This essay is about the possibility of holes. Whether appropriation is total, whether the general economy is an affirmation of the virtual. I am want to say that the point at which sense disseminates solicits or shakes—yet why not say tortures, torsions the expression of the system at such. Perhaps we can say it is the tension between the figures (how to call them as such, we should no doubt question) of Lacan qua Lacanian castration is notoriously an Aufhebung, in which what is lost is really gained: “the physical event (circumcision as a substitute for castration) does not happen as such, but the threat—the Aufhebung of physical into spiritual—allows the phallus to come into being as such, and with it the virile function; just as primal repression is the precondition for the psychic system to function in the first place.”
And, Derrida qua “To sublate a limit is to preserve it but to preserve (a limit) is here to lose it. To keep what is lost is to lack. The logic of Aufhebung turns at every instant around into its absolute other. Absolute appropriation is absolute expropriation. The onto-logical can always be reread or rewritten as a logic of loss or as one of unchecked expense.” A critique of intepretation a familia Deleuze-Guatarri: You are saying that one thing is really secretly—essentially, to use the Hegelian term which is absolutely relevant here—something else. The hermeneutic process, elsewhere meaning—changing the one thing into its more essential meaning—is prepared and indeed imperiously summoned by the very movement of dialectical Aufhebung itself, which ensure the preservation of the cancelled meaning which is to be revealed by interpretation in the first place. And I don’t really understand this next part, but in the kind of ‘indistinct’ identification in which the Aufhebung holds its twin, related, and finally indistinguishable forms, the question of priorities is less important, and priority might remain ‘blind’ or ‘unprompted.’ Priorities such as cause and effect, temporal precedence, ontological superiority, foundational primacy.
In Glas, Derrida writes that “this determination of sexual difference into opposition, and as an opposition in general, and of objectivity and of representation, entertains an essential relationship—historical and systematic—with the Immaculate Conception; if not for the dogma concerning Mary’s birth, at least with its premise or conclusion, the virginity of the mother. Indispensible to Hegel’s whole argument, to the speculative dialectic and to absolute idealism, it commands what we may call the approach to Absolute Knowledge. As soon as you transform difference into opposition, you cannot escape the phantasm…of Immaculate Conception: which is to say a phantasm of the infinite mastery of both sides of the oppositional relationship.”
There seems to be a causal priority of the binary opposition, but in fact there is no such priority. Rather, the ‘beginning’ of the process is itself a kind of mystery of birth and origins: “How to reconcile these two axioms: philosophy only proceeds out of itself and yet she is the daughter of a need or an interest which are not yet philosophy?” In other words, Philosophy puts itself at stake in its self-consciousness of itself as Philosophy, and as such it is the Master of thought. Yet, its truth remains the Slave—it remains enthralled to a need or an interest which is not yet itself. “In its own position, philosophy presupposes. It precedes itself and replaces itself in its own thesis. It comes before itself and substitutes itself for itself.”
Thus, Jameson claims that Derrida taxes the dialectic with a kind of memorial vigilance
To take such a system seriously, Bataille knew, was to prohibit oneself from extracting concepts from it, or from manipulating isolated propositions, drawing effects from them by transportation into a discourse foreign to them: ‘Hegel’s thoughts are interdependent to the point of it being impossible to grasp their meaning, if not in the necessity of the movement which constitutes their coherence.’ They cannot be summarized without being mistreated.
One must, in every sense, go through the “slumber of reason,” the slumber that engenders monsters and then puts them to sleep; this slumber must be effectively traversed so that awakening will not be a ruse of dream.
The epoch of meaning: Lordship and Sovereignty
Derrida commits his reader’s interest to the essential displacements of the master-slave dialectic[i], the rigorous effect of the trembling, submitted as they are reflected in Bataille’s thought. Firstly, it is a question of distinguishing the difference between lordship and sovereignty. “It cannot be said that this difference has a sense: it is the difference of sense, the unique interval which separates meaning from a certain non-meaning.”
