Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic

Is confession the accomplishment of recognition? This is one of the fundamental political questions that traverse the Phenomenology of Spirit.¹ I have chosen to expand upon it here according to one of its possible lines of interpretation, which concerns the divided and contradictory character of the figure of Rousseau in Hegelian discourse. This dual character is due to the following: it is the same philosopher, Rousseau, who is the author of both The Social Contract and The Confessions. Not that these two works would be incompatible with regard to their content or style. Hegel is much too subtle a philosopher to pick out just any old separation between the philosophical and the literary. No. For Hegel, the dialectical tension that comes to be established between these two works indicates a properly political contradiction. This contradiction is related, eminently, to the motif of recognition. Rousseau has posed, following Hegel’s reading, two possible types of recognition: contractual and personal. And these two types of recognition pass through two types of institutional form: the contract and literature.

Now, if there is a contradiction between these two forms—contradictory in themselves—this is not because the contract would have nothing to do with the literary institution. Quite the reverse, the contract has everything to do with the literary institution, insofar as it is the same question that sustains them both: What is the language of recognition? In what language does one demand to be recognized? In what language does one accede to recognition? Rousseau, according to Hegel, was never able to answer these questions because he constantly made use of two languages to approach the problem of language itself: the judicial and the fictional, thus producing a major political aporia.

This aporia, as Hegel will show in the last part of section VI (“Spirit That Is Certain of Itself. Morality”: “Conscience. The ‘Beautiful Soul,’ Evil and Its Forgiveness”) as well as in the last part of section VII (“The Revealed Religion”), only finds its resolution in the religious sphere of Spirit. Our initial question (is confession the accomplishment of recognition?) might imply that the social and political motif of recognition is dialectically sublated by a religious motif—confession. Surprisingly though, according to Hegel, recognition and confession both suffer, in their immediate forms, from the same excess of abstraction. They both have to be confronted about their hidden and unconscious religious content to gain their genuine speculative meaning. According to Hegel, Rousseau is in search of two main conceptual figures: that of the Witness (in confession) and that of Forgiveness (in politics), which both exceed the spheres of morality and contractual political philosophy.

In the first part of this essay, I would like to situate and clarify this problematic in order to show, subsequently, that it still has an effect on our contemporary philosophical and political scene. The dialectic of the recognition of consciousnesses is not only set out in the second section of the Phenomenology, “Self-Consciousness.” The theme of recognition is treated throughout the work until the very end with the issue of reconciliation, which appears to be the dialectical transition from Religion to Absolute Knowledge. I will first linger over the role that recognition plays in the third part of the section of the work entitled “Spirit,” in the chapter entitled “Spirit that is certain of itself. Morality.” In this chapter, Hegel exposes the two central aspects of Rousseau’s thought and introduces the reader to the split between the contract and the confession. In the global introduction to this section, Hegel demonstrates the teleological sense of all previous development by insisting on the diverse types of Self that have been met previously: the abstract person (in “Ethical Order”), the revolutionary citizen (in “Culture”), and finally the moral will (in “Morality”). During these three moments, the motif of recognition is present. This no longer concerns the encounter between two self-consciousnesses, but rather the political community. “The Ethical Order” exposes the recognition of the particular self that becomes politically “actual”; the second part, “Culture,” which is the moment of the social contract as such, marks the emergence of the general will. “Through this process,” Hegel writes, “the universal becomes united with [individual] existence in general.”² The third and last development, “Morality,” is the moment of self-certainty, that is, of singularity, of self-consciousness.

The motif of confession appears here. There is no self-certainty without confession. Rousseau plays an important role in the last two moments, which correspond to the drawing up, and then to the consequences, of the social contract: the emergence of the will to confess. Considering this development, we can see very clearly that confession, according to Hegel, is nothing private, secluded from the political sphere. On the contrary, it is a political achievement. Confession is the postcontractual expression of the will. In what sense? Through the drawing up of the contract, “the power of the individual conforms itself to its substance, externalizes its own self and thus establishes itself as substance that has an objective existence.”³ With the social contract, the individual “acquires an acknowledged, real existence.”⁴ However, this process of recognition lacks something essential. Each consciousness, writes Hegel, stays alien to itself.

