Hegel and the fate of negativity
after empire.
University of Toronto
Ernst Bloch wrote in 1962, in the postscript to
the reprint of his study of Hegel, Subjekt-Objekt, that it’s always the
right time for Hegel.[1]
For Hegel himself, time of necessity both refuses to let go of what was, and
never ceases promising what might be.
And Hegel, for whom this two-timed-ness of the human condition was
fundamental, took it upon himself to create a philosophical language that might
speak of the temporality of being as if from some place that time could not
touch. And, one might add, to speak of this place in temporal terms.
It’s striking how doggedly the search for a place
where critical language can flourish outside time persists in being the central
problem of critical philosophy, from Walter Benjamin’s freezing of the
dialectic to postcolonialism’s uncertainty about when the post-colonial was.
But again, on the other hand, it’s not so striking. Hegel’s modernity – that is
the modernity that was the driving force of radical change in the years Hegel
grew to philosophical maturity – has never since stopped making a mockery of
time. In our world, as in Hegel’s every day brings with it the knowledge that
nothing has changed, and nothing remains the same. Hegel is, in Nancy’s words,
“the inaugural thinker of the contemporary world.”[2]
He attempted to invent a language to describe what happens when thought thinks
its own thinking unfolding in time. In a way this alone might have pre-ordained
these writings to do what they continue to do, namely to refuse to go away. On
top of that, however, is the contradictory insistence on imagining a point at
which this process can be thought to have ended. Or as Bloch had written in the
first preface to the first edition of his book in 1947, “Hegel’s work thinks it
has reached the end, but that was only the aura of ideology.”[3]
To think the totality of the world in time, one has to think as if time were
over. And confounding this is the language itself in which Hegel formulates the
persistence of time on the threshold of its cessation. Adorno wrote in 1962-3
that “in the realm of great philosophy, Hegel is no doubt the only one with
whom at times one literally does not know and cannot conclusively determine
what is being talked about, and with whom there is no guarantee that such a
judgment is even possible.”[4]
It is not only Hegel who wants to invent a
language to counter time, and thereby to make philosophical writing possible.
And it’s not only Hegel who is constantly coming up against the refusal of
language to take on this role. Hegel’s problem refuses to go away, whether our
thought models itself on poststructuralism’s claims for a break with the past,
or the Habermasian persistence of modernity, and it is in this sense that
Hegel’s problem has become the problem of postcolonial theory.
Postcolonial theory remains Hegelian in its
pursuit of a language that describes what happens when the self-sufficiency of
consciousness encounters another consciousness whom a prior history has cast in
an inferior position – the consciousness of a master must find a way to think
about itself through the thoughts of a servant. It is Hegelian too in its
refusal to allow the categories of master and servant, colonizer and colonized
to ossify in a static bipolar relationship. And the postcolonial insistence on
re-casting the categories of critique within the social arrangements of the new
world order seems to follow Hegel’s insistence that Kant’s understanding of
reason be historically contextualized, not only within his own new world order,
but also within the social order appropriate at any one particular historical
and geographical moment. And his attempt to think history in geographical terms
(which Kant had also wanted)[5] has not been
shed by postcolonial theory. On the contrary, if there is a primary
distinguishing moment in postcolonial theory, it is perhaps best thought of in
terms of a recuperation of this aspect of Kant’s philosophy in all its
implications for critical theory.
And yet, postcolonialism’s Hegel remains largely
unresolved, and much remains to be done to describe it. It is possible to speak
about postcolonialism’s Hegel in the terms I just outlined. But why is this
theoretical isomorphism worth dwelling on? I think there are two answers, and
both of them are historical. Or to be more precise, one is genealogical and the
other historical. In order to explain why postcolonialism’s unconscious is
structured like Hegelian language, I will begin taking a few tentative steps in
the direction of a genealogy that might show how to recover the more meaningful
traces of Hegelian thought in postcolonial theory. I speak very hesitantly,
since I cannot hope to do more than point to where we might look if we seek to speak
about Hegel in postcolonial theory beyond the platitudes he is usually made to
stand in for. If we want to understand what Hegel means for postcolonial
theory, we need to look beyond a Hegel where the dialectic of master and slave
is constantly hovering in unspoken ways on the threshold of becoming a
historical metaphor for unequal power relations between groups coded by race,
gender and class. Hegel does that, but more. My assumption is that such an
investigation would find Hegel inscribed like a trauma into the defining
theoretical moments out of which postcolonialism was to emerge. And this
traumatic Hegel is not just any Hegel. Alongside the thinker of master and
servant and of the systematics of Aufhebung, it is also a Hegel in which
history as process has entered a phase of radical indeterminacy – an
indeterminacy Hegel saw coming with the wave, or waves of modernization he saw
sweeping over his time, and which in a moment that I am tempted to describe as
intellectual malice (but I would prefer to think of as an acute insight into
the idea of history as process in modernity), he formulated for posterity as
the end of history. More on that in a minute.
