, because it can no longer
collaborate with the continuous linking-up of meaning, concept, time and
truth in discourse; because it literally can no longer labor and let itself be
interrogated as the “work of the negative.” (328)
In other words, according to Derrida, there would again be a desire to convert

into a positivity that which, on the contrary, must be abandoned or deferred:
the sovereignty of the negative. On the other hand, the dream of entirely
separating the sovereignty of the positivity, or to bring about “a speech which
maintains silence,” while maintaining this silence in a purity and transpar-
ency that is sensible, “furtively” falls under the Hegelian sublation (332).
Derrida writes: “This sovereign speech is not another discourse, another
chain unwound alongside significative discourse. There is only one discourse,
it is significative, and here one cannot get around Hegel” (330). One cannot get
around Hegel, and yet, this does not mean that one gives in to the system. In
contrast, this means that, once again, as with Bataille, an effort is needed to
make the difference endure, but that this effort and this endurance must be
infinite. Only in the impossible possibility of an infinite endurance could the
Hegelian system finally topple. More precisely: this impossible possibility and
this diversion of sovereignty must be thought of and conceived of in another
and more suspensive way than it is in Bataille’s sacrifice. In Derridean terms,
this means only in a radical uncertainty, the opposite of the sacrifice’s alleged
affirmation, only in a sense that is contradictory in advance, at once possible
and impossible, could a delay that is other than dialectical arise (if something
can arrive there).
Only the trace or the inscription of an at once negative and positive opera-
tion—undecidedly negative and positive, never entirely decided on the one or
the other (as Bataille’s sacrifice is, to the contrary), never certain, never sov-
ereign in its decision, or completed in its signification—can put into suspense
that which never ceases to circulate. This undecidable, this reiterated suspen-
sion, tirelessly resumed, which inscribes an infinitely withdrawn gap in the
negative, a double hyperbola that makes it so that to be faithful to the system, I
have to infinitely betray it, but in betraying, I confirm it, and only the play of an
infinite différance can contaminate, as it were, the impossible negativity with
a(n) (always already) possible positivity.
For Derrida, this is why with Hegel one cannot seek out plain silence:
If the word silence “among all words,” is “the most perverse or the most poetic,” it
is because in pretending to silence meaning, it says nonmeaning, it slides and it
erases itself, does not maintain itself, silences itself, not as silence, but as speech.
This sliding simultaneously betrays discourse and nondiscourse. It can be im-
posed upon us, but sovereignty can also play upon it in order rigorously to betray
the meaning within meaning, the discourse within discourse. (332)
ThedesireforsilencethatBataillerequiresisthemostambiguouspointofhisrelation
to Hegel, yet according to Derrida, it is an ambiguity that remains too sure of itself,
because this silence is already devoured by speech, and, at its base, only exists as its
reverse side (and the reverse side, as we have said, is the basic food of the dialectic).
It is not a question, then, of losing or winning, as in the quarrel between
Sartre and Bataille. With Derridean différance, it is rather a matter of “a play in
which whoever loses wins, and in which one loses and wins on every turn,”
where one must contaminate and co-implicate the possible and the impossi-
ble—the positive and the negative, opening and closure, death and the sense-
less—in a way that is performatively more suspensive (1982, 20).
I will finish with one of Derrida’s notes, which summarizes what is at stake
in these relations and heritages:
In order to maintain sovereignty, which is to say, after a fashion, in order to lose it,
in order still to reserve the possibility not of its meaning but of its nonmeaning; in
order to distinguish it, through this impossible “commentary,” from all negativity.
We must find a speech which maintains silence. Necessity of the impossible: to say
in language—the language of servility—that which is not servile. (2001, 331–32)
NOTES
This article is part of the FONDECYT project n. 1130661.

1. Bataille (1988, 190); and Derrida (1981, 40).

2. Such is the title of Sartre’s text: “A New Mystic.” It should also be pointed out that Sartre
really speaks his mind in this text: “M. Bataille disgusts himself. A fact considerably more
terrifying in its simplicity than two hundred pages of loaded considerations on human
wretchedness. . . . He looks like a madman to me and I know, too, that he regards me as a
madman” (277).
3. I note that in The Inoperative Community, Jean-Luc Nancy rejects the figure of the laceration
precisely as a result of such a suspicion. Nancy writes: “Properly speaking, there is no
laceration [déchirure] of the singular being: there is no open cut in which the inside would
get lost in the outside (which would presuppose an initial ‘inside’, an interiority)” (1991, 30).
Evidently, Nancy’s rejection of sacrifice in Bataille is inscribed in the strict form of the
reflection on the conditions for a thought of the community and should be understood as a
rejection of the orgiastic fusion of the sacrificial outburst, whose elementary structure
Nancy shows to be in common with the modern onto-political project, above all in the
monstrous excesses found in the project of totalitarian communities. But it also needs to be
recognized that in Bataille, sacrifice is and is not of the same order as the dialectic. If it was
entirely so, then Nancy, and Sartre in his own way, would certainly have cause do away with
its structure. But in Bataille, the laceration is a paradoxical element: at once continuous
and radically discontinuous, the laceration—this third that is not the third element of
the synthesis resulting from dialectical Aufhebung—is a nondialectical movement of
change, continuous but not homogeneous, as in rhythmical, syncopated eruption
(poussée). The laceration is not a relation to the absolute. It is the wild element that
undoes the opposition between the words of the sacred and the profane, between
continuity and discontinuity, between the logic of expenditure and the logic of the
project (and consequently between the Hegelian-Kojevean master and the slave, as we
will see). In this sense, laceration in Bataille is not at all incompatible with the infinite
finitude that Nancy himself discusses.
4. As Maurice Blanchot says, “Excess is not glut, superabundance. The excess of lack and due
to lack is never satisfied exigency of human insufficiency” (1988, 57 n. 4).
REFERENCES
Bataille, Georges. 1988. The Accursed Share, Vol. 1: Consumption. New York: Zone Books.
. 1992. On Nietzsche, trans. Bruce Boone. New York: Paragon House.
. 1994. Initial Postulate. In The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism, trans. Michael
Richardson, 91–95. New York: Verso.
. 2010. Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt. Albany: State University of New York
Press.
Blanchot, Maurice. 1988. The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris. New York: Station Hill
Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1981. Positions, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
. 1982. Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Press.
. 2001. Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge.
Hegel, G. W. F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hollier, Denis. 1988. The College of Sociology (1937–39). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Louette, Jean-François. 1999. Existence, dépense: Bataille, Sartre. Les Temps Modernes 602:
16–36.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1991. The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael
Holland, and Simona Sawhney. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2010. A New Mystic. In Critical Essays (Situations I), trans. Chris Turner, 219–
93. London: Seagull Books.
Derrida and Post-Hegelian
Kantianism in Eric Weil
Impossibility and Possibility of Dialogue
Roberto Saldías
Alberto Hurtado University, Santiago, Chile
UPON CONSIDERING THE WORK OF ERIC WEIL (BORN IN PARCHIM,

Germany, 1904, dead in Niza, France, 1977), especially the three volumes that
constitute the fundamental core of his thought (Kirscher 1989)—Logique de la
philosophie (1950), Philosophie politique (1956), and Philosophie morale
(1961)—there persists the following question that plagued so many of his first
readers: Are we dealing with a discourse of the Kantian or Hegelian sort? Does
the systematic (scientific) pretension of Weil’s philosophy (Weil 1970) re-
spond more to an idealist transcendental model or to a categorial one? This
problem led the Jesuit Pierre-Jean Labarrière to speak of an “inactuality”
(inactualité) of Weil’s thought that, to be sure, takes up quite seriously the
Hegelian system, but, in the same reflexive effort, seeks to sublate it by return-
ing to the Kant of the finite things, that Kant who sees in the noncoincidence
195
196 Derrida and Post-Hegelian Kantianism in Eric Weil
between freedom and reason the essential space that allows for the under-
standing of finitude (Jarczyk and Labarrière 1996).
Additionally, this inactuality has been a source of ignorant and abstract
interpretations. In the French philosophical scene of the twentieth century,
Weil appears as a rather misunderstood, poorly studied, and even ignored
author (e.g., Descombes 1979). All those authors that tried to think—whether
from the perspective of Marx, Heidegger, Nietzsche, or Freud—the rupture
between thought in the contemporary world and Hegel’s philosophy (consid-
ered, according to Kojève, as the philosophy that fully realized reason) had not
suspected that there could be another way of reflection. That is, one can
critique Hegel but also understand him; in other words, it is not necessary to
renounce systematic discourse to confront and critique the philosopher who
finalizes it. In this project, Weil wants to maintain a philosophical relation
with Hegel (as he does with Aristotle, Kant, and with many others in the
Western philosophical tradition), not a violent relation, indifferent, ironic, or
deconstructive. Weil aims to sublate Hegel but without renouncing discursive
and systematic philosophy, without losing hope in the role that reason con-
tinues to play in history.
The precarious relation between Weil and Derrida can fall within this
context. Situating and understanding this relation properly will allow for a
better analysis of the Weilean pretension to sublate Hegel, which is precisely
what the author of “Violence et Métaphysique” fails to see. Furthermore, this
standpoint will make possible a closer examination of the possible convergen-
ces and the quite real divergences between the two philosophers.
DERRIDA CONTRA WEIL
The relationship, in terms of textual references, between Derrida and Weil is

minimal. Weil never mentions Derrida in his writings and, given the moment
in which he was academically active, it is unlikely that he was familiar with
Derrida=s first works. For his part, Derrida pays little attention to Weil and
refers to him only in a marginal way that reveals, more than anything, his
evident lack of interest rather than a critical stance concerning his thought or
some given work. Derrida’s most important reference to the author of Logique
Roberto Saldías 197
de la philosophie appears in a footnote in “Violence et Métaphysique” (from

the year 1964, reedited in Derrida 1967, 117–228). It is well known that Derrida
in this essay lays the foundations for a dialogue with Lévinas that will carry on
for the rest of his intellectual life. In this essay, Derrida pays homage to
Lévinas’s philosophical project given that he recognizes in the latter’s work
both a critical questioning of the Greek foundations of Western philosophy as
well as that Lévinas aims to open up philosophy to another origin. However, at
the same time, Derrida questions his discursive strategy. In effect, according
to Derrida, by preferring the conceptual and discursive problem of philoso-
phy, Lévinas fails to free himself from the greater problem to which he should
have directed his attention: namely, the problem of language. Furthermore,
and for the same reason, Derrida claims that Lévinas fails to see that infinite
and absolute alterity cannot be rendered into the Greek category of the other
(autre). Lévinas believes that language can declare peace in the face of vio-
lence and can respect the alterity of the Other (Autrui). On the contrary,
Derrida thinks that, along with declaring peace, language also declares war. It
is a field of forces, a field of unending battles, a minor violence that is chosen
against the pure violence of a sort of preoriginary silence that always remains
subordinated to the irreducible violence of articulation. Language, if indeed it
speaks peace, does so at the expense of a war against itself.
What relation can exist between violence and philosophy? Is it possible to
inscribe violence in the philosophical logos, in the identity and the totality to
which the concept aspires? Might it not be rather a violation of the said order,
that order whose alterity will never be able to be appropriated nor domesti-
cated by a rational and coherent discourse? Can it be thought as a sort of
category or does it rather restrict itself to facts that cannot access the concept:
that cannot access internal ruptures of historical contingency, of politics, of
psychology, or of symbolic dimensions of empirical conflicts? Can the mean-
ing of violence, as Lévinas proposes it, be extended to anywhere in the king-
dom of Being: to ontology, to the understanding of “being qua being?” Should
it not rather limit itself to the terrain of the conflicts of coherence that
contains the same philosophical discourse, at least in the abstract acts of
negation that still persist below diverse figures (Vries 2002, 123)?
Lévinas, in his work Difficile liberté, refers laudatorily to Weil’s magnum

opus, Logique de la philosophie; he also lets his reservations be seen. In a note,
Lévinas states: “We owe to Eric Weil’s great thesis—whose philosophical
importance and tenacity of logic will become crucial—the systematic and
vigorous use of the term violence as the opposite of discourse. We, however,
give it a different meaning” (Lévinas 1963, 17–18). Derrida, for his part, in the
long note in his text, tries to show what this “different meaning” is, to the point
of claiming that the perspectives between these two authors are incompatible
and even contradictory. It is there where, in my opinion, Derrida commits an
error in his reading of Weil, an error that, even if only minor in the context of
the purpose of his essay, seems to deserve attention so that the poorly under-
stood Weilean philosophical project may be better understood. I will briefly
reflect on this point.
In the aforementioned note, Derrida holds that both Lévinas and Weil
define violence as the other of discourse. Yet, Derrida claims that the deter-
mination proposed by the former is “diametrically opposed” to that of the
latter’s Hegelianism. In effect, Derrida considers the discourse that Weil rec-
ognizes as nonviolent to refer to the universal project of ontological discourse.
He does so by affirming that the nonviolent pole is, for the author of the
Logique, precisely a sort of infinite coherence, and further that, as a philosoph-
ical project, it is expressed in a clearly Hegelian style. On the contrary, Derrida
sees that ontology corresponds, for the Lévinas of Difficile liberté, to “violence
itself.” In effect, the “end of history,” the nonviolent telos, cannot be given by
an absolute Logic, that is, by the absolute coherence of the Logos in and for
itself; it cannot be the alleged and desirable accordance that exists within the
absolute System. The end of history is rather, for Lévinas, peace that is given in
separation or, otherwise said, the “diaspora of absolutes.” According to Der-
rida, violence, for Weil, can only be reduced or controlled through the reduc-
tion of alterity or of the will of alterity; whereas for Lévinas, all attempts at
coherence are always finite. Therefore, concludes Derrida, “for both, only the
infinite is non-violent and can only announce itself in discourse” (Derrida
1967, 172), but one will have to think and decide well about what type of
discourse is at issue: either the discourse that steps outside of Being to open
itself to the Autrui (Lévinas), or the discourse of a pure logos that, therefore,
persists in Being (as the discourse that underlies Weil’s thought would be
understood), or a nondiscourse that understands nonviolence as a telos that,
for the same reason, lies beyond the word (most likely Derrida’s stance).
Having said this, Derrida’s claims regarding Weil are both accurate, with
respect to this latter’s choice of discourse, and erroneous, with respect to the
type of discourse that he believes to see at work in the logic of the author. The
accurate claim: Derrida sees that Weil does not want to renounce systematic
discourse or, in other words, opts for an idea of philosophy that has, at its core,
reason expressed in a reasonable, coherent discourse that regards both the
whole of reality and itself qua course. The erroneous claim: Derrida fails to see
that what is at issue is, precisely, a discourse that claims a logical understand-
ing of philosophy whose objective is not to give an account of the movement of
the totality of empirical reality nor, in the least, to propose a new philosophi-
cal discourse. It is rather a question of understanding the articulation and the
relation contained in the distinct, philosophical discourses that, throughout
history, have been given, and that form what, in the West, we call philosophy.
Derrida does not enter into this logic, and by not doing so, fails to see that the
Hegelian discourse, within this logic, is one more moment of the development
of the always open and active discourse of philosophy in general. As Kirscher
affirms in, perhaps, the most exhaustive study of the Logique de la philosophie,
“J. Derrida commits an error in his reading . . . by attributing to the logician of
philosophy a thesis that refers to the category of the object. The discourse of
meaning (Weil) is reduced neither to the discourse of the absolute (Hegel), nor
to the discourse of the object (Plato)” (Kirscher 1989, 12). In effect, given that
systematicity is at issue, the thought of Weil cannot be understood outside the
complete order that orients its course: from beginning to end, from the cate-
gory of the truth (Weil 1950, 89–94) to that of the meaning (413–31) of truth and
finally to that of wisdom (433–42). If we abstract from this order, we will easily
find ourselves before a meaningless typology.
Derrida’s error here is symptomatic of the difficulty one has in reading the
Logique and, therefore, of the uneasy reception that Weil’s work had within
the French philosophical scene of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. This allows me,
in what will follow in this paper, to show that, if indeed we can speak of a
Hegelianism in Weil, we must charge ourselves with the task of a critique as
well as that of an overcoming, which is precisely what Derrida, Lévinas, and

