Bad theory

Almost forty years now of theory widely practiced in the US--and we only have a general sense of what theory is. It's a notorious problem that is actually its own solution: theory is one of the only fields where knowledge doesn't know what it has to be. So perhaps we shouldn't ever have to lock down what it is. Neverthless, it has assumed certain shapes. These too should not be avoided or combated in the name of preserving continual micro-self-differentiation etc., etc. Rather, bad elements (that is, bad procedures, bad ways of writing into which we slip--bad theorizing rather than bad theoretical positions or theories) should be identified, isolated, and clipped off or left alone to wither. Here then is what might constitute the "bad theory" (and it should be clear that by "bad" I mean something like "defunct" or "spoiled") that we might just hesitate before putting into service yet again, in another empty denunciation of... what have you:

Theory gone bad is theory that tries to assure the unqualified prolongation of theory. Theory should be finite--more than that, it should continually, with each use, project the point at which it might not be of use. Thus even if you want to say theory is immanent to thought itself, and therefore finite in that respect (when thought dies out theory will die out too), it would still be avoiding the issue: the issue is that the production of something different than theory cannot just be problematized from the outside.

Ethical theory is theory gone bad. There is too much talk of ethics and responsibility now, and this produces a lot of bad theory. This is because the use of ethical terms is the quickest way to build a bridge between politics and theory, or rather the politicization that takes place as theory (as I've outlined before) and the realm of society in all its diffuseness. Perhaps it is an attempt to thicken the overquick linkages to the political realm which early theory indeed made. But there's no reason this has to take the form of ethics--except possibly because this allows theory to sound more relevant, to issue more injunctions. At it's limit, this involves the dissolution of everything political about theory into philosophy, which has always been too comfortable with staying out of politics as it is: why ethics and responsibiliy are semi-proper philosophical subjects is because politics often comes to interrupt and situate philosophical speculation, embarrassing it. Theory that strives to be philosophical (or pseudo-philosophical) shouldn't go down the same road. In this respect I agree even with the extreme assertion of Zizek that, within the period under consideration (1933 and a little after), Heidegger's politicization of his philosophy is more valuable than his outlines of the structures of proper philosophizing (in his courses especially) that borders on an ethics--which is what in general I take away from his recent consideration of Heidegger's joining the Nazis (in In Defense of Lost Causes). That doesn't at all make what Heidegger did right--as Zizek would crudely hold, himself couching things in an overblown ethical language which supposes that the value of this could have been disclosed to him personally and guided his action at the same time as that action could represent a value attributed after the fact, which we perceive as the imposition of politics on the situation (this language--increasingly Badiouian--confuses things almost completely, as I've said before regarding Zizek on this fraught issue). But to attribute such value means (however crudely or confusedly) to recognize that politics imposes itself continually and is actively contained and bracketed by philosophies as well as other forms of knowledge. Theory normally attempts to trace what is thereby left out--but with an ethical turn (which was foreshadowed in the "deconstructivism" practiced at Yale by de Man, where people preached to no end about responsibility in reading), it loses its vocation and becomes increasingly irrelevant. At the same time, and insofar as this irrelevance suffuses theory, "the political" comes up more and more, leading us to the next form of bad theory:

Reifying concepts in order to protect them from reification. Such, at least, is the strategy I see behind such ugly invocations of "the political" or "the social." This form of parody only lends itself to a high seriousness that undoes the reason for adopting the parodic gesture in the first place.

Similarly, bad theory trades in commonplaces. These include the use of phrases like "identity politics," which are most of the time just codes for a reactive movement against queer or feminist impacts upon the humanities. But "western metaphysics" is also a commonplace. Eventually, this trade in commonplaces (a dissolution of the commons?) results in a prohibition on experience itself, as each of these are traded in for something supposedly known (and never described in detail)--or turned back into their reified pseudo-philosophical counterpart by the move we just mentioned.

This is related to the bad-theoretical overuse of alterity as a concept. The dynamics in which alterity engages us are ultimately reductive and need to be reopened back up into the contexts (experiential) from which they emerge. Even if the concept is used to precisely fight reduction, to insist on irreducibility, it has become an uncreative way to reorganize a wide array of phenomena along too-familiar lines.

This is also the way that bad theory ends up relying too much on "language," and makes it into a homogenous field through which everything has to pass. Language isn't that important to good theory. Or, rather, when it becomes a crutch, it isn't language.

Next, bad theory quickly displaces social dynamics too quickly into theoretical terms. An example would be the oft cited "subordination of feminism by Marxism." What and who are we actually talking about here? It is here where Foucault's "discourse" comes in to save the day: when in doubt, say discourse does it. Theories of ideology, in comparison, have infinitely more subtlety--and that's saying something. In Foucault himself, the notion is structured (in the Archaeology of Knowledge) to get him out of precisely the dilemma this question (what? who?) produces, as it is posed to him by people who rightly were wondering just how he was able to coordinate so much information concerning the rise of the human sciences. While it's right to insist that the stratifications of discourse, as well as its effectivity (and by means of such insistence, discourse thereby becomes a richer concept in Judith Butler and Edward Said), this might not be enough to rescue the concept from its reduction to an empty field producing too many of those effects. Discourse has to be used more carefully, with more structuralist concepts brought in to thicken the mix.

Bad theory thinks of itself as avant-garde. It has an easy relationship to its own history that sadly ends up mirroring the simplistic histories of ideas which it was supposed to displace. In general, it proceeds as an arrogant new humanism by thinking of itself as a progressive adventure.

Bad theory thinks it only includes by opening itself to multiplicities. While the focus on alterity is reductive, it'd be wrong to see multiplicity as an alternative, or something that does the job better--even if one conceives of it "rightly" (that is, itself fraught with difference or composed only of differences and dimensions, as in Deleuze rather than in Laclau and Mouffe). Multiplicity might not always be the right thing to which a situation must be opened up or in terms of which it should be conceived. Something like totalization can be mobilized against universality and even unity and oneness, as in Sartre or Adorno.

This touches on another aspect of bad theory: it's unwillingness to use more than one or two theories. Bad theory is usually only one or two theories, which gets stuck to or followed to the letter. It's not yet dogma, because it has so much functionality and can in general also be illuminating. But it seeks to eliminate other theories or foreclose their imposition--which occurs often, and as an annoying conceptual muddle--precisely by extending the one position (and flattening or restricting itself so they can be assimilated without reducing them--which would require changing the current stance). Good theory is polyglot and patchwork: it knows when to shut up in one system and shift to another (in other words, it shouldn't proceed by increasing the number of prohibitions upon itself--something nearly all bad theory does--and then get angry at those who misunderstand the minimalist language). Just because the concept itself--here multiplicity--is actually structured (rigorously) in order not to foreclose something, doesn't mean everyone should see how it doesn't exclude something. Everyone shouldn't have to get on your page (or be immanent to whatever) to be on the same page. Moreover, theory should actually open itself up to other things at the edge of theory, which theory isn't--thus I insisted at the beginning on the finitude of theory, which now is rethought spatially--indeed like literary theory and literary analysis. This leads into my last characterization:

Bad theory thinks it itself is politics: while theory represents the politicization (if only by oblique suggestion) of various other fields and their materials and procedures, it has to be interrupted by something from outside itself--or, as theory, has to go someplace other than the lecture hall--in order to actually become something like activism. Along these lines, one shouldn't think that because one's theory says it does not separate a particular conception and politics (like in theoretical Spinozism), introducing the concept into an arena is not political, nor does it link the politicization that might (and only might) thereby occur to actual politics. It's not that there is a gap which we can never bridge--it is simply that politicization and politics itself requires this lack of certainty as to whether it is, in any instance, traversed, as I think Judith Butler (for one) outlines quite well.

