Daniel Villegas

Session 3. More Hegelianisms without reserve

March 8

What, after all, is sovereignty? Under what register—political, ethical or metaphysical—

should this notion be understood, and how is it to be related to the history of philosophy? And

moreover, if, following Derrida’s “From Restricted to General Economy, a Hegelianism without

Reserve,” Bataille’s notion of sovereignty appears initially to translate Hegel’s lordship, only to

expose this equivalence as the simulacrum that through a burst of laughter sacrifices lordship and

thus the meaning and history of Spirit, then how can we now interpret sovereignty—and

Bataille’s thought—against a concept such as Spinoza’s “spiritual automata,” which at first sight

appears to be its absolute antipode? What can possibly come out of this unexpected encounter

where the notion of a materialism that should be univocal seems to be almost incommensurable

in these two figures? Shouldn’t the presence of two historically mediating figures—Hegel and

Nietzsche—and the common themes of immanence, joyful affirmation and a disregard for an all-

too-human representation of the world provoke thought, or at least some laughter with respect to

their unrecognized proximity? At the very least, this encounter should be able to sharpen and

perhaps activate some of the powers in their thought while, through the work of the simulated

repetition of reinterpretation, opening these paradigmatically closed systems—Spinoza’s and

Hegel’s—if only to find out what, in them, can be properly lost. What else could be the result,

what could be the use of this task, if not only it is unlikely that we can show Bataille to be a

Spinozist (or vice versa) but also that nothing truly useful could be gained other than the defacing

of the Sage’s well-defined concepts?

It may be possible to approach this task of reading one author against another to produce

unheard-of concepts in them through what Derrida calls reinterpretation, viz. to write through a

repetition that follows all the articulations of the imitated discourse while provoking subtle

displacements to finally produce a trembling that “spreads out which then makes the entire old

shell crack” (WD, 260). This mode of reading already puts into play various strata in Derrida’s

essay on Bataille, more importantly the notion of a form of writing where nothing is said, a

major writing that works by making a text work against another (or the same) text, affirming the

game as rule and “exceed[ing] the logos (of meaning, lordship, presence, etc.)” (WD, 267). Could

this be a suitable mode of writing for pressing together these two figures—Spinoza and Bataille—

while avoiding a further violence where a text would be submitted to another? Could this reading

then align itself with Bataille’s project of undoing Hegelianism (WD, 335n19) (Kojève’s Hegel,

let’s say it once and for all) or, at least, through the sliding it would produce, hint at some other

form of materialism that could avoid the Icarian temptation?

And yet, by taking up Derrida’s notion and using it to read other texts—even Bataille’s text

itself—aren’t we already in the midst of the key problem addressed in the essay? Namely whether

the Hegelian Aufhebung, “the speculative concept par excellence,” a negation “which cancels in

such a way that it preserves and maintains what is sublated” (WD, 255) is itself preserved in

Bataille’s excess, if the all-encompassing movement of Hegelian dialectics finds in the general

economy only a higher level articulation so that, in the end, we remain nevertheless in the

Hegelian system, or whether it effectively consists in the true emptying of dialects producing its

exhaustion and sovereign consummation? We can gather from the text the conditions to make

this distinction. The same relation of a simulacrum that consumes what it imitates, which can be

read in the difference of meaning that means the difference between sovereignty and lordship has

to be put into practice between Aufhebung and excess, and the condition for this is intimately tied

to its outcome and to history—which, as Derrida shows, is always the history of meaning. In fact,

as is well known, the role of the master-slave dialectic in the Phenomenology is that of preserving

meaning as the ultimate value to be attained by Spirit throughout its history, even—or in fact

precisely—at the cost of its own natural life, through a surreptitious replacement of the meaning

of life as such (WD, 255). The crucial problem here is that nothing can be simply extracted, cut

off like a morsel from dialectics, since such a movement—as Hegel himself shows just before (and

so necessarily) reaching the battle of the self-consciousnesses—only makes what is extracted, what

is done away like a simple being, into an abstract negativity that does not advance but

consolidates the system. What is called ‘meaning’ in Bataille’s and Derrida’s text is precisely that

which marks the difference between the natural life of being and the pure negativity of self-

consciousness, a difference that is recovered as profit in the history of reason by taking the work

of the negative seriously (WD, 259). The crucial articulation in this text is that between history

and a restricted economy where the labor of meaning is the material base. The comic scandal

exposed by Bataille is that in the Hegelian system meaning and negativity cannot avoid laboring,

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they are necessarily made useful and subservient to the totality, in an economy where all the

stakes are conserved as the history of reason, working for the sake of the “circulation and self-

reproduction as the reproduction of meaning” (WD, 256).