The servant is the man who does not put his life at stake, who wants to conserve his life, and wants to be conserved. However, by raising oneself above life, by looking at death directly, one accedes to lordship: to the for-itself, to freedom, to recognition. Freedom must go through the putting at stake of life. The lord is the man who has had the strength to endure the anguish of death and to maintain the work of death.
Lordship has a meaning because the putting at stake of life is the constitution of meaning, in the presentation of essence and truth. The master must retain his life that he exposes to risk. To rush headlong into death pure and simple is thus to risk the absolute loss of meaning, in the extent meaning necessarily traverses the truth of the master and of self-consciousness. In the history of self-consciousness and phenomenality, the presentation of essence and truth (meaning) is an obligatory stage. “For history, that is—meaning—to form a continuous chain, to be woven, the master must experience his truth.” However, and this is the crucial point, Hegel writes that “the truth of the independent consciousness is accordingly the consciousness of the bondsman.” When servility becomes lordship, the trace of the repressed origin is kept within: “being a consciousness within itself, it will enter into itself, and change round into real and true independence.” To stay alive, to maintain oneself in life, to work, to defer pleasure, to limit the stakes, to have respect for death at the very moment when one looks directly at it—such is the servile condition of mastery and of the entire history that makes it possible. The master is in relation to himself, and self-consciousness is constituted, only through the mediation of servile consciousness in the movement of recognition. At the same moment, yet, it is through the mediation of the thing, which for the slave is initially the essentiality that he cannot immediately negate in pleasurable consumption, but can only work upon and elaborate. This work and elaboration seeks to inhibit desire and delay the disappearance of the thing. As such, ‘the truth of the master is in the slave; and the slave become a master remains a repressed slave.’ As Fredric Jameson writes:
“Hegel’s lesson thus remains in force, both psychologically and politically: the Master’s victory deprives him of the prize itself—namely, recognition by the Other, who has by virtue of his very defeat been transformed into a non-equal and a non-human; a Slave; and the leisure and consumption he has won has the effect of replacing the satisfactions of praxis itself by monotonous indulgence; the Slave, meanwhile, whose ‘Truth is the Master’ (unlike the latter, whose ‘truth is the Slave’), not only knows what recognition really means, but also what production brings, and ‘the labor and suffering of the negative’ (Jameson, 561). 351 509 561 108 122
“The blind spot of Hegelianism, around which can be organized the representation of meaning, is the point at which destruction, suppression, death and sacrifice constitute so irreversible an expenditure and a negativity without reserve—that they can no longer be determined as negativity in a process or a system. In discourse (the unity of process and system), negativity is always the underside and accomplish of positivity.
Bataille writes that if Hegel’s attitude opposes scientific consciousness and an endless ordering of discursive thought to the naivete of sacrifice, then this consciousness and this ordering still retain a point of obscurity. It is not that Hegel did not include this moment in his Phenomenology, but that he misconstrued the moment. This ‘moment’ is implied in “the entire movement of the Phenomenology, in which it is the Negativity of death, insofar as man assumes it, that makes a man of the human animal. But not having seen that sacrifice by itself bore witness to the entire movement of death, the Preface to the Phenomenology was first of all initial and universal—he did not know to what extent he was right—with what exactitude he described the movement of Negativity.”
But we must speak. Hegel could not conceive of the machine. The phenomenon of the fetish is a singularity that the system cannot absorb: “a certain undecidability of the fetish leaves us occilating between a dialectic (of the undecideable and the dialectic) and an undecideability (between the dialectic and the undecideable)” (Glas, 232) Elsewhere, Derrida expresses the magnificent speculation that Hegel ‘could not think or conceptualize the functioning machine as such” (MP, 107). The phenomenon of the trace, that which is presence and absence altogether, but in some non-dialectical way, and which the Absolute Spirit can seemingly not even perceive or register, let alone tolerate.
