No More Learning

Rather, that beyond as which the noumenon is characterized now becomes something like a category of thinking. . . . It is the mind that posits noumena in the sense in which its experi- ence of each phenomenon includes a beyond along with it. . . . The noumenon is not something separate from the
phenomenon, but part and parcel of its essence; and it is within the mind that realities outside or beyond the mind are "posited. " (29)
We should introduce here a pre- cise distinction between the presup- posed/shadowy part of what appear as ontic objects and the ontological horizon of their appearing. On the one hand, as it was brilliantly de- veloped by Edmund Husserl in his phenomenological analysis of per- ceptions, every perception even of an ordinary object, involves a series of assumptions about its unseen flip side, as well as of its background; on the other hand, an object always appears within a certain horizon of hermeneutic prejudices that pro- vide an a priori frame within which we locate this object and which thus make the object intelligible-- to observe reality without preju- dices means to understand nothing. This same dialectic of positing the presuppositions plays a crucial role in our understanding of history:
[J]ust as we always posit the anteriority of a nameless ob- ject along with the name or idea we have just articulated, so also in the matter of histor- ical temporality we always posit the preexistence of a formless object which is the raw material of our emer- gent social or historical ar- ticulation. (85-86)
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? ? ? This formlessness should also be understood as a violent erasure of (previous) forms: whenever a cer- tain act is posited as a founding one, as a historical cut, the beginning of a new era, the previous social real- ity is as a rule reduced to a chaotic ahistorical conundrum--say, when the Western colonialists "discov- ered" Black Africa, this discovery was read as the contact of "prehis- torical" primitives with civilized history proper, and their previous history basically blurred into form- less matter. It is in this sense that the notion of positing the presupposi- tions is "not only a solution to the problems posed by critical resistance to mythic narratives of origin . . . ; it is also one in which the emergence of a specific historical form retroac- tively calls into existence the hith- erto formless matter from which it has been fashioned" (87). This last claim should be qualified or, rather, corrected: what is retroac- tively called into existence is not the hitherto formless matter but, precisely, a matter that was well ar- ticulated before the rise of the new, and whose contours were blurred, became invisible, from the hori- zon of the new historical form-- with the rise of the new form, the previous one is (mis)perceived as "hitherto formless matter"; that is, the formlessness itself is a retroac- tive effect, a violent erasure of the previous form. (So what about the obvious counterargument: the abundance of ethnological studies
of these prehistorical societies, with detailed descriptions of their ritu- als, systems of kinship, myths, etc. ? The classic ethnology and anthropology were precisely stud- ies of "prehistoric" societies, studies that systematically overlooked the specificity of these societies, inter- preting them as a contrast to "civi- lized" societies. Recall how, in their description of the primitive myths of origin, the early anthropologists read, say, the statement that a tribe originates from the owl, as a literal belief ["They really believe their predecessors were owls"], totally missing the way such statements ef- fectively functioned. ) If one misses the retroactivity of such positing of presuppositions, one finds oneself in the ideological universe of evo- lutionary teleology: an ideological narrative thus emerges in which previous epochs are conceived as progressive stages/steps toward the present "civilized" epoch. This is why the retroactive positing of pre- suppositions is the materialist "sub- stitute for that 'teleology' for which [Hegel] is ordinarily indicted" (87). (Marx's aforementioned statement about the anatomy of man offer- ing the key to the anatomy of ape should be read in the same way: as the materialist reversal of teleologi- cal evolutionary progress. )
This Jamesonian account none- theless raises a number of critical points. Yes, presuppositions are (retroactively) posited, but the con- clusion to be drawn from this is not