Structures of the future

So long as one has not studied the structures of the future in a defined society, one necessarily runs the risk of not understanding anything whatsoever about the social.
-Sartre, Search for a Method, 97

The more I read and research, the more I weirdly gravitate towards statements that just seem to word things right, rather than towards complex and interesting ideas in general--and for reasons not unrelated to what Sartre is saying above about society. The "rightness" of such phrases--and Sartre is full of them--often has to do with a vision of something ahead which the words do not fail to grasp, but make concrete. Where they fail, they fail suggestively, with something larger they project and which makes them invaluable. So as I'm currently reading Search for a Method, before I pick up the full Critique of Dialectical Reason, and as I think this particular well-put statement gets lost in the latter--I feel that I should copy it out here.

Three names

I've been wanting to write a post on Jameson for a while, since wading through his immense corpus is basically all I've been doing over the last month or two. This won't be that post. Rather, I just want to give a little review of a few chapters of his new book, Valences of the Dialectic, which came out Sunday, the first of the month.

The first essay or introduction (it borders on both), "Three Names of the Dialectic," is hard reading. Harder, I think, than Jameson usually is. Things get a much better in the two following chapters on Hegel, and the last chapter (or two) on Ricoeur is a masterpiece, over much quicker than you expected, like a good movie. That said, "Three Names" does excellently what many have tried and few have actually accomplished: a full-on characterization of what dialectic is about. This is, no doubt, why it is so tough, for Jameson is not concerned just with the Hegelian dialectic, but all of it--indeed, when he allows himself the luxury of just confining his analysis to just Hegel, things get more concrete (and that's saying something, as you'll soon see). Where Jameson particularly succeeds though is in showing, not how this diversity reduces to one particular thing we can clearly grasp--the dialectic, which is only the first name of the dialectic in this first chapter--but just how diverse this old thing really is. By spraying dialectic around, then sluicing it in certain directions--indeed showing us many dialectics (dialectic prefaced with the indefinite article is the second name) the whole thing seems much richer, more expansive, more exciting, than the old definitions we carried in our heads before picking up the book.

If this doesn't sound like what philosophy does, well, that's because this isn't philosophy. But that doesn't mean it is unhelpful, or that the account ends up being the lyric meditations of some novice (or that philosophers couldn't learn from the account). Jameson knows what he's talking about, as is evident from the chapters on Hegel, but chooses to do something different--something particularly Sartrean--with this knowledge. I'd characterize this as follows: Jameson gives an overbalance of reality to what otherwise would remain a knowable, but ultimately impoverished, conception. Many people (including me) are finding Sartre useful in particularly this way, and Jameson himself has long valued the Critique of Dialectical Reason especially (though of course he has fondness for all of Sartre) for this particular performance.

One shouldn't however, confuse this performance with the effects of style. And, as usual, Terry Eagleton's crassness has to be just as crassly rejected as it encroaches on this issue, for it causes him to do precisely this. His recent essay in the New Left Review, "Jameson and Form," starts off with some nice observations. Eagleton has always lived off of the supposed aptness or incisiveness of these: they're certainly the only reason, really, to read Literary Theory: an Introduction, even if you have to throw most of them away when you actually start thinking about the figures mentioned. Here, we find the following:

My own sense is that, as with all Jameson’s finest writing, these lines [he has quoted a passage in Jameson on de Kooning, as if, like a New Critical couplet, it could be concretely universal outside its context, or at least folded back unproblematically into that larger whole which is the sonnet analysis] stay just this side of too portentous an awareness of their own brilliance, unfurling with all the mounting drama and excitement of the great Proustian period yet with something of its tact and finesse as well, if not exactly its air of naturalness or civilized lucidity. One feels, as one does not with Proust, that there is a turbulent linguistic energy at work here which might breed some disturbingly frenetic effects were it to let rip...

-"Jameson and Form," NLR 59 (September-October 2009), p. 124

But we might say this is right, not because it is good stylistics--as Eagleton thinks it is--but because it starts to create that "overbalance" that Jameson too creates. The difference between pure style and style that functions, or that thickening we find in Sartre, should now become a bit clearer, and we can just dismiss the rest of what Eagleton tries to wring out of what is no longer an "apt" but a functional characterization. This is the following: because we can see Jameson has a style, and because this style resists the moral and even the political insofar as it resists the empirical or really simply is style (you can't talk about the facts if you have linguistic energy), Jameson's writing should therefore be deemed, alas, "problematic," while at the same time, alas, rewarding. Everything, as usual with Eagleton, gets tied up by that that nice New Critical bowtie that is irony or paradox: the sense that there is, in this whole, success only because it is fraught with conflicting parts, that there are benefits only because their are costs; essentially what Irigaray once mockingly called the use of the second law of thermodynamics in criticism, which only serves really to give the illusion of a stable system, to give us some notion there really is some whole at work here--a Jamesonian corpus as rich and varied and deep as "The Canonization," which, yes, exists (no "producing the concept" here, since there's production of the... empirical!). It's all basically a repeat of The Ideology of the Aesthetic, which was once somewhat illuminating but now gains its force only because Jameson actually has explicitly taken anti-empiricist and anti-moralistic stances.

These positions are indeed reiterated in Valences, because it is Jameson's conviction (following Hegel) that dialectic itself has, on the one hand, the function of destabilizing Verstand, commonsense understanding which would indeed suppose a non-totalized empirical world (just stuff, no system), and, on the other, the function of suspending empty moralistic condemnation where the analysis can be extended, a richer vision of things can be obtained by tarrying with the negative, and less superficial condemnations generated (this ultimately leads him to see Utopian elements in Wal-Mart in chapter 16 of this book--though he also says nothing good can come from this institution). Indeed, Jameson's reply to Eagleton regarding his corpus might be simply, "it's dialectical!" (the phrase he uses to give us the third name of dialectic, the adjective), something that would probably be lost anyway on someone who thought good Marxism means merely a commitment to empirical (as history itself: it's plain as day to Eagleton that Jameson's "always historicize!" is refuted by the question "Does this include geometry?"--and lest you think I'm joking, I quote directly page 135) and empty moralistic outrage (it's clear to Eagleton that Jameson's writing is "constructed... to distance personal feeling," 137--or rather, as I'd claim, to distance affective caricatures that some take for feeling).

So if we refuse this notion that what Jameson is doing is purely stylistic, what really is involved in this "overbalancing of reality," as I've called it? We might say it involves the "thickening" I mentioned earlier, by which Jameson takes a thought and turns it into what he likes to call a "thought-mode." Take--not a description out of context--but a simple remark at the end of a discussion of Hegelian "categories" (the various structures we find in the text, like Quality, Becoming, etc.):

As for Kant, not yet being a Habermassian or feeling the sway of any structuralist or postmodern doxa about the primacy of language and communication, he sticks to the mind itself and grasps the categories as so many "concepts of the understanding" which operate both judgments and those perceptions understood to be mental "syntheses of representations." Still, he disposes of some fairly recognizable traditional "space"--the mind--in which, as in Aristotle's "speaking" [just discussed], the categories can comfortably be housed and find their field of efficacy. Whatever Hegel thinks about mind or language, those are not the "places" in which his categories evolve: and to call this last Spirit or even Objective Spirit is to beg the question, insofar as it is precisely the space of the categories which will be called on to define Spirit in the first place. So they seem relatively placeless and disembodied (Valences, 78).

