Derridian dialectic

...what would it be? Could it still be called dialectic? L'economie generale, yes. But this is precisely what is not dialectic in a Hegelian sense (l'economie restreinte).
Or is it? After reading him, one is surprised how much Derrida writes on Hegel. On: that is, not necessarily about, nor simply against Hegel. One is suprised how much Derrida writes not against the dialectic simply, but on it, on top of it, like graffiti, writing over it, lifted above it (Aufgehoben, relevé). One is surprised precisely because Derrida does not seem like the generation that wrote most about or against Hegel in France: the generation of Sartre, Lacan, Bataille, Kojeve, Hyppolite, even Althusser--the "existential" generation (in the sense that they react to existentialism in some way, or, better, to Heidegger). In a way he lifts himself above the fray of those thinkers, bogged down in critiquing dialectical reason, in writing against or about it, and thinks the trace and différance. But that he thinks this trace to lift Hegel above being merely written against or about--this is what one does not expect.
Those interested in Derrida need to think hard about this: Derrida does not write about Hegel (or) to critique him. Deconstruction, if it was the name for those writings about the trace and différance, was precisely what allowed him to write on Hegel and not just simply about Hegel or in such a way as to only critique Hegel.
If this was the case, it means that Derrida was not undoing the dialectic, but precisely lifting it above being written against or written about.
One has to think of this "lifting" if one wants to think what this means for the possibility of a Derridian dialectic. As much as it might mean rescuing or saving, "lifting" can also mean to steal, to pilfer. It is a transgression that precisely does not move into the sphere of a beyond, where something can be written about, comprehended, or written against, definitely opposed. The play on raising up out of the fray of "existential" Hegelianism and also stealing this Hegelianism from the "existential" age is precisely what characterizes the Derridian dialectic. It is what is suppressed and elevated by those Derridians who simply think Hegel exists to be critiqued in the texts of Derrida.
In Derrida's time, this play was also what was being suppressed and elevated--precisely not lifted--by Lacanians. And today, their suppression and elevation is the most tempting way to do away with the lifted Hegelianism of Derrida. Zizek, Badiou: they don't lift Hegel, they comprehend him, they are relieved that they are done with Hegel, that he is over with, that he has been finally made to be commensurate with a postmodernism so he can be used ethically against the old Hegelianism, capitalism. Thanks to Derrida--these Lacanians say--we are able to relieved of Hegel without having the guilt of lifting (relevé) him: thanks to Derrida we can now use him against himself when we write about him. But what--they continue--is all this writing on Hegel in Derrida, this talk about lifting, about relève? We can be relieved of Hegel without lifting him! Stupid Derrida! You do not see how against Hegel you can be in writing about him.
What is dangerous and disgusting about this is that it is a refusal to think about how being relieved of Hegel is precisely lifting him--how relieving (relève) is precisely just another translation of lifting (relève).
What is the Derridian dialectic, then? Can we specify this stolen trace, this trace of a trace? Provisionally: the plunge back into the transgression that Hegelian dialectic effectuates in its negations, but tarrying with this transgression as such, with its negativity just at the point (and time) it negates, so as to make it negate only indeterminately, generally, and yet without reserve. All this means is that the Derridian dialectic is seeing the impossibility of writing against Hegel, and why it could and should always only amount to a lifting of Hegel, a subscription (writing under, which for Derrida is the same as writing on) to the labor of the dialectic. The Derridian dialectic, then, is always a writing on Hegel, a writing that shows how Hegel can never be overcome or elevated (like it is said to be in Zizek, or in Heidegger), never be suppressed.
But what would this dialectic look like? Again, another provisional specification: it would look like "NOUS" (the French word for "we," and, despite or perhaps because of this, also the Greek word for knowing) written on a wall in the Centre Pompidou, traced by Brassaï. A graffiti that writes on something in order to engage what it can't overcome, what it can't write about or against, a dialectic of what can never be suppressed. That is, an infinite lifting, a stealing of what steals, over and over again without reserve.
I'll write on this more in another post. Sketching the relationship to a Hegelianism that seeks to overcome Hegel, and showing that this is precisely not what Derrida does--that he does not want to be relieved of Hegel without lifting Hegel--is all that is crucial here.

