Verismo is not facilely the negative of positivistic naturalisme, but the Aufheben of reality itself. The oft-leveled criticism of verismo— its vulgar excess—, betrays itself. Verismo, more real than reality, proves the fact that reality is not real enough.
Does anyone have any opinions on the new translation last year of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History by Ruben Alvarado?
Skeptic “Ataraxia”
http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=1222
One of the best things that Hegel ever said was ‘Tarry with the negative.’ By the ‘negative’ he meant one-sided and false theories. Yet the ‘negative’ is never entirely false, and thus inhabiting such a position is a worthwhile exercise, even if, eventually, it would cramp one’s style. It is easier for a skeptic to tarry with the negative than a believer in truth and knowledge, since knowledge is the end of thinking and questioning. Skeptics are free to explore the world of thought in a way that those who are bound by knowledge and the search for knowledge are not.
Please let this be a joke as this is one of the most fatuously bad (non)readings of Hegel— not to mention skepticism— I’ve ever encountered.
The prizing of comedy as a porte-parole of human finitude (and of everything that is supposed to be related to it: acceptance of our weaknesses, limitations, and imperfections; reconciliation with the absence of the transcendent and acknowledgment of the equation “a human is [only] human,” “life is [only] life”) is conceptually highly problematic. Such a perspective on comedy is much too simplistic, and soon turns out to be pretty useless. Is it not, rather, that the exact opposite rings truer? If humans were “only human(s)” (and life “only life”), if the human equation indeed added up so neatly and with no remainder, there would be no comedy.
—Alenka Zupancic, The Odd One In: On Comedy (MIT Press, 2008) 49.
The reason God can only appear incognito is that there is nothing to take cognizance of here: God is hidden not to hide some transcendent Truth, but to hide the fact that there is nothing to hide. This is, to my Hegelian view, the whole point of Christianity as the ‘religion of revelation’[.]
—Slavoj Zizek, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (MIT Press, 2009) 235-6.
Memory effaces remembrance (or recollection) just as the I effaces itself.
—Paul de Man, “Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s ‘Aesthetics’”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Summer 1982) 773.
Only insofar as Geist, in its most advanced form, survives and perseveres is any opposition to the total domination of the social totality possible.
—Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (via 3roads)
What I find so repulsive, what I don’t understand, why is the “queer” given this position of privileged negativity: “a queer oppositionality that would oppose itself to the structural determinants of politics such, which is also to say, that would oppose itself to the logic of opposition”? Is this not merely Hegel’s negative as absolute difference, as that which is, “exclusif d’identité et, par conséquent, de lui-même ; car, en tant que rapport à soi, il se définit étant cette identité même qu’il exclut”?
“For the cult of the child permits no shrines to the queerness of boys or girls, since queerness, for the culture at large, as for Philadelphia in particular, is understood as bringing children and childhood to an end”: It is of course not merely “queerness”, but rather any and all sexualization as such that would bring “childhood to an end”. This reads as merely tendentious, as does so much of the work.
Perhaps the best thing, perhaps the only thing, about Lee’s prose is one can gloss over so much of it as it is merely a retreading of Lacan: “the agency of disfiguration that punctures the fictions of the symbolic, shattering its persistent fantasy of recapturing a lost imaginary unity, by obtruding upon it the void of what remains necessarily unsymbolizable, the gap or wound of the real that insists as a death drive within the symbolic”. One does not need to read it; one has always already read it.
Le négatif représente donc toute l’opposition qui, en tant qu’opposition, repose sur elle-même ; elle est la différence absolue, sans aucun rapport avec autre chose ; en tant qu’opposition, il est exclusif d’identité et, par conséquent, de lui-même ; car, en tant que rapport à soi, il se définit étant cette identité même qu’il exclut.
—
G.W.F. Hegel, Science de la logique, Paris, Aubier, 1947, II, p. 58.
[Thus the negative represents all opposition which, qua opposition, resides in itself; it is absolute difference, without any relation to any other thing; qua opposition, it is exclusive of identity and, consequently, of itself; thus, qua self-rapport, it defines itself in being this same identity which it excludes. Translation mine.]
Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality [unreality], is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength. Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then, having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject, which by giving determinateness an existence in its own element supersedes abstract immediacy, i.e. the immediacy which barely is, and thus is authentic substance: that being or immediacy whose mediation is not outside of it but which is this mediation itself.
—G.W.F. Hegel, Trans. A.V. Miller, Phenomenology of Spirit, No. 32
The life of the Spirit [Geist] is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself […] Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it.
—Hegel, Phenomenology (via elchagas)
