Arrested Development: On Hegel, Heidegger and Derrida

ABSTRACT

Although both Heidegger and Derrida criticize Hegel as the archetype and historical culmination of the metaphysics of presence, Hegel’s dialectics also serves as a model for their critical destruction or deconstruction of metaphysics. Through an analysis of the notions of ‘arrest’ and ‘halt’ in Derrida and Hegel, this paper will show how both Heidegger and Derrida take up elements of Hegel’s theory of the development of consciousness, which is characterized both by an ‘unhalting forward motion’ but also by delay, interruption and inertia. This paper will develop the strange parallel between Derrida’s notion of l’arrêt and the halting movement of spirit in Hegel. It will show that Hegel’s ‘rhythm of the concept’ is not so distant from the ‘arrhythmia’ Derrida finds in the notion of l’arrêt. It will thus show how time, history and spirit are linked in a self-deconstructive manner in this unstable point of the arrest/halt.

KEYWORDS:

• Derrida
• Heidegger
• Hegel
• arrest
• rhythm
• arrhythmia

Thought Police: Hegel, Heidegger, Derrida

How is the relation between Hegel, Heidegger and Derrida to be conceptualized today? There is no easy answer to this question, for the links between the three are varied and complicated. It would be a mistake to see the relation between the three as a straightforward development, where Heidegger criticizes Hegel only to be criticized by Derrida in turn, so that the development culminates in Derrida’s thoroughgoing, self-critical philosophical critique. Not only would such a teleology be contrary to the spirit of Derrida’s philosophy, it would also miss the various ways in which Derrida, in criticizing Heidegger – perhaps even in criticizing Heidegger for his latent onto-theology, that is, for his repressed Hegelianism (e.g. Derrida 1982a, 63) – in fact returns, as it were, to Hegel, and is in fact closer to Hegel than to Heidegger. At the same time, it is abundantly clear that Derrida’s criticism of Hegel proceeds largely through the Heideggerian conceptual frame of the history of metaphysics as onto-theology dominated by the conception of being as presence.

How are we to construe, here, a meta-narrative on the stories told by Derrida about Heidegger and Hegel, the story told by Heidegger about Hegel, and Hegel’s own narrative about the history of spirit? Stories which deal not just with being, time and history, but in which the very question of narratability, the position of the subject and its relation to what it presents as knowledge, is posed to the highest degree? ‘All organized narration is a matter for the police’, Derrida writes in the 1979 text Living On/Border Lines (105). To present an organized narrative is to pin down a meaning, to delimit a subject matter, to identify a topic and not to exceed the boundaries of the matter at hand – to ‘tell exactly what happened’, as is demanded of the narrator in one of the Blanchot stories Derrida cites. Demanded by the authorities, a ‘specialist in mental illness’, with the police chief lurking in the background (97). In Living On, the question of meaning is tied to the question of authority as well as the question of temporality in the notion of ‘the arrest’. To answer a question – for example, regarding the positions of and differences between Hegel, Heidegger and Derrida – is to settle on a story, to arrest the play of signification, to fix and determine the positions of the authors relative to one another.

The notion of the arrest, I will argue in the following, can be taken as a substitute – one of many – for the general complex of problems and questions that make up Derrida’s thought. The arrest, Derrida writes, is a ‘false name … for différance’ (114). In Living On, Derrida plays at length on this notion of the arrest, a notion that is ‘difficult to pin down’ (75), both necessary and impossible. Meaning must be arrested, enclosed within limits and organized in a regulated system, and at the same time it always escapes, morphs out of control and slips through the cracks of the ‘ramparts that bolster a system’ (85). In Living On, the discussion circles largely around Blanchot’s L’arrêt de mort, which can be rendered in English as ‘death sentence’, but also as ‘suspension of death’. The arrest is tied, therefore, as the title of Derrida’s text suggests, to questions of life and death: to living, living on before and after death, to dying and not dying quite yet. But the arrest is not just a meditation on death: in this notion, all the different strands of Derrida’s thinking on time and teleology, metaphysics and the critique of metaphysics, the subject and its intermittent presence, meaning and the dissemination of meaning come together.

In Given Time, Derrida insists that both subject and object are ‘arrested effects of the gift’ (1992, 24). Following a line of thought that we can trace back to both Heidegger and Hegel, the arrest here takes on a temporal-ontological significance; through it, Derrida both takes up and seeks to challenge his predecessors’ understanding of the temporal character of beings. Both subject and object only exist as temporary suspensions of an incessant movement of differentiation or dissemination. Everything determined, bounded, fixed, every identity – this is the idea which, I will seek to show, goes back to Hegel – thus depends on a ‘taking out of time’, a maintaining in presence, an arresting of movement and change.

The significance of this idea is historical, political and philosophical. For both Hegel and Heidegger, the very notion of a historical era or epoch is based on the arrest, the temporary suspension of a larger historical development (of being or spirit) in the form of a particular constellation of more or less fixed philosophical notions with their cultural, political and institutional correlates; what Hegel calls a ‘shape of spirit’ (Zantvoort 2018b). Politically, the question relates to the tension between the arrested, fixed – ‘reified’ – institutions, laws and norms that make up a given social order, and the underlying web of changing social relations and notions which the social system can never completely capture or control. From a Hegelian point of view, it is therefore a question of the possibility and timing of revolutions, of the moment when the arrested order begins to crumble and makes way for a new one (Hegel 1977, 6–7).

