Burke, From Desire to Fascination Hegel and Blanchot on Negativity

From Desire to Fascination: Hegel and Blanchot on NegativityAuthor(s): Victoria I. BurkeSource: MLN, Vol. 114, No. 4, French Issue (Sep., 1999), pp. 848-856Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3251365 .

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From Desire to Fascination: Hegel and Blanchot on Negativity

Victoria I. Burke

And as I converse only with myself and look more deeply into myself, I will attempt to render myself gradually better known and familiar to myself. I am a thing that thinks.

Descartes'

"But how is that possible?" cried K. "Surely I haven't made this endless journey just to be sent back again!"

Kafka2

Hegel denies that it makes sense to speak of the incomprehensible, or that which might lie beyond the experience of rational consciousness. The scope of Hegelian rationality is thus ostensibly comprehensive. However, the Phenomenology of Spirit traverses an itinerary whose

particular determinations result from a negativity that "proceeds, as it

were, behind the back of consciousness."3 The experience of consciousness is thus animated by a "magical power" that "converts the it

[the negative] into Being" (PG, 26/PS, 19). This "magical power"

1 Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1979), 23.

2 Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken Books, 1930), 77.

3 G. W. F. Hegel, Phdnomenologie des Geistes (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1988), 68; English translation from Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 56. Further references to these editions will be identified by the abbreviations PG/PS.

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does not appear as an object for-consciousness anywhere in the

Hegelian system. Even the Science of Logic, which purports to be the condition and presupposition of the Phenomenology of Spirit, also pre- supposes the animating power of the negative. Moreover, Hegel strenuously objected to the formalist project of delimiting this power by providing an account of the unmediated experience of negativity. In Hegel's view, the attempt to procure an unmediated experience of this "moving principle" (PG, 28/PS, 21) is tantamount to trying to

"depict actuality itself in a non-actual manner" (PG, 14/PS, 10). Hegel's formalist predecessors, Kant and Fichte, in effect sought to formalize the conditions for the possibility of experience. But even

Fichte, who attempted to do so by showing that the origin of

knowledge was the self-identical self-positing ego, is subject to the

Hegelian observation that the self-positing of the ego is reflected (and thus not self-identical): the self-positing self splits into a self that

posits and a self that is posited.4 Hence, from Hegel's perspective, knowledge of the empirical content of consciousness, i.e., the shapes it traverses, is exhaustive of what can be known about it. Self- consciousness is a "unifying unity ... the synthesizing of the manifold into the unity which sustains itself through this manifold."' In other

words, contrary to Fichte, self-consciousness does not have a structure that belongs to it independent of that which it unifies. To be sure,

Hegel designates the negative as the "soul" and the "self' of consciousness (PG, 28/PS, 21), but this "soul" is to be known exclusively through the shapes of consciousness which it animates.

The "Introduction" to the Phenomenology presents us with an account of the movement of consciousness as it traverses its succession of shapes. Hegel calls this movement experience. Experience is the

process wherein consciousness establishes and exceeds the limits of its own comprehension. Hegel writes that

Consciousness simultaneously distinguishes itself from something [the object] and at the same time relates itself to it . . . and the determinate

aspect of this relating, or the being of something for a consciousness is

knowing. (PG, 64/PS, 52)

Here, knowing is the relation between consciousness and its object. Consciousness develops because it posits the truth of the object to

4Robert B. Pippin, "Fichte's Contribution." Philosophical Forum 19:2-3 (Winter- Spring 1987-88).

5 Herbert Marcuse, Hegel's Ontology and Theory of Historicity, trans. Seyla Benhabib (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), 35.

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VICTORIA I. BURKE

which it is thus related as an in-itself beyond its knowledge, beyond what the object is for-consciousness. Unlike the Kantian thing-in-itself, however, this in-itself is consciousness itself. Hegel calls it the concept. In his words, "Consciousness is, on the one hand, consciousness of the object, and on the other, consciousness of itself, consciousness of what for it is the True [the concept]" (PG, 65/PS, 54). The succession of shapes of consciousness in the Phenomenology is thus articulated by way of the gap between object (for-consciousness) and concept, in the difference, that is, between that of which consciousness is certain

(the object) and that which it projects as the truth (beyond the

object).6 This is at once a temporal and an epistemic gap: the in-itself is projected as something that is now unknown, but that might be known in the future. The difference that consciousness posits in every act of knowing thus continually renews the possibility of extending the sphere of its knowledge.

