Absolute Recoil: Towards A New Foundation Of Dialectical Materialism

Introduction:

Certainly There Is a Bone Here

In Chapter 5 of his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, invoking Engels’ claim that materialism has to change its form with each new scientific discovery, Lenin applies the point to Engels himself:

Engels says explicitly that with each epoch making discovery even in the sphere of natural science [not to speak of the history of mankind], materialism has to change its form. Hence, a revision of the form of Engels’ materialism, a revision of his natural-philosophical propositions, is not only not revisionism, in the accepted meaning of the term, but, on the contrary, is demanded by Marxism.¹

Today, in turn, we should apply this motto to Lenin himself: if his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism clearly failed the task of raising philosophical materialism to the level of relativity theory and quantum physics, neither can it help us grasp other breakthroughs such as Freudian psychoanalysis, not to mention the failures of twentieth-century communism. The present book is an attempt to contribute to this task by way of proposing a new foundation for dialectical materialism. We should read the term dialectics in the Greek sense of dialektika (like semeiotika or politika): not as a universal notion, but as dialectical [semiotic, political] matters, as an inconsistent (non-All) mixture. Which is why this book contains chapters in—not on—dialectical materialism: dialectical materialism is not the book’s topic; it is, rather, practiced within these pages.

The book’s title refers to the expression absoluter Gegenstoss, which Hegel uses only once, but at a crucial point in his logic of reflection, to designate the speculative coincidence of opposites in the movement by which a thing emerges out of its own loss. The most concise poetic formula of absolute recoil was provided by Shakespeare (no surprise here), in his uncanny Troilus and Cressida (Act 5, Scene 2):

O madness of discourse,

That cause sets up with and against itself!

Bi-fold authority! where reason can revolt

Without perdition, and loss assume all reason

Without revolt.

In the context of the play, these lines refer to Troilus’ self-contradicting argumentation when he learns of Cressida’s infidelity: he enumerates arguments for and against what he wants to demonstrate; his reasoning rebels against its own line of argument without seeming to undo itself; and his unreasonableness assumes the appearance of rationality without seeming to contradict itself. A cause that acts against itself, a reason that coincides with the revolt (against itself) … Although these lines refer to feminine inconsistency, they can also be taken as a comment on the secret alliance between the dignity of the Law and its obscene transgression. Recall Shakespeare’s standard procedure, in his royal chronicles, of supplementing the big royal scenes staged in a dignified way with scenes figuring common people who introduce a comic perspective. In the royal chronicles, these comic interludes strengthen the noble scenes by way of contrast; in Troilus, however, everyone, even the noblest of warriors, is contaminated by the ridiculing perspective, which invites us to see every character as either blind and pathetic or as involved in ruthless intrigues.

The operator of this de-tragicization, the single agent whose interventions systematically undermine tragic pathos, is Ulysses. This may sound surprising in view of Ulysses’ first intervention, at the war council in Act 1, when the Greek (or Grecian, as Shakespeare put it in what now may be called Bush mode) generals try to account for their failure to occupy and destroy Troy after eight years of fighting. Ulysses takes a traditional old values position, locating the cause of the Greeks’ failure in their neglect of the centralized hierarchical order in which every individual has their proper place. What, then, causes this disintegration which leads to the democratic horror of everyone participating in power? Later in the play (Act 3, Scene 3), when Ulysses tries to convince Achilles to rejoin the battle, he mobilizes the metaphor of time as a destructive force that gradually undermines the natural hierarchical order: with the passing years, your heroic deeds will soon be forgotten, your reputation will be eclipsed by the new heroes—so if you want your warrior glory to continue to shine, you must rejoin the battle:

Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,

Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,

A great-sized monster of ingratitudes:

Those scraps are good deeds past; which are devour’d

As fast as they are made, forgot as soon

As done. Perseverance, dear my lord,

Keeps honour bright: to have done is to hang

Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail

In monumental mockery …

O, let not virtue seek

Remuneration for the thing it was;

For beauty, wit,

High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service,

Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all

To envious and calumniating time.

Ulysses’ strategy here is profoundly ambiguous. In a first approach, he merely restates his argument about the necessity of degrees (ordered social hierarchy), and portrays time as a corrosive force which undermines the old true values—an arch-conservative motif. However, on a closer reading, it becomes clear that Ulysses gives his argument a singular cynical twist: how are we to fight against time, to keep the old values alive? Not by directly sticking to them, but by supplementing them with the obscene Realpolitik of cruel manipulation, of cheating, of playing one hero off against the other. Only this dirty underside, this hidden disharmony, can sustain harmony. Ulysses plays with Achilles’ envy—with the very attitudes that work to destabilize the hierarchical order, since they signal that one is not satisfied with one’s subordinate place within the social body. This secret manipulation of envy—in violation of the very rules and values Ulysses celebrates in his first speech—is needed to counteract the effects of time and sustain the hierarchical order of degrees. This would be Ulysses’ version of Hamlet’s famous The time is out of joint; O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!—the only way to set it right is to counteract the transgression of Old Order with its inherent transgression, with a crime secretly made to serve the Order. The price to be paid is that the Order which survives is a mockery of itself, a blasphemous imitation of Order.