“Not only is the sovereign operation not subordinate to anything, but it makes nothing subordinate to itself, is indifferent to any possible results; if afterward I wish to pursue the reduction of subordinate thought to sovereign thought, I may do so, but whatever is authentically sovereign is not concerned with this, and at every moment disposes of me otherwise.”
We must find a speech which maintains silence. Necessity of the impossible: to say in language—the language of servility—that which is not servile. One cannot speak silence, but the word itself betrays both discourse and non-discourse. Silence, among words, is the “most perverse or the most poetic.” In pretending to silence meaning, it says nonmeaning, it slides and erases itself.
Thought ruins, and its destruction is incommunicable to the crowd; it is addressed to the least weak. The putting at stake, the one that exceeds lordship, is therefore the space of writing. Sovereignty is absolute when it is absolved of every relationship, and keeps itself in the night of the secret.
The disciplined itinerary of writing must take us to a point at which there is no longer any method or any mediation, the point at which the sovereign operation breaks with method and mediation because it cannot be conditioned by anything that precedes or even prepares it.
But this displacement is powerless to transform the nucleus of predicates. All of the attributes ascribed to sovereignty are borrowed from the Hegelian logic of Lordship. Since the space which separates the logic of lordship and the “non-logic” of sovereignty cannot be inscribed in the nucleus of the concept itself, it will have to be inscribed within the continuous and functioning of a form of writing. There is no nucleus of meaning, but that the concept is produced within a tissue of differences. This writing, which is called writing, exceeds the logos of meaning, lordship, presence. Writing that subjects the same concepts, which remain unchanged in themselves, to a mutation of meaning, a loss of sense towards which they slide, ‘thereby ruining themselves immeasurably.’ This writing folds itself in order to link up with the (inevitable) classical concepts in such a way, with a certain twist, as to render their obedience to habitual laws, but while relating themselves, at a certain point, to the moment of sovereignty, to the absolute loss of their meaning, to expenditure without reserve, to what can no longer be called negativity or loss of meaning; thus, they relate themselves to a non-meaning which is beyond absolute meaning, beyond the closure or the horizon of absolute knowledge.
In doubling lordship, sovereignty does not escape dialectics. The transgression of meaning is not an access to the immediate and indeterminate identity of a non-meaning, nor is it an access to the possibility of maintaining non-meaning. Sovereign transgression is a reduction of this reduction: not a reduction to meaning, but a reduction of meaning. Far from interrupting dialectics, history, and the movement of meaning, sovereignty provides the economy of reason with its element, its milieu, its unlimiting boundaries of non-sense. Dialectical synthesis is not suppressed, but inscribed and made to function within the sacrifice of meaning. “Sovereignty must still sacrifice lordship and thus the presentation of the meaning of death…for meaning, when lost to discourse, is absolutely destroyed and consumed…for the meaning of meaning, the dialectic of the senses and sense, of the sensory and the concept, the meaningful unity of the word (sense)…has always be linked to the possibility of discursive signification.”
In sacrificing meaning, sovereignty submerges the possibility of discourse: not simply by means of an interruption, a caesura, or an interior wounding of discourse (an abstract negativity), but through such an opening, by means of an irruption suddenly uncovering the limit of discourse and the beyond of absolute knowledge.
Tabulature
There is no meta-langauge. There is no metal-language. There is only one discourse, it is significative, and here one cannot get around Hegel. The poetic or the ecstatic is that in every discourse which can open itself up to the absolute loss of sense, to the (non) base of the sacred, of non-meaning, of un-knowledge or of play, to the swoon from which it is re-awakened by a throw of the dice.
