THE FUTURE OF HEGEL
PLASTICITY, TEMPORALITY & DIALECTIC
jacques derrida foreword
A continual transformation and radical interruption, a process and an explosion, plasticity and gelignite. But also physis and techne, nature and culture, nature and the technological, nature and art, if you like: on the one hand, the natural or organic transformation of living forms, their own plasticity and, on the other hand, plastic artificiality and art, and the synthetic, indeed prosthetic technology of ‘plastic matter’. [JD intro, xiii]
What is here announced, we have already seen it, is not exactly a question of posterity, but rather the question of the future, the question of the condition, if we may say so, of what is to come in itself, of what comes in the event which is coming, of everything which presents itself or which absent itself in the word or the experience of ‘to come’.
[…]
It is simply not enough to recall the names of Marx and Heidegger, or the themes of the ‘end of history’, of ‘absolute knowledge’, of the ‘dialectic’, of the ends of this and the ends of that, the ‘death of God’, the ‘death of Man, etc. These terms and themes are Hegel’s terms, we always finish by finding Hegel at the very origin of these thematised or schematised ends.
[…]Hegel’s thought would have assigned to itself this final fatefulness of fate, this very finality of the end and of what remains final, of which the only temporal determination is the ‘past’, what ‘has already passed away’. It is in this sense, simply because it has thought time itself, to have in this manner thought about time, that Hegel’s thought would have, above all, renounced any future for itself as all future itself. This is at least the common belief […]
[…]
In this landscape dominated by wars and European revolutions, top re-question and re-interrogate the Heideggerian interpretation of Hegel, precisely on the fundamental theme of time and history, and in this way, to think and to rethink in its very principle the Heideggerian ‘deconstruction’, that is, the entire perspective it puts forth, that of an onto-theology understood by and from the privilege of the ‘present-now’, and hence of ‘vulgar’ temporality – this strategy is of great scope. [xxvi]
[…]
The future, what is yet to come in the future, is not simply reducible to what is imminent in the future, and this very difference reveals plasticity itself, the condition also for there to be some kind of sense in speaking, as we have been from the beginning, of a ‘history of the future’.
[…] There is thus a farewell to time in Hegel, an abandonment of time, as Heidegger states, but it is not the one we believe; it is only a farewell to ‘the ‘all too common’ definition of time’.
[…] [cf. the visor effect, Spectres of Marx]
This renunciation, this relinquishment, this abandonment or this refusal, which would be the very condition of the ‘farewell’ addressed to the other, the condition of time and of the future to which it is exposed, is that not what, in the expression ‘to see (what is) coming’, does not only suspend the act of ‘seeing’ by a sort of internal blindness […] would regularly shut or close sight itself, from one instant to the other, by some sort of obscuration, and would stop sight itself from seeing in front of itself, would limit the horizon in order to see in front of itself […]
No, there would be an even more radical interruption of sight in the expression ‘to see (what is) coming’.
It would affect all and any finite beings which present themselves upon it from behind or vertically, from a very high stance, in truth, from the height of a height much higher than height itself or any height whatsoever.
What would hence ‘come to me’ would fall upon me or would look at me and would see me come, perhaps, from this scene without symmetry nor synchrony, without ever giving or offering me the possibility of seeing it come or of exchanging with it a glance, without ever giving or offering me the possibility of waiting for it or of preceding it […]
[…]
DEATH OF GOD
Would we only say farewell to death? Does God ever say farewell or adieu? Does he ever mourne himself? Does he ever mourne himself from himself? And the ‘death of God’, is it a way for God to manifest himself, to incarnate himself, to say himself, to name himself in saying to himself Adieu, adieu to God?
[…]
It is always the question of interpreting the Hegelian interpretation of the death of God and of this kenosis in which, according to Paul’s expression, Christ ’emptied himself of himself’.
By translating Kenosis by Entausserung (‘the separation of the Self through an externalisation’), Luther designates a sort of exit outside one’s self in one’s self, a farewell to one’s self, an abandonment of one’s self. A taking leave of one’s self in one’s self.
And most of all he opens the way for a tradition in which the Hegelian dialectic inscribed itself (originary division of judgement, alienation, exteriorisation, exit of God out of himself […]).