Derrida: Trace and Specter

Derrida in his last interview before his death explicitly equates the logic of two of his greatest concepts, the trace and the specter, the first used in his early writings, the second in his robust later work. Reading the latter into the former, one can understand it as a continuation of the thought of Heidegger on Hegel and the latter's concept of Geist. That is, if Geist is composed of the certain, deliberate death (negation) of un-Conceptual existence to be certainly, deliberately reborn in the Concept, understanding the trace as the spectral means understanding it as a different relationship of existence to death, to negativity. The spectral is the un-dead, the concrete anticipation of a death that is never certain to come precisely because it may have already passed the point at which it could be present. But as trace, it is clear from Derrida's early writings that it is also what Heidegger termed the sheltering in the withdrawing of being, the operation of Ereignis or enowning. That is, the relationship of existence to death is reconceived because what relates itself to death for Derrida (and Heidegger) is not existence, but this enowning movement of being, the movement of truth. In short, by combining these two concepts we are able to see that what Derrida was able to do was to exploit the French reworking of Hegelian negativity that was popular in the fifties (and earlier, in the work of Kojeve, Bataille, and Blanchot) with a concept that was not concerned with existence, and thus more concerned with being in the Heideggerian sense (the sense in which it was what was given by a movement of truth). In other words, he was able to bring French philosophy back to the sense of being that Heidegger was pursuing, out of its reified Sartreian form as existence. He was able to bring philosophy out of its concern with death and the present (existence) and towards a concern with death and the movement of presencing (which is chracteristic of enowning). The specter, then, is the figure that was concealed under the figure of the trace in Derrida's early writings.
As far as a critique of Hegel goes, and Heidegger's relationship to it as developed and exploited by Derrida, I can only outline that it would be a returning of Geist to its original signification in German, i.e. ghost. Derrida would show that the work of Heidegger is an exposure of the Hegelian tendency to suppress the spectral in its narration of the death that is constitutive of negativity as determinate--in other words, of the suppression of indeterminate negativity or abstract negativity. I'll outline all this in a clearer fashion sometime in the future--I just write now what is occuring to me. Here's the quote from Derrida that should show the links I've made here:

I have always been interested in this theme of survival, the meaning of which is not to be added on to living and dying. It is originary: life is living on, life is survival [la vie est survie]. To survive in the usual sense of the term means to continue to live, but also to live after death. When it comes to translating such a notion, Benjamin emphasizes the distinction between uberleben on the one hand, surviving death, like a book that survives the death of its author, or a child the death of his or her parents, and, on the other hand, fortleben, living on, continuing to live. All the concepts that have helped me in my work, and notably that of the trace or of the spectral, were related to this "surviving" as a structural and rigorously originary dimension.
-Learning to Live Finally, 26.

Blanchot and Hegel's abstract negativity

In "Literature and the Right to Death," Maurice Blanchot invokes, like Bataille throughout his Inner Experience, the concept of pure nothing, (or, as a power, a becoming) abstract negativity, that Hegel defines early on in the Master-Slave dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit as well as in the beginning of the Science of Logic. The use for this is clear, and also aptly summarizes what I think Bataille thinks of it also, with respect to the work of literature. Blanchot says that "Literature professes to be important while at the same time considering itself an object of doubt," (301), in the sense that it, "by its very activity, denies the substance of what it represents" (310), and thus is "its own negation," (301). This is clear enough. Why? Because it is in this instance merely a contradiction, a determinate negation of itself, a negation that does not overcome our ability to determine the extent to which it is a negation, our ability to discern that it only contradicts itself.
This will become clearer when we contrast it to the abstract negativity that Blanchot outlines next as the real core of this contradiction in literature:

We should point out that as its own negation, literature has never signified the simple denunciation of art or the artist as mystification or deception. Yes, literature is unquestionably illegitimate, there is an underlying deceitfulness in it [because it claims importance and undermines it at the same time, as Blanchot said above]. But certain people have discovered something beyond this: literature is not only illegitimate, it is also null, and as long as this nullity is isolated in a state of purity, it may constitute a marvelous force.
-"Literature and the Right to Death," 301.

