NEGATION'S ART IN PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT 31 world, we have become well adjusted to this question, and well accustomed to the answer, But for the pre-Freudian, Heedl, the question is more acute: what allows for the becomring of consciousness as a shaping self? Here we need to leave Religion and Art Religion, and recur to carlier and more nascent forma- fons within the text's marrative. THE SHAPING OF NEGATION Ia the lntroduction of the Phenomenalogy, Hegel writes of the necessity of the movement by which consciousness moves to a new object, and in this connec- tion he speaks of origination (Entstebung). Yet he says that we do mot have an understanding of how this origsastion takes place: ‘But it is just this necessity itself. or the origination |Entstelneng) af the new object, that presents itself to consciousness without its understanding how this happens, which proceeds for us, as it were, behind the back of consciousness’, So where in consciousness exactly can this generative foree itself be found or located? Where is the “hack of consciousness’? Though the answer is best worked out in the following Science of Logic of 1812, a6 we will seein the next chapter, here in the Phenomenology we get a prelaminary version. Its shape is nor fully formed, but it nevertheless emerges, at least spectrally, and under shifting guises, a3 neguttion. Here ton, Schiller has had his influence. In his Ou Aesthetic Raweation, Schiller describes Beauty, wesaw, as che linking together of wo opposing conditions: life as substance (matter, passivity, sensation), and shape as thought (form, activiry, thinking). Beauty is che “intermediate condition’. Bur in the Eighteenth Letwer ites arrived at by a certain synthesis of the two sides: Beauty combines those two opposite conditions, and thus removes the apposition.” We quickly see that this synthesis is.a sublation (or Auglelrorg), for Schiller immediately adds: ‘But since both conditions remain eternally opposed to ame another, they can only be combined by cancellation jawfgehoben werden)."" In is likely thar Hegel drew his notion of aufbeben from Schiller here, where Beauty must not only destroy but preserve both sides of the eppasition, This is its reconciling function. [nthe subsequent letter, Schiller elaborates: “So we arrive at reality only through limita- Gon, at the postfire, or actually established, only through segatfon or exclusion, at the determination only through the surrender of our free determinability”™ And the claboration continues in che following letter, the Twemticth; So itis not enough for something to begin which did not previously ‘exist; something must cease which previously did ewi [One] qmust i a certamn fashion retern to that segative condition of sheer32 HEGEL AND THE ART OF NEGATION indeterminacy in which he existed before anything at all made an impression upon his scises. Bur chat condition was completely devoid of content, and it is now a question of reconciling an equal indeterminacy and an cqually unlimited determinacy with the greatest possible degree of content, since something, positive is te resule directly from this condition. The determination whieh he received by means of sensation must therefore be preserved, because he must net lose hok! of reality; bur at the same time it must, insofar as it isa limitation, be removed, because an unlim- ited determinacy is to make its appearance, His task és therefore to amnibilure ond at the same time fo preserve the determination of dis condition, a thing which can be done in only one way — by opposing thar determination with another.” Se for Schiller, the sensuous as real can combine with its opposite, the freedom of thought as active, only through the condition of real and active determinacy, and this condition he terms the aesthetic.” Heget had much t ponder here, and acknowledges as much in the Introduction to the Lecteres om Aesthetics decades later."* Bot by then, art is largely divested of its negari In the Phenomenology, om the other hand, the on of that was already received as inextricable with creative HUI poe, oo so felt it his task to explicate what might be that powers source and identity, as origination, That explication begins already in the first part of the Preface, If Schiller's ‘Jiving shape’ combsines the sensuous with the formal activity of thinking, Hegel begat his reflections on “scacntific cognition’ with a homolegous relationship: the coming together of substance and subject. He writes: “In my view, which can be justified only by the exposition of the system itself, everything turns on igrasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject. Bar exactly how might these two unite into a whole ax Truc? How does one make the substance fiereg, and not simply inert in its immediate subscantialiry? O1, how does the subject actualise that substance, and in doing so actualise itself out of its own inmedi uibstance can become living, actual being ‘only in so far as itis the movement of positing itself, or isthe medianon of its self-othering with inelf'. [tis not enough for one side of the substance-subjcct equation samply to take hold of the other, and assume it under its own precicating powers. The substance for the subject) must mediate itvelf our of