Simon Lumsden Reason and the Restlessness of the Speculative: Jean-Luc Nancys Reading of Hegel1

ABSTRACT This paper examines Jean-Luc Nancys interpretation of Hegel, focusing in particular on The Restlessness of the Negative. It is argued that Nancys reading represents a signicant break with other post-structuralist readings of Hegel by taking his thought to be non-metaphysical.The paper focuses in particular on the role Nancy gives to the negative in Hegels thought. Ultimately Nancys reading is limited as an interpretation of Hegel, since he gives no sustained explanation of the self-correcting function of reason. KEYWORDS: Hegel, Nancy, Reason, Negativity, Poststructuralism

I.
Heideggers interpretation of Hegel exerted a powerful inuence on the way the key gures in post-1968 French philosophy interpreted Hegel. Deleuze, Lyotard, Levinas, and Derrida all, to varying degrees and in different ways, interpreted Hegels thought as the pinnacle of the philosophy of presence. That interpretation has ranged from conceiving his
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project in terms of an economy of totalisation (Derrida), to seeing his thought as effecting, through negation, opposition or contradiction the complete reduction of the empirical and singularity to mediated conceptual relations (Deleuze). What characterises all these interpretations of Hegel is that they consider his project to be an essentially consumptive enterprise: consumptive of otherness, the empirical, difference and so on. Throughout the career of Jean-Luc Nancy there has been a consistent engagement with the full spectrum of Hegels thought: religion, political philosophy, ethical thought, philosophy of mind and Spirit and his logic. The early concern with Hegel in The Speculative Remark2 and all the subsequent essays, chapters and comments on Hegel recently culminated in a short work: Hegel: the Restlessness of the Negative.3 In contrast to most of the other signicant gures in what has come to be known as post-structuralism, Jean-Luc Nancy has adopted a far more nuanced reading of Hegels thought. Rather than reading sublation [Aufhebung], dialectic, negativity and reason as weapons in the armoury of Spirits or the Concepts self-satisfaction, Nancy considers all these notions through the lens of the negative. From this perspective these central and inuential notions are in fact disruptive, restless and open. Rather than focusing on Hegels speculative project as Spirits reconciliation with itself, Spirit should, he argues, instead be seen as restless and genuinely postmetaphysical. There is no foundation to thought, no given; everything has always already begun and is in motion. Understood in this way, he says: Hegel is the opposite of a totalitarian thinker.4 Thought, Spirit, self and meaning are all constantly being revised in the ongoing labour and turmoil of their self-relation. Nancys style shares little in common with the stylistically restrained world of Hegel scholarship, nevertheless his overview of Hegel, by shunning both the crudely metaphysical view of Spirit and rejecting the dialectic as the tool of totalisation, is in harmony with much of the leading scholarship in Germany and the English speaking world.5 In both cases they place at the centre of Hegels post-Kantian credentials his rejection of the given. Nancy has written extensively on loss: of community, of a foundation for knowledge, of sense and so on. Despite the pervasiveness of this theme in his writing he is not seeking a new unity or reconciliation, but rather he sees in the very idea of loss something of the movement of thought itself. In
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Hegels thought he nds the rst thinker to embrace alienation as the mark of the liberation of human thought from the given. Hegels thought explicitly engages with and embraces the instability of thought. Rather than seeing that instability in the service of a presupposed plan, which is how the dialectic had often been represented, Nancy presents the power of the negative as thoughts self-transformation. Thought is constantly unsettled, it rethinks its ground and is aware that thought itself is groundless, because reason itself is the exigency of the unconditional.6 Reason in this case cannot appeal to anything beyond itself for justication, but this does not mean that reason has somehow then become the already expressed and satised absolute, rather it means that reason must explain its own self-determining capacity. In Hegels case there is a self-consciousness that this process is innite, that thoughts self-grasping is its own self-surpassing. This paper examines the self-surpassing character of Hegels thought. It situates Hegels expression of the movement of thought in relation to Nancys view of the negative and his idea of sense. It is argued that Nancy gives a persuasive and evocative account of how Spirit transforms itself. The movement of Spirit and thought is possible only because of two key features of Hegels thought: the rejection of the given and the way Hegel overcomes the concept-intuition dualism. Ultimately however, despite Nancys focus on the negativity of thought, he is incapable of explaining both reasons selfcorrecting capacity and why Hegel conceives freedom as self-determination.