Hegel insists upon the inherent contradiction in the principle of the social contract, which he had already raised in the The Jena Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit of 1805–1806: “One imagines the constitution of the general will as if all the citizens gathered together and deliberated, as if the plurality of voices made the general will.”⁵ One imagines in this way the movement by which the individual ascends to the universal thanks to the negation of self. And yet, the general will appears to the individual as an alien will, not as an expression of her own. Why? “The general will must first of all constitute itself from the will of individuals and constitute itself as general, in such a way that the individual will appears to be the principle and the element, but it is on the contrary the general will which is the first term and the essence.”⁶ So if the general will appears first of all to the individual, not as a realization of her individual will, but as a foreign or alien will, it is because the individual as such is the result, and not the origin, of the general will, and this is why she does not recognize herself in it. She needs to invent herself. The confession, as the very form of this self-invention, constitutes in this sense the achievement of political recognition.

The motif of confession appears in the Phenomenology of Spirit with the evocation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, the “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul,” and then with Rousseau’s Confessions. This is the moment of the moral consequences of the social contract, where the individual who does not recognize herself in the general will firmly maintains her conviction, in the need to express her self-certainty: the self understands itself as well as it is understood by others. Again, the expression of this self-certainty is the confession, the accomplished form of the individual’s self-recognition. I quote here a passage from Jean Hyppolite’s commentary in Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit:

How can one not think, before this text, of an entire literature which runs from the Confessions of Rousseau to the Confessions of a Beautiful Soul, passing by the Sorrows of Young Werther? What is important is not what the self has achieved, because this determined action is not necessarily recognized, but rather the assurance that he gives to have acted according to his conviction. “It is this self-assuredness within himself which in these Confessions or in these Sorrows, in all this literature of the self, shows through outwardly and becomes actual: It is this form which is to be established as actual: it is the self which as such is actual in language, which declares itself to be the truth, and just by doing so acknowledges all other selves and is acknowledged by them.”⁷

“What is important is not what the self has achieved”: what the self has achieved is the contract. Hegel means to say that what is important here is no longer the act of deliberation and agreement by which the self commits itself contractually, but rather the feeling of having acted according to his or her conviction. How can we understand this? If it is true that the individual is not the origin but the result of the social contract, the product of the general will, if it is true that the general will precedes, in its truth, the individual will, then the abstract political recognition that takes place in and by the contract must be pursued, concluded, and accomplished, the truth of the individual must be produced and recognized, and it is the role of confession to allow this recognition. Confession appears as a social contract between self and self. If we follow Hegel on this point, then it is necessary to insist once again upon the fact that confession, that is, the act of producing oneself as truth, is a fundamental dimension of political life. Confession is even fundamentally caught up in public life, since it produces the private sense of the public, without which the public would be senseless.

How can Hegel carry out such an inversion: the general will precedes the individual will? Is this not a reversal which threatens to ruin Rousseau’s entire theory for which there is no doubt that the general will is a product of the union of individual wills? To answer these questions, we have to examine the role of language in this process.

We are familiar with the Hegelian critique of the contract and contractual ideologies. But the essential reason for this critique is perhaps not always well understood, this being precisely that contract theory in general presents a relationship between the individual and the community that is not ordered in conformity with the concept, since this theory affirms that there are first individuals and then the social body. We know, moreover, the fact that, for Hegel, this general will is obtained in contract theory and, particularly in Rousseau, by the exchange of particular abstract wills, without substance, and that, therefore, the contract remains purely formal. The community that results remains, as we have seen, alien to itself.