In recent years, there have been several attempts
to revise Hegel’s problematic position within postcolonial theory. The popular
set of Hegel myths and legends (to borrow the title of Jon Stewart’s book)[6]
have to a large extent given way to a more subtle reading of his work, and his
views on topics not too distant from the concerns of postcolonialism have been
much enhanced by Robert Bernasconi, Tsenay Serequeberhan and more recently
Susan Buck-Morss.[7] These
debates center around the need to recover from Hegel an active and conscious
reception of current writings on European incursions into Africa and the New
World, and to demonstrate how they fit into his system. However, as they show,
the more light shed on this aspect of Hegel’s writing, the more difficult and
problematic he becomes for postcolonial theory. It seems that there is an
increasing awareness that the earlier reception of Hegel in postcolonial theory
is becoming less and less tenable. It seems increasingly difficult to read
Hegel via select paragraphs from his philosophy of history, as an arrogant
rejection of everything that is not Western, European, and if possible
Prussian. This has always been the most popular Hegel for discussions of
postcolonialism, right up to and including Spivak’s section on Hegel in The
Critique of Postcolonial Reason. To contrast the “exceptionalism” of the Srimadbhagavadgita
with Hegel’s purported “Euro-teleological normativity” is possible only on the
narrowest reading of Hegel.[8]
But the problem is that Spivak’s reading, though narrow, is correct. Hegel did
hope for a picture of wholeness in which the untidy lives of historically and
geographically remote individuals might disappear under the force of the here
and now. What looks to us like Hegel’s Eurocentrism looked to him like the
necessary double violence which thought inaugurates when thinking historical and
geographical remoteness and casting its own thought processes in language.
However, what a critical reading of Hegel today needs to pay attention to is
the mode in which the remote disappears, for it is in the mode of disappearance
that we find revealed the secret of negativity – that in each violent
disappearance there remains an insistence, a marking the manner in which the
physical world and its inhabitants refuse to go away. Failing this critical
encounter with Hegel, any attempt to restore his importance will remain
embedded in the kind of quandary Edward Said alludes to briefly when he states
in Culture and Imperialism: “The irony is that Hegel’s dialectic is
Hegel’s, after all: he was there first, just as the Marxist dialectic of
subject and object had been there before the Fanon of Les Damnés had
used it to explain the struggle between colonizer and colonized.”[9]
The problem this confronts us with is not so much
the irony of first sightings, but of subsequent possessions. If Marx and Fanon
require Hegel’s dialectic, it is probably more productive to ask why, in most
readings of postcolonial theory, this requirement is so easily submerged
beneath various other assumptions about Hegel, and why it is that
qualifications like Said’s have to be stated with an air of surprise, instead
of being treated as the open secrets they are. The open secret of Hegel having
been there first reaches beyond Fanon to his entire generation, and from there
it will come to inform the theoretical heart of poststructuralism. This has
been clearly demonstrated by Vincent Descombes, among others, and need not be
pursued here.[10] Descombes
shows how an entire generation of French scholars was shaped in their
intellectual lives by the Hegelianism of Alexander Kojčve, and in particular,
Kojčve’s location of the master-slave dialectic at the centre of Hegel’s work.
But rather than attempt to argue an easy genealogy
from Hegel through Kojčve to poststructuralism and postcolonial theory, I would
like to heighten the question of when the postcolonial was by pointing out that
in the Hegelianism out of which some founding thoughts of poststructuralism
arose, there are already strong postcolonial moments. This is clearly evident
in the sections of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, for example, where
he takes issue with Sartre’s Hegel, in order to elaborate on a Hegel that is
much closer to Adorno’s – a Hegel where the force of negativity refuses to go
away, no matter how reasonable the cause of synthesis. For Fanon, negativity is
the identifying impetus of black consciousness that refuses to play the
identifying game of white consciousness – or that only plays the game as a game
that has to be played if the workings of power in history are to be unsettled.
Given the readings of Hegel that were popular in France at the time Fanon was
studying, it is not surprising that he should have take Hegel in this
direction. For Kojčve’s reading of Hegel – and in particular the master-slave
dialectic – is already colored with a certain historical gradient between
Europe and its others, a gradient that unmistakably reveals the traces of a
colonialism that is only beginning to be a dying colonialism.
