"Was the sum of all knowledge only to know how little in his presence one would ever reach it?" [NOTE 1]
The first mistake was thinking that I could absorb, retain, and assimilate all the information about Hegel that I was reading/accumulating. Thinking, against the grain of my own potential argument, that I would never be able to produce knowledge adequate to the task of critiquing Hegel's version of the acquisition of knowledge, instead I settled into the equally disconcerting task of accumulating knowledge culled from reading previous commentaries, expositions and critiques. Sometimes at night reading faster and faster in search of some magic word -- or exact quotation -- that would crystallize all the scattered hypotheses, as if I could ever make that pulp of paper, written and read, more appetizing by discovering its original recipe. Thus I had unwittingly placed myself in the position of Hegel's dog in the following quotation cited by Werner Hamacher: "The belief that we could experience something substantially new through the reading is, according to Hegel's formulation in the Introduction to the lectures on the philosophy of religion, 'just as absurd, as if we attempted to endow a dog with spirit by encouraging it to chew on printed matter.'[NOTE 2]
What is this endless searching after the "right," or the "perfect" quotation? Can the perfect words be found to substitute for the perfect words which would express the meaning of what you want to say? Haven't "we" learned that "it is just not possible for us ever to say, or express in words, a sensuous being that we mean"[NOTE 3]? And if it is impossible for us to express completely what we ourselves will have said, then surely it must be impossible for us to interpret correctly what we think others mean. Clearly, one must give up this perpetually promiscuous, omnivorous reading in favor of a more selective, directed and resistant form of writing. That is, to "produce" the work instead of just thinking about (and thinking through) what others have already written (and may have already meant). In the midst of this process I was confronted with this question: "When will you ever know enough to write?" Certainly, the point must be that reading (collecting and digesting pre-written, or undigested materials) can become a kind of gluttony and lead to a form of indigestion, for which the only true negation would be the punishment (or antidote) of vomiting -- i.e., writing.
Another mistake I made was thinking that I could write this paper in any other way than I would eventually write it, because it would come into being exactly in the way that it would. "This paper," then, is neither a purely philosophical essay, nor an attempt at literary criticism, nor an experiential reading of the experience of reading and writing on Hegel, nor an attempt to proffer the "body" as a substance to block the appearance of any form of idealism, not an attempt at conceptualizing form or done in the same form or manner as the object of this description (performance) but a blending of all of these; where these genres meet in the realm of appearances before they mark off and retreat to their separate domains. For the interrogation of the limits of writing comes up against an interrogation of the limits of reading: one must at a certain point, give up reading as if one could endlessly accumulate knowledge and begin to write in order to "produce" knowledge; at least attempt to inscribe the vicissitudes of consciousness in some aspect of provisional permanence, all the while noting that the notion of appearance begins and ends, is re-cognized, in the moment of its disappearance, and that the concentration on this elusive, not to say "sublime" object -- be it an actual, literal object, the actual material of language, the coupling/uncoupling, detachment/ reattachment of signifier/signified -- leads one to follow the process and transit of meaning itself across the borders of matter and ideal, and the real that issues (Die Sache Selbst) from these transits is not seen as contraband, but as bound to something other than matched couplets of negation, those endlessly proliferating strands of dirempted pairs that propel the engine of dialectics.
I was thinking that the activity of reading would provide the stimulant(medicine/ poison) to reverse the process of absorption (intellectual saturation) and digestion (interpretive glut). But the passivity of the reading experience can only be negated or reversed (not preserved but perversed) by actively writing one's own sense (meaning, direction) into the discourse stream that one is swimming against rather than merely remaining poised in the margins, or positing that place of the margin in order to only marginally occupy the position of subject in that discourse, otherwise one would remain a spectator viewing what remains of one's own in another's remains. One must react to and reactivate Hegel by inserting oneself into the cogs of his system and thus be willing to sacrifice one's own sense (or body) in an attempt to pass through a provisional crack or rupture in order to create a flaw in that system's transmission of meaning. This is the paradoxical enterprise of pedagogy.
"She judged that if her whole history, for Mrs. Wix, had been the successive stages of her knowledge, so the very climax of the concatenation would, in the same view, be the stage at which the knowledge should overflow. As she was condemned to know more and more, how could it logically stop before she should know Most? It came to her in fact as they sat there on the sands that she was distinctly on the road to know Everything" (212-13).