If theory were to wait for experience it would never come about[NOTE 29]
The metaphor of spirit in the sphere of representation, the translation and transference of its proper and authentic meaning into the improper language of sensuous intuition, cannot therefore successfully be carried over and carried out without loss or residue. But this transition of spirit to its other and its return into itself, presented here in the analysis of metaphor as linguistic form, is not merely the specialist object of a regional aesthetic theory, and this metaphor of metaphors designates the relationship of philosophy to its own self--presentation in language and in those various forms like religion, art and the state -- in which spirit only ever finds a deficient mode of expression. Consequently, the self-relation of the absolute is also afflicted throughout with this fissure which exposes it to its own superseded forms and therefore to a sphere which restricts its own sense and its own presence. (Hamacher 234)
One cannot 'read' Hegel except by not reading him. To read him, not to read him, to understand him, to misunderstand him, to refuse him, falls under the decision of Hegel, or it does not take place.[NOTE 30]
Because the experience of reading Hegel is exactly like becoming absorbed and assimilated by Hegel rather than absorbing and assimilating him, it becomes necessary not only to bite the hand that feeds you but also to retract your hand from what feeds upon it; that is, to write the hand that reads you. To write in a "hand" that is difficult to read, if not completely illegible. Here, illegibility, not at the material level, but on the level of sense would therefore extend and extenuate meaning by privileging "writing" over "reading." Legibility would concern a text that was less dificult and thus more readily assimilated and sublated. But such a text would not provide the extreme form of alienation necessary for the self to become other than itself; that is, to misrecognize and therefore transform itself.[NOTE 31] So we propose a writing that would be simultaneously illegible and inedible as opposed to edible, legible and hence subject to erasure. The question would then be which type of writing is being privileged: that which is written with indelible ink, or that which is "written" with the invisible ink of the voice -- thinking in ink is "autosecretion." Just as everything that is legible is not necessarily intelligible, all that is illegible is not necessarily unintelligible. Over and against the pure presence of the voice, which as the active principle of the mouth would swallow it whole, the disappearance, and the residual trace of that disappearance in writing.
Precisely insofar as it grasps itself as the other of itself and as the self of the other, the clasp of philosophical science almost entirely loses its grip -- once again -- upon both other and self, and consequently upon the system which organizes both, and does so without science being able to account for this its autosecretion -- This grip is therefore also no longer merely entirely that of science, but the bite with which it seizes itself as writing. This implies that the system relates to itself, and its particular moments relate to one another, according to a model of reading, implies further that there is no rigorous criterion for distinguishing the writing and its reading. And not indeed because both were one and the same, or might be reduced to one another through the mediations of hermeneutic art. But, on the contrary, because both, text and exegesis alike, represent forms of appropriation and self-appropriation in which the proper withdraws itself, deforms its own structure, fails to remain proper to itself. (Hamacher 206)
The hand, "especially the hand, as absolute instrument,"[NOTE 32] that feeds as it reads and produces feedback as it writes is also the hand that grips this book, that "bites" these words and grasps the concept by apprehending and comprehending it. To bite the hand that feeds you these words, that reads over your shoulder as you are writing, this handwriting -- actually this was handwriting, but it has now been transformed (doubly mediated) by being transferred to the computer word processor program -- must be rewritten. You must rewrite the whole body of which the hand is only a part. You must read and feed, digest and assimilate, write and bite, secrete and grasp the Concept coming out of itself and into its (your) own in order to produce knowledge. For "Hegel" as text must be consumed even as it consumes you. If it consumes itself it does not remain unutterable or ineffable. If uttered, then also utterly destroyed. Thus, the fixation on a writing that can't be fixed, that can be "read off" but not written off.
One of the cruxes of this paper has been (and will have been) precisely what occurs between the two poles of reading and writing. The questions to be mulled over and slowly and patiently are: what happens to the words after they have been read, after they have been absorbed by the digestive apparatus of the Concept and enter into the circulatory system of meaning? What is the relation between reading and rereading, writing and rewriting? Between what has been written and what will not yet have been read away? Between reading into a text and writing it off? What happens in the space between what is not yet writing and what the reading already no longer is? Between these two poles:
(1) Hence the bread and the wine are not just an object, something for the intellect. The action of eating and drinking is not just a self-unification brought about through the destruction of food and drink, nor is it just the sensation of merely tasting food and drink. The spirit of Jesus, in which his disciples are one, has become a present object, a reality, for external feeling. Yet the love made objective, this subjective element become a thing, reverts once more to its nature, becomes subjective again in its eating. This return may perhaps in this respect be compared with the thought which in the written word becomes a thing and which recaptures its subjectivity out of an object, out of something lifeless, when we read. The simile would be more striking if the written word were read away, if by being understood it vanished as a thing, just as in the enjoyment of bread and wine not only is a feeling for these mystical objects aroused, not only is the spirit made alive, but the objects vanish as objects. Thus the action seems purer, more appropriate to its end, in so far as it affords spirit only, feeling only, and robs the intellect of its own, i.e., destroys the matter, the soulless.[NOTE 33]
(2) This abnormal inhibition of thought is in large measure the source of complaints regarding the unintelligibility of philosophical writings from individuals who otherwise possess the educational requirements for understanding them. Here we see the reason behind one particular complaint so often made against them: that so much has to be read over and over before it can be understood -- a complaint whose burden is presumed to be quite outrageous, and, if justified, to admit of no defense. The philosophical proposition, since it is a proposition, leads one to believe that the usual subject-predicate relation obtains, as well as the usual attitude towards knowing. But the philosophical content destroys this attitude and this opinion. We learn by experience that we meant something other than we meant to mean; and this correction of our meaning compels our knowing to go back to the proposition, and understand it in some other way.(¶63)[NOTE 34]