many others failed to see. In effect, the critique of and the lack of interest in
Weil’s work are explained by the false belief that Weil’s philosophy is nothing
more than a repetition of Hegel’s philosophy that took the latter seriously
(Jean Wahl, e.g., speaks of “Phenomenology of the Spirit of 1950”).1 On the
other hand, Kojève’s repetition of Hegel’s work—written in an ironic tone—
was ultimately preferable because it at least liberated the contemporary phi-
losopher from Hegel and permitted one to withdraw from the search for
meaning. Weil was perceived as Hegelian, which in many ways is true, but his
originality was not grasped; he maintained the philosophical will to under-
stand the whole—from which the necessity of systematic discourse follows in
his work—but he also sought a critical understanding, in the Kantian sense of
the term, of the status of the said will. It is the finite being, conscious of his
finitude, that wills to understand and understand itself in the infinite of the
discourse. Along with Hegel, Weil also took upon himself the Kantian inheri-
tance that does not forget the finitude of the act of philosophizing. That is
what was not understood: how to be Hegelian and Kantian at the same time?
WEIL AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL
In this part, I will closely follow the interpretation of Professor Gilbert

Kirscher (1992), whose close and rigorous knowledge of Weil’s work allows for
a very good understanding of the critique and proposal that Weil makes with
respect to Hegel. However, I will distance myself regarding what he believes to
be Weil’s choice of discourse, namely, that of a philosophy of the meaning of
action (Kirscher 1989, 350), which would be closer to Kant than to Hegel. In
effect, in my opinion, Weil does not propose a new philosophical discourse but
rather an understanding of the historical discourse in its unity and plurality,
which, to be sure, can only be discursive and systematic if it aims to be
understood and thought. If Hegel and Kant appear as fundamental referents it
is because Weil sees that they, in their respective historical moments, sought,
in part, to do the same. It is in this sense that they are contributors and it is
precisely this point that must be shown. I will return to this matter in the last
part of this paper since it is there where we might find the possible convergen-
ces between Weil and Derrida.
As Weil himself states, it would be a mistake to believe that he makes some
sort of selection, in the sense of Benedetto Croce, between what would have to
be taken up and abandoned in Hegel’s philosophy (Weil 2003, 97). Weil does
not critique the systematicity of the system but rather its mode of construc-
tivist effectuation by proposing, inversely, a reading of the history of philoso-
phy that returns always from the concept, or from the categorial discourse, to
the field (moral, political, and historical) where there persists the tension
between attitude and category (Weil 1950, 70–82), between history and phi-
losophy, between violence and reason. Yet for Weil, just as for Kant and Hegel,
philosophy, which is always constituted in reference to its history, is necessar-
ily a system. If Hegel can be commended it is for understanding and formulat-
ing this aspect rigorously. Weil sees that the philosophical will of the Western
tradition is founded on the will to understand all, that is, on the will to
articulate in a coherent and totalizing discourse all of the partial understand-
ings and particulars, all of the abstractions of reality. And to what purpose?
Only thus, through this will and within it, is the renunciation of violence
carried out.
Violence resides in the unilateral choice of a determined value. It is taking
a stance from which all that is declared as nonessential should be eliminated;
all is explained starting from the declaration of a truth that refuses to put itself
into question and, consequently, to dialogue with other positions. According
to Weil, “in Hegel’s eyes, it is precisely the multiplicity of these positions which
constitutes the great problem, the problem of philosophy. Hegel wants to be a
philosopher, and to be a philosopher for himself, what is at issue is not the
constructing of one more coherent discourse among so many other coherent,
explicative, reductive discourses but rather to understand reality in the unity
of truth” (1991, 130).
Weil sees that Hegel does not only project the system but rather that he
brings it to fullness and, for the same reason, as Kojeve analyzes it, he ends it.
Therefore, Hegel is the philosopher of the modern world, just as Aristotle was
the philosopher of the ancient world. In effect, the philosophy of Hegel—just
as that of Aristotle—“forms what could be called the crux of history. It is a
matter of singular points in history in which the threads of the past cross over
and from there separate again, after having been . . . gathered back up, re-
united, and ordered” (Weil 1991, 128). These threads and those who give them
order appear precisely after the great revolutions that affect both thought as
well as reality, after Plato and amid the crisis of the ancient polis (Aristotle),
after Kant and the French Revolution (Hegel).
The philosopher of the modern world is in large part the philosopher of our
times. If after him, the system is dissociated and the representation of the
unity of the world and of discourse crumbles, it is because negation or nega-
tivity remains active; in other words, freedom continues to act inside reality.
The human discourse elaborates again and again the order of the world and,
at the same time, given that it is discourse, the choice of one meaning over
another, it undoes it between chaos and cosmos (Weil 1950, 110). Yet, even
broken or dissociated, the Hegelian system continues to be the reference in
relation to which all modern thought is constituted, be it for opposition,
rejection, or misunderstanding: “By understanding Hegel, we will say, we hope
to better understand ourselves” (Weil 1991, 95).
For Weil, the task of philosophy is “to rethink Hegel,” not to repeat him, as
many of his post-Hegelian contemporaries believe him to do. Yet, to rethink
Hegel, in the Weilean perspective, does not mean destruction, irony, or aban-
donment. It means to make the Hegelian will of philosophy our own as abso-
lute knowledge, as unity that is sustained by itself, to later, if it be necessary,
refute it. To put it otherwise, the radical critique that Weil directs to the
Hegelian system is the result of the fidelity to the philosophical exigency just
as Hegel understood and formulated it. Weil seeks to think in his time as Hegel
did in his time, a choice that, to be sure, nourishes the entirety of his method of
access to the philosophical tradition (cf., e.g., what the author says also
of Kant, 1963). Having said this, in a context dominated by the rejection of
systematic philosophy and by the idea that the philosopher should be engaged
in the world, take a stance, and take part, what Weil says of Hegel could be said
of himself: “Given that he wants to understand everything, he is considered by
all to be a traitor of the good cause” (Weil 1991, 130).
What is Weil’s critique of Hegel? Essentially, as I have already suggested, it
is a critique of “constructivism.” This critique is, according to Weil, already
present in Schelling and in Stahl: “Schelling, a fierce enemy, and his only great
disciple, Julius Stahl, an understanding enemy that doesn’t want to lose any
part of the Hegelian experience, objected from early on that Hegel hadn’t
deduced what he had obtained through a positive analysis of historical and
natural reality” (2003, 104–5). Under the influence of Schelling, it is the spirit of
the Kantian critique of metaphysics that inspires the Weilean critique of the
Hegelian system. The term itself, “constructivism,” refers to the examination
of the conditions that legitimize the construction of a concept, that is, a
Darstellung, a presentation, an a priori realization. If the mathematical con-
struction of the concept alone is legitimate—given that it objectifies a concept
of the understanding, and therefore of the finite, in the element of the pure
sensible, in the form of space and time—then the metaphysical construction
must be illegitimate and illusory, since it aims to construct the concept of the
absolute by directly identifying its meaning and its referent without resorting
to the sensible form. “Constructivism” corresponds therefore to that proce-
dure that engenders the transcendental illusion and that manifests itself
particularly in the ontological proof, at the core of metaphysical dogmatism.
Is not the Hegelian system precisely the total and dialectic development of
ontological proof, that is, the systematic deduction of the real from the possi-
ble, of the concrete from the abstract? Hence,
the Hegelian presentation, which moves from the abstract to the concrete,
instead of discovering the abstract in the concrete to show right away the
concrete of that which first seemed to be abstraction, this presentation by way
of deduction, by construction of the richness of the concrete world of which it
pretends to not know anything at first, this Fichtean deduction, is it not in
conflict with the will to understand the world and to understand the real
thought of real men in the real-world? (Weil 2003, 105)
It is in this point where Weil takes up Kantian thought. To do philosophy

is, fundamentally, to depart from the facts to question oneself from there,
through a regressive analysis, about the conditions and the meaning of these
facts, and, at the same time, about the conditions and meaning of the same
questioner. If one proceeds in a constructivist way, an illicit action is carried
out, since the point of departure of philosophizing shifts and the point of view
of man is substituted for that of God; in effect, for Weil we cannot abandon
man, not even in the act of thinking, as laudable as this may be: “The thought
of God from before the creation of the world,” asks Weil, “is it not divine
thought in a human, historical, consciousness which is situated in the world,
being, at the same time, divine thought, that is, truly infinite?” (105).
The Hegelian pretension to understand the real from the possible makes
clear for Weil the insufficient recognition that Hegel has regarding human
finitude and, consequently, regarding the human status of philosophy. This is
something that Kant had already presented with sufficient clarity in Critique
of Judgment (2007, § 76). For Kant, human finitude expresses itself in the
irreducible heterogeneity of our faculties: on the one hand, in the irreducibil-
ity of reason to understanding, of thought of the infinite to knowledge of the
finite; and on the other hand, of thought to sensibility, of discourse to intu-
ition, of meaning to the given, of sense to the fact. This heterogeneity prohibits
human discursive understanding from moving from the possible to the real
without a solution of continuity. Weil recognizes, to be sure, that Hegel does
not ignore the finite-infinite dialect but sees that his pretension to elevate and
overcome without remainder, to understand absolutely the finite in the infi-
nite, reveals his ignorance with respect to the irreducible of the fact, which
remains always outside the thought that understands it.
For Weil, the finite does not reduce itself to the infinite, even if it is thought
in relation to the infinite to be understood from it. In other words, the finite
cannot aufgehoben in the infinite, existence cannot be absorbed and over-
come in the concept. As for the being that we are, the dialectic of the finite and
the infinite, of the particular and the universal, of relation and discourse,
cannot be resolved in the absolute. Therefore, it is an unfinished dialectic, just
as we, human beings, are unfinished. This is why we do philosophy. According
to Weil, it is therefore permissible to question the circularity of the Hegelian
system. If Hegel starts from the finite, from finite consciousness, and if he
arrives at the “théôria in which both language and the individual disappear”
(2003, 124), can he return to his point of departure?
Weil opts for a positive reading of Hegel. He believes that when Hegel
affirms that “the finite is understood in the finite,” what is at issue is a formal
truth since the finite can only see itself by opposing itself to the finite. Yet, is
the finite recovered at the end of the journey? Can the Phenomenology (or if
one prefers, the introduction of the Encyclopedia of Berlin) be reborn from an
already finished system (Weil 2003, 105)? Should the point of arrival not be
finite? In effect, Weil suggests that the Hegelian difficulty of the recognition of
the finite is what impedes the system from carrying out the circularity prom-
ised and demanded by the discourse. Only a philosophy conscious of finite
being can realize the circle of discourse, which is the same as saying that what
is at issue is the constant return to the starting point, that is, the fact of
finitude. The act of philosophizing is thus an act that always begins again. The
Logique de la philosophie, despite what has been said and thought about it, is a
philosophical project that seeks to open again the possibility of said act.
THE ABSOLUTE IN THE LOGIQUE DE LA PHILOSOPHIE
In the Logique de la philosophie, both Hegel and the entirety of the philosoph-
ical, historical discourses (categories) are interior. At least in its pure cate-
gory, the Hegelian discourse is one more moment of this philosophical dis-
course that, as a whole, is always in development (1950, 319–44). Upon
determining the place that the Hegelian discourse takes up in the philosoph-
ical discourse, Weil shows its limits and, therefore, the necessity to sublate it.
Understanding this was not easy for the first readers of the work; and, as we
have already put forward, to grasp Weil’s critique of Hegel is only possible
after understanding the Weilean project in its whole. A complex demand for
the reader is here put to the fore, just as the testimonies of his first readers
understood it: for example, J. Wahl (cf. the report of the thesis cited above) and
M. Merleau-Ponty (cf. the letter that he wrote to Weil have having read the
first version of the work, in Weil 2003, 251). This is the difficulty that Lévinas
(1974, 143) and Derrida (1967, 171–72) also found. In effect, the reader is, up to
a certain point, obligated to be a logician of philosophy and to have a com-
mand of historiography, which is difficult to acquire.
Having said this, the sublation that Weil aims to show and carry out
cannot be done in the way that Hegel did with his predecessors. Can discourse
be carried out after the absolute? If the Hegelian dialectic is taken up as the
heart of the system, how can one go beyond Hegel? Thus, Weil sees that the
only manner of opening once more the discourse after its full closure is by
showing that violence cannot be eliminated and that in the face of absolute
knowledge, it can also be erected as absolute violence—as a violence that
shows itself again as the other expression or, better yet, as the other possible
choice for the human being who does not aim to opt for reason. Hegel defi-
nitely did not see this possibility.
A “logic” of philosophy should necessarily grasp and confront this violence
if it wants that which we have called philosophy to continue its course in
history. Labarriere, perhaps more Hegelian than Weil, believes that, on this
point, there would not be a real sublation of Hegel, since nothing can be added
to the mode of functioning of the dialectic discourse, and that the only thing
that this discourse demands is to be carried to its ultimate consequences
(Jarczyk and Labarriere 1996, 179–92). Weil, aware of the readings and cri-
tiques that have been made of the system, would not accept this interpretation. Weil
recognizes that Hegel is not majorly concerned that there be historical indi-
viduals or instances that would be outside the discourse or that would re-
nounce it. If we take a careful look at the logical development of the particular
philosophical discourses that have been given throughout history, it is pre-
cisely Hegel’s aforementioned lack of concern that makes the movement that
goes from the finite particularity to the universality of the concept be realized.
The worry—the “scandal” of reason, for a Hegelian—is now the possibility to
reject the discourse fully carried out with knowledge of cause (Weil 1950, 64).
The destruction of the total discourse, of that effort of understanding of the
whole of the discursive partialities and of itself, is and will continue to be a
possibility. In other words, man, by knowing reason and knowing what it
implies, can freely opt for violence. The protest against absolute knowledge, if
it can be legitimate, can also be transformed into a total violence; it is this that
demands a radical revision of the definition of the philosophical project in its
entirety. A demand that, of course, will only make sense for whoever aims to
understand.
As an interpreter and critic of Hegel, Weil takes up the philosophical
challenge of continuing the discourse and of seeing the possibility of doing so
coherently with the system that, for him, is equivalent to philosophy in its
entirety. What distinguishes now his purpose is the conscience of a finitude