Philosophically, the question relates to the very possibility of determining an object of knowledge or discourse, of speaking of meaning, identity, or truth by capturing difference in an ordered system of concepts. And this means, of course, that in the history of philosophy, any judgement on or criticism of a philosopher by his or her successors can only be – to play on a Derridean theme – a false arrest, based on a counterfeit warrant. Every thinker arrests thought, seeks to fix and secure it in an ordered system of concepts, even if, as in Derrida’s case, the system is self-reflective and self-disruptive to a maximum degree; every thinker seeks to allocate to their predecessors their place in the history of philosophy as they conceive it, their own little prison cell: Derrida arresting both Heidegger and Hegel; Heidegger arresting Nietzsche, Hegel, Aristotle; Hegel arresting everyone …

Let us take Derrida’s relation to Hegel as a case in point. A superficial reading would seem to show that Derrida’s relation to Hegel is predominantly critical. After all, does Derrida not contend, following Heidegger, that Hegel is the archetype of the metaphysician of presence, the thinker of a totalizing system where everything is accounted for, an ‘economy of meaning’ where nothing is ever lost (Derrida 1978, 343–344, 1982b, 89)? Hegel, from this point of view, appears as the culmination of the tradition of Western metaphysics and, as such, as the primary target of both Heidegger’s and Derrida’s critical interpretations of the philosophical tradition.

However, a closer look clearly shows that Derrida remains, in fact, in many ways very close to Hegel, building on and playing with Hegelian concepts and methods; sometimes explicitly and often implicitly, Hegel is to be found almost everywhere in Derrida’s work.¹ ‘Hegel’, Derrida himself writes in Of Grammatology, ‘is also the thinker of irreducible différance’ (1976, 26). And, in Différance: ‘[D]ifférance thus written, although maintaining relations of profound affinity with Hegelian discourse … is also, up to a certain point, unable to break with that discourse …; but it can operate a kind of infinitesimal and radical displacement of it … ’ (Derrida 1982c, 14). While he thus generally acknowledges his debt and closeness to Hegel, Derrida never stops to emphasize this ‘minimal difference’ that would make all the difference between him and Hegel: Hegel, in the end, reduces difference to identity through a ‘resolution of contradiction into a third term’, by ‘interning difference in a self-presence’ (1981, 40–41). Hegel, the supreme chief of police, arrests everyone and everything while maintaining the illusion of freedom by giving everything its proper and limited place in his self-transparent system. In Positions, Derrida writes:

Since it is still a question of elucidating the relationship to Hegel – a difficult labor, which for the most part remains before us, and which in a certain way is interminable … – I have attempted to distinguish différance … from Hegelian difference, and have done so precisely at the point at which Hegel, in the greater Logic, determines difference as contradiction only in order to resolve it, to interiorize it, to lift it up … into the self-presence of an onto-theological or onto-teleological synthesis. Différance (at a point of almost absolute proximity to Hegel …) must sign the point at which one breaks with the system of the Aufhebung and with speculative dialectics. (Ibid.)

So how is the relation between Hegel and Derrida (as mediated by Heidegger) to be thought? How should we mark the point – a point of almost absolute proximity, if there is such a thing – of the break between speculative dialectics, Heidegger’s Destruktion and deconstruction? Where, on the line of development, does Heidegger break off from Hegel, and Derrida from Heidegger? In asking this question, we cannot help but bring into play everything that Derrida – as well as Hegel, and to a lesser degree Heidegger – say about the possibility or impossibility of determining such a point, a break, a limit – about the possibility or impossibility of arresting.

What must be kept in mind here is that, despite his warnings against an ‘internment’ of the Hegelian kind, Derrida also ‘arrests’ thought by assigning his predecessors a determined position, working with determinate concepts, however slippery and ambiguous, and ordering his thought in an organized narrative. Moreover, Derrida is well aware of this, which is why he continuously seeks to problematize his own statements and narrative, placing them ‘under erasure’. In this sense, Derrida is again closer to Hegel than one might expect. And inversely, too, Hegel’s thought can hardly be reduced to the monolithic, all-devouring and all-encompassing metaphysical system which his contemporary critics take it to be. As has been argued by a variety of commentators, difference, contingency, resistance and various other notions and phenomena which undermine the identity and totality of Hegel’s thinking play a much larger role in his thought than is generally assumed (e.g. Comay 2010; Žižek 2012; Ruda 2018; Zantvoort 2018a).

It will not be possible here to provide a systematic overview of all the Hegelian themes and appropriations in Derrida or of all the ways in which he seeks to diverge from and disrupt Hegelianism, nor of the way in which their relationship is mediated through Heidegger. I will limit myself here, therefore, to the theme of the point, the limit, and the arrest to show how close to Hegel Derrida still is, even in the most radically deconstructive operations of his thought. This analysis will, inevitably, also lead us past Heidegger. As I will try to show, all three thinkers conceive of both determinate beings and conceptual determination temporally, in terms of what I will call ‘self-maintenance’ (Selbsterhaltung, self-preservation). Because they conceive of beings historically, the presence and identity of beings can only be conceived dynamically, as somehow maintaining itself in presence by resisting their own passing away, by arresting movement or history. In conceiving of both the possibility and impossibility of this arrest, Hegel preceded and influenced both Heidegger and Derrida.

Hegel: Halt!

Derrida’s long essay Living On/Border Lines takes the shape of a long commentary on two texts, Shelley’s The Triumph of Life and Blanchot’s L’arrêt de mort, titled Living On, and a running commentary on the commentary in a footnote that extends across the entire text, titled Border Lines. While many of its core themes – the instability and indeterminacy of meaning, life and death, the necessity and impossibility of a text having a limit, an ‘edge’ (arête) (83) – are also discussed in numerous other places throughout Derrida’s work, the notion of the arrest, which appears here and there in passing in other works, is articulated most fully here. As mentioned above, the notion of the arrest must be read – to use very un-Derridean terminology – both epistemologically and ontologically; it refers both to a particular structure of meaning as well as to a structure of things.