[…] above all – and this is a phenomenon at the same time more singular and more resistant to any formalisation – the deprivation of the future is to be deduced from two premises which may seem contradictory. This God who says farewell to himself would have no future, precisely because, in leaving and in emptying himself, he could no longer promise or give.
[…] in the farewell to one’s self, which is nothing else but the salvation of an auto-revelation, the infinite presence, the parousia of God would also forbid this other present which is also the gift to the other, the offering, the future of a promise or of a donation.
God would have no future, he would not even be able to promise or give himself both because he leaves and impoverishes himself […]
We should then accomplish one more step, add a supplement of farewell to this Hegelian farewell, and say farewell to this farewell of God to God.
[…]
One may as well say that plasticity is an experience of farewell.
[…] ‘divine negativity, thought in its most radical form, does not manifest (as it might have been objected) the lack or the passivity, but rather the plasticity of God’.
introduction – the problematic
Now, and this is the fundamental problem, does the philosophy of Hegel have legitimate descendants? How can it still hold out a promise? How can it continue to play a leading role in our time, when history has shown it to be an enterprise that brings time to an end?
Time: everything began with time. And it is on account of time that the divorce between Hegel and contemporary philosophy was decreed. The famous conclusion to the Phenomenology of Spirit signed the death sentence, so to speak, of Hegelianism:
Time is the concept itself that is there and which presents itself to consciousness as empty intuition; for this reason Spirit necessarily appears in time, and it appears in time just as long as it has not grasped its pure concept, i.e. has not annulled time. […] Time, therefore, appears as the destiny and necessity of spirit that is not yet complete within itself.
[…]
Heidegger […] argues that when time is sublated (aufgehoben) by spirit at the moment of Absolute Knowledge, this is in fact simply the vulgar or common notion of time. The ‘vulgar understanding of time’ is a conception that Heidegger believes has dominated the entire history of metaphysics and now ends with it.
[…]
‘Time appears to the vulgar understanding as a succession of nows constantly ‘present-at-hand (vorhandenen)’, that pass by and arrive at the same moment. Time is understood as a sequence, as a ‘flux’ of nows, like the ‘stream of time’.
[…]
A spatial determination – the point – serves to characterise a temporal determination – the instant.
The ordinary understanding of time is what constitutes for Heidegger the unity of the philosophical tradition summed up for him in the name ‘metaphysics’.
Metaphysics, in this view, was ruled by a certain determination of being, understood in the sense of presence […], and that is tantamount to privileging the present tense with respect to the other dimensions of time.
Consequently, the past and future must necessarily appear as either a present time which is just past, or as a present which is yet to come (‘that which is not-yet-now’).
In Heidegger’s view, the conception of time as a homogenous milieu in which events occur dominated philosophy from the Pre-Socratics to Husserl.
Hegel stands out however from the other philosophers because he takes to its logical conclusion this traditional privilege of the present.
[…]
Time for Hegel is understood as the past tense of spirit: spirit must pass over into time in order to fulfil its own identity with itself as absolute and eternal. […] It is the timeless antiquity of ‘presence’, the ‘parousia‘ of the absolute. From this point of view, everything that occurs can only be the indication of what has already come to pass; everything still in the future is simply a potential return to itself.
The youth must wait to grow old to understand that the world ‘possesses the absolute power to actualise itself and that it has done so in our time; that it is not so impotent that it needs first to await its effective realisation’.
[…] The tension towards the unexpected is only one of youth’s illusions, one which Hegel himself remembers as his own before the crisis of his Frankfurt period. But too late. In its twilight discourse, at the beginning of its night, philosophy may be nothing but the announcement of its truth: it is too late for the future. [4]
The System: doesn’t it seem to be a tight loop which envelops everything – all exteriority, all alterity, all surprise? […] ‘For spirit, nothing exists which is absolutely other than itself’. That is why: ‘All spirit’s activity is nothing but a grasping of itself and the aim of all genuine science is only this, to know that spirit recognises in itself everything there is in heaven and on earth.’