II. Modernity at Home with the Negative

Nancy argues that Hegel is the inaugural thinker of the contemporary world since he liberates sense (a notion about which we shall have something to say shortly, but which provisionally can be understood as meaning) from the religious bond of a community.7 It might be argued that the Enlightenment achieved the conceptualisation of this liberation much earlier. For Nancy, however, the Enlightenment liberates sense and knowledge from the strictures of religious orthodoxy and parochialism only to re-inscribe it again in the nite totality of reason. While reason is presented as the saviour from prejudice, the dogmatism of its rational method presents reason as an end in itself. Whatever might be ones reservations about this as an interpretation of enlightenment reason, the innovation of Hegels thought, and why it represents a
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shift from the circumscribed domain of pre-Enlightenment communities, is that knowledge cannot be considered, from the Hegelian perspective, as meaningful totalities of reason or religion. Hegel separates sense and knowledge from a nite, yet total organisational system. Changes of knowledge within these systems are neither able to be conceived as grounded in a transcendent domain nor by the internal coherence of these knowledge systems. By collapsing the uniformity of reason and homogeneous traditional community as sources of meaning the criteria for grounding the experience of self and world are thrown open, accordingly the uniformity of community gives way to society. Civil society marks the emergence of a society which knows itself as separated from itself.8 Hegel shifts the focus from understanding itself to changes in collective self-understandings. Civil society with its competing interests and representative institutions cannot sustain any claim to the givenness of its meanings and values. Civil society represents a self-consciousness of the instability of the way things come to get their meaning. What Hegel calls knowledge or science and absolute knowing, opens modernity as the age of the world that can no longer posit the relation to sense or truth as either immediate or mediate.9 Hegel transforms the notion of truth by incorporating the process of truth-making itself into the very idea of thought. His thought exposes the specic ways in which things come to be meaningful. He examines the ways in which the categories that allow experiences are developed. His thought opens modernity and thinking itself, since he realises that none of our objects, procedures, knowledge and so on are ends in themselves. For Nancy, Hegels rejection of any appeal to the given exposes us to a present that is unstable, as no ideal is posited for the future and there is no nostalgia for the past to deliver a system of readymade meaning. In the modern world Hegel says: Spirit has not only lost its essential life: it is also conscious of this essential loss, and of the nitude that is its content.10 Modern society has lost the form of life that could be reconciled with its faith and that allow it to identify unquestioningly with the norms of its community. Pre-modern society is characterised by the unreective manner in which its subjects were at home in their world. They existed in a natural harmony
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expressed in religion, culture and art. The idea of returning to this harmony lost in the fall or returning in the aftermath of the emergence of modern society to some perceived unied world such as Hellas or a nature untainted by alienation has been a persistent motif in modern cultural life. Reconciling humans and world or even reconciling humans and the transcendent has been a persistent theme of philosophy, and it is a metaphor that is central to Hegels thought. While Hegel preserves the idea of what can be loosely translated as being at home [bei sich], in Hegels hands that quest because it embraces the negative is not nostalgia. At rst sight it seems that the idea of home and the destructive power of the negative seem incompatible. The way in which this apparent tension can be reconciled is articulated clearly by Nancy. Hegels idea of self, Nancy remarks, nds itself in its ordeal and by way of its restlessness, not in the solace of edifying discourse.11 Rather than reaching a point at which the self is reected to itself in the world, the alienated self instead nds itself at home in the very instability of thought itself. It does not nd itself pre-empted in a metaphysical given. How this takes place is best exemplied by exploring the way in which Hegels account of the conscious subject in the Phenomenology of Spirit transforms itself through its attempts to give an account of its knowledge of itself and world.

III. Selfhood and Negativity

Early modern attempts to conceive the character of selfhood consistently conceive it as an isolated individual. From Descartes to Locke a reective method is employed to capture this individual idea of self. This reective method involves the mind attempting to take notice of its own activity. The preferred method of the foundational quest of early empiricism and rationalism was limited to a self-focus, to an examination of ones own mental activity which in turn was to provide a secure footing for knowledge, either by presenting the appropriate faculties of the mind or by grounding knowledge on an indubitable rational fact such as the cogito.12 With Kant that entire strategy is cast into doubt. The empiricist and rationalist accounts of knowledge and selfidentity were polarised between the diversity of representations given by the senses and a unifying rational subject. Cognition rather than being grounded on either receptivity or spontaneity came to be considered in Kants critical writings as two aspects of the same knowing. Kant argued there is a contiReason and the Restlessness of the Speculative 209

