Jason,
I like Balibar’s reading of Hegel, and thank you for your informative account of it. My comment on your post, in fact, grew so long I am posting it separately; but it is very much a response to your “Generation and Corruption of Subjectivity.”
The debate on the Philosophy of Right has to get off the notion of recognition ASAP, and Balibar’s reading does that. The view that families, as well as states, are agents of subjectivation is a good place to go. I would hate to have lived my entire life not understanding that dimension of family life, and as it is I learned about it far too late. (“Oh! That’s what it’s all been about!”)
But…I do think that the idea that Hegel’s dialectical teleology leads him to underestimate the violence in civil society has some problems.…
First (and denial of this is endemic in French approaches to Hegel), dialectics and speculation are quite separate things. According to the methodological discussions at the beginning of the Encyclopedia, dialectics is raw negation, or moving-on-from. It has no intrinsic telos and will last as long as time itself, since it is just what happens to things because of time (they get “negated,” i.e. left behind).
It is “speculation” which introduces telê into the dialectical development, stopping the dialectical drive in order to look at its current contents and give them a systematic definition. The speculative element thus has (like Aristotle’s νους θυραθεν) a sort of arbitrariness to it, in which the telos of a dialectical development doesn’t quite match what actually came out of the development itself. Many (especially in the sad wake of Reichenbach) think this discredits Hegel. In fact, it is part of the game he is playing.
In general, the arbitrariness comes from the fact that Hegel’s “comprehension” of a dialectical development, his statement of where an historical process has, for the moment, come out, is governed not only by the nature of that development itself but by exigencies internal to his system itself; I won’t go into what these are here.
Suffice that in the case of the state, Hegel’s account of civility relies on factors internal to his system—to his accounts of everything else. The result is a sort of “recipe” for how the state is supposed to function. That there are in fact plenty of states which do not function in that way is something Hegel is well aware of; he calls them “bad” or “untrue” states. An example is any state which does not give equal rights to all its citizens.
Hegel is thus not simply trying to state true things about the world around, as Marx, Balibar, and just about everybody else think he is, but to come up with a set of words which will enable others to do that. His view is that in order to diagnose problems with actual states, you need the kind of (verbal) recipe that he has given.
But what about facets of the state which are not simple failures to live up to Hegel’s recipe, but active movements away from it? Here again, Balibar is onto something important: the state generates violence. One of the intrinsic characteristics of what Balibar calls “subjectivation,” however, is that it reduces violence. How can Hegel handle this?
We have to understand the place of the Philosophy of Right in Hegel’s system. Since in Hegel’s philosophy subject = object, what we get in the Philosophy of Right is a state discourse on the state: the Philosophy of Right is the science of the state’s success. To see its failures, we must move to the next “higher’ level of the system, art. There we find a critique of the state for creating a “rabble of paupers,” for operating an oppressive legal system, and for smothering life in a barrage of bureaucratic regulations. These are all, we may say, forms of violence.
It is also asserted that they are not mere failures to live up to what a state should be, but necessary results of the fundamental principle of the state, whose limitations now become evident. The plight of the workers, about which Hegel waxes emphatic in the spoken lectures, is thus part of a wider set of what Lazzarato calls “fractal and differential ruptures” that together constitute the violent side of the state. But it is a side visible only from the point of view of art.
So I think that what Balibar has done is come up with some very serious questions for Hegel—questions to which Hegel, however, has some very serious answers.
I know your intention is “not to make Hegel inescapable once again,” but you don’t need to: that, I fear, is what he has always been.
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