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? ? ? that we are forever caught into this circle of retroactivity so that every attempt to reconstruct the rise of the New out of the Old is noth- ing but an ideological narrative. Hegel's dialectic itself is not yet an- other grand teleological narrative, but precisely the effort to avoid the narrative illusion of a continu- ous process of the organic growth of the New out of the Old. The historical forms that follow one another are not successive figures within the same teleological frame, but successive retotalizations, each creating (positing) its own past (as well as projecting its own future). In other words, Hegel's dialectic is the science of the gap between the Old and the New, of account- ing for this gap. More precisely, its true topic is not directly the gap be- tween the Old and the New, but its self-reflective redoubling--when it describes the cut between the Old and the New, it simultaneously de- scribes the gap, within the Old it- self, between the Old-in-itself (as it was before the New) and the Old retroactively posited by the New. It is because of this redoubled gap that every new form arises as a cre- ation ex nihilo: the Nothingness out of which the New arises is the very gap between the Old-in-itself and the Old-for-the-New, the gap that makes impossible the account of the rise of the New in the terms of a continuous narrative. (Marx him- self was aware of this gap when, in the last chapter of volume 1 of
Das Kapital, he used the narrative of "so-called primordial accu- mulation" to confront the cha- otic brutality of the actual rise of capitalism. )
One should add a further quali- fication here: what escapes our grasp is not the way things were before the arrival of the New, but the very birth of the New, the New as it was "in itself," from the perspective of the Old, before the New managed to posit its presuppositions. This is why fantasy, the phantasmatic nar- rative, always involves an impos- sible gaze, the gaze by means of which the subject is already present at the scene of its own absence--the illusion is here the same as that of alternate reality whose otherness is also posited by the actual totality, which is why it remains within the coordinates of the actual totality. The way to avoid this utopian re- duction of the subject to the impos- sible gaze witnessing an alternate reality, from which he is absent, is not to abandon the topos of alter- nate reality as such. Recall Walter Benjamin's notion of revolution as redemption through repetition of the past: apropos the French Rev- olution, the task of a true Marxist historiography is not to describe the events the way they really were (and to explain how these events generated the ideological illusions that accompanied them); the task is rather to unearth the hidden poten- tiality (the utopian emancipatory potentials) that were betrayed in
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? ? ? the actuality of revolution and in its final outcome (the rise of utilitarian market capitalism). The point of Marx is not primarily to make fun of the wild hopes of the Jacobins' revolutionary enthusiasm, to point out how their high emancipatory rhetoric was just a means used by the historical cunning of reason to establish the vulgar commercial capitalist reality; it is to explain how these betrayed radical-emancipa- tory potentials continue to insist as kinds of historical specters that haunt the revolutionary memory, demanding their enactment, so that the later proletarian revolu- tion should also redeem (put to rest) all of these past ghosts. These alternate versions of the past that persist in a spectral form constitute the ontological openness of the his- torical process, as was clear to G. K. Chesterton:
The things that might have been are not even present to the imagination. If some- body says that the world would now be better if Na- poleon had never fallen, but had established his Imperial dynasty, people have to ad- just their minds with a jerk. The very notion is new to them. Yet it would have pre- vented the Prussian reaction; saved equality and enlight- enment without a mortal quarrel with religion; uni- fied Europeans and perhaps
avoided the Parliamentary corruption and the Fascist and Bolshevist revenges. But in this age of free-thinkers, men's minds are not really free to think such a thought.
