Wednesday, April 05, 2006
(8:11 AM) | The Young Hegelian:
Parricide
“…following Benjamin’s motto on how every document of culture is a document of barbarism, the highest achievements of Western Culture were denounced for concealing the practices of racism and genocide, and so on.” (Žižek)And so on, and so on, and so on. Without pause.
But thought also requires pause, repose, not just the revel of symposia. The Owl of Minerva, it is said, takes flight only at dusk, and so reflection, that mourned faculty of Frühromantik, occurs best when the dust has settled, not in the heat of the moment, where anger boils over, as if demonstrating what it would prove, the primacy of the passions over reason. The settling dust is also an aging process. None of us is getting any younger. Though many seem young, all too young.
Which is why one can understand the energy, the exuberance, the Enthusiasm. These are the ‘horns’ which like those of the rutting stag, Adorno tells us we should never lose, though he was old when he said it, to many had already lost them, seemingly swept aside by a younger generation. Only later do we see that no one, Adorno especially, was really swept aside by that generation.
It is the dramatic irony of youth that it cannot see its perennial repetition of youth’s rites of passage. It cannot see it because it is too engrossed in itself, its own self-assertion, its adolescent defiance. The order of the world, the faits sociaux, are for youth, the norms and values of its parents, its oppressive educators, values which are to be rejected if it is to come into its majority. Everything old stands condemned by virtue of its age, its complicity with an injustice which only the son can see, or so he thinks. “My father is a racist and a bigot,” says a character in a Benninck play, “his generation, everything they stand for… it should go to the wall.” In the same vein Thomas Bernhard: “I will extinguish Wolfsegg utterly… The old must be discarded and destroyed so that the new can emerge”. But in the adolescent’s anger he does not see that the son will soon become the father, and that his sons will do the same to him before his time is up. It is parricide which creates, through a dialectical reversal, new fathers. Mythic revolt tells us about mythic revolt.
The Slave has a similar view towards the Lord: he sees in the Lord only the chains with which he has bound the slave. But Lord and Slave are at two ends of the same chain. The slave’s worldview, driven only by the experience of oppression, is as distorted as that of the Lord, both are one-sided recognition. In its distortion the Slave sees Lordship as universal, equates the universal with enslavement, with the suppression of the other. The phenomenological observer, the third who is equally being educated by being shown the first two, is distant enough (never too distant) to see beyond this ‘universal’ to the totality, see that Lordship’s empire, and the abstract values which ruled it, were partial. But she can also see that the viewpoint of the Slave, the subaltern, is equally false in its one-sidedness, that the two merely complement each other.
Apprehensions of the universal which are particular, which mask the particular relations of Lordship and Slavery, are made thematic in this move, and seen by the observer in their place within the history of Spirit, with its manifold permutations. The observer, if she remembers what she has learned (and frequently she doesn’t), no longer confuses them with universality, doesn’t in haste abandon all talk of the universal because it has once been compromised by particularity.
We parricides, we Protest-ants, forever youthful, forgetful, are not so young as we would like to think.