nuity between representations, the content of representations and the subject doing the experiencing. The synthetic activity that makes experience possible is a form of self-awareness that allows us to know that what is being experienced is our own. The unifying condition of experience Kant termed the transcendental unity of apperception.13 Hegel in general is sympathetic to this strategy, in particular to the idea that a central feature of any relation to an object or any experience requires a unifying self-relation. They differ in the status they give to the conditions that are constitutive of experience. What Hegel objects to, among other things, is the subjective character of the categories.14 Those categories (as well as notions like autonomy) ought instead to be conceived in terms of a broader notion Spiritrather than the spontaneity of the single subject. The categories have to be objective if thought is not to be isolated from world. If they cannot be shown to be objective we are lead straight back to the dualism of empiricism and rationalism. It is not our concern here to examine the ways in which Hegel recongures Kants transcendental categories. For our purposes, examining Nancys interpretation of Hegel, and in particular how he interprets negativity in Hegels thought, it is useful to present briey how the natural consciousness, the protagonist of the Phenomenology, unpacks, through its experience, the conditions that allow its experience. Through this an increasingly complex picture of those conditions and categories is described. From Hegels Jena writings onward his strategy had been to recongure the character of our self-relation such that the conditions of knowing come to be understood as self-determined. The path consciousness takes through the Phenomenology is described most famously as the way of the Soul which journeys through the series of its own congurations as though they were the stations appointed for it by its own nature, so that it may purify itself for the life of Spirit.15 This path of self-knowledge, in the case of the Phenomenology, is not able to be limited to an inquiry of the self by the self. Consciousness can only understand itself by seeing itself as other; in so doing it recognises that its sense of self is the result of a very complex set of relations (intersubjectivity, family, Spirit, morality, religion, language and so on). It is only when it understands itself in terms of these conditions that it will achieve nally, through a completed experience of itself, the awareness of what it really is in itself.16 This completed experience of itself does not leave the indi210 Simon Lumsden

vidual I intact. The natural consciousness comes to understand itself in relation to and in fact in the [external] determinations that make possible its comprehension of itself and the world. The Phenomenology evolves by a process of self-examination, and though this is not the way natural consciousness itself experiences each moment of the text, nevertheless, the movement is at the hands of the natural consciousness. What natural consciousness dogmatically asserts as the truth of the object is shown to be limited. The natural consciousness itself corrects its own truth claims; in the correction what was taken to be true is sublated. This process builds an increasingly comprehensive account of the way in which consciousness experiences objects. What the Phenomenology will show is that the meaningful relation of consciousness to the world is only possible because consciousness is implicitly self-transcending. Consciousness and its relation to itself and its objects, is determined by a conceptual horizon that necessarily transcends the singularity of consciousness. The path of the Phenomenology leads consciousness beyond itself. This negative and self-transcending movement of Hegels account of the conscious subject is emphasised in Nancys reading of Hegel:
The Hegelian subject is not to be confused with subjectivity as a separate and one-sided agency for synthesizing representations, or with subjectivity as the exclusive interiority of a personality. . . . In a word the Hegelian subject is in no way the self all to itself. It is, to the contrary . . . what (or the one who) dissolves all substance.17

The character of its self-relation is one of dissatisfaction with the conditions that mediate and allow its experience. In order to examine and verify these conditions they must be broken apart from the whole and then appropriated explicitly by consciousnessthis is the labour of the negative. Nancy embraces this self-transcending character of consciousness: self is precisely without return to self; self does not become what it already is: becoming is becoming being outside of selfbut such that this outside, this ex-position, is the very being of the subject.18 Two issues emerge from this passage: rstly it is clear that the metaphysical picture of Hegel is completely abandoned by Nancy and the second is the
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role that negativity plays in abolishing any conception of the absolute as given. For Nancy, the chapters of the Phenomenology disclose, in various forms or shapes of consciousness, increasingly complex forms of self-relation. Consciousnesss self-relation and its judgements of experience come to be mediated through community, art, religion, language and so on. Hegel does not begin the Phenomenology by attempting to delineate what the self or consciousness is. It is only with the progressive unfolding of what appears to be external to consciousness that its self-relation is in fact understood. The Phenomenology as we have seen moves forward by a process of consciousness examination of its claims to know. Consciousness is transformed in this process: it will no longer see itself as a subject engaging with an object that is purely other. In comprehending both itself and the conditions for its knowing relation to the world, consciousness is itself transformed. We can only gesture toward understanding the way in which consciousness relation to itself and the world are re-congured. What is at issue in this paper is the manner in which the Phenomenology moves, in particular the role of negativity in that movement. The trajectory of the Phenomenology involves a dislocation and reconguration of the conscious subjects self-relation, such that consciousness cannot be conceived as a self all to itself.19 For Nancy this disassembling and unpacking undermines the stability of selfhood and this instability is its experience.

