No More Learning

As we have seen, Derrida has been comfortable to work with the auto- immunity of spirit. The brilliance of Glas is that it seeks not to avoid the circle of spirit. Yet, even here, the reading of the Aufhebung as relief eschews the truth and totality of spirit as always in struggle without relief. Relief is as unrelieved as everything else in the totality of Geist. This is what is learned
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in and as philosophy in education in Hegel. The event of the to-come is in fact relief for Derrida from what is deemed or presupposed to be unac- ceptable in absolute spirit. The brilliance of Rogues is that reason is not avoided in the aporia of democracy. But the aporetic non-sovereignty of reason - spirit - is avoided. Indeed, Derrida has always sought to protect spirit from itself as its own truth, fearing this closure, this self-knowing, as unacceptable. Derrida does not believe that absolute spirit can think radi- cal alterity without engorging it into self-knowing, and therefore he needs to keep alive the possibility of the to-come that absolute spirit snuffs out. It is this presupposition of what is unacceptable for spirit that Derrida pro- tects by way of diffe? rance. This is the unacknowledged mastery that grounds Derrida's critique of sovereignty.
In fact, the problem of mastery is not just the opposite of what Derrida understands it to be. It is in its triadic structure of opposition and identity that spirit has an absolute vulnerability to its own sovereignty. In ruling out the education carried in and by the triadic 'and', diffe? rance, iteration, decon- struction, autoimmunity and now reason/diffe? rance have never been free to know and to comprehend how vulnerability is shaped in and by modern social relations. 17 Absolute spirit is absolutely vulnerable to its absolute sov- ereignty. But for Derrida to accept this, he would have to philosophize power more according to the master/slave phenomenology than his pre- judgement of truth will allow him. This is why spirit must be avoided in Rogues. It comes too close to finding a reasonable dialectic of sovereignty and non-sovereignty in reason/diffe? rance. It threatens to open up the possi- bility of spirit being known and knowable as the autoimmunity of the weaker rational force in relation to itself as sovereignty. If rationalization and rea- sonableness appear not just as the form of transformation, but also as the content of transformation, then this allows transformation to know itself, and when transformation knows itself as its own form and content this is the Aufhebung of absolute spirit, free to know itself in its presuppositions and not by avoiding them.
There is, then, an unacknowledged mastery underpinning Derrida's cri- tique of mastery. To return for a moment to the language of Rogues, diffe? rance has always been the Security Council of absolute spirit, protecting the latter from misunderstanding its autoimmunity as total, and also has always been the same misunderstanding that sees the truth of Hegelian Aufhebung as dogma. Like the Security Council, diffe? rance hides its own mastery within a rationalization of protection, a protection that is also autoimmune and harms that which is being protected. The Security Council of diffe? rance is the suicide of the reasonable, a self-harming that precisely opposes the
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voices of reason that can speak the hard truth that this protection (i. e. dif- fe? rance) is keeping vulnerable non-sovereignty from itself, from its truth. There is a sense in which diffe? rance takes for itself emergency powers to sus- pend spirit so that it may not be allowed to become sovereign completion. It appears therefore to suspend spirit for spirit's own sake, knowing what is good for it. But as with all emergency powers, law is suspended in order to invoke the law of suspension. The truth of this autoimmunity is kept away from spirit according the law of suspension. As such the truth of this auto- immunity is exported beyond itself, exposing the positing in the suspension of spirit of what is other to spirit.