What I complain of is that those who accept the verdict of fate in this way accept it without knowing why. By a quaint paradox, those who thus assume that history al- ways took the right turning are generally the very people who do not believe there was any special providence to guide it. The very rational- ists who jeer at the trial by combat, in the old feudal or- deal, do in fact accept a trial by combat as deciding all human history. 1
In his less-known Everlasting Man (1926), Chesterton conducts a wonderful mental experiment along these lines, in imagining the monster that man might have seemed at first to the merely natu- ral animals around him:
The simplest truth about manisthatheisavery strange being; almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth. In all sobriety, he has much more of the exter- nal appearance of one bring- ing alien habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one. He has an unfair
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? ? ? advantage and an unfair dis- advantage. He cannot sleep in his own skin; he cannot trust his own instincts. He is at once a creator moving miraculous hands and fin- gers and a kind of cripple. He is wrapped in artificial bandages called clothes; he is propped on artificial crutches called furniture. His mind has the same doubtful liberties and the same wild limitations. Alone among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter; as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the uni- verse hidden from the uni- verse itself. Alone among the animals he feels the need of averting his thought from the root realities of his own bodily being; of hiding them as in the presence of some higher possibility which cre- ates the mystery of shame. Whether we praise these things as natural to man or abuse them as artificial in na- ture, they remain in the same sense unique. 2
This is what Chesterton called thinking backwards: we have to put ourselves back in time, before the fateful decisions were made or before the accidents occurred that generated the state that now seems normal to us, and the royal way to
do it, to render palpable this open moment of decision, is to imagine how, at that point, history may have taken a different turn. (This, however, does not mean that, in a historical repetition in the radical Benjaminian sense, we simply re- turn in time to the open moment of decision and, this time, make the right choice. The lesson of repeti- tion is rather that our first choice was necessarily the wrong one, and for a very precise reason: the right choice is only possible the second time, after the wrong one; that is, it is only the first wrong choice that creates the conditions for the right choice. The notion that we might have made the right choice already the first time, and that we just ac- cidentally blew the chance, is a ret- roactive illusion. )
III
It is against this background that one can raise two further critical points about Jameson's notion of Understanding as an eternal and unsurpassable form of ideology. The first thing to note is that this unsurpassable character is in itself redoubled: first, there is Under- standing as the a priori tendency of human thinking toward iden- titarian reification; then, there is the unsurpassability of the circle of positing the presuppositions, which prevents us from stepping outside ourselves to grasp the not-I in all its
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? ? ? forms, spatial and temporal (from outside reality as our own histori- cal past is independent of us). The first critical point to be made here is that the features Jameson attributes to Understanding ("common-sense empirical thinking of externality, formed in the experience of solid objects and obedient to the law of non-contradiction") clearly are his- torically limited: they designate the modern/secular empiricist com- mon sense very different from, say, a primitive holistic notion of reality permeated by spiritual forces.
However, a much more impor- tant critical point concerns the way Jameson formulates the dichotomy between Understanding and Rea- son: Understanding is understood as the elementary form of analyzing, of drawing the lines of fixed dif- ferences and identities; that is, of reducing the wealth of reality to an abstract set of features. This sponta- neous tendency toward identitarian reification has to be then corrected by dialectical Reason, which faith- fully reproduces the dynamic complexity of reality by way of outlining the fluid network of rela- tions within which every identity is located. This network generates each identity and, simultaneously, causes its ultimate downfall. . . . This, however, is emphatically not the way Hegel conceives the dif- ference between Understanding and Reason--let us read carefully a well-known passage from the fore- word to Phenomenology:
To break up an idea into its ultimate elements means re- turning upon its moments, which at least do not have the form of the given idea when found, but are the im- mediate property of the self. Doubtless this analysis only arrives at thoughts which are themselves familiar elements, fixed inert determinations. But what is thus separated, and in a sense is unreal, is itself an essential moment; for just because the concrete fact is self-divided, and turns into unreality, it is something self-moving, self-active. The action of separating the ele- ments is the exercise of the force of Understanding, the most astonishing and great- est of all powers, or rather the absolute power. The circle, which is self-enclosed and at rest, and, qua substance, holds its own moments, is an immediate relation, the im- mediate, continuous relation of elements with their unity, and hence arouses no sense of wonderment. But that an accident as such, when out loose from its containing circumference,--that what is bound and held by some- thing else and actual only by being connected with it,-- should obtain an existence all its own, gain freedom and independence on its own
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? ? ? account--this is the porten- tous power of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of pure ego. Death, as we may call that unreality, is the most terrible thing, and to keep and hold fast what is dead demands the greatest force of all. 3
Understanding, precisely in its aspect of analyzing, tearing the unity of a thing or process apart, is here celebrated as "the most aston- ishing and greatest of all powers, or rather the absolute power"--as such, it is, surprisingly (for those who stick to the common view of dialectics), characterized in exactly the same terms as Spirit which is, with regard to the opposition be- tween Understanding and Rea- son, clearly on the side of Reason: "Spirit is, in its simple truth, con- sciousness, and forces its moments apart. " Everything turns on how we are to understand this iden- tity and difference between Un- derstanding and Reason: it is not that reason adds something to the separating power of Understand- ing, reestablishing (at some higher level) the organic unity of what Understanding has torn apart, supplementing analysis with syn- thesis; Reason is, in a way, not more but less than Understanding.
