No More Learning

We have seen, at the beginning of this century, that fossil fuel culture claims and will continue to claim the state of emergency and 'restoration' as its own unquestionable imperative. This freedom, this imperative, is absolute godless spirituality, and is evil. It has overcome nature yet it is also in a constant state of emergency in anticipating, knowing, that nature will only yield finite amounts of freedom. Running out of oil, whether as a disruption in supplies or as the end of oil reserves, will play itself out as the allegory of the fallen creature. Fascism will carry the crisis. It will offer the 'sanctuary' (Adorno, 1991: 87) of a dialectic of nihilism, inwardly experi- enced as the yearning for a restoration of itself with the freedom that is deserting it, and outwardly carrying out its imperative for restoration in ruthless fashion such that the dialectic of nihilism becomes the praxis of intrigue. At stake is how fossil fuel culture learns to represent itself as other to itself. Those who refuse this negation, this real loss of abstract freedom, will find in a state of emergency the authority to destroy others by protect- ing themselves. Those who can learn of culture as the representation of representation will learn of their collaboration in the illusions of fossil fuel freedoms and will recognize a relation to the universal. But do not be sur- prised then, when, 'at home', freedom demands armed guards at petrol stations, and 'abroad', it offers destruction to feed the aesthetic. In what may prove to be the coup de gra^ce of fascist culture, through the reproduc- tion of destruction on television and the Web, the categorical imperative of bourgeois freedom will itself be aestheticized. As such, even absolute destruction will not be recognized as a universal event. Ruin in fossil fuel culture is the absence of a notion of culture as representation at all. We are continually learning to enjoy (watching) the recognition that there is nothing we can do. That, above all else, is the triumph of culture as the
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of philosophy.
End of culture
There is a second way in which the spirit of Fascism represents itself; this is as the culture - or, really the lack of culture - of specific forms of philoso- phy. The term 'post-modern' refers to the state of emergency brought about in and through the dialectic of enlightenment. The totality of the latter is the experience of desertion by the universal and objectivity, and marks phi- losophy as the site of the ruin. In turn, this absence even of the possibility of resistance produces in consciousness a capitulation to the culture that represents this resignation. The ideology of the ideology of this culture is that it is representation without a notion of itself as culture. 7 Thought is denied its own expression as thinking, the dialectic of enlightenment ceases to 'examine itself' (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1979: xv) and thought is reduced to predatory voyeurism. Thus the culture of philosophy is the representa- tion of Fascism and the fascism of representation. Or, the same, the culture of philosophy is become representation without dialectic, without negation and without its difficult or aporetic relation to the universal.
As Adorno and Rose both note, representation is essential to philosophy for it is the dialectical relation between thought and being representing itself as thinking, as knowledge, and as philosophy. 8 The 'transcendence of truth beyond the meanings of individual words' (Adorno, 1973: 11), says Adorno, is the work of representation within philosophy. The 'more' is itself a mediation of that which expresses it. It is the relation, the difference, the dialectical experience of the more and 'the in-itself of this more' (1973: 12). But both Rose and Adorno draw attention to the ways in which phi- losophy 'would abolish representation' (Rose 1996: 55). Rose states, 'the translation of modern metaphysics into ontology involves, first and last, the overcoming of representation as the imperium of the modern philosophical subject, and as the false promise of universal politics' (1996: 55). This, she says, converges with 'the inner tendency of Fascism itself' (1996: 41). Ontology cannot discern between evil and positivity because ontology 'can only read experience as identitarian' (1996: 56). Thus, ontology reads 'the insistence on ground . . . [as] the process involved in the Nazi myth of racial superiority' (1996: 56) and refuses the experience of the modern subject its lack of iden- tity, its dialectic of enlightenment. Resignation before the desertion of truth and its consequent evil of posited identity characterizes 'the new
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ontology' (1996: 56). It cannot distinguish between self-identity as fixed and as fluid because it denies the experience of the relation. Without the experience, evil 'makes itself at home with itself' (Adorno, 1973: 26).
