No More Learning

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
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Education in Hegel in Derrida 105
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
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 106 Education in Hegel
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,
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Education in Hegel in Derrida 107
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.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 108 Education in Hegel
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
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Education in Hegel in Derrida 109
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
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 110 Education in Hegel
voices of reason that can speak the hard truth that this protection (i. e. dif- fe? rance) is keeping vulnerable non-sovereignty from itself, from its truth. There is a sense in which diffe? rance takes for itself emergency powers to sus- pend spirit so that it may not be allowed to become sovereign completion. It appears therefore to suspend spirit for spirit's own sake, knowing what is good for it. But as with all emergency powers, law is suspended in order to invoke the law of suspension. The truth of this autoimmunity is kept away from spirit according the law of suspension. As such the truth of this auto- immunity is exported beyond itself, exposing the positing in the suspension of spirit of what is other to spirit.
We have seen in earlier chapters that exporting otherness beyond its being known aporetically in and as the self is the manifestation of misrecog- nition as political reality, and as political power. Otherness as the to-come, as the undecideable, is an emergency measure to provide for a concept of otherness that diffe? rance believes spirit and modernity incapable of keeping safe from total assimilation and corruption. But this has been Derrida's point all along. Keeping the other safe in this way is suicidal. Derrida wants to see the weaker force take 'account of the incalculable so as to give an account of it, there where this appears impossible, so as to account for or reckon with it, that is to say, with the event of what or who comes' (2005: 159). Yet, in fact, the weaker force is being protected by diffe? rance precisely from giving an account of it as itself, that is, as the autoimmunity of rational freedom as spirit. Derrida in the final analysis, protects political complicity from being its own determinative concept of political mastery and vulnera- bility. Diffe? rance can be such a concept, but not while it exiles the educative and formative content of absolute spirit from the comprehension of this concept. 18
This brings us, then, to the different notions of transformation that Derrida and Hegel work with. When diffe? rance is related to a concept of rea- son that is defined by undecideability, what remains is a suspension lacking the transformative capacity that it seeks. Derrida's notion of transformative aporetic philosophical education - iteration alters: something new takes place - is left without the resources to know how to know what this altera- tion is. Doubling, Glas, autoimmunity and suspension are therefore not alteration at all. They never learn about learning and as such they are a repetition of the same education, a repetition of the emergency powers that suspends the truth of education for the sake for education. Diffe? rance, refused self-determination, never transforms because it is never trans- formed. What diffe? rance will never grant is the suspending of its suspension such that it might learn and therein transform itself. 'Iteration alters'
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Education in Hegel in Derrida 111
(Derrida, 1988: 40) is therefore only an intrigue. If transformation is by a reason/diffe? rance that contradicts itself then reason/diffe? rance is the dialec- tic of enlightenment. If it is by repentance then reason/diffe? rance is spirit. And if vulnerable non-sovereignty is 'a completely different story', how is this possible without the alteration of ipseity and diffe? rance, without, that is, an Aufhebung that is determined from within their own autoimmunity, and not avoided behind the autoimmunity of everything else? Even in his dra- matic (re)turn to reason Derrida is still part of the emergency government charged with saving reason literally from itself. The result of this fear of self- completion is that in everything, save that of reason as spirit, Derrida identifies the government of the self in the definition of the other. The aporia of reason as spirit is denied this implication of itself in the other because it is denied the implication of itself as other to itself. Even the weaker force that acts without sovereignty has sovereignty in the weakness. But the kind of sovereignty it has, this is what remains for philosophy to comprehend in and of itself. This comprehension, spoken of by Derrida now as reason, requires reason to know itself in the otherness that deter- mines it. Such a comprehension has all along been the telos of education in Hegel.
Fear of sovereignty
In conclusion, then, Derrida's philosophy remains one of the greatest adventures of absolute spirit and its misrecognition of itself in modern times. But it is his lack of faith in this misrecognition that returns his philos- ophy to him without ever having comprehended its own truth. Believing absolute spirit incapable of holding truth safe from the totality of differ- ence-opposition, and believing it truthful that he should do so, he legislates against the autoimmunity of modern freedom believing himself to be legis- lating for it, for its possibility. He suspends freedom because he does not believe it is formative and re-formative of itself in the present. He thus avoids the totality of Aufhebung, a totality that we have seen in an earlier chapter19 consists in revolution and re-formation, that is, in the circle of its comprehension and in the aporia of the comprehension of its circling. Thus, Hegel says, 'the tremendous difference in the world-historical situa- tion is whether men are only implicitly [potentially] free or whether they know that it is their fundamental truth, nature, or vocation, to live as free [actual] individuals' (Hegel, 1987: 75). Hegel's Aufhebung accepts this total complicity in the social relations of mastery, that is, in abstract bourgeois social relations and the domination of abstract reason, in a way that the
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 112 Education in Hegel
weaker force of non-sovereignty is denied in Derrida. What is required is for philosophy to retrieve the revolution and re-formation of reason within this, its own autoimmunity, and this means accepting culpability within the stronger force in a way that Derrida, for fear of sovereignty, does not do. As we have seen in earlier chapters, the export of fear is precisely the ground of modern sovereignty.
