Hegel and the fate of negativity after empire.

John K. Noyes

University of Toronto

Ernst Bloch wrote in 1962, in the postscript to the reprint of his study of Hegel, Subjekt-Objekt, that it’s always the right time for Hegel.[1] For Hegel himself, time of necessity both refuses to let go of what was, and never ceases promising what might be.  And Hegel, for whom this two-timed-ness of the human condition was fundamental, took it upon himself to create a philosophical language that might speak of the temporality of being as if from some place that time could not touch. And, one might add, to speak of this place in temporal terms.

It’s striking how doggedly the search for a place where critical language can flourish outside time persists in being the central problem of critical philosophy, from Walter Benjamin’s freezing of the dialectic to postcolonialism’s uncertainty about when the post-colonial was. But again, on the other hand, it’s not so striking. Hegel’s modernity – that is the modernity that was the driving force of radical change in the years Hegel grew to philosophical maturity – has never since stopped making a mockery of time. In our world, as in Hegel’s every day brings with it the knowledge that nothing has changed, and nothing remains the same. Hegel is, in Nancy’s words, “the inaugural thinker of the contemporary world.”[2] He attempted to invent a language to describe what happens when thought thinks its own thinking unfolding in time. In a way this alone might have pre-ordained these writings to do what they continue to do, namely to refuse to go away. On top of that, however, is the contradictory insistence on imagining a point at which this process can be thought to have ended. Or as Bloch had written in the first preface to the first edition of his book in 1947, “Hegel’s work thinks it has reached the end, but that was only the aura of ideology.”[3] To think the totality of the world in time, one has to think as if time were over. And confounding this is the language itself in which Hegel formulates the persistence of time on the threshold of its cessation. Adorno wrote in 1962-3 that “in the realm of great philosophy, Hegel is no doubt the only one with whom at times one literally does not know and cannot conclusively determine what is being talked about, and with whom there is no guarantee that such a judgment is even possible.”[4]

It is not only Hegel who wants to invent a language to counter time, and thereby to make philosophical writing possible. And it’s not only Hegel who is constantly coming up against the refusal of language to take on this role. Hegel’s problem refuses to go away, whether our thought models itself on poststructuralism’s claims for a break with the past, or the Habermasian persistence of modernity, and it is in this sense that Hegel’s problem has become the problem of postcolonial theory.

Postcolonial theory remains Hegelian in its pursuit of a language that describes what happens when the self-sufficiency of consciousness encounters another consciousness whom a prior history has cast in an inferior position – the consciousness of a master must find a way to think about itself through the thoughts of a servant. It is Hegelian too in its refusal to allow the categories of master and servant, colonizer and colonized to ossify in a static bipolar relationship. And the postcolonial insistence on re-casting the categories of critique within the social arrangements of the new world order seems to follow Hegel’s insistence that Kant’s understanding of reason be historically contextualized, not only within his own new world order, but also within the social order appropriate at any one particular historical and geographical moment. And his attempt to think history in geographical terms (which Kant had also wanted)[5] has not been shed by postcolonial theory. On the contrary, if there is a primary distinguishing moment in postcolonial theory, it is perhaps best thought of in terms of a recuperation of this aspect of Kant’s philosophy in all its implications for critical theory.

And yet, postcolonialism’s Hegel remains largely unresolved, and much remains to be done to describe it. It is possible to speak about postcolonialism’s Hegel in the terms I just outlined. But why is this theoretical isomorphism worth dwelling on? I think there are two answers, and both of them are historical. Or to be more precise, one is genealogical and the other historical. In order to explain why postcolonialism’s unconscious is structured like Hegelian language, I will begin taking a few tentative steps in the direction of a genealogy that might show how to recover the more meaningful traces of Hegelian thought in postcolonial theory. I speak very hesitantly, since I cannot hope to do more than point to where we might look if we seek to speak about Hegel in postcolonial theory beyond the platitudes he is usually made to stand in for. If we want to understand what Hegel means for postcolonial theory, we need to look beyond a Hegel where the dialectic of master and slave is constantly hovering in unspoken ways on the threshold of becoming a historical metaphor for unequal power relations between groups coded by race, gender and class. Hegel does that, but more. My assumption is that such an investigation would find Hegel inscribed like a trauma into the defining theoretical moments out of which postcolonialism was to emerge. And this traumatic Hegel is not just any Hegel. Alongside the thinker of master and servant and of the systematics of Aufhebung, it is also a Hegel in which history as process has entered a phase of radical indeterminacy – an indeterminacy Hegel saw coming with the wave, or waves of modernization he saw sweeping over his time, and which in a moment that I am tempted to describe as intellectual malice (but I would prefer to think of as an acute insight into the idea of history as process in modernity), he formulated for posterity as the end of history. More on that in a minute.

