No More Learning

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. I consider the focus upon aporia intellectually sophisticated but unhelpful and unam- bitious with regard to the matter at hand: world politics (including religion), global capitalism, and the reinvention of democracy. (2007: 14)
I have included these comments for the following reason. In Derrida and the Political Beardsworth reads Hegel and Derrida together and apart through the question of mediation. Now, ten years later, he recalls them together through aporia, but finds similar weaknesses in both regarding the ambition for transformation. This sets me a doubly difficult problem, namely, to show how aporia is central to Hegel and Derrida, but also to dis- tinguish the significance and the ambition they attach to philosophy as the thinking of this aporia. The second problem is the harder one, for the
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charge that aporetic education is unambitious goes to the heart of educa- tion in Hegel. It asks, bluntly, is recollection, the grey in grey, too unambitious and, in a sense, a reduction of critique to tragic nostalgia? Each of the chap- ters in this book addresses this in some way, and in each of them I have been conscious of the charge of education in Hegel as politically unambitious. I will also address this charge directly towards the end of this chapter.
Derridean education
The Derridean philosophical project - and despite the fact that such a description might appear to invoke a form of closure, there is a Derridean project - holds within itself the claim that 'iteration alters: something new takes place' (Derrida, 1988: 40). The iterability of an element 'divides its own identity a priori' (1988: 53), and ensures 'a minimal remainder . . . in order that the identity of the selfsame be repeatable and identifiable in, through, and even in view of its alteration' (1988: 53). 4 Hence, the structure of iteration 'implies both identity and difference' (1988: 53). 5 The re-marked is what is remarkable. Since it carries the remarkable with it, and since the remainder is not 'a full or fulfilling presence' (1988: 53), iterability is the Derridean critique of identity per se. Iteration, diffe? rance and its remarkable return without loss, are therefore 'a differential structure escaping the logic of presence or the (simple or dialectical) opposition of presence and absence, upon which the idea of permanence depends' (1988: 53). Iterabil- ity, therefore, is not negative, for negativity presupposes a repose of identity as lost. Against this, diffe? rance is a structural theme carried in and as 'the positive condition of the emergence of the mark. It is iterability itself . . . passing between the re- of the repeated and the re- of the repeating, travers- ing and transforming repetition' (1988: 53). It is this open-endedness that draws support from many quarters for Derrida. Events are by definition already unfulfilled; understanding is already the impermanence of iterabil- ity; concepts are already doubled in the structural difference that is their very possibility. 'I will go even further,' says Derrida: 'the structure of the remainder, implying alteration, renders all absolute permanence impossi- ble. Ultimately remaining and permanence are incompatible' (1988: 54).
This question of education is lived by Derrida in the feeling of 'loss with- out return' (Derrida, 1995: 144). 'I am fortunate,' he says, for
I do not have any negative experience in this sense; everything that I live . . . is such that I would be capable of wishing it to start over again eter- nally. This is an affirmative desire in the sense in which Nietzsche defined
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Education in Hegel in Derrida 95 the eternal return in its relation to desire: let everything return eternally.
(1995: 144)
In eschewing this return as negative, here, Derrida hopes to set free this form of movement and transformation from any arrogance that it can also be its own content. There is a stoicism here in that decisions that surrender to divisibility and undecideability are 'the only decisions possible: impossi- ble ones' (1995: 147). There is also a scepticism, for in writing, as in saying, and in theory as in practice,
the most firmly decided is the decision to maintain the greatest possible tension between the two poles of the contradiction . . . what is the most decided is the will not to give up one or the other . . . it is a matter of affirming the most tense, most intense difference possible between the two extremes (1995: 151)
or of suspending the closure of one by the other. This also, at times, charac- terizes Derrida's relation to Hegel. For example, Derrida acknowledges his sharing the effect called philosophy with Hegel. Hegel, he says, may well be the 'express form' (1995: 140) of the desire for and project of absolute knowledge, but 'I seek it just like everyone else' (1995: 141). And in 'Vio- lence and Metaphysics' Derrida says that, in thinking the equivocal in speculation that is 'original and irreducible' (Derrida, 1978: 113), and in the need to 'accommodate duplicity and difference within speculation' (1978: 113), no one 'has attempted this more profoundly than Hegel' (1978: 113).
I want now in the following three sections to explore ways in which educa- tion plays a part in Derrida's work. I will look at Glas, Of Spirit and Rogues, respectively to see how each invokes a form or forms of transformation.
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.