its own inert immediacy. But how? How ix such self-othering possible? Only through negation, says Hegel. ‘This [living] Substance ts, a3 Subject, pure, simple negutiedty, and is for this very reason the bifurcation of the simple; it ts the doubling which sets up opposition, and then again the negation of this indiffcrent diversity and of itsNEGATION'S ART IN PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIT 33 antithesis [the immediate smplicity|." This Hegel calls ‘the process of its owe becoming, the circle that presupposes its end as its goal, having its end also in its beginning’, This process is the ‘labour of the negative’,"' is first introduced, therefore, as the process of becoming, of coming. into actuality This procest requires mediation: hegation cannot simply stand inactive in an immediate state of inertia, om one or the other side of the equa- tion, as if in some pure orginal state, tr must penetrate the nwo sides through movement, and do so as interpenetration. In such interpenctration, the owo, as the othering of irs respective selves, become in fact identical, ‘For mediation’, says moments later, ‘is nothing beyond self-moving [sich bewegende] selfsameness, or is ceflection into self, the moment of the “I” which is for itself pure negativity or, when reduced to its pure abstraction, sieyple becoming.“@ Such reflection into itself, as self-division, is the great mark of Reason as self- generative. or what Hegel. following Anstotle, calls purposive activity. To move our of Substance towards Subject, or from Subject to Substance, one must be self-moving (selbst heregend), This power to move, eaken abstractly, is being for-self or pure negativity’ where ‘the result is the same as the 2." This circular movernent is possible only by means of a aaa always in operation. If this is a circulas vitiows, it is not so because it 6 self-contining and selfenclased. For negation, by its very mature, dissolves the seal of rhe circle, and though it continues in a circular movement (substance {7} subject), it continually creates new circles, Thus Hegel will later say, The circle that remains self-enclosed and, like substance, bolls its moments together, is an immediate lationship, one therefore which has nothing astonishing about it. But that an accident as such, detached from what orcumsenbes it, what is bound and ix actual only in irs context with others, should arcain an existence cof its own and a separate freedam — this is the tremendous power of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of the pure “1°. This latter assertion - the tremendous: power of the negative — appears in a Paragraph that has now, as we'll see further below, become a definitive paragraph of Hegelian negation in contemporary thought, for it goes further and calls us to tarry with this negative in all its power: the living Spirit, the Substance made Subject, is living by virtue aor of shanking before the death inherent in its own dissolution, but of facing it head-on, ‘ly wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. tis this power, not a4 something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative... on the contrary, Spirit is this Pict, by looking the negative in the and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the4 HEGEL AND THE ART OF NEGATION negative is the magical power that converts st inte being.’ But the power is not really the stuff of magic, for Hegel quickly tells us it is the Subject itself, whose immediacy is sublated as “authentic substance, that being or immediacy whase mediation is not ourside of ir bur which is this mediation itself." Introduced here as the self-motivating power through dissolution, the negative ix not simply what allows conversion, but, in its most basic operation, allows creation into being. For the conversion of a thing’s innermost being to its inner most otherness is in fact a creation af a new being that did nor exist before. Such a creation, if it is to operate first within the self-eaclased circle of being, requires a void, of a wording. Bur itis precisely this wold, as voiding, that initiates the creation. Hegel, still in the Preface, writes: “That is why some of the ancients conceived the oid as the principle of motion, for they rightly saw the moving principle as the negutiew, though they did not yet grasp that the negative is the self, So we can sce here that the movernent ro follow, the movement that will drive the entirety of the Phenomeaology forward, the movement thar, we have claimed, is che A oF art, is now, also, and necessarily, at its iumermost core, a hegation, But a creatine negation, an art of negation, which now spills forth through the rest of the Preface and indeed the cntire argument that rests upon it. The Preface is just the beginning, but if we take it at its word, that beginning, is also its end, And the end is also the heginning. In the development of the argument of the Phenomenology proper, we see this movement cof negation at work in various capacities and guises, will use different terms in the opening stages of the text to desoribe ar nuance this force: difference, pure apposite, antithesis (Extgegensetzvorg), coutraciction, self-sumdering (Entzsevien), division, and indeed megation itself, For exam- ple, in the description of