Within the history of philosophy the question of the other while not having a purely singular determination appears nonetheless to be a uniquely human concern. Hence engagement with the nature of alterity and thus the quality of the other are philosophical projects that commence with an assumed if often implicit anthropocentrism. Alterity figures therefore within a context that is delimited from the start by an assumption about the being of being human, or at least the approach to human being usually begins with the posited centrality of human-to-human relations. This position is explicit in the writings of Levinas for whom the presence of the other is acknowledged and sustained through a mode of address. He argues that:
Every meeting begins with a benediction [une benediction] contained in the word hello [bonjour]. This hello [bonjour] that every cogito, that every reflection on self already presupposes and which could be the first transcendence. This greeting [salut] addressed to the other man [l'autre homme] is an invocation. I insist therefore on the primacy of the welcoming relation in regard to otherness. [J'insiste donc sur la primauté de la relation bienveillante à l’égard d'autrui].1
There is therefore a primacy of relation between humans that is given through the ‘word’. If it were possible to define the absence of the ‘word’ then that absence would describe the animal's presence. Absence or ‘poverty’ would prevail. It is, of course, precisely this prevailing sense of deprivation that, as has already been argued, leaves open the possibility of thinking a form of animal presence that was situated beyond both a founding without relation though equally beyond an attempt to supplant it. (This is the complex state of affairs already indicated once the ‘with’ is not taken as the negation of the without relation, but as that which inaugurates another thinking of relation.) In other words, what this leaves open is the possibility of taking up the question of the other that was no longer advanced in terms of a founding absence, where absence is defined in relation to the spoken word. What such a task would necessitate is beginning with a different question. It is that beginning that is at work continually in the project being undertaken here.
If there is another question then a point of departure needs to be located elsewhere. Given that a central concern that has continued to arise both philosophically and theologically is the impossibility of the animal occupying the position of the other and therefore of the related impossibility that there be a founding relation to animals (as a site of plurality incorporating human animality), it is precisely this state of affairs that opens up the possibility of a different question and thus another beginning. The question is straightforward: what if the other were an animal?
As is clear the animal already figures within the history of philosophy. Its accommodation is for the most part a form of confinement within which the animal is positioned in terms of what has already been described as a constituting without relation. As has already emerged in the earlier discussion of Heidegger and Descartes that positioning was linked to a radical separation of ‘thought’ or ‘existence’ on the one hand from ‘life’ on the other. The separation is such that ‘thought’, even in its differing permutations, will always be granted a position in which it is positioned as independent in relation to life. (It is not surprising in this regard that Levinas uses the term ‘cogito’.) Propriety is defined therefore in terms of being without life. Without life is, of course, without animality. This is the without relation. Not the animal as such but what has been referred to as the animal's figured presence. (Hence the continuous presence of the founding without relation.) Once it can be argued that this sense of propriety is inextricably bound up with the without relation, it becomes possible to question the complex relationship between the without relation and its posited counter, namely ‘with’. To continue the engagement with this term that arose in the context of the way the without relation figured in Hegel's Philosophy of Right and thus in showing how Derrida's work enabled a counter to be developed, further aspects of the ‘with’ need to be developed.
In general terms the ‘with’ is, of course, the marker of a generalised strategy of inclusion. The ‘with’ is therefore the move in which absence is taken to have been overcome by presence. In this context presence identifies a form of shared and enforced inclusion. This inclusion takes different forms within the history of philosophy. While not attempting to argue that in each sense the term designates an identical state of affairs, it is nonetheless still possible to note Aristotle's use of the cognate terms ‘partnership’ (koinonian) (1252a1) and ‘the common interest’ (to koiné) in the Politics (1278b23), Descartes, use of the term ‘shared’ (partagée) in the Discours de la méthode, in addition to Heidegger's use of ‘with’ (mit) in the context of Being and Time.2 Taken together all these terms gesture to a definition of commonality defined by a form of sharing. The sharing, and thus the common, are designated by the ‘with’. Moreover, the common and the shared define both the propriety and the internality of human being. What needs to be resisted initially is the possibility of countering this without relation with the simple assertion of the ‘with’. While such an assertion announces incorporation as an already present possibility, in this instance it is one that will be held in abeyance. The argument is therefore that what needs to be resisted is the move in which exclusion is taken to have been countered by the simple act of inclusion. This is especially the case when the without relation is taken as constituting and sustaining that which is proper to the being of being human. The movement between the without relation and the ‘with’ defines the setting in which it becomes possible to take up claims about identity, including those concerning race. Moreover, it allows them to be taken up in a context in which they are not reduced to the enforcing hold of a residual anthropocentrism. In this regard the animal – a prevailing setting that brings animality with it – marks the way.
