Hegel versus Heidegger

“the inherent tension between Hegel’s systematic drive of notional self-mediation (or sublation) and a more original ontological project that, following Heidegger, Alexandre Koyre describes as the historicity of the human condition oriented towards future”

“The root of what Hegel calls “negativity” is (our awareness of) future: future is what is not (yet), the power of negativity is ultimately identical to the power of time itself, this force that corrodes every firm identity”

“The proper temporality of a human being is thus not that of the linear time, but that of engaged existence: a man projects his future and then actualizes it by way of a detour through past resources”

“This “existential” root of negativity is obfuscated by Hegel’s system that abolishes this primacy of the future and presents its entire content as the past “sublated” in its logical form”

“It is not difficult to recognize in this vision of the future-oriented temporality of the engaged subject the traces of Heidegger’s radical assertion of finitude as the unsurpassable predicament of being-human: it is our finitude that exposes us to the opening of the future, to the horizon of what is to come, i.e., transcendence and finitude are two sides of the same coin.”

“No wonder then, that it was Heidegger himself who, in a series of seminars and written texts, proposed the most elaborate version of such a critical reading of Hegel.”

“Since this is not the Heidegger of Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), but the later Heidegger, he tries to decipher the unthought dimension of Hegel through the close reading of Hegel’s notion of the “experience” (Erfahrung) of consciousness from his Phenomenology of Spirit.”

“This blindness for its own foundation is not a secondary feature, but the very enabling feature of Hegel’s metaphysics of subjectivity: the dialectical logos can only function against the background of a pre-subjective Absage, renunciation or saying-no.”

“There nonetheless is a privileged phenomenal mode in which negativity can be experienced, although a negative one: pain. The path of experience is the path of painful realization that there is a gap between “natural” and transcendental consciousness, between “for the consciousness itself” and “for us”: the subject is violently deprived of the “natural” foundation of its being, its entire world collapses, and this process is repeated until it reaches Absolute Knowing.”

“When he speaks about “transcendental pain” as the fundamental Stimmung of Hegel’s thought, Heidegger is following a line that begins in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. There Kant determines pain as the only “a priori” emotion, the emotion of my pathological ego being humiliated by the injunction of the moral law. (Lacan sees in this transcendental privilege of pain the link between Kant and Sade.)”

“What Heidegger misses in his description of the Hegelian “experience” as the path of despair (Verzweiflung) is the proper abyss of this process: it is not only the natural consciousness that is shattered, but also the transcendental standard, measure, or framing ground against which natural consciousness experiences its inadequacy and failure—as Hegel put it, if what we thought to be true fails the measure of truth, this measure itself has to be abandoned.”

“And this brings us back to Heidegger’s reproach that Hegel doesn’t provide the phenomenal experience of negativity: What if negativity precisely names the gap of phenomenality, something that does NOT (and cannot ever) appear?”

“There is no experience of genuine otherness, the subject only encounters the results of its own (conceptual) work. This reproach only holds if one ignores how both sides, the phenomenal “for itself” of the natural consciousness and the “for us” of the subterranean conceptual work, are caught in the groundless abyss of repeated vertiginous loss. The “transcendental pain” is not only the pain that natural consciousness experiences, the pain of being separated from its truth; it is the painful awareness that this truth itself is non-all, cracking, inconsistent.”

“Not because it is a transcendental gesture that by definition eludes the phenomenal level, but because it is the paradoxical, difficult-to-think negativity that cannot be subsumed under any agent (experiential or not), what Hegel calls “self-relating negativity,” negativity that precedes all positive grounding and whose negative gesture of withdrawal opens up the space for all positivity.”

“And from this point, one can even reverse Heidegger’s reproach to Hegel and claim that it is Heidegger who is not able to think this “transcendental pain”—and that he misses the path to think it precisely by dropping all too early the term “subject” needed to think the (inhuman) core of being-human.”