 

In recent years, there have been several attempts to revise Hegel’s problematic position within postcolonial theory. The popular set of Hegel myths and legends (to borrow the title of Jon Stewart’s book)[6] have to a large extent given way to a more subtle reading of his work, and his views on topics not too distant from the concerns of postcolonialism have been much enhanced by Robert Bernasconi, Tsenay Serequeberhan and more recently Susan Buck-Morss.[7] These debates center around the need to recover from Hegel an active and conscious reception of current writings on European incursions into Africa and the New World, and to demonstrate how they fit into his system. However, as they show, the more light shed on this aspect of Hegel’s writing, the more difficult and problematic he becomes for postcolonial theory. It seems that there is an increasing awareness that the earlier reception of Hegel in postcolonial theory is becoming less and less tenable. It seems increasingly difficult to read Hegel via select paragraphs from his philosophy of history, as an arrogant rejection of everything that is not Western, European, and if possible Prussian. This has always been the most popular Hegel for discussions of postcolonialism, right up to and including Spivak’s section on Hegel in The Critique of Postcolonial Reason. To contrast the “exceptionalism” of the Srimadbhagavadgita with Hegel’s purported “Euro-teleological normativity” is possible only on the narrowest reading of Hegel.[8] But the problem is that Spivak’s reading, though narrow, is correct. Hegel did hope for a picture of wholeness in which the untidy lives of historically and geographically remote individuals might disappear under the force of the here and now. What looks to us like Hegel’s Eurocentrism looked to him like the necessary double violence which thought inaugurates when thinking historical and geographical remoteness and casting its own thought processes in language. However, what a critical reading of Hegel today needs to pay attention to is the mode in which the remote disappears, for it is in the mode of disappearance that we find revealed the secret of negativity – that in each violent disappearance there remains an insistence, a marking the manner in which the physical world and its inhabitants refuse to go away. Failing this critical encounter with Hegel, any attempt to restore his importance will remain embedded in the kind of quandary Edward Said alludes to briefly when he states in Culture and Imperialism: “The irony is that Hegel’s dialectic is Hegel’s, after all: he was there first, just as the Marxist dialectic of subject and object had been there before the Fanon of Les Damnés had used it to explain the struggle between colonizer and colonized.”[9]

The problem this confronts us with is not so much the irony of first sightings, but of subsequent possessions. If Marx and Fanon require Hegel’s dialectic, it is probably more productive to ask why, in most readings of postcolonial theory, this requirement is so easily submerged beneath various other assumptions about Hegel, and why it is that qualifications like Said’s have to be stated with an air of surprise, instead of being treated as the open secrets they are. The open secret of Hegel having been there first reaches beyond Fanon to his entire generation, and from there it will come to inform the theoretical heart of poststructuralism. This has been clearly demonstrated by Vincent Descombes, among others, and need not be pursued here.[10] Descombes shows how an entire generation of French scholars was shaped in their intellectual lives by the Hegelianism of Alexander Kojčve, and in particular, Kojčve’s location of the master-slave dialectic at the centre of Hegel’s work.

But rather than attempt to argue an easy genealogy from Hegel through Kojčve to poststructuralism and postcolonial theory, I would like to heighten the question of when the postcolonial was by pointing out that in the Hegelianism out of which some founding thoughts of poststructuralism arose, there are already strong postcolonial moments. This is clearly evident in the sections of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, for example, where he takes issue with Sartre’s Hegel, in order to elaborate on a Hegel that is much closer to Adorno’s – a Hegel where the force of negativity refuses to go away, no matter how reasonable the cause of synthesis. For Fanon, negativity is the identifying impetus of black consciousness that refuses to play the identifying game of white consciousness – or that only plays the game as a game that has to be played if the workings of power in history are to be unsettled. Given the readings of Hegel that were popular in France at the time Fanon was studying, it is not surprising that he should have take Hegel in this direction. For Kojčve’s reading of Hegel – and in particular the master-slave dialectic – is already colored with a certain historical gradient between Europe and its others, a gradient that unmistakably reveals the traces of a colonialism that is only beginning to be a dying colonialism.