In his commentary on Chapter IV, Section A of the Phenomenology,
Kojčve discusses the emergence of the master-slave dialectic as a necessary
expression of the essence of human desire. The terms he uses to describe the
different expressions of desire are telling. For Kojčve,
Hegel’s expression of an independent consciousness for itself and a dependant
life for another is understood as the difference between human and animal
desire.[11]
In calling it this, Kojčve deduces that human society is constituted by a
multiplicity of desires, but that these in turn fall into two essential
categories, or what he calls “anthropogenetic behaviors.” He continues: “In
other words, in his nascent state, man is never simply man. He is always,
necessarily, and essentially, either Master or Slave. If the human reality can
come unto being only as a social reality, society is human – at least in its
origin – only on the basis of its implying an element of Mastery and an element
of Slavery, of ‘autonomous’ existences and ‘dependent’ existences.”[12]
When we read the corresponding pages in Hegel, the
most remarkable thing is the degree of indeterminacy surrounding the notions of
mastery and servitude (or lordship and bondage, which is how Miller translates Herrschaft
and Knechtschaft).[13]
In the paragraph where Hegel first introduces the idea of lordship and bondage,
he presents them as two alternative Gestalten – forms or shapes
(Miller’s translation) – of consciousness. Hegel makes it clear that negativity
directs the process of thinking about one’s own identity via the thought of
another, but he gives us virtually no guidelines for conceptualizing the
details of how this process might take place. Is it historical, metaphorical,
psychological? We don’t know, and Hegel doesn’t tell us. The fact that he
doesn’t tell us is bound to the workings of negativity, whose specificity is
always in the process of being submerged in philosophical work, only to
re-emerge in the moment the philosopher turns away.
This is the puzzle that Hegel presented to Kojčve
and his students. For us, looking back, it would seem there are two dimensions
of this puzzle – first, to what extent did Hegel draw on the experience of
Empire, the negation and consolidation of the European sphere through its
expansion into a world-economy, and how did this affect his thoughts about the
non-equality of consciousness grounded in negativity? and second, what did
Kojčve and his followers make of this?
Before I turn to the first question let me note
that Kojčve appears not to have been in the slightest interested in this first
question. But there is a fascinating historical dialogue underlying his reading
of Hegel which itself draws on everything that lordship and bondage has come to
mean by the 1930’s and 1940’s. When Kojčve conceptualized the duality of
consciousness as two essential anthropogenetic modes, he is repeating the
social dualism of the late 19th century. He himself was aware of the
challenges this posed to his thought, and one of the most intriguing parts of
the Introduction to the Reading of Hegel is the set of notes about the
end of history, revolution, colonial uprisings, the USA, the Orient and Japan,
in which he attempts to come to terms with what human essence and animality
might mean together with the idea of the end of history in the years
immediately following the second world war.[14]
Commenting on the passage where Hegel defines nature as the negative of the
human spirit in space (in other words, on the temporalizing work of thought and
its effect – the production of nature) Kojčve attempts to explicate in
historical terms what happens at the end of history. In doing so, it seems, he
falls into the trap that Hegel sets. For Kojčve, the end of history needs to be
thought as a historical development where the negativity that separates
humanity from nature ceases to have effect in human life. In his note, written
in 1946, Kojčve attempts to argue that there will come an end to history, as
described by Hegel, where humanity’s negating work out of which nature and
history arise, will cease. This, he concludes, will be a reactivation of
humanity’s animal essence, where negativity has given way to harmony. War and
labor cease (for they are the manifestations respectively of humanity negating
its own temporality and spatiality), and all that will remain is what Kojčve
identifies as Marx’s dream of humanity in harmony with itself.
Shortly before his death in 1968, Kojčve revisits
this note with a lengthy addendum for the publication of the second edition.
This revisited note has been commented on extensively, and I do not wish to
engage in that commentary. I simply wish to observe how Kojčve negotiates what
he sees as the futility of attempting to think the end of history in the terms
described above. The key to his changed ideas on the end of history is the
French Revolution, that moment in time which was so decisive for Hegel himself.
Kojčve’s thesis about the persistence of the French revolution’s political
dynamic begs the question as to Hegel’s own concern with the political impact
of extra-European events on Europe itself. In a way, the thesis of the end of
history is an inevitable theoretical response to the problem of modernization
that Hegel saw in the wake of the French revolution. Hegel never ceased to hope
that the revolution’s process of renewal was a continuing process which would
radically transform society throughout Europe and throughout the world. And
yet, his entire project required him to imagine an end to this process.
Nevertheless, he refuses to be pinned down on how the end of history is to be
conceptualized, simply because in modernity, it becomes impossible to dissociate
history as those events that are constantly being renewed from history as this
process of constant renewal, and from history as the consciousness of both. Any
attempt to read the end of history as the end of the consciousness of history
must come to terms with the fact that in Kojčve’s words, “the natural World
remains what it has been from all eternity,” and human life continues as a part
of the natural world. Does this mean that humanity becomes what Nietzsche
described – happy animals without consciousness? Kojčve is not satisfied with
this kind of conclusion. If this were so, he argues, “it would have to be
admitted that after the end of History, men would construct their edifices and
works of art as birds build their nests and spiders spin their webs, would
perform musical concerts after the fashion of frogs and cicadas, would play
like young animals, and would indulge in love like adult beasts. But one cannot
then say that all this ‘makes Man happy.’”[15]
Instead he decides to interpret the end of history as the persistence of
the process whereby human consciousness and activity negates itself in time,
thereby ceasing to fundamentally change the way human society is structured.
