Okay. We'll start the final session for today, which I will be introducing and moderating the Q&A for a particular reason. Ray Brossier, thank you so much for coming. It's a personal thing of an exceptionally close friend of mine. I was reading his wonderful translation of Badiou St. Paul when I first came to Beirut in 2007 or 2006. I can't even remember. It's been a while. And Ray happened to have just moved to Beirut, to the American University of Beirut at that time. And I immediately emailed him and we've been very good friends since. So it's a real pleasure to have you in Bombay, Ray,
and thank you for giving this paper. So Ray is a member of the philosophy faculty at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon. He's the author of Nihil Unbound, Enlightenment and Extinction, a wonderful book on sellers, and the translator, as I just mentioned, of Alain Badiou's St. Paul, The Foundation of Universalism and Theoretical Writings, as well as Quentin Mayer's After Finitude, an essay on the necessity of contingency. So with great pleasure, I introduce Raymond Brossier. Thanks. Thank you. Okay, thanks. Thanks to Rohith and Aaron for organizing this. I'm very happy to be here. My talk, so I've changed the title of my talk to focus more on Hegel because I thought that this would be a way of engaging a little bit more directly
with the theme of the conference. My paper is tangential to the explicit conference topic, but I do hope it will connect with it. First of all, I'll say something about Hegel, and I'll talk about the interpretations of Hegel developed by Slavoj Žižek and Madame Dolar, both of whom are speaking at this conference. And then at the end of the talk, hopefully I will connect it to issues about the relationship between psychoanalysis, capitalism and politics. Okay, so I'll begin with this quote from Zizek, which I think is a very illuminating and important quote.
There is no spirit without a machine. The appearance of spirit is a machine which colonizes the organism. The victory of spirit over mere life appears as a regression of life to mechanism. So I take this to be Zizek's encapsulation of the crux or what is one of the most significant aspects of his Lacanian interpretation of Hegel. And I think this is an interpretation that is particularly necessary now because I think what separates Hegelians or contemporary Hegelians over the extent to which Hegel can and should be understood as a neo-Aristotelian. And the Lacanian, it seems to me that the virtue of the Lacanian interpretation
is to disqualify any Aristotelian reading of Hegel precisely by not helping oneself to the distinction between first and second nature. Aristotle introduces this distinction between first nature and second nature. Human beings as rational animals are part of the natural order, but they have purposes, they have capacities, cognitive and spiritual capacities which are irreducible to the movement, the becoming of the inorganic. And the distinction between second nature, which is underwritten by very influential contemporary kind of philosopher, readers of Hegel such as John McDowell,
in a way, is seen to be, in a way, aligns mindedness with organicity. It aligns mindedness with organicity such that human purposes and activities are to be understood in terms of a complexification or the merging out of organic teleology. So the psychic or cognitive teleology is superimposed onto biological function. And this quote is very, very interesting because the point, as Zizek points out, So in second nature, the recurrence or the repetition of nature within the life of spirit
is in a way it's a reiteration of the inorganic of lifelessness within life or of death within life and this is why in a way the Hegel's key claim is that if the life of spirit or spirit is precisely that which tarries with the negative that incorporates death within itself, there is a kind of psychic life that is structured around these lifeless repetitions or these purposeless drives. And the drive is this kind of repetition or the reoccurrence of lifeless purposelessness within purposeful life.
The machinery of spirit has both a formal and a material aspect. And it's the interdependence of the matter and form that I'd like to examine here. So first of all, I want to say something about Hegel. Yes, about the form in Hegel. Hegel presents a phenomenology as a science of the experience of consciousness. There are lots of ways in which the phenomenology can be unpacked, but the introduction to that text has a straightforward epistemological agenda. Hegel is concerned with the problem of knowledge. How is something like absolute knowing achievable?
He's struggling with skepticism and the so-called problem of the criterion, which is that to separate true beliefs from false ones, we need a true method, but to separate true methods from false ones, we need true beliefs. We must already know that our belief that this is the true method is true. But if we already know that we know something that is true, then we don't need a method to separate true beliefs from false beliefs. This is the classic problem of the criterion, which is usually resolved by resorting to some form of foundationalism. You find a point of contact between thought and being, which provides this absolute footing for cognition. This is exactly the kind of foundationalism that Hegel disqualifies.
