Gregor Moder’s Hegel and #Spinoza [5]

In vervolg op het vorige blog, breng ik hier - zoals aangekondigd - de Introduction van

Gregor Moder, Hegel and Spinoza. Substance and Negativity. Translated from Slovanian by the author. Northwestern Universiy Press, July 2017 - 200 pages

Zijn inleiding loopt uit op behandeling van Althusser, Deleuze en Derrida en  verwijdert zich daarmee van Hegel, maar tot dan is het een knappe behandeling van hoe Hegel (via Jacobi en de met hem begonnen Spinozastrijd) in aanraking kwam met Spinoza, waarom Spinoza belangrijk was voor Hegel en over hoe hij hem las.

[Cf, ook het blog van 18 november 2017 over 't Symposium “Hegel and/or Spinoza” in Londen, waarin Gregor Moder's boek centraal stond.]

De oorspronkelijke paginanummers staan tussen [ ].

Introduction

Hegel and Spinoza: The Question of Reading

For Hegel, Spinoza’s philosophy presented an irresistibly attractive and at the same time relentlessly provocative system of thought. If we were to list Hegel’s main incentives, that is to say, his necessary interlocutors, his favorite adversaries, we would be forced to put Spinoza’s philosophy near the very top, perhaps even directly below Hegel’s polemics with Kant and other famous German Idealists. The reasons for this are, in part, purely extrinsic, or “historical.” In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Spinoza was essential reading for German intellectuals. He was read by Goethe and Herder, who recognized in his system the pantheism of a continuously developing universal force of life. When romanticism sought to conjoin the question of subjectivity to a vitalistic Whole in order to lay the grounds for its project of nature as an expressive totality, as cosmic subjectivity, it drew its inspiration precisely from Spinozism.¹ Before Hegel, Spinoza was discussed by other classic figures of German Idealism such as Kant, Schelling, and Fichte, and perhaps there is not too much exaggeration in the statement that they could not have developed their philosophical systems without the reflection in the mirror of Spinozism.² If it is true that Hegel’s position was, in his early period, generally speaking a Spinozist one,³ then this was only possible because at that time in intellectual Germany a generalized image of Spinozism— for instance, in the form of a romantic pantheism, a living cosmos, and organic unity— was simply an image that demanded immediate engagement, either in its favor or against it.

But why was the figure of Spinoza so dramatically important in the development of German Idealism? How did this inflammatory thinker of nature without a transcendent deity, passionately excommunicated by Jews, hated and ridiculed by Christians, avoided by all, and submerged in relative obscurity suddenly rise to become a topic of general discussion and to a certain extent even a model philosopher, a philosopher as such? The answer, for the most part, lies in a long- lasting controversy among prominent intellectuals which is known as the Pantheismusstreit or Spinozismusstreit (pantheism- or Spinozism- controversy). The spark that started the controversy was a scandal among the intellectual elite of the [4] time, a scandal that involved strong personal convictions, breach of trust, and a tragic death. It started in 1785 when Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, at that time a peripheral but socially quite active figure, published his letters to a renowned thinker of the Enlightenment, Moses Mendelssohn, complete with his commentary, under the title of Ueber die Lehre des Spinoza, in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn (translated as Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn). This publication pushed Spinozism, as well as Jacobi, onto center stage.

The exchange of letters between Jacobi and Mendelssohn started off with the question of whether Lessing, one of the legendary personalities of the German and indeed the European Enlightenment, was a Spinozist or not. Upon learning that Mendelssohn was preparing a publication on Lessing, Jacobi wrote to him and reported that during his visit to Lessing, the latter declared himself a Spinozist. At the time this was an incendiary claim, since being a Spinozist meant as much as being a radical atheist. But the discussion quickly transcended this particular question and evolved to tackle some of the prominent questions of the day, principally the relationship between understanding and faith. Mendelssohn, who was quite upset by Jacobi’s publication of their correspondence, feverishly worked day and night to produce a response. When it was finished, he took the manuscript personally to the publisher on one cold January night, got dramatically sick, and subsequently died; some of Jacobi’s critics blamed him for Mendelssohn’s death.⁴

The controversy sparked by this exchange came to involve the entire intellectual elite, from Herder to Hamman, Reinhold, and Kant. In general terms, what was at stake was the divide between the Enlightenment on the one hand and the Sturm und Drang and romantic movements on the other hand; the relationship between knowing and believing; and between understanding and feeling. One of the key objections to the Enlightenment, raised by the Sturm and Drang movement and by pietism, claimed that in its criticism of traditional authorities and prejudices in the name of the universal understanding it was oblivious to the fact that its own universal position was also possible only in its specific cultural and historical context, and that understanding thus became the very authority that suppresses freedom.⁵