In Derrida’s essay, which follows Bataille’s Hegelian simulacrum to uncover the distance

that separates them, it is a specific kind of laughter—at the precise moment, as the result of an

entire discipline that follows reason through all of its ruses, exceeding phenomenality and read as

a burst encompassing drunkenness, erotic effusion, poetic effusion and so on—that uncovers the

submission of self-consciousness to work, the repression of its truth as slave. If the primordial

battle occurs so that man can recognize his negativity before nature as the meaning of life by

coming face to face with death while preserving his own, Bataille’s laughter exposes the servility

of this lordship that is willing to submit life and death to the labor of a redeeming restricted

economy as their ultimate meaning. What kind of lordship is this that is inevitably bound to the

slave’s consciousness, where the latter clings miserably to life and the former to the promise of an

interest to be paid off by history, with repression (the deferral of enjoyment in (the other’s) work)

as its main condition? For Bataille at least there is nothing tragic about this servile knowledge, it

can be “justly considered comical” in that it submits to undergo all and everything for the sake of

the seriousness of culture and a redemption received as payoff in the future, making of negativity

an absolutely exploitable (yet how unlimited?) resource that labors for the sake of history. True

sovereignty, for Bataille, is necessarily beyond utility, the sole enjoyment of the present moment

with total disregard for the future, absolutely unbound.

This burst of laughter, holds Derrida, exceeds dialectics only on the basis of an absolute

renunciation of meaning and knowledge. We find therefore that the condition for properly

escaping dialectics is a laughter that on principle exceeds the logic of reason. The exceeding of

Aufhebung results from exposing the negative as devoid of any reserved underside, that is, to avoid

using the work of the negative as the meaning of history. In this fashion, not only the motor force

of history is abandoned but also the resulting epochal elevation of meaning. Far from being a

pre-Kantian metaphysics of presence, as both Bataille and Derrida are quick to note, “there is a

point of no return of destruction, the instance of an expenditure without reserve which no

longer leaves us the resources with which to think this expenditure as negativity” (WD, 259). With

the sacrifice effected by sovereignty, the negative ceases to be exploited, it passes on to a beyond

where it is irrecoverable. As Derrida notes later, this is a potlatch of signs, a gay affirmation of

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death—one can imagine a Hegelian scorning this position, holding that it has achieved nothing,

and she would be right in spite of herself; as Bataille wrote to ‘a lecturer on Hegel’: “I imagine

that my life—or, better yet, its aborting, the open wound that is my life—constitutes all by itself

the refutation of Hegel’s closed system,” a negativity without any work left to do (“Letter to X,

lecturer in Hegel”, Bataille Reader, 297).

However, a critical moment of indecision occurs in Derrida’s essay when accounting for

this potlatch of signs. In fact, we find again a sudden restatement of the initial problem of the

identity between transgression and the Aufhebung as if nothing had happened. Transgression, in

the end, does or does not conserve and confirm that which it exceeds? Is transgression the

complementary operation of the overcoming of limits that allowed Hegel to go beyond Kant, the

simultaneous preservation and overcoming of the limit, in short, Aufhebung once again? Indeed a

critical moment for which Derrida sets Bataille against himself—for the comparison between

transgression and Aufhebung is found in one of Bataille’s own texts—and then sets to interpret

“one stratum of his work from another stratum” (WD, 275). Let’s hear Bataille’s laughter once

again: “Wisdom alone will be full autonomy, the sovereignty of being . . . At least it would be if

we could find sovereignty by searching for it: and, in fact, if I search for it, I am undertaking the

project of being sovereignty: but the project of being sovereignty presupposes a servile being!” (BR,

293). Insofar as it is a means for reason since it operates entirely from within the logic of

discourse, the meaning of Aufhebung is its content, which is already history itself, informed by the

circulation of prohibitions that makes it part of the world of work, of restricted economy. The

project of reason makes it subservient to its own content; not an identity but a servile dependance

that mirrors that of the master and the slave. Abandoning the epoch of meaning—

simultaneously exceeding the subject and history insofar as Hegel posits their identity—while

preserving the empty form of Aufhebung thus effectuates the ultimate refutation of Hegelianism, as

it never had any other purpose than to ascertain the complete identity of thought and being,

form and content.1 Derrida’s solution has two conditions for this radical transgression, firstly that

it preserves “the empty form of the Aufhebung” while effecting a paradigmatic displacing that links

the world of meaning to the world of nonmeaning, whereby philosophy and absolute knowledge

