No More Learning

Of Spirit is divided into three climactic moments: the strategy of doubling of metaphysics and Dasein in Being and Time and the Rectoral Address; the strategy of undoubling in the Introduction to Metaphysics of 1935; and the strategy of gathering together in 1953. A brief word, now, on each of these three moments.
First, Derrida notes that in Being and Time Heidegger is clear that he must avoid the term spirit because, in its Cartesian-Hegelian heritage, Geist has itself avoided - blocked - 'any interrogation on the Being of Dasein' (Derrida, 1987: 18). This Heidegger achieves in 1927, by re-marking it in inverted commas. Derrida comments here that 'spirit' within inverted com- mas allows its remainder, its repetition to be salvaged. Heidegger avoids the traditional concept of spirit ('spirit') by avoiding avoiding its being dou- bled. In this doubling of avoiding avoiding 'spirit returns' (1987: 23) in the priority of the question.
In contrast, but for Derrida of the same strategy, the Rectoral Address of 1933 defines spirit without inverted commas, which Derrida reads as a dou- bling or inversion of the doubling within inverted commas in 1927. If the latter is a more recognizable form of opposition to identity, that is, 'spirit,' the former - inverting the inversion - is altogether more disturbing, more risky and more easily misread for the strategy of inverting inversion appears not to be an opposition at all. Thus, says Derrida, and on the one hand, in advancing spirit without inverted commas in the Address Heidegger 'spiritu- alizes National Socialism' (1987: 39), conferring 'elevated spiritual legitimacy' (1987: 39) upon it; and, Derrida adds, 'one could reproach him for this' (1987: 39). Indeed. But, and on the other hand, Derrida inverts this, saying that 'by taking the risk of spiritualizing nazism, he might have been trying to absolve or save it by marking it with this affirmation' (1987: 39). In other
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words, spiritual Dasein marked by metaphysical dogmas of nature, biology and race is re-marked, doubled, precisely by the removal of the quotation marks. This haunting of spirit by 'spirit' says Derrida, 'sets apart Heidegger's commitment and breaks an affiliation' (1987: 39). Derrida's strategy here is to read Heidegger's comments within the totality of Geist and its differ- ence-opposition. This gives political critique a fundamental ambivalence as suspension, prioritizing always that which is being suppressed or hidden. This, says Derrida, is 'because one cannot demarcate oneself from biolo- gism, from naturalism, from racism in its genetic form, one cannot be opposed to them except by reinscribing spirit in an oppositional determina- tion (1987: 39). There is no political position that lies outside this spiritual complicity, outside the doubling of Geist that is metaphysics and opposition to metaphysics. One can seek to avoid complicity by choosing 'spirit' or spirit, but to choose is to be compromised no matter what one chooses. 11 In response Derrida reveals an insight into the implications for political oppo- sition of doubling within complicity and complicity within doubling. 'Even if all forms of complicity are not equivalent, they are irreducible. The ques- tion of knowing which is the least grave of these forms of complicity is always there - its urgency and its seriousness could not be over-stressed - but it will never dissolve the irreducibility of this fact' (1987: 40). Note here that Der- rida makes a similar point in Limited Inc, saying 'if, as I believe, violence remains in fact (almost) ineradicable [in academic discourse] its analysis and the most refined, ingenious account of its conditions will be the least violent gestures, perhaps even nonviolent, and in any case those which con- stitute most to transforming the legal-ethical-political rules' (1988: 112). Here Derrida clearly identifies the strategy of doubling as making transfor- mative judgements possible.