But Jacobi went even further. He claimed that the position of understanding alone, if followed to its extreme consequences, leads to determinism and fatalism and is therefore fundamentally immoral. For him, Spinozism was the most radical, yet at the same time the most consequential form of a rational system. This is why he claimed that a philosophy based on understanding is necessarily a form of Spinozism. Hence the alternative: either one is a philosopher, and therefore a Spinozist, or [5] one has to reject Spinozism, rejecting with it the principle of discursive understanding and philosophy.⁶ The reach of the knowledge that one could attain by means of understanding and philosophy was too short for Jacobi. According to him, they cannot grasp the core of the truth and are limited to posing true statements. The core of the truth remains in all cases something immediate and unanalyzable, something that can only be grasped by intuition or faith. Any true knowledge must therefore be grounded in faith; and understanding is grounded in intuition. We can use these theses by Jacobi as a negative background upon which we may formulate the fundamental challenges of German Idealism: how to secure and defend the ethical place of freedom within the framework of philosophy as “Spinozism”; or in another context: does knowledge require an external guarantee— such as faith or intuition— or is it, to the contrary, guaranteed as knowledge intrinsically, and perhaps capable of producing its own foundation? This is why we can say that the German Idealists embraced Spinozism as an exemplary philosophical system, while trying to reject and supersede it at the same time.⁷

But it was not only for these general and accidental reasons that Hegel was interested in rejecting and admiring Spinoza; there were also specific and for his own philosophy quite essential reasons. On the one hand, Hegel claimed Spinoza was the peak of modern philosophy, even the only possible beginning in philosophy, and he even went so far as to claim that there is no philosophy save as Spinozism.⁸ On the other hand, most of Hegel’s reproaches to Spinoza can be summed up as the reproach that the very philosophy which enables the possibility of philosophy as such is at the same time stuck in its beginning: it never progressed from its starting point, it never developed its own positions. Since this philosophy was incapable of thinking contradiction, Hegel often viewed it as a Parmenidean or identity principle, according to which only being is, while nonbeing is not; he regarded it as a living fossil for supposedly reintroducing a non-Christian, “Oriental” philosophy of light and the principle of ex nihilo nihil fit (nothing can come out of nothing) in philosophy. Hegel himself emphatically affirmed Christian metaphysics and its principle of creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing).⁹

Hegel’s reproach of immobility or rigidity in Spinoza can be analyzed in three different yet closely related ways. Firstly, Hegel claims that the Spinozist substance is incapable of transforming itself or organically growing— which is in obvious contrast to interpretations circulating in German romanticism and preromanticism. To put it in Hegel’s decisive formulation, it is a substance that is not yet substance and subject. In this respect, Spinozism is a variation of the “pantheism of the Eleatics,”¹⁰ and its substance is immobile in exactly the same way that the being of the [6] Eleatics is immobile: it is a pure abstract affirmation and immediacy, and it involves no movement or contradiction. Secondly, Spinoza’s geometric principle of demonstration, more geometrico, is the method of demonstration in mathematics, which was dismissed by Hegel as well as by other German Idealists, since such a method cannot grasp the self-developing nature and the organic movement of the absolute. In this sense, the rigidity of the substance is closely related to the rigidity of its method of explication. ¹¹ Thirdly, Spinozism nevertheless already formulated the most brilliant dialectical concepts, such as, for instance, causa sui (cause of itself) and the principle of omnis determinatio est negatio (all determination is negation), but it failed to develop them to their utmost consequences. It stuck at the beginning. According to Hegel, in the definition of causa sui Spinoza already formulated the “indifference of being and nothingness”; in this concept he already grasped the fundamental speculative idea of self-mediation— for the cause of itself produces itself as its effect and therefore as something other than itself— but apparently failed to apply these principles to the absolute substance, for otherwise it would not have been immobile.¹²

What kind of reading is Hegel’s reading of the philosophy of Spinoza? It would be much too naive— if not completely wrong— to say that he picked out some Spinozist concepts and productively implemented them in his own philosophy while discarding others as deficient. In fact, Hegel never read any of the philosophers in the history of philosophy in this fashion. Moreover, he never read any phenomenon of the spirit— be it artistic, religious, philosophical, or political— in this fashion. Hegel’s reading of a text is completely different from what we usually understand as reliable historical reading; it is never a reading that diligently collects and weighs its sources, references, summaries, and reports, comparing one against the other, and carefully choosing the most adequate explanation in the pursuit of compiling a transparent oversight of the whole with the explicit ambition of producing an impartial view of the matter at hand.

In a way, Hegel’s reading is “nonhistorical” and “unreliable”; that is to say, it is most certainly a reading that takes us away from the immediate letter of the text and its historical context, often in an unashamed and quite apparent attempt at developing Hegel’s own philosophical theses. And yet it does not do so by picking out useful positions and concepts, and separating them from others. On the contrary, the Hegelian reading always admits that the text it is reading is a necessary expression of the spirit and that it is therefore in itself already in truth— and not just a more or less fortunate collection of successful and unsuccessful claims. It is a reading that does not measure its text to an external guideline, but [7] insists on an immanent explanation. A text is therefore always already in truth; but at the same time, its truth is never a complete, absolute, or entire truth. As an affirmative expression of the spirit, a text is always an expression of the absolute, and yet as an affirmative and determinate expression it is also always already its negation. It is as if the truth expressed in the text, through this very expression, already became something other than it was, therefore demanding a new expression.