Hegel uses the term absolute recoil in his explanation of the category of "ground/reason (Grund)," where he resorts to one of his famous wordplays, connecting Grund (ground/reason) and zu Grunde gehen (to fall apart, literally to go to one’s ground):

The reflected determination, in falling to the ground, acquires its true meaning, namely, to be within itself the absolute recoil upon itself, that is to say, the positedness that belongs to essence is only a sublated positedness, and conversely, only self-sublating positedness is the positedness of essence. Essence, in determining itself as ground, is determined as the non-determined; its determining is only the sublating of its being determined. Essence, in being determined thus as self-sublating, has not proceeded from another, but is, in its negativity, self-identical essence.²

While these lines may sound obscure, their underlying logic is clear: in a relationship of reflection, every term (every determination) is posited (mediated) by another (its opposite), identity by difference, appearance by essence, and so on—in this sense, it proceeds from another. When positedness is self-sublated, an essence is no longer directly determined by an external Other, by its complex set of relations to its otherness, to the environment into which it emerged. Rather, it determines itself, it is within itself the absolute recoil upon itself—the gap, or discord, that introduces dynamism into it is absolutely immanent.

To put it in traditional terms, the present work endeavors to elevate the speculative notion of absolute recoil into a universal ontological principle. Its axiom is that dialectical materialism is the only true philosophical inheritor of what Hegel designates as the speculative attitude of the thought towards objectivity. All other forms of materialism, including the late Althusser’s materialism of the encounter, scientific naturalism, and neo-Deleuzian New Materialism, fail in this goal. The consequences of this axiom are systematically deployed in three steps: 1) the move from Kant’s transcendentalism to Hegel’s dialectics, that is, from transcendental correlationism (Quentin Meillassoux) to the thought of the Absolute; 2) dialectics proper: absolute reflection, coincidence of the opposites; 3) the Hegelian move beyond Hegel to the materialism of less than nothing.

Part I begins with a critical analysis of two representative nontranscendental materialist theories of subjectivity (Althusser, Badiou). The second chapter deals with the transcendental dimension and describes the move from the Kantian transcendental subject to the Hegelian subject as the disparity in the heart of Substance. The third chapter provides an extended commentary on Hegel’s basic axiom according to which the Spirit itself heals the wounds it inflicts on nature.

Part II deals with the Hegelian Absolute. First, it describes the thoroughly evental nature of the Absolute which is nothing but the process of its own becoming. It then confronts the enigma of Hegelian Absolute Knowing: how should we interpret this notion with regard to the basic dialectical paradox of the negative relationship between being and knowing, of a being which depends on not-knowing? Finally, it considers the intricacies of the Hegelian notion of God.

Part III ventures an Hegelian expedition into the obscure terrain beyond Hegel. It begins by deploying the different, contradictory even, versions of the Hegelian negation of negation. It then passes to the crucial dialectical reversal of there is no relationship into there is a non-relationship—the passage which corresponds to the Hegelian move from dialectical to properly speculative Reason. The book concludes with some hypotheses about the different levels of antagonism that are constitutive of any order of being, delineating the basic contours of a renewed Hegelian dentology (the ontology of den, of less than nothing).

In between these steps, two interludes—on Schoenberg’s Erwartung, and on Ernst Lubitsch’s masterpieces—offer artistic exemplifications of the book’s conceptual content.

MATERIALISM, OLD AND NEW

Materialism appears today in four main versions: 1) reductionist vulgar materialism (cognitivism, neo-Darwinism); 2) the new wave of atheism which aggressively denounces religion (Hitchens, Dawkins, et al.); 3) whatever remains of discursive materialism (Foucauldian analyses of discursive material practices); 4) Deleuzian new materialism. Consequently, we should not be afraid to look for true materialism in what cannot but appear as (a return to German) idealism—or, as Frank Ruda put it apropos Alain Badiou, true materialism is a materialism without materialism in which substantial matter disappears in a network of purely formal/ideal relations. This paradox is grounded in the fact that, today, it is idealism which emphasizes our bodily finitude and endeavors to demonstrate how this very finitude opens up the abyss of a transcendent divine Otherness beyond our reach (no wonder that the most spiritual of twentieth-century filmmakers, Tarkovsky, is simultaneously the one who was most obsessed with the impenetrable humid inertia of earth), while scientific materialists keep alive the techno-utopian dream of immortality, of getting rid of our bodily constraints.³ Along these lines, Jean-Michel Besnier has drawn attention to the fact that contemporary scientific naturalism seems to revive the most radical idealist program of Fichte and Hegel: the idea that reason can make nature totally transparent.⁴ Does not the biogenetic goal of reproducing humans scientifically through biogenetic procedures turn humanity into a self-made entity, thereby realizing Fichte’s speculative notion of a self-positing I? Today’s ultimate infinite judgment (coincidence of opposites) thus seems to be: absolute idealism is radical naturalist reductionism.⁵

This orientation marks a fourth stage in the development of anti-humanism: neither theocentric anti-humanism (on account of which US religious fundamentalists treat the term humanism as synonymous with secular culture), nor the French theoretical anti-humanism that accompanied the structuralist revolution in the 1960s (Althusser, Foucault, Lacan), nor the deep-ecological reduction of humanity to just one of the many animal species on Earth, but the one which has upset the balance of life on the planet through its hubris, and is now justifiably facing the revenge of Mother Earth. However, even this fourth stage is not without a history. In the first decade of the Soviet Union, so-called bio-cosmism enjoyed an extraordinary popularity—as a strange combination of vulgar materialism and Gnostic spirituality that formed the occult shadow-ideology, or obscene secret teaching, of Soviet Marxism. It is as if, today, bio-cosmism is reemerging in a new wave of post-human thought. The spectacular development of biogenetics (cloning, direct DNA interventions, etc.) is gradually dissolving the frontiers between humans and animals on the one side and between humans and machines on the other, giving rise to the idea that we are on the threshold of a new form of Intelligence, a more-than-human Singularity in which mind will no longer be subject to bodily constraints, including those of sexual reproduction. Out of this prospect a weird shame has emerged: a shame about our biological limitations, our mortality, the ridiculous way in which we reproduce ourselves—what Günther Anders has called Promethean shame,⁶ ultimately simply the shame that we were born and not manufactured. Nietzsche’s idea that we are the last men laying the ground for our own extinction and the arrival of a new Over-Man is thereby given a scientific-technological twist. However, we should not reduce this post-human stance to the paradigmatically modern belief in the possibility of total technological domination over nature—what we are witnessing today is an exemplary dialectical reversal: the slogan of today’s post-human sciences is no longer domination but surprise (contingent, non-planned emergence). Jean-Pierre Dupuy detects a weird reversal of the traditional Cartesian anthropocentric arrogance which grounded human technology, a reversal clearly discernible in today’s robotics, genetics, nanotechnology, artificial life and Artificial Intelligence research:

how are we to explain the fact that science became such a risky activity that, according to some top scientists, it poses today the principal threat to the survival of humanity? Some philosophers reply to this question by saying that Descartes’ dream—to become master and possessor of nature—has turned out bad, and that we should urgently return to the mastery of mastery. They understand nothing. They don’t see that the technology profiling itself at our horizon through the convergence of all disciplines aims precisely at non-mastery. The engineer of tomorrow will not be a sorcerer’s apprentice because of his negligence or ignorance, but by choice. He will give himself complex structures or organizations and will try to learn what they are capable of by exploring their functional properties—an ascending, bottom-up, approach. He will be an explorer and experimenter at least as much as an executor. The measure of his success will be more the extent to which his own creations will surprise him than the conformity of his realization to a list of pre-established tasks.⁷

Should we see an unexpected sign of hope in this reemergence of surprise at the very heart of the most radical naturalism? Or should we look for a way to overcome the impasses of cognitivist radical naturalism in Deleuzian New Materialism, whose main representative is Jane Bennett with her notion of vibrant matter? Fredric Jameson was correct to claim that Deleuzianism is today the predominant form of idealism: as did Deleuze, New Materialism relies on the implicit equation: matter = life = stream of agential self-awareness—no wonder New Materialism is often characterized as weak panpsychism or terrestrial animism. When New Materialists oppose the reduction of matter to a passive mixture of mechanical parts, they are, of course, asserting not an old-fashioned teleology but an aleatory dynamic immanent to matter: emerging properties arise out of unpredictable encounters between multiple kinds of actants (to use Bruno Latour’s term), and the agency for any particular act is distributed across a variety of kinds of bodies. Agency thereby becomes a social phenomenon, where the limits of sociality are expanded to include all material bodies participating in the relevant assemblage. For example, an ecological public is a group of bodies, some human, most not, that are subjected to harm, defined as a diminished capacity for action.⁸ The ethical implication of such a stance is that we should recognize our entanglement within larger assemblages: we should become more sensitive to the demands of these publics and the reformulated sense of self-interest that calls upon us to respond to their plight. Materiality, usually conceived as inert substance, should be rethought as a plethora of things that form assemblages of human and non-human actors—humans are but one force in a potentially unbounded network of forces. We thereby move back to the enchanted world—no wonder Bennett’s earlier work was on enchantment in everyday life. She concludes Vibrant Matter with what she calls (in no way wholly ironically) her Nicene Creed for would-be materialists:

I believe in one matter-energy, the maker of things seen and unseen. I believe that this pluriverse is traversed by heterogeneities that are continually doing things. I believe it is wrong to deny vitality to nonhuman bodies, forces, and forms, and that a careful course of anthropomorphization can help reveal that vitality, even though it resists full translation and exceeds my comprehensive grasp. I believe that encounters with lively matter can chasten my fantasies of human mastery, highlight the common materiality of all that is, expose a wider distribution of agency, and reshape the self and its interests.⁹

What vibrates in vibrant matter is its immanent life force or its soul (in the precise Aristotelian sense of the active principle immanent to matter), not subjectivity. New Materialism thus refuses the radical divide matter/ life and life/thought—selves or multiple agents are everywhere in different guises. A basic ambiguity nonetheless persists here: are these vital qualities of material bodies the result of our (the human observer’s) benign anthropomorphism, so that the vitality of matter means that everything is, in a sense, alive,¹⁰ or are we effectively dealing with a strong ontological claim asserting a kind of spiritualism without gods, with a way of restoring sacredness to worldliness? If a careful course of anthropomorphism can help reveal the vitality of material bodies, it is not clear whether that vitality is a result of our perception being animistic or of an actual asubjective vital power—an ambiguity which is deeply Kantian.

Prior to Kant, and if we do not take into account the aleatory materialism of Democritus and Lucretius, the main opposition was that of external and internal teleology exemplified by the names of Plato and Aristotle. For Plato, the natural world is the product of a divine craftsman who looked to the world of eternal being for his model of the good and then created a natural order. The externality here is twofold: the agent whose goal is being achieved is external to the object, and the value is the agent’s value, not the object’s. Aristotle’s notion differs from Plato’s on both counts: the goal belongs to the organism rather than to an external designer, and the end to which a natural process is directed is simply the being, the life, of the natural object in question—it is not a purpose, neither man’s nor God’s, but the actualization of the immanent potentials of an entity.

