1. Henry James, What Maisie Knew. London: Penguin, 1985: 217.
2. Hegel, qtd. in Werner Hamacher, Pleroma. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998: 260. All subsequent citations to occur in the body of the text as (Hamacher).
3. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit. Tr. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977: ¶97. All subsequent citations from the Phenomenology will refer to this edition and occur in the body of the text preceded by "¶".
4. "Furthermore, every particular metaphor -- if, as Hegel demands, it represents more than merely decorative ornament for the presentation of science -- marks the fissure through which it is connected to the specific level to which it refers. Consequently, again, the metaphorics of consuming, of sucking, of digesting, which structures the entire corpus of Hegel's texts just as much as the metaphorics of grasping or generating does, institutes a connection between the absolute and the form of nature as its self-alienation" (Hamacher 234-5).
5. "The thing (the referent) is relieved (relevée, aufgehobene) in the sign: raised, elevated, spiritualized, magnified, embalmed, interiorized, idealized, named since the name accomplishes the sign. In the sign, the (exterior) signifier is relieved by signification, by the (ideal {ideel}) signified sense, Bedeutung, the concept. The concept relieves the sign that relieves the thing. The signified relieves the signifier that relieves the referent" (Glas 8).
6. De Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality" in Blindness and Insight. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1973: 211.
7. The Phenomenology of Mind. Trans. J. B. Baillie. New York: Harper, 1967: 149.
8. One reading which nuances this passage in a new light is Andrzej Warminski's insight that this example rests on a distinction between the act of looking as opposed to the act of reading, which elides the notion of materiality: "And the necessary exclusion of this conditioning materiality from Hegel's construction and critique of sense-certainty's phenomenality is readable in the text's suppression of the act of reading: when we come back to sense-certainty now, this noon, with the piece of paper on which we had written "Now is the night," we do not read it, says the text, but rather look at it (sehen. . . wieder an) -- when it is only reading the inscription that will allow us to compare night and day"(Warminski 188).
9. This idea comes from Judith Butler's reading of Hegel's rhetorical strategies in Subjects of Desire: "The grammatical subject is, thus, never self-identical, but is always and only itself in its reflexive movement; the sentence does not consist of grammatical elements that reflect or otherwise indicate corresponding ontological entities. The sentence calls to be taken as a whole, and in turn indicates the wider textual context in which it itself is to be taken. But the way in which this context is "indicated" is less referential than rhetorical; Hegel's sentences enact the meanings that they convey; indeed they show that what "is" only is to the extent that it is enacted" (Butler 18).
10. "Language catches consciousness in its power to create double meaning willfully. The sense of this fundamental pun cannot be translated directly into English because it depends upon the fact that to be of the opinion of, to mean in the sense of having an opinion, to opine -- meinen in German -- is close to the possessive adjective and possessive pronoun of the first person in German -- mein. Das Meinen is mein" (Verene, Hegel's Recollection, p.30).
11. "The term 'deixis' (which comes from a Greek word meaning "pointing" or indicating") is now used in linguistics to refer to the function of personal and demonstrative pronouns, of tense and of a variety of other grammatical and lexical features which relate utterances to the spatio-temporal co-ordinates of the act of utterance" (Lyons, Semantics, p.636).
12. cf. Mark C. E. Peterson. "Animals Eating Empiricists: Assimilation and Subjectivity in Hegel's Philosophy of Nature". The Owl of Minerva, 23, 1 (Fall 1991): 49-62.
13. I can't help hearing an echo of the last lines of Wallace Stevens's poem "The Snow Man": "And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is." The definite article which precedes the second nothing is what makes it determinate; it determines it.