A text as an expression of the spirit already implies something that cannot be grasped in its immediate form; it implies something unexpressed. If one was to call on the Aristotelian distinction between actuality and potentiality, then one could say that the text implies an unexpressed potentiality in its very actuality; the texture of the text, so to speak, is never a smooth one. But we can never simply separate the “actual” from the “potential,” as if they were two independent threads; they can be discerned only in retrospect. Aristotle used the distinction between actual and potential to explain movement or change— and perhaps we can say that the text we are reading, for Hegel, is much like a body in motion: it is certainly there, before us, as something true, but at the same time it is not fully there yet; something still needs to happen to it, it must still get somewhere. This is why the Hegelian reading does not weigh its text, picking out its useful parts and discarding the rest. It rather seeks to repeat the text in its truth; and by repeating its truth it reveals its potentiality, its dynamism. One could say that the Hegelian reading is a productive repetition of the truth of the text it is reading.¹³

So, what kind of reading is Hegel’s reading of Spinoza? We can formulate the question that interested Hegel in Spinoza as the question of whether it is possible to think contradiction or movement on the level of the absolute substance, or, to borrow from the title of one of Slavoj Žižek’s books on Christianity, whether it is possible to think the absolute as a fragile absolute.¹⁴ More precisely: how can one read and explicate Spinozism in order to successfully produce such a concept of the absolute? What Hegel found in Spinoza was the idea that only what exists, exists, and that the substance is one and universal, but at the same time also the idea that any particular determination is already a negation of that primordial unity. What Hegel thought was lacking in the work of Spinoza was not something that was completely absent from that philosophy and had to be artificially added to it, from its outside; rather, it was something that was certainly there, written in the first line of the first part of Spinoza’s major work, the Ethics, in the definition of the causa sui. Hegel’s speculative reading does not take Spinozism as its adversary, but strictly speaking as an integral part of its own position.¹⁵ To state again, what Hegel lacked in Spinoza was not a certain positive content, but rather [8] a form of insistence and consequentiality: had Spinoza comprehended the cause in itself as self- determination of the universal substance, and according to the principle of omnis determinatio est negatio as self- negation of the absolute, he would already have had an explicit formulation of the negation of negation, a concept of a productive contradiction, and therefore a concept of an absolute in motion.

Hegel’s question about Spinoza’s philosophy could therefore be understood as a question of movement, specifically of movement or contradiction of the beginning, of the primordial. In other words, it is a question of dynamism internal to being itself, and at the same time a question of why it was necessary for Spinozism, as far as the question of movement of the primordial is concerned, to get stuck at the beginning, at the first sentence, and why it was unable to move from this beginning. To use a recursive formula: why was it necessary for the Spinozist absolute to appear as immobile to Spinozism itself, when it already appeared for the Hegelian reading as an absolute with inner dynamism; that is, as an absolute which on the one hand, for Spinozism itself, was immobile, an identity absolute, whereas on the other hand, for the Hegelian reading, it was already an absolute of contradiction, an absolute in movement?

Lost in Translation

Before submerging deeper into Hegel’s reading of Spinoza, let me schematically point out some of the principal objections to this reading and the concerns regarding it that were traditionally raised. First of all, the understanding of Spinozism as pantheism— be it Eleatic or romanticist— is not entirely justified. Gueroult demonstrated, and his argument was taken up by many other commentators, that in Spinozism the point was not so much that the whole (or the universe) is called God, but that everything that exists exists “in” God.¹⁶ The more proper designation would therefore be pan-en-theism.

             Two, Hegel’s reproach to the mathematical method of demonstration, claiming that it was inept for demonstrating a philosophical truth— an argument that he constantly repeated throughout his body of work— was, in principle, also Spinoza’s reproach.¹⁷

Three, the definition of the cause of itself, praised by Hegel as the moment of absolute knowledge and explained as the fundamental, principal determination of Spinoza’s system, does not really play, in Spinoza, the role of an absolute beginning from which everything else stems and evolves. Moreover, being the cause of itself is but a property of the sub-[9] stance, merely explicating the substance; if we understand it as defining or determining the substance, we have already submitted the essence of God to his power and therefore fallen into the matrix of theological finalism.¹⁸

Four, Spinozism is not organized either as a philosophy of the absolute beginning nor as a philosophy of the beginning with the absolute— at least not in the Ethics. Deleuze pointed out the difference between the Short Treatise on God, Man and His Wellbeing, which indeed begins with God, and the Ethics, where the argument does not start with God and aims rather at being able to rise to God as quickly as we can.¹⁹