that cannot be reduced to the act of philosophizing; it is the consciousness of
the arbitrary character, a priori unjustifiable, of the philosophical choice of
reason; it is the recognition, throughout, of the radical nonidentity of freedom
and reason. It is for this that Weil resorts to Kant, since he recognizes here the
radicalness of evil, namely, that man, just as he is able to choose reason, can
thus also opt for violence. Therefore, all should be rethought in function of this
transcendental fact. The Logique de la philosophie is founded on this intention.
It is very difficult, if not impossible, to present the whole of Weil’s logic.
Let’s look at the fundamental matter at hand: upon recognizing that freedom
is irreducible to reason, Weil also accepts that it is expressed in multiple
attitudes that, being forms of freedom, are also irreducible between each
other. The same thing happens with the philosophical discourses or categories
that determine said attitudes. The logician of philosophy has therefore a dual
task: on the one hand, the task of establishing the table of pure or ideal types of
possible attitudes and of philosophical categories in which said attitudes are
expressed (Weil 1950, 79–82); and on the other hand, the task of establishing
the mediation of the categories, that is, of grasping the logic according to
which philosophical categories are articulated, while understanding by this
that each category is founded on an act of freedom, on the opting for one
determined and concrete configuration of meaning. From this it follows that
no immanent development, by self-explanation, leads, as it does in Hegel,
from one category to the other. Between the categories there is rather conti-
nuity, that is, they do not reabsorb themselves into a final category that would
be total.
By thinking the categories under this logic, the discourse that Weil aims to
ordain is not an absolute discourse where the preceding categories are only
moments. It is not even a new discourse such as those, which have been
recognized in history. In the Logique de la philosophie, a determined discourse
is the characteristic of one more category among others. Therefore, the cate-
gory of the absolute is not and cannot be the last. It is true that inside its
elaboration there exists the pretension of not being refuted by reason, but
Weil sees that it indeed can be refuted by a freedom that comes from reason,
by the violence of man that is content only with doing, with carrying out his
unmediated particular (attitude-category that follows the absolute [1950, 345–

67]),2 without discussing, without wanting to understand. Consequently,
other categories follow it according to a logical and philosophical order that
responds to a philosophical act, which understands that its project excludes
the possibility that a final category could reduce the acts of freedom to inter-
nal determinations of reason. Furthermore, if systematization is possible, it is
thus in a game that remains open, that cannot close itself off in the immediate
unity, a game between chaos and cosmos, between identity and alterity
(Kirscher 1992, 253–54).
WEIL AND DERRIDA
I do not want to conclude without returning to a fundamental question that

underlies the entirety of this paper: what is it that can bring together Weil and
Derrida? Or, what refers to the same matter: in what points is the convergence
truly impossible? Therearevariouselementsthatdrawthemapartthathavealready
been exposed in the first part of this article; yet, to better respond to these questions it
seemsfittingtorecapitulatesomethemesthatdonotaimtobedefinitiveconclusions
but rather manners of opening up to possible dialogue. I will order this part in two
sections.ThefirstreturnstothethemeoftheWeileandiscourseandthesecondtothe
link between the discourse and the problem of violence.
I. The Status of Weil’s Philosophical Discourse
As a direct reference to the introduction of the Logique de la philosophie, whose

title is “Philosophie et Violence,” Derrida claims that “the discourse that E. Weil
recognizes as non-violent is ontology, the project of ontology” and that the coher-
ence in ontology is, precisely, what Lévinas recognizes in the term “violence”
(1967, 171). The statement is, at the least, hasty. When Weil, in this introduc-
tion, speaks of ontology (1950, 28–33), he is plainly thinking about the philo-
sophical discourse that, in a given moment in history, emerges from the
consciousness that acquires a human community in the presence of other
communities, which, likewise, will seek to defend their values and the sacred.
Weil sees that, in that difficult context, the adhesion to one unique truth no
longer suffices; neither does the internal dialogue that united the polis suffice
anymore. The community should seek new actions that allow it to avoid both
internal destruction or decomposition as well as the violent relations that
could arise from other communities. This would be the case when dialogue
becomes discourse. What is at issue is a new configuration of the world where
the nonviolent accord between men is no longer possible if they are only
concerned with themselves; it is necessary that we all be in agreement as to
“what is” (Weil 1950, 29).
The ontological discourse, according to Weil, responds, therefore, to those
moments of history proper to Greek antiquity and that last up until moder-
nity. In the logical development of the categories, this discourse goes hand in
hand with the elaboration of the categories that go from the discussion to god,
and that make their way through the discourses of the object and the I (1950,
121–201). If the categories do not reduce to one moment in history, the elabo-
ration of ontology falls within a period of time that goes from the Socratic-
Platonic project to the philosophical-theological reflections carried out by
Christianity and the Fathers of the Church (including the Thomistic system).
Upon reading Derrida’s statements, it is clear that he failed to understand
what was in play in this introduction. Furthermore, one gets the impression
that he does not go very far in his reading since he does not once mention any
title written later than that which is cited in his note: “The Multiplicity of the
Discourses and the Failure of Ontology” (Weil 1950, 34). In effect, for Weil, the
pure ontological discourse is one that leads to failure when, at the heart of
history, it insists on its unity and on its truth without being able to see the
plurality of possible ontological discourses. This plurality, irreducible to one
solo discourse, leads to the abandonment of ontology.
Nonetheless, this fact does not necessarily imply that ontology or the onto-
logical discourses be totally eliminated. For Weil, to overcome a given philo-
sophical category does not mean, as we have already said, that it is absorbed
or eliminated. The historical discourses will always be available to the human
community qua vehicles of understanding and of the search for new meanings
when they are shaken by the movements of history. In this sense, against what
Lévinas, Derrida, and even some of his closest interpreters managed to think,
the Weilean discourse that unfolds in the Logique de la philosophie is far from
alleging to be a new discourse or a new philosophical category. If Weil chooses

this type of systematic elaboration (without a doubt, as Derrida sees it, with a
Hegelian air to it), it is because he believes he sees in this system a possibility
(and, to be sure, not the only one) of understanding that which has occurred in
philosophy throughout history. Philosophy in the West, since its Greek ori-
gins, has chosen a discursive language. No one denies this. It is for that reason
that the understanding that can be made of this history is, for Weil, discourse;
it cannot be carried out, as understanding, outside of discourse. But this type
of discourse, after what happened with absolute knowledge, knows now that it
should not (because it no longer can) elevate itself again to a pure or unique
category. It is for this reason that Weil believes the last category of philosophy
to be that of action (1950, 393–412), that is, the category that allows the
discourse to remain always open to seeking its internal coherence regarding
other approaches that also can be nondiscursive (it is what Weil designates
under the formal category of meaning, 413–31). Also, this is why Weil knows, in
that search, that the end of history remains unfinished and that, as knowledge,
is situated outside philosophy (the formal category of wisdom, 433–42).
II. Discourse and Violence
In Difficile Liberté, Lévinas recognizes “the systematic and vigorous usage of

the term violence as opposed to discourse” made by Weil in his Logique (1963,
17–18). Yet, as it appears, neither he, nor Derrida, nor many others, manage to
see what consists in this “vigorous usage.” Weil’s choice of discourse aims also,
and beyond what we have already indicated, to account for the possible,
diverse forms of violence that historical, philosophical discourses deal with
and might, in turn, engender. Weil does not believe that a determined dis-
course, not even the philosophical discourse, could definitively eliminate vio-
lence. His aim is distinct and, up until a certain point, more modest. He
believes that only from within a discursive language that is attentive to history
is it possible to understand and, upon understanding, to control violence. This
violence—being the other of reason, the other always active possibility of the
human being in the face of the world and reality—can never be dominated
nor, and much less so, eliminated. The effort of the logician to seek the internal
coherence of the philosophical discourses and the links that can exist between
them helps to simply recognize violence with respect to those discourses and
their relations. It is a recognition that, to be sure, is neither neutral nor passive
but rather seeks to give once more to philosophy the character that, appar-
ently, it has always alleged to have: namely, the character of being a rational,
reflexive, and humane option for nonviolence. If philosophy has a raison d’être
in history it is precisely this one; if philosophy can still be fecund it is by
constantly choosing the humane, rational, and reflexive.
Having said this, what is, concretely, violence for Weil? There is not one re-
sponse to this question, and it is impossible to formulate the final and decisive
one. Weil’s choice of discourse allows only for the apprehension of some forms
that, certainly, are not the only ones. Also, these forms refer to the discourse
categories that, in part, are also responsible for their appearance and for their
multiple expressions. Within this responsibility, philosophy, ergo, cannot halt its
work and should continue acting in history. This is, to a certain extent, the para-
dox of the discourse from which it is impossible to escape—something that Hegel
and so many systematic discourses before him could not truly see.
One of these forms is the most unsettling one for Weil, since in the face of it,
philosophy is totally unarmed: pure and absolute violence. This is not an originary
violence that would be beyond or on the hither side of discourse; it is rather the
conscious and total renunciation both of the discourse as well as any particular
discourse. Weil sees that this renunciation is a possibility that has always been
present in history each time man refuses with knowledge of the cause to dialogue,
to reflect, or to understand oneself and others. But he also sees that this possibility
can acquire a universal caliber and thus implicate the entirety of the human
genus. Weil tries to define this attitude in what he exposes under the category of
unmediated particular (1950, 344–67), which is only possible to be understood
after Hegel and not before him. Consequently, if we wish to sublate this
attitude—but with full knowledge that, as a possibility, it will remain active
always—we must definitively go beyond the absolute despite that it has al-
lowed an understanding of the category of the unmediated particular.
There are two more forms of violence that can be seen in the Logique. The
first of these is violence proper that generates a given philosophical discourse.
All discourse that is elevated to a category responds, as we have seen, to an
attitude, which for its part corresponds to man who lives in and from the
historical world. The attitude-category relation refers thus to the relation
between philosophy and history. Therefore, a category, if it is necessary for the
understanding of oneself and of one’s environment, never totally reduces nor
determines an attitude. The category is nothing more than a moment of
articulation and of understanding of history that serves both concrete man as
well as the philosopher so that they may recognize what is essential in histor-
ical moments and in human communities. Violence, for the category and the
discourse, is all that which it fails to dominate and which will be expressed as
discontent, as rebellion, as a return to the previous category, in synthesis, as
the refusal of history to be dominated by discourse or, in other words, the
refusal of freedom to be reduced by reason. The role of philosophy for Weil
plays itself out in the understanding of the existence of categorial discourse
and, in turn, in the grasping, as much as it can, of the violence that lies outside
this discourse. Weil thinks that there are dimensions to this violence that can
be controlled no longer through the unilateral imposition of discourse but
rather by resorting to other historical attitudes-categories through a process
(proper to the work of action in philosophy) that he calls reprise (Weil 1950,
83–85). Only a gaze toward the past will allow us to recognize the existence of
pure categories or pure discourses. After Hegel we know that no category, that
no philosophical discourse, can understand the totality of history. In this
sense, Weil rejects the imposition of a single discourse. This imposition would
not be philosophy and would be the source of violence. Yet, he believes that the
control of violence can only be carried out in a discursive manner. In other
words, we could affirm that, within this logic, if there is philosophy it is
because there is violence, and also if there is violence it is because there is
philosophy. If the world in which we live is the fruit of this cohabitation, we
cannot withdraw ourselves from it. It is true that the project may seem tragic
or pessimistic, but Weil urges us to not forget the founding option of philoso-
phy, namely, a search that should only end when violence, in any of its forms,
ceases to reign over the world. This end, in short, is beyond philosophy and
compromises the activity of the entirety of the human genus. It is perhaps for
this reason that Weil’s choice of discourse leads to politics (1956) and, within
it, to a constant inquiry regarding education.
Finally, there exists a form of violence that, despite being presented here in
the last moment, is not less relevant than the aforementioned ones. In fact, for
Weil, it is the violence that affects in a direct and profound manner the action
of philosophy itself. It takes form through a feeling: fear (peur). The philoso-
pher is afraid, “he [sic] is afraid of what is not reason in him [sic] and lives with
this fear, and all that he [sic] does, all that he [sic] says and thinks, is destined
to eliminate or to calm this fear. To such a point that one could say of him [sic]
that he [sic] is, above all, afraid of fear” (1950, 19). Fear is thus the feeling that
could lead the philosopher to lose, in her aspiration and her search, control
over herself. “Fear of fear” means for Weil “fear of violence,” but not of external
violence. Weil does not mean that the philosopher does not fear what happens
in history, in human communities, or in philosophical work itself. Yet in the
face of this fear, the philosopher knows (and this is what defines him or her)
that she has the possibility of seeing, of accepting, of suffering, of fighting, even
if at the risk of her life. What Weil means is that there exists a violence even
more fearsome for the philosopher: the violence of her own finitude, of her
animality. This violence is not possible to control. Nothing and nobody (not
even Weil) knows if the philosopher acts by and in full reason. Therefore, all
effort of philosophy, whatever it is and will be, will always be impregnated by
this fear and by this finitude that constantly threatens reason from within. It is
this that makes Weil, in the context in which he writes, want to return to Kant.
The Hegelian pretension can only take place, if it wants to, from the Kantian
consciousness of the finitude of humanity; from that consciousness that
reminds us that the philosopher will be able to live without “fear of fear” only
when reason has penetrated all of the existence of man and humanity or, what
is the same, when violence disappears definitively from the world.
NOTES
The author gives special thanks to Zachary Hugo (PhD candidate in philosophy at the
Universidad Alberto Hurtado) for his translation and thoughtful reading of this paper.
1. Report of the thesis defense of M. Eric Weil, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 56, no. 4
(October–December 1951): 445–48.
2. This is according to the translation of Kluback (1987, 133–42) of the category of the
oeuvre.
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Black Nihilism and the Politics
of Hope
Calvin L. Warren
George Washington University, Washington, D.C.
Dedicated to the brave woman at the D.C. Metro station
I.
Perverse juxtapositions structure our relation to the Political. This becomes