Why this accusation of formalism? One of the more difficult problems that Hegel reproaches Rousseau for having left unresolved is that of knowing in which language the contract is worded. Rousseau neglects to specify the essential thing, that is, that the contract is first of all a linguistic act. Rousseau states the formula of the contract as if it were ready-made, issued straight from a universal philosophical language, beyond any particularities belonging to a nation-state, as if its idiomatic dimension were evaded from the outset. This is to say that what is hidden, passed over in silence, is the moment of the access to sense, the access of the general will, and consequently of the community, to its own sense.

The linguistic community precedes the political community. Language is always, originally, the expression of an impersonal social order that carries the individual beyond herself, meaning that language is the first social contract, preceding by right and in fact the second. But what Rousseau obscures is precisely the fact that the social contract is the doubling of an earlier contract. Sense is obtained from this doubling whose philosophical import Rousseau does not examine, except to say that the first language is metaphoric, then becomes literal at the time of the contract’s stipulation.

If Hegel can affirm that the general will precedes individual wills, this is because the consciousnesses who are drafting the contract are speaking consciousnesses, already capable of distinguishing between the literal and the figurative. In this sense, they already no longer exist as singular individuals but are rather bound by the idiom that, as we know, always makes of the self a universal. To present, therefore, the contract as the process by which the individual accedes to its universal signification amounts to obscuring the existence of an earlier community, of an earlier ethos, which proves that the isolated individual never exists as such, or at least is not an origin.

Not reflecting its own language, the contract is therefore expressed in an alien language, that of things and of the economy. As though such a language could exist, neutral and without ambiguity, an idiom without idiomatism, a language whose phantasmic character Marx will later demonstrate. Hegel shows, in effect, that the contract makes the alienation of property the fundamental form of exchange between wills. The social contract effectively expresses the necessity of the “total surrender of each associate, along with all of his or her rights, to the entire community.” The language that allows this clause to be formulated is also, by the same token, alienated, forced to speak another language: that of the exchange contract. Hegel shows that contracts bearing on property are the prototypes of political contracts, not the other way round. Contract theories take as their model the relationship between men and things, or between things themselves, and not the relationship of men among themselves.

The contract silences its own language at the very moment that it asserts itself as the expression of the will. The result of this silence is that the repressed and denied language will be interiorized, becoming thereby a secret. But in fact, it is the constitution of this secret that coincides with the birth of individuality. There is no individual before the secret in Hegel, that is, before the censure of a language, before the interdiction of an idiom. What is thus required henceforth to be recognized is indeed this language, the postcontractual sense of the singular individual.

This very special political moment, the postcontractual, gives rise, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, to the fine analyses of the relationship between politics and language in the section devoted to the Aufklärung.

In modern society, Hegel writes, “the self knows itself as actual only as sublated.”⁸ In fact, the individual, as we were saying earlier, does not recognize itself in the community that it is nevertheless supposed to have wanted. She is nonrecognized (non-reconnu) by her own recognition; she is outside herself, in an alien spirit. The individual is “alienated from itself.”⁹ The repression and interiorization of the secret becomes, therefore, the deepest fold of interiority and the birthplace of moral consciousness and its language. As Hegel asserts: “The content of the language of conscience is the self that knows itself as essential being. This alone is what is declared, and this declaration is the true actuality.”¹⁰ And as Hyppolite comments: “Whereas the self [moi] becomes alien to itself and is alienated from itself in the language of the seventeeth century, in this new language the self [soi] states itself in its inner certainty” as being the truth.¹¹

This expression presupposes that consciousness recovers the lost language. And it is precisely the role of confession, which Hegel still calls the “aesthetic contemplation of self,” to allow the invention of the recovered language. Modern confession becomes, therefore, the fictitious but effective site of the restoration of the political space that gives the individual subject its substance. Rousseau’s Confessions are, in this sense, the accomplishment of The Social Contract. The philosopher cannot write about recognition, cannot make recognition his subject—as is the case in The Social Contract—without recognizing himself, without writing himself as just, as a recognized, singular individual. A confession has worth, not so much in virtue of its content—the facts that are recounted or owned up to—as in its political task, which is to let the individual accede to its own idiom, and by this to reintroduce her into the political community that had become alien to her. The subject must become the creator of its own history to experience, in language, “the majesty of absolute autarky, to bind and to loose,” to be, at the same time, both within and outside the contractual community.¹²