Instead of the progression in time which is history, the wave of European modernization
that began with the French revolution has continued to spread in space, outward
across the face of the globe, where in wave upon wave of modernization it
encompasses all society.
Kojčve understands the wars of colonial liberation
in this context, as specialized reiterations of the perpetual destabilization
that is modernity. Pointing to Hegel’s legendary completion of the Phenomenology
on the eve of the battle of Jena, he writes:
What has happened since
then is but an extension in space of the universal revolutionary force
actualized in France by Robespierre-Napoleon. From the authentically historical
point of view, the two world wars with their retinue of large and small
revolutions had only the effect of bringing the backward civilizations of the
peripheral provinces into line with the most advanced (real or virtual)
European historical positions. If the sovietization of Russia and the
communization of China are anything more than or different from the
democratization of imperial Germany (by way of Hitlerism) or the accession of
Togoland to independence, nay the self-determination of the Papuans, it is only
because the Sino-Soviet actualization of Robespierrian Bonapartism obliges
post-Napoleonic Europe to speed up the elimination of the numerous more or less
anachronistic sequels to its pre-revolutionary past.[16]
As I mentioned, it is not my purpose to engage in
the discussions on Kojčve’s reading of the end of history. But there is so much
that, from a postcolonial perspective, is troubling in these few sentences that
it is difficult leave them un-commented. What consequences follow from reading
the political struggles at the peripheries in the second world war in terms of
a modernization of backward civilizations? By what stretch of the historical imagination
does it make sense to reduce Russian sovietization and Chinese communism to
analogies of Hitler’s national socialism? And to project onto this homogeneous
conglomeration the independence of Togoland and the self-determination of the
Papuans? And this all in the name of Robespierre and Napoleon. Clearly, the
kind of historical flattening that needs to be undertaken in order to speak the
way Kojčve does about the end of history casts serious doubt on his own
reading. As long as post-history holds interest as a place where, in Erik de
Vries’ words “man’s capacity for mortal risk is gratuitous and therefore
apolitical,”[17] there can
be no historical legitimacy for the mortal risk of the liberation struggle. All
that is left is a coupling of philosophy with a form of political benevolence
whose ideal acteur is the Hegelian civil servant actualized within the
context of European reconstruction.
Kojčve may have shown an admirable political prescience in understanding
the implications for Europe of decolonization (for example his work in the Ministčre
des Finance et des Affaires Economiques sought to “develop a policy that
replaced the vestiges of European colonialism with a more equitable system of
trade between industrialized and developing nations.”)[18]
Kojčve unfolds this set of ideas in the lecture he gave in Düsseldorf at the
invitation of Carl Schmitt, entitled “Colonialism from a European Perspective,”
which he begins by remarking “that in my lecture I very consciously and
deliberately want to avoid anything which is in any way political or could
appear to be so. I intend radically to depoliticize all the concepts I discuss,
above all the concept of so-called colonialism.”[19]
Kojčve then goes on to explain the persistence of Marx’s capitalist economy,
not within Europe, but within a world-system that creates surplus value for an
affluent Euro-American minority at the expense of what he calls an Afro-Asian
proletariat. Against the need for an anti-colonial revolution he then argues
the need for economic reform of the kind that Fordism had brought to Western
capitalism and thereby circumvented the revolution Marx had predicted. In
conclusion, he proposes reconstructing colonialism economically in a Fordist
manner.
We would only need to glance Fanon’s own brand of
anti-colonial Hegelianism of the same time to see how inadequate this must have
looked from the perspective of the colonized peoples and within the context of
their struggles for liberation. From today’s perspective Kojčve’s remedy for
post-colonial exploitation looks like a remarkably apt critique of
globalizations concentration of capital in the hands of the affluent minority.
And yet, the aptness of the critique is where the problem lies - his insistence
that colonial reform be driven by economic policy is in his reading tantamount
to a de-politicization. This points to the problem that Hegel faced when he
attempted to conceptualize historical change both as action and as reflection.
For Kojčve’s benevolent colonial reform, like the struggles in the G7 summits,
can hold not better promise to the world’s exploited masses than to place their
trust in the good conscience of their masters. Let it suffice to note that
Kojčve can only think the postcolonial moment as a moment whose position at the
end of history bears the same characteristics as his own (and Hegel’s own)
post-Napoleonic Europe. Kojčve takes possession of Hegel’s moment in time by
imagining Hegel’s Europe taking possession of the rest of the world, and he
does this even at the same moment that the rest of the world is struggling to
free itself from Europe. This was in 1948. To make matters worse, Kojčve,
writing in 1960 goes on to say that 12 years earlier he had mistaken the
relationship of Europe and its others. Now he prefers to see Japan as the
source of renewal.