We have seen in earlier chapters that exporting otherness beyond its being known aporetically in and as the self is the manifestation of misrecog- nition as political reality, and as political power. Otherness as the to-come, as the undecideable, is an emergency measure to provide for a concept of otherness that diffe? rance believes spirit and modernity incapable of keeping safe from total assimilation and corruption. But this has been Derrida's point all along. Keeping the other safe in this way is suicidal. Derrida wants to see the weaker force take 'account of the incalculable so as to give an account of it, there where this appears impossible, so as to account for or reckon with it, that is to say, with the event of what or who comes' (2005: 159). Yet, in fact, the weaker force is being protected by diffe? rance precisely from giving an account of it as itself, that is, as the autoimmunity of rational freedom as spirit. Derrida in the final analysis, protects political complicity from being its own determinative concept of political mastery and vulnera- bility. Diffe? rance can be such a concept, but not while it exiles the educative and formative content of absolute spirit from the comprehension of this concept. 18
This brings us, then, to the different notions of transformation that Derrida and Hegel work with. When diffe? rance is related to a concept of rea- son that is defined by undecideability, what remains is a suspension lacking the transformative capacity that it seeks. Derrida's notion of transformative aporetic philosophical education - iteration alters: something new takes place - is left without the resources to know how to know what this altera- tion is. Doubling, Glas, autoimmunity and suspension are therefore not alteration at all. They never learn about learning and as such they are a repetition of the same education, a repetition of the emergency powers that suspends the truth of education for the sake for education. Diffe? rance, refused self-determination, never transforms because it is never trans- formed. What diffe? rance will never grant is the suspending of its suspension such that it might learn and therein transform itself. 'Iteration alters'
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(Derrida, 1988: 40) is therefore only an intrigue. If transformation is by a reason/diffe? rance that contradicts itself then reason/diffe? rance is the dialec- tic of enlightenment. If it is by repentance then reason/diffe? rance is spirit. And if vulnerable non-sovereignty is 'a completely different story', how is this possible without the alteration of ipseity and diffe? rance, without, that is, an Aufhebung that is determined from within their own autoimmunity, and not avoided behind the autoimmunity of everything else? Even in his dra- matic (re)turn to reason Derrida is still part of the emergency government charged with saving reason literally from itself. The result of this fear of self- completion is that in everything, save that of reason as spirit, Derrida identifies the government of the self in the definition of the other. The aporia of reason as spirit is denied this implication of itself in the other because it is denied the implication of itself as other to itself. Even the weaker force that acts without sovereignty has sovereignty in the weakness. But the kind of sovereignty it has, this is what remains for philosophy to comprehend in and of itself. This comprehension, spoken of by Derrida now as reason, requires reason to know itself in the otherness that deter- mines it. Such a comprehension has all along been the telos of education in Hegel.
Fear of sovereignty
In conclusion, then, Derrida's philosophy remains one of the greatest adventures of absolute spirit and its misrecognition of itself in modern times. But it is his lack of faith in this misrecognition that returns his philos- ophy to him without ever having comprehended its own truth. Believing absolute spirit incapable of holding truth safe from the totality of differ- ence-opposition, and believing it truthful that he should do so, he legislates against the autoimmunity of modern freedom believing himself to be legis- lating for it, for its possibility. He suspends freedom because he does not believe it is formative and re-formative of itself in the present. He thus avoids the totality of Aufhebung, a totality that we have seen in an earlier chapter19 consists in revolution and re-formation, that is, in the circle of its comprehension and in the aporia of the comprehension of its circling. Thus, Hegel says, 'the tremendous difference in the world-historical situa- tion is whether men are only implicitly [potentially] free or whether they know that it is their fundamental truth, nature, or vocation, to live as free [actual] individuals' (Hegel, 1987: 75). Hegel's Aufhebung accepts this total complicity in the social relations of mastery, that is, in abstract bourgeois social relations and the domination of abstract reason, in a way that the
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weaker force of non-sovereignty is denied in Derrida. What is required is for philosophy to retrieve the revolution and re-formation of reason within this, its own autoimmunity, and this means accepting culpability within the stronger force in a way that Derrida, for fear of sovereignty, does not do. As we have seen in earlier chapters, the export of fear is precisely the ground of modern sovereignty.
The real differences between Derrida and Hegel regarding aporetic philosophical education, then, become especially sharp in the political implications of their respective notions. In Derrida, we have to observe a lack of total complicity within his philosophy of complicity. It might amuse, I suppose, to be criticising Derrida for not being as open to the contradic- tions of totality as Hegel. At those moments when the otherness of diffe? rance could have come to know itself not merely as dogma but also as its own transformative form and content, Derrida seems to suffer a crisis of nerve, and he retreats to the presupposition that truth must not contain its own otherness as its education. We saw above how in one such moment of crisis in Glas Derrida invoked the event, not just as the circle of circles but as the spiral that refuses completion. This is a very telling educational metaphor in Derrida. If education is merely the circle of the same then there appears here to be no possibility of change. Therefore the spiral is needed to illus- trate alteration such that the same does not return to itself but develops. However, the aporia here is that if the circle returns to the same the I does not develop, and if the spiral turns without returning there is no I to com- prehend itself within that development. The spiral is not the metaphor for open-ended education that it at first appears to be. The spiral's develop- ment must return if it is to know of this as education. The subject and substance of aporetic education and of the Hegelian Aufhebung is here, in the impossibility of an education that can return and develop being known as both return and development in the impossibility, that is, in and as learning.