This analysis of Hegel’s, which sees in Rousseau’s two major works both a political opposition and a political continuity, is fundamental. It brings to light one of the most difficult paradox that structures secretly the motif of recognition: is the political recognition of the subject a political movement or is it not always doomed to anchor itself in a nonpolitical realm, in the extraterritoriality of fiction for example?

To answer these issues, we now need to turn towards the last moment of “Morality,” concerning Evil and Forgiveness, and to the following section entitled “Religion.” The two spheres of culture and politics, in the way Rousseau has defined them, are too narrow to allow a solution to this contradiction. “The one who made the confession” is split between his interiority (“keeping himself to himself”)¹³ and community with others, which he repulses. In consequence, “in so far as the self-certain Spirit, as a ‘beautiful soul,’ does not possess the power to renounce the knowledge of itself which it keeps to itself, it cannot attain to an identity with the consciousness it has repulsed, nor therefore to a vision of the unity of itself in the other, cannot attain to an objective existence.”¹⁴ The two sides (self-conscious and objectively existent in the political community) need to be equalized. The “self” of confession must “renounce its separate being-for-self.”¹⁵ In other words, the “self” must forgive and must also be forgiven for staying secluded from the community. Forgiveness is “the work of reconciliation” as the subjectively and objectively “existent Spirit.” The subject of confession opens himself to the substance of the community. In reverse, in order not to get lost or dissolved, the subject must find a witness, or a reminder, in the community itself. The two motifs of forgiveness and witnessing lead both the subject of the confession (singularity) and the subject of the contract (universal form of subjectivity) to the religious spiritual content of their selves. Hegel writes: “The reconciling Yea, in which the two ‘I’s let go their antithetical existence, is the existence, of the ‘I’ which has expanded into a duality, and therein remains identical with itself, and, in its complete externalization and opposite, possesses the certainty of itself: it is God manifested in the midst of those who know themselves in the form of pure knowledge.”¹⁶ Further, in “The Revealed Religion,” Hegel adds: “The transcended immediate presence of the self-conscious essence has the form of universal consciousness.”¹⁷ The individual is reconciled with the community. This reconciliation once again excedes the limits of the moral and political sphere. It is God who forgives; it is God who is the witness. Rousseau would not really have exposed the necessary theologico-political dimension of recognition, and of language itself.

We can refer to Derrida on this point when he declares in Faith and Knowledge: “Without God, no absolute witness. No absolute witness to be taken as witness in testifying…. In the irrepressible invoking of a witness, God would remain then one name of the witness, he would be called as witness.”¹⁸ No forgiveness without God either. This does not mean that the resolution of the divorce exposed by Rousseau is “religious.” Derrida adds: “with God, a God that is present, the existence of a third … that is absolute, all attestation becomes superfluous, insignificant or secondary.”¹⁹ With and without God: such is the meaning of the philosophical sublation of religion accomplished by philosophy in the last moment of the Phenomenology of Spirit, Absolute Knowledge.

In The Philosophy of Right, Hegel provides us with a theory of political recognition that is supposed to put an end to the dilemma between confession, contract, and religion. He writes: “the principle of modern states has prodigious strength and depth because it allows the principle of subjectivity to progress to its culmination in the extreme of self-subsistent personal particularity, and yet at the same time brings it back to the substantive unity.”²⁰ Recognition in modern States, therefore, has the sense, not only of a guarantee of universality, that of the citizen’s existence, it is also related to the singular individual’s social status. The singular individual thus demands to be recognized as well. He is, in the words of Sartre, “a being that is in question of its own being.”²¹

The desire for recognition is this: the expectation of a response given to a being’s concrete questioning of its own being. The expectation of a response given to an ontologico-political question, which consists in knowing what is becoming of the singular individual, was at first denied by the social contract. Recognition, in modern States, must therefore always be made up of an objective institutional component—the political community—and a subjective institutional component.