Five, there are many details that suggest that Hegel’s treatment of Spinoza was either less than thorough or even a deliberate attempt at forcing Spinozism to fit into a neatly arranged space that Hegel cleared for it in the grand scheme of the development of the spirit throughout the history of philosophy. An overwhelming example of this procedure, for Macherey, was Hegel’s reduction of the infinity of attributes in Spinoza’s system to only two attributes of extension and thought (and explaining those as basically Eleatic being and thinking), a reduction that apparently serves no other purpose than to place Spinoza immediately after Descartes in the logical-historical sequence of philosophy.²⁰

But, six, none of the other aspects of Hegel’s reading of Spinoza was quite as far-reaching as the notorious principle of omnis determinatio est negatio. This principle was not Hegel’s invention, and Hegel was not the first to try to explain the entirety of Spinoza’s system from this principle. The idea that to determine is to negate reached Hegel in relation to Spinoza through Jacobi.²¹ What is astonishing about this principle is, to put it quite simply, that Spinoza never used it as a guiding principle of his philosophy. The sentence was floating around in the air even before Jacobi, but it was this infamous polemicist that gave it the form of an ontological principle according to which all actually existing (that is, determinate) things are marked by an intrinsic decadence or nonbeing (that is, by negation).²²

But if we follow Macherey’s thorough and elaborate analysis, Hegel’s specific take on this principle is even more fascinating. The reason why Hegel was so enthusiastic about this “Spinozist” principle is that he read it inversely: as if all negation is determination, that is, as if a negation of an entity is in fact a productive procedure of (positive) determination. ²³ The Hegelian gesture with regard to Spinozism can then be summed up as follows: had Spinoza comprehended “his” principle as a speculative principle, that is, as a principle of potentiality, then his system of absolutely infinite substance and finite modes would never have been just a system of ontological degradation, of simple negation, but rather a [10] system of the negation of negation, of productive negation. This may all sound well, except for one simple flaw—the principle of ontological degradation is not a Spinozist principle at all!

If Hegel’s reading of Spinozism was fundamentally dependent on the principle which differentiates between an undetermined, perfect absolute on the one hand and a sequence of gradual determinations, differentiations, and ontological dilutions or degradations on the other hand, then it is obvious that Hegel understood the system of the substance, attributes, and the modes as a typical emanationist system.²⁴ But while Spinoza was indeed inspired by the vast Neoplatonic tradition of the emanationist causality, Deleuze emphasized that he produced within it an important immanentist twist. Both emanative cause and immanent cause remain in themselves when producing their effect— but they differ in that with immanentist causality, the effect also “remains in” its cause. This distinction has enormous consequences for the entire system, because the immanent cause knows no ontological hierarchy, and since the effect was never “cast out” or “sent out” and never “fell out” of its cause, it also does not need to teleologically “return” to its cause.²⁵

The perplexity of Hegel’s reading of Spinoza’s philosophy relies mainly on the fact that he was attracted by concepts and principles— for instance, the definition of causa sui as the beginning of philosophy with a contradiction between the cause and the effect at work in the absolute substance, omnis determinatio est negatio as the first step toward a concept of productive negation— that were without any doubt tremendously important for Hegel, but seem to have only a tangential relation to Spinoza. And as if this were not enough, some of Hegel’s reproaches to Spinoza do not only seem unjustified, but also unreasonable to the extent that they unnecessarily see an adversary where there is in fact an ally. The most obvious example of this is the question of the method. Spinoza’s famous example of working iron from the Treatise on the Emendation of the  Intellect is an attack on Descartes’s method of clear and distinct perception: if one accepts the premise that in order to work iron, one must first acquire a proper working tool, a hammer, then one must necessarily also accept the following premise that in order to produce that working tool, the hammer, one must first acquire another hammer and other tools, and so on ad infinitum.²⁶ Spinoza’s definition of the adequate idea in the Ethics spells out quite clearly that it is an idea “which, insofar as it is considered in itself without relation to its object has all the properties, that is, intrinsic characteristics, of a true idea.”²⁷ Spinoza’s concept of “method” therefore demands an intrinsic relation to truth, which is precisely what Hegel’s “Introduction” to the Phenomenology of Spirit was so brilliantly arguing for in its criticism of the Kantian demand that one [11] must first discuss the limits of knowledge before even attempting to reach the truth.²⁸ All of this seems to suggest that what Hegel was so enthusiastic about and at the same time annoyed by in Spinozism was . . . Hegel himself. Or, as Macherey put it, it seems that Spinoza served Hegel as some sort of mirror surface upon which his own ideas were reflected. And perhaps Macherey’s remark can indeed go for the image of Spinoza in German Idealism in general: they needed it precisely as the image against which they were able to formulate their own philosophical positions.²⁹ But perhaps something similar can be said about the image of Hegel in what we could call the French materialism of the twentieth century. In Althusser, to immediately take the example of a thinker that we will often come back to, we can detect not only the generalizing tendency to reduce Hegel to a collection of dry wisdom, but also the failure to perceive the proximity of some of his own philosophical endeavors to those of Hegel. Additionally, it is important to note that in opposing Hegel, Althusser leaned heavily on the philosophy of Spinoza.