The real differences between Derrida and Hegel regarding aporetic philosophical education, then, become especially sharp in the political implications of their respective notions. In Derrida, we have to observe a lack of total complicity within his philosophy of complicity. It might amuse, I suppose, to be criticising Derrida for not being as open to the contradic- tions of totality as Hegel. At those moments when the otherness of diffe? rance could have come to know itself not merely as dogma but also as its own transformative form and content, Derrida seems to suffer a crisis of nerve, and he retreats to the presupposition that truth must not contain its own otherness as its education. We saw above how in one such moment of crisis in Glas Derrida invoked the event, not just as the circle of circles but as the spiral that refuses completion. This is a very telling educational metaphor in Derrida. If education is merely the circle of the same then there appears here to be no possibility of change. Therefore the spiral is needed to illus- trate alteration such that the same does not return to itself but develops. However, the aporia here is that if the circle returns to the same the I does not develop, and if the spiral turns without returning there is no I to com- prehend itself within that development. The spiral is not the metaphor for open-ended education that it at first appears to be. The spiral's develop- ment must return if it is to know of this as education. The subject and substance of aporetic education and of the Hegelian Aufhebung is here, in the impossibility of an education that can return and develop being known as both return and development in the impossibility, that is, in and as learning.
To herald a pledge, a promise, an originary, an impossibility and an unde- cideability is to refuse mastery one last time, and each time. It is to see the domination practised by the logos in opposition, abstraction, contradiction, and negation, but it is also to avoid this political totality by positing truth as other without return and without self-determination. It is to know complic- ity as mastery but still to refuse to become master. The irony here is this. It is when Derrida refuses absolute mastery that he is most totally master whereas, in Hegel, it is because he accepts the totality of mastery that, as master, he can know alteration in iteration. This is the difference between the two modes of education in Derrida and Hegel. It is the master alone
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Education in Hegel in Derrida 113
who can know of and be changed by his experience of his own autoimmu- nity. It is the nature of political complicity in modern bourgeois social relations that absolute vulnerability and non-sovereignty are already a polit- ical reality in the master and it is he who will also know this fragility as a formative experience. This, again, is education in Hegel.
This is not, then, a political experience imbued with a pledge from beyond. This is an experience of freedom, within freedom, by freedom. It is an experience of the truth of complicity in freedom and of freedom in complicity. This is a doubling that does not have the luxury of excess, and where even what remains is consumed by mastery. This appears hopeless and resigned until and unless they are experienced as having their truth within education. Education is never resigned or hopeless because re-form- ing is the truth of what education is, and in this case it re-forms how we understand both hopelessness and resignation. This re-forming of totality within totality is the hard philosophical lesson of modern social and politi- cal contingency, and it is where and how the absolute appears in these modern social relations. Hegelian Aufhebung does not avoid the experience of vulnerability having its own truth in the master as his spiritual education. But there is no alteration in an iteration that merely affirms itself as unde- cideable. The master is decided already. This is the political implication of modern philosophy. It is from here that philosophy must have already begun. Derrida does not seek to avoid this political totality. Indeed, it is his aim to avoid avoiding it. He says that to do philosophy is 'to project the greatest mastery over all the possible discourses of mastery and to renounce it. The two things go together . . . [it is] a modesty haunted by the devil' (1995: 140). He is right here. But modest mastery in diffe? rance is protected against because the master can immodestly control the definition of mas- tery by which he is to be judged. The weakness and vulnerability of the master, as the master/slave relation makes clear, is in his mastery, and the greater this recognition, the greater, too, the modesty.
I have tried to show in this chapter how Derrida's protection of philoso- phy from the absolute has distorted his understanding of the Aufhebung and of education in Hegel. Derrida's notion of transformative aporetic educa- tion precludes from itself the truth in education that Derrida seeks for dif- fe? rance, for deconstruction, for iteration and for autoimmunity. Diffe? rance, the effect of iteration, has always disavowed itself of any triadic structure by refusing its construction within and by negation. To refuse negation is to avoid 'the self who is other and the other who is not me'. It results, as we have seen, in Derrida exporting otherness beyond spirit in order to protect spirit from its dogmatic assimilation of otherness. It is this avoidance of the
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 114 Education in Hegel
negative and self-otherness that has the result of transformation in Derrida being form without content, a dialectic of nihilism. 20 The result has been that commentators search for ways in which diffe?