“Throughout his own work, Lacan, in turn, modifies Heidegger’s motif of language as the house of being. Language is not man’s creation and instrument, it is man who “dwells” in language: “psychoanalysis should be the science of language inhabited by the subject.””

“Lacan’s “paranoiac” twist, his additional Freudian turn of the screw, comes from his characterization of this house as a torture-house: “in the light of the Freudian experience, man is a subject caught in and tortured by language.””

“Not only does man dwell in the “prison-house of language,” (the title of Fredric Jameson’s early book on structuralism), he dwells in a torture-house of language.”

“Wittgensteinian “ordinary language philosophy,” which perceives itself as a medical cure meant to correct the usages of ordinary language that give rise to “philosophical problems,” wants to eliminate precisely the “torturing” of language that forces it to deliver truth.”

“(Remember Rudolph Carnap’s famous critique of Heidegger from the late 1920s, which claims that Heidegger’s ratiocinations are based on the wrong use of “nothing” as a substantive).”

“against Heidegger’s historicization of the subject as modernity’s agent of technological mastery, against his substitution of Dasein for “subject” as the name for the essence of being-human, Lacan stuck to the problematic term “subject.””

“When Lacan implies that Heidegger misses a crucial dimension of subjectivity, his point is not a silly-humanist argument that Heidegger “passivizes” man too much into an instrument for the revelation of Being and thus ignores human creativity. Lacan’s point is, on the contrary, that Heidegger misses the properly traumatic impact of the very “passivity” of being caught in language, the tension between human animal and language: there is “subject” because the human animal doesn’t “fit” language, the Lacanian “subject” is the tortured, mutilated, subject.”

“Insofar as the status of the Lacanian subject is real, i.e., insofar as the real Thing is ultimately (the impossible core of) the subject itself, one should apply to the subject Lacan’s definition of the Thing as that part or aspect “of the real which suffers from the signifier.” The most elementary dimension of the subject is not activity, but passivity, enduring.”

“In a human being, desires lose their mooring in biology, they are operative only insofar as they are inscribed within the horizon of Being sustained by language; however, in order for this transposition from the immediate biological reality of the body to the symbolic space to take place, it has to leave a mark of torture in the body in the guise of its mutilation.”

“It is thus not enough to say that “the Word became flesh”: what one should add is that, in order for the Word to inscribe itself into flesh, a part of the flesh—the proverbial Shylockian pound of flesh—has to be sacrificed.”

“Since there is no pre-established harmony between Word and flesh, it is only through such a sacrifice that the flesh becomes receptive for the Word.”

“This brings us, finally, to the topic of jouissance. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe located very precisely the gap that separates Lacan’s interpretation of Antigone from Heidegger’s (to which Lacan otherwise abundantly refers): what is totally missing in Heidegger is not only the dimension of the real, of jouissance, but, above all, the dimension of the “between-two-deaths” (the symbolic and the real), which designates Antigone’s subjective position after she is excommunicated from the polis by Creon.”

“In exact symmetry with her brother Polynices who is dead in reality, but denied the symbolic death, the rituals of burial, Antigone finds herself dead symbolically, excluded from the symbolic community, while biologically and subjectively still alive.”

“In Agamben’s terms, Antigone finds herself reduced to “bare life,” to a position of homo sacer, whose exemplary case in the twentieth century is that of the inmates of the concentration camps.”

“Francois Balmès makes here a perspicuous remark that it is as if Lacan’s implicit clinical reproach to Heidegger’s existential analytic of Dasein as “being-towards-death” is that it is appropriate only for neurotics and fails to account for psychotics. A psychotic subject occupies an existential position for which there is no place in Heidegger’s mapping, the position of someone who in a way “survives his own death.” Psychotics no longer fit Heidegger’s description of Dasein’s engaged existence, their life no longer moves in the coordinates of a futural project freely engaged against the background of one’s assumed past: their life is outside “care” (Sorge), their being is no longer directed “towards death.””

