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A Commentary Upon Derrida's Reading of Hegel in Glas 1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2015

Simon Critchley
Simon Critchley*
Affiliation:
University of Essex
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Abstract

“Qu'est-ce qui cloche dans le système, qu'est-ce qui boite? La question est aussi boiteuse et ne fait pas question. Ce qui déborde le système, c'est l'impossibilité de son échec, comme l'impossibilité de la réussite: finalement on n'en peut rien dire, et il y a une manière de se taire (le silence lacunaire de l'écriture) qui arrête le système, le laissant désoeuvré, Iivré au sérieux de l'ironie.”

Glas is a tour de force of Hegel scholarship. Although primarily concerned with the Philosophy of Right and the Phenomenology of Spirit, Derrida also offers detailed discussions of The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate, the First Philosophy of Spirit of 1803-4, the 1803 essay Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, the Lectures on Aesthetics and the introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. In addition - and this list is not exhaustive - there are discussions of and references to the Logic, the Encyclopaedia, the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, the Differenzschrift, Faith and Knowledge, and abundant quotations from Hegel's correspondence.

Type
Articles
Information
Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain , Volume 9 , Issue 2: number 18 , Spring/Summer 1988 , pp. 6 - 32
Copyright
Copyright © The Hegel Society of Great Britain 1988

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Footnotes

1

Each page of Glas is divided into two columns. The left hand column discusses Hegel, whilst the right hand column deals with the writings of Jean Genet. The following essay focuses in detail on Derrida's reading of Hegel and is taken from a more extensive commentary on Glas which places the latter work in the development of Derrida's thinking, discusses the secondary literature on Glas, explains its methodology of reading, assesses the significance of the Genet column and its relation to the reading of Hegel, and finally addresses the question of a context for Glas by comparing Derrida's reading of Genet with that given by Sartre in Saint Genet. It is hoped that this commentary will eventually be published in its entirety. All references for Glas are to the translation except where the original context is significant or where I have substantially altered the translation; in these cases, I also refer to the two volume French paperback edition (see abbreviations). Following the practice of Derrida's translators, “Page references to Glas are given in the following form: 000bi… First the page number of the translation is indicated, after which is placed an a to indicate the left column or a b to indicate the right column. If the reference is to the inserts or tattoos in the column, the a or b is followed by an i to indicate the insert” (GL 13) I would like to thank Jay Bernstein, Peter Dews and John Llewelyn for their comments on a draft of this essay.

References

2 Blanchot, Maurice, L'écriture du désastre (Paris: Gallimard, 1980) p. 79–80 Google Scholar.

3 Paris: Vrin, 1970.

4 In the portion of this commentary that deals with Genet (see footnote 1), I discuss at length the mechanistic model of reading that appears to be at work in Glas.

5 The conception of matter as that which remains outside of itself and outside the horizon of essence and the thinking of Being (Gtr22-3ai) is highly significant for Derrida, which raises the question as to whether a deconstructive reading could be understood as a materialist reading.

6 Derrida's relation to Jewish philosophy, theology and tradition is discussed, albeit with a rather limited and non-philosophical understanding of Derrida's work, by Handelman, Susan in ‘Reb Derrida's Scripture’, in The Slayers of Moses. The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982) pp. 163–178 Google Scholar. An expanded version of the same argument appears in Displacement. Derrida and After, edited by Krupnick, Mark (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983) pp. 98–129 Google Scholar. It is the latter article that is discussed by Habermas in a long footnote of the Philosopical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987) p. 406–7Google Scholar, and in which Habermas finds support for his interpretation of Derrida. Habermas' thesis is that,

“…even Derrida does not extricate himself from the constraints of the paradigm of the philosophy of the subject… Derrida passes beyond Heidegger's inverted foundationalism, but remains in its path. As a result, the temporalised Ursprungsphilosophie takes on clearer contours. The remembrance of the messianism of Jewish mysticism and of the abandoned but well-circumscribed place once assumed by the God of the Old Testament preserves Derrida, so to speak, from the political-moral insensitivity and the aesthetic tastelessness of a New Paganism spiced up with Hölderlin”. (p.166-7).

Habermas' claim is that the deconstruction of the (Christian) metaphysics of presence is ultimately the attempt to renew a specifically Judaic relation to God. Regardless of the truth of Habermas' argument, which might be truer than he imagines, and whose crude reductionism is sadly only fuelled by Handelman's analysis, my question is: why should the accusation of Judaism be an accusation? What is the possible force of Habermas' argument? If traces of religious or mystical thinking are ‘discovered’ by Habermas in Derrida's work, then why should this have the force of a refutation? Must philosophical thinking continually purify itself of any religious residues?