The important point in the present context is that
Kojčve saw colonialism as a provocation for Hegel’s model of history – history
seen here both as the history of philosophy and the philosophy of history.
But where does this leave Hegel?
It is Susan Buck-Morss’ achievement to have shown
how our understanding of this dialectic requires contextualizing his comments
within his reception of current debates on slavery and, perhaps, colonization.
What I would now like to do is to show how the postcolonial theme can be
elaborated around Hegel’s concerns with the end of Empire. I hope to be able to
use that discussion to demonstrate that the incorporation of Hegel’s dialectic
into poststructuralism was to a certain extent pre-programmed to raise some key
issues of postcolonial theory. Or to put it differently, Hegel’s own
confrontation with the social order of Empire was inscribed into his dialectic
in ways that fed directly into current debates via what might be called the
postcolonial unconscious. This follows a complex and at times tortuous path,
but I believe that the best way of entry is via the concept of negativity.
For Hegel the idea of negativity is one that had
to be developed – in a certain sense at least – after Empire. In order to argue
this point, I will need to take some time explicating the semantic field that
would have opened up to Hegel and his readers when they encountered the word
Empire. In the process, I will explain how, most pronouncedly in the Phenomenology
of Spirit, negativity related to
the idea of Empire. I hope this will lay the groundwork for positioning the
Hegelian concept of negativity within the discourse of postcolonial theory.
If we want to understand how negativity arises
after Empire in Hegel, we have to be attentive to his use of the word Reich.
If for no other reason, Hegel’s use of the German word for Empire has to be of
interest to postcolonial studies because of how its semantic field articulates
with the major philosophical project of his early writings: the need to
reconcile individual desire and knowledge with the most appropriate forms of
social expression. Empire carried both an ontological promise that it might
fulfill this need (Hegel has no difficulty speaking of the kingdom of Nature in
the same breath as what we would call Empire today)[20]
and a historical display of all the ways it has failed to do so. This
historical deficit of Empire in the German context is the subject of an essay
entitled simply “The German Constitution”, which Hegel commenced in 1797, at
the same time as his friends Hölderlin and Isaak von Sinclair were attending
the Congress of Rastatt, where representatives of the Holy Roman Empire
negotiated with France in the hopes of reaching some kind of a peaceful
settlement. Here Hegel interrogates the Holy Roman Empire in search of its
formal contributions to a specifically German social order. Or to use terms
more familiar in the postcolonialism debates, he attempts to derive a German
localism from a hypothetical globalism attached to Empire.
The reason why Hegel was able to put his ideas on
Empire in place relatively early, had to do with his encounter with Edward
Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon’s great work was
published between 1776 and 1788, and Hegel found it in the library of Carl
Friedrich von Steiger in Bern while he was a Hofmeister there from 1793 to
1796, and he read it with enthusiasm.
For Hegel, reading in the first decade of the new
French Republic, Gibbon’s monumental documentation of the collapse of Rome
would have looked like a commentary on the collapse of the French aristocracy,
promising a reawakening of a culture more suited to the fragmented German
political landscape, and a culture that was easily identifiable with ancient
Greece.
Herder had already established a tradition in
Germany for understanding colonialist and imperialist projects in terms of
Greek cultural dissemination. For example, speaking of Greece in 1769, he
observes that it was a culture established as a colony of seafarers. In
addition, he claims that for this reason it lived on in a kind of mobile
cultural expression which required a similar mobility of reception.[21]
This is an idea which was later to be exceptionally important for Hegel, and it
is worth keeping in mind when discussing how Empire relates to negativity after
Hegel. The tag we can put on it now would read something like this – the ideal
relationship of the developing and learning spirit to the surrounding world is
a relationship of mobility aimed at its own cessation, and as such, its social
expression bears similarity to colonizing activities. This similarity becomes
intensified when we begin to understand what colonization looked like to
Herder’s generation – the generation against which that of Hegel measured its
own intellectual emergence. Culture was for Herder both mutable and
historically determined, and it is probably best understood as the form of
expression that tied the nature of individual groups to the common human
destiny in which they took part. Greece is a telling reference for him, since
it is the culture which he saw as forming the single most positive model for
thinking about the genesis and coherence of a common German culture in an age
of territorial fragmentation.
The idea of a cultural unity whose forces could
work against modernity’s fragmentation was one of the earliest lessons Hegel
took from Herder, and with it he allowed the mid-century debates on colonialism
and empire to be built into his quest for a solution to the discrepancies
between individual experience and group identity. Hegel provided virtually no
commentary on Gibbon, so there is a lot of conjecture in attempts to position
the English historian in Hegel’s early thought. Nevertheless, given the
subsequent directions his historical philosophy took, it seems reasonable to
assume he was reading Gibbon more or less the way he is popularly received
today – as testimony to the circularity of history – a circularity that
contains within it the most pressing demands of Hegel’s historical dialectic.