Hegel’s particular contribution consists in developing a theory of the State that puts an end to Rousseau’s vision of an individual divided between its situation as a political subject on the one hand and a self-certain individual on the other, between its juridical and its confessional language. In this way there appears at the end of The Philosophy of Right—as Sartre, once more, comments in Life/Situations²²—the idea of a possible recognition of minorities by the State and not simply by a literary act (this question also appears in Sartre’s preface to Frantz Fanon’s book The Wretched of the Earth).²³ Hegel intends to show that a State which truly conforms to its concept does not require individuals to invent themselves, that is, to invent their language, that is, again, to invent their law through the intermediary of a narrative. The contradiction that exists between formal legal language and the secret idiom must therefore be dialectically sublated. The question of religion is inescapable on this point, which does not mean that religion, once again, is the ultimate solution to this problem. As Clayton Crockett declares, commenting on Slavoj Žižek’s argument about the meaning of religion in Hegel: “the essence of politics repeats the founding gesture of Christianity and involves a ‘kind of short circuit between the Universal and the Particular.’”²⁴ Rousseau would have stayed blind to this dialectic dimension of politics and of language in which the cultual community precedes the emergence of the individual.

Today, the entire question is that of knowing whether this contradiction between the private subject and the citizen has disappeared, and whether the religious dimension of the substance-subject is taken for granted. To bring this essay to a close, I would like to open up a series of questions with regard to this point. It seems to me that this contradiction has reappeared—that, perhaps, it has never even disappeared. I take as proof the political signification that a philosopher such as Derrida gives anew to confession, against Hegel in a sense, showing how this motif haunts modern States.

The text Circumfession²⁵ focuses on the motif of the struggle between the civil state and the “name hidden from the civil state,” between public life and the secret life that is necessary to write, to which one must give one’s language. The profoundly political aspect of confession, for which, according to Derrida, St. Augustine provides the foundation, stems from the fact that the political subject has to invent its own facticity. Facticity, as we have seen, never preexists the political community. And invention corresponds to the act that Derrida calls, taking up one of St. Augustine’s expressions, “faire la vérité” (to make the truth). The facticity of “making” renders possible the facticity of “being.”

What does “to make the truth” mean? As Derrida says, “To make the truth cannot simply mean ‘to tell it,’ if ‘to tell the truth’ presupposes ‘information,’ ‘presentation,’ a manner of ‘bringing to knowledge’ something that ‘is.’”²⁶ Further on he says that one can “‘speak truthfully’ without ‘bringing out the truth’”;²⁷ or again: “one can always describe or note the truth without avowal.”²⁸ This means that to confess is not to recount one’s life, according to what would be a purely private gesture, but rather to give life itself the political access to its own facticity. To free, in and by writing, the structure of a recognition that forever escapes the civil state, that of the recognition of the minority, of the necessarily minoritarian character of every singular individual, the minoritarian character that Derrida names the sentence: “I have been seeking myself in a sentence,” he says.²⁹

This fissure between the life of the political subject and the life of the individual phrase is found again in the motif of forgiveness, whose decisive political signification Derrida, once again, has demonstrated. Forgiveness does not speak, no more than does the confession, the language of the civil state, and yet the State today lasts only if it forgives. We have already insisted upon the proximity of forgiveness and confession. Forgiveness consists in the mutual recognition of confessed singular individuals. The yes of forgiveness thus shatters the negativity of their isolation, but the movement is the same: “it is the same movement which was expressed in the consciousness that made confession of itself.”³⁰ The confession, at once singular and collective, is therefore at work in political life as its paradoxical condition.