“This excess of jouissance that resists symbolization (logos) is the reason why, in the last two decades of his teaching, Lacan (sometimes almost pathetically) insists that he considers himself an anti-philosopher, someone who rebels against philosophy: philosophy is onto-logy, its basic premise is, as Parmenides, the first philosopher, put it, “thinking and being are the same,” the mutual accord between thinking (logos as reason/speech) and being.”

“Up to Heidegger, the Being that philosophy has in mind is always the being whose house is language, the being sustained by language, the being whose horizon is opened by language, or, as Wittgenstein put it, the limits of my language are the limits of my world. Against this onto-logical premise of philosophy, Lacan focuses on the real of jouissance as something that, although it is far from being simply external to language (it is rather “ex-timate” with regard to it), resists symbolization, remains a foreign kernel within it, appears within it as a rupture, cut, gap, inconsistency or impossibility”

“No wonder, then, that, with regard to anxiety, Lacan prefers Kierkegaard to Heidegger: he perceives Kierkegaard as the anti-Hegel for whom the paradox of Christian faith signals a radical break with ancient Greek ontology (in contrast to Heidegger’s reduction of Christianity to a moment in the decline of Greek ontology within medieval metaphysics).”

“Faith is an existential jump into what (from the ontological view) cannot but appear as madness, it is a crazy decision unwarranted by any reason—Kierkegaard’s God is effectively “beyond Being,” a God of the Real, not the God of philosophers.”

“Which is why, again, Lacan would accept Heidegger’s famous statement, from the 1920s, when he abandoned Catholic Church, that religion is a mortal enemy of philosophy—but he would see this as the reason to stick to the core of the Real in the religious experience.”

“The “official” transcendental correlation subject-object is thus redoubled by a kind of negative correlation of the subject and the impossible-real object: before relating to objects, which are part of external reality, the subject is haunted by its own objectal shadow.”

“We can also see in what way, two lacks overlap in this impossible object: the constitutive lack of the subject (what the subject has to lose in order to emerge as the subject of the signifier) and the lack in the Other itself (what has to be excluded from reality so that reality can appear).”

“Again, the object is not simply there at the crosscut of the two lacks: it literally, and much more radically, emerges through the overlapping of the two lacks. (Once Lacan got this point, he changed the status of objet a from imaginary to real.)”

“So the real is not some kind of primordial Being lost with the opposition of subject and object (as Hölderlin put it in his famous Ur-Fragment of German Idealism); the real is, on the contrary, a product (of the overlapping of the two lacks). The real is not lost, it is what we cannot get rid of, what always sticks on as the remainder of the symbolic operation.”

“In the opposition between the symbolic order and reality, the real is on the side of the symbolic—it is the part of reality that clings to the symbolic (in the guise of its inconsistency/gap/impossibility). The real is the point at which the external opposition between the symbolic order and reality is immanent to the symbolic itself, mutilating it from within: it is the non-all of the symbolic.”

“There is a real not because the symbolic cannot grasp its external real, but because the symbolic cannot fully become ITSELF.”

“There is being (reality) because the symbolic system is inconsistent, flawed. The real is thus an impasse of formalization. One should give to this thesis all its “idealist” weight: it is not only that reality is too rich, so that every formalization fails to grasp it, stumbles upon it; the real IS nothing but the impasse of formalization—there is dense reality “out there” BECAUSE of the inconsistencies and gaps in the symbolic order.”

“The real is nothing but the non-all of formalization, not its external exception.”

“Since reality is in itself fragile and inconsistent, it needs the intervention of a Master-Signifier to stabilize itself into a consistent field; this Master-Signifier marks the point at which a signifier falls into the real. The Master-Signifier is a signifier that not only designates features of reality, but also performatively intervenes into reality.”

“As such, the Master-Signifier is the counterpart of the objet a: if objet a is the real on the side of the symbolic, the Master-Signifier is the signifier that falls into the real.”

“Its role is exactly homologous to that of transcendental synthesis of apperception in Kant: its intervention transforms the inconsistent multiplicity of fragments of the real into the consistent field of “objective reality.” In the same way that, for Kant, it is the addition of the subjective synthesis that transforms the multiplicity of subjective impressions into objective reality, for Lacan, it is the intervention of the Master-Signifier, which transforms the confused field of impressions into “extra-linguistic reality.””