Adorno makes a similar case to Rose. In philosophies of the 'authentic', 'the authority of the absolute is overthrown by absolutized authority' (1973: 5). This form of absolute godless spirituality, complicit with the language that it strips of representational significance, offers itself as a refuge from the false promise of universal politics. However, it is, says Adorno, a refuge where 'a smoldering evil expresses itself as though it were salvation' (1973: 5). Rose notes that the new ontology gives 'Being to beings, who live and die' (Rose, 1996: 55). Adorno, more directly, observes that in relation to a phi- losophy where 'simply to be there becomes the merit of a thing' (1973: 21), beings could 'hardly do anything other than exist' (1973: 13). The jargon of authenticity marks the state of emergency for philosophy now, not because of the desertion of the universal from the creaturely, but from its absolution from desertion in Being. The year 1933 marks the state of emer- gency that responds to the ruin of universal politics and the philosophical subject by denying their formative significance. Good and evil, positive and negative, are therein released from their bondage to the autonomous moral subject and retrieved in their authenticity for states of Being. Thus, says Adorno,
positive and negative are reified prior to living experience, as though they were valid prior to all living experience of them; as though it was not thought that first of all determined what is positive or negative; and as though the course of such determination were not itself the course of negation. (1973: 21)
In terms of education in Hegel, this is to say that the jargon of the authen- ticity of Being posits the meaning of life and death as a voyeur of their struggle and not as the result of that struggle and the illusions it carries.
Dominant within philosophy then is the effacing of its formation within the baroque spirit of desertion, an effacing which is mourning in denial of itself. The dialectic of enlightenment has been traduced into the ideology of the ideology of philosophy and has resigned itself to the notion of totality that it gives to itself when it is no longer attached to itself as its own object. This fetishism of philosophy is again the inner tendency of Fascism. It destroys opposition, defines totality as equivalence, liquidates experience and the individual, posits illusory being as essence, separates thought from experience, aestheticizes the political, and, through the equivalence of
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unmediated singularity, reinforces the particularity of bourgeois freedom. In short, it suppresses 'the risk of the universal interest' (Rose, 1996: 62). 9
So, if the spirit of Fascism dominates not only the political reality of free- dom but also its image in and as philosophy, then might we conclude that culture itself, the representation of the relation of state and religion, is fas- cist through and through? Has modern bourgeois subjectivity become its own ideology, its own duplication? Has the dialectic irretrievably lost its substance, its political significance, to the un-dialectic of the immediacy of image and reality? Are we without an object of experience altogether? If autonomous thinking is resigned, if the dialectic is eschewed in favour of authenticity, and if fossil fuel culture becomes its own ideology of ideology, then the familiar question raises itself - can anything be done? This is the kind of question Adorno felt the need to defend himself against. In 'Resig- nation', he notes that critical theory was criticized for not producing a programme of action. His response was that resignation lies not in the rec- ognition that individuals are formed and deformed by culture and cannot change this 'merely through an act of their own will' (Adorno, 1991: 171). Rather, resignation is reserved for those who find relief from the cognition of impotence by action. As such, 'the feeling of a new security is purchased with the sacrifice of autonomous thinking' (1991: 174). The question of theory and practice, however, is borne of the same ideology of ideology, the same fascism of representation and representation of Fascism that it would overcome. This is both its strength and its weakness. The fact that we are implicated in political and philosophical cultures is our formation, our deformation and our re-formation. This notion of totality is qualitatively different from a fascist notion of totality as conformity and equivalence, for here culture retrieves itself as its own object.
Any return of the object of thought to itself as thinking, or as our philo- sophical education, is not the overcoming of fascist culture, but it is the philosophical re-education regarding a notion of totality that fascist culture attributes to itself. To know fascist totality is to know complicity, even in going to the pictures. And to know complicity is to know how to think the dangers, the violence, of guarding our 'particular interests' (Rose, 1996: 62). In the cinema as in the traffic queue, the aestheticization of the political is politicized by the negation of the particular for whom traffic or the audi- ence is everyone except himself. These are strange places to experience the universal, but then, they are cultural experiences. 'We are always staking ourselves in the representation of Fascism and the fascism of representa- tion throughout the range of quotidian practices and cultural rituals' (Rose, 1996: 61). It is an educational matter, then, to learn to comprehend them
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differently, not in the kind of cultural studies which only deals in 'close ups of the things around us by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects' (Benjamin, 1992: 229) but by the form and content of philosophical think- ing that can retain the relation of such experiences to the object as to itself. Such philosophy is representation and as such is both the fascism of repre- sentation and the representation of Fascism.
Illusion
Another way of stating the education described in the previous paragraph is as education in Hegel. If this education was seen above as able to survive the end of culture in the quotidian experiences of the traffic queue and the cinema, and even in turning on a light bulb, it also persists in an equally unlikely way in Hegelian philosophy. Education in Hegel is present for itself in the shapes that insist on its disappearance.