So Hegel writes in the section 84 of the introduction, in consciousness one thing exists for another. Consciousness regularly contains the determinateness of the moment of knowing and at the same time this other is to consciousness not merely for it, but is also outside of this relationship or it exists in itself and this is the moment of truth. So consciousness is consciousness of something both as it is for consciousness and as it is in itself independently of consciousness. So consciousness for Hegel is the consciousness of the difference between knowing, or what is for consciousness, and truth, or what is in itself. And this difference provides Hegel with a criterion he seeks. Natural consciousness, or what he calls phenomenal knowledge,
possesses the criterion for distinguishing between what is for it and what is in itself. And this criterion is imminent to phenomenal knowledge, knowledge or any claim to knowledge, knowledge in its most immediate, naive form. So Hegel continues, therefore, consciousness provides its own criterion from within itself so that the investigation becomes a comparison of consciousness with itself. For the distinction made above between truth and knowing, between the absolute and the relative, falls within consciousness. Thus, in what consciousness affirms from within itself as being in itself or the true, we have the standard which consciousness itself sets up by which to measure what it knows.
So this is why Hegel insists that consciousness or what he calls self-consciousness has a constitutive relationship to conceptualization. He says consciousness is its own notion, where the notion is the concept. The notion is at once knowledge, i.e. what the object is for consciousness, and truth, i.e. what the object is in itself or the essence of the thing. So on the one hand, Hegelian phenomenology measures the extent to which the notion or the concept corresponds to its object, knowledge corresponding to the object, and the object is the truth, the independent dimension, while on the other hand, and it measures the extent to which the object, the truth corresponds to its notion or knowledge.
So he continues, if we designate knowledge as a notion, but the essence or the true as what exists or the object, then the examination of the structure of the science of the experience of consciousness consists in seeing whether the notion corresponds to the object. But if we call the essence or in itself of the object the notion, and on the other hand understand by the object the notion itself as object, viz as it exists for another, then the examination consists in seeing whether the object corresponds to its notion. It is evident, of course, that the two procedures are the same. So this is why Hegel will insist that the concept of the object contains the criterion of truth or of absoluteness
to which knowledge itself is accountable. This is why Hegel will say that for philosophical science, what is concretely as opposed to abstractly real or actual, the German word is wichlichkeit, this is the word actual. is the notion as the unity of knowledge and truth or subject and object rather than either moment considered separately. So consciousness then is the notion of itself. It relates to itself as another. This is section 80, once again from the introduction. Consciousness is explicitly the notion of itself, hence it is something that goes beyond limits and since these limits are its own, it is something that goes beyond itself.
And this process of self-overcoming, consciousness of self-overcoming in trying to secure the truth about its object generates the process of what I'm going to call phenomenological recursion. Phenomenological recursion is in a way a kind of a toy formalization of the experience of consciousness. I'm not going to read out this whole quote. This is Hegel's account of how the transition between one object of knowledge, where there is a distinction between knowledge and truth, and the overcoming of the limits of knowledge and the grasping,
the truth of the object in itself generates a new object of knowledge in which the difference between, the original difference between truth and knowledge is re-inscribed. So you get something like this. In stage one, you have knowledge for consciousness one is contrasted with truth in itself, the first object. In stage two, you have knowledge for consciousness two, which is itself contained or structured around the difference between knowledge for the first consciousness and truth for the first consciousness. And this is contrasted to the new truth, the new truth of the object. And of course, in this process, you get a kind of a recursive process where you can keep on embedding these structures,
these concatenations of structures, of differences, through the unfolding of the science of the experience of consciousness. Now, what's left out of a kind of a trivial formalization like this is the dimension of negativity. Recursiveness is not deduction. There is no inference involved in recursion. Recursion is a mechanism. It's an operation but it doesn't involve any inference. Now, inferential necessity then for Hegel is precisely what can only be seen from outside, externally. This is where Hegel makes a distinction between what is for the content experienced by consciousness
and the truth, what is for consciousness and what is in itself for the knowledge of that consciousness. This is where he is saying that there is something going on behind the back of knowing consciousness. of consciousness and it's what's going on behind the back of cognitive consciousness that is seized by the phenomenological observer, the Hegelian philosopher, who is tracking this recursive process to convert mechanism into necessity. So I'll read out the sections in bold. It is just this necessity itself or the origination of the new object that presents itself to consciousness without its understanding how this happened,
which proceeds for us as it were behind the back of consciousness. So in the movement of consciousness there occurs a moment of being in itself, or being for us, being for us the observers, which is not present to the consciousness, comprehended in the experience itself. The content however of what presents itself to us does exist for it. we comprehend only the formal aspects of that content or its pure origination. For it, for the consciousness, what has thus arisen exists only as an object, while for us it appears at the same time as movement and a process of becoming. And it's this process of becoming that is charted by the science of the experience of consciousness.