The supposition, therefore, is that what the intrusion of the animal brings into play is the complication of the ‘with’. This will occur since what is then held to one side is the founding anthropocentrism upon which the ‘with’ traditionally depends and reciprocally the without relation sustains. As such, the occurrence of the animal means that it is no longer a question of the simple negation of the without relation such that the animal will be with ‘us’ once ‘we’ have introduced them either by an act of humility or the extension of human qualities to them, e.g. the animal becoming the bearer of rights and therefore another subject of right. Such acts of extension not only subsume the differences between human and non-human animals, they would also efface the differences that are ineliminably at work within whatever it is that the universal term ‘animal’ is taken to name. The argument is always going to be that the animal, allowing the term to name at the same time a recalcitrant animality, forces another thinking, one in which what is occasioned is the recognition that differences cannot be thought – thought, that is, if those differences are also to be maintained – in terms of the movement between the without relation and ‘with’ (a movement in which the latter is either the negation of the without relation or a supplement to it). This is especially the case if the terms ‘with’ and without relation are taken to do no more than name a simple opposition. A setting of this type can be taken further by concentrating on a specific moment – one from a range of possibilities – in which a certain conception of the philosophical can be positioned in relation to the problematic of the ‘with/without relation’. The instance in question will involve Hegel's discussion of ‘disease’ in his Philosophy of Nature.3
Disease, as will emerge, is as implicitly bound up with race and racial identity as it is with animality. Disease becomes one of the ways in which both the figure of the animal and the figure of the Jew have an operative presence within Hegel's texts. As such disease provides, in the first instance, an important opening to the question: what if the other were an animal? In the second instance this question establishes the possibility of deploying elements of any answer in analysing the work of the figure of the Jew as present in Hegel's writings. Taking up disease therefore – a mode of analysis that will have established limits and thus provide openings – will occasion an opening that will have resisted a founding anthropocentrism, by no longer being strictly delimited by the opposition of the without relation and the ‘with’.
Disease for Hegel involves the movement in which one system or organ isolates itself and ‘persists in its activity against the activity of the whole, the fluidity and all-pervading process of which is thus obstructed’ (PN §371). Health, in contrast, is the fluidity of the totality working in unison. Disease, moreover, even though it is linked to the particular, is such that it can take over and dominate the whole. The effect of this form of particularity is its universalisation through the whole. What this means is that disease then becomes the domination of particularity positioned on the level of the organic.4 It is not surprising therefore that Hegel understands ‘Therapy’ in the following terms:
The medicine provokes the organism to put an end to the particular irritation in which the formal activity of the whole is fixed to restore the fluidity of the particular organ or system within the whole. (PN §373)
This discussion both of disease and therapy brings with it an inevitable philosophical determination. In the course of developing a philosophical understanding of disease, and in order to establish a connection between disease thus understood and geography, but also and as significantly to account for the clear variation in the specificity and location of diseases, Hegel draws on the volume Reise in Brasilien … in den Jahren 1817 bis 1820 by Dr J. B. von Spix and Dr C. F. P. von Martius. The passage in the extract that Hegel quotes which is of greatest interest identifies the relationship between disease and civilisation (where the latter is understood as a state of development).
The physician who compares some of the diseases in Brazil such as smallpox and syphilis, with those in other parts of the word, is led to observe that just as each individual is subject to particular diseases in each phase of his development, so, too, whole nations, according to their state of culture and civilization are more susceptible to and develop, certain diseases. (PN §371)
What allows the connection between the individual and the state of civilisation to be established is the philosophical position that underpins the connection between particular and universal that is played out in the discussion of disease. While the passage in question was not written by Hegel it should not be thought surprising that it is deployed in order to identify the differing parameters of the complex interrelationship between disease, place and the movement of historical time. The passage indicates that the analogy is between on the one hand the history of the individual, thus the individual's development, and the history of ‘culture and civilisation’ on the other. What needs to be given greater detail is the location of this generalised sense of development within what could be described as the logic of disease.