In particular, let us take a look at Althusser’s well-known interpretation of the so-called materialist inversion of Hegelian dialectics. What is at stake for Althusser is not simply to take binary oppositions like matter/-idea, practice/theory, economy/ideology, and then overturn their order of primacy. For Althusser, it does not suffice to invert the stream of causality, so to speak, and claim that instead of the primacy of theory one should argue for the primacy of practice; or that the system of economic production is not dependent on the dominant state maxim (mercantilism, liberalism, etc.), but vice versa, so that the dominant state ideology is dependent on the relations of economic production. The inversion of Hegelianism that must take place, for Althusser, is therefore not just an inversion of the direction in which determination works within idealism, but a much more ambitious step: he demands no less than an outright disownment of the hierarchical ontological- causal model of determination. Such a model was characteristic of the metaphysical systems of Neoplatonism, and Althusser strongly argued for the Spinozist principle of— to apply the Deleuzean reading through Duns Scotus— the univocity of being.³⁰

This principle is the key to understanding Althusser’s theses, where theory is not the opposite of practice but rather such and such theoretical practice; where the ideology of the state is not the opposite of the system of economic production but rather such and such ideological production. This already determines the image of Hegel rejected by Althusser: it is the image of Hegel as an inversion of Neoplatonism. Macherey— a student of Althusser’s and coauthor of the famous Reading “Capital”— spells it out: “What Hegel proposes is simply to reverse this [Neoplatonic] [12] order, by placing the Whole at the end of the process and by arranging its determinations as moments that progressively lead there.”³¹ What Althusserians saw in Hegel was essentially the embodiment of both theology and teleology, coupled with the inverse ontological model of systems of emanative causality, where instead of the falling from the absolute and the subsequent return to it we have the process of sublation as a persistent advance toward it. This is why the infamous concept of absolute knowledge was explained as a mythical point of convergence of knowledge and truth, exhibiting the fundamental fallacy of the idealist theory of knowledge, its confusion of the object of knowledge and the real object, which allows it to keep “silently pondering the religious fantasies of epiphany and parousia.”³²

One must note that Althusser and his students were hardly the only French school that saw teleology and theology working hand in hand throughout Hegel. Derrida pointed out that Lacan, Althusser, Foucault, Deleuze, Sartre, Merleau- Ponty, Lévinas, and many others went through a case of an “organized allergy . . . towards the Hegelian dialectic,” each with their own specific theoretical background and entry point.³³ This all started with the legendary lectures of Koyré and Kojeve, whose readings of Hegel massively influenced generations of scholars and thinkers. Catherine Malabou points out that Kojeve’s reading of absolute knowledge as the End of Time, which lay the foundation for the idea of absolute knowledge as a convergence of all oppositions, was itself heavily influenced by Heidegger’s explanation of absolute knowledge as Parousia, and by his claim that primary time, for Hegel, was past time.³⁴ One could claim, then, that a large portion of the French rejection of Hegel is based on Heidegger’s critique of Hegelianism as onto-theological metaphysics.

Of course, within the construction of his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel did place the chapter on absolute knowledge immediately after the chapter on revealed religion; in fact, as the logical conclusion of that chapter. The spirit of revealed religion is for itself still separated from its object, even though the two are clearly one in itself. Consciousness is still not reconciled or united with essence. Hegel writes: “Its own reconciliation therefore enters its consciousness as something distant, as something in the distant future.”³⁵ This is Hegel’s own formulation of the necessity for the advent of absolute knowledge. The reference to Parousia as the future reconciliation is quite apparent. And yet the knowledge at stake in absolute knowledge is not knowledge of some mystical- religious truth. In absolute knowledge, consciousness does not learn anything new; no new content is reached. Absolute knowledge is not the mythical elimination of the difference between subject and object, between truth and knowledge; it is not the Holy Grail of cognition, it is not the prophesized moment of [13] immediate and final truth where concrete words express concrete being. Rather, absolute knowledge is an empty point. It is precisely the concept of the fundamental irreconcilability in the heart of truth itself. To use a recursive phrasing proposed by Mladen Dolar: the truth is nothing but the hiatus between truth and knowledge.³⁶ Absolute knowledge is the place of this void, and this void is what produces the effect of Parousia.

Perhaps we could say that absolute knowledge works like a punctuation mark at the end of a sentence. The punctuation itself has no content; it is simply a formal decision that the process is at an end. This way it refers the reader back to the sentence itself, producing the effect of the meaning that was in the sentence all along.