14. These "scraps of paper" below are most certainly not the same as the "bit of paper" just mentioned, occurring as they do in a paragraph of the Preface which critiques philosophies of pure formalism, but . . . it is another "bit of paper" which is, nonetheless, admissible evidence proving the fact that these bits of paper are nothing if not "material" to Hegel's argument: "What results from this method of labeling all that is in heaven and earth with the few determinations of the general schema, and pigeon-holing everything in this way, is nothing less than "a report clear as noonday" on the universe as organism, viz. a synoptic table like a skeleton with scraps of paper stuck all over it, or like the rows of closed and labeled boxes in a grocer's stall. It is as easy to read off as either of these; and just as all the flesh and blood has been stripped from this skeleton, and the no longer living 'essence' [Sache] has been packed away in the boxes, so in the report the living essence of the matter [Wesen der Sache] has been stripped away or boxed up dead" (¶51).
15. I find the majority of de Man's writing impeccable. His focus on the moments in Hegel's writing where the phenomenal determination vanishes as it is sublated in the generality of cognition is particularly astute: "The point is that this certainty vanishes as soon as any phenomenal determination, temporal or other, is involved, as it always has to be. Consciousness ("here" and "now") is not "false and misleading" because of language; consciousness is language, and nothing else, because it is false and misleading. And it is false and misleading because it determines by showing (montrer or demontrer, deiknumi) or pointing (Zeigen or Aufzeigen), that is to say in a manner that implies the generality of the phenomenon as cognition (which makes the pointing possible) in the loss of the immediacy and the particularity of sensory perception (which makes the pointing necessary): consciousness is linguistic because it is deictic" (de Man "Hypo" 41-2). I only wish to point out the interpretive shading that is taking place. Either one decides to dwell on "the loss of the immediacy of sense perception" (presence), or one focuses on the capacity of language to express (point to) what is not there (absence). I am choosing to focus on the movement between the loss of particular immediacy and the gain of cognitive universality. This idea of "in-betweenness" takes on a special relevance in my discussion of Hegel's Aesthetics below.
16. "Modern linguistics classifies pronouns as indicators of the utterance (Benveniste) or shifters (Jakobson). . . . In fact, it is impossible to find an objective referent for this class of terms, which means that they can be defined only by means of reference to the instance of discourse that contains them." Agamben, Language and Death. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991: 23. cf. Lyons: "Anaphor presupposes that the referent should already have its place in the universe-of-discourse. Deixis does not; indeed deixis is one of the principal means open to us of putting entities into the universe-of-discourse so that we can refer to them subsequently" (Lyons 673).
17. Hegel, The Philosophy of History. Tr. J. Sibree. Buffalo: Prometheus, 1991: 392-3.
18. "Force is dynamic and functional as opposed to static and substantive -- the activities making up the language-object that is force are functions and relations" (Sussman 35).
19. Cf. Hyppolite 26. Hyppolite is writing specifically about poetry which has "relieved" itself of the greatest amount of its sensuousness. Poetry comes closest to the Idea, but it is still not sense in-itself and for-itself: "No art, except poetry, signifies itself by doubling itself" (ibid.). One could perhaps see the defining gesture of poetry in this penultimate, orphic moment of turning back on itself. Instead of escaping from signification or retreating to the sensuous, poetry points to itself ('signifies itself')and suggests the sense of its own turning (away) from itself as making sense.
20. "Fassen is originally to 'grasp', and hence to 'apprehend'. Begreifen is similar" (Aesthetics 404). See also footnote on p.306: "Begreifen is literally to touch or handle; figuratively, to comprehend or understand."
21. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature. Tr. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), §363. Henceforth cited parenthetically as PON followed by section §.
22. "One must of course note that the eighteenth- and nineteenth century uses of infection are broader than our own; we will see Hegel appealing to the notion of infection, for example, in his account of vegetable assimilation, where it means as much as the intussusception or intake of liquids. . . . Nevertheless, the proximity to pathology in the word infection remains a significant overtone or undercurrent throughout the vocabulary of reproduction through contagium. Infection is simultaneously assimilatory, sexual, pathological, and, one must say, if only in memory of Novalis' pharmaceutical view of the soul and Goethe's geistige Anastomose, eminently 'spiritual.' " I am merely adding "linguistic" to this catalogue of infection's attributes. See David Farrell Krell, Contagion: Sexuality, Disease, and Death in German Idealism and Romanticism, (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998), 92. Henceforth cited in the body of the text as Krell.