The second seminal moment in Of Spirit concerns Heidegger's definition of spirit in 1935 in his Introduction to Metaphysics. Here, Heidegger neither doubles Hegelian Geist with Dasein, nor breaks the attachment of spiritual Dasein to metaphysics. Instead, Heidegger quotes himself on spirit from the Rectoral Address but in doing so omits the one set of inverted commas that had been put around spirit in the original text. The sentence in question states in the Address that 'spirit' is not mere sagacity or rational tool, rather spirit (without inverted commas) is resolution. When this definition of spirit is quoted by Heidegger from his own speech the inverted commas around the first spirit are removed. This strategy Derrida calls 'spectacular' (1987: 66) and a revision 'passed over in silence' (1987: 66). 12 Even if it is inadvertent, it is, he says, still 'an invisible crossing-out' (1987: 67) of a dou- bling. If Derrida is right, then both in Being and Time and in the Address,
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and in accord with the priority of the question, Heidegger doubles both spirits. But now, in the Introduction to Metaphysics, removing the inverted commas around metaphysical Geist erases the differentiation between meta- physics and Dasein and erases the priority of the question.
To those who would find in Derrida's extended footnote in Of Spirit a retraction of the priority of the question in favour of an originary ethics13 we should note that, in fact Derrida redoubles any strategy of an Umkehrung, of a turning that might 'seem to dictate a new order' (1987: 131). Any such turning that tried to remove 'the remnant of Aufkla? rung which still slum- bered in the privilege of the question' (1987: 131) would be doubled in the attempt. Here Derrida retains the priority of the Hegelian Aufhebung and the totality of spirit in/as opposition. Thus, for Derrida everything cannot be re-commenced; even if thinking, late on as it were, permits the path trav- elled to be seen, even if one can re-trace one's steps, this 'return does not signify a new departure, from a new principle or some degree zero' (1987: 132). 14 The footnote avoids avoiding any effacement of Geist by remaining within the 'law of the most radical questioning' (1987: 131). This consis- tency of complicity is marked and re-marked for Derrida by the equivocation of Geist that is 'always haunted by its Geist' (1987: 40). The phantom of meta- physics 'always returns' (1987: 40) and Geist is 'the most fatal figure of this revenance' (1987: 40). This is for Derrida what Heidegger can never avoid, 'the unavoidable itself - spirit's double, Geist as the Geist of Geist, spirit as spirit of the spirit which always comes with its double. Spirit is its double' (1987: 41) and is a double that 'can never be separated from the single' (1987: 40).
The third seminal moment in Of Spirit is Derrida's discussion of Heidegger's move from Geist to geistlich in his thoughts on Trakl's 'spirit in flames' (1987: 85) and on spirit which inflames. Here, political opposition within the complicity of doubling, re-marked by inverted commas and by inverting inverted commas, is no longer present. Now Heidegger carries Trakl's statements in opposition to his (Heidegger's) former equivocation within the complicity of political opposition. No longer doubled within the priority of the question, now, in 1953, spirit is the originarity of the promise, the pledge, the event. Again, Derrida's concern and priority is the extent to which 'this supplement of originarity . . . precedes or exceeds questioning itself' (1987: 90), or, in the terms we are exploring here, the extent to which it avoids metaphysical Geist. In short, Derrida argues that the Geist that geistlich now replaces is merely 'a crudely typecast form of the metaphysico-Platonic tradition' (1987: 95), and, failing to avoid avoiding Hegelian totality, in fact confirms 'a metaphysics of evil, a metaphysics of the will' (1987: 102).
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Doubling in Of Spirit, then, acts as suspension does in Glas. Doubling is able to hold in tension the totality of metaphysics of Geist and the to-come that is resonant in that totality in order to effect the transformation that re-marks of diffe? rance. The Heidegger of 1927-1933 is the Heidegger of this suspension. The Heidegger of 1935-1953 is the Heidegger of the anti- metaphysical and therefore metaphysical dogma of geistlich. Derrida main- tains the domination of the totality of difference-opposition which Heidegger, he says, 'brutally sends [. . . ] packing' (1987: 95). Where Derrida prioritizes the autoimmunity of Geist in order to be consistent with its totality, Heidegger simply avoids it, and therein avoids the transformative significance of such autoimmunity.