Empires come and go, the rise to fame, logistical and economical supremacy
followed by disorganization and collapse seems one of the fundamental patterns
that condemn humanity to the stasis against which Hegel struggled. He
referenced this much more explicitly in his readings of Faust, where Goethe
conceived humanity’s secular path to salvation in terms of a restlessness and
striving, driven by the force of negation embodied in Mephistopheles, the
“spirit that always negates.”
Negativity in Goethe, as in Hegel becomes the
multi-facetted force that opposes form while at the same time enabling it. The
large body of commentary linking Hegel to Goethe has neglected to relate this
founding moment in Hegel’s philosophy to the theme of Empire as the epitome of
collapse and regeneration in social form.[22]
To do this, we need to isolate a constellation that was important in Hegel’s
early writing. The central concept of negativity holds in place not only the more
commonly mentioned linked concepts like desire, freedom, self and other. It
also extends to such concepts as barbarism, mobility, defense, and others. My
interest here is the changed nuance introduced by adding the concept of Empire
to this constellation. To do this, I need to mention briefly how negativity
emerges alongside the concepts of mobility and the Barbarian, both of these in
turn being thought alongside the concept of Empire (and in more shadowy ways,
alongside European colonialism).
Hegel first started using the word Barbarian –
albeit sparingly – in his early writings in Bern.[23]
His context is irregular, but there seems to be a predominant consideration
attached to the word – it has to do with the image that he must have derived
from Gibbon, of faceless, mobile (we might say deterritorialized) hordes
outside the city walls, threatening the sedentary accomplishments of a
civilized yet overly complacent humankind. The figure of the barbarian
continues to spring almost automatically to Hegel’s mind whenever he wants to
provide an image for the moment when culture’s territoriality must face its
outside, its negative. And, it might be added, it continued to hold an almost
mythical force for Kojčve’s generation, the generation of intellectuals who tried
to come to terms with the debasement of human values in Nazi Germany. By the
time Adorno and Horkheimer write the Dialectic of Enlightenment, for
example, it has acquired a force far surpassing that in Hegel.
And, in keeping with the general understanding of
physical mobility as the central defining force of Bildung in his own
age, Hegel too sees mobility as a journey in search of a return. As such, it
incorporates a teleological, goal-seeking dimension - a dimension that sends
the inquiring spirit into the physical world where it encounters the world's
stubbornness, its resistance, its negativity. And the subject of improvement
incorporates this encounter with the negative within subjectivity, drawing on
the force of the negative in order to propel him back to himself, back home. In
its goal-seeking dimension, mobility seeks in the final instance to negate
itself and allow the traveling subject to return to its proper place. This is a
central concern for Hegel. In his foreword to the Phenomenology of Spirit,
Hegel makes it clear that the goal of phenomenology only makes sense to him if
it can be grasped as a pathway from the self to the world, a path which lays
out a journey destined to return spirit and self to itself. What Hegel
emphasizes time and again is that concepts themselves need this departure and
return if they are to function as concepts.[24]
And more, the subject only becomes subject in its actualization through the
motions of the concept.
To tell the story of the self-improvement of the
subject and, alongside it, of humankind is to wrestle conceptually with the
weight of material life, tied to immobility, and at the same time to allow the
flights of thought to return to that materiality, while at the same time
carefully mapping the territory it covers in the process. It will take but a
small development of this idea to see that Hegel’s story is closely related to
the weight of sedentary culture and immobile individuals confronting the
mobility of European culture, but also the mobility of other cultures, and
asking what this might mean for the progress of history.
The negativity that Hegel describes as the moving
force of the soul relies upon a regime of difference that is situated in the
physical world, in the world of things. If the spirit is to find its way back
to itself via the consciousness-spending journey into the world of the
negative, then the encounter with difference will have to be understood in
terms of the order of things. What this means is that the negativity he
associates with barbarism is a necessary moment in the establishment of
territoriality.
What this means in the present context becomes
clearer if we jump to Hegel’s later works. In his Lectures on the Philosophy
of History, the geographical determination of history is expressed as a
territorial field, a distance across which human action can perform its
irrational yet purifying acts. For Hegel, to tell the story of world history is
to tell and retell this mobility, this excursion into nature-as-territory, into
negativity - an excursion whose only purpose can be to return to a
nature-become-property. And in the process the subject returns as the subject
authorized to determine this relationship for himself - the subject authorized
to accept his own alienation from nature. The subject returning from negativity
is destined to sedentary life. For it is here that man's freedom from nature
expresses itself as a relationship to property.
Tsenay Serequeberhan has shown how, in the Philosophy
of Right, Hegel uses this conception of objectification and property to
imagine how colonialism might solve the problems of civil society – much in the
same way the ideologues of German colonialism would argue 50 years later at
mid-century. Her conclusion is that Hegel’s presentation of “colonial expansion
as the manifestation of the Idea” allows him to “metaphysically articulate and
ethically justify the colonialist eventuations of European history.”[25]
What is omitted in this conclusion is Hegel’s ambivalent stance on the
combination of property and mobility – in other words on the mobility of
capital and the acquisition of territory, the two central pillars of colonial
expansion.