Within the operation of that logic disease marks the moment in which particularity dominates a conception of possible universality. Development therefore is the overcoming of susceptibility to diseases in which susceptibility is defined both geographically as well as racially. Overall, however, what this entails is not the impossibility of disease actually occurring but the gradual elimination of the circumstance of its occurrence by the movement of history and the continual link between thought and place. Such a move means that death is then repositioned. Rather than being pathological in the sense that it is linked to the specific result of the generalisation of an aberrant particular, Hegel distinguishes between a given individual disease which has immediate actuality and an ‘abstract power’ which brings about the cessation of activity within the organism. Hence, disease in this latter sense is there as an abstract possibility that occurs in the ‘very nature’ of the organism. That positioning accounts for death's ‘necessity’ (PN §375). Death is essential. Disease is aberrant particularity. Animality can be located within the opening that the difference between death and disease creates.
And yet, it should not be thought that Hegel's concern with the relationship between disease and the animal is simply arbitrary. This point becomes clear in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline (1817). Within that text he argues the following:
Even perhaps less than the other spheres of nature, therefore, can the animal world present in itself an independent, rational system of organization, or retain a hold on forms determined by the concept and preserve them against the imperfection and mixture of conditions, from confusion, degeneration, and transitional forms. This weakness of the concept, which exists in the animal though not in its fixed, independent freedom, entirely subjects even the genus to the changes that are shared by the life of the animal. And the environment of external contingency in which the animal must live exercises perpetual violence against the individual. Hence the life of the animal seems in general to be sick, and the animal's feeling seems to be insecure, anxious, and unhappy. [Das Thierleben zeigt sich daher überhaupt als ein krankes; so wie sein Gefühll, als ein unsicheres, angstvolles, und unglückliches.] (§293)5
The animal therefore, while designating an organic entity that forms part of the natural world, is at the same time positioned in relation to a form of singularity. This can be contrasted to the presentation of the human. In the Philosophy of Right, for example, the specifically human is articulated in terms of a power that is necessarily intrinsic to ‘Man’, a power that enables an act of self-constitution:
Man is pure thought of himself and only in thinking is he this power to give himself universality [Der Mensch ist das reine Denken seiner selbst und nur dekend ist der Mensch diese Kraft, sich Allgemeinheit zu geben] i.e. to extinguish all particularity, all determinacy.6 (227)
The impossibility of self-constitution within the animal – a positioning that locates the animal's singularity and defines it as continually ‘sick’ – is explicable in a number of different ways. The most significant in this context is an explanation in terms of Hegel's distinction between ‘impulse’ (Instinkt) and ‘drive’ (Trieb) on the one hand, and the ‘will’ on the other. (As is clear from the earlier discussion of this distinction in the context of his Philosophy of Right, it is one that is central to the way the figure of the animal occurs in Hegel's philosophical work.) The will is that which enables ‘Man’ to stand above impulses and drives. Moreover, it is the will that allows Man to be equated with the wholly ‘undetermined’ while the animal is always already determined.
The animal has an inherent separateness. However, it is not a separateness that involves the simple separation, and thus relation, of part to whole. (This will be the case whether the relation is posited or not.) The animal is a singularity whose separation is given by its existing for itself (cf. PN §361). In Hegel's terms the animal is ‘the self which is for the self’ (PN §350). The reason why it is possible to move between the animal and animality is that both the animal as such and human animality can be defined in terms of that which ‘is not aware of itself in thought but only in feeling and intuition’ (PN §350). In both instances there is a positioning in which the ‘self’ can become an object to itself. However, the self is only present as ‘self-feeling’. Not only is this a position that cannot be overcome directly, more significantly it can be positioned historically. That location is not the moment within a simple evolutionary or teleological development. Rather, it is one in which the ‘undeveloped organism’ can only appear as such – i.e. appear as ‘undeveloped’ – due to the already present actualisation of the ‘perfect organism’. Note Hegel's argument in the Philosophy of Nature:
In the perfect animal, in the human organism, these process [those pertaining to the Genus] are developed in the fullest and clearest way; this highest organism therefore presents us in general with a universal type, and it is only in and from this type that we can ascertain and explain the meaning of the undeveloped organism. (PN §352)
What this entails is that the potentiality within ‘Man’ – the power of a self-actualisation – has to be presupposed in the identification of the undeveloped as undeveloped. This position does of course mirror the mode of historical development that is operative as much within the Phenomenology of Spirit as in the treatment of the ‘Idea of Philosophy’ in Part One of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830).7 To recall the argumentation of the previous chapter, the animal and the ‘sensual man’ (the latter is a position that can be reformulated in terms of human animality) have a similar status. Neither can ‘transcend’ their determined and delimited state in order to see themselves ‘in thought as universal’ (PN §350). In animals, as has been mentioned, this is due to the dominance of ‘instincts’ and ‘drives’. In the ‘sensual man’ it is the failure of the ‘will’. The reciprocity in this instance needs to be noted. The failure of the ‘will’ is the triumph of the instincts and the drives hence the triumph of animality. What this gestures to is animality's recalcitrance. This provides the most direct link to the logic of disease. In the Philosophy of Right Hegel argues that:
The nature of an organism is such that unless each of its parts is brought into identity with the other, unless each of them is prevented from achieving autonomy, the whole must perish. (282)
The threat posed is not just by the presence of disease but also by a logic in which disease and particularity as well as the singularity of animality play a similar role. In the next section of the Philosophy of Right Hegel joins the ‘state’ and ‘body’ together. They are not the same. Nonetheless, both are held back from complete realisation as themselves by differing modalities of the logic of disease. ‘A bad state is one that merely exists [der bloβ existiert]: a sick body exists too but it has no genuine reality [keine wahrhafte Realitat]’ (PR §270). The ‘bad state’ and the ‘sick body’ are in different ways imperfect and incomplete. However, both have the potentiality for their own self-overcoming and thus self-realisation.