To herald a pledge, a promise, an originary, an impossibility and an unde- cideability is to refuse mastery one last time, and each time. It is to see the domination practised by the logos in opposition, abstraction, contradiction, and negation, but it is also to avoid this political totality by positing truth as other without return and without self-determination. It is to know complic- ity as mastery but still to refuse to become master. The irony here is this. It is when Derrida refuses absolute mastery that he is most totally master whereas, in Hegel, it is because he accepts the totality of mastery that, as master, he can know alteration in iteration. This is the difference between the two modes of education in Derrida and Hegel. It is the master alone
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who can know of and be changed by his experience of his own autoimmu- nity. It is the nature of political complicity in modern bourgeois social relations that absolute vulnerability and non-sovereignty are already a polit- ical reality in the master and it is he who will also know this fragility as a formative experience. This, again, is education in Hegel.
This is not, then, a political experience imbued with a pledge from beyond. This is an experience of freedom, within freedom, by freedom. It is an experience of the truth of complicity in freedom and of freedom in complicity. This is a doubling that does not have the luxury of excess, and where even what remains is consumed by mastery. This appears hopeless and resigned until and unless they are experienced as having their truth within education. Education is never resigned or hopeless because re-form- ing is the truth of what education is, and in this case it re-forms how we understand both hopelessness and resignation. This re-forming of totality within totality is the hard philosophical lesson of modern social and politi- cal contingency, and it is where and how the absolute appears in these modern social relations. Hegelian Aufhebung does not avoid the experience of vulnerability having its own truth in the master as his spiritual education. But there is no alteration in an iteration that merely affirms itself as unde- cideable. The master is decided already. This is the political implication of modern philosophy. It is from here that philosophy must have already begun.
Derrida does not seek to avoid this political totality. Indeed, it is his aim to avoid avoiding it. He says that to do philosophy is 'to project the greatest mastery over all the possible discourses of mastery and to renounce it. The two things go together . . . [it is] a modesty haunted by the devil' (1995: 140). He is right here. But modest mastery in diffe? rance is protected against because the master can immodestly control the definition of mas- tery by which he is to be judged. The weakness and vulnerability of the master, as the master/slave relation makes clear, is in his mastery, and the greater this recognition, the greater, too, the modesty.
I have tried to show in this chapter how Derrida's protection of philoso- phy from the absolute has distorted his understanding of the Aufhebung and of education in Hegel. Derrida's notion of transformative aporetic educa- tion precludes from itself the truth in education that Derrida seeks for dif- fe? rance, for deconstruction, for iteration and for autoimmunity. Diffe? rance, the effect of iteration, has always disavowed itself of any triadic structure by refusing its construction within and by negation. To refuse negation is to avoid 'the self who is other and the other who is not me'. It results, as we have seen, in Derrida exporting otherness beyond spirit in order to protect spirit from its dogmatic assimilation of otherness. It is this avoidance of the
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negative and self-otherness that has the result of transformation in Derrida being form without content, a dialectic of nihilism. 20 The result has been that commentators search for ways in which diffe? rance makes a difference. In the Derrida I have presented above, diffe? rance makes all the difference; it changes everything, until it is asked to state what this difference consists in, and then it has nothing to say. It has no voice which can speak of how we should understand the truth of this change, or, therefore, of this philosophi- cal education. Derrida, ironically like many Hegelians, wants the transforma- tive power of aporetic critique without the burden of the absolute. But transformative philosophical education without absolute spirit is only the illusion of education. Nothing changes unless we are being re-educated about what change in and by education actually means. It is to remain uned- ucated about all transformation because it is to remain uneducated about education by education. This re-education is the truth of education in Hegel, transformative of the thinker in being thought.