even more apparent and problematic when we consider the position of blacks
within this structuring.1 On the one hand, our Declaration of Independence
proclaims, “All men are created equal,” and yet black captives were fractioned
in this political arithmetic as three-fifths of this “man.” The remainder, the
two-fifths, gets lost within the arithmetic shuffle of commerce and mercenary
prerogatives. We, of course, hoped that the Reconstruction Amendments
would correct this arithmetical error and finally provide an ontological equa-
tion, or an existential variable, that would restore fractured and fractioned
215
216 Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope
black being. This did not happen. Black humanity became somewhat of an
“imaginary number” in this equation, purely speculative and nice in theory
but difficult to actualize or translate into something tangible. Poll taxes,
grandfather clauses, literacy tests, and extra-legal and legal violence made a
mockery of the 14th Amendment, and the convict leasing system turned the
13th Amendment inside out for blacks. Yet, we approach this political perver-
sity with a certain apodictic certainty and incontrovertible hope that things
will (and do) get better. The Political, we are told, provides the material or
substance of our hope; it is within the Political that we are to find, if we search
with vigilance and work tirelessly, the “answer” to the ontological equation—
hard work, suffering, and diligence will restore the fractioned three-fifths with
its alienated two-fifths and, finally, create One that we can include in our
declaration that “All men are created equal.” We are still awaiting this “event.”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. placed great emphasis on the restoration of
black being through suffering and diligence in his sermon “The American
Dream” (1965):
And I would like to say to you this morning what I’ve tried to say all over this
nation, what I believe firmly: that in seeking to make the dream a reality we
must use and adopt a proper method. I’m more convinced than ever before
that violence is impractical and immoral . . . we need not hate; we need not use
violence. We can stand up against our most violent opponent and say: we will
match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We
will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will
still love you . . . we will go to in those jails and transform them from dungeons
of shame to havens of freedom and human dignity. Send your hooded perpe-
trators of violence into our communities after night and drag us out on some
wayside road and beat us and leave us half dead, and as difficult as it is, we will
still love you. . . . [T]hreaten our children and bomb our churches, and as
difficult as it is, we will still love you.
But be assured that we will ride you down by our capacity to suffer. One
day we will win our freedom, but we will not only win it for ourselves, we will so
appeal to your hearts and conscience that we will win you in the process. And
our victory will be double.
Calvin L. Warren 217
The American dream, then, is realized through black suffering. It is the humil-
iated, incarcerated, mutilated, and terrorized black body that serves as the
vestibule for the Democracy that is to come. In fact, it almost becomes impos-
sible to think the Political without black suffering. According to this logic,
corporeal fracture engenders ontological coherence, in a political arithmetic
saturated with violence. Thus, nonviolence is a misnomer, or somewhat of a
ruse. Black-sacrifice is necessary to achieve the American dream and its
promise of coherence, progress, and equality.
We find similar logic in the contemporary moment. Renisha McBride,
Jordon Davis, Kody Ingham, Amadou Diallo, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Frederick
Jermain Carter, Chavis Carter, Timothy Stansbury, Hadiya Pendleton, Oscar
Grant, Sean Bell, Kendrec McDade, Trayvon Martin, and Mike Brown, among
others, constitute a fatal rupture of the Political; these signifiers, stained in
blood, refuse the closure that the Political promises. They haunt political
discourses of progress, betterment, equality, citizenship, and justice—the
metaphysical organization of social existence. We are witnessing a shocking
accumulation of injured and mutilated black bodies, particularly young black
bodies, which place what seems to be an unanswerable question mark in the
political field: if we are truly progressing toward this “society-that-is-to-come
(maybe),” why is black suffering increasing at such alarming rates? In re-
sponse to this inquiry, we are told to keep struggling, keep “hope” alive, and
keep the faith. After George Zimmerman was acquitted for murdering Tray-
von Martin, President Obama addressed the nation and importuned us to
keep fighting for change because “each successive generation seems to be
making progress in changing attitudes toward race” and, if we work hard
enough, we will move closer to “becoming a more perfect union.” Despite
Martin’s corpse lingering in the minds of young people and Zimmerman’s
smile of relief after the verdict, we are told that things are actually getting
better. Supposedly, the generation that murdered Trayvon Martin and Ren-
isha McBride is much better than the generation that murdered Emmett Till.
Black suffering, here, is instrumentalized to accomplish pedagogical, cathar-
tic, and redemptive objectives and, somehow, the growing number of dead
black bodies in the twenty-first century is an indication of our progress to-
ward “perfection.” Is perfection predicated on black death? How many more
black bodies must be lynched, mutilated, burned, castrated, raped, dismem-

bered, shot, and disabled before we achieve this “more perfect union”? In
many ways, black suffering and death become the premiere vehicles of polit-
ical perfection and social maturation.
This essay argues that the logic of the Political—linear temporality, bio-
political futurity, perfection, betterment, and redress—sustains black suffer-
ing. Progress and perfection are worked through the pained black body and
any recourse to the Political and its discourse of hope will ultimately repro-
duce the very metaphysical structures of violence that pulverize black being.
This piece attempts to rescue black nihilism from discursive and intellectual
obliteration; rather than thinking about black nihilism as a set of pathologies
in need of treatment, this essay considers black nihilism a necessary philo-
sophical posture capable of unraveling the Political and its devastating logic
of political hope. Black nihilism resists emancipatory rhetoric that assumes it
is possible to purge the Political of anti-black violence and advances political
apostasy as the only “ethical” response to black suffering.
II. THE POLITICS OF HOPE
To speak of the “Politics of Hope” is to denaturalize or demystify a certain

usage of hope. Here I want to make a distinction between “hope” (the spiritual
concept) and “the politics of hope” (political hope). The relationship between
the spiritual concept of hope and its use as a political instrument is the focus
of the black nihilist critique.2
Following Kant and other postmetaphysical philosophers, the critical
field questions (and in some circles completely denounces) a certain spiritual
predisposition to the world—that “unknowable” noumenon that limits Rea-
son but provides the condition of possibility for its organization of the world
of perception, phenomenon. The problem with the critical questioning of the
spiritual is that it often appropriates spiritual concepts and then, insidiously,
translates them into the “scientific” or the knowable, as a way to both capital-
ize on the mystic power of the spiritual and to preserve the spiritual under the
guise of “enlightened understanding.” We find this deceptive translation and
capitalization of spiritual substance within the sphere of the Political—that
organization of social existence through political institutions, mandates, log-

ics, and grammars—as a way to govern and discipline beings. If we think of
hope as a spiritual concept—a concept that always escapes confinement
within scientific discourse—then we can suggest that hope constitutes a
“spiritual currency” that we are given as an inheritance to invest in various
aspects of existence. The issue, however, is that there is often a compulsory
investment of this spiritual substance in the Political. This is the forced desti-
nation of hope—it must end up in the Political and cannot exist outside of it
(or any existence of hope “outside” the political subverts, compromises, and
destroys hope itself. Like placing a fish out of water. It is as if hope only has
intelligibility and efficacy within and through the Political). Put differently,
the politics of hope posits that one must have a politics to have hope; politics
is the natural habitat of hope itself. To reject hope in a nihilistic way, then, is
really to reject the politics of hope, or certain circumscribed and compulsory
forms of expressing, practicing, and conceiving of hope.
In the essay “A Fidelity to Politics: Shame and the African American Vote
in the 2004 Election,” Grant Farred (2006) exposes a kernel of irrationality at
the center of African American political participation. Traditionally, political
participation is motivated by self-interested expectancy; this political calcu-
lus assumes that political participation, particularly voting, is an investment
with an assurance of a return or political dividend. The structure of the
Political—the circular movement between self-interest, action, and reward—
is sustained through what Farred calls the “electoral unconscious.” It “histo-
ricizes the subject in relation to the political in that it determines the horizon
of what is possible it maps, through its delimitation or its (relative) lack of
limits, what the constituency and its members imagine they can, or, would like
to expect from the political” (217). In this way, the electoral unconscious, as
the realm of political fantasy, mirrors the Lacanian notion of fantasy; it maps
the coordinates of the political subject and teaches it how exactly to desire the
Political. For Farred, there is a peculiar logic (“another scene”) operating as
the motivation for African American participation in the Political. Unlike the
traditional political calculus, where action and reward determine civic en-
gagement, African American participation does not follow this rational calcu-
lus—because if it did, there would actually be no rational reason for African
Americans to vote, given the historicity of voting as an ineffective practice in

gaining tangible “objects” for achieving redress, equality, and political subjec-
tivity. African Americans, according to Farred, have an “irrational fidelity” to a
practice that, historically, has yielded no concrete transformations of anti-
blackness. This group is governed not by the “electoral unconscious” but by
the “historical conscious,” which is the “intense [and incessant] understand-
ing of how the franchise has been achieved, of its precarious preciseness as
well as their (growing) contemporary liminality, their status as marginalized
political subjects” (217). African Americans are a faithful voting block not
because of voting’s political efficaciousness but as a way to contend with a
painful (and shame-full) history of exclusion and disenfranchisement. Politi-
cal participation becomes an act of historical commemoration and obliga-
tion; one votes because someone bled and died for the opportunity to partic-
ipate, and “duty” and “indebtedness” motivate this partial political subject.
Within this piece, we get a sense that black fidelity to the Political is tanta-
mount to the Lacanian notion of drive—one perpetuates a system designed to
annihilate—participation, then, follows another logic. The act of voting, accord-
ing to Farred, is legitimate in and of itself; it is a means as an end (or a means
without an end, if we follow Agamben’s logic [2000]). The means, the praxis of
voting, is all there is without an end in sight. African American political
participation is an interminable cycle of reproduction, a continuous practice
of reproducing the means of reproduction itself. This irrational fidelity to a
means without an end gives rise to “the politics of despair”—representation
for its own sake and the apotheosis of singular figures—and a politics without hope:
African American fidelity, however, takes its distance from Pauline “hope”—
like faith, hope is predicated upon a complex admixture of expectations and
difference. In this respect, the African American vote is not, as in the colloquial
sense, hopeful: it has not expectations of a shining city appearing upon an ever
distant, ever retreating, hill in the unnamed-able future. Fidelity represents
the anti-Pauline politics in that its truth, its only truth, resides in praxis. (223)
This brilliant analysis compels us to rethink political rationality and the value
in “means”—as a structuring agent by itself. What I would like to think
through, however, is the distinction between “hope” and “despair” and “expec-
tations” and “object.” Whereas Farred understands political participation as
an act without a political object, or recognizable outcome—without an “end,”
if we think of “end” and “object” as synonyms—I would suggest that the
Politics of Hope reconfigures despair and expectation so that black political
action pursues an impossible object. We can describe this contradictory object
as the lure of metaphysical political activity: every act brings one closer to a
“not-yet-social order.” What one achieves, then, and expects is “closer.” The
political object that black participation encircles endlessly, like the Lacanian
drive and its object, is the idea of linear proximity—we can call this “progress,”
“betterment,” or “more perfect.” This idea of achieving the impossible allows
one to disregard the historicity of anti-blackness and its continued legacy and
conceive of political engagement as bringing one incrementally closer to that
which does not exist—one’s impossible object. In this way, the Politics of hope
recasts despair as possibility, struggle as triumph, and lack as propinquity.
This impossible object is not tethered to real history, so it is unassailable and
irrefutable because it is the object of political fantasy.
The politics of hope, then, constitutes what Lauren Berlant would call
“cruel optimism” for blacks (Berlant 2011). It bundles certain promises about
redress, equality, freedom, justice, and progress into a political object that
always lies beyond reach. The objective of the Political is to keep blacks in a
relation to this political object—in an unending pursuit of it. This pursuit,
however, is detrimental because it strengthens the very anti-black system that
would pulverize black being. The pursuit of the object certainly has an “irra-
tional” aspect to it, as Farred details, but it is not mere means without expec-
tation; instead, it is a means that undermines the attainment of the impossible
object desired. In other words, the pursuit marks a cruel attachment to the
means of subjugation and the continued widening of the gap between histor-
ical reality and fantastical ideal.
Black nihilism is a “demythifying” practice, in the Nietzschean vein, that
uncovers the subjugating strategies of political hope and de-idealizes its fan-
tastical object. Once we denude political hope of its axiological and ethical
veneer, we see that it operates through certain strategies: 1) positing itself as
the only alternative to the problem of anti-blackness, 2) shielding this alter-
native from rigorous historical/philosophical critique by placing it in an un-