In his commentary on Chapter IV, Section A of the Phenomenology, Kojčve discusses the emergence of the master-slave dialectic as a necessary expression of the essence of human desire. The terms he uses to describe the different expressions of desire are telling. For Kojčve, Hegel’s expression of an independent consciousness for itself and a dependant life for another is understood as the difference between human and animal desire.[11] In calling it this, Kojčve deduces that human society is constituted by a multiplicity of desires, but that these in turn fall into two essential categories, or what he calls “anthropogenetic behaviors.” He continues: “In other words, in his nascent state, man is never simply man. He is always, necessarily, and essentially, either Master or Slave. If the human reality can come unto being only as a social reality, society is human – at least in its origin – only on the basis of its implying an element of Mastery and an element of Slavery, of ‘autonomous’ existences and ‘dependent’ existences.”[12]

When we read the corresponding pages in Hegel, the most remarkable thing is the degree of indeterminacy surrounding the notions of mastery and servitude (or lordship and bondage, which is how Miller translates Herrschaft and Knechtschaft).[13] In the paragraph where Hegel first introduces the idea of lordship and bondage, he presents them as two alternative Gestalten – forms or shapes (Miller’s translation) – of consciousness. Hegel makes it clear that negativity directs the process of thinking about one’s own identity via the thought of another, but he gives us virtually no guidelines for conceptualizing the details of how this process might take place. Is it historical, metaphorical, psychological? We don’t know, and Hegel doesn’t tell us. The fact that he doesn’t tell us is bound to the workings of negativity, whose specificity is always in the process of being submerged in philosophical work, only to re-emerge in the moment the philosopher turns away.

This is the puzzle that Hegel presented to Kojčve and his students. For us, looking back, it would seem there are two dimensions of this puzzle – first, to what extent did Hegel draw on the experience of Empire, the negation and consolidation of the European sphere through its expansion into a world-economy, and how did this affect his thoughts about the non-equality of consciousness grounded in negativity? and second, what did Kojčve and his followers make of this?

Before I turn to the first question let me note that Kojčve appears not to have been in the slightest interested in this first question. But there is a fascinating historical dialogue underlying his reading of Hegel which itself draws on everything that lordship and bondage has come to mean by the 1930’s and 1940’s. When Kojčve conceptualized the duality of consciousness as two essential anthropogenetic modes, he is repeating the social dualism of the late 19th century. He himself was aware of the challenges this posed to his thought, and one of the most intriguing parts of the Introduction to the Reading of Hegel is the set of notes about the end of history, revolution, colonial uprisings, the USA, the Orient and Japan, in which he attempts to come to terms with what human essence and animality might mean together with the idea of the end of history in the years immediately following the second world war.[14] Commenting on the passage where Hegel defines nature as the negative of the human spirit in space (in other words, on the temporalizing work of thought and its effect – the production of nature) Kojčve attempts to explicate in historical terms what happens at the end of history. In doing so, it seems, he falls into the trap that Hegel sets. For Kojčve, the end of history needs to be thought as a historical development where the negativity that separates humanity from nature ceases to have effect in human life. In his note, written in 1946, Kojčve attempts to argue that there will come an end to history, as described by Hegel, where humanity’s negating work out of which nature and history arise, will cease. This, he concludes, will be a reactivation of humanity’s animal essence, where negativity has given way to harmony. War and labor cease (for they are the manifestations respectively of humanity negating its own temporality and spatiality), and all that will remain is what Kojčve identifies as Marx’s dream of humanity in harmony with itself.

Shortly before his death in 1968, Kojčve revisits this note with a lengthy addendum for the publication of the second edition. This revisited note has been commented on extensively, and I do not wish to engage in that commentary. I simply wish to observe how Kojčve negotiates what he sees as the futility of attempting to think the end of history in the terms described above. The key to his changed ideas on the end of history is the French Revolution, that moment in time which was so decisive for Hegel himself. Kojčve’s thesis about the persistence of the French revolution’s political dynamic begs the question as to Hegel’s own concern with the political impact of extra-European events on Europe itself. In a way, the thesis of the end of history is an inevitable theoretical response to the problem of modernization that Hegel saw in the wake of the French revolution. Hegel never ceased to hope that the revolution’s process of renewal was a continuing process which would radically transform society throughout Europe and throughout the world. And yet, his entire project required him to imagine an end to this process. Nevertheless, he refuses to be pinned down on how the end of history is to be conceptualized, simply because in modernity, it becomes impossible to dissociate history as those events that are constantly being renewed from history as this process of constant renewal, and from history as the consciousness of both. Any attempt to read the end of history as the end of the consciousness of history must come to terms with the fact that in Kojčve’s words, “the natural World remains what it has been from all eternity,” and human life continues as a part of the natural world. Does this mean that humanity becomes what Nietzsche described – happy animals without consciousness? Kojčve is not satisfied with this kind of conclusion. If this were so, he argues, “it would have to be admitted that after the end of History, men would construct their edifices and works of art as birds build their nests and spiders spin their webs, would perform musical concerts after the fashion of frogs and cicadas, would play like young animals, and would indulge in love like adult beasts. But one cannot then say that all this ‘makes Man happy.’”[15] Instead he decides to interpret the end of history as the persistence of the process whereby human consciousness and activity negates itself in time, thereby ceasing to fundamentally change the way human society is structured. Instead of the progression in time which is history, the wave of European modernization that began with the French revolution has continued to spread in space, outward across the face of the globe, where in wave upon wave of modernization it encompasses all society.