L’arrêt, Derrida explains, combines the meanings of waiting and deciding, suspending and resolving, ‘delay and haste’ (114–115); it is both movement and rest: it determines meaning, stabilizes and fixes the outline and limits of a narrative, situation or thing, but at the same time, as an active moment of decision, an act backed up by authority, it also shifts, changes and destabilizes the structure in which it intervenes. The arrest ‘both paralyzes and sets in motion’ (134), it is a decision, a sentence that closes a case, passes judgment, and thereby stabilizes an indeterminate field of shifting meanings and possibilities, renders a verdict and establishes a truth; like the king in Hegel, who interrupts the endless dilly-dallying of the bureaucrats and renders a decision by signing his name (Hegel 1991, §280). Yet at the same time the arrest is also a suspension, a moment in a chain of events, which will turn out not to have been decisive and will only set in motion further events (110).

Although Hegel is mentioned only a few times in passing in Living On, the entire text can also be read as a meditation on the borderlines of Hegelian dialectic, on the Hegelian movement of Aufhebung and its possible limits. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit can also be read as a narrative that is torn between delay and haste, paralysis and motion, inertia and development (Comay 2018). Hegel defines the development of knowledge as the ‘unhalting’ (unaufhaltsam) progress towards its goal, towards the truth, defined as the identity of object and concept. ‘Spirit is never at rest’, Hegel writes, ‘but always engaged in moving forward’ (1977, 6).² But although this movement is without halt, restless and unarrestable, it is at the same time curiously halting, stuttering and stopping, deferred, delayed: thinking is ‘checked in its progress’ (in seinem Fortlaufen gehemmt), ‘impeded’ (aufgehalten) by the weight of its own material (36).³ I want to suggest here that Derrida’s arrêt can be read in strict parallel to Hegel’s use of ‘halt’ and ‘unaufhaltsam’. Derrida speaks of the arrêt de mort in what might at first glance seem to be anti-Hegelian terms as a ‘double bind’, a ‘disjunction [that] allows of no respite, no hope for reconciliation; it is unceasing, sans arrêt’ (1979, 118). Yet Hegel’s unaufhaltsam and Derrida’s sans arrêt are also surprisingly close. There is even a certain kind of truth in the arrêt de mort: ‘In the unarrestable dissemination of its titles, the arrêt de mort is the truth about truth’, Derrida writes (142).

What is at stake in this question of arrest and unarrestability, halt and Unaufhaltsamkeit? No less than the entire field of the critique of metaphysics and of presence, along with time and history, along with life and death. The tension in Hegel between rest and restlessness, halt and unhalting movement circumscribes the entire dialectic and all the questions about its telos or end, its necessity or contingency, the position of the subject, its openness or closure. Hegel’s ‘halt’ contains a polysemy no less rich than Derrida’s arrêt, and this is no coincidence. In Dutch, halt! is what the police shout when they want to stop and arrest a suspect. In German, too, it is an order to stop backed up by legal authority or lethal force; you could find signs stating ‘halt!’, together with a skull and bones, at the former East-German border or at the edges of concentration camps. In English, it is a military command. In a more general sense, to halt is to suspend, to arrest, to stop a process in its tracks. But the German halten is also to hold on to something, to hold in your hand, to maintain it in the present moment; to grip or to grasp something. First you grasp, apprehend or comprehend something, then you have to hold on to it, keep it in mind or in memory. Behalten means to keep something, to maintain it, to hold on to something that threatens to slip away. Erhalten means to preserve, maintain, but also to receive in payment or as a gift. As such, halten is closely related to the French maintenant, now, which Derrida makes so much of⁴; it stresses the being present of what is kept in the hand, held on to with an effort as if to keep it from vanishing. Hegel, too, emphasizes the need to actively maintain – erhalten or behalten – things and concepts in the face of their transitory, unhalting movement of self-transformation, and, in another way, as we will see, so does Heidegger.

As for Hegel, the entirety of his thought is marked by a fundamental tension between rest and unrest, fixity and movement, haltlessness and holding present. Derrida, citing Blanchot, suggests that ‘the arrêt’ might ‘designate the strange law that extends beyond the limits of [Hegelian] dialectic’; that the ‘unexperienceable experience of death’ arrests and ‘shakes’ the dialectic (119). But isn’t the law that is at work in the halting development of Hegel’s thought every bit as strange as any arrêt de mort? Isn’t all of this double-binded, ‘invaginated’, ‘de-borded’, ambiguous, ‘hard-to-pin-down’ or ‘unarrestable’ play of multiplicity of meaning and undecidability already contained within Hegel’s own writing? That it might be is nowhere clearer than in a passage from the introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit, which I will now cite at some length. It is a question here of life and death, of fear and violence, of the necessary and haltless development of consciousness and of knowledge towards its goal, but also of the halting inertia of consciousness trying to hold on to what it is in danger of losing.

As we know, Hegel conceives of the Phenomenology as a depiction of the series of stages through which consciousness passes on its development to true knowledge. ‘The goal’, Hegel writes (1977, 51),

is as necessarily fixed for knowledge as the serial progression; it is the point where knowledge no longer needs to go beyond itself, where knowledge finds itself, where concept corresponds to object and object to concept. Hence the progress towards this goal is also unhalting [unaufhaltsam], and short of it no satisfaction is to be found at any of the stations on the way.

The progress Hegel is describing here is that of the ‘natural’, ‘untruthful consciousness’ on the way to becoming ‘real consciousness’. This development is necessary, both in terms of its goal and in terms of its stages. Of course, this would confirm the classical image of Hegel as a teleological thinker of the ‘end’ – of history or of absolute knowledge – a thinker of identity, who subscribes to the classical figure of truth as the identity of concept and object, and a thinker of necessity, for whom the entire movement of history and consciousness and knowledge is prefigured and predetermined in advance. Development is necessary and unaufhaltsam, necessarily unaufhaltsam: consciousness cannot halt, cannot stop at any of the stations on the way, it can find no rest or satisfaction, because knowledge has no limits, and therefore consciousness can recognize no limits. The passage continues:

Whatever is confined within the limits of a natural life cannot by its own efforts go beyond its immediate existence; but it is driven beyond it by something else, and this uprooting entails its death. Consciousness, however, is for itself its concept. Hence it is something that goes beyond limits, and since these limits are its own, it is something that goes beyond itself. … Thus consciousness suffers this violence at its own hands: it spoils its own limited satisfaction.