Why must, again and again, non-sense be ascribed to the aesthetic? Jameson on Derrida and the machine. Reduction to substance. (Zizek)
The sovereign operation suspends subordination in the form of immediacy. That which indicates itself as interior experience is not an experience, because it is related to no presence, to no plenitude, but only to the ‘impossible; it undergoes in torture. This experience above all is not interior: and if it seems to be such because it is related to nothing else, to no exterior (except in the modes of nonrelation, secrecy, and rupture), it is also completely exposed—to torture—naked, open to the exterior, with no interior reserve or feelings, profoundly superficial.
All the concepts of general writing—science, materialism, the unconscious—could be placed within this schemization. Predicates are not there in the service of meaning, in order to mean something, but rather to makes sense slide and deviate. This writing does not produce ‘new conceptual unities,’ nor is it to be distinguished from classical concepts ‘in the form of essential predicates.’ Rather, the proper names of the traditional concepts are maintained, but they are ‘struck’ and ‘solicited’ by qualitative differences of force—those marks that separate discourse from its excess, and account for major and minor writing. However, within a general economy, concepts are not subordinated to the totality of the system. Derrida maintains that ‘it is not a question of subordinating the sliding and differences of discourse, the play of syntax, to the entirety of an anticipated discourse.”
With delicate solicitation, the play of difference is ‘indispensible’ for the ‘correct reading’ of the general economy’s concept’s, and ‘if each notion must be reinscribed within the law of its own sliding and must be related to the sovereign operation, one must not make of these requirements the subordinate moment of a structure.” The sovereign operation therefore also suspends subordination in the form of immediacy. In order to understand that it does not, at this point, enter into work and phenomenology, one must exit from the philosophical logos and think the unthinkable. How can mediacy and immediacy be transgressed simultaneously? How can ‘subordination’ in the sense of the logos be exceeded in its totality? Bataille: “I write in order to annihilate the play of subordinate operations within myself (which is, after all, superfluous).” Only perhaps, and how ‘profoundly superficial,’ for this writing assures us of nothing, must give us no certitude, no result, no profit. It is absolutely adventurous, is a chance and not a technique.
Vulgar knowledge is in us like another tissue: A very determined point; at a certain determined point.
Of Hegel, only the usual vulgarization, the singular proof of the state of general ignorance in which remained, and remains today, the dialectic of master and the slave, whose lucidity is blinding. No one knows anything of himself if he has not grasped this movement which determines and limits the successive possibilities of man.
To have spent the night with reason, to have kept watch and to have slept with her: and to have done so throughout the night, until morning, until the other dawn which resembles, even to the point of being taken for it—like daybreak for nightfall—the hour when the philosophical animal can also finally open its eyes. For at the far reaches of this night something was contrived, blindly, I mean in a discourse, by means of which philosophy, in completing itself, could both include within itself and anticipate all the figures of its beyond, all the forms and resources of its exterior; and could do so in order to keep those forms and resources close to itself by simply taking hold of their enunciation.
And yet, to laugh at philosophy is the form of an awakening that calls for an entire ‘discipline’ and ‘method.’ In privileged moments that are less moments than the always rapidly sketched movements of experience; rare, discreet and light movements, without triumphant stupidity, far from public view, very close to that at which laughter laughs: close to anguish, first of all, which must not even be called the negative of laughter for fear of once more being made useful. A complicity without reserve accompanies Hegelian discourse, takes it seriously up to the end, without an objection in philosophical form. However, a certain burst of laughter exceeds it and destroys its sense, or signals, in any event, the extreme point of ‘experience’ that makes the Hegelian discourse dislocate itself. “And this can be done only through close scrutiny and full knowledge of what one is laughing at.”
[i] Within ideological analysis, the dialectic of master and slave has proved quite productive, especially as a model for structural antagonism, recognition, and dominance. As a theory of structural exclusion, the master-slave dialectic can be reworked to articulate a repressive logic of centrality and margin. That is to say, how Foucault can show how “the very concept of madness is historically generated by the emergence of the concept of reason, which needs an excluded or marginalized term in order to affirm its own centrality.” (Jameson, 352)
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