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1 This, however, is threatened by an affirmation made earlier in the text, that Bataille’s major writing “does not tolerate the distinction of form and content” (WD, 267). Is this to be understood only in reference to Sartre, that implicit adversary in Derrida’s essay who is only named in the footnotes? Or does it mean that they must be, as with everything else, first be posited as different only to later make them jump from within?

are themselves identified with a naive consciousness bound to a restricted economy. Second, that

such subjection delivers it to general economy that has expenditure as its principle, making it

unavailable for any particular reading—insofar as the stability of its logic has been abandoned—

and ultimately having death as its destiny.

This staged fight, in fact (of Bataille against Hegel and against himself), provides Derrida

with his own bounty, the notion of a major writing that exceeds the logos—the operation that we

have been describing, the affirmative reduction of sense that, insofar as it isn’t the position of an

originary non-sense, “definitively eludes any expectation of a reassuring archia, a condition of

possibility or transcendental of discourse” (WD, 269). This major writing is, however, neither

coextensive nor subject to sovereignty—since sovereignty subordinates nothing—it is the radical

alteration of science, the absolute excess of every philosophy and every science (WD, 268). But

moreover, this notion yields something even more invaluable, a necessary freedom, a “method”

that permits one to “detach an interpretation from its reinterpretation and submit it to another

interpretation bound to other propositions of the system,” all within the “general systematicity of

the text,” to skirt over the weaknesses of a text and be able to bind together the strong forces.

(WD, 338).

And so, how is it possible to take up Bataille’s and Derrida’s concepts, which Derrida claims

absolve him from “absolute knowledge, putting it back in its place as such, situating it and

inscribing it within a space which it no longer dominates,” (WD, 270) a process where the

consummation without return, the exhaustion of the resource of meaning is the only operation

that guarantees such an absolution? There is a risk—and this risk again invokes Hegel—of losing

sovereignty as soon as any meaning is called for or promised as the result of these operations, on

account of the distinction between abstract and absolute negativity, where the former simply

keeps returning as a false positivity until it recognizes its own alterity, thus becoming an absolute

negativity and fulfilling once again the work of Aufhebung. In this scheme, it is apparently only a

matter of time before sovereignty becomes conscious of itself—and speaking is already enough

for this—thus giving in to the logic of the system. Silence seems to be the only protection for

sovereignty, so that even speaking must constantly reintroduce “the sovereign silence which

interrupts articulated language.” (WD, 263). Derrida expands on the absolute vulnerability of this

silence, identifying the sliding that other Bataillean concepts—communication, continuum and instant

—activate to avoid falling back into the work of the negative. Thus, it is the irredeemable

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incompletion of beings and not their presence that gives place to communication in the first

place, and the sovereign moment that is nothing other than the interval that occurs when “my

thought then passes from one world to the other, from the objective one where it constructs itself,

to the subjective one where it is undone, but in the time it takes to to come undone, before it is

completely undone, I can still externalize its content” (AS III, 242). Yet whereas in this text Bataille

goes on to suggest a sensible, emotional contact that spreads through the crowd as laughter itself

giving rise to a single inner torrent among all the independent beings, producing the subject in a

miracle that exclaims “Impossible, yet there it is!” Derrida seems determined to keep Bataille

(and Hegel perhaps) separate, unavailable for political uses in the left and the right and preserve

uniquely the space of writing, keeping sovereignty within the milieu of the “night of secret

difference” (WD, 266). Is this night just a new mysticism? No, if mysticism is to be simply

opposed to the rational, nor a negative theology which always intends to recover the unthinkable

as an ontotheological ground. The atheist mystic, writes Bataille, contemplates the negative quite

directly but is never “able to transpose it into Being, refusing to do so and maintaining himself in

ambiguity.” (WD, 337).