Kant breaks with this entire tradition and introduces an irreducible gap into our perception of reality. For him, the idea of purpose is immanent to our perception of living organisms: we ineluctably perceive them as if a concept had guided its production (an animal has eyes, ears and a nose in order to orient itself in its environment, it has legs in order to move itself, teeth in order to make eating easier, etc.). However, such teleological thinking does not relate to the objective reality of the observed phenomena: categories of teleology are not constitutive of reality (as are categories of linear material causality), they are merely a regulative idea—a pure as if, that is, we perceive living organisms as if they were structured in a teleological way. While efficiently causal explanations are always best (x causes y, y is the effect of x), there will never be a Newton for a blade of grass, and so the organic must be explained as if it were constituted teleologically. Although the natural world gives an almost irresistible semblance of teleology, or adaptedness to goals, this is an anthropomorphic mode of thought, a subjective point of view under which we (have to) comprehend certain phenomena.¹¹

The gap that separates modern science from Aristotelian descriptions of nature (experienced natural reality) concerns the status of the Real qua impossible. The commonsensical realist ontology opposes appearance and reality: the way things merely appear to us and the way they are in themselves, independently and outside of our relating to them. However, are not things already in themselves embedded in an environment, related to us? Is not their in itself the ultimate abstraction of our mind, the result of tearing things out of their network of relations? What science distils as objective reality is becoming more and more an abstract formal structure relying on complex scientific and experimental work. Does this mean, however, that scientific objective reality is just a subjective abstraction? Not at all, since it is here that one should mobilize the distinction between (experienced) reality and the Real. Alexandre Koyré pointed out how the wager of modern physics is to approach the real by means of the impossible: the scientific Real, articulated in letters and mathematical formulae, is impossible (also) in the sense that it refers to something we can never encounter in the reality within which we dwell. An elementary example: based on experiments, Newton calculated how fast, with how much acceleration, an object will move in free fall in an absolute vacuum, where there are no obstacles to slow down its movement; we, of course, never encounter such a pure situation in our reality, where tiny particles in the air always slow down the free fall, which is why a nail falls much faster than a feather, while in a vacuum the velocity of their fall would be identical. This is why, for modern science, we have to begin with an impossible-Real to account for the possible: we first have to imagine a pure situation in which stones and feathers fall with the same velocity, and only thereafter can we explain the velocity of actual objects falling as divergences or deviations due to empirical conditions. Another example: to explain the attenuation of the movement of objects in our ordinary material reality, physics takes as its starting point the principle of inertia (again first formulated by Newton) which postulates that an object not subject to any net external force will move at a constant velocity—an object will continue moving at its current velocity until some force causes its speed or direction to change. On the surface of the Earth, inertia is as a rule masked by the effects of friction and air resistance which attenuate the speed of moving objects (usually to the point of rest), and this observable fact misled classical theorists such as Aristotle into assuming that objects move only as long as force is applied to them.¹² Lacan’s notion of the Real as impossible should be applied here, including his opposition between reality and the Real: the principle of inertia refers to an impossible Real, something that never happens in reality but which has nonetheless to be postulated in order to account for what goes on in reality. It is in this sense that modern science is more Platonic than Aristotelian: Aristotelian approaches begin with empirical reality, with what is possible, while modern science explains this reality with reference to an ideal order which is found nowhere in reality.

Kant thus intervenes into the field of teleology as an agent of scientific modernity: purposes are imposed onto natural objects as organizational principles by us, the observing subjects; the role of teleological concepts is not constitutive but merely regulative, we apply them to make our experience meaningful. Kant thereby opens up an irreducible gap between chaotic nature in itself in its meaningless reality, and the meaning, the meaningful order, the purposefulness, we impose onto it. He

does not try to coerce nature into purposefulness, he doesn’t try to obliterate its part of heterogeneity or contingency. On the contrary, he introduces the notion of purposefulness as a notion which retroactively makes nature purposeful. His point is thus not to transform chaotic nature into well-ordered one: he conceives of the notion of purposefulness in such a way that it reflects the notion of nature as chaotic. Perhaps, we should recognize here a discovery which corresponds to the discovery of the notion of fantasy in Freud and even more in Lacan. We are dealing with the invention of a notion which provides a name for the retroactive arrangement of successfulness or healing in a field in which a crack is gaping.¹³

New Materialism takes the step back into (what can only appear to us moderns as) premodern naivety, covering up the gap that defines modernity and reasserting the purposeful vitality of nature: a careful course of anthropomorphization can help reveal that vitality, even though it resists full translation and exceeds my comprehensive grasp. Note the uncertainty of this statement: Bennett is not simply filling in the gap, she remains modern enough to register the naivety of her gesture, admitting that the notion of the vitality of nature is beyond our comprehension, that we are moving into an obscure area.

The move that defines New Materialism should be opposed to the properly Hegelian dialectical-materialist overcoming of the transcendental dimension or the gap that separates subject from object: New Materialism covers up this gap, reinscribing subjective agency into natural reality as its immanent agential principle, while dialectical materialism transposes back into nature not subjectivity as such but the very gap that separates subjectivity from objective reality.

If, then, New Materialism can still be considered a variant of materialism, it is materialist in the sense in which Tolkien’s Middle-earth is materialist: as an enchanted world full of magical forces, good and evil spirits, etc., but strangely without gods—there are no transcendent divine entities in Tolkien’s universe, all magic is immanent to matter, as a spiritual power that dwells in our terrestrial world. However, we should strictly distinguish the New Age topic of a deeper spiritual interconnection and unity of the universe from the materialist topic of a possible encounter with an inhuman Other with whom some kind of communication could be possible. Such an encounter would be extremely traumatic, since we would have to confront a subjectivized Other with whom no subjective identification is possible, it having no common measure with being human. Such an encounter is not an encounter with a deficient mode of an Other Subject, but an encounter with an Other at its purest, with the abyss of Otherness not covered up or facilitated by imaginary identifications which make the Other someone like us, someone we can emphatically understand. There are many literary and cinema works which deal with this—suffice it here to mention three.