The education in Hegel that forms the substance of each chapter in this book has its ground in one of Hegel's most difficult ideas, that of the groundlessness of illusory being. As we will now see, illusory being is death in life, dependence in independence, and the other in the self. In each of these relations the illusion is that there is no relation. Education in Hegel retrieves this relation while recognizing that even such retrieval is grounded in the groundlessness of illusion. The significance of illusion here is that it can retrieve for philosophical thought an object where it appears that no such object exists. In the concrete case of fossil fuel culture - where the object has been assimilated into the aesthetic of fossil fuel freedom, and where the paradox of complicity has nothing to set itself against, and where paradox and complicity thus melt away without substance - this means that philosophy can find an otherness to the totality of its freedom.
The political significance of illusory being is that the illusory mastery of the bourgeois is still a substantive self-re-formation, because illusion here is itself determinative, or educational. The logic of essence in Hegel's Science of Logic is really the logic of the illusions of essence. Being is saved for itself when essence makes it its own. As such, essence holds itself to be the inde- pendence of being. But essence, like all mastery, avoids the dependence of its mastery upon an other. It avoids its own vulnerability by exporting other- ness beyond itself, failing here to recollect otherness within itself. This illusion is concrete as the subjective reflective thinker, for whom reflection is autonomy. As such, the mastery of this essence is a positing of life as without death, or of essence as without nothingness. It is, as we saw in Chapter One above, life understood from the point of view of the victor in the life and
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death struggle. It is really only a non-essence, a merely illusory essence, an illusory mastery. As the truth of the master is the slave so, here, the truth of illusory being is really the nothingness of being that it rejects as other than itself and to itself. In one manifestation the awareness of the illusory foun- dation of essence here is scepticism. This is because reflection, aware of itself as illusion, believes itself unable to think the truth of anything, for each thought that it holds to be true will be undermined by the groundless- ness of all thought. Thus it appears that scepticism is as far as thought can go. The mastery of such scepticism is really a violence against itself, where thought attacks thought. When this is believed to have no educational import for thought, scepticism becomes the aesthetic of destruction. This, as we saw above, characterizes the illusion of fossil fuel freedoms, that totality is null and that actions therefore have no other.
But scepticism is at best only one third of a triadic philosophical educa- tion. The harder education, now, is that regarding how illusion can be substantive, and can be educative as self-determinative. This determinate substance is already content10 within scepticism but not yet recognized or disturbed as such. This content(ment) is carried in the illusion of life as something without nothing, of life without death, of ground without also groundlessness. Reflective subjective essence enjoys this as the idea of itself as completely separate from nothingness. Here, mastery and scepticism are the one reflective freedom. Politically, in fossil fuel culture, this freedom is total in the exclusion of otherness from all sovereign masters. It defines what a 'free' man is, masking the groundlessness of this definition in and by the illusion that fear, death, or other have no part to play here. As such, essence as illusion has no object that can compromise it, for it is related to all externality as freedom from it, and internally, it is related to itself by the absence of such objects. What fossil fuel culture adds to this illusion, as we have seen already, is that externality is in fact no object and that fossil fuel freedom has no responsibilities except to itself. Its actions have no object but themselves, and these are aesthetic.
How, then, can the inherent instability of such political illusion become an object to itself in such a way as to know its freedom re-formed against itself? The philosophical education here is of illusory being learning that, as reflection, it is the reflection of nothing. This contains a crucial ambigu- ity. As the reflection of nothing it is nothing. As the reflection of nothing it is something. It is what it is: the reflection of nothing, grounded in groundless- ness. This education is open to two misrecognitions of current interest.
The first is that this self-mediation, in undermining essence, lends itself to the hope for some form of intersubjective middle between reflective subjects,
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often conceived as mutual recognition. The second is that this self- mediation is seen to impose itself as an infinitely reproduced difference from itself that eschews all identity thinking, including that grounded in intersubjectivity and the logos. Both of these responses are less than and more than the philosophical education that illusion contains. They both posit something other to illusion, rather than see their own complicity within the totality of the other also as illusion. Both responses, the positive over- coming of illusion and the unknowable (excessive) condition of its possibility, essentially posit that of which they are already the return. Suppressing this education leaves only what Hegel calls external reflection.
It is to education in Hegel that we now turn in order to understand better the philosophical education that illusion commends. It contains within it immediacy, mediation, and the Aufhebung. As immediacy it is the posited sovereignty of the reflective subject. As mediated it is brought into relation with death, with that which is other to itself, and in this case it is where something is brought into relation with nothing. How it understands itself in this relation is the actuality of social and political relations. In fossil fuel culture the relation to death is the relation of freedom without a real object, and where the universal aspect of any action is represented to the voyeur as being without relation to it and thus liberated from responsibility for it. As such, fossil fuel culture is denuded of any educational significance regard- ing the relation of the universal to personal freedom and hides also the way in which culture achieves this. The truth of fossil fuel culture is that nothing happens. It will require education in Hegel to retrieve what happens when nothing happens.