Rogues
We now turn to one of Derrida's later works, Rogues, for a third illustration of transformation in Derridean philosophy. In Rogues the concept of auto- immunity is central to Derrida's examination of democracy. At the heart of democracy there is an ambivalence that must be honoured. On the one hand, democracy must protect itself from those who would harm it. This threat can come from within the democracy or from without. Either way, this protection has a feature that moves democracy from being an immune system to an autoimmunity. Since it is part of the freedom of democracy to allow itself to be harmed by itself, it is by its very nature opposed to itself as an autoimmune disorder. When democracy protects itself it attacks itself.
This is a simple enough aporia of self-opposition. But in describing democracy in this way Derrida also has in mind a more important observa- tion. The reality of the autoimmune democracy is that in protecting itself, the 'itself' that it protects is not democracy. Autoimmunity means that democracy is always yet-to-come. Because the protection of democracy is also against itself, it is never a present democracy. It is, rather, 'the intermi- nable adjournment of the present of democracy' (Derrida, 2005: 38). Thus, according to its own ambivalent nature democracy defers itself, differs from itself. This, as we have seen above, is its diffe? rance. One can say here that what- ever educational significance was carried by diffe? rance and deconstruction in earlier work, it is now also part of the Derridean notion of autoimmunity.
We noted above Derrida's comment that philosophical critique 'is a mat- ter of affirming the most tense, the most intense difference possible between the two extremes' (Derrida, 1995: 151) of a totality and its deferral. We also saw above how Derrida argues that this thinking of diffe? rance in iterability transforms both totalities in leaving them open to judgements regarding
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'the least grave' (Derrida, 1987: 40) of the ways in which deferral is avoided. The example Derrida gives in Rogues is the democracy of the United Nations and the way in which the Security Council works as autoimmunity. The Security Council permanently abuses democracy in order to protect democ- racy. Little philosophical sophistication is needed for those who experience autoimmunity as their being demonized, and, indeed, by the 'devil' him- self. This was the view of Hugo Chavez (26 September 2006) when he said at the UN that President Bush 'came here as if he were the owner of the world' but that he was in fact the devil and had left a stench of sulphur after his address the previous day, and of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who said in the same session, 'as long as the UN Security Council is unable to act on behalf of the entire international community in a transparent, just and democratic manner, it will never be legitimate or effective. '
But as we have already seen above, Derrida's critique of a totality is never as simple as merely pointing out inequalities of power, although this is an important element of deconstruction. In Rogues as elsewhere there is a total- ity of complicity that is more than mere opposition. It is already the case, for example, that the names of Chavez and Ahmadinejad represent the threat to democracy that democracy needs to protect itself against. This is an interminable circle in which the opposition of each 'demon' to the other has its justification. As foes they are the erasure of diffe? rance because both have their legitimacy in the totality of difference-opposition. This totality of autoimmunity is a powerful example of when and how diffe? rance is political critique, critique, that is, of this totality and this erasure. In diffe? rance the Security Council and its opponents can be thought together as the suspen- sion of its (i. e. of diffe? rance's) erasure. Diffe? rance here is the deferral of its own deferral, or, in this example, the deferral of the deferral of democracy. This shares its aim with the strategy of doubling in Of Spirit and with the architecture of Glas. In this example it does justice to the injustice of pres- ent democracy. Diffe? rance here, as the excess of its autoimmunity, presents democracy to itself and leaves open the idea of democracy to-come. This is democracy present within its deferral, and is again where deferral is trans- formative, altering even as it repeats itself.
