No More Learning

Glas
Glas provokes the autoimmunity of Hegelian Aufhebung beyond itself in excess of the totality of difference-opposition in modern Western philoso- phy. In doing so Derrida presents us with a remarkable spiritual exercise in complicity in order to illustrate how close by each other the transformation of diffe? rance and the education of Geist really are. As we will see, his strategy here is to prioritize the totality of spirit in order to find diffe? rance within it. There is still the claim of diffe? rance as the to-come, but the strategy here for
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transformation is to read diffe? rance as much within the totality of Geist as possible.
At the beginning of Glas Derrida grants totality to Hegel, and admits that to begin Glas is already, always not to have 'yet read, heard or understood Hegel' (Derrida, 1986: 4), but also, at the same time, to be already, always, within Hegel in that lack of reading, hearing or understanding. 'So, already, one would be found entrained in the circle of the Hegelian beginning' (1986: 4). Yet, says Derrida, if the Aufhebung is 'the schema of the internal division, of self-differentiation as self-determination and self-production of the concept' (1986: 7) how, then, can it also leave this family relation for the ethical life of work and law? Is there room here for the ambiguity of a bastard offspring, both within and without the family, 'that will have to feign to follow naturally the circle of the family? ' (1986: 6). If so, how will this bastard know itself? Within the family there is a pressure of belonging that is therefore accompanied by a pressure to belong. Family pressure (Trieb) is already a division of inner and outer, even in being the family. Philosophy is the (unwelcome) calculation of this division, a calculation grounded - presupposed - in the appearance of division or pressure as opposition. The latter is felt as 'a lack [that] I try to fill up' (1986: 25). 'To relieve the terms of the opposition, the effects of the division' (1986: 95) is the unique inter- est of philosophy. Glas traces the relation of this relief to its condition of possibility in difference-opposition. 6
Derrida's critique here is not only of philosophy as a calculation of relief from opposition. It is also a critique of the way philosophy assumes opposi- tion and its relief as its logos. This is the central argument of Glas. Spirit may claim itself as this speculative circular relation but in fact philosophy's com- plicity with opposition, a complicity that sees them claim the whole for themselves, is a suppression of the pressure of the family circle. Indeed, not just a suppression, but a relief of this family pressure in the calculation of opposition and its overcoming. This relief is philosophy's and Hegel's Aufhebung. Starting from opposition, it calculates resolution around the need to belong, and issues a relief, a copulation and a copula of its own that in erasing pressure claims beginning, end and working middle as its own. The bastard performs here an 'anti-erection' (1986: 26) or an 'upside-down erection' (1986: 81). He does not simply reproduce (family, pressure); he reproduces in such a way as to reclaim the natural, to ingest it as his own merely undeveloped moment. This is, therefore, a Derridean critique of the Hegelian Aufhebung. The extent to which it is also a critique of recollec- tion and education in Hegel we will return to in due course.
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The development of this Aufhebung as anti-erection sees the family struc- ture overturned in and by this new conceptual logic of relief and ingestion. Where pressure held the family together, speculative relief rebuilds the family from within opposition. A family built on the principle of the bastard takes a recognizably contradictory and speculative form. 'The son is son only in his ability to become father, his ability to supply or relieve the father, in his occupying his place by becoming the father of the father, that is, of the son's son. A father is always his grandfather and his son his own grand- son' (1986: 81). In the same way, Derrida relieves Hegel's family pressure. The young Hegel who anticipates Hegelianism and completes Hegelianism is not only the adolescent become mature, but is where 'the Hegelian tree is also turned over; the old Hegel is the young Hegel's father only in order to have been his son, his great-grandson' (1986: 84).
As an example of family pressure relieved in this way Derrida turns to the role of the sister in Hegelian immediate ethical life, and in particular to the opposition between the 'law of singularity and the law of universality' (1986: 142). Human law is male, public, and visible; it is the activity of the known and its being known. Divine law is 'the law of woman' (1986: 142), more natural, nocturnal, hidden. The natural moment of pure singularity for the brother who does not yet know the 'universality-producing labour in the city' (1986: 143) is death. But even here there is work in the form of mourn- ing that, 'as the economy of the dead' (1986, 143), retrieves/returns nature to spirit. Denied burial, as in Antigone, the two laws come into conflict. Yet Derrida criticizes Hegel's reading here in the Phenomenology as being based exclusively on a Western Greek family model and, consequently, restricting itself only to a limited number of relations. This plays itself out as two anti- nomical family relations; one the conjugal relation from which nothing leaves, and one the parental relation whose outpouring of nature cannot return. Of greater interest to Derrida is 'the infinite superiority of the bond between brother and sister' (1986: 148). Here brother and sister are not related through desire, nor through recognition. They are related neither as male and female, nor as activity and passivity, nor as civic persons. How then can they be naturally related to each other without desire or depen- dency? Hegel's answer is that the sister is the 'highest intuitive awareness of what is ethical' (Hegel, 1977: 274), both natural and free. Yet this highest intuitive awareness is relieved within the system, ingested by the Aufhebung that sees the brother become citizen and the sister get married. Or, in other words, difference is again relieved as opposition, or diffe? rance is present only as the male perspective and as the work of knowledge. Derrida states here that
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the opposition between difference and qualitative diversity is a hinge of the greater Logic. Diversity is a moment of difference, an indifferent dif- ference, an external difference, without opposition. As long as the two moments of difference (identity and difference since identity differs, as identity) are in relationship only to themselves and not to the other, as long as identity does not oppose itself to difference or difference to iden- tity, there is diversity. So diversity is a moment both of difference and identity, it being understood, very expressly, that difference is the whole and its own proper moment. (1986: 168)
But, he continues, when natural difference is overcome then 'we pass on to difference as opposition' (1986: 168). Only here is diversity now its own seed, and thus autoimmune in 'opening itself to negativity and in becoming opposition' (1986: 168). This is to deconstruct opposition, then, to find the condition of its possibility in diffe? rance, and not in desire in general. There is no desire 'in general' (1986: 169) prior to difference and identity as opposition. Derrida here rules out any a priori transcendental or immediate- natural difference that is not already 'difference-opposition' (1986: 168). This is the significance for philosophy of diffe? rance as philosophy. Diffe? rance is always already opposition, and all reconciliation is by necessity tragic. Ethical life is already culpability in difference-opposition.