What happens when nothing happens is that education happens, and this education is both the theory and the practice of the relation of life with death, of self with other, and of freedom with its object. Illusion is just such an education. Essence has an independence that is merely posited: it is illu- sory being. When illusion learns of itself as illusory being this is not an overcoming of illusion. It is the truth of illusion known as illusion in illu- sion. This is the nature of the Aufhebung here. It knows to know the ground of illusion and the negation of the ground of illusion to be the same ground- lessness. This does not resolve the two groundless elements of illusion and its negation. Rather, it is their being learned. What is the 'same' here is that neither of them, neither illusion nor its negation, are the same as them- selves. It is in illusion that essence is both already other to itself and that what is other to it is not essence. Illusion is this truth for itself and it is in our philosophical education that illusion is both the theory and practice of this truth - its formation, its negation, and its re-formation in this recollection.
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The truth of illusion is the truth of the negation of the negation, the truth that is groundless. It is this notion of truth that can retrieve the missing uni- versal from within the end of culture and within fossil fuel freedom.
Education in Hegel teaches that it is in the illusions of the master in fossil fuel culture that the latent fascism of this objectless political form becomes unstable and collapses. But without the philosophical education that illu- sion does have substance, that in the recollection of illusion something does happen, there will remain only the end of culture, an empty repetition of illusion without meaning. And this latter captures completely the stand- point of fossil fuel culture. Education in Hegel is a re-formed relation to the paradox of contingency and to the other that is hidden within fossil fuel mastery. It asks of us that we learn to do justice to aporia and not to aban- don it as a dead end. Doing justice to fossil fuel culture means complicity as education and not, as in the academic workshop, complicity without educa- tion. It is the retrieval of such a concept of implication which provides for rather than effaces the relation to the universal.
Nevertheless, the ideology of fossil fuel culture provides the current and most likely the future form and content of representation, of thinking. As the oil runs out, so representation of the universal in fossil fuel freedoms will become increasingly difficult. Each time I drive my car the universal is ideologically represented. Each time I cannot drive my car the universal will assert itself. But without learning how this assertion is another representa- tion of freedom, another politics, and another understanding of thinking, the universal will remain unthinkable within fossil fuel freedom. It is not just a question of new and renewable sources of energy. It is also a question of renewing political and philosophical education regarding the nature of fos- sil fuel freedom. To renew energy sources in order only to repeat fossil fuel freedom will repeat eternally the crisis that feeds our fascistic desires. There may not be long to wait before the fascism of the representation of fossil fuel culture meets the universal that it eschews in a war for its own survival. Even that, however, may not be enough to retrieve its universal significance from the spectacle of war.
Notes
1 Though I note that at the time of writing some are arguing that OPEC has exag- gerated the levels of oil reserves.
2 See Tubbs (2005a).
3 I have explored this double relation in much greater detail as philosophy's higher
education. See Tubbs, 2004. It is also the philosophical insight underpinning my study of the philosophy of the teacher in Tubbs (2005b).
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4 The chapter that this is taken from in Rose's Judaism and Modernity is also reprinted in Marcus and Nead, (1998) 85-117.
5 From Adorno, 1991: 159.
6 This remark is relevant here as a critique of fossil fuel culture but not as a descrip-
tion of education in Hegel.
7 This is a charge that Rose (1981) makes of Marxism in the final chapter of Hegel
Contra Sociology.
8 A case can also be made that for Benjamin representation is the form and the
content of the transcendental and the speculative relation of philosophical expe-
rience. See, for example, Caygill, 1998, chapter 1.
9 Author's italics removed.
10 The double meaning here is intentional.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Chapter 4
Education in Hegel in Derrida
[I]n her [Gillian Rose's] critical engagement with Derrida in particular, there are chapters yet to be written.
(Wood, 2002: 117)
Introduction
In this chapter I read education in Hegel alongside and apart from philo- sophical education in Derrida. This involves looking both at how Derrida extricates philosophy and transformation from absolute spirit, that is, from absolute knowing, and at the kind of education, influenced by his view of absolute spirit, that underpins the idea of diffe? rance. I will make the case here that diffe? rance is grounded in a misunderstanding of the nature and character of Hegelian absolute spirit. 1 That is to say, Derrida does not com- prehend the absolute in education in Hegel, but he does recognize the importance of philosophy and of aporia within it as transformative. In short, I will argue that Derrida posits the absolute in absolute spirit not as educa- tion in Hegel but as a dogma of totality, and because of this he seeks to protect for philosophy what is educational in spirit from its being engulfed in this dogma. The goal of diffe? rance, therefore, is to retrieve for philosophy the movement of doubling in spirit while rejecting its triadic totality in Hegelian Aufhebung. Like many Hegelians before him, Derrida wants the power of aporetic critique without the baggage of the absolute. He wants to keep the content of the form of aporetic education something yet-to-come, something undecideable. In doing so, Derrida takes non-absolute Hege- lianism as far as and perhaps further than anyone else in the recent history of Western philosophy.