Basic stuff, yes (we're still at the beginning of the essay "Hegel and Reification"), and while there's a somewhat humorous remark to kick it off (which might be approached more accurately and more philosophically in terms of the history of philosophy), and some nice talk about "places," basically everything's just good old thinking (and good thinking) until we get to that last sentence. It is here that we find something thickening, just in this offhand remark: there's no real purpose except to explain, not even how we feel reading Hegel (he'll come to that later, on page 80-1), but the sorts feelings that shape the contours of Hegel's thinking when we follow it. In this seeming placenessness and disembodinedness there is something like the aesthetic projected by this aspect of Hegel, and pinpointing this aesthetic not only give us a better hold on him, but also shows what sort of field Hegel feels his conceptions work within. There is an effort, in short, to connect whatever is in question to experience--though not necessarily "our" experience.

Jameson then is able to seize on this, and perform, precisely, dialectical reversals:

...So they seem relatively placeless and disembodied: they are not the thoughts of a Mind, even a transcendental one (since for one thing, they are not yet even thoughts as such): Absolute Spirit may be, or however Hegel's combination of Substance and Subject may be understood, it is not an omniscient and anthropomorphized narrator of some sort. In fact, I tend to think it would be better to imagine the "space" of Hegel's categories in the absence of all such modern container notions of subjectivity or of element, in a kind of spacelessness. This makes the categories in Hegel far more situation- or event-specific; all the while acknoledging the evident fact that whatever "space" or "context" may be invoke, it will always also itself be precisely one of those categories it was alleged to have governed or contained. Thus once again here we confront the well-known paradox of the "class which is a member of itself," something "solved" by the attempt to imagine a state of things--or better still a type of discourse--itself free of such representational homogeneity, and able to accommodate a series of "events" without a frame or background. Add to this the characterization of these moments as somehow related to pensée sauvage in that the Logic effectuates the construction of local universals out of particulars in a situation in which universals do not yet exist, and we have an even more paradoxical approach to hegel opening up before us (Valences, 78-9).

The aesthetic, given overpresence I might even say, allows a certain leap by which we're able to say that we have to basically suspend our belief (and not disbelief, for once with Hegel!) in Absolute Spirit. All of which involves a project of seeing "Hegel's Marxism" (as Jameson puts it, 100), a project that he picks up back in "Three Names," rather than line things up in the regular order.

Indeed, back in "Three Names," we find positions Jameson has held for some time elaborated more explicitly: Verso's book jacket says Jameson moves towards the "innovation" of a "spatial dialectic," but this is old news, really. Jameson--and this is why, primarily, I like him (and why I like Derrida)--doesn't innovate. All his concepts are tied together and slowly grow, inflecting each other. Often (much more than in Derrida, who struggled for consistency much harder than was, for anyone other than him, productive) there are local eruptions of something completely new and weird, but then the rest of the web comes to meet it by stretching itself over some abyss. This is the work of producing closure that I've stressed was essential to understanding Jameson in a previous post (in which I basically tried to anticipate what Jameson might say in such an introductory chapter as this one)--and it's important to distinguish it on the other hand from the production of a system, which can be just as productive of "innovations." Indeed, this sort of language of what we might call the "theory industry" is parasitic on theory itself, and it is this structure--which I wouldn't say is necessarily organic, and rather involves something like what long durations of concept-formation can produce faster than thought (whether of advertisers or of lesser-experienced thinkers) itself, in a sort of short-circuit that "innovation" precisely misdescribes--that seems to resist such an industry. This is, at least, what I would add to how Jameson describes theory, which is indeed very concerned with the "theory industry:"

The persistence of the proper name in theory, indeed--as when we identify various texts as Derridian, Althusserian, or Habermassian--only serves to betray the hopelessness of the nonetheless unavoidable aim of theoretical writing to escape the reifications of philosophy as well as the commodifications of the intellectual marketplace today (Valences, 9).

Again, he's held this position for some time (see my old post from last year on this, though the position is even older). What is new is the presentation, and of course the particular "thickenings." We see an even more incisive characterization of Derrida in these pages ("it is as though the dialectic moves jerkily from moment to moment like a slide show, where deconstruction dizzily fast-forwardds like a film by Dziga Vertov," 26, a thickening of what has essentially become my view, which we find in Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future, that Derrida "unlike Adorno [...] refuses any positive or substantive concept of its own negative method, and indeed of method as such," 180), as well as a striking and more explicit take on what's wrong with Foucault (his thought is not non-dialectical but "too dialectical:" "Foucault attributes the positive valorization of Enlightenment to his deluded bourgeois readers and positions it as an error which the new narrative of paranoia and conspiracy is to correct: whereas from a dialectical perspective both narratives are correct and both narratives are equally in error," 52), and a thought-provoking characterization of Adorno and Zizek (the latter producing paradoxes not to undo the stupid first impression that it is indeed paradoxical, but rather "to undo that second moment of ingenuity which is that of interpretation [...]: the paradox is of the second order; what looked like a paradox was in reality simply a return to the first impression itself," affirming the "objective appearance," 59--and if this is true my reading of Zizek in that earlier post is faulty, but I still distrust Zizek more than Jameson does). What's also promising and somewhat more explicit than in previous works are the readings of Capital and some of its most visible dialectic moments--a subject Jameson will tackle more in a more focused manner in yet another book.

Also more explicitly formulated is the notion of "neutralization" as it relates to the dialectic, which was worked out perhaps most visibly in Archaeologies of the Future, but also has been around basically since Jameson began considering Greimas. Here, though, like everything else, it gets a bit more thorough treatment, due again to this clean though perhaps too formalistic presentation that divides up the dialectic into its three names: the dialectic, a dialectic (or many dialectics), and dialectical (it's dialectical!). The first makes the case that the dialectic, whether Marxist or Hegelian, has to be seen as not a claim to unity but a presentation that is an aspiration to totality (this mirrors the rejection of the Absolute Spirit we saw above). It passes over into its opposite, which actually is the most fruitful albeit complex section of this first chapter, where we see the dialectic at work in what were antinomies and binarisms of all sorts (the large thread running through this--again worked out more explicitly than in other works--is that structuralism is dialectical in a Sartrean sense, despite what Lévi-Strauss said at the end of La Pensée Sauvage; however many good and unexpected examples appear here). The basic move (which we saw in the analysis of Foucault, above) is made as explicit as it could be: Foucault's work, and anti-dialectical work like it (a topic picked up in the third chapter on "Hegel's Contemporary Critics"),

should seem to generate a situation in which power has no opposite (or is its own opposite). I believe that this seeming impasse can at least be clarified by the suggestion that this particular type of opposition is to be grasped as the superposition of at least two binary systems: a purely logical opposition between essential and inessential or center and margin. Here the "negation" lies in the differentiation between the initial equivalents, while its ideological investment--the very content of domination itself--derives from the way in which this second opposition reappropriates the first one. The force of negation is then transferred from the latter to the former (Valences, 21).