Disease, as the above passage makes clear, is a ‘limitation’ involving a singularity that can be overcome. Its having been overcome occurs because of a return to the ‘fluidity’ of the whole. ‘Fluidity’ is the consistent ‘interrelatedness’ of the organic whole, a position that will have its corollary, not in the presence of the State or the Subject as a self-completing finality defined in terms of self-perpetuating Sameness, but one in which both are present as differing loci of continual activity. The activity in question, however, is of an organic totality or unity in which particularity is subsumed and ordered by the operation of that totality. The significant point in this context is that the limitation imposed by the logic of disease can be overcome when it is defined either by climate, historical or organic development. The overcoming involves moving beyond regional restrictions. The animal, however, will always be limited. There can be no cure for animality.
The political organisation or mode of human being, which equally is sick, exists as such because it can be recognised as not being in accord with the ‘Concept’. That recognition itself demands the movement within historical time in which the actualisation of the State can be said to have become real. Prior to that actualisation in which the System is present both as the ‘image’ (Bild) and the ‘actuality of reason’ there is the complex of particulars. Within that complex the link between disease, racial positioning (a positioning given by the interplay of climate, geography and historical development) and the animal is not given by identifying one element with the other. Rather the link between them is established by the description of the animal in the Philosophy of Nature that has already been noted, namely the animal is ‘the self which is for the self’ (§351). As such the animal is trapped within a singularity in which self-understanding – an understanding in which that self is only ever part of the universal – can only endure within particularity. More emphatically, what this means is that were there to be pure particularity – in other words, were there to be a more generalised sense of particularity – then the animal provides that possibility. What the animal occasions therefore is an opening once the human is to be thought beyond the strictures given by the without relation.
Introduced by the animal is not just the centrality of a different sense of relation but the need to position the already present connection – a connection emerging, as will be argued, with the abeyance of any form of strict opposition between the without relation and the ‘with’ – in terms of a founding sense of relationality. The suggestion is therefore that what the animal – in the sense in which it is present here – allows is a return to a sense of relationality that is not defined by that which is internal to the human (i.e. not defined in terms of a founding anthropocentrism) but in terms of a response to the question of what the coming into relation with that which has already been positioned as the without relation. What is identified by this being a question is the centrality of both process and an undoing of the hold of already existent modes of relationality. A relation to the without relation therefore, while it will necessitate both activity and invention, also demands a radical transformation of what exists already.
The weave that allows for the complex of relations between animal, disease and race (or religion) to be established has a specific exigency in regard to the figure of the Jew in the Philosophy of Right.8 The central passage demanding discussion occurs in the Addition to §270. It should be noted in advance that Hegel's is an avowedly liberal position that not only promulgates tolerance, it describes the enactment of tolerance within governmental actions in relation to Jews ‘as prudent and wise’ (als das Weise und Würdige). The detail of Hegel's argument, however, contains what is central. The Jew is an ‘anomaly’. However, a strong State can tolerate anomalies because the presence of both the ‘strength of custom’ (die Macht der Sitten) and ‘the inner rationality’ of the State's own institutions have the effect of diminishing and closing the ‘differences’ between the ‘anomalies’ and the rights of the State. Hence, while within the structure of Hegel's overall argument there may be a ‘formal Right’ to exclude Jews from the position of bearers of rights since they are not only a different religion but, more significantly, because they are ‘a foreign people’ (einem fremden Volke), such an act, the argument continues, would neglect the fact that they are ‘above all men’ (zuallererst Menschen). Hence what prevails is the ‘feeling’ of Manhood. The definition of the feeling and its effect is central. Hegel argues that
what civil rights rouse in their possessor is the feeling of oneself [Selbstgefühl] as counting in civil society as a person with rights, and this feeling of self-hood infinite [unendlichen] and free from all restrictions is the root from which the desired similarity in disposition and ways of thinking comes into being.
