Compromised Resistance
Compromised Resistance
Compromise is often the manifestation of opportunism. One resorts to compromise instead of taking a principled stand and ighting for one’s position because one doesn’t really have a position to ight for. While most compromise undoubtedly suffers from the taint of opportunism, every practical political activist knows that compromise is nonetheless necessary. In addition to being critical of the institutions of power, one must see the institutions themselves as the expression of freedom. Compromise with institutions of power doesn’t simply represent an abandonment of conviction; it also represents a fulillment
Volume 1, Issue 1: What Does Intellectual Freedom Mean Today? A Provocation
of it: an uncompromised idea is an unrealized idea. 35 Though practical activists necessarily school themselves in the importance of compromise, theorists do not. For the theorist, pure uncompromising negativity is always a more comfortable position. This position guards one against complicity with murderers—not just Heidegger’s with Hitler, but Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s with Stalin, Alain Badiou’s with Pol Pot, and so on. It seems that every time a theorist abandons pure resistance for a compromise with a positive political position, this is a decision that the theorist will come to rue and likely apologize for.
No one will celebrate Merleau-Ponty’s defense of Stalin or Badiou’s defense of Pol Pot, but we should nonetheless acknowledge the importance of such gestures. Though they both subsequently recognized their errors, the step out of pure negation to a positive embrace of a political position represents the task of theory. Pure resistance has the virtue of never being wrong, but this also prevents it from ever being right—that is, from ever actualizing itself as a positive entity in the world. This is why theory must move beyond resistance and identify the positive attainment of freedom.
Thought appears to run ahead of action, and the practical world seems to require time to catch up with the theoretical one. We can imagine utopias that we lack the capacity for realizing, and thought gives tasks for our practical activity to achieve. This vision of the relationship of thought and action holds for most modern philosophers, inclusive of materialists like Marx, who theorizes revolutionary conditions for the proletariat to act on. But Hegel reverses the priority of thought and action entirely. According to Hegel, it is not the task of our actions to catch up to our thoughts but for our thoughts to catch up to our actions. Thought can do so because our actions are always thinking actions, even if unconsciously so.
In the light of this reversal, the theoretical privileging of resistance consigns theory to always remaining behind the practical activity that it hopes to theorize, while at the same time assuming that it runs ahead. Pure negativity constructs an image of freedom that eliminates the possibility for the recognition of freedom as actual. On the other hand, when one compromises
one’s theoretical position with actuality and when one identiies positive formations of freedom, one is not tainting thought with the scourge of the real world. Instead, through this path one elevates thought to the dignity of actuality.
Hegel pushes negativity to its ultimate point so that it loses its purity and manifests itself in actuality. Without this actualization, negativity cannot serve as the site for freedom. If one wants freedom, one must discover what happens when there are no external authorities left to ight, when the external authorities
The End of Resistance: Hegel’s Insubstatial Freedom
appear as the mark of our freedom rather than as an obstacle to it. The freedom to denounce fails to see that it remains caught up in what it denounces, whereas the freedom that identiies its own limit in the external authority reaches the point of self-determination.
1 G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 153.
2 G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. George Di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 674.
3 In the case of Spinoza, it is not a question of aligning his desire with the substantial Other because, for him, there is nothing but this one substance.
Spinoza himself becomes swallowed up in the substance of God, which is why his philosophy can leave no place for the subject and must conceive of freedom merely as the reconciliation with necessity.
4 Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Volume I, 353.
5 The classic cinematic instance of the parent’s humiliation in front of the child occurs in Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948). After helping his father
Antonio (Lamberto Maggiorani) search for his stolen bicycle, Bruno (Enzo Staiola) watches him attempt to steal someone else’s and then endure the public humiliation of being caught. This moment represents freedom for Bruno as a subject, but not simply because he no longer has any attachment to his father as an authority. Despite his tears, Bruno’s look up at his father shows that his father remains an authority even at the moment of his desubantialization. In one of the concluding shots of the ilm, De Sica focuses on Bruno grasping his father’s hand, indicating his identiication with his father at this moment. This is the positive manifestation of freedom, as Hegel conceives it. Just as the speed limit sign continues to exist in the external world when the subject recognizes this sign as its own limit, so does the father. What changes is that Bruno now sees his own role in the father’s authority. (I am indebted to Richard Boothby at Loyola University Maryland for this point and for his general comments on the essay.)