23. Although I will not explicitly analyze the following passages, the notion of language as infection (as a virus -- where the 'I' veers into "Us") has implicitly guided my thinking on this subject. The first citation is from the chapter entitled "Culture and its realm of actuality:" "Language, however, contains it in its purity, it alone expresses the 'I', the 'I' itself. This real existence of the 'I' is, qua real existence, an objectivity which has in it the true nature of the 'I'. The 'I' is this particular 'I' -- but equally the universal 'I'; its manifesting is also at once the externalization and vanishing of this particular 'I', and as a result the 'I' remains in its universality. The 'I' that utters itself is heard or perceived; it is an infection [Ansteckung] in which it has immediately passed into unity with those for whom it is a real existence, and is a universal self-consciousness. That it is perceived or heard means that its real existence dies away; this its otherness has been taken back into itself; and its real existence is just this: that as a self-conscious Now, as a real existence, it is not a real existence, and through this vanishing it is a real existence. This vanishing is thus itself at once its abiding; it is its own knowing of itself, and its knowing itself as a self that has passed over into another self that has been perceived and is universal" (Phenomenology ¶508). The second major instance of "infection" occurs in the chapter "The abstract work of art:" The work of art therefore demands another element of its existence, the god another mode of coming forth than this, in which, out of the depths of his creative night, he descends into the opposite, into externality, into the determinations of the Thing which lacks self consciousness. This higher element is Language -- an outer reality that is immediately self-conscious existence. Just as individual self-consciousness is immediately present in language, so it is also immediately present as a universal infection [Ansteckung]; the complete separation into independent selves is at the same time the fluidity and universally communicated unity of the many selves; language is the soul existing as soul" (Phenomenology ¶710). Just as disease is communicable, so is language contagious.
24. Krell helps clear up the distinction between these words: "No doubt Hegel means by infection what Goethe meant by intussusception. . . . Infection as we know it is what we heard Schelling call Ansteckung, [infection and toxification] catching a cold, for example, by being invaded and contaminated by a bacillus or virus. . . . Yet the infectious sucking of plants is not as innocent as it may seem. For all assimilation in vegetable and animal organization is, as Novalis, Schelling, and Hegel all observe, a kind of poisoning. Hegel declares Infektion 'the infinite power of life'" (Krell 147).
25. "Production and intuition, the concept of the sign thus will be the place where all contradictory characteristics intersect. All oppositions are reassembled, summarized and swallowed up within it. All contradictions seem to be resolved in it, but simultaneously that which is announced beneath the same sign seems irreducible or inaccessible to any formal opposition of concepts; being both interior and exterior, spontaneous and receptive, intelligible and sensible, the same and other, etc., the sign is none of these, neither this nor that, etc. Is this contradiction dialecticity itself? Is dialectics the resolution of the sign in the horizon of the nonsign, of presence beyond the sign?" (Derrida, "Pit" 79-80).
26. "C/M) Any linguistic code contains a particular class of grammatical units which Jespersen (1922b) labeled SHIFTERS: the general meaning of a shifter cannot be defined without a reference to the message." (Jakobson 388). See also P.388: According to Peirce, a symbol Š is associated with the represented object by a conventional rule, while an index is in existential relation with the object it represents. Shifters combine both functions and belong therefore to the class of INDEXICAL SYMBOLS" (ibid. 388).
27. "As a striking example Burks cites the personal pronoun. I means the person uttering I. Thus on the one hand, the sign I cannot represent its object without being associated with the latter "by a conventional rule," and in different codes the same meaning is assigned to different sequences such as I, ego, ich, and ja: consequently I is a symbol. On the other hand, the sign I cannot represent its object without "being in existential relation" with its object: the word I designating the utterer is existentially related to his utterance and hence functions as an index." (Jakobson 388).
28. "Among these double constructs we would have to number Appearance, whose translation of the movements of reflection into a hierarchical configuration is also a translation of formal structures into historical and teleological progressions. The notion (Begriff) and sublation (Aufhebung) also fall into this intermediary category, playing both structural and metaphysical roles. The Begriff is both a structural and a metaphysical horizon, while the Aufhebung translates the mechanics of negation into the teleology of history" (Sussman 50).