But there is an added twist in Rogues to the strategy of suspension and alteration. Now, towards the end of his life, Derrida gives priority to reason in a way significantly different from his earlier work. 15 Derrida argues here for increased vigilance regarding the changes that the autoimmunity of dif- ference-opposition holds for the world as a whole. Gone is the rational and the very visible form of autoimmune calculation of the Cold War that sat at the precipice of mutually assured destruction in order to avoid mass suicide. 16
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This has been replaced now by a new, more violent, less visibly autoimmune terror and violence. This consists in wars against rogue states, wars that break the very international law that they claim to be defending against those who break it. The excess of the autoimmunity of sovereign state power that can defer the hegemonic rationalizations for terror against terror is weak in comparison to the totality it defers. When Derrida says that the rationalizations employed to justify autoimmune suicide, for example, that of national security, must 'not be allowed to take us unawares' (2005: 157), he is saying that we must think the deferral of such rationalizations. But, and here is the new emphasis, to think this deferral of sovereign rationaliza- tions is to think rationally against them. It is to the autoimmunity of reason that Derrida now turns for the strategy of doubling and transformation. We must, he says, sometimes 'in the name of reason, be suspicious of rationalizations' (2005: 157). We must, in the name of reason, call into question - defer - all of the logics of suicidal sovereignty.
We must erode the ontotheological rationalizations of sovereignty and with it the suicidal right to undermine law in order to protect it.
This is the same struggle with totality as difference-opposition that Derrida has always been waging. He has always sought to use aporia and autoimmunity against themselves but in a way different from their appear- ance within difference-opposition. What is mere contradiction in the latter is transformative diffe? rance in the former. Now, however, he is prepared to name the two different kinds of reason that are at play here. He is ready to make explicit the rational difference between excess and difference- opposition that has always been implicit in his theorizing. Since this difference (and sameness) of diffe? rance has always been the gesture wherein transformation occurs we must say also that Derrida is now prepared to name the transformative character of diffe? rance as rational. He calls the apo- ria of difference-opposition mere rationalization, and the aporia of diffe? rance he calls reasonableness, vulnerable non-sovereignty and (a different con- ception of) God. Vulnerable non-sovereignty opposes sovereignty from within according to the latter's own suicidal tendency. It is distinguished from what it opposes and how it opposes precisely because it lacks the sov- ereignty of suicide. It is suicide without sovereignty, and is a vulnerability without autoimmune rationalization. It is 'the name of a God [that] would allow us to think something else, for example a vulnerable non-sovereignty, one that suffers and is divisible, one that is mortal even, capable of contra- dicting itself or of repenting . . . it would be a completely different story, perhaps even the story of a God who deconstructs himself in his ipseity' (2005: 157). This vulnerable non-sovereignty, says Derrida, is what is
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happening today. 'It is and it makes history through the anxiety-provoking turmoil we are currently undergoing' (2005: 157).
But, as always, the relation of the two kinds of reason is no simple sense of opposition. Were it just one unconditional sovereignty opposing another unconditional sovereignty this would not be deferral, but only more differ- ence-opposition. What, then, characterizes deferral now as non-sovereign and vulnerable reason? It is characterized by the responsibility to be reason- able, to prefer the reasonable, in the opposition between two antinomic rationalizations, and in its being 'irreducible to the rational it exceeds' (2005: 158). It strives for justice across aporias in giving an account of the impossible and the incalculable.
Even here, however, Derrida says he feels he is not immune to the auto- immunity of a regulative Kantian sovereign rationalization. The 'last resort' (2005: 83) of a regulative Idea is something 'I cannot swear that I will not one day give in to' (2005: 83). He would succumb, perhaps, if the to-come carried in non-sovereign reason fails to be transformative in and as 'the cre- ation of an international juridico-political space that, without doing away with every reference to sovereignty, never stops innovating and inventing new distributions and forms of sharing, new divisions of sovereignty' (2005: 87). In other words, a Kantian imperative might be needed if diffe? rance fails to transform the space that it also opens, a concern we saw above in Beardsworth's hesitations.