known future, 3) delimiting the field of action to include only activity recog-
nized and legitimated by the Political, and 4) demonizing critiques or
different philosophical perspectives.
The politics of hope masks a particular cruelty under the auspices of
“happiness” and “life.” It terrifies with the dread of “no alternative.” “Life” itself
needs the security of the alternative, and, through this logic, life becomes
untenable without it. Political hope promises to provide this alternative—a
discursive and political organization beyond extant structures of violence and
destruction. The construction of the binary “alternative/no-alternative” en-
sures the hegemony and dominance of political hope within the onto-
existential horizon. The terror of the “no alternative”—the ultimate space of
decay, suffering, and death—depends on two additional binaries: “problem/
solution” and “action/inaction.” According to this politics, all problems have
solutions, and hope provides the accessibility and realization of these solu-
tions. The solution establishes itself as the elimination of “the problem”; the
solution, in fact, transcends the problem and realizes Hegel’s aufheben in its
constant attempt to sublate the dirtiness of the “problem” with the pristine
being of the solution. No problem is outside the reach of hope’s solution—
every problem is connected to the kernel of its own eradication. The politics of
hope must actively refuse the possibility that the “solution” is, in fact, another
problem in disguised form; the idea of a “solution” is nothing more than the
repetition and disavowal of the problem itself.
The solution relies on what we might call the “trick of time” to fortify itself
from the deconstruction of its binary. Because the temporality of hope is a
time “not-yet-realized,” a future tense unmoored from present-tense justifi-
cations and pragmatist evidence, the politics of hope cleverly shields its “so-
lutions” from critiques of impossibility or repetition. Each insistence that
these solutions stand up against the lessons of history or the rigors of analysis
is met with the rationale that these solutions are not subject to history or
analysis because they do not reside within the horizon of the “past” or “pres-
ent.” Put differently, we can never ascertain the efficacy of the proposed
solutions because they escape the temporality of the moment, always retreat-
ing to a “not-yet” and “could-be” temporality. This “trick” of time offers a
promise of possibility that can only be realized in an indefinite future, and this
promise is a bond of uncertainty that can never be redeemed, only imagined.
In this sense, the politics of hope is an instance of the psychoanalytic notion of
desire: its sole purpose is to reproduce its very condition of possibility, never
to satiate or bring fulfillment. This politics secures its hegemony through time
by claiming the future as its unassailable property and excluding (and deval-
uing) any other conception of time that challenges this temporal ordering.
The politics of hope, then, depends on the incessant (re)production and
proliferation of problems to justify its existence. Solutions cannot really exist
within the politics of hope, just the illusion of a different order in a future
tense.
The “trick” of time and political solution converge on the site of “action.”
In critiquing the politics of hope, one encounters the rejoinder of the dangers
of inaction. “But we can’t just do nothing! We have to do something.” The field
of permissible action is delimited and an unrelenting binary between action/
inaction silences critical engagement with political hope. These exclusionary
operations rigorously reinforce the binary between action and inaction and
discredit certain forms of engagement, critique, and protest. Legitimate ac-
tion takes place in the political—the political not only claims futurity but also
action as its property. To “do something” means that this doing must translate
into recognizable political activity; “something” is a stand-in for the word
“politics”—one must “do politics” to address any problem. A refusal to “do
politics” is equivalent to “doing nothing”—this nothingness is constructed as
the antithesis of life, possibility, time, ethics, and morality (a “zero-state” as
Julia Kristeva [1982] might call it). Black nihilism rejects this “trick of time”
and the lure of emancipatory solutions. To refuse to “do politics” and to reject
the fantastical object of politics is the only “hope” for blackness in an anti-
black world.
III. BLACK NIHILISM
Within critical discourses, black nihilism is saturated with negative seman-

tics. Theorists consider it the bane of black existence and appropriate lan-
guage and metaphors of the pathological to situate black nihilism outside of
Ethics and moral law. Many describe it as a “disease of the soul” that produces
callousness, meaninglessness, and masochism. Thus, the rhetorical maneu-
vers performed in this work attempt to foreclose a critical engagement with
the term itself—to deprive the term of intellectual nourishment and precipi-
tate its demise. I want to rescue the term from this discursive annihilation and
offer it up as the most significant philosophical perspective in the twenty-first
century. This is certainly an audacious claim, but any critical analysis of black
existence in the twenty-first century will have to contend with black nihil-
ism—either reluctantly or otherwise. It is the inescapable interlocutor in
every utterance about blackness; it demands an address. One cannot simply
disregard the black nihilistic position as insane, naive, or irrational any-
more—although these rhetorical maneuvers were successful in previous gen-
erations. The surd of anti-blackness requires a position outside the liberal
grammar of bio-politics, futurity, and “hope” to limn the depth of black suffer-
ing. Black nihilism expresses discursively what black bodies endure existen-
tially in an anti-black world (the “bio-political grotesque”). The project of
rescuing (or resuscitating) this term, which is the objective of this essay, is
absolutely essential to understanding the “lived experience of the black,” as
Fanon would have it.
Frederick Nietzsche is credited with the term “Nihilism” and describes it
as a particular crisis of modernity. The universal narratives and grounds of
legitimation that once secured meaning for the modern world had lost integ-
rity. In the absence of a metaphysical grounding of social existence, we
were left with a void—a void that dispenses with metaphysical substance,
even as this substance unsuccessfully attempts to refill this void. Nihilism,
then, presents itself as the philosophical reflection of social decay; it offers
politico-philosophical death (the death of ground) as the only “hope” for
the world. Theorists often strip black nihilism of this philosophical signif-
icance and this, in my view, is a fatal error. When denuded of philosophical
functionality, black nihilism becomes nothing more than a catalog of
“dysfunctional” behaviors. Behavior and philosophy are unmoored in this
understanding of black nihilism, as if one is not the articulation of the
other—they, indeed, “inter-articulate” each other. We might even suggest
that the purported, dysfunctional behavior of the black nihilist is dis-
course by other means, when traditional avenues of articulation and re-

dress are inadequate and inaccessible.
Cornel West introduces black nihilism as a term to describe a crisis in
black communities in Race Matters (1994). For him,
nihilism is to be understood here not as a philosophic doctrine that there are no

rational grounds for legitimate standards or authority; it is, far more, the lived
experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaningless, hopelessness, and (most
important) lovelessness. The frightening result is a numbing detachment from
others and a self-destructive disposition toward the world. Life without mean-
ing, hope, and love breeds a coldhearted, mean-spirited outlook that destroys
both the individual and others. (23)
It is an existential angst that resembles “a kind of collective clinical depres-

sion” and a disease that resembles alcoholism and drug addiction (29). It “can
never be completely cured, and there is always the possibility of relapse” (29).
According to West, lovelessness, hopelessness, and meaninglessness are re-
sults of market forces and market moralities attenuating black institutions,
weakening the armor that once provided protection against the pulverizing
force of anti-blackness. Black nihilism indexes a devastating exposure to
institutional, spiritual, and psychic violence against blacks.
Within this description of nihilism, however, there is a certain tension
between grounding and ungrounding. Black institutions assert themselves as
necessary ground but are unable to secure this position, which leaves a void
that capitalistic market forces are filling. This shifting of ground is a symptom
of the metaphysical organization of life. The problem, then, is grounding itself.
How do black institutions establish themselves as ground and by what pro-
cess does this ground shift? It is precisely the establishment and shifting of
ground that is the “meaninglessness” of which black nihilism rejects—it has
no legitimacy other than its “own will to power.” If existential wholeness is
predicated on the security of this ground, then black existence itself is always
fractured and fragile. The shift of ground from black institutions to market
forces indicates that social existence will also shift and bend with the various
transitions. We have at the heart of West’s analysis an “ontology of coherence”
that undermines itself; it assumes a coherent self that never existed but is,
instead, the fantasy construction of political hope and its grounding logic. In
other words, West can only restore hope and meaning if he re-establishes a
grounding for black existence, but as this crisis indicates, any such grounding
is subject to shift, transform, or decay.3
Meaning itself is an aspect of anti-blackness, such that meaning is lost for
the black; blacks live in a world of absurdity, and this existential absurdity is
meaning for the world. Meaninglessness is really all there is (or we could say
that “real” meaning for the world is utter meaninglessness). In an interview
with Mark Sinker, Greg Tate provided a reconceptualization of meaning when
he stated, “the bar between the signifier and the signified could be understood
as standing for the Middle passage that separated signification from sign”
(Sinker 1991). The very structure of meaning in the modern world—signifier,
signified, signification, and sign—depends on anti-black violence for its con-
stitution. Not only does the trauma of the Middle passage rupture the signify-
ing process, but it also instantiates a “meaningless” sign as the foundation of
language, meaning, and social existence itself. Following the work of Nicolas
Abraham and Maria Torok (1986), we could suggest that the meaninglessness
of anti-black violence is the “crypt-signifier” that organizes the modern world
and its institutions. Any “meaning” that is articulated possesses a kernel of
absurdity that blacks embody as “fleshy signs.” The “meaninglessness” that
Cornel West bemoans is nothing more than the kernel of nonsense that an
anti-black world attempts to conceal with its discourses of hope and futurity.
What the black nihilist does is bring this meaninglessness to the fore and
disclose it in all of its terroristic historicity.
For West, this crisis of meaning and hope can be rectified through the
“politics of conversion” (we can read in this Kierkegaard’s idea of a “conver-
sion experience”). This is deliverance from the bondage of market moralism,
which results in the “politicization of love”—conceptualizing love as an orga-
nizing political principle (another spiritual principle appropriated by the
Political). West identifies Toni Morrison’s masterpiece Beloved as an example
of this ethic of love that converts the self-destructive nihilist. Beloved teaches
us how to “generate a sense of agency among a downtrodden people” (29). But
West neglects the trauma that organizes this text and the nihilistic response
to this trauma as the only form of “agency” in an absurd anti-black world.

Racial terror compels Sethe to leave the plantation with her children, and the
threat her children could be recaptured and subjected to the horrors of the
plantation motivates her to make a very heavy decision: the choice between
prolonged social death or physical death. These are really the only choices
that she has, and her ethic of love is to choose the latter—it is an act of mercy.
We could say that Sethe becomes a nihilist in that moment of decision, and
infanticide is not an irrational, pathological, or loveless act, but the ultimate
testament of agency and love. This is what Paul D could not understand
because it contravened the narratives of political hope and futurity; her act
was read as cruel by those who attempted to translate the absurd “false
choice” that structured her existence into a bio-political grammar of meaning.
It is certainly “inappropriate” to disregard this weighty decision as “loveless”
or “hopeless,” for in doing so, we fail to understand the philosophical state-
ment her action is articulating. This is a philosophical statement that under-
stands the inadequacy of political hope in conditions of anti-black violence.
It is easy to disparage behavior that runs contrary to the dictates of a
bio-political order. Black nihilism invites us to consider this behavior as a
form of philosophical discourse that must be addressed. In separating the
behavior from its philosophical statement, we not only run the risk of patholo-
gizing forms of blackness but also of foreclosing a particular critique of polit-
ical hope that is absolutely necessary to understand black existential angst in
the twenty-first century. In “Cornel West and Afro-Nihilism: A Reconsidera-
tion,” Floyd W. Hayes (2001) offers an alternative reading of black nihilism
that considers it a “reaction to the dominant culture’s nihilism” and a critique
of anti-blackness. In Hayes’s masterful critique of West, he interprets this
behavior as a form of ressentiment. Following Nietzsche and Scheler, Hayes
argues that black ressentiment is a critique of metaphysical thinking, anti-
black absurdity, and inequitable distribution of resources. It is a “historical
and contemporary phenomenon” (251) that emerges during the trans-Atlantic
slave trade and calcifies over time. These sentiments of anger, revenge, and
rage engender rebellion, and what is often misinterpreted as black pathology.
Ressentiment, then, is the meeting ground for an array of responses to anti-
blackness, and it challenges the erroneous separation of behavior and philos-
ophy. Black nihilism, in my analysis, acknowledges the persistence of ressen-

timent, but, unlike Hayes, posits no escape from it. The inability to ameliorate
ressentiment is the essence of black suffering. Ressentiment constitutes tor-
ment without relief, and the desperation for relief results in forms of self-
injury, in which the body must speak the existential crisis that gets muted
within humanist grammars.
In Hope on the Brink: Understanding the Emergence of Nihilism in Black
America, theologian Lewis Brogdon (2013) would describe this theory of unre-
solvable torment as the “death of hope.” For Brogdon, this death is even more
severe than West’s nihilism. This death is something that Brogdon mourns
throughout the text with the assurance that it can be resurrected. The hope
that he pines for is really political hope, for the hope that is lost is a hope in the
efficacy of the Political to redress the injuries of anti-black violence. Brogdon
believes that the withdrawal of political hope leads to despair. Reflecting on
this lost hope, Brogdon suggests:
And today, the black community is increasingly populated by people whose

hope in a just and equitable society either died a long time ago or continues to
die as they face stifling social inequities and disappointing economic dispari-
ties.
I heard a similar comment while teaching a study on why the church
struggles with the issue of racism. One older congregant from the Civil Rights
generation said, “We already heard that and tried that. Nothing has changed.”
Instead of working for change, some blacks, like this congregant, choose to
respond to the permanence of racial inequality by retreating from the struggle
altogether, accepting the inequitable nature of society as permanent, after
having one’s hope die a slow, painful death. (42)
The challenge that the “older congregant” put to Brogdon was a serious one. If
Brogdon admonishes her to keep political hope alive, then he must answer the
question “why?” For this congregant, we have exhausted the discourses of
humanism and the strategies of equality—nothing has worked. Brogdon side-
steps this challenge by presenting “working for change” as a viable option,
which is really a nonanswer. What type of “work” will bring about the prom-
ises of the Political? Is there a type of work that will, once and for all, alleviate
black suffering? Why would someone continue to do the same thing repeat-
edly without any substantial change (some would say this is the definition of
insanity)? Brodgon leaves these nihilistic questions unanswered, precisely
because they are unanswerable, and, instead, continues to exhort blacks to
struggle for the fantasy object. This struggle is presented as a spiritual virtue,
and the spiritual concept of hope is contaminated with the prerogatives of a
political order. This problematic conflation is never adequately explained.
Why is continued hope in an anti-black political order a sign of spiritual
maturity? And if this order is redeemable, then it is the obligation of the
advocate to explain how this redemption will occur. This merging of the
spiritual and the political creates a flawed theology that either endangers
people or necessitates living in what Lewis Gordon would call “bad faith” in
Bad Faith and Anti-black Racism (1995). Perhaps it is the retreat from the
Political that is the ultimate sign of spiritual maturity.
Political Apostasy
For West and Brogdon, nihilism is a spiritual-psychic disorder that requires a