IV. Experience
Nancy in the Experience of Freedom20 inects his account of experience with a clearly Hegelian sensibility. In that work experience is conceived as trying the self at the selfs border, the immediate testing of the limit which consists in the tearing apart of the immediacy by the limit.21 Experience on this view is understood as self-surpassing and self-examination. Conceived in this way experience serves as a summary of the movement of the Phenomenology expressed in the previous section. The transition from one position to another involves nding the truth of the rst point in the other, so that experience is a constant unsettling of thoughts and the conscious subjects own ground. This movement of constantly retreating into the ground and re-establishing the ground is the work or labour of the negative. On Nancys reading, Hegel

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explicitly distances his project from one that appeals to knowledge or faith. What Hegel calls knowledge is no longer positioned in relation to the given but rather is open to the instability of becoming. . . . The point of the present is neither to be believed nor known it is to be experienced.22 The truth of thought shifts from being grounded on the sensible content or the revelation of God or faith to a notion of experience that opens consciousness to what is other to it and in the process unsettles its own ground.23 The unsettled character of experience is expressed in the description of it in the Phenomenologys preface:
Experience is the name we give to just this movement, in which the immediate,24 the unexperienced, i.e. the abstract, whether it be of sensuous [but still unsensed] being, or only thought of as simple, becomes alienated from itself and then returns to itself from this alienation, and is only then revealed for the rst time in its actuality and truth, just as it then has become a property of consciousness also.25

Consciousness, once it tries to reect on either its knowing or its own self, is driven beyond itself. It can, for example, only make judgements about or reect on objects in the universal medium of thought. When I think about what I am as a self, I reect upon my singularity, I am aware that I occupy space and time. In this reection I experience myself, but in so reecting my immediacy is eliminated, because in this reection I am communing with and through the mediated conceptual realm of thought. This realisation is unsettling as my singularity appears to be dissolved in the mediations of conceptuality, but the realisation of the necessary relation of my thought to the universal penetrates into both how meaning is necessarily framed and results in a constant revision of ones self-understanding. The drive to understand itself collapses the limited platforms of self-understanding by which consciousness had characterised experience, and this leads to constant revision of its self-understanding.
Whatever is conned within the limits of a natural life cannot by its own efforts go beyond its immediate existence; but it is driven beyond it by something else, and this uprooting entails its death. Consciousness, however, is explicitly the Concept of itself. Hence it is something that goes beyond lim-

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its, and since these limits are its own, it is something that goes beyond itself . . . Consciousness suffers this violence at its own hands; it spoils its own limited satisfaction.26

Consciousness wants each new shape of consciousness to be The Truth, but it cannot rest with that new truth and simply accept this as true, as thought troubles its thoughtlessness, and its own unrest disturbs its inertia.27 Thought and the categories that are the conditions for consciousnesss experience are representative of Spirit, but they also constitute the subjects self-relation. The conscious subjects experience is advanced by thought, because thought is not simply the singular subjects but is part of Spirit. In this sense as Nancy comments thought must take the self out of itself.28