Avoiding education in Hegel
In summary then we have followed the idea of transformation as education in Derrida from its statement in Limited Inc through three different shapes that it takes. In Glas we saw Derrida evoke the totality of spirit in order to do justice to the excess of spirit. His strategy here was to give priority to spirit and to difference-opposition in both architecture and content in order that its totality speaks of itself beyond itself. Of Spirit, on the other hand, gives priority to excess in order to expose the doubling and the non-doubling of spirit. He invokes excess in order to do justice to the autoimmunity of spirit, to the totality of its complicity, and to the impossibility of this totality in and through its being doubled. Both strategies aim to do justice to diffe? rance as transformative. Finally, in Rogues, diffe? rance is seen to be the gesture of a non-sovereign reason, a reason/diffe? rance, in contrast to the rationaliza- tions of sovereignty that are decidedly unreasonable in their suicidal nature. The aim of Rogues is still to do justice to the to-come and the undecideable,
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but this time by prioritizing the transformative qualities of reasonableness over autoimmune irrationality.
I want now to argue that in fact the one thing Derrida is not truly open to is the truth of transformation in aporetic philosophical education. This takes us to the differences, still together and apart, between Hegel and Derrida on the nature of transformation in aporia, differences which are themselves grounded in presuppositions of knowing and/or not-knowing the absolute or absolute spirit.
The character of transformation in Derrida is that it has all the instability of aporetic spirit, seen in Glas and in Of Spirit, but with none of the baggage of the absolute that attends spirit in Hegel. This gives the appearance that Derridean transformation is radically open-ended in comparison to Hegelian Aufhebung especially when the latter is (mis)understood as the resolution or synthesis or relief of competing opposites. The fluidity of education in Derrida is not dependent upon negation or loss, nor upon reconciliation. Instead, the movement of diffe? rance is an effect of identity, not an opposi- tion of non-identity. The transformative import of diffe? rance is in its trace of the impossible within the autoimmunity of identity. This is to come to understand the world differently.
In Rogues, as we saw, transformation is stated in rational terms, as the transformation that inheres in 'the fragile difference between the rational and the reasonable' (2005: 159). Here we might expect Hegelian Aufhebung and Derridean aporetic education to converge further. Hegel has, after all, always been working with two different types of reason: abstract reason and philosophical reason. Abstract reason resembles the sovereignty of rational- ization in Derrida and philosophical reason resembles the reasonableness that massively compromises such rationalization. Further, where Derrida in Rogues turns to the character of reason as vulnerable and mortal, and even divine, it is the case as we saw above in Chapter 1, that the master/slave rela- tion in the Phenomenology of Spirit is the template in Hegel for the transformative relationship of power and its vulnerability. But any sugges- tion now that the aporetic philosophies of Hegel and Derrida are commensurable in this respect is absolutely unsustainable. The reason is, that precisely where Derrida in Rogues articulates transformation in and as the concept of reason/diffe? rance, spirit is nowhere to be seen. Just when Derrida finally turns to reason to think through the antinomies of power, and indeed in terms of (a different) God, his previous strategy of using spirit as the totality of this thinking is dropped, an avoidance we might say here, that is passed over in silence.