The significance of this positioning is that the feeling for and of ‘self’ is already an overcoming of particularity or ‘restrictions’. The latter is displaced by the emergence of the self of this ‘feeling’. Not only is this ‘self’ already impossible for the Jew, working with the assumption that maintaining the identity of the Jew is to maintain both finitude and restriction, hence particularity positioned by the without relation, it is also the case that once articulated within the logic of disease what becomes clear is that the figure of the Jew takes the form of a disease that can be overcome.
The work of the figure constructs Jews such that they are present as aberrant in relation to a form of universality. Furthermore, that in which they are aberrant – the Jew in the ‘Man’, the disease in the organic body – contains within it, as a potentiality that is enacted through an already present power, a capacity to overcome by eliminating this form of particularity. Unlike animality this sense of particularity harbours a potential that will allow for the incorporation of the Jew as ‘Man’ but only to the extent that the Jew qua Jew is effaced in the process. It should also be noted that the Jew as an anomaly is equally a historical claim. The figured presence of the Jew as ‘lost’ and as fated for ‘infinite grief’ is a historical (though also geographical) positioning that is within the logic of Hegel's own argument as a positioning that can be overcome. This overcoming is presented in terms of the movement of ‘Mind’ (Geist) that occurs in this situation. The entire passage in which the movement of Geist is outlined reads as follows:
Mind is here pressed back upon itself in the extreme of its absolute negativity. This is the absolute turning point. Mind rises out of this situation and grasps the infinite positivity of this its inward character, i.e. it grasps the principle of the unity of the divine nature and the human, the reconciliation of objective truth and freedom as truth and freedom appearing within self-consciousness and subjectivity, a reconciliation with the fulfilment of which the principle of the North, the principle of the Germanic peoples, has been assigned. (PR §358)
Central to the argument as it pertains to the specific sense of self that is envisaged within this setting is an implicit conception of power. Prior to taking up the way power operates in this context it should be noted that what is at work equally is the interplay of history and geography. What this means is that even though an abstract conception of particularity will have been overcome by the realisation of a form of universality, that enactment is the result of a fateful realisation of that which pertains to another conception of the particular, namely the ‘Germanic peoples’. With regard to the operation of power not only is ‘Man’ presented in terms of a potentiality for ‘self-feeling’ and thus a return to self that arises from within, such a formulation needs to be connected to the one, already noted, that thinking is the ‘power’ to present universality. The presentation in question, thus the power as operative, eliminates particularity. Power and potentiality, Hegel's versions thereof, overcome the restrictions given by the logic of disease. Even though the reference to ‘power’ and the possibility of its actualisation in terms of the presentation of universality is not a chance occurrence, what has been identified by ‘power’ also unfolds within the passage of historical time. While disease as a recurrent particular will necessitate the continuity of ‘therapy’, differing modalities of disease cannot be separated from specific geographical, racial and historical determinations.
Disease as an abstract possibility cannot be overcome – such is the nature of the organic – however, particular modalities of disease can be. Historical development on the one hand and the enactment of specific strategies in relation to geography on the other will work to undo the insistence of individual diseases. However, once this set-up is presented in terms of the logic of disease, what then occurs is the identification of that which will always work to overcome particularity. Moreover, that overcoming has its own necessity. As has already been noted for Hegel, the viability of the whole – universality in general, be it body or State – depends upon the eventual elimination of particularity. (Or, in its most benign form it depends upon making particularity an irrelevant after-effect of the universal.) What endures, however, is the animal – the animal as the mark of an insistent particularity. Within this context, once the animal is brought to bear upon the logic of the disease and the construction of the figure of the Jew in relation to it, a different configuration of identity emerges. Hence the question: is it the case that the affirmation of an implicit animality is the only way in which it is possible to hold to the affirmed presence of the Jew rather than the equation of the Jew with its presence as figure?