Kojčve understands the wars of colonial liberation in this context, as specialized reiterations of the perpetual destabilization that is modernity. Pointing to Hegel’s legendary completion of the Phenomenology on the eve of the battle of Jena, he writes:

What has happened since then is but an extension in space of the universal revolutionary force actualized in France by Robespierre-Napoleon. From the authentically historical point of view, the two world wars with their retinue of large and small revolutions had only the effect of bringing the backward civilizations of the peripheral provinces into line with the most advanced (real or virtual) European historical positions. If the sovietization of Russia and the communization of China are anything more than or different from the democratization of imperial Germany (by way of Hitlerism) or the accession of Togoland to independence, nay the self-determination of the Papuans, it is only because the Sino-Soviet actualization of Robespierrian Bonapartism obliges post-Napoleonic Europe to speed up the elimination of the numerous more or less anachronistic sequels to its pre-revolutionary past.[16]

As I mentioned, it is not my purpose to engage in the discussions on Kojčve’s reading of the end of history. But there is so much that, from a postcolonial perspective, is troubling in these few sentences that it is difficult leave them un-commented. What consequences follow from reading the political struggles at the peripheries in the second world war in terms of a modernization of backward civilizations? By what stretch of the historical imagination does it make sense to reduce Russian sovietization and Chinese communism to analogies of Hitler’s national socialism? And to project onto this homogeneous conglomeration the independence of Togoland and the self-determination of the Papuans? And this all in the name of Robespierre and Napoleon. Clearly, the kind of historical flattening that needs to be undertaken in order to speak the way Kojčve does about the end of history casts serious doubt on his own reading. As long as post-history holds interest as a place where, in Erik de Vries’ words “man’s capacity for mortal risk is gratuitous and therefore apolitical,”[17] there can be no historical legitimacy for the mortal risk of the liberation struggle. All that is left is a coupling of philosophy with a form of political benevolence whose ideal acteur is the Hegelian civil servant actualized within the context of European reconstruction.  Kojčve may have shown an admirable political prescience in understanding the implications for Europe of decolonization (for example his work in the Ministčre des Finance et des Affaires Economiques sought to “develop a policy that replaced the vestiges of European colonialism with a more equitable system of trade between industrialized and developing nations.”)[18] Kojčve unfolds this set of ideas in the lecture he gave in Düsseldorf at the invitation of Carl Schmitt, entitled “Colonialism from a European Perspective,” which he begins by remarking “that in my lecture I very consciously and deliberately want to avoid anything which is in any way political or could appear to be so. I intend radically to depoliticize all the concepts I discuss, above all the concept of so-called colonialism.”[19] Kojčve then goes on to explain the persistence of Marx’s capitalist economy, not within Europe, but within a world-system that creates surplus value for an affluent Euro-American minority at the expense of what he calls an Afro-Asian proletariat. Against the need for an anti-colonial revolution he then argues the need for economic reform of the kind that Fordism had brought to Western capitalism and thereby circumvented the revolution Marx had predicted. In conclusion, he proposes reconstructing colonialism economically in a Fordist manner.

We would only need to glance Fanon’s own brand of anti-colonial Hegelianism of the same time to see how inadequate this must have looked from the perspective of the colonized peoples and within the context of their struggles for liberation. From today’s perspective Kojčve’s remedy for post-colonial exploitation looks like a remarkably apt critique of globalizations concentration of capital in the hands of the affluent minority. And yet, the aptness of the critique is where the problem lies - his insistence that colonial reform be driven by economic policy is in his reading tantamount to a de-politicization. This points to the problem that Hegel faced when he attempted to conceptualize historical change both as action and as reflection. For Kojčve’s benevolent colonial reform, like the struggles in the G7 summits, can hold not better promise to the world’s exploited masses than to place their trust in the good conscience of their masters. Let it suffice to note that Kojčve can only think the postcolonial moment as a moment whose position at the end of history bears the same characteristics as his own (and Hegel’s own) post-Napoleonic Europe. Kojčve takes possession of Hegel’s moment in time by imagining Hegel’s Europe taking possession of the rest of the world, and he does this even at the same moment that the rest of the world is struggling to free itself from Europe. This was in 1948. To make matters worse, Kojčve, writing in 1960 goes on to say that 12 years earlier he had mistaken the relationship of Europe and its others. Now he prefers to see Japan as the source of renewal.

The important point in the present context is that Kojčve saw colonialism as a provocation for Hegel’s model of history – history seen here both as the history of philosophy and the philosophy of history.