Have we forgotten about Spinoza? Of course not. In fact, the previous description of

atheistic mysticism quite reminds one of Hegel’s own attempt to forget the old lens grinder,

claiming that “with Spinozism everything goes into the abyss but nothing emerges from

it” (Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. III, 122). This seems to be a place as good as any other

to begin that rapprochement, if only to sharpen what this kind of mysticism might mean. What,

in fact, does this condemnation mean, what does it tell us about Spinoza and, moreover, about

Hegel himself ? Let us remember that the Sage also pays Spinoza the greatest compliment in the

same lectures, famously holding that “thinking, or the spirit, has to place itself at the standpoint

of Spinozism” (Idem.). The true idea in Spinoza, for Hegel, is that substance is the absolute one,

the truly actual, and the unity of thinking and being insofar as it is causa sui. This substance, as

Pierre Macherey shows, is initially identified by Hegel with the Parminidean One, a being that is

as much a night and a pure clarity, insofar as “pure light and pure darkness are two voids that are

the same thing” (Science of Logic, §152, quoted in Macherey, 23). This substance, however, appears

in Hegel’s reading to behave rather along the lines of a Plotinus, insofar as the subsequent

determinations have no actuality on their own and operate as the hypostasis of the absolute yet

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with diminished reality. In Hegel’s reading, the attributes and modes are the second and third

moments of an unfolding that is simply affirmed without contradiction. Thus “the moment of

the negative is what is lacking and deficient in this one, rigid, motionless substantiality. The

pattern of the antithesis is that, in distinguishing itself explicitly from the corporeal [through the

work of negativity, that is to say, of death], spirit is substantial and actual, that spirit is, and is no

mere privation or negation.” (LHP, 126). For Hegel, by affirming substance as absolute,

containing all determinations without contradiction, substance becomes “a point of departure, a

base, that cannot be recognized as such except at the moment when nothing is based on it any

longer and that is the basis for nothing.” (Macherey, 26). This is how Macherey glosses the

expression “zum Grunde gehen,” the paradoxical condition of having an abyss for foundation,

“the plenitude of the absolute, imprisoned in the radical interiority of substance, is that of the

void” (Idem.). Everything that happens after the affirmation of the abyss as a ground will thus

have only the appearance of movement. The second moment, the attribute, will only be a

determination of the absolute, a determination that is a negation of everything that made “the

absolute absolute” [das Absolut-Absolute]. Instead of affirming the opposition between the

phenomenal world and the world that exists in and for itself, “these different immediacies have

been reduced to a reflective shine [zum Scheine herabgesetzt], and the totality that the attribute is is

posited as its true and single subsistence, while the determination in which it is is posited as

unessential subsistence” (SL, 11.373). Yet if the attribute has a relative determination and a

subsistence though only as shine, the mode is the complete loss of self into the contingency of

being that is unable to return to the absolute, insofar as “the immediately perceptible reality that

results from the addition of all these modes converts itself into an appearance in the most critical

sense of the term, because this appearance does not give the absolute anything more than an

illusory expression in which it ends by disappearing, and at the same time appearance is engulfed

in the absolute” (Macherey, 29).

Not to rush into interpreting this expression of the substance as an irrecuperable

expenditure, although it is already tempting to do so, we may focus more closely in the way that

Macherey exposes how in front of “the mirror of Spinozism . . . Hegelian discourse brings into

view its own limitations, or even its internal contradiction.” (Macherey, 11). Macherey’s defense

of Spinoza against Hegel begins in showing that there is a mistaken identification of ratio essendi

and ratio cognoscendi in Hegel’s reading of the Ethics. Of course this doesn’t mean that Spinoza

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distinguishes between them, rather he holds that their identity has to be contemplated sub specie

aeternitatis, that is, irrespective from a subjective representation but rather “in the likeness of the

order of an equally necessary reality” (Macherey, 56). Hegel’s mistaken assumption is precisely to

read Spinoza as “simply a consistent carrying out or execution of Descartes’s principle” (LHP,

119), assuming that the axioms, definitions and propositions that compose the Ethics have been

arrived subjectively and inferentially, and only later presented more geometrico, that is, as if the

order of reasons could be separated from the order of reality; in Spinoza, rather, the order and

connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.

Does this alter in any way Hegel’s imputation of an immobile system? Insofar as true

negativity is still lacking, there will be no movement and no history, and the false appearance of

movement will still yield nothing but void. To this imputation, Macherey answers by presenting

Spinoza’s own notion of history that, most importantly, does away with any teleology that

promises reconciliation after negativity has been put to work, such that “if there is a Spinozist

history, it is totally independent of such a presupposition. It situates itself at a point where its

necessary development, its material process, no longer requires the ideal sanctum of a meaning

and an orientation in order to be understood; its rationality has nothing to do with the obligatory

unfolding of an order, because it no longer has any goal to complete” (Macherey, 53).

