No More Learning

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.
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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. 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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94 Education in Hegel
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
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(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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