perception, with the object as Thing in the sensible word: ‘The Thing is posited as being for itself. or as the absolute of all othemess, therefore as purely seff-related bur the that is self-related 1s the suspension of #fselfiin other words, the Thing has its essential being in another Thin, 26). Or in a subsequent pastage on appearance and the supersensable world, concerning force: "Force, as actual, exists semply and solcly in its expression, which atthe same time is nothing clse chan a superses- sion [Sichselbstanfhebers| of itself (§142)." Or again, “This self-identical essence is therefore relared only to itself; “to itself” implies relationship to an “other™ and the relation-te-selfis rather a self-semdering: or. in other words, that very self-idenrical ness is an inner difference’ (§162). Or in the subsequent section on self-consciouyness: "Consciousness has for its object one which, of its own self, posits its otherness or difference as a nothingness’ (G176), And all this culini- nates in the final section on Absolute Knowing, where, drawing om the nation of itcamation and kenosis, Hegel speaks of the Self as absolute Spit and NotionMEGATION'S ART IN PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIT 35 (Begriff, which takes it shape, after surrendering its cternal essence, in the neal workd: ‘The self-sanderieg of stepping-forth into existence stems from the purity of the Notion, for this is absolure abstraction or negativity... [eis only through action that Spirit és in such a way that it is really there, that is, when it raises it existenceinto Thougit and thereby into an absolute antithesis, and retums out of this annthests, in and through the antithesis iself* (§796). From this central movement, whose various segments might expand oyrward to reveal further vectors of the negative at work, We can move forward to the section on Religion, and now modulate the understanding we have been explor- ingabave of why Hegel couples art and religion together. Both art and religion are expressions nor only of the sclf-begetring that shapes inself through art into religion, but also of that contradictory urge or activity, that self-sundering, that allows self-consciousness to come into existence against its own interior dif- ference. When Hegel says of the Religion of Art that the ‘Spirit hax advanced From the form of Sudutaace to assume that of Subject, for it produces its shape, thus making explicit in at the act, or the sclé-consciousness® (§748), act and self- consciousness are here equated, bur only through an incarnational unity of substance and subjectivity, a unity thar is ultimately, as the Preface laid out in advance, a negativity thar abstracts both sides into ‘absolute Being’ (and along with it both essence and existence, both life and form, etc}. Thus the later Language of kewosts: the ‘self-suedering or stepping-forth into existence’ that stems from an ‘absolute abstraction or negarivity® (S796), Now if the power that allows movement forward in creativity and activiry is also a negating power, because origination stems from the Entzveiex (literal the splitting in two) of what was once a whole o a unity, or from the aude of pure identity inta difference, and from the megation of thar difference back again into a self-conscious unity, then the inherent dynamic that shapes art and rchigion, and artas religion, is much more primordial than what the outline of the Phenomenology might first suggest. IF we follow Schiller’s cue, as surely had done, and see arm nor first as aesthetics, an a posterior reflection on the nature and work of artistic practice, but as an @ priovi impulse or drive that sublates ewo opposing forces, then we gain a better sense of how art might Function in the Pheronienology fundamentally: not as a categorical practice in and of itvelf, but ax a shaping force that underhes our most significant activity and formations, individual and collective. The artof ‘Artas Rehyon’ would thus become much more than simply stages long life's way, ending in philosophy, Art would be the creative impulse at irs most primordial, figuring in the very movement upon which the Pilemomeaology is based, the originating movement ind the back of consciousness, Art could not receive its own category, since itcouk only emerge asa manifest expression, a Gestalt, when that movernent36 HEGEL AND THE ART OF NEGATION: becomes ‘perfectly transparent tn itself", and this, for Hegel, only happens in the moment of Religion, Bur this means that Religion, and indeed Philos: the Absolute Knowing to follow, become creative expressions bound impulse, of creative expressions of this very impulse, And yet the fact that the impulse itself is a negating smpulse remains sn disruptive to our thinking about art, religion, or ever philosophy. It seemed disruptive enough for Hegel himself, who did nor maintain the explicit notion of art as 4 shaping impulse in his subsequent thinking, In fact, we know that by the time of the Lectares on Aesthetics of the 1820s, are had become the starting point of a triadic mowernent whereby it must, in the end, concede to, even ina self-consuming manner, religion and philosophy And for many this leads to Hegel's now (infamous wea that art becomes “a thing of the past’. Bur here in the