Absolute ambition
Finally, now, I return to Beardsworth's challenge that aporetic philosophy, Derridean or Hegelian, is too unambitious in terms of its scope for transfor- mation. Perhaps there are two notions of ambition at work here. Derrida's ambition in the way I have presented him is concerned with keeping alive and open the truth to-come that lies suppressed in and by the dominance of difference-opposition. The educational strengths and weaknesses of this we have explored in this chapter. What, then, of the Hegelian Aufhebung? What is the scope of its ambition? It shares Derrida's concern to expose aporia in identity, and to find meaning in difference and otherness. But its view of its complicity within prevailing social relations is very different from Derrida and at the most fundamental level. Hegelian Aufhebung is the expe- rience of the risk that is run in trying to think truthfully. It speaks of the preparedness to live and work with the groundlessness of its own reason. This is philosophy as the vocation to be true to itself. If this means that it appears unambitious as a force for social transformation, then so much the worse for versions of transformation that are less than true to themselves. 21 Part of education in Hegel means learning to mediate ambition as also actual.
The Aufhebung does work for the middle, and does so by not presuppos- ing the truth of the work beyond the unavoidable social and political pre- suppositions that already ground it. Beardsworth is right to be concerned
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about the ways in which the diremption of the universal and the particular are being played out on a global scale between master and servant. I hope that the other chapters in this book have begun to illustrate the contribu- tion that education in Hegel can make to these debates. The centre is pre- cisely what needs to be thought. But we should be ever mindful of imposed middles that are less than comprehending of the conditions that pre- determine middles as broken middles. This is not a lack of ambition. If any- thing, it is painfully too ambitious, recognizing its own groundlessness yet still risking truth within such an actuality. It is wrong to mistake Hegel's 'grey in grey' for an end of formative philosophy. As I hope previous chapters have shown, recollection is not passive, nor is it nostalgic. It is our knowing of phi- losophy as formative and it is itself re-formative of this knowing. This is where the centre can be thought, and this too is not an unambitious project.
Notes
1 I use spirit and Geist interchangeably in this chapter.
2 I should add here that in this chapter I am not concerned with Derrida's critique
of the Hegelian Aufhebung, except as it pertains to the form and content of Glas. Indeed, I am trying to draw out from Derrida the presuppositions that ground his idea of transformative aporetic philosophy as he practises it in Glas, Of Spirit and Rogues. It could be said, however, that Derrida retrieves from the Aufhebung all that he takes to be transformative from all that is dogmatic, and that diffe? rance is there- fore his own version of the Aufhebung. While I think this is true, it would need a different chapter to make this case, one that did attend to Derrida's comments, beyond Glas, on Hegel.
3 This is taken from an as yet unpublished essay by Richard entitled 'Responding to a Post-Script: Philosophy and its Futures' (2007). It replies to a reply I had made to his slightly earlier essay 'A Note to a Political Understanding of Love in our Global Age' (2006) which published by the E-Journal Contretemps. The whole exchange was to be published by Contretemps but sadly the Journal ceased publish- ing before this was possible.
4 Derrida's italics.
5 Derrida's italics.
6 'To relieve' is how Derrida's term relever in Glas - itself Derrida's translation of Auf-
heben - is translated in the English version of Glas. As I noted above in footnote 2 I have not extended this chapter to include Derrida's comments on the Aufhebung except as they constitute Glas.
7 This turn to the event in Glas is unjustified within or without the totality of differ- ence-opposition. This Heideggerian move is an example of the presuppositions of the absolute that ground Derrida's critique of absolute knowing. This will become clearer in what follows.
8 From Hegel, (1988: 327).
9 Note here I am juxtaposing the end of Glas and the beginning.
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10 But not, as noted above, with the turn to the event.
11 This is expressed by Lo? with to Jaspers who, after hearing Heidegger's lecture on
Ho? lderlin, 2 April 1936, sees this as the reason for Heidegger linking poetry to
the swastika (Ott, 1994: 133).
12 The context of this omission in Introduction to Metaphysics is important here.
Heidegger is arguing that spirit has degenerated into mere cleverness, which itself becomes a tool, a value, and a political propaganda. Against this Heidegger commends 'a spiritual power which originally unites and engages, assigns, obliges' (Of Spirit: 65, Introduction to Metaphysics: 48; the translation of Derrida's translation is used here) and it is here that he chooses to illustrate this spiritual power by quoting from his own Rectoral Address but dropping the inverted commas around the first spirit. Thus we get 'spirit ['spirit' in the original] is neither empty sagacity, nor the gratuitous game of joking, nor the unlimited work of analysis of the understanding, nor even the reason of the world, but spirit [without inverted commas in the original] is the being-resolved [Entschlossenheit] to the essence of Being, of a resolution which accords with the tone of the origin and which is knowledge' (Derrida, 1987: 67). In addition, the chapter in Introduction to Meta- physics then proceeds to assign the originarity of this spiritual Dasein as within 'the absolute privilege of the German language' (1987: 68).