“The Lacanian “subject” names a gap in the symbolic, and its status is real.”

“As Balmès pointed out, this is why in his crucial seminar on the logic of the fantasy (1966-67), after more than a decade of struggling with Heidegger, Lacan accomplishes his paradoxical and (for someone who adheres to Heidegger’s notion of modern philosophy) totally unexpected move from Heidegger back to Descartes, to Cartesian cogito.”

“There really is a paradox here: Lacan first accepts Heidegger’s point that the Cartesian cogito, which grounds modern science and its mathematicized universe, announces the highest forgetting of Being; but for Lacan, the Real of jouissance is precisely external to Being, so that what is for Heidegger the argument AGAINST cogito is for Lacan the argument FOR cogito—the real of jouissance can only be approached when we exit the domain of being.”

“This is why, for Lacan, not only is cogito not to be reduced to the self-transparency of pure thought, but, paradoxically, cogito IS the subject of the unconscious—the gap/cut in the order of Being in which the real of jouissance breaks in.”

“So he passed to the much more refined “I think where I am not,” which decenters thinking with regard to my Being. As the awareness of my full presence: the Unconscious is a purely virtual (in-existing, insisting) Other Place of a thought, which escapes my being.”

“The tautology of thinking is self-canceling in the same way as the tautology of being, which is why, for Lacan, the “I am that which I am” announced by the burning bush to Moses on the Mount Sinai indicates a God beyond Being, God as Real.”

“The importance of Lacan’s assertion of cogito is that, with regard to the couple language-world, it assures a point external to it, a minimal point of singular universality, which is literally world-less, trans-historical. This means we are condemned to our world, to the hermeneutic horizon of our finitude, or, as Gadamer put it, to the impenetrable background of historical “prejudices” that predetermine the field of what we can see and understand.”

“Every world is sustained by language, and every “spoken” language sustains a world—this is what Heidegger aimed at in his thesis on language as a “house of being.” Is this effectively not our spontaneous ideology? There is an endlessly differentiated, complex, reality, which we, individuals and communities embedded in it, always experience from a particular, finite perspective of our historical world.”

“What democratic materialism furiously rejects is the notion that there can be an infinite universal Truth, which cuts across this multitude of worlds—in politics, this means a “totalitarianism” that imposes its truth as universal. This is why one should reject, say, Jacobins, who imposed onto the plurality of the French society their universal notions of equality and other truths, and thus necessarily ended in terror. So there is another version of the democratic-materialist axiom: “all that takes place in today’s society is the dynamics of post-modern globalization, and the (conservative-nostalgic, fundamentalist, Old Leftist, nationalist, religious…) reactions and resistances to it.” To which, of course, materialist dialectics adds its proviso: “… with the exception of the radical-emancipatory (Communist) politics of truth.””

“Of course, the only way for us to articulate this truth is within language—by way of torturing language.”

“As Hegel already knew, when we think, we think in language against language. This brings us to Benjamin: Could we not apply his distinction of mythic violence and divine violence to the two modes of violence we were dealing with? The violence of language to which Heidegger refers is “mythic violence”: it is a sprach-bildende Gewalt, a language-forming violence, to paraphrase Benjamin’s definition of mythic violence as staats-bildend—the force of mythos as the primordial act of narrativization or symbolization. In Badiou’s terms, the violent imposition of the transcendental coordinates of a World onto the multiplicity of Being. The violence of thinking (and of poetry, if we understand it differently from Heidegger) is, on the contrary, the case of what Benjamin calls “divine violence,” it is a language-destroying (sprach-zerstoerend) twisting of language in order to enable a trans-symbolic real of a Truth to transpire in it.”

“This paper was originally presented at the conference “One Divides Into Two: Negativity, Dialectics, and Clinamen,” held at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin in March 2011.”