About the Hegelian Ticklish Subject

or

Why Negation of Negation is No Repetition

By Robbert A. Veen

Draft, ver. 1.0

No republishing allowed (yet)

The second chapter of The Ticklish Subject by Slavoj Žižek is all about
Hegel. It has nine paragraphs and discusses a range of topics that we would
associate with Hegel like negation, and negation of negation, concrete
universality, the speculative identity of substance and subject and the like.
But Žižek does so within a context in which unrelated books about Egyptian
wisdom, Freud, Nietzsche and Malebranch play a big role as well.
Let's take a look at the first paragraph.

The question is obviously both interesting and important. What is negation

of negation in Hegel? Žižek does not start with an analysis of Hegel's logic
in order to find the answer, but with an example of a book by Colin Wilson
called "From Atlantis to the Sphinx", in which it is argued that the Western
principle of self-consciousness brought about a rise in imagination, which will
ultimately lead to a new level of connected or shared imagination. The only
thing we need to do is to recognize that this is what has already been
happening for the past 3500 years. At that time new violent cultures arose
that ultimately spawned modern European consciousness. It was a fateful
trajectory of ancient wisdom to technological reason. And it is this moment
when ancient wisdom was lost, that coincides with its opposite, it is already
the next step in evolution.
Žižek calls this the Hegelian matrix of development. The loss of the ancient

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wisdom is already in itself its own overcoming. The notion of loss, of the fall,
is a misperception. It is actually a move from in it-self to for-itself.
To call this the proper Hegelian matrix of development goes against a
superficial intuition. Should we not first have a thesis, in this case ancient
Egyptian wisdom, then its negation in the rise of violence European cultures,
and then some kind of synthesis in which the principles of the former stages
are somehow brought to completion? Then they have become sublated into
a new and richer synthesis.
An example of an abstract negation would be any kind of myth that posits a
real historical paradise preceding our own era, as something that will be
ultimately restored. It is like feminists imagining a world without men, or
African-Americans imagining a world without whites. The mythical
imagination forgets that one's own position is already mediated by the other.
Any simple schematic of a lost world being recovered belongs to the domain
of abstract negation. The Hegelian negation of negation works quite
differently. It is about a passage from state A to state B, Žižek says. The
first immediate negation "negates the position of A while remaining within its
symbolic confines." For instance the immediate negation of religion is
heresy. The second negation "negates the very symbolic space common to
A and its immediate negation." The negation of the negation of a religion
therefore is decidedly not a return to religion, nor is it some kind of mixture
or synthesis between religion and its opposite. It is in a very real sense
going beyond both sides of the opposition, transcending the symbolic space
that is the common ground of both religion and its heresies. At the same
time one must add, that an atheist and that defines his position as nothing
but the rejection (abstract negation) of religion, would forget precisely that
his own position is mediated by its own opposite. Which would lead to the
conclusion that atheism as an abstract opposition or denial to all religion in a
way does not transcend the symbolic confines of its opponent. How could it?
Whatever is it not, dialectically is therefore what it is it-self, as defined by
something else. And secondly, it shows that the only proper negation of

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religion in a way comes from religion itself and is accepted by a religion to be
its own opposite: heresy.

So far so good.
Žižek however goes on to criticize this element of Hegel's method for being
"nothing but repetition at its purest." The first negation is a gesture that
fails, like heresy will not destroy the original religion. "Then, in the second
move, this same gesture is simply repeated." The same is expressed by a
different terminology that sounds Hegelian all right, which involves the
passage from in-itself to for-itself. The negation of the negation has as a
result that the inner character of the former is now expressed. "It just
repeatedly asserts (''re-marks') what it already was in itself." So only the
heresy within heresy, which is not identical to the repetition of religion, will
actually express what religion really is.
Isn't there a contradiction between these two statements by Žižek? At first
he says that a negation of negation involves negating the symbolic space
common to a content and its immediate or abstract negation. (p. 72) In that
case we have a new expression for a reality and at the same time the
destruction of its symbolic presentation. One can argue that something is
now better expressed. But then on page 74 he calls this a mere repetition of
a gesture. To become for itself does not actually change anything, it does
not even express what it already was, it just repeatedly asserts what it
already was.
If the negation of negation would involve a return to a higher-level-
expression of the original positive, then I would grant Žižek this argument.
But surely the real negation of negation in Hegel works differently. Religion
is not negated by heresy, but by the Enlightenment and its arguments for
autonomous reason. That is not heresy. And the rational religion of the
early 19th century - the negation of the negation, going beyond the former
opposition - is not a simple return to a former positive, but a higher level
expression that is actually a new cultural reality. The negation of the

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Enlightenment critique of religion is a rational theology we call modernism,
which is neither a return to the Christian authoritarian tradition of the 17th
century, nor a heresy.
Now it remains true that the opposition between religion and Enlightenment
critique cannot be construed as an absolute opposition. That is to say that
the one depends on the other, authoritarian religion depending as much on
the exclusion of autonomous reason, including the emphasis on traditional
values and truths, as the Enlightenment depends on its formalist strategy of
opposition. Hegel makes that clear when he explains the relationship
between faith and pure insight. The paradoxical example that brings out the
inner paradox here is of course the possibility that one's autonomous reason
might lead to the affirmation of traditional authoritarian religion. Against that
possibility one can only argue by shifting from means to goals. The idea of
autonomous reason has no option but to label itself as an independent value
of the same symbolic stature: a religion of reason is born.
All of which shows that the negation of negation is neither the reiteration of
the first negation, nor the return to the former's symbolic space. It is both
the expression of the inner principle of the former positive as well as the
negation of its independence and claim to totality. The negation of the
negation rests on the insight that the abstract negative does show the
inadequacy of the positive it negates, even though it is obviously dependent
on what it opposes for its own determinacy. Just as much as it rests on the
insight that only a new reality can satisfy the competing claims of both
extremes. In that new stage it is the former positive that is shown to be an
abstraction from the one reality that is drawn upon by the first negation for
the "energy" it requires to opposite its other.
Maybe I don't read Slavoj Žižek correctly. Probably not. I find his analyses of
Hegel difficult to follow because they don't refer directly to Hegel's texts and
are not supported by an in-depth exegesis. So I might be very wrong here. At
least I have contradicted my false understanding of Žižek 's Hegel by my -
hopefully better - understanding of Hegel himself.

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Robbert Veen © 2010