Here, death enters the scene. This, too, is a classical Hegelian trope: to recognize a limit is to recognize the beyond, the Jenseits of the limit, and so is to already be beyond the limit. Knowledge, consciousness, reason reach towards the infinite, the unlimited, while what is natural is bound to a finite existence.

The Logic of the Limit

Before continuing the analysis of this passage, we should pause for a moment to recall Hegel’s opposition between the understanding, which is limited to dealing with ‘fixed and inert [feste und ruhende] determinations’ (18–19), and reason, which drives thinking to continuously supersede these limited and fixed determinations and thus to enter its unhalting development. In the Logic, Hegel writes that the understanding is ‘the infinite force which determines the universal, or conversely, imparts through the form of universality a fixed, enduring existence [fixe Bestehen] to the determinateness that is in and for itself transitory [Haltungslosen].’ The understanding arrests things by fixing them in a system of rigid concepts. Haltungslosigkeit is thus on both sides of the operations of consciousness: the understanding turns the haltless determinations of abstract universality into fixed categories, and reason yet again renders them haltless, fluid and limitless.

According to Hegel, for thinking, the limit is at the same time necessary and impossible: the limit constitutes the quality, the life, the determinate existence (Dasein) of a thing, its identity, its enduring existence (Bestehen); but at the same time, the limit is always already superseded and transgressed. And this is not only the case for thought, reason, or for living things; all things are subject to this logic of the limit. As Hegel writes in the Logic, ‘Something is on account of its limit … on account of the limit it is, what it is, in the limit it has its quality. … Existence is determined; something has a quality, and as such is not only determined, but limited; its quality is its limit, which allows it to remain affirmative, stable existence [mit welcher behaftet es zunächst affirmatives, ruhiges Dasein bleibt]’ (1969, 126–129). The stability of things is secured by its limit; while the constant, unaufhaltsames need to go beyond limits is immediately inscribed in its very finitude and identity.⁵ It is not just consciousness that is incessantly forced to go beyond its own limit; this necessity is inherent in all finite things. In the Phenomenology, this is explained as follows (34):

Existence is quality, self-identical determinateness or determinate simplicity, determinate thought … On account of its simplicity or self-identity it appears fixed and enduring [erscheint sie als fest und bleibend]. But this self-identity is no less negativity; therefore its fixed existence passes over into its dissolution. The determinateness seems at first to be due entirely to the fact that it is related to an other, and its movement seems imposed on it by an alien power; but having its otherness within itself, and being self-moving, is just what is involved in the simplicity of thinking itself; for this simple thinking is the self-moving and self-differentiating thought, it is its own inwardness, it is the pure concept. … That it is the nature of that which is to be in its being also its own concept; this is what logical necessity as such consists of.

We will return to the status of this logical necessity in our discussion of Heidegger below. What is important to note here is that it is not just for consciousness that finite things appear as finite and therefore transient; it is the very ideality of being – its need to relate itself to itself, to maintain itself as self-identical – that constitutes its finitude and makes it necessary for all things to ‘pass over into dissolution’. Identity, Hegel insists, is always unstable: for something to be identical to itself is always already to be limited, to separate itself from other things, but therefore also to be related, through the limit, to what is beyond the limit. Examples of this logic abound in Hegel’s writings: heavy bodies, such as planets, are related to other heavy bodies through gravity and are thus in a certain sense ‘ideal’ and self-reflective (1970, §270); animals separate themselves from objective reality through their claws and teeth but also relate to it by seeking to attack and devour it and thus incorporate it (1977, 149); the unhappy consciousness tries to maintain itself as something independent and stable, but is related to the ‘unchangeable’ beyond through a limiting ‘surface’ (133), which is why both the unhappy consciousness and the ‘unchangeable’ are eventually destabilized and transformed. Consciousness is merely a specific case of this same principle, which for Hegel can be found everywhere in nature and society. It is precisely because, as a result of this unstable, impossible limit, every determinate thing, concept or social structure contains the seeds of its own demise within itself that these things need to maintain themselves in existence. Self-maintenance or self-preservation (Selbsterhaltung) is thus for Hegel the precondition of any identity, of any determined being persisting through time at all.

Impossible Inertia

We can now see what this means for consciousness as it is described in the passage from the Phenomenology we were discussing above. Consciousness is a peculiar case of this more general logic of the limit and self-maintenance. It is self-transgressing, self-overcoming because it reflects on its own existence and therefore on its limits: it is always already beyond itself. This is why ‘consciousness suffers this violence at its own hands’, as Hegel writes: as soon as it has found itself, as it has come to a halt, has found a place to rest, it is immediately again forced to start moving. ‘There is no satisfaction to be found at any of the stations on the way’; although consciousness would like to remain in one place, to enjoy the knowledge it has attained and feel secure in its self-identity, to escape its self-inflicted violence, this is impossible. Yet at the same time, Hegel seems to suggest, consciousness does find a ‘limited satisfaction’. No satisfaction, or a limited satisfaction? What, in any case, would be unlimited satisfaction (if not, as Freud also makes clear, death)? We should recall here that the ‘stations’ of consciousness will later in the Phenomenology become ‘shapes of spirit’, concrete shapes of life, nations and cultures with all their customs and characteristics which endure, certainly, for a time, thereby making up the long stretch of history or time, or, as Hegel says, the being-there of the concept (der daseiende Begriff selbst, 1977, 34). The interruptions in the unaufhaltsames development of spirit or consciousness are thus the very body and existence of historical shapes of spirit, which endure for some time, resisting this development, holding on to their life and satisfaction, limited though it may be, before being swept up in the further development of history (Zantvoort 2018b).