The fundamental point of departure here is the relationship between the animal and the logic of disease. This provides the context in which what would amount to the affirmation of animality can take place. Such an affirmation involves a twofold move. In this instance its mode of operation is importantly different. The first point is that the animal is the particular that cannot be incorporated. The animal, as with animality, does not lend itself to ‘therapy’. The animal therefore provides that which were it to be maintained would have to occur in terms of the animal's particularity. This opens up the second element. Were the Jew to be retained qua Jew – a retention as affirmation that would be premised on the continual refusal of the move in which the Jew was allowed to be ‘first of all a Man’, in other words the refusal of the figure of the Jew – then the structure in which this occurs would not involve the conflation of Jew and animal, but that shift in philosophical thinking in which particularity was no longer excised in the name of the universal. Allowing for this eventuality would be the consequence of having introduced the animal, as it is the animal that presents this set-up as a possibility. The introduction would be the staging of an ongoing relation. (Moreover, it would be a relation structured neither by absence nor by privation.)
Beginning to understand the consequences of defining alterity in terms of relationality necessitates, in this context, the complex move in which what becomes central is not the recognition of the Jew qua Jew as though all that is at stake is mere particularity, but the more demanding argument that what is actually at stake is a reworking of the ‘with’ and thus relation. Affirming particularity has as its most extreme version – and thus the version that sets the measure – the relation to animality. In order to pursue this relation what has to be taken up is the distinction (or opposition) noted at the beginning between the ‘with’ and the without relation and the positioning of being human. In the case of Hegel the ‘Man’ occurs with the concurrent exclusion or subordination of the Jew; this is the figure at work. Hence, there is a retention of the without relation.
Hegel's concern with disease is with pathologising particularity in order that its becoming universal – i.e. in this instance the domination of the organism by disease, or its separateness, here the possible affirmation of Jewish identity – is then precluded. The limit condition, however, is the animal. That which remains singular and thus continually positioned by the without relation is animality. Hence the condition for allowing the presence of any form of particularity, where the state of being-particular is maintained, becomes the positioning of animality. However, the animal's sickness, its ‘insecurity’ and ‘anxiety’, hold it ‘without’ a place, and yet once the animal becomes animality then rather than a strict either/or what emerges is a different sense of place. What occurs is another positioning in which border conditions and thus relationality have a different determination. Animality opens the way to the animal and thus to its alterity. That opening positions the other as no longer delimited by the extremes of the other of the same on the one hand and the other as the enemy on the other. Alterity would not mark the absence of relation. The contrary would be the case. Alterity would pertain to pre-existing relations in which neither Jew, nor animal, nor animality, nor the infinite of possibility that particularity holds open would be privileged.
While the human's relation to non-human animals must be mediated by the impossibility of attributing a unique quality to either side of the relation, it remains the case that the interplay of animal and animality (thereby allowing the animality of human being a place) will set different modalities of relation in play. Within those modalities it becomes possible to open up the position in which the affirmation of Jewish identity becomes possible (noting again that this affirmation would have been rendered impossible by the necessity that the figure's identity as Jew be undone by the eventual identification of Jew with ‘Man’). Within the context of affirmation relationality has a radically different quality. One of the elements that comes to define it is memory. What the Jew who becomes a ‘Man’ will remember is having been a Jew. Memory will be one of the defining marks of relation. Even within the strictures of Hegel's own argumentation, the produced ‘Man’, namely ‘Man’ who in no longer being a Jew and therefore defined by the constituting without relation, will nonetheless have been marked in advance. There is a trace that remains. Reciprocally, the Jew, no longer defined by the logic of disease, retains the mark of being ‘above all a Man’ even though that mark no longer defines identity. These positions recall each other. Recalling is in fact a form of tracing. As a result the space that would have been disclosed by the strict opposition between the ‘with’ and the without relation and whose presence is held in play by the logic of disease will have been transformed. Rather than a homogenisation of the space there is the intrusion into the site of a different sense of fluidity, one in which any form of positioning only occurs as an after-effect. A positioning, where positioning is henceforth to be understood as finitude, is the effect of a process. In Hegel's terminology it would be that what was only ever at work was a continual negotiation between the will and sensuality, not the mastery of one by the other – as though the will (consciousness) could master ‘instincts’ and ‘drives’ – but the continual interplay of the two. (Instinct and drives would be repositioned as the affective such that integral to human being was the continuity of living with an unending and self-constituting relation to an affective quality that can only ever be a site of negotiation rather than a site of exclusion. Exclusion as the without relation.)