Punctuation marks— full stops, commas, semicolons, and so on— clearly belong to the field of writing. Since there is no sound for them, it may seem, at first glance, that they are imposed on natural, organic spoken language. However, it is common linguistic knowledge that such “artificial” imposition is in fact characteristic of “natural” language itself. We know from everyday experience that certain silences produce meaning just as well as words; we are all aware and constantly use the dramatic pause; we know that silence is golden, and so on; that is to say, we know that punctuation marks belong to language as such, whether it is written or spoken. Moreover, as was pointed out by Saussure a long time ago, what signs are signifying is not defined by their positive or affirmative content, “but negatively by their relations with the other terms of the system,” and therefore “their most precise characteristic is in being what the others are not.”³⁷

Derrida pushed this argument even further and claimed that writing is not a secondary representation of immediate, natural, or organic speech, that it is not a later deformation of the authentic voice, but that it even has a specific advantage over the spoken word. The negativity of writing, precisely its necessary delay and deformation, is in fact inscribed in the essence of language itself. Derrida writes: “If ‘writing’ signifies inscription and especially the durable institution of a sign . . . , writing in general covers the entire field of linguistic signs. In that field a certain sort of instituted signifiers may then appear, ‘graphic’ in the narrow and derivative sense of the word, ordered by a certain relationship with other instituted— hence ‘written,’ even if they are ‘phonic’— signifiers. The very idea of institution . . . of the sign is unthinkable before the possibilityof writing and outside of its horizon.”³⁸

The negativity of language, pointed out by Saussure and Derrida, implies that the punctuation mark is, in fact, the primordial phenomenon of language. That artificial and purely formal cut of the punctuation mark, imposed on the affirmative texture of organic language, is in fact [14] its innermost possibility, its proper character. Now, how is this connected to the problem of absolute knowledge? The point is that absolute knowledge operates precisely in such a double function. On the one hand, it works as the full stop at the end of a sentence, as the point of the promised End Judgment; but on the other hand, this End Judgment turns out to be purely void and dimensionless, nothing more than a formal point revealing to us that any positive, affirmative content of an End Judgment is always an effect or a product of its process. This formal gesture of a punctuation mark is radically foreign to Spinoza and contemporary incarnations of Spinozism. It is precisely this simple gesture that Hegel found, in nuce, lacking in Spinoza: what Spinoza said was already everything that needed to be said; all that was still missing was the punctuation mark at the end of the sentence.

Residual Questions

To sum up the problematic of reception, one could make the general observation that the relationship between Hegelianism and Spinozism is often a relationship of mutual fascination with one self, a kind of mutual intellectual masturbation. It seems that Hegel, and to some extent this goes for German Idealism in general, recognized in Spinoza a powerful image, one that helped him formulate his own project better, but also one that had discouragingly little to do with Spinoza’s philosophy itself. At the same time, one could claim that the French Spinozists— with Althusser and Deleuze carrying the banner— recognized in Hegel a caricature of a theologian and a finalist which they gleefully hated and denounced, but failed to see the common ground that bound their projects to that of Hegel.

However, this mutually failed relationship which determines much of the contemporary debate within materialism nevertheless pivots around some basic themes.³⁹ While on the one hand Hegel read Spinozism as a system of emanative causality and ontological degradation, Althusserians, on the other hand, read Hegelian dialectics as an inversion of the emanationist system. Hegel claimed that Spinozism is fundamentally an example of what he called Oriental determinism, an example of abstract negativism where everything determined is simply negative, where all singularity is dissolved in the absolute substance— and where there cannot be any concept of the freedom of the subject. But similarly, Hegel was reproached for presenting a mechanical finalism where the movement of thought is reduced to a straightforward transition through [15] rigidly outlined stages of development and where there is never a place for true surprise, since everything leads to a predictable conclusion, to the mythic point of Parousia. And after all, even the Althusserian theory of ideological interpellation was criticized by Lacanians as basically a functionalist theory, since it can only “explain its proper success, but not how and why it does not work,”⁴⁰ since it fails to account for the traumatic residue of its process, a kind of a leftover that “far from hindering the full submission of the subject to the ideological command, is the very condition of it.”⁴¹

These objections— determinism, mechanical teleology, functionalism— overlook the fact that neither Hegelians nor Spinozists subscribe to a hierarchical concept of causality, and that they do not understand transformation or movement within the order of the actual in Cartesian terms of a spontaneous thinking substance– – which influences mechanical operations of the extended substance by intervening from outside of it. Both Hegelians and Spinozists, in their own specific terms and concepts, argue for a substance capable of organizing its own transformation. How exactly is such a self- determination demonstrated, on what grounds is it argued for, and what specific concepts and strategies are employed— this remains an open question and lies at the core of the problematic that we will address as the problematic of Hegel and Spinoza. In its own way, the problematic of reception once again points to the question of movement within the absolute, to the question of the contradictory status of beginning and to the question of an irreducible dynamism, hidden in the positive landscape of a text. The residual questions that will guide our inquiry as our basic thematic points are as follow. Firstly, the question of teleology, especially in its relationship to causality. Secondly, the question of the relationship between the absolute and the determined, where Hegel and Spinoza formulated solutions that sometimes seem to their adversaries as only minor adjustments of the classical metaphysical causal model of Neoplatonists, but in fact completely remove that model. And thirdly, the question of the limit that precedes what lays beyond.