But where does this leave Hegel?

It is Susan Buck-Morss’ achievement to have shown how our understanding of this dialectic requires contextualizing his comments within his reception of current debates on slavery and, perhaps, colonization. What I would now like to do is to show how the postcolonial theme can be elaborated around Hegel’s concerns with the end of Empire. I hope to be able to use that discussion to demonstrate that the incorporation of Hegel’s dialectic into poststructuralism was to a certain extent pre-programmed to raise some key issues of postcolonial theory. Or to put it differently, Hegel’s own confrontation with the social order of Empire was inscribed into his dialectic in ways that fed directly into current debates via what might be called the postcolonial unconscious. This follows a complex and at times tortuous path, but I believe that the best way of entry is via the concept of negativity.

For Hegel the idea of negativity is one that had to be developed – in a certain sense at least – after Empire. In order to argue this point, I will need to take some time explicating the semantic field that would have opened up to Hegel and his readers when they encountered the word Empire. In the process, I will explain how, most pronouncedly in the Phenomenology of Spirit,  negativity related to the idea of Empire. I hope this will lay the groundwork for positioning the Hegelian concept of negativity within the discourse of postcolonial theory.

If we want to understand how negativity arises after Empire in Hegel, we have to be attentive to his use of the word Reich. If for no other reason, Hegel’s use of the German word for Empire has to be of interest to postcolonial studies because of how its semantic field articulates with the major philosophical project of his early writings: the need to reconcile individual desire and knowledge with the most appropriate forms of social expression. Empire carried both an ontological promise that it might fulfill this need (Hegel has no difficulty speaking of the kingdom of Nature in the same breath as what we would call Empire today)[20] and a historical display of all the ways it has failed to do so. This historical deficit of Empire in the German context is the subject of an essay entitled simply “The German Constitution”, which Hegel commenced in 1797, at the same time as his friends Hölderlin and Isaak von Sinclair were attending the Congress of Rastatt, where representatives of the Holy Roman Empire negotiated with France in the hopes of reaching some kind of a peaceful settlement. Here Hegel interrogates the Holy Roman Empire in search of its formal contributions to a specifically German social order. Or to use terms more familiar in the postcolonialism debates, he attempts to derive a German localism from a hypothetical globalism attached to Empire.

The reason why Hegel was able to put his ideas on Empire in place relatively early, had to do with his encounter with Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon’s great work was published between 1776 and 1788, and Hegel found it in the library of Carl Friedrich von Steiger in Bern while he was a Hofmeister there from 1793 to 1796, and he read it with enthusiasm.

For Hegel, reading in the first decade of the new French Republic, Gibbon’s monumental documentation of the collapse of Rome would have looked like a commentary on the collapse of the French aristocracy, promising a reawakening of a culture more suited to the fragmented German political landscape, and a culture that was easily identifiable with ancient Greece.

Herder had already established a tradition in Germany for understanding colonialist and imperialist projects in terms of Greek cultural dissemination. For example, speaking of Greece in 1769, he observes that it was a culture established as a colony of seafarers. In addition, he claims that for this reason it lived on in a kind of mobile cultural expression which required a similar mobility of reception.[21] This is an idea which was later to be exceptionally important for Hegel, and it is worth keeping in mind when discussing how Empire relates to negativity after Hegel. The tag we can put on it now would read something like this – the ideal relationship of the developing and learning spirit to the surrounding world is a relationship of mobility aimed at its own cessation, and as such, its social expression bears similarity to colonizing activities. This similarity becomes intensified when we begin to understand what colonization looked like to Herder’s generation – the generation against which that of Hegel measured its own intellectual emergence. Culture was for Herder both mutable and historically determined, and it is probably best understood as the form of expression that tied the nature of individual groups to the common human destiny in which they took part. Greece is a telling reference for him, since it is the culture which he saw as forming the single most positive model for thinking about the genesis and coherence of a common German culture in an age of territorial fragmentation.

The idea of a cultural unity whose forces could work against modernity’s fragmentation was one of the earliest lessons Hegel took from Herder, and with it he allowed the mid-century debates on colonialism and empire to be built into his quest for a solution to the discrepancies between individual experience and group identity. Hegel provided virtually no commentary on Gibbon, so there is a lot of conjecture in attempts to position the English historian in Hegel’s early thought. Nevertheless, given the subsequent directions his historical philosophy took, it seems reasonable to assume he was reading Gibbon more or less the way he is popularly received today – as testimony to the circularity of history – a circularity that contains within it the most pressing demands of Hegel’s historical dialectic. Empires come and go, the rise to fame, logistical and economical supremacy followed by disorganization and collapse seems one of the fundamental patterns that condemn humanity to the stasis against which Hegel struggled. He referenced this much more explicitly in his readings of Faust, where Goethe conceived humanity’s secular path to salvation in terms of a restlessness and striving, driven by the force of negation embodied in Mephistopheles, the “spirit that always negates.”