Derrida is clear about the thesis that Glas carries.
Whether it be a matter of ferment or fervour, the tumultuous opposition of the two 'principles' is always at work: the feminine (night and natural silence of substance) and the masculine (light, logos of self-consciousness, becoming-subject of substance). This opposition, like opposition in gen- eral, will have been at once the manifestation of difference. . . and the process of its effacement or its reappropriation. As soon as difference determines itself, it determines itself as opposition; it manifests itself to be sure, but its manifestation is at the same time . . . the reduction of dif- ference, of the remain(s), of the gap. That is the thesis. (1986: 235-36)
This is Derrida's reading of the totality of Hegelian Aufhebung. Its starting point is an opposition that, as the reheating of the remains, seeks therein also to assimilate them, 'to cook, eat, gulp down, interiorize the remain(s) without remains' (1986: 236). The crumbs that are left are themselves appropriated in the Last Supper where opposition determines itself such that nothing shall go to waste; there shall be no remains: Sa. Absolute knowing.
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In Glas, then, it is the status assigned to difference-opposition that separates Derrida from Hegel. Derrida sees difference-opposition in Hegel as absolute and self-completing in Geist. For Derrida, however, diffe? rance is the manifestation of the event,7 the 'annulus of exchange' (1986: 242), which, in keeping open the remain(s) of difference as opposition, guards the present against the closure of the to-come. Diffe? rance therefore is not just the 'circle of circles' (1986: 245), it is also a spiral capable of transform- ing closure into the openness of the to-come.
The architecture of Glas also sees Geist prioritized, something that is nec- essary to represent both the totality of Geist and its remain(s). Spirit re-heats the remains and rises from nature as 'the phallic column' (1986: 248) on each page. Diffe? rance is present in the rising as that which 'does not let itself be thought by the dialectics to which it, however, gives rise' (1986: 243). It is the 'singular repercussion of interiority in exteriority' (1986: 250). It is Glas. However, Geist is also prioritized in the architecture of Glas in a further way. The beginning of Glas, as we saw, is already Hegel. The end of Glas, now, is also Hegel. To be consistent to the totality of difference-opposition in and as Glas, ethical life must triumph again over nature in order to arrive at what the family was - is - at the beginning. Hegelian totality encompasses Glas completely for now it is clear that Glas has to be Hegelian to be able to begin at all. At the moment when nature is relieved by subjectivity, by 'man, free, self-knowing spirit' (1986: 256),8 it is the time for pressure and relief to discuss their differences. It is time for the Dionysian circle to meet the Christian circle and to converse regarding its (their) relation. But such a discussion 'runs to its ruin for it counted without . . . Hegel' (1986: 262-1),9 who returns the remain(s) to nature and spirit (again). What remains for us are the remains which we 'will not have been able to think without him. For us, here, now: these words are citations, already, always, we will have learned that from him' (1986: 1), again.
In this way, Glas is a remarkable suspension not only of the autoimmunity of Geist, but also of the differences between Geist and diffe? rance. 10 The whole circle of Glas is Hegelian; the columns that emerge from nature on each page are the triumph of calculation rising from reheating the remain(s). But its resonance, its suppressed other that is other to difference-opposi- tion while also being in it, is Glas. In this sense Glas is the totality of the to-come that is resonant even within the totality of Hegelian Aufhebung, a totality that cannot be avoided if diffe? rance is to be (un)known. Glas, in its totality beyond its totality - even in the to-come of Geist - is also diffe? rance. The suspension of Geist and diffe? rance here is the remarkable, an iteration that alters and wherein something new takes place. It is, we might say,
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a Derridean form of Aufhebung.
It marks excess as well as completion as the truth of the totality of Geist, and does so unmistakably around the idea of diffe? rance which carries this movement as alteration, that is, as philosophical education.
Of Spirit
I want now to explore how this totality of Geist as an autoimmunity that exceeds itself pertains to political critique in Of Spirit. In particular, I want to look at how Derrida sees the complicity of diffe? rance within Geist is first maintained by Heidegger but then abandoned. The strategy of suspension is here referred to by Derrida as 'doubling' and it is in doubling that trans- formation is carried here.
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.