Notes

1. See Charles Taylor, Hegel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 16, 40– 41.

2. Pierre Macherey, Hegel or Spinoza, trans. Susan B. Ruddick (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 195.

3. Klaus Düsing, “Von der Substanz zum Subjekt: Hegels spekulative Spinoza- Deutung,” in Spinoza und der Deutsche Idealismus, ed. Manfred Walther (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1992), 164.

4. Daniel Dahlstrom, “Moses Mendelssohn,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2011 Edition, ed. E. N. Zalta, http:// plato .stanford .edu /archives /spr2011 /entries /mendelssohn/.

5. Hans- Georg Gadamer, in Truth and Method, trans. J. Weinsheimer and D. J. Marshall (London: Continuum, 2004), 273, reformulated this thesis slightly, writing that the Enlightenment was prejudiced against prejudices. Hegel himself insisted that while it is, of course, better to be led by your own judgment than to blindly follow an outside authority, this does not rid you of prejudices. In Phenomenology of Spirit he wrote: “The only difference between abiding by the authority of others or abiding by one’s own convictions in a system of opinions and prejudices lies solely in the vanity inherent in the latter” (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977], 75).

6. Jacobi reports his conversations with Lessing in great detail. After reading what could be roughly understood as a Spinozist poem by Goethe that Jacobi showed to him, Lessing exclaimed that he subscribes to hen kai pan (One and All) and that he would not object to be called a Spinozist. Jacobi was startled,  he “blushed” and had “gone pale,” for he expected a different result. The next day, Jacobi writes, they agreed on the paradigmatic example of Spinoza in philosophy. We find, phrased as a quote from Lessing, the basic formulation of what became a trademark Hegelian dictum. “[I:] In the main I had come to get help from you against Spinoza. Lessing: Oh, so you do know him? I: I think I know him as only very few can ever have known him. Lessing: Then there is no help for you. Become his friend all the way instead. There is no other philosophy than the philosophy of Spinoza. I: That might be true. For the determinist, if he wants to be consistent, must become a fatalist: the rest then follows by itself” (Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel “Allwill,” trans. George di Giovanni [Montreal: McGill- Queen’s University Press, 1994], 187).

7. See also Jean- Marie Vaysse, “Spinoza dans la problématique de l’idéalisme allemande,” in Spinoza au XIXe siècle, ed. A. Tosel et al. (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2007), 65; Pierre- Henry Tavoillot, “Spinoza dans la querelle du panthéisme,” in Spinoza au XIXe siècle, ed. A. Tosel et al. (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2007), 40.

8. Hegel, TWA 20:165. Hegel’s alternative “entweder Spinozizmus oder keine Philosophie” is in essence very close to the alternative proposed by Jacobi (see also Adrian Johnston, Adventures in Transcendental Materialism: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014], 34).

9. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 60– 61.

10. Ibid., 60.

11. Hegel, TWA 20:161.

12. Hegel, TWA 20:168: “Hätte Spinoza näher entwickelt, was in der causa sui liegt, so wäre seine Substanz nicht das Starre.”

13. This specific way of reading philosophical texts, not taking them in as a collection of fixed statements but revealing their intrinsic dynamism, their implied, unexpressed potentiality, was an especially powerful influence on Heidegger’s philosophy. The hermeneutical structure of the question of being is an especially important reference here, since it quite clearly states that the question itself is an integral part of being as such— which is what Heidegger underscored in the introduction to his Being and Time (Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Stambaugh [New York: State University of New York Press, 1996], 3– 7). Moreover, Hegelian reading sets in motion all necessary aspects of Gadamerian hermeneutics, where reading is understood as religious reading, that is, as a re- reading (re- legere) which aims to resurrect “the dead trace of meaning” (Gadamer, Truth and Method, 156). And last but not least, we may cautiously suggest that there is a peculiar connection between such a notion of reading and the Althusserian concept of symptomal reading.

14. The full title of Žižek’s book is The Fragile Absolute; or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (New York: Verso, 2001).

15. See also Düsing, “Von der Substanz zum Subjekt,” 163.

16. See Marcial Gueroult, Spinoza I: Dieu (Ethique, I) (Paris: Aubier- Montaigne, 1968), 223; Genevieve Lloyd, Spinoza and the “Ethics” (London: Routledge, 1996), 40. Negri claimed that Spinoza proposed a “strategy of constitu tion” against the “pantheistic utopia” (Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics, trans. Michael Hardt [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000], 28– 35).