Negativity in Goethe, as in Hegel becomes the multi-facetted force that opposes form while at the same time enabling it. The large body of commentary linking Hegel to Goethe has neglected to relate this founding moment in Hegel’s philosophy to the theme of Empire as the epitome of collapse and regeneration in social form.[22] To do this, we need to isolate a constellation that was important in Hegel’s early writing. The central concept of negativity holds in place not only the more commonly mentioned linked concepts like desire, freedom, self and other. It also extends to such concepts as barbarism, mobility, defense, and others. My interest here is the changed nuance introduced by adding the concept of Empire to this constellation. To do this, I need to mention briefly how negativity emerges alongside the concepts of mobility and the Barbarian, both of these in turn being thought alongside the concept of Empire (and in more shadowy ways, alongside European colonialism).

Hegel first started using the word Barbarian – albeit sparingly – in his early writings in Bern.[23] His context is irregular, but there seems to be a predominant consideration attached to the word – it has to do with the image that he must have derived from Gibbon, of faceless, mobile (we might say deterritorialized) hordes outside the city walls, threatening the sedentary accomplishments of a civilized yet overly complacent humankind. The figure of the barbarian continues to spring almost automatically to Hegel’s mind whenever he wants to provide an image for the moment when culture’s territoriality must face its outside, its negative. And, it might be added, it continued to hold an almost mythical force for Kojčve’s generation, the generation of intellectuals who tried to come to terms with the debasement of human values in Nazi Germany. By the time Adorno and Horkheimer write the Dialectic of Enlightenment, for example, it has acquired a force far surpassing that in Hegel.

And, in keeping with the general understanding of physical mobility as the central defining force of Bildung in his own age, Hegel too sees mobility as a journey in search of a return. As such, it incorporates a teleological, goal-seeking dimension - a dimension that sends the inquiring spirit into the physical world where it encounters the world's stubbornness, its resistance, its negativity. And the subject of improvement incorporates this encounter with the negative within subjectivity, drawing on the force of the negative in order to propel him back to himself, back home. In its goal-seeking dimension, mobility seeks in the final instance to negate itself and allow the traveling subject to return to its proper place. This is a central concern for Hegel. In his foreword to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel makes it clear that the goal of phenomenology only makes sense to him if it can be grasped as a pathway from the self to the world, a path which lays out a journey destined to return spirit and self to itself. What Hegel emphasizes time and again is that concepts themselves need this departure and return if they are to function as concepts.[24] And more, the subject only becomes subject in its actualization through the motions of the concept.

To tell the story of the self-improvement of the subject and, alongside it, of humankind is to wrestle conceptually with the weight of material life, tied to immobility, and at the same time to allow the flights of thought to return to that materiality, while at the same time carefully mapping the territory it covers in the process. It will take but a small development of this idea to see that Hegel’s story is closely related to the weight of sedentary culture and immobile individuals confronting the mobility of European culture, but also the mobility of other cultures, and asking what this might mean for the progress of history.

The negativity that Hegel describes as the moving force of the soul relies upon a regime of difference that is situated in the physical world, in the world of things. If the spirit is to find its way back to itself via the consciousness-spending journey into the world of the negative, then the encounter with difference will have to be understood in terms of the order of things. What this means is that the negativity he associates with barbarism is a necessary moment in the establishment of territoriality.

What this means in the present context becomes clearer if we jump to Hegel’s later works. In his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, the geographical determination of history is expressed as a territorial field, a distance across which human action can perform its irrational yet purifying acts. For Hegel, to tell the story of world history is to tell and retell this mobility, this excursion into nature-as-territory, into negativity - an excursion whose only purpose can be to return to a nature-become-property. And in the process the subject returns as the subject authorized to determine this relationship for himself - the subject authorized to accept his own alienation from nature. The subject returning from negativity is destined to sedentary life. For it is here that man's freedom from nature expresses itself as a relationship to property.

Tsenay Serequeberhan has shown how, in the Philosophy of Right, Hegel uses this conception of objectification and property to imagine how colonialism might solve the problems of civil society – much in the same way the ideologues of German colonialism would argue 50 years later at mid-century. Her conclusion is that Hegel’s presentation of “colonial expansion as the manifestation of the Idea” allows him to “metaphysically articulate and ethically justify the colonialist eventuations of European history.”[25] What is omitted in this conclusion is Hegel’s ambivalent stance on the combination of property and mobility – in other words on the mobility of capital and the acquisition of territory, the two central pillars of colonial expansion.