V. The Negative
The history of philosophy might be understood as successive attempts to express the absolute in various guises: the thing in itself, God, that all is one, determinate nature and so on. The shapes of consciousness expressed in the Phenomenology can be understood as those various attempts to think the absolute, and the various chapters of the Phenomenology and especially the preface all demonstrates various failures to think the absolute and thereby the failure of reconciling self and world, through religion, the faculties of mind, the correct tools of epistemology or scientic method and so on. All these approaches are motivated to overcome the self-other relation. In Hegels case this problem is overcome by conceiving the absolute as the self-originating and self-differentiating Spirit.29 The crudely metaphysical reading of Hegel largely conceived this self-producing spirit as able to reconcile mind and world by reverting to a pre-Kantian metaphysics. On this view, Spirit can be self-producing and self-differentiating because it is the expression of some kind of divine intelligence.30 Nancy like much of the best scholarship on Hegel in recent years completely distances his account from any metaphysical view of Hegel that considers Spirit, thought or the concept as an expression of some kind of spiritual, natural or rational given. Reason cannot appeal to a transcendent realm of ideas such as a Platonic idea or a thing-in-itself; it must instead be conceived as determining its own norms by virtue of a self-correcting capacity. While Nancy would not refer to this movement as self-correction,
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since his concern is with the openness of the movement of thought, the feature that Nancy takes to be central to thoughts and Spirits self-producing and self-differentiating capacity, a capacity that does not appeal to a metaphysical foundation, is the negative. One of the persistently critical readings of Hegel takes his thought to reinscribe instability in a dialectical system of contradiction and opposition. In Difference and Repetition, for example, Deleuze presents Hegels dialectic as replacing difference with a logic of mediation and double negation. Otherness is transformed through a mediated relation into the image of a self-identical subject or is dissolved as a determination of Spirit. All difference is appropriated to establish identity. Hegels account of difference, on this view, because of the logic of the dialectic, excludes multiplicity.31 The dialectic is the annihilator of all difference and the subject comes to nd itself in and through the other because Hegel presupposes its identication with whole. Spirit in this case is a giant coil of determinations rolling themselves out over time in which the self slowly alienates itself and then through the dialectical manoeuvres recovers the whole by seeing itself as an expression of the whole. The self progresses to full self-consciousness only by a kind of metaphysical tyranny of recognition in otherness. Nancys account of the dialectical movement could not be more different: to know oneself . . . is to be, concretely before the insufciency and incompletion of the self, and by this very lack, to be in relation to the other . . . it is to be already in movement, to become.32 What has been of concern here is to show that the conception of consciousness that emerges in the Phenomenology cannot be conceived as an individual, enduring entityconsciousness is both self-producing and determined from without. The way in which consciousness apprehends what is other to it is the key to understanding the relation of consciousness to its conditions. It is in understanding the manner in which consciousness grasps its objects that consciousness comprehends its own self; only then are the determinate aspects of its relationship to itself and other discernible. The subjects self-relation is continually re-established through the other as the other is inscribed in the very conditions that allow self-awareness. From the start, the subjects self-examination is inscribed with the other as intersubjectivity. The self occupies a place in which its self-world

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relation is constantly re-negotiated because as Nancy puts it: the world of separation is that world in which the terms of a relation of senseterms such as nature gods or communityare no longer given.33 Because of the preeminence of the dislocating power of the negative, sense is open and constantly transforming. We have seen the essential way in which Nancys reading of Hegel brings out the relation between self and negativity. It is the energy of this subjects investigation of its self-relation and knowledge claims that unfolds the determinations of thought and transforms the subject itself. The way I have described the movement of the Phenomenology above, in particular the way in which the character of human self-relation is expanded, tries to bring out the negative character of consciousnesss journey. Through its experience consciousness comes to understand the conditions of its self-consciousness and the categories of its thought not as a faculty of mind or mental activity but rather as a selfrelation that always involves conditions, categories and so on that are largely determined from without, by the play of forces that constitute Spirit. Its selfrelation is stripped of its straightforward identication of subject and object. What emerges from Nancys reading of Hegel is that the restlessness and force of the negative is the central feature or human thought and selfhood. As will be discussed below, Nancys account of the negative ignores what is for Hegel the unique quality of modern self-consciousness: that it comes to be identied with a new way of considering reason. Reason does not have a methodologically regulative role, but rather is the self-correcting capacity of the concept of Spirit and the Idea. The motor of this self-correcting capacity is the negative and it is intimately tied to the subjects own attempt to make sense of itself and the world.

VI. Sense and Thought

The dualism of concept and intuition is arguably the single most important conceptual division that post-Kantian philosophy sought to reconcile. Kants thought had tried to reconcile the division between empiricism and rationalism arguing that intuition and the intellect were separate components of a single knowledge. The intuitive component of cognition was responsible for the reception of sensory information. The intellect shaped that sensory