The chapter is in eight sections. The first speaks of Hegelian hesitations regarding Derridean aporia by way of Richard Beardsworth. This raises con- siderably what is at stake politically as well as philosophically between Hegel and Derrida in terms of transformation. The second section introduces the
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idea of transformation in Derrida's philosophy. The third, fourth and fifth sections look to Glas, Of Spirit and Rogues, respectively for clues as to the nature of education that underpins these works. The sixth section explores ways in which the Derridean notion of transformation avoids its totality as complicity and avoids therein the truth of its own spirit. The penultimate section explores fear and sovereignty in Hegelian and Derridean aporetic philosophical education, while a short conclusion returns to Beardsworth's concern about lack of ambition in Hegel. In sum, while it can be seen that Derrida seeks to employ the power of aporetic philosophical education as critique, in fact he avoids its most difficult moment by exporting its open- ness to otherness - it's own otherness and that of others to it - as something beyond the actuality of political education. Derrida always had the opportu- nity to find in diffe? rance the truth of identity and difference, but, even in returning to reason in later work, he still refused the Aufhebung its truth in and as transformation. 2
Derrida and the political
In his book Derrida and the Political (1996) Richard Beardsworth makes the timely warning against seeing Hegel as 'the major philosophical forerunner of twentieth century political terror' (1996: 159) and against the 'common- place of contemporary French philosophy that Hegel is "the" thinker of identity' (1996: 47). Indeed, he defines two ways in which Hegel and Derrida are close by each other. First, diffe? rance and the Aufhebung are both philoso- phies of complicity, working from within the conceptual logic to comprehend in Hegel their fate and in Derrida their being contaminated. 'Both philoso- phies,' he says, 'can be considered as descriptions of the "economies" between law, its violence, the exclusions which violence engenders and the return of what is excluded' (1996: 72). As such, Hegel and Derrida should 'be thought together, their differences articulated, and not placed in oppo- sition' (1996: 72).
The second way in which Beardsworth sees Hegel and Derrida close by each other comes in what he calls his 'hesitation' (1996: 95) regarding Derrida's conceptualizing of the disavowal of time that conditions meta- physics and logic. He asks whether, by returning logic to the aporia of time, Derrida in fact misses the chance for 'transforming' (1996: 96) the logic that suppresses the aporia. Does Derrida risk 'leaving the historic-material determinations of time too "undetermined"' (1996: 96) and in turn leave the promise, the unknowable, appearing 'too formal? ' (1996: 154). If so, it is
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a formality that freezes Derrida's deconstructions of the tradition 'into a finite, but open set of "quasi-transcendental" logics which turn the relation between the human and the technical into a "logic" of supplementarity with- out history' (1996: 154). This hesitation, Beardsworth notes, is of 'Hegelian inspiration'(1996: 96) and concerns the need for 'Hegelian mediation' (1996: 97).
However, I want also to note that in more recent work Beardsworth's Hegelian hesitations have developed into the need to think the centre between what we might be (religion) and what we are (politics). Philosophy in Hegel, says Beardsworth, is the labour required to know this difference. But how, he asks, is this to be known within a globalized diremption of particular and universal enacted on the one hand as the abstract freedom of the individual in unmediated civil society and, on the other, as the pro- saic finite gods of materialism and militarism? He argues that thinking the centre of this global diremption 'may well be beyond human intervention and creativity, but it remains a theoretical and political necessity' (2007: 2). 3 It will require identity and difference to be thought together and not, there- fore, as the excess of French thought nor the tragic mourning of recognition as misrecognition that is the causality of fate of Hegelian philosophy. For Beardsworth, if I may put it this way, Hegel's 'grey on grey' is always too late, and Derrida's diffe? rance is never in time.
I cannot here address directly Beardsworth's case for the centre being constituted as secular political love nor on his strategic use of the early Hegel in doing so. However, I do want to note what he says now regarding his Derrida and the Political. In the latter he says, I
brought Hegel and Derrida together, at least initially, through the think- ing of aporia. I am no longer in agreement with this position.