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[antihegel]

How can one be anti Hegel?

like all jokes, delivery is more important than semantics.

[antihegel]

The object of knowledge, determined as it is by the intention inherent in the concept, is not the truth. Truth is an intentionless state of being, made up of ideas. The proper approach to it is not therefore one of intention and knowledge, but rather a total immersion and absorption in it. Truth is the death of intention.

– Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne

[antihegel]

By taking up a present, I draw together and transform my past, altering its significance, freeing and detaching myself from it. But I do so only by committing myself somewhere else.

Psychoanalytical treatment does not bring about its cure by producing direct awareness of the past, but in the first place by binding the subject to his doctor through new existential relationships. It is not a matter of giving scientific assent to the psychoanalytical interpretation, and discovering a notional significance for the past; it is a matter of reliving this or that as significant, and this the patient succeeds in doing only by seeing the past in the perspective of his co-existence with his doctor. The complex is not dissolved by a non-instrumental freedom, but rather displaced by a new pulsation of time with its own supports and motives.

The same applies in all cases of coming to awareness: they are real only if they are sustained by a new commitment.

[…]

All explanations of my conduct in terms of my past, my temperament and my environment are therefore true, provided that they be regarded not as seperable contributions, but as moments of my total being, the significance of which I am entitled to make explicit in various ways, without its ever being possible to say whether I confer their meaning upon them or receive it from them.

– Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith, 1962

[antihegel]

Perhaps because pairing the juridical and biopolitical modalities in a single text evokes powerful, and potentially critical, contradictions, there are remarkably few examples in which the juridical and biopolitical narratives appear together. Instead, they are treated separately. Primarily, the contradiction entailed in a frame combining both categories is that Manning could not be the agentive activist deserving of punishment for her intentional acts at the same time as she is the agent of emergent queer expression, because readers might justify her actions as determined by (and therefore nonagentive) a troubled, queer, emerging identity. What is missing is a joint narrative that would see both the queer transgression and the state-oriented transgression as not only agentive, but also homologously functional for a system invested in parceling out the personal from the political. The danger to the state is that readers might see the system as a whole as an entity invested in the twin secretive logics of pathology and blame.

— Dana L. Cloud, Private Manning and the Chamber of Secrets, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 2014

[antihegel]

As Kim Love’s experience shows, it is a prison industrial complex [PIC] norm to use women’s bodies in unsafe ways to pacify male inmates. The prison staff and the PIC create sexually opportune environments (e.g., cage women in the same cells as straight men), coerce women into having unsafe sex with their cell-mates because there are few if any barriers for the sex acts, then validate the sexual roles with toiletries or medical favors (exchange of goods or services).

Forced boarding by a third party for sexual contact, or in prison “V-coding,” on the streets would be seen as pimping, as Kim Love called it. The placement of such coercion inside of prison, however, serves to locate pimping as a central part of a transwoman’s sentence. Most acts performed by prison staff, violent or not, are unfortunately upheld as the norm of prison culture. The vision of “sexual tension being brought down, to where there’s no sexual tension -- they would probably overturn that place” screams to Love’s understanding of prison staff using her body to pacify her “husband.”

While Love’s remarkable survival skills speak to a particular angle of resilience, Emmet Pascal witnessed many women attempting to resist or refuse being “V-coded,” but guards only turn a blind eye. The refusal of prison guards to acknowledge such violence (deliberate indifference), if not to directly coerce it, places the guards in a pimping position. [...]

In an equally abusive placement, gender-variant women are being V-coded close to the end of their sentences. This location works to keep women incarcerated because if they defend themselves against rape or other violence that occurs with their “husband” or cellmate, it is common for them to be charged with assault then placed in the “hole.” The assault charge then shreds the previous parole possibility or release date.

— blake nemec, “No One Enters Like Them: Health, Gender Variance, and the PIC”, Captive Genders, 2011, ed. Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith

[antihegel]

trans. Alphonso Lingis

[antihegel]

When performatives succeed, they produce a truth whose power sometimes imposes itself forever: the location of a boundary, the installation of a state are always acts of performative violence that, if the conditions of the international community permit it, create the law, whether durably or not, where there was none or no longer any law, where law did not yet impose itself or was not yet strong enough.

In creating the law, this performative violence – which is neither legal nor illegal – creates what is then held to be legal truth, the dominant and juridically incontestable public truth.

– Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi, “History of the Lie: Prolegomena”, trans. Peggy Kamuf [formatted for reading]

[antihegel]

Our belief is that friendships and love relationships will help people a lot more than medication and professionals.

– Chris Harrop, Lyn Ellett, Rachel Brand, and Fiona Lobban, Friends interventions in psychosis: a narrative review and call to action, Early Intervention in Psychiatry 2015

[antihegel]

Although Rapping (1996) argues that feminist CR [consciousness-raising] is better politically than the recovery movement, I fear that an epistemological and political reliance on CR might promote an implicit acceptance of the conceptualization of “woman” as belonging to the private sphere of healing and consolation. One additional problem with CR as a political method even within feminism was that it attracted middle- and upper-class women who had little interest in the fundamental social change envisioned by radical feminists. Even among radical feminists, CR was and is a limited political option. Often, feminists could see no avenues for action beyond CR. […] When the raising of consciousness is seen as an end in itself, feminist practice runs up against the wall of the therapeutic, as the working over of identity replaces politics.

Dana L. Cloud, Consolation and Control in Culture and Politics, 1998

[auntbutch]

George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 25-26.