29. Novalis, Novalis: Philosophical Writings. Albany: SUNY UP, 1997: 59.
30. Maurice Blanchot, "Fragmentaire," qtd. in Warminski, Readings in Interpretation. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987: 183.
31. Vico, The New Science. Tr. Bergin and Fisch. Ithaca: Cornell UP: 405: "So that, as rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them (homo intelligendo fit omnia), this imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them (homo non intelligendo fit omnia); and perhaps the latter proposition is truer than the former, for when man understands he extends his mind and takes in all things, but when he does not understand he makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them."
32. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind (London: Oxford UP, 1971), 147.
33. Hegel, "The Spirit of Christianity," in Early Theological Writings. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1948: 250-1.
34. Though this might seem too obvious, it should be noted that the text must exist in order for a person to be able to read and reread it (not just hear it as at a lecture). Note: (1) "read away," "read off," "read up" (or "eaten up" -- "lesen vs. essen") as opposed to "read over and over;" (2) The pun on "meinen" recalling the same vocabulary from the chapter on sense-certainty; (3) The "we" comes in to take the place of the subject as writer, whereas in the bulk of the paragraph the subject position is that of the reader; (4) Here, Hegel tacitly acknowledges the difficulty of his own style of philosophical writing.
35. "The dialectic of language, of the tongue [langue], is dialectophagy" (Derrida, Glas 9).
36. Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989: 207.
37. cf. Hamacher, Pleroma, p.231.
38. Cf. Hegel's interest in Sense (Sinn) juxtaposed with a commentary of Derrida's:
'Sense' is this wonderful world which is used in two opposite meanings. On the one hand it means the organ of immediate apprehension, but on the other hand we mean by it the sense, the significance, the thought, the universal underlying the thing. And so sense is connected on the one hand with the immediate external aspect of existence, and on the other hand with its inner essence. Now a sensuous consideration does not cut the two sides apart at all; in one direction it contains the opposite one too, and in sensuous immediate perception it at the same time apprehends the essence and the Concept" (Aesthetics 128-9).
Already the opposition of meaning (the atemporal or nonspatial signified as meaning, as content) to its metaphorical signifier (an opposition that plays itself out within the element of meaning to which metaphor belongs in its entirety) is sedimented -- another metaphor -- by the entire history of philosophy. Without taking into account that the separation between sense (the signified) and the senses (sensory signifier) is enunciated by means of the same root (sensus, Sinn). One might admire, as does Hegel, the generousness of this stock, and interpret its secret releve speculatively, dialectically; but before utilizing a dialectical concept of metaphor, one must examine the double turn which opened metaphor and dialectics, permitting to be called sense that which should be foreign to the sense" ("White Mythology" 228).
Derrida's distinctions here are based on his assumption that Hegel considers "meaning" as a "content" and as a single, teleologically determined "signified." My argument is that this perspective is problematic in that "meaning" can be characterized as that which shuttles or shifts between "signifiers" and "signifieds"; i.e. as the mode and medium of transference rather than fixed or final destination. "Meaning" like metaphor is two-sided: it has a sensuous side which connects it to the signifier and an intelligible side which connects it to the signified. In effect, Derrida is "cut[ting] the two sides apart." Thus, we have the notion of a play of "meanings" taking place between signifiers and signifieds, rather than just a play of "signifiers" in relation to other signifiers.
39. "Hegel's interest is in the Begriff, but the road past ordinary logical meanings to this higher sense of the concrete concept is the metaphor which always points to what is not present in the logical sense of things" (Verene 24).
40. Aesthetics, p.39: "In this way the sensuous aspect of art is spiritualized, since the spirit appears in art as made sensuous. "[via footnote p.92, Derrida, "Pit": "in art the sensuous is spiritualized (vergeistigt) and the spirit "sensualized (versinnlicht)"].