This is clean and openly didactic--more typical of this particular essay than most of Jameson's work. Nevertheless, it is indeed good to have out there when dialectical reversal is indeed harder to grasp for most people than it perhaps should be. Or so Jameson claims in the next section, where he considers the adjectival form (dialectical), and how (following Sartre) the dialectic "will always be its own illustration or example; that any exercise of it wil already be its own presentation," and thus is always difficult to grasp, since "you have to be grappling with a dialectical reality reality in order to be able to show" (and perhaps we might add see) "what the dialectic is" (50). We can close on this note, which brings us to the most essential aspect of the dialectic that--as I said in a previous--always has been the most imperative to bring into overpresence, or deepen:

[F]or the present it is the contagiation of the dialectic, rather than its structure, that we are out to catch a glimpse of: some essential restlessness or negativity that fastens onto our thinking at those moments in which we seem arrested and paralyzed by an antinomy--for, as has been observed above, the relationship between antinomy and dialectic is a crucial one in the contemporary period, where the antinomy has taken the place of the contradiction, expressing intractability rather than energy or construction (or indeed incommensurability rather than relationship).

What happens in moments like these--at least when the dialectic unexpectedly proposes itself, and when it suddenly crosses our minds that "it's dialectical!"--is that the problem itself becomes the solution, and that the opposition in which we are immobilized like a ship in the ice must itself now become the object of our thinking... (Valences, 50-51).

Like a language

I want to go over something pretty basic here. One of the objections constantly levied against structuralism is that it treats things as languages when it should treat the things as things. It is generally a legitimate frustration with the oddness of the founding structuralist gesture, which is to say that the thing being investigated is a language, or is structured like a language, or can be understood as a language, or comprehended by using the insights from linguistics, etc. etc. etc.

The criticisms (whether they come from phenomenologists, post-structuralists, or post-post-structuralists) claim that this simplifies the thing in question, and ultimately just projects upon the thing the very terms in which it is being analyzed.

The concern is legitimate, as I said, because it wonders at an analogy being taken so seriously and worked out to the fantastic length and intricacy involved in structural interpretations like those of Lévi-Strauss. But what it fails to understand is that the main term in the analogy, language, has to be understood differently if the analogy is to make any sense.

In other words, the critics of structuralism think they know what language is when they hear the phrase, x can be understood like a language. But the structuralist emphasizes that language, when considered as a structure, looks nothing like what they are imagining.

Language for the structuralist is more like a logic ("structure" is the name for this type of logic, or rather logic working in this way), and as such already doesn't have to be made up of words used in speech, or even something like a grammar (insofar as we think we know what "words," "speech," and "grammar" are when considered independently of the logic in which, according to the structuralist, they are merely minimal units or relations between of these units). So you can't object to a structuralist by saying that x or y doesn't exhibit any features of a language--by saying that it isn't something, for example, that is determined by a culture, or exhibiting conscious organization. For if it involves something like a logic, it will have already worked something like a language.

That is, if the thing has a logic in the way that it also participates, say, in dialectic, it will have worked like a language. "Logic," in other words, is helpfully understood in a pseudo-Hegelian way here. Lévi-Strauss himself articulates the commensurability between structure and dialectic in the famous last chapter of The Savage Mind, in a hugely influential attack on Sartre's fascinating (and too neglected) Critique of Dialectical Reason. In doing so, he is making the case that structural logic is immanent to the being of things in the way Sartre (rightly) says it it is in Hegel and Marx.

It is only after this that he overturns Sartre's notion of dialectical reason, grounding it in what Sartre calls analytic reason, ultimately leading him to conclusions which are more familiar, and which involves further qualifying the way this logic or structure works. Sartre says:

[Scientific, Analytic] Reason is the mind as an empty unifier... Dialectical Reason transcends the level of methodology; it states what a sector of the universe, or, perhaps, the whole universe is. It does not merely direct research, or even pre-judge the mode of appearance of objects. Dialectical Reason legislates, it defines what the world (human or total) must be like for dialectical knowledge to be possible; it simultaneously elucidates the movement of the real and that of our thoughts, and it elucidates the one by the other... It is therefore, both a type of rationality and the transcendence of all types of rationality. The certainty of always being able to transcend replaces the empty detachment of formal rationality: the ever present possibility of unifying becomes the permanent necessity for man of totalising and being totalised, and for the world of being an ever broader, developing totalisation.
-Critique of Dialectical Reason, 20

In short, dialectical reason does not remain one-sided: it is speculative, and therefore not a function of the understanding. Lévi-Strauss replies simply that:

all reason is dialectical... since dialectical reason seems to me like analytical reason in action; but then the distinction between the two forms of reason which is the basis of Sartre's enterprise would become pointless.
-The Savage Mind, 251

If we understand the logic established by dialectical reason's "legislation," or, in Sartre's terms, the totalizations, as the crucial thing, it does seem legitimate to say that analytical reason can establish them just as much as dialectical reason, if we add something to the former.

This is the other crucial aspect of structure, which is that it is not a logic that can be taken over by consciousness:

Linguistics thus presents us with a dialectical and totalizing entity but one outside (or beneath) consciousness and will. Language, and unreflecting totalization, is human reason which has its reasons and of which man knows nothing.
-The Savage Mind, 252

This, then, is the usual claim which we recognize in structuralism, and to which the objections usually are directed, since it makes the subject a mere function of "language." Thus, Levi-Strauss' immediate response:

And if it is is objected that it is so only for a subject who internalizes it on the basis of linguistic theory, my reply is that this way out must be refused, for this subject is one who speaks: for the same light which reveals the nature of language to him also reveals to him that it was so when he did not know it, for he already made himself understood, and that it will remain so tomorrow without since his discourse never was and never will be the result of a conscious totalization of linguistic laws.
-Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 252

But notice that such claims about language only make sense when we understand the more basic claim that "language" here is fundamentally like a logic. Thus the structure gets its non-internalized character because it is a logic immanent to things, not just because it is so determining (which is nearly always read as constraining) of the subject's role. The fact that the subject is a function of language here does not have to do with how determining the structure is, but how language is a logic. It is only in this sense that we can really understand why such a language resists internalization: for even if it were internalized, made conscious, it would still only be operative or produce effects because it was a logic. In short, making it conscious doesn't matter. The logic matters. And it is in this sense that the analytic reason can, when active, produce dialectic effects of totalization, because in that instance this only means what is always the case is indeed the case: the logic, the structure, is producing effects.

Let me just say that this fact complicates dismissals of poststructuralism as well as structuralism which rely upon the fact that, in absence of a deconstruction of something, one falls back upon structures and thereby remains within a certain cultural, linguistic sphere, or just involves deconstructing "cultural" structures--as if all taint of structuralism had to be removed. Such things are said of Foucault, Derrida, and even Lacan (leading to a move away from the tensions between the symbolic and the imaginary and a sole focus on the symbolic and the real). All of this is complicated if the critic understands that in each case language as a structure means something different than language--especially if we take language in its Heideggerian sense. By this I don't just mean that it is made up of binaries, either (though of course this is involved). I mean that it is a logic in the sense I explained earlier, and one which Lévi-Strauss is not so quick to immediately call "cultural" (that is, unless we reconsider our notion of that latter term).