Phenomenology, art, in the transformed sense we have now given it by way of Schiller, is a ‘death’ only ax a negation that, at the same time, is a creation, an annihilarion that is an ongination. It is nor thar art ives way to religion and philosophy, or cven that Art as Religion gives way to Revealed Religion, which in turn gives way to Absolure Knowledge, Rather art is an ensuring impulse, one that, as a negating dynamic, originates the move- ment of the act of consciousness. Art is the emergence of a productive force on the sate that has remained toa often obscured im vanous Hegelianisms since Hegel: the creative and effectual power of the mind as a self-sundering act. Thinking of mepation as the impetus or conudus of movement's vitality is not only, as we will further discover, something at the heart of the poesis thar both brings art into being and then perhaps leaves it behind {in its ‘death’, or, as Agamben will say, withour content); tris also that the very nature of this movement must be understood from the question of the creative activity of art in the first instance, before tt ever reaches the system (i.c. aesthetics), The Phenomenology becomes an important first text in this regard, lf art after the Phenomenology has,on one end, played itself out as something surpassed (ever to the point of death), then the Phenomenology allows us to retain of regain a view of art thar remains originary, before it has been sundered fully from religion and indeed philosophy, But we should go further and sce this ofigenary moment oF art before 4 ts art, before it takes actual shape in the expressions We call art, ‘or. what might amount to the same thing, in Hegel's terns, after it is art {after it has been surpassed as a shaped expression). If rhis originary moment has any effective then religion and philosophy themselves become affected, or infecred, and ‘surpassed" themselves, What would this ‘surpassing’ mean, exactly? For Agamben it means surpass- ing the ‘swamp of aesthetics and technics to restore to the poctic status of man ‘on carth its original dimension’. Here aesthetics means art other as reflectiveNEGATION'S ART IN PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIT 7 technique or as technics, even technology [im the Heideggerean sense). Esther way, itis cunning the creative impulse ingo the syseene thar later became Hegel's Aesthetics, in which Hegel says the greatest need for the day is not creating art again. bur ‘knowing philosophically what art is’. To go beyond this kind of aesthetics, which loses the force of art to a purely reflective stance, and makes itinte a ‘fine art’, void of any contest or action (and bet us remember the sense of finality in the word “fine’ of ‘fine arr’), is to gn back to the Peenomenalogy and retrieve art as an integral feacure of the coming to being of Spirit, And if we push this further, this surpassing, which is actually a return — a return that evokes Nictzsche's circle of eternal retum, which Agamben picks up in relation to Nietzsche's conception of art as ‘the highest task of man, the tnie metaphysi- cal activity"®'— this surpassing surpasses even religion and philosophy as summilar systems of static reflection. This would mean religion and philosophy would hecome mage than what any one fixed system cnukd mamntaim, more than the mere institutional isation of thought and practice, mare chan compartmentalisations of experience. [t would mean religion and philosophy, like art, would always be mowing beyond themselves and into the other, The beauty of the Phenomenology is thar itis a wholly organic expression always on the move. Art is religion, which is philosophy; and even though ‘Absolute Knowledge’ may be the apotheosis of the Spirit's movement, we can see its own negative omganiciem will ahways disrupt thar apotheosis in a kenotic emptying. The dialectical movement, in all its so- called progressive moments, is never fully a movement roward absolute synthesis, then, [tie a movement driven by absolute negation in which synthesis is only a stage made necessary by and yet always falling. to coat though falling in a productive manttcr as it yields to the mavericnt that is The movement of the Phenomenology of Spirit asa text thus takes.us beyond the traditional categories and limits of art, religion and philosophy As we hawe said, it reverses Kant by breaking open limits, [t takes us beyond fine arr, beyond fine religion. beyond Sine philosuphy {1 keeps them ‘unfinalised', moving together toward cheir own transcendence, yer entwined one within the other, lin this movement, we are moved ourselves into a wholly new space in which art, religion and philosophy must be radically reoonceived, even beyond the later dimself, Under such an impulse the Pbenonrenology can be called a work of art. Not beeause itis a fine thing of beauty Not even because ot shows the genius of a creative mind, But because its own productive impulse works against its self to make something new of iself, And in this sense Jean-Luc Nancy was right tc call Hegel ‘the inaugural thinker of the contemporary world’," For if maodemity, or postmodernity, o pest-postmedernity, sto surpass itself, as it continually strives to do, in spite of itself, it will do so only by reconceiving itself in ils own creative negativity