In the process of projecting the truth beyond its object, "consciousness suffers violence at its own hands and spoils its own limited satisfaction" (PG, 63/PS, 51); for although it comprehends its object, it experiences itself as a beyond that perpetually eludes this limited

comprehension. Consciousness suffers repeated epistemic crises as the object for-consciousness keeps falling short of the "beyond" which consciousness seeks to present to itself. In this sense, consciousness aims at making "that which is in-itself express itself outwardly and become for-itself' (PG, 21/PS, 15). It seeks to become certain of itself as the truth. But this endeavor is foiled because consciousness, in the

very attempt to comprehend itself, repeatedly engenders a breach in the coherence of its own understanding.

In chapter IV of the Phenomenology, Hegel names the movement which animates self-consciousness desire. The aim of desire is to make

explicit the identity of concept and object (PG, 121/PS, 105). The

concept and object are always already identical because consciousness is in-itselfthe identity of concept and object, but this identity is notfor- consciousness; that is to say, consciousness does not have itself in-itself as its object. Desire is thus the drive for the concept (or the in-itself) to become for-consciousness so that consciousness no longer posits itself as a truth beyond the object which it comprehends. AsJean Hyppolite claims, the aim of desire is desire itself.7 That is, consciousness seeks

6Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 21.

7Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure ofHegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit," trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 160.

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to have immediate knowledge of itself.8 However, such a state would involve a complete actualization of consciousness, fully exhausting its

potentiality. Consciousness in-itself would have become wholly for- itself. Nevertheless, the action of generating the difference between

concept and object is essential to the character of consciousness, and it is precisely the action of creating this difference that both prevents the self-identity of consciousness and makes possible the progress of

knowledge. Desire is thus regenerated by the same movement of consciousness that seeks to satiate it; the difference between concept and object is both the result and condition of the activity of consciousness. The attempt to capture the concept as an object only serves to entrench the difference between concept and object.

Hegel claims that the identity of concept and object is ultimately made explicit in absolute knowing. In absolute knowing, consciousness intuits itself as time: "Time is the Dasein of the concept." [Die Zeit ist der Begriff selbst, der da ist] (PG, 524/PS, 487).9 However, from

Hegel's point of view, time qua time cannot be intuited, and must, rather, be experienced as cloaked in the empirical content of history. As a result, the experience of the absolute identity of concept and

object, "the idea of the thought of thought,"'? must be the intuition of the totality of Spirit's experience. Heidegger makes essentially the same observation: in attempting to ground Dasein in negativity, and to establish Dasein's (non-)relation to negativity as the moment of vision [Augenblick] which inspires "authenticity," he arrives at the conclusion that the negative cannot be intuited in itself. For Heidegger, Dasein's disclosure of itself in its authentic being would be the disclosure of its own having-been in particular ways. "As authentically futural, Dasein is as 'having-been.'"' Hegel and Heidegger are in

agreement, then, that the "infinity of the difference [die Unendlichkeit des Untershiedes]" (PG, 123/PS, 107) between concept and object, self-

differentiating negativity itself, cannot be intuited on its own, but must be instead intuited in the shape of the concrete history of its

experience.

8 H. S. Harris, Hegel's Ladder I: The Pilgrimage of Reason (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), 329.

9 Translation from H. S. Harris, Hegel's Ladder II: The Odyssey of Spirit (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), 730.

10 Donald P. Verene, Hegel's Recollection (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), 105.

' Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tfibingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1986), 326; and Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 373. Further references to these editions will be identified by the abbreviations SZ/BT.

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VICTORIA I. BURKE

Thus construed, absolute knowing is possible. However, Bataille, in what appears to be a deliberate, but suggestive, misreading of Hegel, claims that absolute knowing would be "definitive non-knowledge,"12 and is, as such, "impossible." It would be the experience of what cannot be experienced: "unincorporated negativity."13 This "experience" could not be an experience, since it excludes all possibility. It would instead be the absolute renunciation of all experience, what Bataille called "sovereignty." Now, in truth, as far as Hegel is con- cerned, Spirit is in fact fleetingly acquainted with Bataille's sover-

eignty as a moment, but Hegel takes this state to be superseded by absolute knowing, properly construed. Nevertheless, one Hegelian figure does aspire to the "inner experience" represented by sover-