The problem with consciousness is that it is conscious: it has its own engine of self-transformation within itself, it must continually go beyond itself, but it knows what it is doing – it knows what it stands to lose. Because its limits constitute its identity and its quality, to go beyond its limits is to go beyond itself, and therefore to die. Only for consciousness, death is a problem; it is being-towards-death, it knows that to follow its own innermost logic is to die. If to think, to be, is to immediately lose itself and go beyond itself, what else is there to do, for consciousness, but to resist its immanent development and hold on to what it has achieved? Hegel writes (51):

When consciousness feels this violence, its anxiety may well make it retreat from the truth, and strive to hold on [zu erhalten streben] to what it is in danger of losing. But it can find no peace [Ruhe]. If it wishes to remain in a state of unthinking inertia [Trägheit], then thought troubles its thoughtlessness, and its own unrest [Unruhe] disturbs its inertia.

Now, it becomes really complicated. When consciousness feels the violence of its necessary self-overcoming, of its impending death, it becomes anxious. It wants to retreat from the truth, and maintain, retain or hold on to what it is about to lose. But because its unhalting development is necessary, this is impossible – it can find no rest. Consciousness wishes, desires to remain in a state of unthinking inertia, and hold on to the satisfaction it finds there. It seeks to resist development, resist movement, to hold on to its stability, its satisfaction and its identity. But this state of inertia can only be unthinking, that is, unconscious, because as soon as consciousness allows the slightest sliver of awareness to enter its mind, it recognizes what it is, its limit, and therefore its end and what is beyond its end. For Hegel, it is impossible to stop to think: to stop is to stop thinking, to think is to stop stopping. So unthinking inertia is impossible; thought’s own unrest disturbs its inertia. And yet it is necessary – for only through unthinking inertia can consciousness have its satisfaction, its identity, its existence, and its life. Similarly, a shape of spirit – a social-historical form of life – can only persist in being through inertia, through resisting its necessary development and self-destabilization. All finite existence is but a delayed vanishing, a temporary reprieve from an unhalting development. Inertia is a suspended death – arrêt de mort. Here, Hegel’s and Derrida’s conceptions of life converge. Derrida writes, quoting Blanchot: ‘Survivre, living on: not living or (not living) maintaining oneself, lifeless, in a state of pure supplement, a movement of supplementing life, but rather arresting the dying, an arrest that does not arrest it, that on the contrary makes it endure’ (1979, 107, translation altered).

Hegel here also seems close to Freud, who, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, considers all life to be merely a ‘detour towards death’ (1989, 612–613); Freud speaks here of the ‘inertia inherent in organic life’ which causes it to go through ever more complicated twists and turns on its way towards death. Hegel, however, as mentioned, extends this characterization beyond organic life to finite beings in general. In the Philosophy of Nature he writes: ‘All finite things are temporal, as they are subject to change over shorter or longer periods, and their duration is therefore only relative’ (1970, §258). The relative duration of things and the limited satisfaction of consciousness is made possible by its impossible inertia, its fearful turning away from its own demise, its active persistence in being, its resistance to its own immanent development. Selbsterhaltung, self-preservation or self-maintenance, is for Hegel a general characteristic of things, not just of living beings – although there are relative stages and differences, of course. Through reflection-into-themselves, things (consciousness, societies, but also plants and planets) construct an internal space, shielded from the relation to the outside through a border, a skin, a surface, a limit, which allows them to persist in being for a limited duration. In the Science of Logic, Hegel puts this as follows (1969, 405):

[T]he reflected determinations have the form of being-in-and-for-self. They therefore prove to be the essential determinations, and instead of passing over into their opposites they appear rather as absolute, free and indifferent towards each other. Consequently, they stubbornly resist their movement [Sie widersetzen hartnäckig ihrer Bewegung]; their being is their self-identity in their determinateness, in accordance with which, even though they presuppose each other, they maintain themselves completely separate in this relation.

All determinate, finite existence is for Hegel always a result of arrested development – of temporarily resisting the immanent process of self-transformation inherent in all things. Yet if development is necessary, and unhalting, the arrest – inertia – is equally necessary. And impossible. There can be no beings – inorganic or organic beings, animals or consciousnesses, people or states – without resistance, without these beings actively seeking to maintain themselves in the face of change. There is no self-identity without self-maintenance. In conceiving of reality as a process of immanent destabilization, Hegel was the first serious philosopher of entropy (Zantvoort 2015). But what is more important is that self-maintenance – the processes through which beings seek to maintain themselves in their self-identity – is for Hegel the very thing that engenders destabilization, disruption, differentiation. It is precisely by seeking to remain inert, seeking to remain identical to itself, that a thing is in relation to itself and immediately to its limit and to its other, and thus is forced to go beyond itself. For Hegel, this disruption is at once internal and external to things; it does not simply come from the outside, ‘as if its movement is imposed on it by an alien power’ – as would be the case for Freud, who suggests change is imposed on the inherently inert organism by changes in the environment, or Rousseau, who, as Derrida points out (1976, 256), invokes a mysterious ‘catastrophe’ which is supposed to have disrupted the state of nature.

And immediately – if inertia immediately engenders transformation, if self-maintenance immediately engenders self-overcoming, how is the arrest – and thus existence – possible? If development is unaufhaltsam, without halt, how can things remain the same? How can we maintain stability? How do things manage to linger, for a while, in inert self-satisfaction? Here, we enter a topic of crucial importance to Hegel, which we can trace further through Nietzsche and Heidegger to Derrida. Nietzsche, we know, characterizes value as the ‘viewpoint of the conditions for preservation-increase in regard to the complex structures, relatively enduring, of life in the midst of becoming’ (1968, no. 715). This statement is the core of Heidegger’s analysis in Nietzsche’s Word: ‘God is Dead’ (2002). Preservation-increase, Erhaltung and Steigerung, are the simultaneous conditions of relative duration in the midst of becoming. No preservation without increase, no self-maintaining without self-overcoming, no stability without change, no inertia without death.

