Hegel without reserve

Traumatic Encounters: Holocaust Representation and the Hegelian Subject

by Paul Eisenstein

Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. 236 pages

The post-Hegelian turn in critical philosophy "after Auschwitz" left residues in contemporary cultural criticism that have also influenced the development of Holocaust and trauma studies in recent years. In Traumatic Encounters: Holocaust Representation and the Hegelian Subject, Paul Eisenstein explores how the Hegelian subject might be redeemed for Holocaust and trauma studies from a milieu that has sometimes led to its preemptive burial. The ultimate aim of this redemption is to make a case for recovering the dialectic between the Particular and the Universal in Hegel's conceptualization of the subject of history for the project of bearing witness to the traumatic past. Eisenstein's vehicles for this agenda include Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, D. M. Thomas's The White Hotel, Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, and David Grossman's See Under: Love. His analyses of these works deliver insight after insight, all of which challenge prevailing assumptions about the limits of witnessing when all perspectives are partial yet nevertheless should--or indeed must--retain universal implications.

Eisenstein remarks the myriad reasons for a political if not fundamentally anti-intellectual suspicion of Hegel in "Holocaust Memory and Hegel," the first chapter of Traumatic Encounters. In his discussion of Hegel and his critics, Eisenstein rightly observes that Hegel's dialectic and Absolute Spirit have come to be associated with the aggrandizing and difference-obliterating tendencies of National Socialism. This association follows from reductive interpretations of Theodor W. Adorno's excoriating evaluation of the fate of metaphysics and lyric poetry after Auschwitz and Jacques Derrida's subsequent deconstruction of the ontotheological ideals of unified consciousness and immediate presence in the phenomenological and structuralist traditions. Reductive readings of Adorno and Derrida have, in their turn, sometimes spurred cultural and literary critics to make recourse to anti-identitarian mantras as a justification for a politically activist dismissal of Hegel as a quintessential representative of the Eurocentric and patriarchal Continental tradition. I share Eisenstein's sense that part of the reluctance to read Hegel rests as much on his notorious difficulty as it does on a failure to accept the formalized critical ambivalence of the logic that culminates in the Aufhebung. In the Aufhebung, the alternating moments of negation and certainty, sensuous consciousness and its knowledge, posit, negate, invert, reverse, and supersede the opposition between putatively independent essences and dependent appearances. To recognize the ineluctable mediation and interdependency of these moments is to move beyond false binaries in order to comprehend and sustain their alterity. The Aufhebung thus reflects a formal, dynamic, and ongoing articulation of each moment relative to one another over time and space rather than a homogenizing unification that neutralizes their differences without remainder.

Of course, from a reductive point of view, one of Hegel's most despicable crimes is his authorship of the concept of Absolute Spirit in the Phenomenology of Spirit. In the poststructuralist and multiculturalist heydays of the 1980s and 90s, the ideology associated with this concept made him the icon of a totalizing logic of identity that needed to be repudiated in the name of an antifascist politics. Yet as Eisenstein establishes, Absolute Knowing, or Spirit, in Hegel entails a simultaneous recognition of the freedom that abides in historical contingency (and to which Notions themselves are subject) on the one hand and a philosophically comprehensive Science of Knowing on the other. It cannot be separated from the negativity of a "withdrawn I," which Hegel paradoxically identifies as the "substance of Self" externalized over time. This predication of substance as a self-mediated and self-mediating negativity in the last chapter of the Phenomenology is the articulation of foregoing intermediations between moments of certainty and negation, and between the positing of essences and appearances that culminates in the simultaneity of the "in itself," the "for itself," and the "for others." These intermediations do not add up to a definition of self-consciousness as mastery. The differences between the subjective and objective aspects of these standpoints can never be resolved; instead, they are brought together in self-consciousness, which is itself given to the same subjectifying and objectifying dynamics. Hence the progress toward a higher level of self-consciousness that begins with perception and ends with Absolute Spirit is presented as a movement of historically mediated becoming rather than the synthesis of a homogenous all-knowing presence.