Spirit, whose task is to comprehend itself, to anticipate itself in everything that is now and is to come, can never encounter anything wholly other, can never come face to face, one might say, with the event. How then could there be room in Hegelian thought for the question of the future, if everything has already been permeated by spirit and, in this fashion, already completed?
Hasn’t Hegel’s ‘farewell’ to time simply been turned around to time’s ‘farewell’ to Hegel?
[…]
In particular, it [the Future of Hegel] must remain open to that analysis which claims that the absence of a conception of the future in Hegel implies the absence of a future for the philosophy of Hegel. To say, with Heidegger, that Hegel never speaks about the future amounts to saying that Hegel does not have a future. The present work contests the validity of Heidegger’s assertion […]
the promise of plasticity
With this end in view, our plan is to form a concept, that of ‘plasticity’ […]
To ‘form a concept’ in the sense intended here means first of all to take up a concept (plasticity), which has a defined and limited role in the philosophy of Hegel, only in order to transform it into the sort of comprehensive concept that can ‘grasp’ the whole.
Transforming plasticity into a concept is a matter of showing that plasticity ‘seizes’ the philosophy of Hegel and allows the reader to ‘comprehend’ it, appearing at one and the same time as a structure and as a condition of intelligibility.
[…] although it is a logical form, the concept must not be considered like an empty receptacle, rather as a power that can fashion its own content.
[…] my title already indicates that plasticity will be envisaged as the ‘instance’ which gives form to the future and to time in Hegel’s philosophy.
[…] time and the future are mutually involved in a dialogical process governed by plasticity.
[…] to posit the future as plasticity amounts to displacing the established definition of the future as a moment of time.
[…] the future, that which is ‘to come’, will not be restricted in meaning by the immediate, ordinary connotation, that of the ‘future’ as a tense.
[…] By ‘plasticity’ we mean first of all the excess of the future over the future; while ‘temporality, as it figures in speculative philosophy, will mean the excess of time over time.
[…]
Koyre, on the one hand, argues that for Hegel, ‘time is dialectical and… is constructed from the vantage point of the future’, but on the other hand, he asserts that
the philosophy of history – and in that respect the philosophy of Hegel as a whole, the System, so to speak – can only be a possibility if history has come to an end, if it has no more future; if time can stop.
Kojeve, for his part, maintains on the one hand that ‘Time for Hegel is characterised by the primacy of the future’, but, on the other hand, ‘man’ when he achieves the standpoint of Absolute Knowledge has no future left:
Man who no longer relates himself… to an object given externally, thus has no further reason to negate it for the sake of remaining in existence and conserving his self-identity. And Man who no longer negates has no real future.
[…]
The possibility of affirming the ‘future of Hegel’ – in the double meaning of a future ‘of’ is philosophy and a future ‘within’ his philosophy – depends in the first instance on posing the question of the future where one does not expect it. Henceforth it is plasticity which will be presented as the ‘unforeseen’ of Hegelian philosophy. [7]
plasticity in its ordinary meanings
The English and French substantives ‘plasticity’ and plasticite and their German equivalent, Plastizitat, entered the language in the eighteenth century. They joined two words already in use which had been formed from the same root: the substantive ‘plastics’ (die Plastik), and the adjective ‘plastic’ (plastisch). All three words are derived from the Greek plassein, which means ‘to model’, ‘to mould’. ‘Platic’ as an adjective, means two things: on the one hand, to be ‘susceptible to changes of form’ or malleable (clay is a ‘plastic’ material); and on the other hand, ‘having the power to bestow form, the power to mould’, as in the expression ‘plastic surgeon’ and ‘plastic arts’.
Plasticite, or ‘plasticity’, just like Plaztiztat in German, describes the nature of that which is ‘plastic’, being at once capable of receiving and of giving form.
Plasticity’s native land is the field of art. Plasticity characterises the art of ‘modelling’ and, in the first instance, the art of sculpture.
The plastic arts are those whose central aim is the articulation and development of forms; among these are counted architecture, drawing and painting.
Hence, by extension, plasticity signifies the general aptitude for development, the power to be moulded by one’s culture, by education.