In Frank Schatzing’s science fiction novel The Swarm (2004), scientists and journalists from across the world investigate what at first appear to be freak events related to the oceans: swimmers are driven from the coast by sharks and venomous jellyfish; commercial ships are attacked and sometimes destroyed in a variety of ways; France suffers an outbreak of an epidemic caused by contaminated lobsters, etc. When it becomes clear that all these events are related, an international task force is set up to deal with the problem. But the attacks continue: the east coast of North America is overrun by Pfiesteria-infested crabs, and the resulting epidemic causes millions of deaths and renders the affected cities uninhabitable; the Gulf Stream fails, threatening a global climate change that would destroy human civilization, and so on. During a task force meeting, a scientist offers his hypothesis: the phenomena are deliberate attacks by a hitherto unknown intelligent species from the depths of the sea; their goal is to eliminate the human race, which is devastating the Earth’s oceans. The attackers—baptized the yrr—are single-cell organisms that operate in swarms, controlled by a single hive-mind that may have existed for hundreds of millions of years. Although the scientists succeed in making limited contact, the attacks do not cease, until a science journalist dives deep into the ocean and releases a corpse pumped full of the yrr’s natural pheromone, hoping to trigger an emotional response. It works and the yrr end their attacks on humanity. The novel’s epilogue reveals that a year later mankind is still recovering from its conflict with the swarm. The knowledge that humans are not the only intelligent life form on Earth has plunged most religious groups into chaos, while parts of the world still suffer from the epidemic sent by the yrr to destroy the threat to their marine homeland. Humanity now faces the difficult task of rebuilding its society and industry without coming into conflict with the ever-watchful superpower under the sea. While the novel deals with an ecological topic (the destruction and poisoning of maritime ecosystems), its actual focus is on our inability to understand aliens, on the impact the discovery of another intelligent species on Earth might have on us.

In the film Ender’s Game (2013) an alien species called the Formics attacks Earth in the year 2086. The invasion is defeated, but the Formics continue to build up forces on their home planet. The story is about Andrew Ender Wiggin, a child genius trained in Battle School for the forthcoming war with the Formics. In the course of his military education, Ender trains with a computerized mind game in which characters that look like Formics materialize and dissolve before him. As the best student, Ender is nominated commander of the fleet and on Graduation Day leads the fleet in a battle simulation near the Formics’ home planet. After eradicating the enemy forces he learns that the simulation was in fact a real battle and that he has destroyed the Formics in reality. Remembering his experience in the mind game, Ender realizes that the Formics had tried to communicate with him. He rushes to a mountain similar to the one he saw in the game and finds a Queen with a single Queen egg remaining. After promising the Queen that he will find a planet for the egg, he takes off in a spaceship, determined to colonize a new Formic World—a minimal ethical pact or bond is thus established between Ender and the Formic Queen.

A key feature shared by both these works is their imagining the Other as a maternal Other, as a swarm of pre-individual units subordinated to a single maternal collective Mind. In short, in both cases, the encounter is sexualized; it is the encounter of a male subject stumbling upon a feminine Other which is, as a rule, the pre-symbolic maternal Other of the psychotic closure, the absolute Other from whom no distance is tolerated, allowing no space for the subject’s desire—an Other who just uses us as an instrument of its jouissance. A materialist approach should avoid not only this maternal temptation of imagining the Other as a pre-Oedipal Absolute without lack, but also the opposite temptation of reducing the Other to a mirror of our own disavowed interior (all we find in the Other is our own repressed content that we have projected into it)—the temptation to which Tarkovsky succumbed in his cinema version of Solaris. The difference between Stanislaw Lem’s classic science fiction novel and Tarkovsky’s cinema version is crucial here. Solaris is the story of a space agency psychologist, Kelvin, sent to a half-abandoned spaceship orbiting a newly discovered planet, Solaris, where strange things have been taking place (scientists going mad, hallucinating and killing themselves). Solaris is a planet with an oceanic fluid surface that moves incessantly and, from time to time, imitates recognizable forms—not only elaborate geometric structures, but also gigantic child bodies or human buildings. All attempts to communicate with the planet have failed, but scientists entertain the hypothesis that Solaris is a gigantic brain which can somehow read human minds. Soon after his arrival, Kelvin finds his dead wife Hari at his side in bed. Years ago on Earth, Hari had killed herself after Kelvin had abandoned her. Now he is unable to shake her off, all attempts to get rid of her miserably fail as she rematerializes the next day. Analysis of her tissue reveals that she is not composed of atoms like normal human beings—past a certain micro-level, there is nothing, just a void. Finally, Kelvin grasps that Hari is a materialization of his own innermost traumatic fantasies.

Solaris, then, is a gigantic Brain that materializes in reality the innermost fantasies that support our desire, a machine that generates the ultimate fantasmatic objectal supplement or partner that we would never be ready to accept in reality, even though our entire psychic life turns around it. Read in this way, the story is really about the hero’s inner journey, about his attempt to come to terms with his own repressed truth. Or, as Tarkovsky himself put it in an interview: Maybe, effectively, the mission of Kelvin on Solaris has only one goal: to show that love of the other is indispensable to all life. A man without love is no longer a man. The aim of the entire ‘solaristic’ is to show humanity must be love.¹⁴ In clear contrast to this, Lem’s novel focuses on the inert external presence of the planet Solaris, of this Thing which thinks (to use Kant’s expression, which fits perfectly here): the point of the novel is precisely that Solaris remains an impenetrable Other with which no communication is possible—true, it returns us to our innermost disavowed fantasies, but the Che vuoi? behind this remains thoroughly impenetrable (Why does It do it? As a purely mechanical response? To play demonic games with us? To help us—or compel us—to confront our disavowed truth?).¹⁵