It is--to put it in Hegel's well- known terms of the dichotomy between what one wants to say and what one actually says--what
Understanding, in its activity, really does, in contrast to what it wants/ means to do. Reason is therefore not another facility supplementing Understanding's one-sidedness: the very idea that there is something (the core of the substantial content of the analyzed thing) that eludes Understanding, a transrational Be- yond out of its reach, is the funda- mental illusion of Understanding. In other words, all we have to do to get from Understanding to Reason is to subtract from Understanding its constitutive illusion--Under- standing is not too abstract/violent; it is, on the contrary, as Hegel put it a propos Kant, too soft toward things, afraid to locate its violent movement of tearing things apart into things themselves. 4 In a way, it is epistemology versus ontology: the illusion of Understanding is that its own analytic power--the power to make "an accident as such, when out loose from its containing cir- cumference,--that what is bound and held by something else and ac- tual only by being connected with it,--. . . obtain an existence all its own, gain freedom and indepen- dence on its own account"--is only an abstraction, something external to true reality that persists out there intact in its inaccessible fullness. In other words, it is the standard critical view of Understanding and its power of abstraction (that it is just an impotent intellectual exercise missing the wealth of real- ity) that contains the core illusion
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? ? ? of Understanding. To put it in yet another way, the mistake of Un- derstanding is to perceive its own negative activity (of separating, tearing things apart) only in its negative aspect, ignoring its posi- tive (productive) aspect--Reason is Understanding itself in its produc- tive aspect. 5
IV
Even Jameson succumbs to this classical anti-Hegelian topic when he identifies narcissism as that which "may sometimes be felt to be repulsive in the Hegelian system as such" (130) or, in short, as the cen- tral weakness of Hegel's thought expressed in his claim that rea- son should find itself in the actual world:
We thereby search the whole world, and outer space, and end up only touching our- selves, only seeing our own face persist through multitu- dinous differences and forms of otherness. Never truly to encounter the not-I, to come face to face with radical oth- erness (or, even worse, to find ourselves in an historical dy- namic in which it is precisely difference and otherness which is relentlessly being stamped out): such is the di- lemma of the Hegelian dia- lectic, which contemporary
philosophies of difference and otherness seem only able to confront with mystical evocations and imperatives. (131)
Instead of trying to under- mine or overcome this narcissism from the outside, emphasizing the preponderance of the objec- tive (or that the Whole is the non- true and all other similar motifs of Theodore Adorno's rejection of identitarian idealism), one should rather problematize the figure of Hegel criticized here by way of asking a simple question: which Hegel is our point of reference here? Do not Georg Luka? cs and Adorno both refer to the idealist- subjectivist (mis)reading of Hegel, to the standard image of Hegel as the absolute idealist who asserted Spirit as the true agent of history, its Subject-Substance? Within this framework, capital can effectively appear as a new embodiment of the Hegelian Spirit, an abstract mon- ster that moves and mediates itself, parasitizing upon the activity of actually existing individuals. This is why Luka? cs also remains all too idealist when he proposes to simply replace the Hegelian Spirit with the proletariat as the Subject-Object of History: Luka? cs here is not re- ally Hegelian, but a pre-Hegelian idealist.