For Hegel, the Idea can only be conceived as manifesting itself in colonial expansion if the subjective acts involved therein are understood against the background of his debates on negativity. The negativity of outward expansion is coupled to that of mobile capital, and can find its own negation only in the acquisition of property as an objectification of personality.

Hegel does not state it explicitly, but it seems that, if colonization is to offer any kind of solution for him, it would have to require the sedentary moment of settler colonization. The importance of this sedentarizing moment for Hegel as the quintessential moment in world history is evident in his discussion of the emergence of the Christian German world.

The German world's original relationship with nature is one of migration into the great central European forests, but Hegel emphasizes that this migratory origin was a state of barbarism that should not be confused with true freedom - and here he mentions Rousseau. For the barbarian origins of the Germanic nations are themselves only viewed in a positive light where their tendency is sedentary. In order to make this point, Hegel distinguishes between two branches of the German nations - which we might call the nomadic and the sedentary. He speaks of “the German nations who remained in their ancient habitations and those who spread themselves over the Roman Empire, and mingled with the conquered peoples.”[26] The latter resulted in barbarian migrations and the emergence of new and hybrid nations, whose mental and moral existence remains marked by hybrid division. These nations have become the Romanic nations - Italy, Spain, Portugal and France. They are of course also to a large extent the merchant and colonizing nations, the driving force of the new world order whose emergence so clearly troubled many German commentators from the mid-18th century onward.

Hegel inherited this trouble around the topic of commerce and empire from his predecessors. The German reception of the Scottish Enlightenment had forced the issue of commerce as an activity aimed at the betterment of mankind, and by the time Hegel wrote, it was almost obligatory to take a stance on whether commercial activity meant the fulfillment of human destiny (like Goethe was increasingly to argue), or if it bore with it the seeds of exploitation (as we find so strongly stated in Herder, more ambivalently in the later Kant).

Hegel’s position on this point is noteworthy, and it will bring me to my conclusion. Almost everything he had developed by way of a systematic explanation of the individual’s place in society led him to believe that the unrestricted mobility of capital is a detrimental thing.[27] Here he was close to Schelling’s explanation of bad infinity as best exemplified in the English national debt. It is true, his interests in the Scottish theorists inclined him towards a minimal State intervention in the economy.[28] But for him social change had to be thought in terms of the social mechanisms and institutions that might regulate the wayward mobility encouraged by free commerce. Hegel made it clear in his early Jena work on the German constitution that he identified the moderate stabilizing force of State institutions with the changing face of Empire he was witnessing at his own doorstep. In his manuscript on Philosophy of Nature and Philosophy of Spirit of 1805, he read the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire and the concurrent institution of the Napoleonic Code in France and parts of Germany as the demise of an ineffectual Empire whose negativity was constantly escaping its own codification. And in its place he imagined a codification of modern ideas of property that permitted the individual to take charge of nature in its own proper domain. For Hegel, the collapse of a defunct Empire and the institution of a modern Empire began to look like an opportunity to preserve local particularities within a well defined local  – it’s tempting to say ethnic – territory, while at the same time conceptualizing a “global” order that promised the progress of humanity.

 

This seems to me to be the right moment to pause and call to mind a structural analogy between that moment in European history and philosophy and our own– the postcolonial moment where one imperial order gives way to another, bringing with it a cultural order characterized by the apologist invention of the local and the ideology of the global – with such deadly results. In Hegel’s eyes, the global looked like Napoleon on his horse, and the corpses on the fields between the Metztal and the Munketal, just outside his city seemed easy to disregard alongside the promise of a new social order. Negativity’s conversion to territoriality looked like a triumph of the global alongside a sudden celebration of the local. I suppose if he were writing today, I would vehemently oppose what he would have to say about our own new social order. But then, maybe not even Hegel could have imagined George W. Bush on a horse.

An examination of the Hegelian dialectic and the role it has played in formulating some of the key concepts of postcolonial theory should re-awaken Stuart Hall’s question: (1996) “when was the postcolonial?”.[29] The manner in which we choose to answer this question has a lot to do with the way we read Hegel today, and it will also determine the usefulness of the idea of the postcolonial as an analytical and critical concept.

 



[1] “Hegel ist immer an der Zeit.” Ernst Bloch, “Nachschrift 1962,” Subjekt-Objekt. Erläuterungen zu Hegel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1981), 13. See also the motto from Derrida that Stuart Barnett chooses for his introduction to Hegel After Derrida (London: Routledge 1998), p. 1: “We will never be finsihed with the reading or rereading of Hegel, and, in a certain way, I do nothing other than attempt to explain myself on this point.”

[2] Jean-Luc Nancy, Hegel. The Restlessness of the Negative, trans. Jason Smith and Steven Miller (Minneapolis: University of Minesota Press 2002), p. 3.