Nullity here is something infinitely more than mere negation. It is its nothingness in the abstract, in a way that we cannot determine, "its own unreality," as Blanchot says, "realized" in the extreme. In other words, at the core of literature is something much more than a contradiction, in that it professes legitimacy and at the same time (i.e. as it is constructing its legitimacy--as Blanchot emphasizes, these are simultaneous processes) undermines that legitimacy. Instead, it questions its own legitimacy or constructs its own illegitimacy to such an extent that it is impossible to determine the extent to which this questioning goes: in questioning itself, it goes beyond itself into everything else. In other words, it is impossible to determine how much it is illegitimate, how much it calls itself into question--i.e., whether it is not calling more than itself (society, political regimes, existence, morality) into question with it.
This is Hegel's abstract negativity, or, isolated in the Science of Logic, pure nothing, at play. It escapes all dialectic except by determining itself--and if one rejects the way in which Hegel says it determines itself, then one is only left with its nullity, with its own self-questioning. That is, unless one thinks it in the realm of the Absolute, as something that already must be its own Concept, it will indeed pull everything into question.
In literature, indeed, there is often no speculation such that a dialectic may condition or determine this abstract negativity. Thus there is either denial, which many works of literature engage in, or the process of "opening up completely" to this abstract power, this nullity, this questioning that goes beyond itself, embodying it and allowing it to develop itself, questioning everything.
As a note, we should say that this does not mean that the work of literature is indefinite or vague at its heart. Quite the contrary. This is why it is important to note that the work constructs its illegitimacy within or as its legitimacy: precisely in its determinateness it opens itself up to this abstract negativity. Therefore, the calling-into-question is never just calling into question anything, but rather, in its power to question everything, can particularly question specific entities which it directs itself towards (the state, morality, etc.) in its (de)construction of its legitimacy. This is why Blanchot says that "it is not a question of abusing literature, but rather of trying to understand it and to see why we can only understand it by disparaging it" (302): the work that accesses abstract negativity is not just any indefinite work of the pen--it is precisely the work that is trying to understand itself. Indeed, this is why it can question anything in the first place.

Postscript: After reading this essay over a few times, it seems that Blanchot might, most of the time, be invoking regular Hegelian negativity--i.e. determinate negativity--to explain writing as a work. In the interest of not distorting this invocation, we should not stretch it always into something abstract which it is not. But in the end, however, he really does have in mind and consider literarture as the abstract negativity pointed out by Bataille (whom he befriended about a decade before this essay was written and published): the type of negativity that he is using can only be abstract because it not only questions beyond itself in such a way as to lift the questioning work of literature out of the sphere of its immediate influence, but also calls the reality of everything into question. This is what Blanchot is saying in the following: "The influence authors exert is very great, it goes infinitely [my italics -MJ] far beyond their actions... His [the author's] negation is global It not only negates his situation... but bypasses time" (315). The "global" negation is the abstract negation: "global" and "abstract" mean the same thing here. Indeed, after this passage Blanchot clearly puts forth the general thesis regarding abstract negativity in general:

This negation negates nothing, in the end... the work in which it is realized is not a truly [read: determinate; true according to Hegel, who considers only determinate negation the operation of truthl] negative, destructive act of transformation, but rather the realization of the inability to negate anything [we might also call this "abstract," then], the refusal to take part in the world.
-"Literature and the Right to Death," 315.