We speak of the plasticity of the newborn, of the child’s plasticity of character. Plasticity is, in another context, characterised by ‘suppleness’ and flexibility, as in the case of the ‘plasticity’ of the brain. Yet it also means the ability to evolve and adapt.
[…] the adjective ‘plastic’, while certainly in opposition to ‘rigid’, ‘fixed’ and ‘ossified’, is not to be confused with ‘polymorphous’.
Things that are plastic preserve their shape, as does the marble in a statue: once given a configuration, it is unable to recover its initial form.
‘Plastic’, thus, designated those things that lend themselves to being formed while resisting deformation.
hegel’s idea of plasticity
To form the concept of plasticity as it figures in Hegel’s philosophy requires first of all that we uncover the way in which Hegel himself constructs this idea.
[…] the double connotation of the adjective ‘plastic’ reappears: a capacity to receive form and a capacity to produce form. It is this double signification which enables us to treat the adjective as itself a ‘speculative word’, in Hegel’s special sense.
[NB Derrida’s discussion of the Khora in Plato. See here]
Hegel:
This sense for the perfect plasticity of gods and men was pre-eminently at home in Greece. In its poets and orators, historians and philosophers, Greece is not to be understood at its heart unless we bring with us as a key to our comprehension an insight into the ideals of sculpture and unless we consider from the point of view of their plasticity not only the heroic figures in epic ad drama but also the actual statesmen and philosophers. After all, in the beautiful days of Greece, men of action, like poets and thinkers, had this same plastic and universal yet individual character both inwardly and outwardly.
[…]
In the preface to the Science of Logic of 1831 Hegel states:
A plastic discourse demands, too, a plastic sense of receptivity and understanding on the part of the listener […]
[…]
If […] the ideal philosophers are both ‘universal and individual’, this comes from the way they acquire their formative principle from the universal – the concept – while at the same time bestowing a particular form on the universal by incarnating it or embodying it. Thus the individual now becomes the ‘Dasein’, the ‘being-there’ of spirit, the form in which the spiritual is translated into the materiality of sense. Consequently, plasticity appears as a process where the universal and the particular mutually inform one another, and their joint outcome is that particularity called the ‘exemplary individual’.
[…]
What is a ‘plastic discourse’?
A passage from the Preface to the phenomenology of Spirit helps clarify this definition:
Only a philosophical exposition that rigidly excludes the usual way of relating the parts of a proposition could achieve the goal of plasticity.
As a philosophical proposition is normally understood, the subject of the proposition is thought of as a fixed instance: it is given predicates from outside, and is not able to produce them itself. ‘To exclude rigidly the usual way of relating the parts of a proposition’ implies a reconceptualising of this relation, which is now to be understood as a process of substance’s ‘self-determination’. Substance’s relation to its accidents changes from one conception to another, and this Hegel interprets as the transition from the predicative proposition to the speculative proposition.
Elevated to its speculative truth, the relation between subject and predicates is characterised by ‘plasticity’.
The process of self-determination is the unfolding of the substance-subject.
In the Encyclopedia’s Science of Logic Hegel defines the ‘relation between substantiality and accidentality’, or the ‘Anbsolute Relation’, as the ‘activity-of-form’. Indeed it is this ‘activity’ that clearly indicates the very plasticity of substance itself, its capacity both to receive form and to give form to its own content.
With this consideration of self-determination, seen as the ‘originary operation of plasticity’, we arrive at the very heart of the present study.
to see (what is) coming and the dialectic
The foundation of the dialectical process is in fact a movement, the movement of self-determination.
The dialectical process is ‘plastic’ because, as it unfolds, it makes links between the opposing moments of total immobility (the ‘fixed’) and vacuity (‘dissolution’), and then links both in the vitality of the whole, a whole which, reconciling these two extremes, is itself the union of resistance and fluidity. The process of plasticity is dialectical because the operations which constitute it, the seizure of form and the annihilation of all form, emergence and explosion, are contradictory.
[…]
The connection linking the three concepts, ‘Plasticity’, ‘Temporality’, and ‘Dialectic’, now becomes clear: it is nothing less than the formation of the future itself.
Plasticity characterises the relation between substance and accidents.