For Hegel, the Idea can only be conceived as
manifesting itself in colonial expansion if the subjective acts involved therein
are understood against the background of his debates on negativity. The
negativity of outward expansion is coupled to that of mobile capital, and can
find its own negation only in the acquisition of property as an objectification
of personality.
Hegel does not state it explicitly, but it seems
that, if colonization is to offer any kind of solution for him, it would have
to require the sedentary moment of settler colonization. The importance of this
sedentarizing moment for Hegel as the quintessential moment in world history is
evident in his discussion of the emergence of the Christian German world.
The German world's original relationship with
nature is one of migration into the great central European forests, but Hegel
emphasizes that this migratory origin was a state of barbarism that should not
be confused with true freedom - and here he mentions Rousseau. For the
barbarian origins of the Germanic nations are themselves only viewed in a
positive light where their tendency is sedentary. In order to make this point,
Hegel distinguishes between two branches of the German nations - which we might
call the nomadic and the sedentary. He speaks of “the German nations who
remained in their ancient habitations and those who spread themselves over the
Roman Empire, and mingled with the conquered peoples.”[26]
The latter resulted in barbarian migrations and the emergence of new and hybrid
nations, whose mental and moral existence remains marked by hybrid division.
These nations have become the Romanic nations - Italy, Spain, Portugal and
France. They are of course also to a large extent the merchant and colonizing
nations, the driving force of the new world order whose emergence so clearly
troubled many German commentators from the mid-18th century onward.
Hegel inherited this trouble around the topic of
commerce and empire from his predecessors. The German reception of the Scottish
Enlightenment had forced the issue of commerce as an activity aimed at the
betterment of mankind, and by the time Hegel wrote, it was almost obligatory to
take a stance on whether commercial activity meant the fulfillment of human
destiny (like Goethe was increasingly to argue), or if it bore with it the
seeds of exploitation (as we find so strongly stated in Herder, more
ambivalently in the later Kant).
Hegel’s position on this point is noteworthy, and
it will bring me to my conclusion. Almost everything he had developed by way of
a systematic explanation of the individual’s place in society led him to
believe that the unrestricted mobility of capital is a detrimental thing.[27]
Here he was close to Schelling’s explanation of bad infinity as best
exemplified in the English national debt. It is true, his interests in the
Scottish theorists inclined him towards a minimal State intervention in the
economy.[28] But for him
social change had to be thought in terms of the social mechanisms and
institutions that might regulate the wayward mobility encouraged by free
commerce. Hegel made it clear in his early Jena work on the German constitution
that he identified the moderate stabilizing force of State institutions with
the changing face of Empire he was witnessing at his own doorstep. In his
manuscript on Philosophy of Nature and Philosophy of Spirit of 1805, he read
the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire and the concurrent institution of the
Napoleonic Code in France and parts of Germany as the demise of an ineffectual
Empire whose negativity was constantly escaping its own codification. And in
its place he imagined a codification of modern ideas of property that permitted
the individual to take charge of nature in its own proper domain. For Hegel,
the collapse of a defunct Empire and the institution of a modern Empire began
to look like an opportunity to preserve local particularities within a well defined
local – it’s tempting to say ethnic –
territory, while at the same time conceptualizing a “global” order that
promised the progress of humanity.
This seems to me to be the right moment to pause
and call to mind a structural analogy between that moment in European history
and philosophy and our own– the postcolonial moment where one imperial order
gives way to another, bringing with it a cultural order characterized by the
apologist invention of the local and the ideology of the global – with such deadly
results. In Hegel’s eyes, the global looked like Napoleon on his horse, and the
corpses on the fields between the Metztal and the Munketal, just outside his
city seemed easy to disregard alongside the promise of a new social order.
Negativity’s conversion to territoriality looked like a triumph of the global
alongside a sudden celebration of the local. I suppose if he were writing
today, I would vehemently oppose what he would have to say about our own new
social order. But then, maybe not even Hegel could have imagined George W. Bush
on a horse.
An examination of the Hegelian dialectic and the
role it has played in formulating some of the key concepts of postcolonial
theory should re-awaken Stuart Hall’s question: (1996) “when was the
postcolonial?”.[29] The manner
in which we choose to answer this question has a lot to do with the way we read
Hegel today, and it will also determine the usefulness of the idea of the
postcolonial as an analytical and critical concept.
[1] “Hegel ist immer an der Zeit.” Ernst Bloch, “Nachschrift 1962,” Subjekt-Objekt. Erläuterungen zu Hegel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1981), 13. See also the motto from Derrida that Stuart Barnett chooses for his introduction to Hegel After Derrida (London: Routledge 1998), p. 1: “We will never be finsihed with the reading or rereading of Hegel, and, in a certain way, I do nothing other than attempt to explain myself on this point.”