So one way of understanding absolute knowing is as a fusion of phenomenal knowledge or the object of phenomenology and science or the subject of phenomenology. And this fusion is the point at which we, the phenomenological observers, see the necessity in what was mere chance for experiencing consciousness. And the sequence of what Hegel calls determinate negations through which both subjective knowing and objective truth are compelled to satisfy their own notions. So this is very important, is that determinate negation in a way is invisible from the vantage point of the experiencing consciousness. It's only the observing, the scientific consciousness, that perceives the determinacy of the negation going on behind the back
of experiencing consciousness. Now, a second consequence, a second famous regal and claim is that essence is contradiction. Contradiction is in the thing itself, not just in a representation of the thing. So what Kant characterizes the discrepancy between representation and thing is for Hegel the thing itself insofar as it's no longer a self-identical substance but rather a concatenation of differences, something that is not what it is and is what it is not. The difference between what the thing is and what we take it to be is internal to the thing itself. But there is an ambiguity in this account of phonological recursion. Only the formal aspect of the process of becoming or the movement of pure origination
is grasped in its necessity, not its content. What is experienced as content remains, to a certain extent, in a way to be carefully qualified, contingent. So what is necessary is the form as a surplus of negativity. The true object is the nothingness of the first, but this nothingness is precisely what is not present for the experiencing consciousness. It can only be grasped retrospectively by the phenomenological observer as the in itself of the for itself. So everything hinges on how we understand this form of nothingness. Does it constitute the cognitive core of experience, what experience knows without knowing that it knows, Or is it rather what resists knowing, which is to ask,
is there a formlessness latent in this very form of nothingness? And this is to ask to what extent form coincides with what Hegel calls the concept. Recursion is an automatism, not an operator of necessity. While necessity is logical compulsion, recursion is mechanical compulsion. So the science of the experience of consciousness proceeds through the formalization of nothingness, precisely of what is not for natural consciousness. This is why Zizek then I think gives this very useful encapsulation. Hegel, there is an unconscious in Hegel but it's the unconsciousness of form. Hegelian unconscious is formal, it is the form of enunciation invisible in the enunciated content.
I won't read the whole quote, we'll just focus on the section in bold. Hegel's unconscious is the unconscious of self-consciousness itself, its own necessary non-transparency, the necessary overlooking of its own form in the content it confronts. So there's a resistance to formalization in and through form. And in this sense, the phenomenology can be read as charting self-consciousness and this is repeated attempts to successfully sublate, which is to say to formalize the content of its experience. This is a quote from Rebecca Comey's Resistance and Repetition, also about Freud and Hegel. She writes, the phenomenology is often read as a building for man,
the ultimate obstacle to enlightenment turning out not to be the opacity of things, the inscrutability of other minds, the recalcitrance of the passions or the unruliness of the body, but the resistance mounted by reason itself to its own inexorable demands. The ultimate obstacles to reason are those generated by reason." Now, of course, she's going to contest this reading. She wants to say that there's another kind of resistance operating in and through consciousness. There is this resistance generated by the surplus of form, but there's also a resistance at the level of content, of concrete particularity, and this is the resistance tracked by psychoanalysis. So what is supposedly omitted by this edifying reading is the resistance to reason
generated by a form of repetition, symptomatic of reason's other, i.e. the unconscious. The discrepancy between the form and content of experience can be crystallized in the contrast between determinate negation and overdetermination, or between sublation and iteration. This is Zizek's account. This is the crux of the post-Hegelian rupture. Its most elementary feature from Kierkegaard to Marx is the gap that emerges between sublation and repetition. That is, repetition acquires autonomy with regard to sublation. And the two are now opposed. Either a thing is sublated, i.e. determinately negated into a higher mode of its existence, which is what Hegel wants, or it just drags on in its inertia.
So, and here, Zizek then continues and elaborates on what he thinks resists formalization in the content of experience, and it's what he calls over-determination. In the Hegelian dialectical process, negativity is always radical or radicalized and consistent. Hegel never considers the option of a negation that fails, so that something is just half negated and continues to lead a subterranean existence or rather insistence. So this is the difference in a way between conceptual negation and non-conceptual negation. Conceptual negation is always determinate, it always succeeds, whereas non-conceptual,