[…]
The dialectical composition of such concepts as ‘the future’, ‘plasticity’ and ‘temporality’ forms an anticipatory structure operating within subjectivity itself as Hegel conceived it.
To distinguish this structure from the future as it is ordinarily understood, we will name this structure ‘to see (what is) coming’ (le ‘voir venir‘), obeying Hegel’s injunction to philosophies in one’s own idiom.
‘Voir venir’ in French means to wait, while, as is prudent, observing how events are developing. But it also suggests that other people’s intentions and plans must be probed and guessed at. It is an expression what can thus refer at one and the same time to the state of ‘being sure of what is coming’ and of ‘not knowing what is coming’. It is on this account that the ‘voir venir’ can represent that interplay, within Hegelian philosophy of teleological necessity and surprise.
[…]
Plasticity is, therefore, the point around which all the transformations of Hegelian thought revolve, the centre of its metamorphoses.
[…]
[…]
Jacques Derrida:
The impossibility of co-existence can be posited as such only on the basis of a certain co-existence, of a certain simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous, in which the alterity and identity of the now are maintained together in the differentiated element of a certain sameness… The impossible – the co-existence of two nows – appears only in a synthesis.. in a certain complicity or complication maintaining together several current nows which are said to be the one past and the other future. (‘Ousia & Gramme)
The writer draws attention to the little word hama, which appears five times in Physics IV, 218a, and means ‘together’, ‘all at once’, ‘both together’, and ‘at the same time’. This location ‘os first neither spatial nor temporal’. The simul here ‘says the complicity, the common origin of time (the possibility of the synthesis of the co-existence of the nows) and space (the potential synthesis of the co-existence of points), appearing together as the condition for all appearing of being’.
The exposition of Physics IV allows us to see how Aristotle understands time at the same ‘time’ as a sequence of nows and as an instance of synthesis.
[…]
In this capacity to differentiate itself from itself time displays the marks of its plasticity. Yet this differentiation itself requires a twofold understanding. For it is, on the one hand, synchronic: the Hegelian concept of time cannot be reduced to a singular meaning. And on the other hand, it is diachronic: to say that time is not always what it is also means that it temporally differentiates itself from itself, that it has, to put it another way, a history.
[…]
In the advent of Christianity, which he saw as the ‘axis on which the history of the world turns’, Hegel saw the emergence of the modern conception of subjectivity which dialectically sublates the earlier Greek conception.
The subject thus differs from itself chronologically and logically. First the ‘substance-subject’ shows itself as a substance-subject, then as a substance-subject; one needs to respect the accentuation here, insisting on, to repeat the terms of Bernard Bourgeois, ‘The substitution of the primacy of Christian thought, which is subjectivism (‘the subject is substance’) for the primacy of pagan thought, which is substantialist (‘substance is the subject’).
[…] The first modality arises from what it is possible to call the originary synthetic unity of a teleological movement in potentiality and in action.
The other modality stems from the originary synthetic unity of apperception, the foundation of representation.
[…]
Reading Hegel amounts to finding oneself in two times at once: the process that unfolds is both retrospective and prospective. In the present time in which reading takes place, the reader is drawn to a double expectation: waiting for what is to come (according to a linear and representational thinking), while presupposing that the outcome has already arrived (by virtue of the teleological ruse).
[…]
No transcendental status can be attributed to the movement of ‘seeing (what is) coming. Any transcendental instance necessarily finds itself in a position of exteriority in relation to that which it organises. By its nature, the condition of possibility is other than that it makes possible. Yet the Hegelian conception of a system implies precisely the opposite: the absence of any ‘outside’ of the System. Dialectical philosophy is systematically non-transcendental. There is no place, in Hegel, for a specific analysis of the concept of time, one that would demonstrate its plastic character. [17]
[…]
The scarcity of references to the concept of plasticity is thus evidence of is distinct mode of presence, which is that of the originary synthesis, maintained only in the interval between presence and absence. It is for this reason, because plasticity works on and within the body of the systematic exposition, without ever extending above it or overdetermining it, that it is revealed as the concept capable of accounting for the incarnation, or the incorporation of spirit.