If, however, one problema- tizes this presupposition shared by Luka? cs and Adorno, another
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? ? ? Hegel appears, a more materialist Hegel for whom reconciliation be- tween Subject and Substance does not mean that the subject swal- lows its substance, internalizing it into its own subordinate moment. Reconciliation rather amounts to a much more modest overlapping or redoubling of the two separations: the subject has to recognize in its alienation from the Substance the separation of the Substance from itself. This overlapping is what is missed in the Feuerbach-Marxian logic of de-alienation in which the subject overcomes its alienation by recognizing itself as the active agent who itself posited what appears to it as its substantial presupposition. In the Hegelian reconciliation be- tween Subject and Substance, there is no absolute Subject that, in total self-transparency, appropriates or internalizes all objective substantial content. But "reconciliation" also doesn't mean (as it does in the line of German idealism from Ho? lderlin to Schelling) that the subject should renounce its hubris of perceiving itself as the axis of the world and accept its constitutive decentering, its dependency on some primordial abyssal Absolute that is beyond/ beneath the subject/object divide and, as such, also beyond subjective conceptual grasp. The subject is not its own origin: Hegel firmly rejects Fichte's notion of the absolute I that posits itself and is nothing but the pure activity of this self-positing. But the subject is also not just a
secondary accidental appendix/ outgrowth of some presubjective substantial reality: there is no sub- stantial Being to which the subject can return, no encompassing or- ganic Order of Being in which the subject has to find its proper place. Reconciliation between subject and substance means the acceptance of this radical lack of any firm foun- dational point: the subject is not its own origin, it comes second, it is dependent upon its substantial pre- suppositions; but these presupposi- tions also do not have a substantial consistency of their own but are al- ways retroactively posited.
What this also means is that Communism should no longer be conceived as the subjective (re)ap- propriation of the alienated sub- stantial content--all versions of reconciliation as "subject swallows the substance" should be rejected. So, again, reconciliation is the full acceptance of the abyss of the de- substantialized process as the only actuality there is: the subject has no substantial actuality, it comes sec- ond, it only emerges through the process of separation, of overcom- ing of its presuppositions, and these presuppositions are also just a ret- roactive effect of the same process of their overcoming. The result is thus that there is, at both extremes of the process, a failure/negativity inscribed into the very heart of the entity we are dealing with. If the status of the subject is thoroughly processual, then it emerges through
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? ? ? the very failure to fully actualize it- self. This brings us again to one of the possible formal definitions of subject: a subject tries to articulate (express) itself in a signifying chain, this articulation fails, and by means and through this failure, the subject emerges; the subject is the failure of its signifying representation--this is why Lacan writes the subject of the signifier as ", as "barred. " In a love letter, the very failure of the writer to formulate his declaration clearly and efficiently, his oscilla- tions, the letter's fragmentation, etc. , can in themselves be the proof (perhaps the necessary and the only reliable proof) that the professed love is authentic--here, the very failure to deliver the message prop- erly is the sign of its authenticity. If the message is delivered smoothly, it arouses suspicions that it is part of a well-planned approach, or that the writer loves himself, the beauty of his writing, more than his love object; that is, that the object is ef- fectively reduced to a pretext for engaging in the narcissistically sat- isfying activity of writing.
And the same goes for sub- stance: substance is not only al- ways already lost but comes to be only through its loss, as a second- ary return-to-itself--which means that substance is always already subjectivized. In reconciliation be- tween subject and substance, both poles thus lose their firm iden- tity. Let us take the case of ecol- ogy: radical emancipatory politics
should aim neither at the complete mastery over nature nor at the hu- manity's humble acceptance of the predominance of Mother Earth. Rather, nature should be exposed in all its catastrophic contingency and indeterminacy, and human agency assumed in the whole un- predictability of its consequences-- viewed from this perspective of the "other Hegel," the revolutionary act no longer involves as its agent the Luka? csian substance-subject, the agent who knows what it does while doing it.