Indeed Hegel alludes to this very possibility when he argues that the ‘will’ regulates. To modify regulation is not to argue for its supposed opposite, i.e. deregulation. Rather the modification assumes the attribution of a power to the regulated. In other words, there needs to be an allowing in which the distribution of activity can be enacted. The distribution of power while always having forms of regulation – hence racism's all too real possible structural presence – has the capacity to subvert any regulation. This does not open up a concern with alterity as though the positioning of the other is already given. Rather the other is repositioned within relations that are defined as much by continuity – relationality defined by the continuity of becoming – as they are by alterity always having particularity. Relationality positions and yields identities. Consequently their quality is not assumed from the start. These relations are dynamic and therefore the borders, rather than having been given in advance – i.e. given within a structuring process similar to the opposition between the without relation and the ‘with’ as a simple opposition or the interarticulation of the logic of disease with the figure of the Jew – are always porous. Their continuity – thus what follows from the affirmation of alterity, the location of alterity within the continuity of particularity – does not depend on the attribution of fixed and already determined qualities that would then generate moral positions. Moreover, if there were a politics of alterity then it would take relations and thus their continuity as its ground. The clear consequence is that a politics of alterity is articulated through the cultural and political practices that maintain particularities within the process of their own continual transformation. Moreover, allowing relation to ground a sense of practice is to link the political (broadly conceived) to the ontological. No longer would the identity of self and other depend upon a structure of recognition since relationality would necessitate the continuity of a process.9 Identities would be in a state of becoming. Within that setting the relation between human and non-human animals would continue to be posed and equally the varying responses worked out. Becoming – as an ontological condition – and the porosity of borders delimit the spacing in which relations are continually enacted and worked out.10
In order to set out the force of this analysis the problems raised by the constituting without relation need to be revisited. After all, could the following question not be asked: why couldn't we live without Jews? There are two initial aspects of this question that underscore its centrality. The first is that it addresses historical specificity. The second is that posing the question becomes a way of addressing the without relation in a more generalised sense. In this first instance the question recalls a particular historical moment. The expression ‘Judenfrei’ was integral to the formulation of policy both before and after the National Socialists came to power in 1933.11 Guarding particularity is of fundamental importance. And yet, in the second instance, the term ‘Jew’ could be replaced by other names that would be subject to processes similar to those enacted by the constituting without relation. In other words, the question works in two interrelated ways. In the first it maintains historical specificity and thus is present within contemporary attempts to take up issues pertaining to Jewish identity (to which it should be added that the identity in question needs to be subjected to the same level of analysis and inquiry as any identity claim). In the second, it is implicated, structurally, in other emphatic moments of exclusion. Exclusion here is not ostracism, it is part of the work of the figure. As such, it involves the construction and maintenance of an identity where the identity in question is predicated upon the without relation. Within such a movement the identity of the ‘we’ is sustained by the incorporation of the Jew within its figured existence. Hence the way into the question is not through the act in which the Jew (as the sign of particularity as well as a more generalised other) was incorporated into the ‘we’. The contrary is the case. Incorporation would mean the disappearance of the Jew within the realm of the figure. To the extent that the Jew is maintained, maintained as other, as a mode of particularity not delimited by the figure, its effect – the result of an emphatic holding to particularity within the primacy of relation – is that it has a transformative effect on how the ‘we’ is understood.12 ‘We’ will have a different quality if the Jew is maintained and the hold of the figure undone. Moreover, what constitutes the practices of racism is precisely the refusal of this possibility, namely the refusal of affirmation as a continual opening to the future and the undoing of the figure. (It is vital to note that racism is not simply an attitude or a belief. Racism is enacted. Institutional practices as much as individuals can be racist.) One direct consequence of allowing for particularity, an allowing thought within the structure of the animal's allowed presence, means already having ceded a certain construction of the ‘we’. The presence of the animal is the presence of an already present other defined by particularity rather than universality. Particularity is given within relation. The change in definition, while a philosophical response, is nonetheless implicated in activity and thus forms of practice.
In his Aesthetics, after examining the relationship between material presence and the spiritual, Hegel raises the question of the relativity of facial beauty in sculpture. He posits the possibility, one held by others, that because
the Chinese, Jews and Egyptians regarded other, indeed opposite, formations just as beautiful … there is no proof that the Greek profile is the model of genuine beauty.13
For Hegel such a view is ‘superficial chatter’ (‘ein oberflächliches Gered’). He goes on to add that the Greek profile ‘belongs to the ideal of beauty [dem Ideal des Schönheit] in its own independent nature’. Slightly earlier in the same section of the text Hegel describes the role of the animal body in sculpture thus:
The animal body serves purely natural purposes and acquires by this dependence on the merely material aspect of nourishment an expression of spiritual absence. [den Ausdruck der Geistlosigkeit].14
No matter how ‘unsurpassable’ [unübertrefflichen] the sculpture of an animal may be it is limited to the presentation of life, a life, as has been noted, which is positioned by the absence of the spiritual. The sculpture of others – ‘the Chinese, Jews and Egyptians’ – is distanced from the ideal of beauty and thus from the connection that sculpture may have had to the spiritual. The history of sculpture in its development can, in the end, do without animals, and can have surpassed works that are not the expression of the spiritual. Their presence is limited to a moment within history, a moment whose presence is there to be overcome.