Heidegger: Anaximander’s Inertia

So far, we have gone some way towards establishing the generality of this logic of self-maintenance, inertia and self-overcoming in Hegel. Before seeing how Derrida takes up this question in terms of the notion of the arrest, let us take a detour through Heidegger, who also speaks of a certain kind of inertia in beings in the Anaximander Fragment (1975). While the context of Heidegger’s discussion is rather different from Hegel’s, because, rather than offering his own interpretation of the temporal nature of beings or consciousness, Heidegger approaches it obliquely through a reading of this ancient fragment, it is nevertheless worth considering, because Derrida will return to Heidegger’s Anaximander Fragment in his own approach to this question.

In this text, Heidegger in turn invokes Hegel in an appreciative-dismissive way: ‘Hegel’, he writes, ‘is the only thinker who has thoughtfully experienced the history of thought, yet he says nothing about the Anaximander fragment.’ In fact, we could say that Hegel speaks of it incessantly. The Anaximander fragment, ‘the oldest fragment of Western thinking’ (13), speaks precisely of the perseverance of beings in presence which we have here thematized in Hegel.

Before discussing the relevant passages in more detail, let us recall the usual translation of Anaximander’s fragment and Heidegger’s own poeticizing-thinking translation. The more or less ‘literal’ translation provided by Heidegger runs as follows (we will have to leave the complications of the re-translation of Heidegger’s German into English aside here):

But that from which things arise also gives rise to their passing away, according to what is necessary; for things render justice and pay penalty to one another for their injustice, according to the ordinance of time. (20)

What is at issue here, Heidegger surmises, is the temporally determined being of beings, their lingering in presence, their mode of being in between their ‘arrival in unconcealment’ and their ‘withdrawal’ into concealment: that is to say, the relative duration of beings in the midst of becoming. The first part and the latter part of the fragment, Heidegger explains, cannot with certainty be ascribed to Anaximander, so only the middle part – ‘ … according to necessity; for they pay recompense and penalty to one another for their recklessness … ’ – can be assumed to be original. Heidegger ultimately translates this part as follows:

along the lines of usage; for they let order and thereby also reck belong to one another (in the surmounting of) disorder. (57)

We cannot go into detail on Heidegger’s reasons for his translation, but let us look at some relevant features. Heidegger insists that Anaximander’s saying refers to beings as a whole, both natural beings and beings belonging to the human domain. The application of supposedly ‘human’ notions like dikē (justice, order), tisis (penalty, ‘reck’) and adikia (injustice, disorder) to beings in general is not the result of a misguided anthropomorphism, Heidegger states, but the result of the fact that Anaximander’s is an original thinking for which such later distinctions had not yet become firmly established. This is similar, therefore, to Hegel’s discussion, where the inertia of consciousness and its transgressing of limits must be understood as a feature inherent in all beings as such, rather than as specifically human characteristics.

What is the mode of being of beings according to Anaximander’s saying? It is adikia, injustice or disorder. And what does this injustice consist in? In beings’ persevering in presence, their insisting on continuing to be past their proper duration, their ‘due date’ – in other words, in their inertia. Heidegger writes:

What has arrived may even insist [bestehen] upon its while solely to remain more present, in the sense of perduring [Beständigen]. That which lingers perseveres [beharrt] in its presencing. In this way it extricates itself from its transitory while. It strikes the wilful pose of persistence [des Beharrens], no longer concerning itself with whatever else is present. It stiffens – as if this were the way to linger [Verweilen] – and aims solely for continuance and subsistence [auf die Beständigkeit des Fortbestehens]. (42)

Although the fragment speaks also of dikē and the surmounting of injustice, adikia is not a purely negative mode of being, a state of injustice or disorder which can be entirely avoided. It belongs to the essence of beings to persist in presence: ‘Everything that lingers awhile stands in disjunction. To the presencing of what is present, to the ἐόν of ἐόντα, ἀδικία belongs. Thus, standing in disjunction would be the essence of all that is present’ (42). Things exist only through persisting – by maintaining themselves in being. Yet it is this very feature of self-maintenance that allows them to outlast their while, to become inert. To be is to be inert is to be unjust.

If injustice belongs essentially to beings, how can justice nevertheless have a place? Heidegger says: ‘They [beings] let order and thereby also reck belong to one another [in the surmounting of] disorder.’ Heidegger introduces ‘Reck’ (Ruch) as a translation for tisis, and associates this old German word with care, esteem, solicitude. Dikē would therefore consist in things rendering one another mutual consideration, giving one another their due, making space (or time) for one another, and not insisting on their own presence. Read in this way, we could construe this as an immanent form of justice, established between humans and humans, things and things, things and humans. As mutual recognition – or forgiveness. Yet this is not Heidegger’s conclusion.

The order of beings and the distribution of justice cannot ultimately be thought, Heidegger believes, as immanent to beings. It points beyond them to a source, a dispenser of justice which is altogether other than beings. This source is here named by the word at the beginning of Anaximander’s fragment, to khreon, translated as necessity or, by Heidegger, as ‘usage’ (Brauch). The need to move from the immanent level of beings’ relation to one another to the vertical relation with the Being of beings is based, in Heidegger’s reading, on a very small word in the fragment that is easily passed over: γάρ, ‘namely’ or ‘for’. This word, Heidegger insists without much explanation, ‘introduces a grounding’; it allows us to deduce that where the second clause (‘for they let order … ’) speaks of the mode of being of beings – ‘what is present in the manner of its presencing’ – the first clause, kata to khreon, provides a ‘clue’ to the ground of beings: ‘The first clause must designate presencing as such, and even the extent to which presencing determines what is present as such’ (48).