13 Simon Critchley, for example, argues that it does. By granting the priority of the originary pledge or the promise that is affirmed, then, in the question and in opposition, this opens 'the ultimately ethical orientation of Of Spirit' (Wood, 1993: 95). If Hegel's anti-erection seeds virility against pressure, then Derrida's 'inver- sion or reversal' (1993: 96) of the question in effect puts the lead in Hegel's pencil (as it were). This new priority for Critchley is the Levinasian Other, a dimension of alterity and transcendence. Here, for holocaust we can read 'ethics of deconstruction'. Further, for Critchley, the footnote signals Derrida's 'depar- ture' (1993: 95) from what he calls 'the repetitive order of commentary' (1993: 95) in Of Spirit. This departure needs to be understood as affirming the 'uncondi- tioned duty' (1993: 94) that underpins deconstruction, that is, its 'ethical and political responsibility' (1993: 94). At root here, for Critchley, Derrida practises in deconstruction an 'undecideability' (1993: 94), a 'suspension of choice or decision between two alternatives, a suspension provoked in, as and through a practice of double reading' (1993: 94). See also Wood, 1993: 1.
14 It is interesting here to note that this could well be a description of recollection, of the grey in grey. It is important then to bear in mind that there is no loss here for Derrida, no negation, and therefore nothing to be recalled from loss. The return is diffe? rance, not recollection; it is remarkable, but not self-(re-)formative.
15 Derrida has always been mindful to remind his readers that he has never eschewed reason in his philosophy.
16 It is interesting to note the mutuality of fear and risk achieved here in the policy of mutually assured destruction (MAD), but this mutuality still represents only a mutual export of fear. It is not the way that fear and vulnerability in the double negation of self and of self as other speaks its educational truth. MAD, because it is mutual, is not open to learning of fear as the self who is other and the other who is not this self. Learning is in the lack of mutuality; this is the real double neg- ative of education in Hegel, a learning that MAD closes off from itself. MAD is
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fear is stasis; this is its madness. But from Derrida's point of view it was perhaps
safer for the world than less explicit autoimmunity.
17 I have said more on the speculative and educative significance of this 'and' in an
earlier work, Philosophy's Higher Education, (2004) chapter 6.
18 I note here that Gillian Rose has stated that diffe? rance, comprehended specula-
tively, could have been the unity and difference of identity and difference (Rose,
1984: 139).
19 see above, Chapter 1.
20 See Gillian Rose's Dialectic of Nihilism (1984).
21 At times in writing this chapter I have been struck by the thought that it might
appear somewhat decadent to be arguing over whose version of vulnerable non- sovereignty is the right one. But, this too must be risked.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Chapter 5
Education in Hegel in Levinas
Introduction
Howard Caygill has recently said of Levinas that his 'anti-Hegelian opera- tion is less the overcoming of Hegelian dialectic than its deflation' (Caygill, 2002: 53). In this chapter I want to reflate the Hegelian in Levinas or, more accurately, to show how education in Hegel in Levinas in fact reflates itself through the eternal return of presuppositions as oppositions. The chapter is divided into three main sections. The first section looks at how Levinas deflates the Hegelian dialectic in Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being, with particular attention paid to three forms of education found there, namely teaching, philosophy and study. The second section watches the reflation of Levinas's anti-Hegelian operation in some of the poignant and telling criticisms offered by Caygill. This reflation comes about by way of the aporias that mediate Levinas's ethics, and for Caygill this is most apparent in the oppositions of war and peace, and state and religion. The final section reads this reflation as education in Hegel. It concentrates on how the relation of state and religion, the notion of alterity, and the posit- ing of error in philosophy are re-formed in such learning.
PART A
Deflating Hegel
Following Caygill's line of argument, Levinas's deflation of the Hegelian dialectic amounts to emptying the system of the movement associated with negation, mediation, contradiction and Aufhebung. Within such movement Levinas finds only a repetition of the same from which no new result emerges. As such, the Hegelian dialectic is emptied of the form and content that represent its presupposition that nothingness can be determinate, can be known. Against this, Levinas argues for a fundamental non-grounding of
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