The incorporeal invisible

I just attended the last of this year's Gauss Seminars in Criticism, where Eleanor Kaufman was giving a amazing series of lectures on "The Incorporeal in French Phenomenology." Her task was to think the being of objects or things, but without projecting thought or intention upon the thing (to speak loosely). In other words, she wanted to think being without thought as it takes place in objects, in the sense that being has always (especially in Heidegger, though he also does the most to expose this dependence and criticize it) been what thought can grasp, despite the fact that there were many objects having their being (like the whole cosmos) before thought. In doing so, she returns to the phenomenology of Sartre, in an amazing work of recuperation that sees his phenomenological experiments--especially his work of constructing unbelievably brilliant examples, which rightly are famous--as different at times from his existential philosophy.
She also handily opposes Sartre to Merleau-Ponty, and teases her idea of what thing-being is from this resistance of Sartre to Merleau-Pontian concepts, specifically, the flesh. The being of objects does not participate in the flesh. However, interestingly, it has its being in a way that is very like the Merleau-Pontean chiasmus, as sketched in The Visible and the Invisible: that is, the reversibility of the visible. Kaufman reads, I think, the chiasmus, which is invisible, into Sartre--though in such a way that its ties to Merleau-Ponty are cut because we enter such a different conceptual framework, and are therefore able to be developed in interesting ways that Merleau-Ponty wouldn't be able to think.
One of these ways is towards the incorporeal in Deleuze: Sartre thinks the incorporeal, in other words. This I think is interesting, though, for what it says about Merleau-Ponty: that if thought through correctly, and perhaps a little more rigorously than Merleau-Ponty himself was able to think about it (though it seems that right before his death he was working in this area) the invisible, as it functions in the chaismus, is incorporeal. And this is entirely what I tried to say, in a long paper put up below in several posts called "Derrida, Merleau-Ponty, Depth and the Body," that Derrida saw in Merleau-Ponty a while ago: that the invisible exists in two registers, one which has it participate in the flesh insofar as it resists the fleshly, one which is completely other to the flesh. Derrida pulls the second, which is more incorporeal, out of the first, and I think this is an invaluable move, one which would further allow us to follow Kaufman's amazing analysis as it proceeds.

Building, dwelling, thinking...

A reading of "Bauen, Wohnen, Denken," which proceeds roughly along the path of the introduction and first part of the essay, with general comments meant to make Heidegger a bit more accessible interpolated. Thanks to my friend and colleague Emily for giving me the opportunity of writing this finally! I hope it is a little bit helpful:

Building (Bauen: constructing, structuring, to house something) and dwelling (Wohnen: residing, living, to stay with somebody) are the terms of the question. The question focuses upon building. It asks: If our inquiry "traces building back" into the place where we can see it working in the way that is most proper to it qua building, if we trace the way it looks like it works back into this "domain" (Bereich), then does this place, this domain, this original coherence of the phenomenon of building have anything to do with another sort of place that we call a dwelling? Looking into the way building is properly building, which means looking at the way it is building (that is, looking at it ontologically, in its be-ing building), does this resonate with how dwelling is properly dwelling? Does this building be-ing building resonate with dwelling being dwelling?
To understand this, we will ask 1) What is it to dwell, or how does dwelling be? and 2) How does building resonate with [gehört] or belong with dwelling?
To put it in more simple terms, Heidegger looks at a phenomenon: as Merleau-Ponty would describe it, the way that something coheres as it appears to us, its structured appearance to our lives (so like, a room appears to us as a usable space before it appears as a rectangle we inhabit, to the extent that the space of the room warps around the objects in it. Sartre said once a room taken phenomenologically is a lot more like how a blind person "sees" it: the room is a set of objects for him to use--the fact that it has corners is really irrelevant because they're hard to touch, nothing he needs is there, etc.). Thus what will follow is a phenomenology of building or construction. But his phenomenologies are phenomenological ontologies: they look at the coherence of something appearing precisely as how it exists, in its being (taken intransitively, as be-ing or is-ing: Levinas said helpfully once that Heidegger's contribution to philosophy is in restoring an intransitive character to being). So the being of building is a sort of coherence, its remaining proper to itself as a phenomenon--but doing so not in the aspect of how it looks or feels, say, but in how it exists, how it just remains there in its activity as an activity, how it "just works" as we like to say, implying some process but at the same time implying that it just does this process in being typically itself. So he's looking at the way building is properly being building. This is why he contrasts what he's doing to some aesthetic, architectural treatise on construction to giving rules or architectural ideas: this couldn't be further from looking at the being of building (for him--for me, this move in Heidegger is always suspect, because its dickish, as if his way of doing things is the only real way). He's also going to do this phenomenological ontology with dwelling, or, translated a little less pompously, "living in" something (his translators are also pompous sometimes). In fact, he's going to look at this first, to try and see if living in something is going to end up having any relation to constructing something. This makes sense because, of course, we live in the things we build. But the uniqueness of Heidegger is to pose this banality in ontological terms.
Part I:
At first it looks to us like we can only reach (gelangen, get to, as in: get to that place where there is)--it looks like we can only get to dwelling, or what dwelling is, through building, by means of building, or what building is. This is why we asked what dwelling is first--to try and work against the way things seem when we don't see them as structured appearances or as phenomena (and chiefly when we don't see them as appearances structured by their being, as ontological phenomena). In fact, we work against this because the mode of our presentation of building looks like it informs our way of considering it. That is, if we do look at things in this mistaken way, we'll think that dwelling is merely an end of building. This makes dwelling look like it is just having shelter in something, in being located inside a place that is reserved by building for this purpose. But this is not right: just because we fulfill the purpose of something doesn't mean that we are properly dwelling, that we are, in our being, in our remaining what we are, dwelling. In fact, I can dwell by precisely not fulfilling the purpose of something. To look at building as a means, and dwelling as an end--and thus to look at dwelling through building--is to avoid the question. We'll come to this below in how the question about housing problems is brought up.
For Heidegger, thinking about a dwelling in terms of its ability for us just to be located within it is, like thinking about the room as a rectangular box in space, to miss the phenomenon, is to miss how it is structured. It's no mistake that this is how science, in the use of physics in engineering and architecture, thinks about a dwelling (according to Heidegger). What's interesting is that for him this is reflected in how the problem of living-in something or dwelling in it is usually approached. His resistance to this approach will govern the structure of the rest of the essay: it especially governs what will happen next--his turning to language. When Heidegger does this, he supposes several things that are a bit farfetched and which I tried to bring out below: 1) that language itself can give us the phenomena if we hear it right, 2) the right language in which we hear this is German (here he is in serious danger of becoming a Black-forest patriot and/or Nazi) and that this is the case because, 3) like Hegel, he believes that German has a relationship to the way that the Greeks, the proper thinkers, thought (also a Nazi conception, but again, Hegel thought it too, so what this means is, on a certain level, tough to say). What he is trying to do, though, is significant: he's trying to think of construction or building not as a means, which means thinking of it not as something involving machines and technology. So he tries to pull that back out of the language. What he's claiming though is pretty profound: because we think of a dwelling through construction, this means of presenting it itself makes construction a means. In other words, the way of presenting the problem duplicates the way we consider the terms of the problem.
However, if we look at language, the German language, the language proper to thinking and in which nothing less than the spirit of the West, as it was handed down from the Greeks, is preserved as such, then to build, bauen, is already to dwell: that is, dwelling has a relationship to building that is not of a means-end nature. For building, in German, in this proper language, especially if we go back and look at its older meanings, in fact looks a lot like it simply means being, which is preserved in the German word for "am:" bin. When I say I am (ich bin), I mean "the way in which... I am." That is, I mean: I have cultivated myself, constructed myself, taken care of myself in this particular way. I have precisely not *made* myself or manufactured myself, as if I were a performance. "Here building, in contrast with cultivating, is a constructing." Cultivation is an art, but is not something technical: it is closer to the art of trimming vines and shaping a plant. In short, building itself is not properly something technical, precisely because--for reasons we state most clearly in "The Question Concerning Technology" but which we'll get to below--the technical is not technical: the technical is much closer to this cultivation, to this taking-care-of, to this sort of protection, which we'll come back to. Building is not properly manufacturing, it is cultivating.
We have not yet answered how this cultivating is dwelling, but we can see that this view of building as a sort of manufacturing is precisely what the means-end view of building and dwelling has done to our thought. It has turned us away from all that in building already could mean something else. (This means that, in truth, it has turned us away from Germany, from German language.) It has turned us away from how building and constructing can mean something like cultivating, and cultivating in a pure, proper, German sense: that is, without recourse to an idea of cultivation as performance, as fakery, as tricks, as technique and art that is a technology in the vulgar sense. To think of cultivating as something other than a manufacturing, to hear it even in our language itself: this is what being attentive to the phenomenon, rather than reducing it to a means-end relationship, had allowed us.
So perhaps we can look at our German language again, this time precisely at dwelling, and see whether it too could mean something like cultivation. Then there would be a relationship that would not be one of means-end. It would remain then for us to inquire into what the nature of this other relationship would be. But first let's get to dwelling now without building, without going through building: which we now know means, without seeing building as something that has an end.
We don't hear that wohnen, dwelling, means cultivating directly. That is, we have to take a detour in order to hear cultivation in dwelling. (It will take us to what we will call the fourfold.) For like building, it means remaining as something, but it means this more immediately, in terms of preserving and guarding, not cultivating. In fact, it means something closer to freeing-up. When I say I dwell, what I really mean is that I am free to do whatever. It does not mean, like cultivating, a sort of gathering together and holding together as protection, but a setting loose, a sort of freeing up. So we have gathering on the one hand and a setting free on the other—but we will come back to this opposition.
What we should note now is that if dwelling means being free, a dwelling would therefore be something like an object that is set free so that it can exist within this type of freedom. In fact, this freeing up of the thing is a lot like saving it from becoming a mere end, something that is just an object located within a techno-scientific or objectivized space. It is, as we will see, to really treat it as a thing, before it becomes an object, a point in space. This is not just a change in terminology that will oppose something good (a thing) to something bad (an object), although we will indeed exploit this opposition. What we are getting at is more fundamental: a dwelling is a freed object, or a thing that is more originary, more proper than an object because it is free. When something is left to its own, it is dwelling: “to dwell means… to remain at peace within the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its essence,” that is, to its being properly itself.
To clarify: what Heidegger is doing is distinguishing something that is objectivised and scientific from something that, he says, is more basic, more properly itself. To call the dwelling a thing here means the same as regarding the room not as a rectangle but as a livable space. This will come back more explicitly in the second part. But this distinction allows him to launch himself into a meditation on how the world looks when it is full of things, not objects, and how the dwelling fits into this world made up of these things.
Put differently, dwelling is when something’s thingness takes precedence before its objecthood because, as we said, dwelling is precisely this freeing. A dwelling is only a concatenation of dwelling itself, therefore, which is a setting free, a making free, an allowing of what surrounds me to come before me unburdened by how it logically is supposed to fit into my business. Dwelling is more free than the space in which I carry out my business. In fact, it fits into a whole world that is more properly itself than the space of my business, the space of technical and scientific objecthood. In this non-technical world, the dwelling is on top of the earth, before this earth is considered a set of resources, a set of minerals. It is also under the sky, before it is considered the space of physics. It is on top and below these, in this world, which also remains in front of gods and the holiness that pervades the phenomenality of things as such. And in this world are mortals, who is capable of being properly himself in his being-towards-death, in his dying qua dying, as we explained in Being and Time.
Each of these obscure terms—earth, sky, mortals, gods—all these are essentially what we see around us considered phenomenologically: that is, with concern for their being properly themselves, grounded or structured by their being. They are not just the things that we see but the larger “regions,” as Heidegger occasionally will call it, in which more specific things can appear. They are like the ur-phenomena, in which the things appear. Something coming out of the sky will appear to us as a sort of sky-phenomena: for Heidegger the phenomena of the sky include the length of the day and time, basically time-management. Something from the earth appears to us as an earth-phenomenon: it is that out of which we create things and make things. The gods or divinities are the realm in which we try and relate to both earth- and sky-phenomena as such: something from this region appears to us as our expectation about a thing. The sphere of mortals or men is where we live out our lives, where the phenomena like the continuity of one’s self-history appears. This continuity is ensured by death—but that is an issue I can’t get into here because it takes too much time: one has to summarize a lot of Being and Time, in which it is first fleshed out. Regardless, you see what is going on. What is being explained here by looking at the regions in which phenomena appear is that the coherence of the world, which is the world being properly itself as a world, and which he in a vatic manner describes as its oneness—this coherence is only possible if man dwells in it, in the sense of dwelling that this essay is pursuing. For dwelling will fit together these ur-phenomena or regions. That means that man takes up the earth, the sky, the holiness of the world as well as his own mortality, and makes them actively fit together, gain the structuredness that is proper to them as phenomena, through his own dwelling. The world could indeed take up space without man, but only man can give it the significance of a phenomenon: that is, an appearance that is structured and meaningful insofar as it is.
Each of these four aspects or regions of the world fits together, to borrow a metaphor we used in Basic Concepts. But this fitting together, this oneness of the four, can only take place if there is dwelling, and if man, the mortal, is the one who does this. How is this possible? Well, it is possible in that the fitting-together is precisely what is allowed by a sort of setting-free of the things within these regions. If you set something free, it is set free so that it can find its proper place, so that it can find where it can most be itself, so that it can fit together with its most proper situation. This, we know, is precisely what dwelling does: it sets a thing free.
So we now understand the ramifications of this setting-free of the thing. To set a thing free, to keep its freedom, is to allow it and other things to find their proper situation. This situation is one that occurs within one aspect of the fourfold. And insofar as it is free, it allows the fourfold to fit together, to become one or have a oneness—a oneness that simply is the world being properly the world. But we also understand how dwelling is cultivation, as building is. For to allow all these regions, all these fourfold, to fit together, is to care for the whole world through the setting free of the things. Indeed, dwelling might deal immediately with things, with the setting free of things—but this setting free is a way to ultimately cultivate the world as such, to preserve and save and nurture the world as its proper self. And insofar as this is so, we understand how Dwelling is building: “dwelling, insofar as it keeps or secures the fourfold in things”—that is, sees things as part of the fourfold, of the world itself—“insofar as it keeps or secures the fourfold in things, is, as this keeping, a building...”

Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl's Phenomenology

Here is what I think is an absolutely crucial, unbelievably (unbelievably!) brilliant text of Sartre's, in full, explaining and popularizing phenomenology. I'll make some remarks afterwards. In the meantime, hopefully this will get the text out there more, and help to save both it and Sartre from their current under-appreciated stature. At the very least, it still remains one of the most (if not the most) clear introductions to intentionality in Husserl, in my mind. This is a text everyone interested in philosophy should read. Who else could have explained its merits as a restoration of the horror and charm to things? Or the deficiency of other accounts which it corrects as the solipsism of a child kissing his own shoulder? Who else could have made you feel the operation of this idea within our everyday practices, precisely because of its theoretical sophistication, so viscerally that when we indeed think it, we react even bodily--becoming entranced, disgusted, or even dizzy with near-rapture? Who else, except Sartre?!

"Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology"
From The Phenomenology Reader, ed. Dermont Moran and Timothy Mooney (London, Routledge, 2002). Found online in Thomas Sheehan's notes for his Sartre course at Stanford.
A translation (by Joseph P. Fell) of “Une idée fondamentale de la phénoménologie de Husserl: l'intentionnalité,” in Situations I (Paris: Gallimard, 1947).

“He devoured her with his eyes.” This expression and many other signs point to the illusion common to both realism and idealism: to know is to eat. After a hundred years of academicism, French philosophy remains at that point. We have all read Brunschvicg, Lalande, and Meyerson, we have all believed that the spidery mind trapped things in its web, covered them with a white spit and slowly swallowed them, reducing them to its own substance. What is a table, a rock, a house? Answer: a certain assemblage of “contents of consciousness,” a class of such contents. Oh digestive philosophy! Yet nothing seemed more obvious: is not the table the actual content of my perception? Is not my perception the present state of my consciousness? Nutrition, assimilation! Assimilation, Lalande said, of things to ideas, of ideas by ideas, of minds by minds. The corpulent skeletons of the world were picked clean by these diligent diastases: assimilation, unification, identification. The simplest and plainest among us vainly looked for something solid, something not just mental, but would encounter everywhere only a soft and very genteel mist: themselves.
Against the digestive philosophy of empirico-criticism, of neo-Kantianism, against all “psychologism,” Husserl persistently affirmed that one cannot dissolve things in consciousness. You see this tree, to be sure. But you see it just where it is: at the side of the road, in the midst of the dust, alone and writhing in the heat, eight miles from the Mediterranean coast. It could not enter into your consciousness, for it is not of the same nature as consciousness. One is perhaps reminded of Bergson and the first chapter of Matter and Memory. But Husserl is not a realist: this tree on its bit of parched earth is not an absolute that would subsequently enter into communication with me. Consciousness and the world are given at one stroke: essentially external to consciousness, the world is nevertheless essentially relative to consciousness. Husserl sees consciousness as an irreducible fact that no physical image can account for. Except perhaps the quick, obscure image of a burst. To know is to “burst toward,” to tear oneself out of the moist gastric intimacy, veering out there beyond oneself, out there near the tree and yet beyond it, for the tree escapes me and repulses me, and I can no more lose myself in the tree than it can dissolve itself in me. I am beyond it; it is beyond me.
Do you recognize in this description your own circumstances and your own impression? You certainly knew that the tree was not you, that you could not make it enter your dark stomach and that knowledge could not, without dishonesty, be compared to possession. All at once consciousness is purified, it is clear as a strong wind. There is nothing in it but a movement of fleeing itself, a sliding beyond itself. If, impossible though it may be, you could enter “into” a consciousness, you would be seized by a whirlwind and thrown back outside, in the thick of the dust, near the tree, for consciousness has no “inside.” Precisely this being-beyond-itself, this absolute flight, this refusal to be a substance is what makes it be a consciousness. Imagine for a moment a connected series of bursts that tear us out of ourselves, that do not even allow to an “ourselves” the leisure of composing ourselves behind them, but that instead throw us beyond them into the dry dust of the world, on to the plain earth, amidst things. Imagine us thus rejected and abandoned by our own nature in an indifferent, hostile, and restive world -- you will then grasp the profound meaning of the discovery that Husserl expresses in his famous phrase, “All consciousness is consciousness of something.” No more is necessary to dispose of the effete philosophy of immanence, where everything happens by compromise, by protoplasmic transformations, by a tepid cellular chemistry. The philosophy of transcendence thrown us on to the highway, in the midst of dangers, under a dazzling light.
Our own being, says Heidegger, is being-in-the-world. One must understand this “being-in” as movement. To be is to fly out into the world, to spring from the nothingness of the world and of consciousness in order suddenly to burst out as consciousness-in-the-world. When consciousness tries to recoup itself, to coincide with itself once and for all, closeted off all warm and cozy, it destroys itself. This necessity for consciousness to exist as consciousness of something other than itself is what Husserl calls “intentionality.”
I have spoken primarily of knowledge in order to make myself better understood: the French philosophy that has molded us understands little besides epistemology. But for Husserl and the phenomenologists our consciousness of things is by no means limited to our knowledge of them. Knowledge, or pure “representation,” is only one of the possible forms of my consciousness “of” this tree; I can also love it, fear it, hate it; and this surpassing of consciousness by itself -- i.e., intentionality -- finds itself again in fear, hatred, and love. Hating another is just a way of bursting forth toward him; it is finding oneself suddenly confronted by a stranger in whom one lives, in whom, from the very first, one lives through the objective quality of “hatred.”
So all at once hatred, love, fear, sympathy -- all those famous “subjective” reactions that were floating in the malodorous brine of the mind -- are pulled out. They are simply ways of discovering the world. Things are what abruptly unveil themselves to us as hateful, sympathetic, horrible, lovable. Being dreadful is a property of this Japanese mask: an inexhaustible and irreducible property that constitutes its very nature -- and not the sum of our subjective reactions to a piece of sculptured wood.
Husserl has restored to things their horror and their charm. He has restored to us the world of artists and prophets: frightening, hostile, dangerous, and with its havens of mercy and love. He has cleared the way for a new treatise on the passions that would be inspired by this simple truth, so utterly ignored by the refined among us: if we love a woman, it is because she is lovable. We are delivered from Proust. We are likewise delivered from the “internal life”: in vain would we seek the caresses and fondlings of our intimate selves, like Amiel, or like a child who kisses his own shoulder -- for everything is finally outside: everything, even ourselves. Outside, in the world, among others. It is not in some hiding-place that we will discover ourselves; it is on the road, in the town, in the midst of the crowd, a thing among things, a human among humans.

Existence (and The Hermeneutics of Facticity)

Facticity and existentiality: the alternation between these terms is a constant feature of every analysis in Being and Time, and tracking their appearance and disappearance, their use and their constant reinterpretation is a great way to ensure that one reads that treatise attentively. But existentiality, despite Heidegger's efforts, can be said to remain underdeveloped there--no doubt because it is intrinsically hard to think and the later parts of the treatise that would give it a fuller and more explicit definition are missing. This of course does not mean that it is not thought in Being and Time, or that it is not developed and investigated as a structure, just that it is often less foregrounded in propositional statements and definitions than facticity. Supplementing this lack are the refinements made to it immediately afterward in Was ist Metaphysik?,  and especially with respect to Sartre's interpretation of existence in the Brief über den "Humanismus," that place heavy emphasis on interpreting existence as ek-sistence, standing-outside-of-itself. But perhaps this refinement is a bit too rigid with respect to what Heidegger is getting at in Being and Time, and therefore less helpful. What is needed is, of course, a good reading of Being and Time--in which ek-sistence as existence is indeed fully developed--but also perhaps a look at the earlier, clumsier lecture notes. In these Heidegger is less interested compared to his published texts for rigor with respect to how he speaks of being (not caring as much, that is, whether he says the obviously wrong phrase "being is"), and thus he is more likely to define it explicitly in a sort of rough and ready fashion. This brings it more into relief as a phenomenon  equiprimordial (gleichursprunglich) with facticity: because Heidegger does not have to talk about it with respect to Sartre's interpretation of it (which more and more should not be dismissed as a misinterpretation but a necessary interpretation and modification), it is seen more clearly as interconnected with facticity. All this is to say that a reading of the following sentences from the 1923 Freiburg course The Hermeneutics of Facticity could seriously help the reading proposed above:

The being of factical life is distinctive in that it is in the how of the being of its being-possible. The ownmost possibility of be-ing itself which Dasein (facticity) is, and indeed without this possibility being "there" for it, may be designated as existence.