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manifold into meaning. For post-Kantian German idealism, this division of responsibilities produced a fundamentally divided knowledge, since it was still based on a division of mind and world. The crudely metaphysical reading of Hegel argues he resolved this dualism by reverting to a pre-Kantian metaphysics, which effectively denied the intuitive by presenting the conceptual determinations that constitute the world and allowed human experience of the world as the expression of a monistic spirit. In opposition to this view, Nancy argues that Hegel preserves something like intuition but it is stripped of its association with a given objective reality delivered through the senses. There is considerable debate in the literature about exactly how to understand intuition once the nature of its opposition to conceptuality can no longer be considered dichotomous.34 What is important for our understanding of Nancys non-metaphysical reading of Hegel is that thought and the true cannot rely on something given to ground them, they are as Nancy describes them wholly immanent: the world is only this world, it has no other sense . . . (. . . it does not itself have a sense that would bring it to an end).35 The term sense has a technical meaning in Nancys thought. It is designed to conceive of a non-metaphysical process of meaning creation; it evokes the conceptual, intuitive and affective quality of thinking. Sense is also the term he uses to translate Hegels central term Concept. The term sense is adopted from Hyppolites interpretation of Hegel.36 In Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative and in Nancys other writings sense, echoing Hyppolites use of the term, expresses the process of meaning creation in a way that does not simply reduce sense to pure concepts, but includes the relation between sensibility and thought. His notion of sense attempts to think through meaning at the level of Spirit. It evokes the movement of the negative and the self and the meaning produced through that movement.
We can analyse this concept [of sense] as signication, understanding, meaning, and so forth. But what is implied, articulated and exploited in all these analyses . . . cant simply be the concept of something that would stay put, set within an exterior reality, without any intrinsic relation to its concept.37

The crucial feature of sense is that it grasps itself as sense, and is in fact produced in this very grasping itself: what makes sense about sense, what makes