7 For an interesting feminist reading of these passages, see Lloyd's, Genevieve ‘Hegel: the feminine nether world’ in The Man of Reason (London, Methuen: 1984) pp.80–5Google Scholar.

8 I borrow this formulation from Gasché's, Rodolphe The Tain of the Mirror. Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986) p. 100 Google Scholar.

9 Cf. Freud, , ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in On Metapsychology. The Theory of Psychoanalysis (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984) pp. 251–68Google Scholar.

10 Phaedrus, 247a; Metaphysics, 983a.

11 Cf. Critique of Practical Reason. Translated by Beck, Lewis White (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956) pp. 126–30Google Scholar.

12 La voix et le phénomène (Paris: P.U.F. 1967), p. 114 Google Scholar.

13 I owe this formulation to conversations with Jay Bernstein.

14 Mention of Zoroaster is suggestive here and alerts the reader to the two references to Nietzsche's, Also Sprach Zarathustra (Leipzig: Alfred Kröner Verlag, 1930 Google Scholar. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961) that occur during the discussion of Genet (Gtr102bi & 262b). At the close of the Genet column, Derrida cites six lines from ‘Before Sunrise’ (‘Vor Sonnenaufgang’ p.180-1/tr. p. 184–5Google Scholar), where Zarathustra speaks to the sky, “You abyss of light! (Du Lichtabgrund)!” and of the god that came to him before the sun (“Vor der Sonne”). Zarathustra speaks of the friendship between himself and the god of light, in which they have both “the sun in common” (“die Sonne ist uns gemeinsam”) and “the vast and boundless Yes” (“das ungeheure unbegrenzte Ja-”). The paralclls between, on the one hand, Zarathustra and the God of Light and, on the other, Derrida and Genet are clear, even if their precise implications are not. Pulling a remark out of context, one might suggest that in Glas, “…you have here at your disposal, as if in contraband, everything necessary for an almost complete, literally literal (littéralement littérale) reading of Zarathustra. You can verify.” (Gtr102bi/G143bi).

15 Cf. Heidegger, , ‘Der Rückgang in den Grund der Metaphysik’ in Was is Metaphysik? (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1969), p. 19–20 Google Scholar. Translated by Kaufmann, Walter as ‘The Way Back into the Ground of Metaphysics’ in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (New York: Meridian, 1975), p. 275–6Google Scholar. Further page references given in text.

16 Cf. Gtr11-12ai, 20a, 22-3ai, 57a; and references to onto-theo-logy (33a), the history of Being (94a), and an earlier important reference to Zeit und Sein (167a), which occurs, significantly enough, during the discussion of Antigone.

17 But what holocaust is Derrida discussing here? Is it the Greco-Christian ecclesiastical notion of to holocauston, a burnt offering, or the Shoah, or indeed both at once? If Derrida is referring to the Shoah with the word holocaust, then - and here one need only allude to debates current within holocaust studies - would this not unwittingly constitute a Hellenization or Christianisation of the Shoah, an assimilation of a Judaic occurrence to the language of Greek metaphysics? The deliberateness of Derrida's translation of Opfer by holocauste leads one to conclude that he is discussing the Shoah in terms of the gift and the sacrifice. But is this an appropriate language in which to discuss the Shoah ? And, perversely, what of Heidegger's intervention in this context? What of Heidegger's much discussed silence or near silence on the holocaust? And what of Derrida's use of the notion of es gibt Sein to open up the non-metaphysical thought of the gift or holocaust in Hegel? To what extent can and does Heidegger think the holocaust? It would be necessary here to look at Derrida's discussion of Heidegger and politics in De l'esprit (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1987)Google Scholar.

18 On the issue of an ethics of sacrifice with reference to the recent l'affaire Heidegger, see Levinas's, Emmanuel ‘Mourir Pour’ in Heidegger. Questions Ouvertes (Paris: Editions Osiris, 1988), pp. 254–64Google Scholar.

19 Cf. Heidegger, , ‘Das Wesen der Sprache’ in Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959), p. 159–61Google Scholar. Translated by Hertz, Peter D. as ‘The Nature of Language’ in On the Way to Language (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 57–9Google Scholar.