What does the word khreon say, then, about the presencing of what is present? The ‘traditional’ translation with ‘necessity’ points to interpretations in terms of logos and moira (‘fate’) (55). It would thus designate the principle of original ordering, that which apportions the destiny and, above all, the duration of all finite things: that which grants things their ‘while’, and which would therefore ultimately determine when things – justly – ‘presence’ in proper proportion and proper relations to other things, and when they unjustly insist on their presence and ‘willfuly persist’ beyond their proper while. We could construe this, therefore, as an answer to the question we posed above: if, as Hegel seems to claim, the dissolution of the identity of a thing is immediately inscribed in its impossible limitation, how is it possible that things nevertheless endure in being, have a certain duration? Recall that for Hegel, too, the question of inertia and the need for things to go beyond themselves is also a matter of ‘logical necessity’. It is the logical necessity of the concept that ultimately determines the term of things, their relative duration, and would decide when they have become inert and when the time has come for them to pass away.

Heidegger, however, is not satisfied with this translation of khreon as necessity. Khreon should be understood in terms of Brauch, which he relates to the hand, the hand that delivers and dispenses, gives, and at the same time takes, receives, and holds and maintains.⁶ Giving and having, holding on and giving up or giving in (zugeben) are here co-implicated. ‘Khrao means to place in someone’s hands or hand over, thus to deliver, to let something belong to someone. But such delivery is of a kind which keeps this transfer in hand, and with it what is transferred’ (51–52).

What we see emerging here is the theme of the gift, which will continue to occupy Heidegger and which will be of great importance to Derrida, and to Derrida’s critique of Hegel’s ‘restricted economy’. Khreon gives without fully exhausting itself in giving or ultimately revealing itself as the source of the gift. Brauch, ‘usage’, means to use in the sense of usufruct, the right to use without full property rights. This emphasizes the limited and reserved manner in which beings are given their presence, their while: they receive without fully owning. The economic themes are here clearly manifest⁷:

Usage delivers what is present to its presencing, i.e. to its lingering. Usage dispenses to what is present the portion of its while … Usage distributes order and reck in such manner that it reserves for itself what is meted out, gathers it to itself, and secures it as what is present in presencing. But usage, enjoining order and so limiting what is present, distributes boundaries. (53–54)

We asked: how is inertia possible? How can things persist in being, if development is unhalting and logically necessary? What arrests the unarrestable? This is Heidegger’s answer: here, he assigns the ‘source’ of law and order to an unknowable and quasi-unnamable giving, which is designated in different ways: Being, khreon, Ereignis. For Heidegger, we require a transcendent authority to issue arrest warrants and distribute boundaries. Both Hegel and Derrida can be turned against Heidegger on this point. For Hegel, the limit emerges in the relation between the thing and its other(s); things are due consideration to other things, not to a mysterious ground. The question turns on what the ‘logical necessity’ determining the duration of things which Hegel invokes consists in. I would argue that it absolutely does not mean there is a predetermined schedule according to which things come into being and pass away; rather, every moment of becoming involves an element of irreducible contingency, a ‘groundless ground’ (Hegel 1969, 476–478).⁸

Derrida/Hegel: (ar)Rhythmic Development

The issue in Derrida is complicated, of course. But in Derrida, too, the notion of the arrest can be construed, not just as a conundrum with regard to the impossibility of assigning things a fixed meaning, but as the precondition for the existence of things with regard to their temporal determination. In Given Time, in his commentary on Marcel Mauss’ The Gift, Derrida distinguishes between economic exchange and gift-giving in terms of the term that must expire between giving a gift and receiving a counter-gift. Gifts exchanged would not be gifts at all, since they are part of an economic structure of interests, value, and representation. Of course, Derrida insists that the term elapsed between gift and counter-gift can never fully eliminate the economics inherent in the exchange. Yet the ‘term’ represents the temporal differentiation that makes any system possible – the term between gift and restitution, and, we could add, self-identity and self-overcoming, unconcealing and withdrawing, birth and death. It is in this sense that both subject and object are ‘arrested effects of the gift’ (1992, 24): they are hypostatized identities temporarily excised from an instable field of differentiation. Unlike for Heidegger, however, for Derrida their ‘term’, duration or limit is not dispensed by a mysterious giver, it is inscribed in the thing itself:

The syn-, the synthesis, the system, or the syntax that joins together gift and exchange is temporal – or more precisely temporizing – differance, the delay of the term or the term of delay that dislocates any ‘at the same time’ … Here is, it seems, the most interesting idea, the great guiding thread of The Gift: For those who participate in the experience of gift and countergift, the requirement of restitution ‘at term’, at the delayed ‘due date’, the requirement of the circulatory differance is inscribed in the thing itself that is given or exchanged … the thing itself demands gift and restitution, it requires therefore ‘time’, ‘term’, ‘delay’ … Differance, which (is) nothing, is (in) the thing itself. (39–40)

[…]

There where there is gift, there is time … The thing must not be restituted immediately and right away. There must be time, it must last, there must be waiting – without forgetting. It demands time, the thing, but it demands a delimited time, neither an instant nor an infinite time, but a time determined by a term, in other words, a rhythm, a cadence. The thing is not in time; it is or has time, or rather it demands to have, to give, or to take time – and time as rhythm, a rhythm that does not befall a homogeneous time but that structures it originarily.