-Ontology--The Hermeneutics of Facticity, 12.

Existence leaps out of the facticity which it is or exists as (one begins to see how tough it is to talk about this stuff explicitly). This makes phenomena like historizing in Being and Time open out into its existentiality and not remain just a sort of mode of authenticity that emphasizes facticity, which is precisely the most necessary and most fruitful way to think about it. Furthermore, we see how the hermeneutical task is itself really a making-the-

phenomenon-exist for us:

It is with respect to this authentic be-ing itself that facticity is placed into our forehaving when initially engaging it and bringing it into play in our

 hermeneutical questioning. It is from out of it, on the basis of it, and with a view to it that facticity will be interpretively explicated. The conceptual explacata which grow out of this interpretation are to be designated as existentials.

-Ontology--The Hermeneutics of Facticity, 12.

In short, it is helpful to drive the term "existence" back into the

 phenomenon, its co-belonging with facticity, in order to get a handle on it--and in fact this itself is the task of hermeneutics for Heidegger. Like with Kant, just collecting terms together, or even dividing them up in order to explicate them ("ek-sistence") does not release what is gotten at by the terms into any significant understanding. If Heidegger does this after Being and Time, it is perhaps because he considers this hermeneutical task preparatory to the thinking to be carried out in that treatise. But what bears upon this is the relation between the hermeneutical task and the phenomenology he carries out there--which he specifies in the introduction.

Benjamin on fate, character, and law

For Benjamin, "fate" signifies what befalls man beyond the commandment of religion (thus as irreligious) when he has submitted himself to the law of the state. This submission entails that man renounces his life as a man and assume the complex relationship to legal determination which only considers him in terms of his bare life, his actions as a legal subject. Thus Benjamin says,

It is not therefore really man who has a fate; rather, the subject of fate is indeterminable... it is never man but only the life in him that it [fate] strikes.
-"Fate and Character" in Selected Writings, Volume 1

The subject of fate then is actually void. This does not mean he is free in a Sartre-like way, however. The subject of fate is complex and always already guilty or unfree, because he must always assume this voided legal subjectivity and annul his rich and complex bond as a man to the religious. To put it another way, the annulment of man by the assumption of law invests the subject with bonds to comport himself towards law in a legal way--this is why he is complex and not free (in a Sartre-like way) in his being void. When the subject does comport (or submit) himself this way, most notably when the law bears upon him, fate strikes on the subject.
"Character" takes up this void subject of fate and law and "gives this mystical enslavement... the answer of genius." In other words character takes up the void subject and develops him into an irreducible comic (that is, playful, supplemental) signifier. The bond to the religious, beyond the law, is thus restored. But this does not occur by any retrieval of the man that originally held a bond to the religious and not to the law: this man is not a reserve of plenitude outside of the law which can always be reinstated, for instance, through religious worship. Rather, character reinstates a bond to the religious, beyond the law, by creating a new bond to religion as this void subject of the law, as a subject that has transgressed religion: we see how Benjamin thinks dialectically about this. However, this is not a positive dialectic of determinate negation: the point is to arrest and interrupt the development of the legal subjectivity, not conserve it, in the assumption of character (cf. "Derridian dialectic," and "Benjamin, German Idealism, and dialectic" below). All this means that the character is not a plenitude but a void which resists the void: in short, he is a performative subject, "an individual whom, if we were confronted by his actions in life instead of by his person on the stage, we would call a scoundrel," because he went beyond the "authentic" and infinitely empty legal subjectivity. Then, as Benjamin says, "complication becomes simplicity, fate freedom."
The relationship to religion also changes: as much as the man before he voided his subjectivity and became mere life under the law, religion is not a plenitude to be returned to by this development of character. Religion too must be void, that is, must be messianic and waited for indefinitely. It is only in this way that it could be present to a subject that has renounced it: one must wait for divine recompense for the transgression that was submitting to the law instead of holding fast to the commandments (this is the meaning of the messianic that we find in the "Critique of Violence" and, modified, in "Theses on the Concept of History").

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 space of the body

Here is yet more powerful empirical evidence that Maurice Merleau-Ponty is extremely right in his theory of the body as an intentional structure, and anti-representationalist accounts of consciousness or existence in general on the right track in exhaustively explaining even the most extreme phenomena. The evidence is an article, to be published in Science, about several experiments that detail how one can experimentally produce "out-of-body" experiences.
The main experiment detailed was conducted at Princeton and essentially proves (primarily spatial) intentionality as someone like Sartre explains it: in standing towards a tree, for example, looking and directing oneself to it, one is not observing the tree from the physical point in Cartesian space that one occupies, but is rather at the tree. Sartre shows that this "at" is not vague in any way, but is in fact highly determinate: one is with the tree, there, where the tree is--not in the sense of its being in space but of its being in a field of intentions, in a field of possible things I may walk towards, act towards, or, in general, be-towards. Instead of using Sartre's "at," we may put it in a Heideggerian way and say that one is"nearest" the tree, that is, nearest in the sense of intention: what being "at" the tree means when we understand it this Heideggerian way is that I am at the tree such that something that interposes itself between me and the tree in Cartesian or empirical space will be "further" away from me than the tree.
Now, the experiment at Princeton set up some virtual goggles such that one's viewpoint when the goggles were on appeared several feet ahead of one's actual viewpoint in physical space. Prodding them with a stick (in what looks like the direction of the virtual viewpoint, though I don't see in the end why it being otherwise would contradict the point I'm about to make) would give them the "out-of-body" experience. Now, isn't it clear that the "out-of-body" experience detailed here would be almost identical with the experience of being "at" or "near" the tree in the distance? One is pushed a little with a stick, and one feels (the experimenters document) the feeling of being "out-there" at the point in physical space where the virtual viewpoint is supposed to be. In other words, what is this but a feeling of what is, insofar as intentionality is supposed by Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Husserl, Sartre, and others to be the way things actually are--what is this but a feeling of what is actually the case? In a sense the experiment just makes you perceive where you are already at.

Note: This example of Sartre's is in his extrordinarily brilliant two-page article entitled "Intentionality: a fundamental idea in Husserl's phenomenonlogy," which everyone who has five minutes of free time should read: witty, concise, and extremely illustrative, it is I think one of Sartre's best pieces of writing--and given his ouvre, that is saying something. Unfortunately it is located in the hard-to-find Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology (in its 1970 issue), so I can't give you a link to it (which I would love to be able to do). Recently, however, it has been included in The Phenomenology Reader, edited by Dermot Moran and Timothy Mooney, and published by Routledge, which is in most bookstores, so next time you're in Barnes and Noble (or at the library) take five minutes and read it, then put the book back. If you're worried you just stole knowledge, remember that Alain Badiou develops into a pretty coherent philosophical position the notion that knowledge is and should be free, and you'll feel better about it.