[antihegel]

20. Philosophy is at once the power of alienated thought and the thought of alienated power, and as such it has never been able to emancipate itself from theology. The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion. Not that its techniques have dispersed those religious mists in which human beings once located their powers, the very powers wrenched from them – but that these cloud-enshrouded entities have now been brought down to earth. It is thus the most earthbound aspects of life that become the most impenetrable and rarefied. The absolute denial of life, in the shape of a fallacious paradise, is no longer projected into the heavens, but finds its place within material life itself. The spectacle is thus a technological version of the exiling of human powers in a “world beyond” – and the perfection of separation within human beings.

– Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, 1995

[antihegel]

The matrix that must be inhabited in order to displace the machinery of unnameing is a global information net that will, in the last decade of the twentieth century, only reach further into every aspect of people’s lives. The effect of this net (not entirely planned, but increasingly recognized and capitalized on) is to create formations in information – to form in informing. As Mark Crispin Miller (1988) has argued, this net does not at all “bring us all closer together” (also see Ryan 1989, 89-90). On the contrary, it merely ensures the dominance and cynical repetition of the deadening (deafening) logic of the Same. […] I propose a kind of graffiti politics aimed at disrupting the sameness of the net and at creating alternative nets […]

The kind of question that the emerging, diverse community will face is, for example, whether this global information net, which is capable of enforcing the most brutal unnameings, can be displaced by a global communications net, where there is as much emphasis on commune in communication, as there is on formation in information. In other words, an interactive global net.

Such a net, however, is as far as post-secular community should go toward globalism. […] We need to know each other, and that means to live with the other, and truly be a possibility for the other and let the other be a possibility for us.

– Bill Martin, Matrix and line: Derrida and the possibilities of postmodern social theory, 1992

For more on “unnameing” see the post before this or my identity tag.

I think Martin was very on-the-nose here, but it’s worth noting, 25 years later, that we may be dominated by an interactive web, but that the net itself is basically not malleable at any scale by its participants and only gets increasingly homogenized every year. In contrast, is a so-called communication net that refuses even more recuperation still economically feasible? Of course, we do create networks in the cracks, but to what extent can we actually use information infrastructure at scale that resists the societies of control that built them? This passage serves as a reminder that people have dreamt of using modern media for socialism for decades. We still struggle to ground the virtual in the material. At this point, is real community possible? If so, are we paying enough attention to let it florish and seed, or are we just paving the way for more recuperation?

[antihegel]

We may provisionally consider the “unnamed” and the “unnameable” as different categories. The unnameable participates in the responsibility of the impossible (towards the other), while the unnamed is a category of counter-possibility. It is the erasure of possibility through the erasure of an emergent name. The person (or movement) who is unnamed can be subjugated or destroyed without notice (this is another way of saying, “We represent the universal discourse – too bad if you don’t fit in”). Without notice – but not necessarily without remainder. The margins must create a new machinery of naming, and yet this machinery must also engage with, and subvert, the counter-possible machinery of unnameing.

– Bill Martin, Matrix and line: Derrida and the possibilities of postmodern social theory, 1992

Emphasis mine. To make things clearer, “responsibility of the impossible (toward the other)” is a reference to Derrida’s ethics centered around maintaining, multiplying, and seeking out difference as a semiotic political project. Here, the impossible describes the transcendentally not-possible, or not-reachable, and the counter-possible describes what is not-possible because the powers of writing (in a generalized sense) and the instability of signs are used to “obliterate names” through the “violence of origins”.

In other words, when marginal figures don’t have proper names, it can be because of fundamental otherness that prohibits naming, or because of unnameings that prevent names from being realized or kept. The first is part of Derrida’s ethics of difference, and violence against it can be carried out through false namings that preserve hegemony by destroying the possibility of a true 'outside'. Justice requires the protection of difference against these forces. The second, unnaming, is itself a means of violence. We need tools to fight unnaming while preserving the unnameable.

[antihegel]

Real communism consists in creating the conditions for human renewal: activities in which people can develop themselves as they produce, organizations in which the individual is valuable rather than functional. Accomplishing this requires a movement – to change the character of work itself. And redefining work as a creative activity can only happen as individuals emerge from stifled, emotionally blocked rhythms of constraint. It will take more than the will to change, in the current situation; to resist neutralization itself demands desire.

– Felix Guattari and Toni Negri, Communists Like Us, 1988, trans. Michael Ryan, 1990

[antihegel]

[antihegel]

[Quoting Wagner:] “Not mere music” – no musician would say that. […] Let us remember that Wagner was young at the time Hegel and Schelling seduced men’s spirits; that he guessed, that he grasped with his very hands the only thing the Germans take seriously – “the idea,” which is to say, something that is obscure, uncertain, full of intimations; that among Germans clarity is an objection, logic a refutation. […] Let us keep morals out of this: Hegel is a taste. – And not merely a German but a European taste. – A taste Wagner comprehended – to which he felt equal – which he immortalized. – He merely applied it to music – he invented a style for himself charged with “infinite meaning” – he became the heir of Hegel. – Music as “idea.” –

Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, trans. Kaufmann

[littlestudybugs-deactivated2018]

@rivkahstudies

From your Hebrew alphabet post :) 

Thank you for pointing out about the ‘ih’ sound, I always thought it was just silent. So, while this isn’t my neatest handwriting,  it will be getting a lot of use.

[rivkahstudies]

Ooh that looks good! Thanks for correcting my mistake because I put an extra final letter in the post (everyone keeps reblogging it but I need to correct it!). Maybe if I get time today I’ll remake it!

Yes, for instance if you have a word with it like v'ahavta, there’d be an “ih”/silent under the first v sound :) it causes a pause/glottal stop in some cases. Also, the little *vav note at the bottom usially only applies for “oh” and “oo” sounds if you’d like to add that to your notes. Like I said, gotta remake the post. I love your handwriting!