spiritual antidote. In this configuration of the spiritual, the nihilist is in need of
deliverance—deliverance from the bondage of “hope-death.” We might, how-
ever, think of the nihilists not as the fleshly embodiment of “hope-death” but
as spiritualists invested in the deliverance of the spiritual from the clutches of
the Political. The black nihilist, in this regard, is profoundly spiritual and
addresses the contamination of the spiritual by its political sequelae. Unlike
the political-theologian, the nihilist does not promise redress within the
structure of the political, for this is impossible, but offers, instead, rejection of
the political as a spiritual practice itself.4
In a very thought-provoking discussion published in Religious Dispatches
about the murder of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman’s acquittal, J.
Kameron Carter, Anthea Butler, and Willie James Jennings conceptualize
anti-blackness as a form of spiritual idolatry (Carter 2013). Evoking the semi-
nal text Is God a White Racist? (1973), written by Dr. William R. Jones, these
scholars suggest that anti-black political organization is often anchored in a
racist theology—one that considers anti-blackness God’s will. Jones put the
theodicy question to Black Liberation theologians and questioned this undy-
ing fealty to a liberation grounded in political reconfiguration and emancipa-
tory rhetoric. Is God a White Racist? not only articulates the disjuncture
between emancipatory “hope” and the devastating reality of black suffering
but also questions the place of the Political within this liberation theology.
This theology, indeed, presupposes certain metaphysical assumptions about
the Political—progress, linear time, and agency—and Jones reveals a certain
paradox within liberation theology: it is grounded in the Political but lacks a
strong political philosophy to justify this grounding (i.e., a philosophy that
connects the theological to the Political). This becomes even more problem-
atic because these metaphysical presumptions are themselves instruments of
anti-blackness. Anti-blackness, ironically, becomes the very foundation for
the purported liberation from anti-blackness in this theology. This is precisely
the contradiction that Jones intimates throughout the text, and it is this
entanglement that renders political liberation somewhat of a ruse.
In the article “Christian Atheism: The Only Response Worth Its Salt to the
Zimmerman Verdict” (2013), J. Kameron Carter perspicuously foregrounds
the problem of the Zimmerman verdict as a perverse deification of anti-
blackness. If the shooting of Trayvon Martin was “god’s will,” as Zimmerman
expressed to Sean Hannity in an interview, then this god considered black
death a moral imperative, or an act of righteousness, and Zimmerman, in
shooting Trayvon Martin, assumed the role of the obedient disciple. For
Carter, this god is nothing more than an idol, a spiritual imposture created by
modernity and its institutions:
The white, western god-man is an idol that seeks to determine what is normal.
It is a norm by which society governs the body politic or regulates, measures,
evaluates, and indeed judges what is proper or improper, what is acceptable
citizenship. It is this idol, the idol of “the American god,” that is the symbolic
figure Zimmerman identified himself with and in relationship to which he
judges Trayvon Martin as, in effect, religiously wanting—wanting in proper
citizenship, and ultimately wanting in humanity. (3)
The “white, western-god-man” (or the “American god”) that Carter describes
bears resemblance to what Sylvia Wynter would call “Man” (2003, 322)—both are
philosophical-theological apparatuses of anti-blackness, and they function to
colonize essential spheres of existence (“Man” colonizes human and the
“white, western-god-man” colonizes God). The “white, western-god-man” and
“Man” index a process of extreme epistemological and metaphysical violence,
and this violence serves as the foundation of Western society and its politics.
The only response to this epistemological and metaphysical violence, accord-
ing to Carter, is atheism. It is here that we hear an uncanny resonance with
Ernest Bloch’s Atheism in Christianity (1971), in which “a good Christian must
necessarily be a good atheist.” True Christianity necessitates a certain athe-
ism—in fact it depends on it—to fortify the boundaries between the just/
unjust and the righteous/unrighteous. In other words, when a Christian en-
counters the idol of anti-blackness, she must assume an atheistic posture
toward this idol to remain faithful (or as Carter would describe it to be “worth
your salt”).
The atheism that Carter proffers, however, is entangled in the metaphysical
bind that sustains the very violence his atheism is designed to dismantle. For him,
this atheism entails “social, political, and intellectual struggle . . . struggle in soli-
darity with others, the struggle to be for and with others, the struggle of the
multitude, the struggle that is blackness [as] the new ecclesiology” (2013, 4). The
term “struggle” here presents political metaphysics as a solution to the problem of
anti-blackness—through labor, travail, and commitment one embraces prog-
ress and linearity as social goods. With this metaphysics, according to Carter,
we can “struggle to get rid of these ‘Stand Your Ground’ Laws that are in place
in many states besides Florida, struggle against state legislatures (such as
North Carolina’s) that are enacting draconian laws of various sorts, struggle in
the name of the protection of women’s agency about their own bodies—in
short, struggle to imagine a new politics of belonging” (4). This struggle
contains the promise of overcoming anti-blackness to usher in a “not-yet-
social-order.” Again, the trick of time is deployed to protect “struggle”
from the rigorous historical analysis that would demand evidence of its
efficacy. The “not-yet-social-order,” situated in an irreproachable future (a
political prolepsis), can only promise this overcoming against a history
and historicity of brutal anti-black social organization. Carter is looking

for a political theology—although we’ve always had one under the guise of
democratic liberalism—that will provide conditions of life by mobilizing
the discourses of hope and future temporality. The problem that this theology encir-
cles, and evades, is the failure of “social justice” and “liberation theology” to
dismantle the structure of anti-black violence; this brings us full circle to the
problem that Dr. William R. Jones brilliantly articulated. Are we hoping for a
new strategy, something completely novel and unique, that will resolve all the
problems of the Political once and for all? If the Political itself is the “temple”
of the idolatrous god—the sphere within which it is worshipped and pre-
served—can we discard the idol and purify the temple? Does this theology
offer a political philosophy of purification that will sustain the “progress” that
struggle is purported to achieve? In short, how does one translate the spiritual
principleofhopeintoapoliticalprogram—apoliticaltheology?Theproblemoftrans-
lation haunts this theology and the looking-forward stance of the political theologian
cannot avoid the rupture between the spiritual and the Political.
Can we reject this racist god and, at the same time, support the political
structure that affirms this idol? Can we be “partial” atheists? This becomes a
problem for Carter when he suggests that we abandon this idol but fails to
critique the structure of political existence, which sustains the power of this
idol. Atheism as imagined here would entail rejecting the racist-white-god, or
a racist political theology, and replacing it with a just God, or an equitable
political theology. Will replacing the idol with a more just God transform the
Political into a life-affirming structure for blackness? Unless we advocate for a
theocracy, which is not what I believe Carter would propose, we need an
answer to this question of translation. The answer to this question is glaringly
absent in the text, but I read this absence as an attempt to avoid the nihilistic
conclusion that his argument would naturally reach. We might even suggest
that one must assume a nihilistic disposition toward the Political if justice,
redress, and righteousness are the aims. The problem with atheism, then, is
that it relies on the Political as the sphere of redemption and hope, when the
Political is part of the idolatrous structure that it seeks to dismantle. In this
sense, Dr. William R. Jones becomes an aporia for Dr. Kameron Carter’s text, if
we read Jones as suggesting that black theology offers no cogent political
philosophy, or political program, that would successfully rid the Political of its
anti-black foundation. The Political and anti-blackness are inseparable and
mutually constitutive. The utopian vision of a “not-yet-social order” that
purges anti-blackness from its core provides a promise without relief—its
only answer to the immediacy of black suffering is to keep struggling. The logic
of struggle, then, perpetuates black suffering by placing relief in an unattain-
able future, a future that offers nothing more than an exploitative reproduc-
tion of its own means of existence. Struggle, action, work, and labor are caught
in a political metaphysics that depends on black-death.
The black nihilist recognizes that relying on the Political and its grammar
offers nothing more than a ruse of transformation and an exploited hope.
Instead of atheism, the black nihilist would embrace political apostasy: it is the
act of abandoning or renouncing a situation of unethicality and immorality—
in this sense, the Political itself. The apostate is a figure that “self-
excommunicates” him-/herself from a body that is contrary to its fundamen-
tal belief system. As political apostate, the black nihilist renounces the idol of
anti-blackness but refuses to participate in the ruse of replacing one idol with
another. The Political and God—the just and true God in Carter’s analysis—
are incommensurate and inimical. This is not to suggest that we can exclude
God, but that any recourse to the Political results in an immorality not in
alignment with Godly principles (a performative contradiction). The project
to align God with the Political (political theology) will inevitably fail. If anti-
blackness is contrary to our beliefs, self-excommunication, in other words
“black nihilism,” is the only position that seems consistent. We can think of
political apostasy, then, as an active nihilism when an “alternative” political
arrangement is impossible. When faced with the impossibility of realizing the
“not-yet-social order,” political apostasy becomes an empowered hermeneu-
tical practice; it interprets the anti-black Political symbolic as inherently
wicked and rejects it both as critique and spiritual practice.
IV. BLACK NIHILISM AND HERMENEUTICAL NIHILISM
The Italian nihilist Gianni Vattimo has revived and developed the philosoph-
ical tradition of nihilism in gravid ways that speak to contemporary threats of
annihilation and destruction. His project is important because it permutes

the thought of Nietzsche and Heidegger, and in doing so, he not only offers an
important critique of modernity but also puts this critique in the service of a
politico-philosophical imagination—an imagination that conceives of the
weakening of metaphysical-Being (Nihilism) as the solution to the rational-
ization and fracturing of humanity (the source of modern suffering or pain). In
short, this project attempts to restore dignity, individuality, and freedom to
society by remembering Being (proper-Being, not metaphysical-Being) and
allowing for the necessary contextualization and historicization of Being as
event.
In The End of Modernity (1988) and Nihilism and Emancipation (2004),
Vattimo reads Heidegger’s destruction of ontology as a philosophical comple-
ment to Nietzsche’s declaration of the “death of God.” Both Nietzsche and
Heidegger offer trenchant critiques of metaphysics, and by reading them
together, he fills in certain gaps, in particular, the relationship between meta-
physics and social rationalization, foundations and Ontology, and sociologi-
cal philosophy and thinking itself. We can understand both Vattimo’s and
Heidegger’s project as the attempt to capture the relationship between what
we might call metaphysical-Being (fraudulent Being as object) and Being (in
its proper contextualized sense). This relationship, indeed, has been particu-
larly violent and produced various forms of suffering—this suffering is the
essence of metaphysics, or what Vattimo would call “pain,” and it is sustained
through the “will to power,” violence (e.g., physical, psychic, spiritual, and
philosophical), and the destruction of liberty. The metaphysical tradition has
reduced Being (an event that structures historical reality and possibility itself)
to an object, and this objectification of Being is accomplished through the
instruments of science and schematization. The result of this process is that
Being is forgotten; the grand aperture that has provided the condition for
relationality for many epochs is now reified as a static presence, a presence to
be possessed and analyzed. In this sense, we lose the grandeur of Being and
confuse it for the particularity of a certain epoch, being. The nihilist, then,
must overcome the oblivion of Being through the weakening of metaphysical-
Being. Vattimo recovers Heidegger’s term Verwindung (distorting acceptance,
resignation, or twisting) as a strategy to weaken metaphysical Being, since the
nihilist can never truly destroy metaphysics or completely overcome it (Uber-

winden). This strategy of twisting and distorting metaphysics helps us to
re-member and re-collect (An-denken) the grandeur of Being (Ge-Shick as the
ultimate gathering of the various epochal presentations of being) and to place
metaphysical-Being back in its proper place, as a particular manifestation of
this great historical process. Only by inserting our present signification of
Being into the grand gathering of Being (Ge-Shick) can we properly contextu-
alize our own epoch—the epoch of social rationalization, technocracy, meta-
physical domination (Vattimo 1988, 1–13).
Vattimo extends the Heideggerian critique of metaphysics to Politics and
understand it as a particular metaphysical organization of existence. The
logic of modernity “of linear time, a continuous and unitary process that
moves toward betterment” (Vattimo 2004, 49–50), continues to dominate the
Political field and serves as its foundation. It aims at a continuous perfection
of metaphysical concepts. We can describe this movement as both a constant
rediscovery/reengagement of metaphysical concepts and the upward move-
ment to perfect these concepts. For Vattimo, however, once we have accom-
plished the nihilistic project of remembering (true) Being and weakening
metaphysical foundations, we are left with an empowered hermeneutics. This
hermeneutics, or what is also considered “ontological hermeneutics,” at-
tempts to facilitate the “self-consumption” of metaphysical Being, so that
there is nothing left to it. This “self-consumption” of metaphysics results in
the dissolution of foundations, of first philosophies, and it presents incom-
mensurability, conflict, and contingency as the “weak foundation.” In short,
Vattimo thinks of metaphysical Being as a particular interpretation of Being;
it establishes itself as irrefutable ground and silences, or extinguishes, com-
peting interpretations of existence. The nihilistic project dissolves the herme-
neutical foundation of metaphysics and enables conflicting interpretations to
emerge. This interpretation of violence departs from the metaphysical usage
of it, as a violation of innate rights or equality, and, instead, indicates “the
preemptory assertion of an ultimacy that, like the ultimate metaphysical
foundation, breaks off dialogue and silences the interlocutor by refusing even
to acknowledge the question ‘why?’” (Vattimo 2004, 98). Put differently, Vat-
timo’s foundation is the dissolution of all foundations—even this interpreta-
tion—and any “founding violence” that silences competing interpretations of

existence. In doing so, he weakens metaphysical being and opens up the
possibility of “projectionality”—the ability to engage in your unique project
unencumbered by metaphysical strictures. Once this unencumbered projec-
tionality is actualized, we understand “emancipation” as the freedom from
metaphysical enclosures and the ability to interpret existence according to
one’s own life-project.
For the black nihilist, however, the question is this: Will the dissolution
of metaphysical Being that Vattimo advances eliminate anti-black vio-
lence and redress black suffering? What would “emancipation” entail for
black-objects (as distinct from the “human” that grounds Vattimo’s proj-
ect)? Anti-blackness becomes somewhat of an unacknowledged interloc-
utor for Vattimo:
Philosophy follows paths that are not insulated or cut off from the social and
political transformations of the West (since the end of metaphysics is unthink-
able without the end of colonialism and Eurocentrism) and “discovers” that the
meaning of the history of modernity is not progress toward a final perfection
characterized by fullness, total transparency, and the presence of, and the
presence finally realized of the essence of man and the world. (Vattimo 2004,
35, emphasis mine)
Vattimo adumbrates a relationship between metaphysics and colonialism/

