Holocaust Memory and Hegel

The finite has always to be maintained and made into an absolute.

Hegel

To invoke the name Hegel in the context of the Holocaust—and what it means to remember it—will surely seem to some to strike a discordant tone. As cardinal spokesman for German Idealism and its version of absolute subjectivity, Hegel is usually more frequently aligned with clearing a conceptual space amenable to the commission of Holocausts rather than with ensuring against any future recurrence of them. Few may be as explicit as Karl Popper—for whom Hegel is the decisive link in the emergence of modern totalitarianism¹—but the lion's share of contemporary critical-theoretical positions (especially those informed by poststructuralism) still depend fundamentally on a rejection of Hegel on ethical grounds. This rejection has primarily to do with the sense that the historical fate of particular groups and identities do not fare so well within and as a consequence of the Hegelian system and the position of Absolute Knowledge reached by Spirit. Indeed, today, for many Hegel's grand dialectic of History—in which every immediacy, every experience, every particular is already and automatically swallowed up by the whole—points up the violence of master-narratives at their worst. As it entraps and subsumes so many different material markers of identity (bodily, ethnic, gender, class, etc.)—markers which for Hegel gain their apparently singular bearing solely by means of what is universal (i.e. consciousness and the activity of thinking)—Hegel's master-narrative, it is said, lets nothing go free. One need only recall Hegel's paean to the "cunning of reason" in his introduction to the Philosophy of History, in which he claims quite explicitly that "the particular is for the most part of too trifling value as compared with the general," and thus its sacrifice is nothing to lament. ² Moreover, Hegel is said to erase the very principle of difference itself, since every advance within Hegel's dialectic appears to represent an achievement of meaningful knowledge which disavows the very condition of meaningful knowledge—that condition being the "play" of nonmeaning which even allows meaningful knowledge to be constituted in the first place. As Derrida says of Hegel's phenomenology, "It does not see the nonbasis of play upon which (the) history (of meaning) is launched." ³

This is, of course, part of the now-standard deconstructive critique of Western metaphysics and the "transcendental subject" on which it relies, the subject who erases within his own mind the divide between spirit and matter and thereby realizes a fictive unity between the two. It is Hegel who theorized this subject more thoroughly than anyone, insisting that every material reality experienced by this subject is always and only the product of his or her mediation; as Hegel put in the preface to the Phenomenology, "everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject." ⁴ The radicality of German Idealism indeed concerns precisely its theses pertaining to the status of objectivity as such—that is to say, its claims that objectivity itself is the product of subjective mediation, that what counts as an object can only be determined by a subject. In this respect, objectivity is in a sense an illusion: it does not exist "out there" but is rather the result of a distinction between subject and object made by the very subject in question. ⁵

For Hegel, this very distinction is a structural feature of consciousnessor selfhood itself. According to Hegel, there is a fundamental "disparity which exists in consciousness between the 'I' and the substance which is its object" (21). Moreover, this disparity—what Hegel refers to as the "negative in general"—is absolutely critical for the survival of subject and object. This is why Hegel says that the distinction, conventionally thought to be a "defect of both," is in fact "their soul, or that which moves through them" (21). The key point of Hegel's phenomenology is to recognize that the...