Apropos Hegel's reconciliation in a modern postrevolutionary state, Jameson proposes the out- lines of a higher-enlarged version of the Hegelian reconciliation, a version appropriate for our global capitalist epoch: the project of a human age characterized by pro- duction-for-us (the end of classes) and ecology (113-15). Jameson's view is that, far from standing for the ultimate end of history, the rec- onciliation proposed at the end of the chapter on Spirit in Phenome- nology is a temporary fragile synthe- sis--Hegel himself was aware that this reconciliation is threatened, as is clear from his panicky reaction to the revolution of 1830 and the first signs of universal democracy. (Re- call his furious rejection of the Brit- ish electoral Reform Bill, the first step toward universal elections. ) Is it then not consequent that, in view of the new contradictions of the nineteenth-century capitalist
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? ? ? system that exploded the frag- ile Hegelian synthesis, a renewed Hegelian approach that remains faithful to the idea of concrete uni- versality, of universal rights for all, "calls in its very structure for the subsequent enlargements of later history" (115) and for a new project of reconciliation? Such a move is nonetheless illegitimate: it doesn't take into account radically enough that the same paradox as that of the retroactive positing of presup- positions holds also for the future. Let us take the case of a nation: to paraphrase an old critic of Ernest Renan, a nation is a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past, a hatred of their present neighbors, and dangerous illusions about their future. (Say, today's Slo- venes are united by the myths about a Slovene kingdom in the eighth century, their hatred of [at this mo- ment] Croats, and the illusion that the Slovenes are on their way to become the next Switzerland. ) Each historical form is a totality that en- compasses not only its retroactively posited past but also its own future, a future that is by definition never realized: it is the immanent future of this present, so that, when the present form disintegrates, it under- mines also its past and its future.
This is why Hegel was right to insist that the owl of Minerva takes off only at dusk; and this is why the standard Communist project was utopian precisely insofar as it was
not radical enough; that is, insofar as, in it, the fundamental capital- ist thrust of unleashed productivity survived, deprived of its concrete contradictory conditions of exis- tence. The insufficiency of Hei- degger, Adorno, and Horkheimer, etc. , resides in their abandonment of the concrete social analysis of capitalism: in their very critique or overcoming of Marx, they in a way repeat Marx's mistake--like Marx, they perceive the unleashed pro- ductivity as something ultimately independent of the concrete capital- ist social formation. Capitalism and Communism are not two different historical realizations, two species, of instrumental reason--instru- mental reason as such is capitalist, grounded in capitalist relations, and "really existing Socialism" failed be- cause it was ultimately a subspecies of capitalism, an ideological attempt to have a cake and eat it, to break from capitalism while retaining its key ingredient. In other words. Marx's notion of the Communist society is itself the inherent capital- ist fantasy; that is, a phantasmatic scenario for resolving the capitalist antagonism he so aptly described. In other words, our wager is that, even if we remove the teleological notion of Communism (the society of the fully unleashed productivity) as the implicit standard by which Marx, as it were, measures the alienation of the existing society, the bulk of his critique of political economy, the
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? ? ? insight into the self-propelling vi- cious cycle of capitalist (re)produc- tion, survives.
The task of today's thought is thus double: on the one hand, how to repeat the Marxist critique of political economy without the uto- pian/ideological notion of Com- munism as its inherent standard; on the other hand, how to imagine ef- fectively breaking out of the capital- ist horizon without falling into the trap of returning to the eminently premodern notion of a balanced, (self-)restrained society (the pre- Cartesian temptation to which most of today's ecology succumbs).
Slavoj Z? iz? ek is Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His latest publica- tions are Living in the End Times (Verso, 2010) and First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (Verso, 2010).
NOTES
1. G. K. Chesterton, "The Slavery of the Mind" (1929), www. basilica. org/pages/
ebooks/G. K. Chesterton-The Thing. pdf (accessed 8 July 2011).
2. G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (1926), www. worldinvisible. com/ library/chesterton/everlasting/content. htm (accessed 8 July 2011).
3. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 18-19.
4. There is a wonderfully vulgar Jewish joke about a Polish-Jewish wife, tired after a hard day's work, when her hus- band comes home, also tired but horny, telling her, "I cannot make love to you now, but I need a release--can you suck me and swallow my sperm, this would help me a lot! " The wife replies, "I am too tired to do that now, darling--why don't you just masturbate and finish in a glass, and I will drink it in the morn- ing! " Does not this wife--contrary to the cliche? about the holistic-intuitive reasoning of women as opposed to the masculine rational analysis--provide an example of the ruthless feminine use of Understanding, of its power to separate what naturally belongs together?
5. In a strict homology to this Hegelian logic, it is meaningless to demand that psychoanalysis be supplemented by psychosynthesis, reestablishing the organic unity of the person shattered by psychoanalysis: psychoanalysis already is this synthesis.
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