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it originate is that it senses itself making sense. . . . sense apprehends itself, grasps itself as sense.38 There is in this way no surplus to sense, there is no object as thing-in-itself that a concept is trying to express the truth of: its concept and reference are indissociable.39 Sense is the self-consciousness of the selfs and thoughts meaning making and sensing capacity and is the production of meaning and sense itself. Sense, as with Hegels Concept, refers to the central philosophical distinction between sensibility and intelligibility. The Concept (and sense) preserves the tension between concept and intuition and allows them to penetrate from one into the other. 40 Nancy prefers the notion of sense to Hegels Concept because it maintains the sensibility and affectivity of the intuitive and the sensible while (as in the phrase: x makes sense) it can also mean the conceptual or discursive. Sense does not collapse intuition into concept but involves the constant movement of one into the other. That tension is central to thoughts self-advancement or self-production. In order to understand this self-transforming capacity of sense (or of thought and the Concept in Hegels terminology), the key features of the dialectical movement, the features that give them their characteristic restlessness, have to be sketched: reason and the understanding. This will also help us to see ultimately the limitations of Nancys project of taking the heart or Hegels project to be governed by the negative. For Nancy, the movement of sense is achieved by thinking the limits of its meaning, pulling apart claims to know and to understand. Thinking requires that it touches on its own limit and its own singularity.41 In Hegels technical language it is the understanding [Verstand] that pushes the limit, it holds a position and asserts its truth. It functions as an abstract understanding that categorises and holds onto a position until the bitter end. But the limit of the understanding is that while it can explore a determination of thought or a claim to know in detail and with conviction, it cannot see the limit of its claim. It is reason that reconciles differences and functions as the motor of thoughts self-correcting capacity. Reason is, at least in part, the source of the instability, as it is dissatised with any claim to know. Reason can only be dissatised because it appeals to determinations or signicances that are beyond the limits of the posited position.42 It is this movement that reason effects that gives Hegels texts (and Spirit) their characteristically self-correcting quality. The self-correcting capacity of reason is however ignored by Nancy.
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Nancy conceives sense, and by implication Spirit, as a domain of meaning or meaning potential that can be appealed to or drawn from through the dynamism of the negative, through its constant self-transformation. Thinking relates to itself through the other but its self-producing and self-discriminating capacities cease once the other is identied with the same. This identication is never complete as there is part of sense that resists, reinstates [sense], and opens it once again.43 That part of sense is, as we have seen, reason. Nancy provides a progressive account of the restlessness of the negative and a persuasively non-metaphysical reading of Hegels speculative project. Hegels idea of thought, Nancy remarks, consists in passing into the element of the speculativewhich designates for Hegel the relation of ideality to itself insofar as it wrests itself away from every given.44 However, the crucial issue is exactly why reason is dissatisedwhy thought moves forward, why does it wrest itself away from every given? What remains difcult to determine on Nancys account is why the various positions held and the determinations expressed come to be seen as insufcient and how they are then redetermined. Nancy contrasts his interpretation of sense with the traditional view of Hegel: Hegel has often been read as if he exhibited the auto-development of an anonymous subject or reason, foreign to us, the big other of an autistic self.45 The truth revealed by the movement of the negative should in contrast to this view be understood as one in which truth nds or happens upon itself as us.46 The absolute, truth and sense only have sense between us, precisely because of the unrest of the self. The self hovers outside of itself with others and between us: the absolute is this self-transforming instability. Nancy concludes that the absolute is in the passage of sense: as the interval of time, between us, in the eeting and rhythmic awakening of a discrete recognition of existence.47 The absolute is meaningful only because of us and for us and in the movement of and between selves: Each with others, each near the others: the near of the absolute is nothing other than our near each other.48 In this case the movement of sense is achieved not because of some given character of reason but is embodied in the restlessness of the self and the self-other relation; what is between us is the sharing of singularities in movement.49 The consequence of this unrest is a persistent questioning of the xity of our claims to know. That movement involves exposing us to ourselves, dislocating ourselves and our self-certainty.
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What this account leaves unexplored is the way in which the transformation of sense or the Concept is actually achieved. Nancy is clear that the movement of sense involves overcoming limits, which means mediating and collapsing determinations. He remarks that sense is not given: it is the demand that it be given . . .. Sense must interrogate itself anew . . . it must make demands on itself, call to itself, ask itself, want itself, desire itself, seduce itself as sense.50 However, without some kind of criteria for establishing the grounds of the evaluation or the interrogation, then the reective capacity of Spirit and of ourselves is restricted to a recognition of the restlessness of the negative. This fails then to establish the concrete ways in which, for Hegel, reasons role is that of evaluating our concepts, norms and commitments. Nancy gives a more comprehensive picture of Spirit and experience than those for whom Spirit is really nothing more than the normative commitments that we hold ourselves to and for which others also make us accountable.51 Spirit and reason are more than an intersubjectively constituted process of commitment making, nevertheless an important part of the sociality of sense and Spirit is giving reasons and holding each other to account for our actions and our reasons. What we need from Nancy is more than just the realisation that we are part of an ungrounded Spirit but that this realisation involves a developmental trajectory that appreciates the full implications of selfdetermination: how we come to understand ourselves in terms of those rules, conditions and so on that we have deliberatively, that is intersubjectivity determined. Nancy does claim that [Freedom] is indeed autonomy, but the law it gives itself is precisely itself: it therefore gives itself the law to have no law.52 In Nancys case he associates the law with the understanding and freedom with the negative. In so doing he divides the understanding and reason. Hegels notion of a self-determining subject is bound to both these notions. This restricted interpretation of autonomy, as the rejection of the given, betrays the fundamental limitation of Nancys Hegel interpretation. Autonomy and freedom are more than expressions of a self-transformative power, that transformation involves commitments to laws and norms and those commitments are mediated through our relations with others and institutions. This is where Hegel differentiates himself from Kant as the self-determining subject is on Hegels account unable to be conceived in isolation from its sociality, indeed self-determination is only possible with the emergence of
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civil society and modern forms of government. The Concept is developed in and through social and institutional relations. The norms that dene our selfunderstanding, as Nancy makes clear, cannot reect some grand divine being but are developed through a complex and self-evolving set of relations that are always more than we can say of them and that is why things keep transforming.53 Nevertheless, how we come to consider ourselves in the specic ways that we do is because of determinate weaknesses in previous claims, for example, as to how freedom should be considered and how it is practically realised. In order to understand ourselves we need a story that explains why we come to take those earlier claims and realisations of freedom to be insufcient. In Nancys case freedom is identied exclusively with the movement of the negative, he remarks that freedom is the position of negativity as such.54 But Hegelian freedom must involve more than recognising that nothing is given, it must be understood as self-determining. One needs a story as to why one comes to identify with certain norms as adequate, why one would act as if one were their author and so on. Nancy does not give an account of the determinate path by which we come to understand ourselves in the specic ways that we do and why we act freely only if we act as if we were the authors of those laws, even though in Hegels case that identication and authorisation is mediated through social relations and democratic institutions. Without an account of the complex process by which norms are rejected, modied and transformed by reason and then embodied in our actions, Nancys restless negative runs the risk of making the negative another version of a metaphysical Spirit. In Nancys examination of the negative, how things come to be re-determined or rethought and the commensurate changes in self-understanding that result from this process are left unexplained beyond asserting that their source is the negative. What is needed is more than an examination of the instability of thought. If the role of reason is neglected in the transformation and openness of sense then the negative that Nancy takes to be the dening feature of Spirit takes on a strongly ontological value that threatens to undermine the very revival of Hegel that he wants to effect.