41. Cf. Philosophy of Mind §462, Zusatz: "Words thus attain an existence animated by thought. This existence is absolutely necessary to our thoughts. We only know our thoughts, only have definite, actual thoughts, when we give them the form of objectivity, of a being distinct from our inwardness, and therefore the shape of externality, and of an externality, too, that at the same time bears the stamp of the highest inwardness. The articulated sound, the word, is alone such an inward externality. To want to think without words as Mesmer once attempted is, therefore, a manifestly irrational procedure which, as Mesmer himself admitted, almost drove him insane. But it is also ridiculous to regard as a defect of thought and a misfortune, the fact that it is tied to a word; for although the common opinion is that it is just the ineffable that is the most excellent, yet this opinion, cherished by conceit, is unfounded, since what is ineffable is, in truth, only something obscure, fermenting, something which gains clarity only when it is able to put itself into words. Accordingly, the word gives to thoughts their highest and truest existence."
42. Preface #53 (p.32): "The Understanding, in its pigeon-holing process, keeps the necessity and Notion of the content itself -- all that constitutes the concreteness, the actuality, the living movement of the reality which it arranges. Or rather, it does not keep this to itself, since it does not recognize it; for, if it had this insight, it would surely give some sign of it. It does not even recognize the need for it, else it would drop its schematizing, or at least realize that it can never hope to learn more in this fashion than one can learn from a table of contents. A table of contents is all that it offers, the content itself it does not offer at all."
43. Derrida, "Force and Signification" in Writing and Difference. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978: 27.
44. "Epilogue," Warminski, 187-8: "But, of course, this piece of paper on which I write and read this is not the particular piece of paper sewn into my copy of the Phenomenology and that I can see, touch, smell, and taste. It is also not the particular piece of manuscript paper preserved in the Hegel archives in Bochum on which Hegel wrote "Now is the day" and "Now is the night" and compared them. To identify it with that piece of paper would be to fall back into the position of sense-certainty: the Now of reading and of writing is not one we can see; it can only be written and read. This does not mean that we are talking about an ideal, universal piece of paper, as it were. No, this piece of paper on which I write "Now is the day" and "Now is the night" and read them is the material condition of possibility of the opposition between the particular and universal. It is neither the particular, immediate, phenomenal piece of paper available to the senses nor the universal, mediated, intelligible piece of paper available to the mind, but other: a piece of paper that exists in the here and now of writing and reading. It is a piece of paper conditioned by the materiality (as distinguished from phenomenality) of reading and writing."
45. This passage from Hegel's Aesthetics could be fruitfully juxtaposed with the following citation from Derrida's essay on Hegel's semiology. I realize that Derrida is referring specifically to certain passages in the Encyclopedia in his discussion of Hegel and the sign. But he extrapolates from this point to comment on Hegel's entire system and certainly if one is able to criticize Hegel when the parts of his system don't appear to fit together nicely, then one should also be allowed to use overlooked and underused passages in order to support an argument which attempts to show the amazing interconnectedness of the various parts. Here, I juxtapose these quotations in order to show my opposition to Derrida's determined effort to focus on what he perceives to be Hegel's "teleological" imperative: "Since the sign is the negativity which "relifts" (releve) sensory intuition into the ideality of language, it must be hewn from a sensory matter which in some way is given to it, offering a predisposed nonresistance to the work of idealization. The idealizing and relevant negativity which works within the sign has always already begun to disturb sensory matter in general. . . . Among other consequences it follows from this that one may consider the concept of physical ideality as a kind of teleological anticipation, or inversely that one may recognize in the concept and value of ideality in general a "metaphor." Such a displacement -- which would summarize the entire itinerary of metaphysics -- also would repeat the "history" of a certain organization of functions that philosophy has called "meaning." The equivalence of these two readings is also an effect of the Hegelian circle: the sensualist or materialist reduction and the idealist teleology following, in opposite directions, the same line. The line that we have just named, as provisional convenience, 'metaphor'"(Derrida, "Pit" 90).