Thus, the essay as a whole is attempting to lift the contradiction of determinate negation, the contradiction of bad faith that presents itself as the very form of literature into the sphere in which it operates or acts as itself, constituting itself as literature. All in all it is a rebuttal to Sartre and his ideas on a literature of action which precisely as action withdraws itself into the work of literature--i.e. into the work of constructing a call to action to a world distant from the work. The act for Sartre, Blanchot reveals, is therefore a non-act, a refusal to act (Blanchot criticizes Sartre in the same way, then, that Hegel criticized Kant): Blanchot puts this poignantly when he quips that this would be "making the wall into the world" (310)--"The Wall," ("Le mur"), of course being Sartre's famous short story. Blanchot is showing that the work is already within the world, already "disappears," in the world as he often puts it ("for failure is its essence, disappearance constitutes its realization", 308), and as such has a greater potential for negativity than can actually be determined through any artistic or, on the side of those who receive the literary work, social act. This power is the power of an abstract negativity: it is what, within the bad faith which we do not merely enter as a consequence of our actions (Sartre), but are born into, reside within, and begin any action out of, shatters this faith by developing and refining it to its utmost extent, the instant at which it becomes infinitely indeterminable (abstract). This is why Blanchot says "Literature is not nothing" (313). It is not nothing because it is a nullity, pure nothingness, nothing so simply and purely it is nothing excessively. It is so much nothing that it cannot be nothing. In this respect, it cannot be in any way either, not even as the other side of pure, abstract being in a process of becoming. It is a residue, a product of this determinate becoming, simultaneously being prior to it as well as what cannot be, "not light that has become the repose of noon but the terrible force that draws beings into the world and illuminates them" (326). In other words (that Blanchot essentially uses), it is a self-effacing trace. It should be clear from this last metaphor that most of this is made clear by Derrida in "From Restricted to General Economy" in Writing and Difference, and cannot be thought with respect to Blanchot without the rigor with which he clarifies the mission of Bataille and Hegel.

"The Concept is the killing of the Thing"

Thinking the thing, the object, means thinking the death of the thing as well as its living relation to you: this is what Kojeve means when he says that the Concept is the killing of the Thing. Thinking, for Hegel, is always therefore a thinking of death. It is a thinking that thinks and indeed enacts the death of the thing thought. This is because, at bottom, the being that is thought is at the same time nothing--at least this is what Hegel says in the Science of Logic. The crucial thing to grasp is that even if we consider the thinking of the thing's nothingness, its death or relationship to you [the thinker, the thinking] as dead--even if we consider this thinking of nothingness a reduction of the abstract, pure nothingness of the thing to a determinate nothingness, one still has to think the death of the thing in this act. In other words, sometimes too much stress is put upon Hegel reducing nothingness to something determinate and something able to be exchanged in an economy of being--Bataille and Derrida are guilty of this--and not enough on the fact that what is indeed interesting about the determinate nothingness is that it is nothingness, that it is the death of the thing, the thinking of its negativity as related to whatever that negativity brings about. The recuperation of negativity into a determinate economy of negativity, the extraction of negativity from its abstractness, its purity, is secondary to this engagement with negativity as the other side of every single thing. Only if one stresses that thinking is a thinking of the death of the thing, a simultaneous lifting it into death and out of abstraction, does one really get what Hegel is talking about when he calls this thinking in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit submitting to the "labor, the patience of the negative."
Quickly, I'll just finish by being clear: thinking is the thinking of the death of each thing because at bottom each thing has its being purely, in pure abstraction--in pure being. Now, this is at bottom the same thing as nothingness. Insofar as a being is a being it is equal to nothing--thus, with any thinking of the being of something, one also has to think its negativity. Even when determinate and not pure, the abstract equality of nothing with being reigns... it is what brings about this determination of being and nothing. Thus, one is thinking at the same time of a being and of its death, its abstract nothingness. It is only by thinking this nothingness as part of the thing that one can say something is at all. Also, it is only by thinking this nothingness that one can lift what is equivalent to nothingness out of its abstraction and into the Concept: the Concept is therefore the thinking that comprehends the nothingness, the death of the thing, giving it its determinacy and its nothing equally as it gives it its being. Thus Hippolyte can also say that Language is the death of the thing, along with Hegel, and be right: associating the Concept with language as he does, Hippolyte equally shows us that language is what accesses the nothingness, the death of the thing.