Eurocentrism that renders them coterminous. If, as Vattimo argues, “the end
of metaphysics is unthinkable without the end of colonialism and Eurocen-
trism”—which I will suggest are varieties of anti-black violence—then herme-
neutical nihilism must advance an escape from anti-blackness to accomplish
its agenda. Furthermore, if philosophy follows paths created by sociopolitical
realities, then we must talk about anti-blackness not just as a violent political
formation but also as a philosophical orientation. The nihilist would insist
that its hermeneutics would transform political reality and, concomitantly,
eliminate black suffering. Ultimately, we rely on An-denken (thinking other-
wise) to resolve the problem of asymmetrical power relations and the uneven
distribution of resources that characterizes black suffering in the modern
world. But how would a philosophical project translate into a political pro-
gram or usher in the “yet-to-come” social unencumbered by metaphysics?
Must we eradicate anti-black violence before we can think otherwise? Or, to
put this issue differently, can we think at all without anti-blackness?
For the black nihilist, anti-blackness is metaphysics. It is the system of
thought and organization of existence that structures the relationship be-
tween object/subject, human/animal, rational/irrational, and free/en-
slaved—essentially, the categories that constitute the field of Ontology. Thus,
the social rationalization, loss of individuality, economic expansionism, and
technocratic domination that both Vattimo and Heidegger analyze actually
depend on anti-blackness.5 Metaphysics, then, is unthinkable without anti-
blackness. Neither Heidegger nor Vattimo explores this aspect of Being’s
oblivion—it is the literal destruction of black bodies that provide the psychic,
economic, and philosophical resources for modernity to objectify, forget, and
ultimately obliterate Being (nonmetaphysical Being). We might then consider
black captivity in the modern world as the “perfection” of metaphysics, its
shameful triumph, because through the violent technology of slavery Being
itself was so thoroughly devastated. Personality became property, as Hortense
Spillers would describe it, and with this transubstantiation, Being was objec-
tified, infused with exchange value, and rendered malleable within a sociopo-
litical order. In short, Being lost its integrity with the Trans-Atlantic Slave
Trade; at that moment in history, it finally became possible for an aggressive
metaphysics to exercise obscene power—the ability to turn a “human” into a
“thing.” The captive is fractured on both the Ontological and ontic levels. This
violent transubstantiation leaves little room for the hopeful escape from
metaphysics that Heidegger envisions. Can the black-as-object lay claim to
DaSein? And if so, how exactly does hermeneutic nihilism restore Being to
that which is an object?
If we perform a “philosophy of history,” as Vattimo would advise, we
understand that metaphysicians, and even those we now consider “post-
metaphysicians,” constructed the rational subject against the nonreasoning
black, who, according to Hegel, Kant, Hume, and even Nietzsche was situated
outside of history, moral law, and consciousness (Bernasconi 2003; Judy 1993;
and Mills 1998). It is not enough, then, to suggest that metaphysics engenders
forms of violence as a necessity, as a byproduct; thinking itself is structured by

anti-blackness from the very start. Any postmetaphysical project that does
not take this into account will inevitably reproduce the very structures of
thought that it would dismantle.
Hermeneutic nihilism provides a discursive frame to understand the in-
transigence of metaphysics as the residue of anti-blackness in the contemporary
moment. The black nihilist, however, must part ways with Vattimo concern-
ing the question of emancipation. For Vattimo, hermeneutic nihilism avoids
“passive nihilism.” Passive nihilism is characterized by strands of fatalism or
by melancholic nostalgia for lost foundations. To avoid this situation, Vattimo
introduces hermeneutics as an alternative to passive nihilism and conceives
of hermeneutics as the natural result of an accomplished nihilism—namely,
after the weakening of metaphysical Being, hermeneutics replaces metaphysics as a
self-consuming “foundation.” He attempts to move beyond the metaphysical
remnants found in the theories of Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Wittgenstein and
think of hermeneutics as competing interpretations that reduce the violence
of secure foundations. This of course provides the possibility for a radical
democracy and a reconfiguration of Ethics, Law, and the Political. Ultimately,
this weakening of metaphysical Being allows the human to project him-/
herself in the world, what Vattimo calls “projectionality,” and engage in the
unique project that constitutes existence. This is the crux of emancipation for
Vattimo. We, ironically, find ourselves back in the province of “progress,”
“hope,” “betterment,” all the metaphysical instruments that constrain the
very life that he would emancipate. This, of course, is unavoidable, for he can
only twist these concepts and reclaim them as part of a postmetaphysical
agenda. Vattimo’s hermeneutic nihilism is not very much different than po-
litical theology and democratic liberalism. It is a discourse of hope, a politics
of hope that advances the belief that we can weaken metaphysics and reduce
suffering, violence, and pain. When it comes to black suffering, however, we
are compelled to hold up the mirror of historicity and inquire about the
possibilities of emancipation for the black-as-object. Anti-blackness is the
residue that remains, the intransigent substance that makes it impossible to
destroy metaphysics completely. The black nihilist must confront this resi-
due, but with the understanding that the eradication of this residue would
truly end the world itself. Black emancipation is world destructive; it is not an
aperture or an opening for future possibilities and political reconfigurations
(Wilderson 2010). The “end of the world” that Vattimo envisions does not take
into account that pulverized black bodies sustain the world—its institutions,
economic systems, environment, theologies, philosophies, and so forth. Be-
cause anti-blackness infuses itself into every fabric of social existence, it is
impossible to emancipate blacks without literally destroying the world. More-
over, this means that black emancipation will not yield a new world or possi-
bilities for reorganization—black emancipation is the nihilistic “solution”
that would destroy the field of all possible solutions. In this sense, black
emancipation becomes something like death for the world—with all its
Heideggerian valences.
Black bodies and black suffering, then, pose a problem for emancipatory
logic. If literal black bodies sustain modernity and metaphysics—through
various forms of captivity, terror, and subjection—then what would emanci-
pation entail for blacks? How do we allow metaphysics to self-consume and
weaken when blackness nourishes metaphysics? (We can define the “prob-
lem” in W. E. B. Dubois’s poignant question “what does it mean to be a
problem?” in the twentieth century as metaphysics itself [1903, 10]. Now we
must ask: “what does it mean to be the source of metaphysics’ sustenance in
the 21st century?”) Either the world would have to eliminate black bodies,
which would amount to a self-destructive solution for all, or it would have to
wrest blackness from the clutches of metaphysical anti-blackness that sus-
tains the world. Our hope is that black emancipation would be accomplished
through the latter, but history does not prove that this is possible—every
emancipatory strategy that attempted to rescue blackness from anti-
blackness inevitably reconstituted and reconfigured the anti-blackness it
tried to eliminate. Anti-blackness is labile. It adapts to change and endlessly
refashions itself; this makes emancipation an impossible feat. Because we are
still attempting to mine the depths of anti-blackness in the twenty-first cen-
tury and still contemplating the contours of this juggernaut, anti-blackness
will escape every emancipatory attempt to capture it.
We are left, yet again, to place our hope in a future politics that avoids
history, historicity, and the immediacy of black suffering. For this reason, the
black nihilist rejects the emancipatory impulse within certain aspects of black
critical discourse and cultural/critical theory. In this sense, the modifier
“black” in the term “black nihilism” indicates much more than an “identity”; a
blackened nihilism pushes hermeneutic nihilism beyond the limits of its meta-
physical thinking by foregrounding the function of anti-blackness in structur-
ing thought.
Epistemology/Hermeneutic Nihilism
Black nihilism acknowledges that metaphysics is a destructive matrix, but it

resists the temptation to believe that there is an alternative or a “beyond” the
violence that sustains the world. For many, this could be read as fatalism or
passive nihilism. The terms “passive” and “fatalism” applied to black nihilism
are saturated with negativity to discredit its legitimacy; this discursive ma-
neuver becomes another metaphysical strategy of disciplining and punishing
“errant” thought. Despite these invectives and political hope’s “will to power,”
black nihilism uses hermeneutics to return the political “dream” to its proper
place—in the place of the void (Fanon). Black nihilism demands a traversal,
but not the traversal that reintegrates “the subject” (and Being) back into
society by shattering fundamental fantasies of metaphysics, but a traversal
that disables and invalidates every imaginative and symbolic function. Its
hermeneutics “blackens” the world, as Lewis Gordon suggests in “Theory in
Black: Teleological Suspensions in Philosophy of Culture” (2010).
The problem that confronts the black nihilist is one of epistemology, espe-
cially when the dominant epistemology privileges metaphysical forms of anti-
black organizations of knowledge. The field of knowledge is uneven and
reflects the asymmetrical power relations that sustain anti-black violence in
modernity. The difficulty in expressing black nihilistic thought is that it is
situated in the tense space between hermeneutics and epistemology. If we
think of epistemology as an anti-black formation, then every appeal to it will
reproduce the very metaphysical violence that is the source of black suffering.
Nihilistic Hermeneutics allows us to fracture epistemology, to chip away at its
metaphysical science, and to enunciate from within this fissure. Vattimo
provides a cogent explanation of the distinction between epistemology and
hermeneutics in his reading of Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of

Reflection (1981):
Epistemology is founded on the presumption that all discourses are commen-

surate with and translatable among each other, and that the foundation of
their truth consists precisely in this translation into a basic language, that is,
the one which mirrors facts themselves. Hermeneutics instead admits that
there is no such single unifying language, and tries to appropriate the language
of the other rather than translate into its own tongue . . . Epistemology is the
discourse of normal science, while hermeneutics is discourse about as-yet-
incommensurable discourses. (Vattimo 1988, 149)
Read through the register of anti-blackness, we can understand epistemology

as the violent attempt at discursive and linguistic unification—the compul-
sion to establish a unifying ground of language. Because blackness is placed
outside of the “customary lexis of life and culture,” as Hortense Spillers (2003)
reminds us, blackness speaks an inassimilable language, an “anti-grammar”
that resists linguistic/epistemological domination—what we call “transla-
tion” (221). Anti-black epistemology is somewhat schizophrenic in its aim: it at
once posits blackness as an anti-grammatical entity—paradoxically, a non-
foundation-foundation that provides the condition of possibility for its own
existence—and at the same time, and in stunning contradiction, it forces a
translation of this anti-grammar into a system of understanding that is de-
signed to exclude it. This tension between grammatical exclusion and com-
pulsory inclusion is part of the violence of captivity. A hermeneutical practice
that acknowledges the impossible translation of blackness without forcing its
annihilation (through translation/domination) is the only way we can under-
stand the nihilist. Put another way, black nihilism shatters the coherence of
anti-black epistemology and cannot be “known,” or rendered legible, through
traditional epistemology.
The problem that we encounter is that black nihilism is reduced to an
anti-black epistemology—the “illegible grammar” that speaks through the
black body, psyche, and “spirit” is forcibly, and erroneously, translated into an
epistemology that is inimical to its meaning. Black nihilism cannot be reduced
to an anti-black foundation of knowledge (or metaphysics), and when this

translation, this compulsory alignment of knowledge, fails to explain or un-
derstand the black nihilist, black nihilism is considered pathological and must
be disciplined, contained, and, ultimately, destroyed. If all knowledge must
submit to a bio-political imperative, then the socially dead object is always
already situated at an impasse in relation to this imperative: either one lives in
bad faith—the “optimistic” and politically hopeful belief that anti-black struc-
tures can be transformed to provide vitality to blackness, despite all evidence
to the contrary—or one lives as the pathogen (i.e., socially pathological) and
risks increased vulnerability to violent state apparatuses. In other words, the
“pathological behavior” that West and Brogdon bemoan as self-destructive,
pessimistic, and apathetic from black youth is a gross misreading. Perhaps
this “pathology” is a way of speaking otherwise when other forms of discourse
are inaccessible; the nihilist might have to assume an anti-grammatical enun-
ciation to express the inexpressible. West and Brogdon subject this anti-
grammar to an anti-black epistemology, which mandates that all action must
align with its bio-political imperative. When this forced translation fails, the
nihilist is labeled “pathological,” “troubled,” “faithless,” “suicidal,” “fatalistic,”
and “reckless.” Hermeneutical nihilism challenges this domination and al-
lows incommensurate grammars to exist. The strategy of forced alignment—
translation as domination—is a tool of the Political designed to preserve its
metaphysical organization. Bio-politics will always fail the politically dead
object because bio-politics depends on the politically dead black object to
constitute itself. If political integration is the dream of the optimists, it will
result in nothing more than what Achille Mbembe (2003) calls the “necro-
political” (40). In this context, we can define necro-politics as the distribution
of fraudulent hope that leaves the subject endangered.
V. CONCLUSION
Throughout this essay, I have argued that the Politics of hope preserve meta-
physical structures that sustain black suffering. This preservation amounts to
an exploitation of hope—when the Political colonizes the spiritual principle of
hope and puts it in the service of extending the “will to power” of an anti-black
organization of existence. The Politics of hope, then, is bound up with meta-

physical violence, and this violence masquerades as a “solution” to the prob-
lem of anti-blackness. Temporal linearity, perfection, betterment, struggle,
work, and utopian futurity are conceptual instruments of the Political that
will never obviate black suffering or anti-black violence; these concepts only
serve to reproduce the conditions that render existence unbearable for blacks.
Political theologians and black optimists avoid the immediacy of black suffer-
ing, the horror of anti-black pulverization, and place relief in a “not-yet-but-is
(maybe)-to-come-social order” that, itself, can do little more but admonish
blacks to survive to keep struggling. Political hope becomes a vicious and
abusive cycle of struggle—it mirrors the Lacanian drive, and we encircle an
object (black freedom, justice, relief, redress, equality, etc.) that is inaccessible
because it doesn’t really exist. The political theologian and black optimist,
then, propose a collective Jouissance as an answer to black suffering—finding
the joy in struggle, the victory in toil, and the satisfaction in inefficacious
action. We continue to “struggle” and “work” as black youth are slaugh-
tered daily, black bodies are incarcerated as forms of capital, black infant
mortality rates are soaring, and hunger is disabling the bodies, minds, and
spirits of desperate black youth. In short, these conditions are deep meta-
physical problems—the sadistic pleasure of metaphysical domination—
and “work” and “struggle” avoid the terrifying fact that the world depends
on black death to sustain itself. Black nihilism attempts to break this
“drive”—to stop it in its tracks, as it were—and to end the cycle of insanity
that political hope perpetuates.
The question that remains is a question often put to the black nihilist:
what is the point? This compulsory geometrical structuring of thought—all
knowledge must submit to, and is reducible to, a point—it is an epistemic
flicker of certainty, determination, and, to put it bluntly, life. “The point” exists
for life; it enlivens, enables, and sustains knowledge. Thought outside of this
mandatory point is illegible and useless. To write outside of the “episteme of
life” and its grammar will require a position outside of this point, a position
somewhere in the infinite horizon of thought (perhaps this is what Heidegger
wanted to do with his reconfiguration of thought). Writing in this way is
inherently subversive and refuses the geometry of thought. Nevertheless, the
nihilist is forced to enunciate his refusal through a “point,” a point that is