eignty, namely, the beautiful soul. The beautiful soul seeks direct

knowledge of an object without limit or determinate content. Hegel characterizes the beautiful soul as "disordered to the point of mad- ness, and it wastes away in yearning and pines away in consumption" (PG, 441/PS, 407). In Hegel's view, the beautiful soul is doomed, for it is fruitless to dwell on the abyssal night of negativity qua negativity, uncloaked from the empirical content of the shapes of consciousness that negativity engenders. Still, with the figure of the beautiful soul, Hegel at once acknowledges that meditation on the nature of what

might lie beyond rational comprehension is an experience for rational consciousness while at the same time ruling it out as an

experience of the absolute. To take seriously the experience of the beautiful soul (the penul-

timate moment of the Phenomenology), as well as Bataille's reading of

Hegel, is to acknowledge that consciousness is compelled by the

possibility of an object other than comprehensive recollection, and that desire, if it truly seeks its own comprehension, desires the intuition of an object which would be impossible to comprehend. As Gerald Bruns has put it, "imagine Descartes . . . with nothing possible as a prospect, project, or even condition, with nothing to experience except his own subjectivity, which is, however, a subjectivity without

identity . . . a boundaryless interiority exposed on all sides to an outside without horizons."'4 Such an object would be, as Blanchot writes in Thomas the Obscure, "the beyond which admits of no be-

12 Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Ann Boldt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 108.

13Jacques Derrida, "From Restricted to General Economy," in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

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yond."15 In Hegelian terms, it would be the absolute identity of

concept and object stripped of the recollection of the history of its own experience and turned instead toward the difference of itself from itself. The object in question is not one of the terms of this relation, but rather the difference itself. This difference, I claim, is what Blanchot refers to as the "object of fascination." He speaks of it as the Outside because it lies beyond rational comprehension. But, to use Bataille's phrase, the experience of it is "inner experience." This

conception of the Outside is a recasting of the Hegelian conception of the in-itself, which is perpetually beyond what consciousness can know and yet is its very "soul."

As I have mentioned, the relation of consciousness to the in-itself has a temporal dimension. Accordingly, Blanchot's Outside, like the

Hegelian in-itself, resides on the futural horizon, even though it is not a totality of possibilities to be actualized. This feature of Blanchot's

thought is nicely captured byJohn Caputo, who describes the Outside as "a future that will never be present, that is prohibited in principle from ever being actualized."'6 The step beyond or toward it is "the

step not beyond" [le pas au dela].17 It inheres in the present as an

interruption of it, but also remains always yet "to come." It is outside rational comprehension, but recoils upon thought and becomes its

abyssal and ungraspable origin, a point which as definitively inter-

rupts the present as it affirms the inescapability of death. The Outside is at once a threat to the coherence of thought and its

most intimate and constant companion. In his 1953 recit, The One Who Was StandingApart From Me [Celui qui ne m'accompagnait pas], Blanchot characterizes this companionship as a strange partnership in which the companion offers an ineluctable resistance, an inscrutable au-

thority, and a persistent demand. To converse with this companion is to undertake, like one of Kafka's protagonists, "the move outside of truth."18 It is to become exiled from the world, for in seeking the

14 Gerald L. Bruns, Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 136

15 Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure, trans. Robert Lamberton (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1973), 105.

16John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 77.

17Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992).

18 Idem, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 1982), 77.

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nature of the law which dictates the relation between oneself and the

world, to wit, the object of fascination (which the companion allegori- cally represents), one ceases to inhabit the world. Like the Heidegge- rian "friend whom every Dasein carries with it" (SZ, 163/BT, 206) and who calls to Dasein as the call of conscience,19 the companion presents an ineffable challenge. Foucault comments that we ought not to understand this "companion" as "a privileged interlocutor, some other speaking subject; [rather] he is the nameless limit language reaches. That limit, however, is in no way positive; it is instead the

deep into which language is forever disappearing only to return identical to itself."20

