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Hegel and Postmodernity: Towards In-Finitude

Article in Philosophy and Society, 2024


Future is a risky word. Especially if one follows the flight of Hegel’s owl of Minerva painting its grey on grey: we could use Lyotard’s voice here and say that “we know that it is unwise to put too much faith in futurology”. On the other hand, however, if we have learned something from Hegel in the last two centuries, it is that the very insight into the structures of the present constitutes the future.


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Today, we are standing in front of the abyss. We see a future that is already our past. The relativism prevalent in the late post-modern era appears weak to those who peer into the depths of time. What unfolds before us is not merely what Hegel termed the “contentful nothing”, a determinate nothingness like darkness, silence, or void, which we have been anticipating in the last decades – from the comfort of our living room sofa and with our imaginary largely supported by the blockbuster Hollywood production – through visions and fantasies of the apocalypse. What we face now, instead, is something radically different: something that has no content and no image, like Hegel’s “pure nothing” lacking any determination. We are not anticipating the catastrophe, we are in the midst of it. Imagination has been replaced by experience. Collectively, we find ourselves gazing into the Real, the pre-ontological chasm where being and nothing inter-pass. And indeed, the abyss gazes back at us, echoing Nietzsche’s notorious line from the Beyond Good and Evil: “when you stare for a long time into an abyss, the abyss stares back into you”. A confrontation with the abyss is experienced by many today as the edge of the West (which was always the edge of its interest) increasingly moves inwards, shrinking the “zone of indifference”. From today’s point of view, it seems that the age of postmodernity is at its demise and that we are standing on the threshold of a different historical reality that has outstripped its very denomination.


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Within the neoliberal stance, there exists a certain vicious cycle, an entrenched self-referentiality of which the lever was traced by the Ljubljana School as the phenomenon of the “enjoyment in the symptom”. What is the core of this problem is not only that enjoyment as such is essentially masochistic (remember only the magnetism of toxic relationships), as Freud discovered through his analysis of repetition compulsion, and that, moreover, such nature of enjoyment perfectly corresponds to a certain “perverse inversion” of the big Other’s prohibition of enjoyment into the injunction to enjoy taking place in consumerist society. There is yet another part to this problem, which establishes the real impasse of the current state of the Western world.

 

What is at stake here is a certain shift in the mechanism of identification. Because of the disintegration of the instance of the ego ideal known in the psychoanalytic parlance as the subject supposed to know, i.e. the authority of knowledge, and the authority of the carriers of knowledge such as teachers, scientists, and specialists in all different fields who used to function as the backbone of the apparatus of the social state (one can only read Fisher’s Capitalist Realism from 2009 to understand the effects of this disintegration), the individual no longer identifies with a specific knowledge, responsibility and moral law transmitted to them by society, that is, the instance of the ego ideal pertaining to the big Other. One no longer identifies with the resolution of the symptom in order to be able to function effectively (a demand for the resolution of the symptom may also, of course, produce new symptoms, but what is decisive is the existence of the very possibility of a resolution), but rather with the symptom itself, that is, with their fundamental incapability to resolve the symptom. And this, in a self-referential loop, produces a situation where resolution as such is no longer possible, where there is no longer even the possibility of resolution, which makes the reproduction of the symptom the only way out of the unbearability of the symptom-producing condition. This is why the major symptom of the West today is identification with the symptom.

 

It is not (only) the specific bodily symptom, social or mental disorder that an individual identifies with, but, on a much more fundamental level, one identifies with the very symptom of the identification with the symptom. The mass phenomenon of mass shootings in schools is exactly the symptom of such identification with the symptom. On the level of the libidinal and political economy, such an identification pattern can be subsumed into the following sentence: “I cannot resolve the problem because I am the problem”. This is one step further from the cynical position of postmodernity, where the declaration was something like “I partake in the problem which I know I should wish to resolve” (remember the fetishist disawoval). And because, ultimately, every symptom is the symptom of a symptom, the aim to detect the (phantasmal) traumatic core as the (alleged, that is, always retroactively produced) origin of the symptom, is replaced with hunting the external cause, that is, with blaming the random suspect. Finger-pointing is thus another ubiquitous symptom of the unresolved symptom, where the old predictable “repressive apparatus of the state” has been superseded by the capricious, insane repression of the anarchic market governance that has no logic whatsoever and is therefore virtually impossible to confront.

 

This echoes somewhere with the postmodernist vision of the endless multiplication of copies and simulacra with no original referent or no orientation grid. In such disposition, a line of copies, or symptoms, turn into an indistinguishable jumble of innumerable differences with mutual reference that fail to cut the knot and to make a difference. There is no (external) enemy or culprit to point to. And there is no easy way out. Free market capitalism has an auto-immune disease – it fights against itself, and any medicine you give it only makes it worse.


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The dusk of modernity and the dawn of the new times – whether or not we can see the outlines of it yet (perhaps there is no hope for it, and we should all subscribe to the accelerationists’ vision drawing on the inevitability of technological development in conjunction with global capitalism, along with its transhuman consequences) – would mean, at its fundament, raising human self-awareness to a new level, which would no longer celebrate infinity while silently practicing finitude, killing, and mortality, but rather celebrate finitude and practice infinity within finitude itself. What is to be transformed, however, is not only our attitude towards finitude and infinity and the correspondent “revaluation of all values”, but along with that, also the mode of economic production that would take the form of an ever-improving and self-sufficient circle. The least we can say is, especially due to the current concentrations of political and military power and the self-revolutionizing nature of technology itself, that this is by no means a simple task. Nevertheless, it is a task – a task towards in-finitude.



Abstract

The article delves into the multifaceted interplay between Hegel and postmodernity, as well as between postmodernity and the contemporary era. Both perspectives grapple with the notion of modernity, intricately tied to considerations of history, the idea of ending, and the concept of historical breaks. Deriving an analysis of the leading ideas of modernity and postmodernity, focusing especially on their relation to Hegel’s philosophy, we propose the thesis that postmodernity is not an epoch that succeeded modernity, but rather a transitional phase contributing to the decline of modernity itself. The contours of this new epoch, as yet indefinable or explicable, are revealed through significant shifts that have recently unsettled the fundamental frameworks upon which modernity was constructed. In doing so, we show that Hegel, who is certainly not a postmodernist, points to precisely the mechanism through which modernity can be transcended, which concerns human relation to substance, being, and time. Moreover, as it entails a revised human engagement with finitude and infinity, we term this relation “In-Finitude”, or “Un-Endlichkeit”.

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