Reason and the Restlessness of the Speculative 221

Notes
1

The research project of which this paper is a part was funded by an Australian Research Council post-doctoral fellowship. Thanks to a reviewer from Critical Horizons for their detailed and insightful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

J.-L. Nancy, The Speculative Remark (One of Hegels Bon Mots), trans. Cline Surprenant, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2001. J.-L. Nancy, Hegel: the Restlessness of the Negative, trans. Jason Smith & Steven Miller, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Ibid., p. 3. See, for example among those writing in English: Robert Pippin, Hegels Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self Consciousness, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1989 and his Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997; Terry Pinkard, Hegels Phenomenology: the Sociality of Reason, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994 and Paul Redding Hegels Hermeneutics, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1996.

4 5

6 7 8 9

Nancy, Hegel: the Restlessness of the Negative, p. 23. Ibid., p. 3. Ibid. Ibid., p. 14. This is a point that is reiterated in Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert Richardson & Anne OBryne, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2000. There he describes Hegels transformation of the idea of truth as the truth of the event beyond every advent of meaning p. 162.

10

G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1977. Volume 9 of Gesammelte Werke, ed. by H.-F. Wessels & H. Clairmont, Hamburg, Meiner, 1988, (PhG 7/7). German page numbers follow paragraph numbers from the English translation.

11 12 13

Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, p. 4. See Pippins discussion of this issue in Hegels Idealism, especially chapter 4. Robert Pippin has been instrumental in understanding Hegels project as continuing the Kantian critical tradition. See his Hegels Idealism. G. W. F. Hegel. The Encyclopaedia Logic: Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. T. F. Garaets, W. A. Suchting & H. S. Harris, Indianapolis, Hackett, 1991, 42.

14

15 16 17 18 19

Hegels Phenomenology, 77/p. 60. Ibid. Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, pp. 4-5. Ibid., p. 57. While I cannot discuss this issue here, one can see the similarity between this issue

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and the way Nancy recongures Heideggers notion of being-with [mitsein] in The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1991.
20

The Experience of Freedom, trans. Bridget McDonald, Stanford, Stanford University Press 1993, experience itself, because it neither gathers nor produces anything: it decides its law and its transgression p. 85.

21 22 23 24

Ibid., p. 87. Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, p. 14. Ibid. The immediacy of the object, in the beginning of sense-certainty, is something that consciousness always keeps as a standard to be nally expressed, but it is simply not possible, as the course of the Phenomenology shows, to account for this immediate experience.

25 26 27 28 29 30

Hegel, Phenomenology, 36/p. 28; (trans. amended). Ibid., 80/pp. 62-3. Ibid., 80/p. 63. Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, p. 40. Hegel, Phenomenology, 15/p. 12. For a contemporary version of this interpretation of Hegel see Paul Guyers Absolute Idealism and the Rejection of Kantian Dualism in the Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, ed. Karl Ameriks, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000.

31

Hegel betrays and distorts the immediate in order to ground his dialectic in that incomprehension, and to introduce mediation in a movement which is no more than that of his own thought and its generalities. Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York, Columbia University Press, 1994, p. 10.

32 33 34

Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, p. 41. Ibid., p. 4. See for example, Terry Pinkard German Philosophy 1760-1860, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002; Sally Sedgwick, Hegel, McDowell, and Recent Defences of Kant, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, vol. 31, pp. 229-247.

35 36

Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, p. 5. Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence, trans. Leonard Lawlor & Amit Sen, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1997, see in particular p. 20. Nancy, A Finite Thinking, ed. Simon Sparks, Stanford, Stanford University Press 2003, p. 5. Ibid., p. 92. Ibid., p. 5. Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, p. 50. Reason and the Restlessness of the Speculative 223

37

38 39 40

41 42

Nancy, A Finite Thinking, p. 5. Nancy captures this movement of reason well in remarking that to think mediation is to think the impossibility of keeping determinations isolated in Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, p. 52.

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

Nancy, A Finite Thinking, p. 6. Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, p. 63. Ibid., p. 76. Ibid. Ibid., p. 78. Ibid., p. 79. Ibid., p. 78. Nancy, A Finite Thinking, p. 93 (my emphasis). See for example Robert Brandom, Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegels Idealism, European Journal of Philosophy, vol. 7, 1999, pp. 164-189. Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, p. 68. For a more detailed discussion of this issue see my Satisfying the Demands of Reason: Hegels Conceptualization of Experience, Topoi, vol. 21, no. 1, 2003, pp. 41-53.

52 53

54

Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, p. 68. the truth of sense is the afrmativity of the restlessness of the negative: its insistence in itself, without renunciation or evasion, its praxis, and the conatus of its being ibid., p. 31.

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