AGAINST THE DEFLATED HEGEL

At the beginning of his Encyclopaedia Logic (the Small Logic), Hegel deploys the three elementary "attitudes [positions, Stellungen] of thought towards objectivity."¹⁶ The first attitude is that of metaphysics, i.e., of naive realism, which directly presupposes the overlapping of the determinations of thought and determinations of being: metaphysics has no doubts and no sense of the contradiction in thought, or of the hostility of thought against itself. It entertains an unquestioning belief that reflection is the means of ascertaining the truth, and of bringing the objects before the mind as they really are.¹⁷ This first attitude of simply describing the universe in its rational structure is then undermined by the second attitude whose first form is empiricist skepticism, which doubts that we can ever form a consistent structure of what reality is out of the only thing we have access to, our dispersed and inconsistent experience, with its multiplicity of data. Empiricist skepticism is then countered by the second form of this attitude: Kant’s transcendental position. What transcendentalism shares with empiricist skepticism is that both accept the inaccessibility/unknowability of the Thing-in-itself. However, in contrast to empiricism, transcendentalism as it were turns the obstacle itself into its own solution: it elevates the very forms of our mind, of subjectivity, which (de)form our access to the in-itself and thus deny us direct access to it, into an a priori, a positive fact constitutive of our phenomenal reality.

The question here is whether the transcendental horizon is the ultimate horizon of our thinking. If we reject (as we should) any naturalist or other return to naive realism, then there are only two ways to get over (or behind/ beneath) the transcendental dimension. The first form of this third attitude of thought towards objectivity is an immediate or intuitive knowing which posits a direct access to the Absolute beyond (or beneath) all discursive knowledge—Fichte’s I = I, Schelling’s Identity of Subject and Object, but also direct mystical intuition of God. The second form, of course, is Hegel’s dialectics, which does exactly the opposite with regard to intuitive knowing: instead of asserting a direct intuitive access to the Absolute, it transposes into the Thing (the Absolute) itself the gap that separates our subjectivity from it.

As Hegel points out, this last position itself has two forms, dialectical and speculative, and everything hinges here on the opposition between dialectical and speculative thinking—one might say that dialectics remains negative, while only speculation reaches the highest positive dimension. Dialectics which is not yet speculative is the vibrant domain of the tremor of reflection and reflexive reversals, the mad dance of negativity in which all that is solid melts into air—this is dialectics as eternal warfare, as a movement which ultimately destroys everything it gives birth to. In Marxist terms, we are dealing here with materialist dialectics and not dialectical materialism; in Hegelian terms, with determinate reflection and not reflexive determination; in Lacanian terms, with there is no relationship and not "there is a non-relationship."

So, in terms of the attitudes of thought towards objectivity, taken together we have not three but six such attitudes: 1) naive realist metaphysics, 2) empiricist skepticism, 3) transcendental criticism, 4) direct intuitive knowing of the Absolute, 5) dialectical thinking, and 6) speculative thinking proper. These six positions, three of which are positive (1, 4, 6) and three negative (2, 3, 5), can be reduced in turn to three basic positions: objective-metaphysical, subjective-transcendental, dialectical-speculative. Does not this matrix continue to determine our choices even today? Scientific naturalism (from quantum cosmology to evolutionary theory and the brain sciences), relativist historicism, versions of transcendentalism from Heidegger to Foucault, New Age intuitive knowing, negative dialectics from Trotskyist permanent revolution through Western Marxism (Adorno) up to today’s forms of resistance … What would be the properly speculative position? Not Stalinism, since it clearly stands for the return to a naive realist metaphysics.

Can the main figure of Hegel that has emerged in recent decades—the deflated liberal Hegel of mutual recognition—do the job? It is crucial to see the political as well as the ontological limits of this deflated liberal Hegel—a figure who ultimately amounts to a weird Darwinian Hegel. The underlying ontological premise of Robert Pippin’s reading of Hegel (rarely explicitly stated but nonetheless clearly indicated here and there) is that, in the evolution of animal life and of human animals on Earth, the human species somehow (this indeterminacy is crucial!) began to function in the modes of normativity and mutual recognition. On Pippin’s interpretation, spirit thus refers neither to an extra-natural immaterial substance (along the lines of the Cartesian res cogitans opposed to the res extensa) nor to a Divine Mind or Cosmic Spirit which commandeers human agents as vehicles for the accomplishment of its own purposes. Here are some key passages from Pippin’s Hegel’s Practical Philosophy about the capacity of some natural beings to be aware of themselves in a non-observational, but more self-determining way:¹⁸

The suggestion Hegel seems to be making is simply that at a certain level of complexity and organization, natural organisms come to be occupied with themselves and eventually to understand themselves in ways no longer appropriately explicable within the boundaries of nature or in any way the result of empirical observation.

Even though this finally achieved independence from nature is achieved only in objective spirit … it is never to be understood as something non-natural and it is still the case that a link with and partial determination by nature is always stressed by Hegel.

It is the achievement of the sublating relation to nature that constitutes spirit; natural beings which by virtue of their natural capacities can achieve it are spiritual; having achieved it and maintaining it is being spiritual; those which cannot are not.¹⁹

The last quote indicates the thin line along which Pippin is treading here: although he writes that humans are natural beings which by virtue of their natural capacities can achieve spiritual self-relating, he by no means endorses the Aristotelian view according to which the human being is a substantial entity among whose positive features are potentials or powers of spiritual self-relating. For Pippin (following Hegel), spirit is not a substantial entity but a purely processual one, it is the result of its own becoming, it makes itself what it is—the only substantial reality there is is nature. The distinction between nature and spirit therefore stems not from the fact that spirit is a thing of a different kind from natural things, but rather has more to do with the different sets of criteria that are required for explaining them: spirit is a kind of norm, an achieved form of individual and collective mindedness, and institutionally embodied recognitive relations.²⁰ That is to say, free acts are distinguished by the reason to which a subject might appeal in justifying them, and justification is a fundamentally social practice, the practice of giving of and asking for reasons by participants in a set of shared institutions. Even at the individual level, expressing an intention amounts to "avowing a pledge to act, the content and credibility of which remains (even for me), in a way, suspended until I begin to fulfill the pledge."²¹ It is not until my intention is recognized by others and myself as being fulfilled or realized in my deed that I can identify my act as my own.²² Justification thus turns out to be more retrospective than prospective, a process in which the agent’s own stance on her action is by no means authoritative. Being an agent, being able to provide reasons to others to justify one’s deeds, is thus itself an achieved social status such as, let us say, being a citizen or being a professor, a product or result of mutually recognitive attitudes.²³