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Why is it that reason/diffe? rance and spirit cannot be thought together by Derrida in Rogues? Why is he willing to work with spirit when diffe? rance is not explicitly gestured as reasonableness, and equally unwilling to work with spirit when rational non-sovereignty defines diffe? rance and the to-come? The answer to this is that diffe? rance (and reason/diffe? rance) as Derrida con- ceives it must not know itself as its own content. The emphasis placed on reason in Rogues makes it especially vulnerable to having its own content in spirit, and in absolute knowing. But for Derrida, reason/diffe? rance must not be able to know itself, for in doing so it would make transformation its own truth; knowable; Sa. It is this presupposition that underpins the Derridean project. Spirit in Hegel has always been both the form and the content of the autoimmunity of sovereignty. This is what spirit is. Indeed, this is what is educative in both the life and death relation and the master/slave rela- tion as education in Hegel presents them. Life is autoimmune. It opposes itself even as it lives, for everything it does brings death closer. Sovereignty is also autoimmune. In the master/slave relation the absolute sovereignty of the master is exposed as autoimmune by his dependence upon the slave. The slave, in turn, is absolute vulnerability and non-sovereignty. Life and death, and master and slave are components of a spiritual education that has aporia as its educative form and content. Spirit is this form and content, and absolute spirit is this form and content in and as learning, as spirit's formative and substantial education about itself. This educative truth of death in life and of non-sovereignty in sovereignty is exactly what Derrida avoids for autoimmunity on behalf of spirit. Derrida is happy for spirit to double itself but not that it should know itself in this doubling. This dou- bling can be a transformation of spirit in learning about its excess, its to-come, and its radical undecideability, but it cannot be a transformation that is formative of and substantial as spirit's own education regarding itself. In education in Hegel, however, it is because spirit is both the form and content of death in life and of sovereignty attacking itself, that it is also transformative in and of itself, transformative of sovereignty from within and not prejudged by a view from without that spirit formed in this way compromises truth in an unacceptably dogmatic way. The Derridean grounding of diffe? rance against absolute spirit here is in the presupposition of what is and is not acceptable in the thinking of truth.
As we have seen, Derrida has been comfortable to work with the auto- immunity of spirit. The brilliance of Glas is that it seeks not to avoid the circle of spirit. Yet, even here, the reading of the Aufhebung as relief eschews the truth and totality of spirit as always in struggle without relief. Relief is as unrelieved as everything else in the totality of Geist. This is what is learned
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in and as philosophy in education in Hegel. The event of the to-come is in fact relief for Derrida from what is deemed or presupposed to be unac- ceptable in absolute spirit. The brilliance of Rogues is that reason is not avoided in the aporia of democracy. But the aporetic non-sovereignty of reason - spirit - is avoided. Indeed, Derrida has always sought to protect spirit from itself as its own truth, fearing this closure, this self-knowing, as unacceptable. Derrida does not believe that absolute spirit can think radi- cal alterity without engorging it into self-knowing, and therefore he needs to keep alive the possibility of the to-come that absolute spirit snuffs out. It is this presupposition of what is unacceptable for spirit that Derrida pro- tects by way of diffe? rance. This is the unacknowledged mastery that grounds Derrida's critique of sovereignty.
In fact, the problem of mastery is not just the opposite of what Derrida understands it to be. It is in its triadic structure of opposition and identity that spirit has an absolute vulnerability to its own sovereignty. In ruling out the education carried in and by the triadic 'and', diffe? rance, iteration, decon- struction, autoimmunity and now reason/diffe? rance have never been free to know and to comprehend how vulnerability is shaped in and by modern social relations. 17 Absolute spirit is absolutely vulnerable to its absolute sov- ereignty. But for Derrida to accept this, he would have to philosophize power more according to the master/slave phenomenology than his pre- judgement of truth will allow him. This is why spirit must be avoided in Rogues. It comes too close to finding a reasonable dialectic of sovereignty and non-sovereignty in reason/diffe? rance. It threatens to open up the possi- bility of spirit being known and knowable as the autoimmunity of the weaker rational force in relation to itself as sovereignty. If rationalization and rea- sonableness appear not just as the form of transformation, but also as the content of transformation, then this allows transformation to know itself, and when transformation knows itself as its own form and content this is the Aufhebung of absolute spirit, free to know itself in its presuppositions and not by avoiding them.
There is, then, an unacknowledged mastery underpinning Derrida's cri- tique of mastery. To return for a moment to the language of Rogues, diffe? rance has always been the Security Council of absolute spirit, protecting the latter from misunderstanding its autoimmunity as total, and also has always been the same misunderstanding that sees the truth of Hegelian Aufhebung as dogma. Like the Security Council, diffe? rance hides its own mastery within a rationalization of protection, a protection that is also autoimmune and harms that which is being protected. The Security Council of diffe? rance is the suicide of the reasonable, a self-harming that precisely opposes the
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voices of reason that can speak the hard truth that this protection (i.