That there is an obvious correlate between a conception of the ‘we’ – now as the expression, thus actualisation, of universal subjectivity – and the necessity to do without sculptures defined by the relation to animality on the one hand and on the other by a refusal of the ‘Greek profile’ indicates that what is continually at stake is the possibility of allowing for particularity. What this entails is a sense of allowing that works beyond the interplay of exclusion and subsumption. Allowing, in this instance, brings animals, ‘the Chinese, Jews and Egyptians’, among other, into a constellation in which what will always need to be worked through is the ineliminable and thus founding presence of a complex of relations. This allowing – and it should be noted that to allow is to occasion activity – is that which occurs as part of the attempt to answer the question: what if the other were an animal?
1. E. Levinas, ‘La proximité de l'autre’, in Altérité et transcendance (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1995), p. 109.
2. These points of connection are easily made. However, they necessitate a far more rigorous analysis than the passing comments offered here. Not only has Derrida interrogated the conception of commonality (see in particular his Politiques de l'amitié (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1994)), Jean-Luc Nancy has made the questions of the ‘with’ and the ‘share’ central to a number of his most important politico-philosophical texts. See, for example, La comparution (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1991), and ‘Cum’ in his La pensée dérobée (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2001), pp. 115–27.
3. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature (Part Two of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, 1830), trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). (Hereafter PN; in references given in the text numbers preceded by § refer to sections and numbers on their own refer to pages.)
4. Similar argument occurs in the Logic (Part One of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, 1830), trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978):
In common life the terms truth and correctness are often treated as synonymous: we speak of the truth of a content, when we are only thinking of its correctness. Correctness, generally speaking, concerns only the formal coincidence between our conception and its content, whatever the constitution of this content may be. Truth, on the contrary, lies in the coincidence of the object with itself, that is, with its notion. That a person is sick, or that some one has committed a theft, may certainly be correct. But the content is untrue. A sick body is not in harmony with the notion of body, and there is a want of congruity between theft and the notion of human conduct. (§171)
5. Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline and Critical Writing, ed. Ernst Behler, trans. Steven A. Taubeneck from the Heidelberg text of 1817 (London: Continuum, 1990).
6. G. W. F. Hegel Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). (Hereafter PR; in references given in the text numbers preceded by § refer to sections and numbers on their own refer to pages.)
7. I have examined the relationship between particularity and universality in Hegel's Shorter Logic in my The Plural Event (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 83–117.
8. Hegel's relation to Judaism is treated in a range of books. I want, however, to note the presentation of this relation in Yirmiyahu Yovel's The Dark Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche and the Jews (Cambridge: Polity, 1998). While Yovel discusses similar passages to the ones treated here from the Philosophy of Right the direction of his interpretation is importantly different. For an overview that situates Hegel's writings on Judaism in the context of Christian religious thought in Germany, see Amy Newman, ‘The Death of Judaism in German Protestant Thought from Luther to Hegel’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, vol. LXI, no. 3 (1993), pp. 455–84.
9. While it cannot be argued for in detail in this context, what the insistence on both relationality and porous borders makes possible is a response to the position developed by Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit concerning that which establishes and sustains identity (G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977)). Rather than the argument that self-consciousness exists ‘for another’ insofar as ‘it exists only in being acknowledged’ (111), identity now exists within a relation in which identities emerge as after-effects. Moreover, all identities are subject to the continuity of negotiation. Again this needs to be understood as the continuity of becoming.
10. The argument developed here will be presented in a more sustained manner in Chapter 9.
11. There is a wealth of material on the policy that took the destruction of the Jews as its goal and equally there is a genuine debate on the varying roles played by individuals and groups in its realisation. For an overview of the issues see Hans Mommsen, ‘Hitler's Reichstag Speech of 30 January’, History and Memory, vol. 9, nos. 1/2 (1997), pp. 147–62.
12. I have taken up this point in relation to friendship and thus to the possibility of there being Jewish friends in ‘Friends and Others: Notes to Lessing's Die Juden and Nathan der Weise’ in my Philosophy's Literature (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2001), pp. 167–91.
13. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lecture on Fine Art. Vol. II, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 730.
14. Ibid. p. 728.