Is such a reading of Hegel appropriate to our historical moment? In his Back to Hegel?, a critical review of my Less Than Nothing,²⁴ Pippin proceeds in four systematic steps, although his criticisms are interlinked across the different levels, from basic ontological questions about the fabric of being to the viability of the Welfare State today. His argument can be condensed as a paraphrase of de Quincey’s famous passage on the simple art of murder: If once a man indulges himself in looking for gaps in the fabric of being, very soon he comes to think little of the notion of an abyssal act; and from this he comes next to abandon reliance on reason in our deliberations, and from that to reject that great dream of social democrats everywhere, Sweden in the Sixties. Pippin begins at the most basic level of ontology, problematizing my thesis on the ontological incompleteness of reality:

I do not fully understand the claims about holes in the fabric of being, and at any rate, we do not need the claim if we go in the direction I am suggesting. For if that formulation of apperception is correct, it means we are able to account for the inappropriateness of psychological or naturalist accounts of such states, all without a gappy ontology (in the sense, if not in the same way, that Frege and the early Husserl criticized psychologism without an alternate ontology).

Pippin correctly reads my incompleteness thesis against the background of the status of subjectivity; he is well aware that I develop the topic of ontological incompleteness in order to answer the question How should reality be structured so that (something like) subjectivity can emerge in it? Pippin’s solution is different: for him, Kantian transcendental apperception—the unity of awareness with self-awareness—suffices. Self-awareness means a minimal self-relating on account of which we, as humans, have to justify our acts with reasons. Pippin, of course, supplements Kant with the Hegelian account of the (transcendental, not empirical) genesis of self-awareness out of complex social relations focused on mutual recognition, or, to quote his acerbic critical remark: ‘Spirit’ emerges in this imagined social contestation, in what we come to demand of each other, not in the interstices of being. There is no need for holes in the fabric of the universe for this. From my standpoint, the problematic nature of this account is signaled by the fact that Pippin ends up with a standard transcendental dualism:

Of course, it is possible and important that some day researchers will discover why animals with human brains can do these things and animals without human brains cannot, and some combination of astrophysics and evolutionary theory will be able to explain why humans have ended up with the brains they have. But these are not philosophical problems and they do not generate any philosophical problems.

True, but such full scientific (self-)naturalization would have consequences for philosophy: if we could fully account for our moral acts in terms of natural causes, in what sense would we still experience ourselves as free? Kant’s notion of freedom implies a discontinuity in the texture of natural causes, that is, a free act is an act which is ultimately grounded in itself and, as such, cannot be accounted for as an effect of the preceding causal network—in this sense, a free act does imply a kind of hole in the texture of phenomenal reality, the intervention of another dimension in the order of phenomenal reality. Of course, Kant does not claim that free acts are miracles which momentarily suspend natural causality—they just happen without violating any natural laws. However, the fact of freedom indicates that natural causality does not cover all there is but only the phenomenal reality, and that the transcendental subject, the agent of freedom, cannot be reduced to a phenomenal entity. Phenomenal reality is thus incomplete, non-All, a fact confirmed by the antinomies of pure reason which arise the moment our reason tries to comprehend phenomenal reality in its totality. One should always bear in mind that this ontological scandal is for Kant the necessary result of his transcendental turn.

This brings us to Pippin’s second reproach: in his view, the thesis on the ontological incompleteness of reality opens up the space for abyssal acts of freedom, acts not grounded in any rational deliberation, since they are located in the interstices of being. That is to say, insofar as Spirit as a historical form of collective Reason, as a space within which rational deliberations take place, can be considered broadly synonymous with the Lacanian big Other, and insofar as, following (the late) Lacan, I insist that there is no big Other, our acts lose their rational and normative foundation:

The condition of modern atheism means for Žižek, in Lacanian terms, that there is and can be no longer any big Other, any guarantor of at least the possibility of any resolution of normative skepticism and conflicts. But no transcendent guarantor is not the same thing as no possible reliance on reason in our own deliberations and in our claims on others.

Considered outside the big Other as shared symbolic substance, acts can only be irrational interventions with no collectively binding normative foundation; that is, they can be grounded only in direct brutal power, in the agent’s resolve and will: And if the act is ‘abyssal,’ then ‘politics’ simply means ‘power,’ power backed by nothing but resolve and will, likely met with nothing but resolve and will. I consider this a total misreading of my position: the fact that there is no big Other in no way implies that humans can operate outside the thick texture of symbolic coordinates. Lacan is more than aware of the weight of this texture—just recall his endless variations on decentered subjectivity, on the retroactive effect of meaning, on how a human being does not speak but is spoken, and so on. Lacan’s point is just that the big Other is inconsistent, self-contradictory, thwarted, traversed by antagonisms, without any guarantee (there is no Other of Other), with no ultimate norm or rule totalizing it—in short, the big Other is not some kind of substantial Master who secretly pulls the strings but a stumbling malfunctioning machinery. In his reading of Hegel’s ethical thought Pippin himself insists on the retroactivity of meaning: the meaning of our acts is not an expression of our inner intention, it emerges later, from their social impact, which means that there is a moment of contingency in every emergence of meaning. But there is another more subtle retroactivity involved here: an act is abyssal not in the sense that it is not grounded in reasons, but in the circular sense that it retroactively posits its reasons. A truly autonomous symbolic act or intervention never occurs as the result of strategic calculation, as I go through all possible reasons and then choose the most appropriate course of action. An act is autonomous not when it applies a preexisting norm but when it creates a norm in the very act of applying it. Take the act of falling in love: I don’t fall in love when I meet a woman who meets my preestablished criteria; if it’s true love, then I don’t love the woman for her smile, eyes, legs, etc.—I love her smile, eyes, etc. because they are hers. So it is not that I act and make choices without reasons, rather that I freely choose which set of reasons will determine me.

