Thesis on Hegel: Memories of an Education

Exhaustion seems like a good place to start. So much has been made between Oppermann and I about exhaustion, the exhaustion of a thought, or thinking until one is exhausted. At the time of this thesis, we had not stumbled into the labyrinth of exhaustion to any real degree. We had experienced fragments of this exhaustion reading Kafka to each other, or staying up and speaking, sipping wine and coffee until we thought we were half-dead. Exhaustion is a word that can rightfully be dedicated to Oppermann. If Genet had his Lady of the Rose, Oppermann had his Lady of Exhaustion. And it saved us many times from the back avenues of Genet's dismay at taking his desire too literally. Oppermann introduced me to Genet and Exhaustion. He did not introduce me to ladies directly, though I am honored to have met some of the women whose life with him met at an intersection. Exhaustion is many ways safe. And it was enough to attempt a modicum of shelter in the genius of exhaustion.

When I spoke about Avant Garde Art, I was speaking with reference to at least two major encounters with art history that I had had to that time: one was the television documentary called "The Shock of the New," the other was a visit to the Fin de Siecle work of Gustav Klimpt presented around this time at the Los Angeles County Museum of art. Both the work of the documentary and the exhibit evoke a sense of awe and respect for the history of art in the 20th Century. It is not certain that at the time of my thesis I was making the nihilistic, unimaginative assertion that "it's all been said and done, so what's the point." That is the terrible foot-dragging depression behind all of this, the child-like obsession with a turn of novelty, and despair that this novelty might not ever be made present...

"For Hegel the Idea must embrace the terrible extinguishing of the world, and the very way all things must come to an end."

This idea came to me before I read one of my favorite passages in Jung, from Symbols of Transformation (cw vol. 5 para 577): indicating that the true essence of the mother was "separation and farewell."

The pillory where criminals were scourged was also known as the Hekate; and to her, as to the roman Trivia, were dedicated junctions of three roads, forked roads, and crossroads. Where the roads branch off or meet, dog sacrifices were offered to her, and there too were thrown the bodies of the executed: the sacrifice occurs at the point of union. Where the roads cross and enter into one another, thereby symbolizing the union of opposites, there is the “mother,” the object and epitome of all union. Where the roads divide, where there is partition, separation and splitting, there we find the division, the cleft [scheide: “parting,” “sheath,” “vagina”] – the symbol of the mother and at the same time the essence of what the mother means for us, namely cleavage and farewell. (pp. 370-371)"

The passage I have copied out again is not new any more to me. I have had at least 20 years of sifting and shredding it's value. It remains a kind of totem that wards against my own sentimental turning back: because it keeps shutting the door, it says that the process is one of separation from my vanity and pride. Bob Dylan continues to speak also true: "when you thought you lost everything, you find out you can lose a little more."

Hermes is a thief, he steals time in terms of dedication to a seemingly futile alchemical endeavor, that friends will oft point out are dead-ends. Hegel and Jung are dead-end philosophers. Hermes is a thief of memory, where so many times the right mode of speech or the right story are forgotten. The thief, with a cloak and dagger at the crossroads might back-stab you. But we are talking of time, my dear friends, and this is merely metaphor.

Was it not enough to continue to dream of a dream that might have been? Is it not important to give creedence to my youthful shape, who believed something that time and again experience has told me was incorrect? It is not the dream, or the vision of the youth that should be ignored, simply his arrogance, his bitter coarseness, his forced rhyme. The youth asks: Is it better to be crushed by it's impossibility (of the "celestial possible") than to be capable of one last smug determination that speaks, twists it's tongue to this very moment in a sneer that said: "told you so?"

The devil, brought up like this with his twisted physiognomy, is no pretty picture. The truth the devil speaks remains the phrase that will haunt this account: "don't go off living pipe-dreams, indeed, but listen with your whole heart to the music of Pan..."

"Yet what undoes the Idea - and Idealism - is that Science itself can no longer claim to be outside of time: as time's infinite and Eternal form. Science is poeticized by a kind of radical temporality."

Here I read the inspiration of Harvey Rabbin, the inspiration at the "thesis" stage of my youth (we had yet to endure the era of "Elective Affinities," and dream once again of Another "Truth.") This remains one of the wonders of Hegelian Dialectic: that in point of fact it is not a logical stillbirth, rather it is a specific way in which knowledge actually grows: not only as an empire, or as a kind of apparatus of capture of the "State Apparatus" (Acknowledging the influence of Deleuze and Guattari on Harvey Rabbin and in turn on me: a Marxist approach: "radical temporality," that was bound to overturn existing orders, neither indulging in the deadly fetish of revolution, nor staying with the "spirit of the time" (Jung, Red Book), Kapital) ...but as a genuine profoundly painful searching for the transition of knowledge.

Does knowledge have to be painful? Only if that knowledge dares to deal with the shadow of imperialism, eurocentrism: all of which have been accused of Hegel. Nevertheless it is a question

"....thesis, antithesis-synthesis, forget about it." Slavoj Zizek on Hegel see also Zizek on Hegel part 2...

(Though Zizek deteriorates for minutes to baudy sexual jokes, he remains Lacanian, and true to finding some way of dealing with some of the most potentially deadened intellectual material: perhaps through engaging enough of the bawdy adolescent male who would dare to say: "exactly what is in Hegel's writing anyway?")

"Hegel in a way was a historicist, but, the main feature of the historical thought-program is evolutionary mobilism... that everything is historically motivated, and so on, where our historical experience begins, it is the experience of a certain impossiblity, in the sense of a historical break, you cannot go back to the past. If you do the practice attains a radically changed meaning..." (Zizek on Hegel, 2 or 16 3:40 ff)

Zizek is pointing to the same radical temporality, that suggests, once again that the only de-facto history we have is bound to the present.

In writing that the "Idea and Idealism is no longer outside of time," I am, of course displacing the Eurocentric approach to historicising. Nevertheless, I will appeal to Hegel for a story of knowing. This is not the same as the "thought construct" what Kierkegaard dismissed with a shrug of his shoulders. In fact a better story of knowing has rarely been told. It is up to us to investigate this knowing-in-time, with a fool-hardy impatience to know, and with enough temperance to renounce, release the accomplishment, entrance to Gelassenheit.