The Outside reconfigures the possibility of Hegelian absolute

knowing into a "relation to impossibility."21 Here, knowledge of the

explicit identity of concept and object would be impossible, not

possible, and therefore not related to thought by any teleology or

possibility of actualization. However, "impossibility," Blanchot writes,

"escapes us by the very fact that there is no escaping it" (EI, 65/IC, 45). The object of fascination is found to be both "ungraspable" and "unreleasable."22 Hegel maintained that consciousness supersedes its

object only because of the difference between concept and object. For him, it would have been antithetical to the nature of conscious-

ness, as precisely that which generates the difference between itself and its object, for this difference itself to become an object, because the difference is indissociably bound to that which it distinguishes. Blanchot's radicality and his displacement of Hegelian thought thus lies in the notion that what haunts thought is the impossible possibility of the becoming-for-consciousness of its own difference from the object. Heidegger, like Blanchot, differentiates himself from

Hegel on this basis: rather than seeking "the restlessness and the excitement of continual novelty and changing encounters" (SZ, 172/ BT, 216), as Hegelian consciousness does in traversing shape after

shape of consciousness, Heidegger dwells upon the difference be-

19Jacques Derrida, "Heidegger's Ear: Philopolemology," in Reading Heidegger: Com- memorations, ed. John Sallis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).

20 Michel Foucault, "Maurice Blanchot: The Thought From Outside," in Foucault/ Blanchot, trans. Brian Massumi (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 51.

21 Maurice Blanchot, L'Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 66, and The Infinite Conversation, trans. and foreword by Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota University Press, 1993), 47. Further references to these editions will be identified by the abbreviations EI/IC.

22 Blanchot, Space of Literature, 25.

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tween thought and being, a difference through which thought and

being are understood to be the same [Gleich] but not identical

[Identitdit].23 For Heidegger, the difference enshrouds itself as the oblivion of the difference [die Vergessenheit der Differenz],24 which accounts for the being of truth as aletheia, a perpetual struggle between concealment and unconcealment. For Blanchot, by contrast, the difference as difference is a law, which, from the perspective of

consciousness, can only be disclosed as the abyss, the night, the interminable outside. It is the "limitlessness beyond the limit [that] limits the limit by turning its law into a secondary, derived, entity, and affirms its own necessity as an always prior demand, a demand that is

infinitely at odds with the law of the limit."25 It is precisely this

dissymmetry in the relation of thought to the outside that issues the

challenge that confronts thought.26 Blanchot mythologizes the impossible object of fascination as

Eurydice, the wife of Orpheus. Greek mythology tells us that Eurydice was killed before the consummation of her marriage to Orpheus when she was stung by a viper as she walked in a meadow with her bridesmaids. Overwhelmed with grief, Orpheus undertook the journey to the Underworld where he won the favor of the gods by playing his lyre. The gods permitted him to return Eurydice to the surface of the earth on the condition that he not gaze upon her during the

journey. But Orpheus could not resist looking at her, and the gaze of

Orpheus condemns Eurydice to the Underworld for eternity.27 Orpheus is guilty of what Blanchot calls impatience, the attempt to

bring to light that which cannot reveal itself: "The deep does not reveal itself directly, it is only disclosed hidden in the work," writes Blanchot.28 It is in this sense that we are to understand the object of

23 In the German, Gleich means formally, but not numerically identical, whereas Identitdt means both formally and numerically identical.

24 Martin Heidegger, Identitat und Differenz (Pfullingen: Verlag Giinter Neske, 1967); Trans. Joan Stambaugh, Identity and Difference (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 43.

25 Leslie Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (New York: Routledge, 1997), 93. 26 As Leslie Hill points out, the Outside is not to be understood as analogous to what

Levinas call "the Other," although at first glance the inscrutable resistance offered by the Outside may appear to simulate "the Other." Most of the texts cited in this paper were published prior to Levinas's 1961 Totalite et Infini, and Blanchot's later reading of Levinas insists on a secularization and multiplication of what Levinas call the relation to the Other. Hill, ibid., p. 178.

27 This version of the myth, which was derived from Ovid and Virgil, can be found in Edith Hamilton, Mythology (New York: New American Library, 1940), 103-5.

28 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 171.

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fascination to be impossible: Orpheus is compelled by a desire the

pursuit of which destroys the conditions of its own fulfilment. This

desire, which Blanchot calls fascination, imperceptibly animates consciousness. Both intimate companion and threat, it is that which

compels thought beyond itself. In it we find the unmasterable

unthought of what Hegel calls absolute knowing.29

University of Massachusetts at Boston

29 I would like to thank Rebecca Comay, Stephen Pfohl, Amit Sen, and Paul Raymont for conversations which contributed to the creation of this paper.

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Burke, From Desire to Fascination Hegel and Blanchot on Negativity

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