Any argument that would focus on meaning, metaphor, and expression must attempt to make sense of Hegel's discussion of language in the first chapter "Sense-Certainty: Or the 'This' and 'Meaning' (Die sinnliche Gewissheit; oder das Diese und das Meinen)." And yet by beginning the focus here with the chapter on "Sense-certainty" the argument will necessarily branch out to other sections of the Phenomenology of Spirit in which language is referred to directly; for example, in the chapter on "Culture and its realm of actuality" where the focus is on language as "infection," and as the medium through which the self ('I') externalizes and alienates itself in the foreign matter that is Culture.
The argument extends across Hegel's Philosophy of Nature and the Aesthetics. This tactic of dipping into the Philosophy of Nature will provide a treatment of the animal organism and its "power of digestion" under the heading of "assimilation," and work to show that in Hegel digestion functions not only as a metaphor [NOTE 4] of reading but also of his fundamental Concept of Aufhebung (cancel, preserve and lift up). In other words, if the act of reading is a metaphor of digestion, then by looking at the literal process of digestion as performed by the body we can begin to remark how Hegel's own metaphors are generated by their passage through the literal body of his examples. Further, we will see how they are inscribed as a kind of writing that cannot be so easily erased and raised up into the Concept, leaving the "body" of meaning (and its body -- it is written) behind in order for a bodiless (unwritten) meaning to be "spiritually" (ideally) incorporated. The underlying theme will be to reinscribe, rewrite and reincorporate the "body" back into Hegel's corpus (qua body of work), to trace the places where Hegel wants to sublate the body (and nature) into the realm of spirit (idea) in order to show that this transition is not always as smooth and as absolute as Hegel would have us think. We will be paying special attention to the function of metaphors of the body which Hegel finds necessary to use even as he would erase or sublate that body into a purified "body" of meaning. The question is: does Hegel actually dissolve particulars on the literal level and only use metaphors as transitory, disposable carriers transporting "meaning" across the border between literal and figurative levels of language, abandoning them once they have entered the realm of the universal (Idea)? The argument will focus on these transitions, in-betweens, mediums, middles, means and the shapes through which they are figured (mediations) -- art, appearance, metaphor, digestion, linguistic shifters and the sign itself -- as places where change comes about through reversal and inversion. The point is not to prove whether or not Hegel's method is successful, but to trace his argument back and across different domains to see what if anything remains or is left over after the process of assimilation has taken place.
One way of doing this is to be attentive to an underlying denigration of writing in Hegel, ("Even in his very last works, Hegel never gave up the wish to erase and to eradicate writing" (Hamacher 112), and to examine the literal remains of his textual body. Here, Derrida's critique of Hegel is relevant more for the questions it raises than for the answers it provides. One simple equation that might provide an heuristic device to roughly mark the differences between Hegel and Derrida would be: In Hegel, you can take the signifier out of the signified, but you can't take the signified out of the signifier; while in Derrida, you can take the signified out of the signifier, but you can't take the signifier out of the signified [NOTE 5]. But Derrida's fixation with the 'play of signifiers' begins to seem inadequate when it merely initiates an endless ricochet between terms, never really settling on any signifier long enough to get caught by the pull of the signified. And even if one does wish to stop this infinitely deferred movement it does not necessarily mean that one would prefer simple closure, the substitution of teleological ends in place of indeterminate beginnings. Rather, perhaps our focus should be directed on how these undecidable meanings shuttle between determinate meanings; neither new beginnings nor ultimate ends, but the ceaseless formation and dissolution of the means, and the transitions between the means through which meanings are conveyed.
In addition to the pun on meinen as signifying both "meaning" (opinion) and "my own," which calls into question the particular claims of sensuous knowledge because meaning cannot be the property of an individual but is immediately a universal, other linguistic cruxes will be found in the double meaning of Sense [Sinn] as both sensory and intelligible; fassen and begreifen as meaning both, literally, mechanical seizure and figuratively, apprehension and comprehension (for which in English we have the "prehensile" notion of grasping things with our hands).
When we move to the Aesthetics we will deal principally with art, appearance, metaphor and figurative language, specifically with the notion of the disappearance of the sensuous element of the work of art and the appearance of the spiritual. This relates to Hegel's view of particulars which I initially believed to be deprecatory, but now view in a different light. If Hegel appears to be pointing out the negligibility of particularity while at the level of consciousness in sense-certainty, it is only because that kind of knowledge is not particular but as expressed in language is immediately universal, and hence does not tarry with particulars in the strict sense, nor in the sense which is crucial to art and aesthetics.
We are not only speaking of the metaphor in the text of philosophy (Derrida), but also of the body in the text of philosophy, the metaphor of the body and the body of metaphor; or better, the metaphor of the body and the body of metaphor in the text of philosophy.
Inasmuch as the idea of this paper is to crisscross between the domains of the Phenomenology, Aesthetics and Philosophy of Nature in order to produce a stratigraphic reading and a tangential writing whose trajectories don't necessarily tie up the loose ends as much as allow them their own space in which to digress, the focus will be on the in-betweens, the very concept of in-betweenness: deixis, shifters, meaning, appearance, force, language, metaphor, art, infection, assimilation, sense. Attention should be paid to the activity of crossing over and of carrying over, of transition and transformation, transit and transference across domains. Just as the etymology of metaphor itself is a carrying over from the literal to the figurative, from one level of meaning to another, so though ricochets between these two poles, but both poles must exist for the movement to occur, propelled by the dialectical motor of negation. And in Hegel the mode of transcendence is a function of language's capacity to transform transience into permanence ["a permanence of impermanence" ¶156] and permanence back into transience; to articulate the threshold across which disappearance appears as disappearance and appearance disappears as appearance.