17. Deleuze argued that Spinoza was fully aware that the method of mathematics is inappropriate when dealing with philosophical knowledge (Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. M. Joughin [New York: Zone Books, 1990], 20). Furthermore, in Deleuze’s reading, the essences of the modes are not logical or mathematical structures but physical realities, res physicae (ibid., 192). And finally, Deleuze pointed out that the notiones communes (common notions) which in his judgment constituted the essential epistemological breakthrough of Spinoza’s Ethics are to be understood as “biological, rather than physical or mathematical, ideas” (ibid., 278; see also Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. R. Hurley [San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2003], 54– 58). The question of Spinoza’s method, more geometrico (or ordine geometrico), was explained by Macherey as a strictly anti- Cartesian concept of truth, a concept of truth that was in fact very close to Hegel’s own. For both, even though they differ in what they attribute to thinking, “truth is an internal determination of thought, which excludes all relation to an exterior object” (Macherey, Hegel or Spinoza, 73). Lloyd warned that the sterile construction of the mathematical demonstration in Spinoza can be misleading, since the book is soaked with ironies and witty, even emotional remarks (Lloyd, Spinoza and the “Ethics,” 19– 20).

18. Gueroult, Spinoza I, 41. See also Macherey, Hegel or Spinoza, 16.

19. Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy, 76.

20. Pierre Macherey, “Le Spinoza idéaliste de Hegel,” in Spinoza und der Deutsche Idealismus, ed. Manfred Walther (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1992), 149.

21. Jacobi uses the phrase in the correspondence with Mendelssohn, explaining his understanding of Spinoza: “This God therefore does not belong to any species of things; it is not a separate, individual, different, thing. Nor can any of the determinations that distinguish individual things pertain to it” ( Jacobi, Main Philosophical Writings, 219). Further down, Jacobi quotes Spinoza’s letter to Jelles from June 2, 1674, where Spinoza does in fact use the phrase “determination is negation” (Spinoza, EPS 50, 892). Jacobi comments: “Individual things therefore, so far as they only exist in a certain determinate mode, are non- entia; the indeterminate infinite being is the one single true ens reale” ( Jacobi, Main

Philosophical Writings, 220).

22. Hegel wrote: “Spinoza hat den großen Satz: Alle Bestimmung ist eine Negation. Das Bestimmte ist das Endliche” (Hegel, TWA 20:164). See also Düsing, “Von der Substanz zum Subjekt,” 183.

23. Macherey, Hegel or Spinoza, 115.

24. See also Düsing, “Von der Substanz zum Subjekt,” 169– 71.

25. Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy, 171– 74.

26. Spinoza, TIE, 9.

27. Spinoza, TIE, 244.

28. Hegel writes: “Meanwhile, if the fear of falling into error sets up a mistrust of Science, which in the absence of such scruples gets on with the work itself, and actually cognizes something, it is hard to see why we should not turn round and mistrust this very mistrust. Should we not be concerned as to whether this fear of error is not just the error itself?” (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 47).

29. Tavoillot provided a much more measured formulation, writing that what was at stake for German Idealism in discussing Spinoza was not a faithful reconstruction of his system, but rather its philosophical value for their own time: “Savoir ce que Spinoza a vraiment dit importe alors moins que de savoir si ce qu’il a dit est vrai” (Tavoillot, “Spinoza dans la querelle du panthéisme,” 36– 37).

30. Throughout his oeuvre, Deleuze constantly refers to Duns Scotus and his concept of univocity of being; what is especially important in the context of Spinoza is that Deleuze argues that Scotus was the essential philosophical forerunner of Spinoza. See especially Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy, 58– 67.

31. Macherey, Hegel or Spinoza, 75.

32. Louis Althusser, “From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy,” in Reading “Capital,” by Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1970), 16.

33. Jacques Derrida, “A Time for Farewells: Heidegger (Read by) Hegel (Read by) Malabou,” in The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic, by Catherine Malabou, trans. L. During (London: Routledge, 2005), xxvi.

34. Malabou, Future of Hegel, 3.

35. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 478.

36. Mladen Dolar, Samozavedanje: Heglova Fenomenologija duha II (Ljubljana: Društvo za teoretsko psihoanalizo, 1992), 9– 10.

37. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. W. Baskin (New York: McGraw- Hill, 1959), 117.

38. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 44.

39. Adrian Johnston understands the category of the subject as one of the central antagonistic points in contemporary materialism: “I would go so far as to maintain that one of the primary antagonisms splitting materialism today from within is that between neo- Spinozist and neo- Hegelian tendencies, the former (incarnated by, for instance, Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze, and their various progeny) seeking to dissolve the figure of the subject and the latter (represented most notably by Žižek and Slovene Lacanianism) to preserve it” ( Johnston, Transcendental Materialism, 20).

40. Mladen Dolar, “Beyond Interpellation,” Qui Parle 6, no. 2 (1993):78.

41. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 2008), 43.