Unlike for Heidegger, therefore, the injunction to give or return does not come from a mysterious lawgiver, the dispenser of duration and limits. For Derrida, the original ‘rhythm’ that structures time is not of transcendent origin, but radically immanent. Or rather, we should say it is both radically immanent and (at the same time?) radically transcendent: ‘The gift gives, demands, and takes time.’ But also: ‘The thing gives, demands, or takes time’ (41).⁹

Things come into being, develop and pass away according to their own immanent rhythm; their duration, limit or term is not prescribed by a transcendent authority but is inscribed into the things themselves. Hegel similarly seeks to articulate a difficult immanent-ideal concept of rhythmic development in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit. What is at stake here is again the development of consciousness on the way to knowledge, which we have previously described in terms of the impossible inertia of consciousness. Consciousness, which seeks to know itself and, through itself, all reality, is constantly disjointed and forced out of its inertia by its attempt to attain knowledge; and at the same time, the object of knowledge, the ‘content’ or the thing itself, shows itself to constantly destabilize itself and exceed its boundaries. What is active and what is passive, what is determining and what is determined, what is identical to itself and other to itself is blurred and becomes almost impossible to distinguish in a complicated rhythmic movement of activity and abstinence.

Knowledge is the ‘cunning’, Hegel writes, ‘which, while seeming to abstain [enthalten] from activity, looks on and watches how determinateness, with its concrete life, just where it fancies it is pursuing its own self-preservation [Selbsterhaltung] and particular interest, is in fact doing the very opposite, is an activity that results in its own dissolution, and makes itself a moment of the whole’ (1977, 33). Consciousness seeks to hold itself together while allowing the things it contemplates to undergo their immanent development; it holds itself together and holds its place by apparently suspending its activity in a forced state of abstinence. But who is consciousness fooling? Its cunning must ultimately fail, and consciousness itself will be swept away in the development of its object. This mutual implication of consciousness and objectivity in a stuttering development of stops and starts, deceits and double crosses is what Hegel calls ‘the rhythm of the concept’:

It is in the nature of what is to be in its being its own concept, that logical necessity in general consists. This alone is the rational element and the rhythm of the organic whole; it is as much knowledge of the content, as the content is the concept and the essence – in other words, it alone is speculative philosophy …

This nature of scientific method, which consists partly in not being separate from the content, and partly in determining the rhythm of its movement by itself, has … its proper exposition in speculative philosophy …

What, therefore, is important in the study of science, is that one should take on oneself the strenuous effort of the concept. This requires attention to the concept as such … What is looked for here is the effort to give up this freedom, and, instead of being the arbitrarily moving principle of the content, to sink this freedom in the content, letting it move spontaneously of its own nature … This refusal to intrude into the immanent rhythm of the concept, either arbitrarily or with wisdom obtained from elsewhere, constitutes a restraint [Enthaltsamkeit] which is itself an essential moment of the concept.

The proper composure for the thinking subject, according to Hegel, is here therefore not the pose of the master who seeks to control everything and hold everything in his hands, but rather one of letting-be, of zugeben. Yet at the same time, consciousness is always implicated in the determination of its object; its abstinence is itself a ruse, a fiction. This conflict is never resolved in Hegel. Rhythm suggests, perhaps, a predetermined order, a score given in advance which consciousness or spirit are following, unknowingly, in their world-historical development. But nothing could be further from the truth. The rhythm of the concepts is never predetermined, it skips and jumps, stalls and starts, it is full of surprising twists and turns. While in Given Time Derrida speaks of the rhythm that originarily structures time, in a fashion very similar to Hegel, in Living On he instead speaks of the ‘arrhythmia’ of the arrest, in an apparent attempt to once again outdo Hegel by one further twist of the screw:

This is the pulse of the ‘word’ arrêt, the arrhythmic pulsation of its syntax in the expression arrêt de mort. Arrêter, in the sense of suspending, is suspending the arrêt, in the sense of decision. Arrêter in the sense of deciding, arrests the arrêt, in the sense of suspension. They are ahead of or lag behind one another. One marks delay; the other, haste. They are … the antagony from one arrêt to the other. The antagony lasts from one to the other, one relieving the other in an Aufhebung that never lets up, arrêt arresting arrêt, both senses, both ways. The arrêt arrests itself … Like death, the arrêt remains undecidable … The arrêt arrests itself, but in stopping (as arrêt), it imparts movement, sets things in motion. (1979, 114–5)

But where is the point where arrhythmia breaks away from rhythm to be located? How can we be sure the arrhythmic pulsation of the arrest will not be resolved once again in a more rhythmic rhythm? The impossibility of deciding on such a point, which Derrida elaborates again and again, is already fully prefigured in all its baffling complexity in Hegel.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For a good collection of essays on Hegel after Derrida, see Barnett (1998).

2. I occasionally diverge from Miller’s translation in the Hegel citations. In particular, ‘Begriff’ has been rendered as ‘concept’ throughout, rather than as ‘Notion’.

3. In another oblique reference to Hegel, Derrida writes in the ‘telegrammatic’ footnote to ‘Living On’: ‘Arrêt: the greatest “bound” energy … tightly gathered around its own limit, retained, inhibited (Hemmung, Haltung) and immediately disseminated’ (171–172).

4. For example in ‘Ousia and Grammè’ (1982a), and in Given Time (1992, 4–8), where it is a question of the relation between the now, time, law, and economy – and Hegel.

5. Derrida reflects at length on this same necessary-impossible function of the limit in ‘Living On’: ‘The word bord’ [edge, brink, verge, border, boundary, bound, limit, shore] has imposed itself more than once. If we are to approach [aborder] a text, for example, it must have a bord, an edge … ’ (1979, 81).

6. See Derrida (2008) for his discussion of the theme of the ‘hand’ in Heidegger in a somewhat different context, especially in relation to Hegel and ‘begreifen’ (40).

7. See Derrida’s comments on economy and Heidegger’s ‘Anaximander Fragment’ (1992, 158–161).

8. Žižek argues along these lines when he claims necessity in Hegel is always ‘retroactive’ (2012, 213).

9. In The Gift of Death (2007), for example, this coincidence of transcendence and immanence is elaborated in terms of what Derrida calls ‘tout autre est tout autre’.