And this brings us to the true focal point of the debate. Pippin’s line of reasoning is that since, for me, bourgeois society is unreformable, a radical change is needed; however, since there is no big Other, this change cannot be a direct enactment of some historical necessity or teleology in the classical Marxist sense, but must be an abyssal voluntaristic act. Pippin here addresses what he sees as the largest question of all, the one he found the most dissatisfyingly addressed in my book:

[Žižek] wants to say that bourgeois society is fundamentally self-contradictory, and I take that to mean unreformable. We need a wholly new ethical order and that means the Act. That society’s pretense to being a rational form is undermined by the existence of a merely contingent particular, a figurehead at the top, the monarch. (A better question, it seems to me, is why Hegel bothers, given how purely symbolic and even pointless such a dotter of i’s and crosser of t’s turns out to be.)

Pippin immediately makes it clear in what sense bourgeois society is reformable—his reference is, as expected, that great dream of social democrats everywhere—‘Sweden in the Sixties!’ This, he continues,

does not seem to me something that inevitably produces its own irrational and irreconcilable Unreason, or Other. More lawyers for the poor in Texas, affordable daycare, universal health care, several fewer aircraft carriers, more worker control over their own working conditions, regulated perhaps nationalized banks, all are reasonable extensions of that bourgeois ideal itself, however sick and often even deranged modern bourgeois society has become.

As to unreformability, I am simply claiming that the demands in Pippin’s list may appear as a series of reasonable extensions of the bourgeois ideal, but this appearance is abstract in a strictly Hegelian way, and ignores the general tendency of today’s global capitalism.²⁵ At a more basic level, the claim that bourgeois society is fundamentally self-contradictory is a consequence of Hegel’s universal thesis—it is a claim which holds for every society:

The history of a single world-historical nation contains (a) the development of its principle from its latent embryonic stage until it blossoms into the self-conscious freedom of ethical life and presses in upon world history; and (b) the period of its decline and fall, since it is its decline and fall that signalizes the emergence in it of a higher principle as the pure negative of its own.²⁶

In this simple and elementary sense, every particular form of state and society is by definition self-contradictory and, as such, condemned to disappear—as Pippin himself points out, the rational state articulated in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right had itself already entered into a state of decay, the proof being that Hegel was able to articulate its notional structure.²⁷ This is why the most un-Hegelian thing imaginable here would be to present Hegel’s idea of the rational state as a vision which is no longer self-contradictory but which, à la Fukuyama, is in its essence the finally found optimal formula that we, Hegel’s successors, simply have to gradually improve and reform, rather than attempt to change in its essence. Whatever Hegel stands for politically, however, it is not the gradual improvement of bourgeois society. Hegel’s vision of social development is, on the contrary, full of unexpected reversals—the promise of freedom turns into the worst nightmare, and so on. This is why Hegel would have immediately comprehended the logic of the reversal of the emancipatory promise of the October Revolution into the Stalinist nightmare, or, today, of the rise of religious fundamentalism in the midst of consumerist permissiveness. As for reformism, the Hegelian stance would have been: yes, but with a twist—one begins with a modest reform which aims only to make the existing system more just and efficient, and one triggers an avalanche which sweeps away the very order of deliberation which led us to propose the modest reform in the first place.

With regard to Pippin’s vision of the gradual progress of bourgeois society, let us also not forget that Hegel concludes his Philosophy of Right not with an idealized vision of a modern peaceful corporate state, but with the necessity of war as the moment in which a state is most supremely its own—war is a supreme dialectical example of how a negative relation to oneself appears as a contingent external obstacle or threat. The truth of the external enemy which, for accidental reasons, poses a threat to a state is the state’s self-related negativity, the assertion of the state in its pure essence, in contrast to all its particular moments (individual destinies, property relations, etc.):

This negative relation of the state to itself is embodied in the world as the relation of one state to another and as if the negative were something external. In the world of existence, therefore, this negative relation has the shape of a happening and an entanglement with chance events coming from without. But in fact this negative relation is that moment in the state which is most supremely its own, the state’s actual infinity as the ideality of everything finite within it. It is the moment wherein the substance of the state—i.e. its absolute power against everything individual and particular, against life, property, and their rights, even against societies and associations—makes the nullity of these finite things an accomplished fact and brings it home to consciousness.²⁸

Pippin dismisses my idea of ‘pure’ drives (or ‘pure’ anything) as something that belongs in the Hegelian zoo, i.e., something that is definitely superseded, rendered philosophically obsolete, by Hegel’s philosophical achievement. But is not war, the way Hegel conceptualizes it, precisely the (re)assertion of the pure essence of the state in contrast to its particular content? In this sense, is not the push-towards-war an exemplary case of the pure death drive (pure negativity)? One can, of course, argue that war is today more threatening due to the catastrophic potential of new technologies, but this in no way renders Hegel’s point outdated; it just compels