6 G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Volume III: The
Volume 1, Issue 1: What Does Intellectual Freedom Mean Today? A Provocation
Consummate Religion, trans. R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart, ed. Peter C. Hodgson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 125.
7 In Hegel’s Philosophy of Freedom, Paul Franco points out that Hegel was the irst thinker to grant the state a positive role in the formation of the subject’s
freedom. The state does not just provide a milieu in which the subject can act freely without constantly fearing for its life. Much more than this, it forces the subject to undergo an explicit and necessary alienation for its interests, which enables the subject to disentangle its freedom from the advancement of its interest. According to Franco, “It is only with Hegel that the state and the social institutions comprising it are no longer viewed as merely establishing negative or external conditions for the quest for human autonomy but as directly promoting and cultivating such autonomy.” Paul Franco, Hegel’s Philosophy of Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 343.
8 One of the primary culprits of this interpretation of the Philosophy of Right was Rudolf Haym, an avowed enemy of Hegel. See Rudolf Haym, Hegel und seine
Zeit (Berlin: Rudolf Gärtner, 1857).
9 Shlomo Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 124.
10 Hegel read Adam Smith and derived his conception of civil society in part from Smith’s description of the laws that govern economic interaction. But
unlike Smith, he saw that unbridled capitalist interactions necessarily would produce a realm of intractable poverty that no economic strategy could remedy. Hegel would call this realm of intractable poverty the “rabble.” For more on Hegel’s theorization of the rabble, see Frank Ruda, Hegel’s Rabble (London: Bloomsbury, 2011).
11 G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet, ed. Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 276.
12 If we think about the two totalitarian horrors of the twentieth century— Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany—it seems as if Hegel misses the real danger.
The problem is not imagining the state in terms of civil society but the excessive power of the state to curtail individual freedom. But ironically, both of these totalitarian enterprises avoided complete identiication with the state. In each case, a party apparatus adjacent to state structure pulled the strings, and this party apparatus arose out of an implicit recognition that the state alone is the
The End of Resistance: Hegel’s Insubstatial Freedom
realization of freedom.
13 Martin Heidegger, “Why Do I Stay in the Provinces?,” trans. Thomas Sheehan, in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan (Piscataway, NJ:
Transaction Publishers, 2009), 27-30.
14 In the contemporary world, Slavoj Žižek has become a philosophical celebrity. Žižek’s full embrace of his celebrity—he makes ilms, accepts interviews
everywhere, engages in public debates, and so on—marks his status as a Hegelian philosopher. Like Hegel, Žižek does not associate the freedom of thought remaining in the margins.
15 Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 40.
16 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume Three, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Penguin, 1981), 959.
17 One might speculate that without Hegel’s friend-become-enemy Schelling as his teacher, Kierkegaard would have built upon the philosophical ediice
that Hegel created rather than struggling against its caricature. Schelling’s tendentious and ultimately preposterous version of Hegel’s thought rendered this impossible.
18 Søren Kierkegaard, Judge For Yourself!, in For Self-Examination / Judge For Yourself!, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1990), 208.
19 See Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientiic Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, vol. 1, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1992).
20 Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation of the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin, trans. Reidar
Thomte (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 155.
21 Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 36.
22 Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, ed. Raymond Queneau (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 167. Kojève’s image of the subject as a negating being
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inds echoes throughout twentieth century French thought, especially that of Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Lacan.
23 Kojève repeatedly changed his mind about when and where history ended:
he went from seeing Napoleon as the embodiment of this end (a position he attributed to Hegel), to Stalin, to American consumer society, to Japanese society.
24 The idea of the end of history is more Kojève’s than Hegel’s. According to Philip Grier, Kojève bases his idea of the end of history on his acquaintance
with Hegel’s writing from 1802 on the priority of the future over the past, an acquaintance that he gained thanks to his friend and fellow Russian émigré Alexandre Koyré. Grier postulates that Kojève’s procedure for developing his thesis involved “taking an obscure set of passages on time from a very early version of Hegel’s Naturphilosophie which Hegel certainly rejected prior to writing the Phenomenology, and treating them as the basis for an interpretation not only of that work but of the whole of Hegel’s philosophical position.” Philip T. Grier, “The End of History and the Return of History,” in The Hegel Myths and Legends, ed. Jon Stewart (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 188-189. But even if Kojève incorrectly imputes the idea of the end of history to Hegel, he is not wrong to recognize a moment when the negative manifests itself as a positivity, which Hegel calls the absolute.