But here, once again, where Hegel envisaged a dialectical resolution of this contradiction, are we not on the contrary confronted with its return, a return without solution? Individuals, minorities, must they not always show themselves, make themselves—in the sense both of the fictitious and the factical—to exist politically? A politician today must be perceived as someone who is ready to confess his errors and, in so doing, accept responsibility for those errors. He must be willing to ask forgiveness in his own name for the wrongs of the entire nation. The media thus becomes the site of political confession where power creates an individual figure.³¹

Every citizen would thus have to give, as Judith Butler says, an account or a narrative of herself or of himself. In her book Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler insists upon the aporetical intrication of the private and the public meaning of the “I”: “When the ‘I’ seeks to give an account of itself, it can start with itself, but it will find that this self is already implicated in a social temporality that exceeds its own capacities for narration; indeed, when the ‘I’ seeks to give an account of itself, an account that must include the conditions of its own emergence, it must, as a matter of necessity, become a social theorist.”³² This transcendence of the self has also and inevitably a religious dimension because of the very structure of the address of the narrative. The “account of oneself” can be interpreted as a pure act of faith: faith in oneself and faith in the other.

The dilemma today would thus no longer be between man and citizen, the dilemma or schism whose fallacious character Marx has shown, but between three types of political languages. First, there is, again, the language of contracts, which are multiplying in the social sphere—one may think here of the increasingly differentiated character of work contracts. Second, there is the language of self-expression, which allows the subject of these contracts to make or form herself as a genuine individual through the medium of the “account”—a new form of the confession. Third, there is the religious dimension of this belief in oneself and in the value of this self-testimony. Three heterogeneous idiomatic systems working together. This would relaunch the problem of the religious essence, in the Hegelian sense, of the relationship between the indivividual and the political community. This religious essence seems currently to be separated from its content, appearing as a third term, not as a synthesis, between the particular and the universal. The double challenge of Rousseau by Hegel and of Hegel by contemporary Continental philosophers would then inform, without providing us with any dogmatic answer, a political and literary reorientation of the philosophical concept of the religious meaning of the nonreligious.

1. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977).

5. Hegel and the Human Spirit: A Translation of the Jena Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit (1805–1806) with Commentary by Leo Rauch (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983), trans. from G. W. F. Hegel, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8, Jenaer Systementwürfe III [also known as Realphilosophie II, first published 1931, section II, B, “The Contract”].

7. Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974), p. 512.

11. Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 512.

18. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 65.

20. “and so maintains this unity in the principle of subjectivity itself” (G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967], §260).

21. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948), p. 52.

22. Jean-Paul Sartre, Life/Situations: Essays Written and Spoken, trans. Paul Auster and Lydia Davis (New York: Pantheon, 1977).

23. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1965).

24. Clayton Crockett, Interstices of the Sublime (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), p. 152.

25. Jacques Derrida, “Circumfessions,” in Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

31. Even though he refused to talk about his personal life in the beginning, Nicolas Sarkozy eventually wrote Witness, a book that presents his political convictions in the form of a confession: “As far as I can remember, I always wanted to achieve in the political realm. Politics was not part of my family’s tradition. In fact, I probably should have stayed away from it: I had neither connections nor wealth, I was not a bureaucrat, and my name, since it sounds foreign, would have been enough for someone other than myself to descend into anonymity. I like to build, to move, to resolve problems. I think that the effort is always worth it, and in the end, it always pays off. Those are my values. That is why I am a politician. That is what I am here to tell you” (my translation from Témoignage [Paris: Editions XO, 2006], back cover)

It is impossible here not to think of the very beginning of Rousseau’s Confessions: “I will present myself, whenever the last trumpet shall sound, before the Sovereign Judge with this book in my hand, and loudly proclaim, ‘Thus have I acted; these were my thoughts; such was I’” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, trans. W. Conyngham Mallory [New York: Tudor, 1928], §3).

32. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), p. 8.