[3] Bloch, “Vorwort zur Ausgabe 1951,” Subjekt-Objekt, 11.

[4] Theodor W. Adorno, “Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel,” Hegel: Three Studies, transl. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 1993), 89.

[5] See Kant’s announcement of his lecture plan for the year 1765-66, where he states that his three-fold conception of geography (as physical, moral and political geography) is “the actual foundation of all history, without which it can be little distinguished from fairy tales.” Immanuel Kants Nachricht von der Einrichtung seiner Vorlesungen in dem Winterhalbenjahre von 1765-1766. In: Gesammelte Schriften. Hrsg. von der Koeniglich-Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin. Berlin, 1902-. Vol. 2: 312.

[6] Jon Stewart (ed.), The Hegel Myths and Legends (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press 1996).

[7] Robert Bernasconi, “Hegel at the Court of the Ashanti” in Hegel after Derrida, ed. Stuart Barnett (London & New York: Routledge 1998) 41- 63. Bernasconi is careful to isolate the colonialist impulses in Hegel’s treatement of Africa. Tsenay Serequeberhan, “The Idea of Colonialism in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” in International Philosophical Quarterly 29 (1989) 311-12. Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel and Haiti, Critical-Inquiry 26 (2000): 821-865.

[8] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1999), 58.

[9] Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage 1994) 210.

[10] Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1980).

[11] Alexandre Kojčve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Lectures on the ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’, transl. James H. Nichols (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press 1989), p. 8.

[12] Kojčve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, p. 8.

[13] Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, transl. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1977).

[14] Kojčve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, p. 158n6.

[15] Kojčve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, p. 159 (note).

[16] Kojčve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, p. 160-1 (note).

[17] Erik de Vries, „Alexandre Kojčve – Carl Schmitt Correspondence and Alexandre Kojčve, ‘Colonialism from a European Perspective’,” Interpretation 29 (2001): 91-130, p. 93.

[18] Michael S. Roth, Knowing and History. Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press 1988), p. 126.

[19] Alexandre Kojčve, ‘Colonialism from a European Perspective’,” Interpretation 29 (2001): 115-130, p. 115.

[20] In a marginal comment on the introductory section of “The German Constitution” (1801), where he notes the necessity for a thorough definition of the conditions for individual accession to power, Hegel writes: „Das deutsche Reich ist von dieser Seite wie das Reich der Natur unerschöpflich im Großen und unergründlich im Kleinen, und diese Seite ist es, welche die Eingeweihten in die Kenntnisse des unendlichen Details der Rechte mit jener Bewunderung, jenem Staunen vor der Ehrwürdigkeit des deutschen Staatskörpers erfüllt.“ (“The German Empire is in this respect like the Empire of Nature, inexhaustible in the whole and unfathomable in detail, and it is this aspect which arouses in those conversent in the unending details of the law such admiration and astonishment for the honourable qualities of the German State.”) G.W.F. Hegel, Werke in 20 Bänden. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1970, Band 1: Frühe Schriften, p. 455.

[21] Johann Gottfried Herder, Werke, vol. 9/II: Journal meiner Reise im Jahr 1769; Pädagogische Schriften, ed. Rainer Wisbert (Frankfurt a. M. 1997), p. 23.

[22] Kaufmann hints at a line of thought running from Kant’s cosmopolitanism (1784) to Hegel and Goethe’s negativity). Hegel. A Reinterpretation (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 1985), p. 119.

[23] For example in his Fragmente über Volksreligion und Christentum (1793-1794), where it stands for a vague notion negating the practices of Christianity. Hegel, Frühe Schriften, p. 169.

[24] According to Michael Beddow, Hegel writes in a tradition that regards human action as informed by teleological principles that are essentially biological in nature, and that are to be grasped as internal, not external. This teleology works "purely from within; each entity [has] an immanent form which it [strives] to express, and the realisation of that potential [is] its telos, its end" The Fiction of Humanity: Studies in the Bildungsroman from Wieland to Thomas Mann (Cambridge : Cambridge UP 1982: 136).

[25] Tsenay Serequeberhan, “The Idea of Colonialism in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.” International Philosophical Quarterly 29 (1989): 301-318, p. 318. I have changed the verb endings to fit the grammar of my sentence.

[26] G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, transl. J. Sibree (New York: Dover 1956), p. 348.

[27] See Jay Drydyk, “Capitalism, Socialism and Civil Society” Monist 74(3) (1991) 457-477.

[28] Terry Pinkard, Hegel. A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000), p. 193.

[29] Stuart Hall, “When was ‘the Postcolonial?’  Thinking at the Limit,” in I. Chambers and L. Curti, eds., The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, (London and New York, 1996), pp. 242-260.