25 Julia Kristeva gives Hegel credit for introducing negativity into philosophy. She states, “the notion of negativity, which may be thought of as both the cause
and the organizing principle of the process, comes from Hegel.” Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 109. Despite this contribution, Hegel—even the young Hegel—fails to give this negativity its full due. As Kristeva says, “already in the Phenomenology of Spirit negativity is presented under the rule of the One and the Understanding, even in those moments when it appears most material and independent.” Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 114.
26 Theodor W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993), 30-31.
27 Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, 87-88.
28 Whereas Hegel proclaims the whole (which subsumes all negativity) as truth, Adorno famously reverses that judgment, stating in Minima Moralia, “The whole
The End of Resistance: Hegel’s Insubstatial Freedom
is the false.” Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Relections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), 50.
29 Jean-Luc Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, trans. Jason Smith and Steven Miller (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 68.
30 Judith Butler ends her otherwise faithful analysis on Hegel’s impact on twentieth century French thought by signaling the problem with his
identiication with the universal. She writes, “Both the ‘subject’ and its ‘desire’ have come to suffer the process of historicization, and the presumed universality of the Hegelian discourse becomes increasingly suspect.” Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Relections in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 231. With this conclusion, Butler points toward her own development of a politics of resistance, a politics that represents a clear step away from the allegiance to Hegel that she expresses in this irst book.
31 The exception among recent theorists is Gilles Deleuze, who takes Hegel to task not for his abandonment of negativity but for his embrace of it in the
irst place. Deleuze argues that the turn to the negative itself is part of the (positive) structure that it supposedly contests—and thus must be eschewed. In rejecting the negative, he advocates, instead, an embrace of the initial positivity of desire (an embrace he sees Spinoza accomplishing). Though this position seems dramatically removed from that of someone like Adorno (who believes that Hegel doesn’t take negativity far enough), it actually bears an incredible resemblance. According to Deleuze, negativity is part of structure, part of power (and thereby antithetical to desire), and so one must refuse negativity if one is to refuse structure and, at the same time, remain true to one’s desire. In this way, Deleuze sees sustaining an initial positivity of desire as the only way of actually accomplishing what Hegelian negativity pretends to accomplish. This is why Deleuze’s initial positivity resembles Hegelian negativity to such an extent. Despite his critique along these lines, Deleuze’s position on Hegel remains well within the theoretical landscape of recent critical thought.
32 Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage, 1991), 136-137.
33 G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 1825-1826, Volume III: Medieval and Modern Philosophy, trans. Robert F. Brown and J. M. Stewart, ed.
Robert F. Brown (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 190-191.
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34 G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on Natural Right and Political Science: The First Philosophy of Right, Heidelberg 1817-1818 with Additions from the Lectures of
1818-1819, trans. J. Michael Stewart and Peter C. Hodgson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 127.
35 Lenin, as both a thinker and an activist, always insisted upon his hatred of opportunism. His break with Karl Kautsky and with the Second International
occurred over their willingness to acquiesce to bourgeois rule and to content themselves with gradual change. No one would confuse Lenin with someone quick to—or even amenable to—compromise. Throughout his life, he consistently identiied and attacked the proclivity to compromise, demanding that communists hold fast to their radical position despite its unpopularity. And yet, in 1920 Lenin turned his attack away from opportunism and toward what he called “‘Left-Wing’ Communism,” the communism that latly rejects all compromise. In “Left-Wing” Communism, An Infantile Disorder, Lenin claims that “to reject compromises ‘on principle,’ to reject the admissibility of compromises in general, no matter of what kind, is childishness which it is even dificult to take seriously.” V. I. Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism, An Infantile Disorder: A Popular Essay in Marxist Strategy and Tactics (New York: International Publishers, 1940), 22. Refusing all compromises, according to Lenin, results in a position so far left, so pure, that it can never achieve the slightest actualization.