We can see here how the notion of the “spiritual automaton” that follows the necessary

order of causes disregarding its own subjective passions can be casted as sovereignty, and most

importantly how this notion exposes the limitations of Hegelian defense of freedom and lordship.

As it may be expected, it is the refutation of teleology that characterizes the Spinozist refutation

of Hegel in Macherey’s reading, but he formulates it in far more interesting terms, such that

“Hegel declares himself furthest from Spinozism exactly at the point on which the two doctrines

appear to coincide,” namely in the determination of truth as “an internal determination of

thought, which excludes all relation to an exterior object” (Macherey, 73). The fact is that the two

philosophers understand something very different by the term thought. While for Hegel it is spirit

as the product of (the) history (of meaning) that identifies with itself as totality after facing the

negative and absorbing it into its absolute actuality, thus placing itself at the end of its self-

recovering teleology, for Spinoza thought consists of nothing more than one of the essences

through which substance is expressed, without privilege and without hierarchy. The abyss—the

absolute presence of all determinations—in which Hegel attempted to cast Spinoza is in fact

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recovered by Hegel as the result of his own notion of history but, Macherey shows, what is for

him a scandal is the fact that the absolute is presented as the starting point of a process without

end. In Spinoza, we find knowledge rather as a “process of self-determination of thought that

permits one to know the real in totality, following a law of absolute causality, but without

completely exhausting the determinations within it” (Macherey, 75). This is in short what allows

Macherey to claim that “Spinoza is not only already Hegelian but above all that he was more

profoundly so and with greater consequence than himself ” (Macherey, 18). And isn’t this yet

another form of Hegelianism without reserve? Impossible, yet there it is!

We can almost hear Macherey laughing along with Bataille when Hegel, who placed all his

trust in Spinoza as an absolute beginning that could be recovered with profit at the end, finds that

his reading of Spinoza was even more of an illusion [Schein] that would return nothing. Thus

“Hegel liked to think of himself as the master of the image he imposed on Spinoza, but it is

rather Spinoza himself who offers a mirror in which he projects, without knowing, his own

truth” (Macherey, 76). We have thus gained nothing by comparing Bataille and Spinoza other

than sharpening the contours of a materialist thought, finding instead that what makes of the

spiritual automaton a sovereign entity is precisely a matter of method—which for Bataille means

“doing violence to habits of relaxation” (Guilty, 29)—that has as its result the abandoning of the

teleological anguish of a speculative and representational subject—perhaps all this was well

known beforehand. A further task would be to read these methods together, one that is based on

the affirmation of absolute chance and the other on the affirmation of absolute necessity. And

yet, aren’t these simply mirrors of each other, opening to the infinite? Insofar as “reflection on

chance strips the world bare of the entirety of predictions in which reason encloses it” (Guilty, 71)

chance appears as indistinguishable from absolute necessity, it is a spiritual life, impersonal,

dependent on chance, never on efforts of the will (74).

God is not me: that proposition makes me laugh until, all alone at night, I stop laughing and, being

alone, I’m lacerated by my unrestrained laughter. ‘Why am I not God?’ From my childishness comes the

answer—‘I’m me.’ But, ‘Why am I who I am?’ ‘If I wasn’t myself, would I be God?‘ The terror is

rising in me, since–What do I know anyway? (Guilty, 84).

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Such is our final tableau, composed by three figures—Bataille on the left, Spinoza on the

right, each of which hold two mirrors that, facing each other, produce an irrecuperable infinite;

in the middle, a defaced Hegel unable to mediate and absorb the two figures that exceed him

from each side—immanence and expenditure effectively producing an absolute opposition that

can never be sublated—What do you do with a defaced Hegelianism?

Bibliography

Bataille, Georges. 1988. Guilty. Venice, Calif: Lapis Press.

Bataille, Georges, and Georges Bataille. 1991. The accursed share 2/3, The history of eroticism.

Sovereignty. New York: Zone Books.

Bataille, Georges, Fred Botting, and Scott Wilson. 1997. The Bataille reader. Oxford, UK:

Blackwell.

Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Writing and difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, and George Di Giovanni. 2010. The science of logic. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, and Robert F. Brown. 2009. Lectures on the history of philosophy

1825-6. Vol. 3, Medieval and modern philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Macherey, Pierre. 2011. Hegel or Spinoza. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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