[2] Jean-Luc Nancy, Hegel. The Restlessness of the Negative, trans. Jason Smith and Steven Miller (Minneapolis: University of Minesota Press 2002), p. 3.
[3] Bloch, “Vorwort zur Ausgabe 1951,” Subjekt-Objekt, 11.
[4] Theodor W. Adorno, “Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel,” Hegel: Three Studies, transl. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 1993), 89.
[5] See Kant’s announcement of his lecture plan for the year 1765-66, where he states that his three-fold conception of geography (as physical, moral and political geography) is “the actual foundation of all history, without which it can be little distinguished from fairy tales.” Immanuel Kants Nachricht von der Einrichtung seiner Vorlesungen in dem Winterhalbenjahre von 1765-1766. In: Gesammelte Schriften. Hrsg. von der Koeniglich-Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin. Berlin, 1902-. Vol. 2: 312.
[6] Jon Stewart (ed.), The Hegel Myths and Legends (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press 1996).
[7] Robert Bernasconi, “Hegel at the Court of the Ashanti” in Hegel after Derrida, ed. Stuart Barnett (London & New York: Routledge 1998) 41- 63. Bernasconi is careful to isolate the colonialist impulses in Hegel’s treatement of Africa. Tsenay Serequeberhan, “The Idea of Colonialism in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” in International Philosophical Quarterly 29 (1989) 311-12. Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel and Haiti, Critical-Inquiry 26 (2000): 821-865.
[8] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1999), 58.
[9] Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage 1994) 210.
[10] Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1980).
[11] Alexandre Kojčve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Lectures on the ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’, transl. James H. Nichols (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press 1989), p. 8.
[12] Kojčve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, p. 8.
[13] Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, transl. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1977).
[14] Kojčve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, p. 158n6.
[15] Kojčve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, p. 159 (note).
[16] Kojčve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, p. 160-1 (note).
[17] Erik de Vries, „Alexandre Kojčve – Carl Schmitt Correspondence and Alexandre Kojčve, ‘Colonialism from a European Perspective’,” Interpretation 29 (2001): 91-130, p. 93.
[18] Michael S. Roth, Knowing and History. Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press 1988), p. 126.
[19] Alexandre Kojčve, ‘Colonialism from a European Perspective’,” Interpretation 29 (2001): 115-130, p. 115.
[20] In a marginal comment on the introductory section of “The German Constitution” (1801), where he notes the necessity for a thorough definition of the conditions for individual accession to power, Hegel writes: „Das deutsche Reich ist von dieser Seite wie das Reich der Natur unerschöpflich im Großen und unergründlich im Kleinen, und diese Seite ist es, welche die Eingeweihten in die Kenntnisse des unendlichen Details der Rechte mit jener Bewunderung, jenem Staunen vor der Ehrwürdigkeit des deutschen Staatskörpers erfüllt.“ (“The German Empire is in this respect like the Empire of Nature, inexhaustible in the whole and unfathomable in detail, and it is this aspect which arouses in those conversent in the unending details of the law such admiration and astonishment for the honourable qualities of the German State.”) G.W.F. Hegel, Werke in 20 Bänden. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1970, Band 1: Frühe Schriften, p. 455.
[21] Johann Gottfried Herder, Werke, vol. 9/II: Journal meiner Reise im Jahr 1769; Pädagogische Schriften, ed. Rainer Wisbert (Frankfurt a. M. 1997), p. 23.
[22] Kaufmann hints at a line of thought running from Kant’s cosmopolitanism (1784) to Hegel and Goethe’s negativity). Hegel. A Reinterpretation (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 1985), p. 119.
[24] According to Michael Beddow, Hegel writes in a tradition that regards human action as informed by teleological principles that are essentially biological in nature, and that are to be grasped as internal, not external. This teleology works "purely from within; each entity [has] an immanent form which it [strives] to express, and the realisation of that potential [is] its telos, its end" The Fiction of Humanity: Studies in the Bildungsroman from Wieland to Thomas Mann (Cambridge : Cambridge UP 1982: 136).
[25] Tsenay Serequeberhan, “The Idea of Colonialism in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.” International Philosophical Quarterly 29 (1989): 301-318, p. 318. I have changed the verb endings to fit the grammar of my sentence.
[26] G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, transl. J. Sibree (New York: Dover 1956), p. 348.
[27] See Jay Drydyk, “Capitalism, Socialism and Civil Society” Monist 74(3) (1991) 457-477.
[28] Terry Pinkard, Hegel. A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000), p. 193.
[29] Stuart Hall, “When was ‘the Postcolonial?’ Thinking at the Limit,” in I. Chambers and L. Curti, eds., The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, (London and New York, 1996), pp. 242-260.