46. "Without this overflow of language, of the tongue that swallows and eats itself, that is silent, tongue-tied, or dies, that also vomits a natural remain(s) -- its own -- it can neither assimilate nor make equal to the universal power of the concept, language would not be language a living language hears, understands itself. Language would not be what it is in (it)self, conformably to its concept (Begriff), to what in it conceives itself, grasps, takes possession of itself, catches and comprehends itself, elevates itself, leaves with one wing stroke {d'un coup d'aile} the natal ground and carries off its natural body" (Glas 9).
47. For a comprehensive reading across Hegel's writings which focuses on the traces of the rhetorical tradition evident in his discourse, including the notion of reading as digestion, see John H. Smith, The Spirit and the Letter: Traces of Rhetoric in Hegel's Philosophy of Bildung. And the following succinct summary of that praxis: "the individual must work through the preformed content of the past by "consuming," "digesting," and "reinterpreting" the fullness of already existing formulations. More precisely, the very images of digestion and economic appropriation themselves refer back to a tradition of rhetorico-hermeneutic pedagogical praxis according to which the student, after having mastered the praecepta of the ars rhetorica, "consumes" the great texts of the pasts by lectio, "digests" them by selectio and imitatio, and transforms them creatively by a program leading from literal translation (interpretatio) to independent production (aemulatio)" (Smith 20).
48. Blake, "Annotations to Reynolds" in The Complete Poetry and Prose. New York: Doubleday, 1988: 647.
49. Cf. Warminski's commentary: "That the sign here is "a vector" or a "directional motion" that can manifest itself only as a turn or a trope means, in short, that the determination of its referential, carrying-back, function necessarily takes place as a trope, and a phenomenalizing trope at that. In other words, it has acquired, or has "conferred" upon it, a "signifying function," as de Man says, which function has to be understood very precisely in terms of the Saussurian distinction between the "signification" and the "value" of a given utterance. (Signification always takes back to the context, the referential context, of an utterance, . . . whereas value is purely intrasemiotic)" (Aesthetic Ideology 25-6).
50. "The first point that arises here is grounded in the fact that art in general loves to tarry with the particular. The Understanding hurries, because it forthwith summarizes variety in a theory drawn from generalizations and so evaporates it into reflections and categories, or else it subordinates it to specific practical ends, so that the particular and the individual are not given their full rights. To cling to what, given this position, can only have a relative value, seems therefore to the Understanding to be useless and wearisome. But, in a poetic treatment and formulation, every part, every feature must be interesting and living on its own account, and therefore poetry takes pleasure in lingering over what is individual, describes it with love, and treats it as a whole in itself. . . . The advance of poetry is therefore slower than the judgments and syllogisms of the Understanding to which what is important, whether in its theorizing or in its practical aims and intentions, is above all the end result, while it is less concerned with the long route by which it reaches it" (Aesthetics 981).cf. Preface ¶32, and the understanding's ability to look death in the face -- "tarrying with the negative."
51. "To comprehend the structure of a becoming, the form of a force, is to lose meaning by finding it. . . . To say that force is the origin of the phenomenon is to say nothing. By its very articulation force becomes a phenomenon. Hegel demonstrated convincingly that the explication of phenomenon by a force is a tautology. But in saying this, one must refer to language's peculiar inability to emerge from itself in order to articulate its origin, and not to the thought of force. Force is the other of language without which language would not be what it is ("Force and Signification," 26-7).
52. Carriers in the sense that metaphors that "carry over," and as in these particular definitions of "carrier," e.g.: "5 a: a bearer and transmitter of a causative agent of an infectious disease; esp. : one who carries the causative agent of a disease systemically but is immune to it b: an individual (as one heterozygous for a recessive) having a specific gene that is not expressed in its phenotype 6 b: a substance (as a catalyst) by whose agency some element or group is transferred from one compound to another 7 a: an electromagnetic wave or alternating current whose modulations are used as signals in radio, telephonic, or telegraphic transmission."
53. "We are taking the word, element, in the Hegelian sense of medium (milieu), as when we say the "element of water." When saying "the self," we want to note, like Hegel, the absolutely reflective character of being itself and of the "I" (Hyppolite 11, footnote #2).