contradictory and paradoxical all at once. To say that the point of this essay is
that “the point” is fraudulent—its promise of clarity and life are inadequate—
will not satisfy the hunger of disciplining the nihilist and insisting that one
undermine the very ground upon which one stands. Black nihilistic herme-
neutics resists “the point” but is subjected to it to have one’s voice heard
within the marketplace of ideas. The “point” of this essay is that political hope
is pointless. Black suffering is an essential part of the world, and placing hope
in the very structure that sustains metaphysical violence, the Political, will
never resolve anything. This is why the black nihilist speaks of “exploited
hope,” and the black nihilist attempts to wrest hope from the clutches of the
Political. Can we think of hope outside the Political? Must “salvation” trans-
late into a political grammar or a political program? The nihilist, then, hopes
for the end of political hope and its metaphysical violence. Nihilism is not
antithetical to hope; it does not extinguish hope but reconfigures it. Hope is
the foundation of the black nihilistic hermeneutic.
In “Blackness and Nothingness,” Fred Moten (2013) conceptualizes black-
ness as a “pathogen” to metaphysics, something that has the ability to unravel,
to disable, and to destroy anti-blackness. If we read Vattimo through Moten’s
brilliant analysis, we can suggest that blackness is the limit that Heidegger
and Nietzsche were really after. It is a “blackened” world that will ultimately
end metaphysics, but putting an end to metaphysics will also put an end to the
world itself—this is the nihilism that the black nihilist must theorize through.
This is a far cry from what we call “anarchy,” however. The black nihilist has as
little faith in the metaphysical reorganization of society through anarchy than
he does in traditional forms of political existence.
The black nihilist offers political apostasy as the spiritual practice of
denouncing metaphysical violence, black suffering, and the idol of anti-
blackness. The act of renouncing will not change political structures or
offer a political program; instead, it is the act of retrieving the spiritual
concept of hope from the captivity of the Political. Ultimately, it is impos-
sible to end metaphysics without ending blackness, and the black nihilist
will never be able to withdraw from the Political completely without a
certain death-drive or being-toward-death. This is the essence of black
suffering: the lack of reprieve from metaphysics, the tormenting complic-

ity in the reproduction of violence, and the lack of a coherent grammar to
articulate these dilemmas.
After contemplating these issues for some time in my office, I decided to
take a train home. As I awaited my train in the station, an older black woman
asked me about the train schedule and when I would expect the next train
headed toward Dupont Circle. When I told her the trains were running slowly,
she began to talk about the government shutdown. “They don’t care anything
about us, you know,” she said. “We elect these people into office, we vote for
them, and they watch black people suffer and have no intentions of doing
anything about it.” I shook my head in agreement and listened intently. “I’m
going to stop voting, and supporting this process; why should I keep doing this
and our people continue to suffer,” she said. I looked at her and said, “I don’t
know ma’am; I just don’t understand it myself.” She then laughed and thanked
me for listening to her—as if our conversation were somewhat cathartic. “You
know, people think you’re crazy when you say things like this,” she said giving
me a wink. “Yes they do,” I said. “But I am a free woman,” she emphasized “and
I won’t go back.” Shocked, I smiled at her, and she winked at me; at that
moment I realized that her wisdom and courage penetrated my mind and
demanded answers. I’ve thought about this conversation for some time, and it
is for this reason I had to write this essay. To the brave woman at the train
station, I must say you are not crazy at all but thinking outside of metaphysical
time, space, and violence.
Ultimately, we must hope for the end of political hope.
NOTES
1. This essay is written with a certain geo-political specificity; my purview, here, is the United
States and the particular history of anti-black brutality that structures black existence
within this context. Although my analysis is focused on the U.S. context, I would argue that
the devastating logics of anti-blackness and metaphysics constitute a global problem, and
this essay offers an entrée into a much larger discussion about anti-blackness in a global
frame.
2. Defining the “spiritual” is a notoriously difficult task. The spiritual in this analysis is similar
to what Fred Moten (2013) and Nahum Chandler (2013) would call “paraontology.” It
exceeds and precedes political ontology. The spiritual escapes the confines of the Political
and its organization, providing perhaps the only reprieve from the Political.
3. The idea of the “ungrounding of ground” or the impossibility of a final/permanent ground
is also expressed in the political philosophy of “post-foundationalism.” The “Political”
indexes the impossibility of final ground, and the political process is designed to fill in this
vacuum. “The Political” in my analysis constitutes an episteme of metaphysics, as a way to
think being through a particular set of predispositions—progress, bio-futurity, change,
betterment, and so forth. The “political” (the uncapitalized “p”) dockets the programmatic
effort to materialize metaphysical sensibilities. This is usually what we mean when we
speak of politics. Oliver Marchart (2007) maintains the difference between the Political and
politics to suggest that the Political can transform politics by destabilizing its metaphysical
grounding. The black nihilist would disagree with Marchart that any such transformation
is possible for anti-blackness and would reject the idea that the political difference (the
Political vs. politics) would provide any emancipatory relief from black suffering or possi-
bility of a world without anti-blackness.
4. My use of the word “reject” here is very similar to the word “retreat” that Philippe Lacoue-
Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy use in their seminal work Retreating the Political (1997). For
them, retreating the political constitutes a critical questioning of the relationship
between politics and philosophy, and this retreat enables us to reflect on the Political as
a refusal to think—a retreat from thinking itself, when thinking is hijacked by meta-
physical closure. I have something similar in mind with the term “rejection.” I envisage
“rejection” as a critical posture toward the Political and its metaphysical, anti-black
organization of existence.
5. The work of theorists such as Hannah Arendt (1966), Lindon Barrett (2013), and Denise
Ferreira da Silva (2007) presents anti-blackness as a foundation for modern thought and
political organization.
REFERENCES
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Contributors
L FELIPE ALARCÓN is adjunct instructor at the Instituto de Humanidades

at Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile. He studied public
administration at the Universidad de Chile and holds an MA in
contemporary thought from Universidad Diego Portales. He has translated
Maurice Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean-Christophe Bailly, and other
French thinkers into Spanish.
MATTHEW H. ANDERSON studied comparative literature at the University at

Buffalo. His translations have appeared in theory@buffalo and Research in
Phenomenology. His translation of Blanqui’s “Eternity According to the
Stars” appeared in CR: The New Centennial Review in 2009. He lives in
Vancouver, British Columbia.
DONALD CROSS is a doctoral candidate and Presidential Fellow in the

Department of Comparative Literature at the University at Buffalo. His
dissertation centers on a dialogue concerning the question of style in the
works of Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques
Derrida.
249
250 Contributors
JUAN MANUEL GARRIDO is Professor of Philosophy at the Universidad

Alberto Hurtado in Santiago, Chile. Formerly, he was Associate Professor of
Philosophy and Director of the Instituto de Humanidades at Universidad
Diego Portales, also in Santiago. He is the author of On Time, Being, and
Hunger: Challenging the Traditional Way of Thinking Life (Fordham
University Press, 2012) and La formation des forms (Galilée, 2008), among
other books.
RODOLPHE GASCHÉ is Eugenio Donato and SUNY Distinguished Professor of

Comparative Literature at the University at Buffalo. He is the author of more
than a dozen books and more than 100 articles. Among his books are
seminal works on Derrida (The Tain of the Mirror, Harvard University Press,
1986), Paul de Man (The Wild Card of Reading, Harvard University Press,
1998), Kant (The Idea of Form, Stanford University Press, 2003), and Europe
(Europe, or the Infinite Task, Stanford University Press. 2008).
PETER GRATTON is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Memorial

University of Newfoundland. He has published numerous articles in
political, Continental, and intercultural philosophy and is the author of The
State of Sovereignty: Lessons from the Political Fictions of Modernity (SUNY
Press, 2012) and Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects (Bloomsbury,
2014). He is currently at work on The New Derrida, with Rick Elmore
(Bloomsbury, forthcoming).
FRANCIS GUIBAL is Emeritus Professor at the University Marc-Bloch in

Strasbourg. He is the author of several studies on Hegel, Heidegger, Lévinas,
G. Morel, Derrida, Lyotard, and E.Weil. Among his most recent publications
are Emmanuel Levinas: Le sens de la transcendance, autrement (PUF, 2009)
and À-Dieu: de la philosophie à la théologie? (Cerf, 2013).
MARÍA VICTORIA LONDOÑO-BECERRA holds bachelor’s and master’s

degrees in political science from the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá,
Colombia. She is a candidate for the master’s degree in contemporary
thought and political philosophy at the Universidad Diego Portales in
Santiago, Chile.
Contributors 251
ANDREA POTESTÀ is Professor of Philosophy at the Pontificia Universidad

Católica de Chile in Santiago, Chile. He received a PhD in philosophy from
the University of Parma (Italy) and from the University of Strasbourg
(France). He has taught at the University of Strasbourg (France), University
of Metz (France), University of Minas Gerais (Brazil), and University of Chile
(Chile). He is the author of a book in Italian on Kant (La “Pragmatica” di
Kant, Franco Angeli, 2004), a book in French on Plato (Voyages à Syracuse,
Phocide/Portique, 2009), a book in Spanish on Husserl, Heidegger, and
Derrida (El origen del sentido, Metales Pesados, 2013), and several articles on
Heidegger and Derrida.
ROBERTO SALDÍAS earned a PhD in philosophy from the Centre Sèvres

(Paris) and is Professor of Modern Philosophy, Political Philosophy, and
Philosophy of Art at the University Alberto Hurtado (Santiago, Chili). His
publications include “Philosophy and Violence: From the Absolute to Action in
Eric Weil’s Philosophy of Logic” (Ideas y Valores, 2013) and “Personality Is God:
The Reprise of God Category by the Category of Personality” (Cultura, 2013).
MAURO SENATORE is a CONICYT postdoctoral fellow at the Instituto de

Humanidades at the Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago (Chile). He is the
editor of the volume Performatives after Deconstruction (2013) and, with
Francesco Vitale, of the translation into Italian of Rodolphe Gasché’s The Tain of
the Mirror. He is writing a book on Derrida’s thought of dissemination.
FRANCESCO VITALE is a permanent lecturer in esthetics at the University of

Salerno (Italy). His main publications devoted to Jacques Derrida are
Spettrografie: Jacques Derrida tra singolarità e scrittura (2008) and Mitografie:
Jacques Derrida e la scrittura dello spazio (2012). Recently he has been
working on a project called biodeconstruction that focuses on Derrida and
the question of life between biology and philosophy.
CALVIN L. WARREN is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at George

Washington University. He is currently completing two manuscripts,
Ontological Terror: Blackness, Liquidity, and Antebellum Culture and Onticide:
The Destruction of Black Being.

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Editors’ Note

CR: The New Centennial Review is devoted to comparative studies of the

AFTER THE DISCOVERY OF HEGEL’S EARLY THEOLOGICAL WRITINGS, WHICH

were subsequently published in 1907 by a student of Wilhelm Dilthey—Herman

The theme of unhappy consciousness is thus seen to form the core of

writings as opposed to those of the systematic thinker, thus driving a wedge

forcefully into relief, I turn to the preface of Le malheur de la conscience, which

Hegel’s philosophy cannot be reduced to a number of logical formulae. Or,

elaboration on these fragments in the spirit of existential, or existentialist,

Wahl’s systematic linkage of Hegel’s philosophy to Christian religiosity, and

To speak of several states of Hegelian thought, of a youthful Hegel or an

reading of Hegel’s problematic of the family could be held to be an intrinsically

Hegelian exigencies, in such an approach one sometimes dissimulates to

1. See Butler (1987, 83).

Bourgeois, Bernard. 1970. Hegel à Francfort ou Judaïsme-Christianisme-Hegelianisme. Paris: Vrin.

Juan Manuel Garrido

In the long and brilliant introduction to his translation of Husserl’s posthu-

cally develops the principles, methods, and tools of a historical phenomenol-

transparent and exhausted by its phenomenality. Absolutely objective, i.e.,

became possible. The specific dialectics of mathematical knowledge and ob-

becoming of mathematical idealities. Becoming must actually and factually

is no way to gain access to the essence of knowledge from some an-historical

picture of his philosophical insight concerning the primordiality of the histor-

a much more relevant sense, however, in which Dedekind’s “axiomatic” con-

From a Hilbertian point of view, mathematical signs embody definitions,

definitions, operations, theorems, and so forth. That is why the progression of

objectivation and progression of mathematical idealities in history. This au-

Cavaillès’s criticisms of the determination of mathematics as “defined nomolo-

judgments”), a mere juxtaposition of results, regardless of any proper content and

them. This is not a philosophy of consciousness, but a philosophy of concept

Far from having signaled the positive overcoming of Husserl’s idealization

Pure difference is not absolutely different (from nondifference). Hegel’s critique of

THE SPECTER THAT HAUNTS ALL OF DERRIDA’S WORK IS THE SPECTER OF

Hegel’s Geist. Derrida considered Hegel as summing up the Western onto-

but is also the tradition’s preeminent thinker of difference and relationality.

Ontology has always been constituted by a gesture of extraction [arrachement] from

(Heidegger 1962, 428), therefore understanding Spirit as having an external

In almost a “somnambulant style,” one could, Derrida warns, repeat a

The dialectical demonstration is intimately united to the reality that inter-

nitely, without ever positing or postulating a transcendence distinct from this

In sum, then, “human language” is the “very medium of the dialectic”

THE SEED AND THE GENETIC PROGRAM

In the final pages of the preface to Dissemination (1972), entitled

Chapter 10 of The Formation of the Scientific Mind gives an exemplary account

As the heterogeneity and absolute exteriority of the seed, seminal differance

dissemination: what is this queue that prevents the seed-program to return to

THE GERM OF DEATH

Dissemination is the achievement of grammatology to the extent that the

Consciousness is the Idea’s or absolute being’s return to self. Absolute being

A long addition follows the section of EPN dedicated to sex-relation. “In it

Derrida’s reading focuses on the contradiction brought to light by Hegel at the

of copulation (as “the negative identity of the differentiated individuals”) is

The animal, in overcoming and ridding itself of particular inadequacies, does

The inner universality therefore remains opposed to the natural singularity of

Derrida recalls this thought of classification at the very beginning of his

which the philosophy of nature by definition wishes to reduce. But let me

“disseminates itself only by feint.” Here, I suggest, he recalls an expression

Hegelian philosophy presents a contradiction between truth and scientific

THE WORK OF PSYCHIC WRITING

It is time to go back to Derrida’s reading of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams in

Before starting to read the section, I want to draw attention to an over-

constitutive one is drawn in chapter 1 of Of Grammatology, in particular, in the

Returning to the reading of Freud’s Interpretation, I remark that, for Derrida,