Light and Reflection 38

Nonetheless, against the presuppositions of this surface reading of Hegel, there flows a countercurrent, turning his light against itself. Perhaps expectedly, this current and

countercurrent of light create a whirlpool in the text. For Hegel, light constitutes the material manifestation of motion—the displacement of matter’s identity—as it returns to itself in order to constitute a self-identical matter (Hegel, 1970: 87), the consequences of which have already been discussed. This is to say that for Hegel, the identicality of light is not at first this self-identity, but is such only as the return to a unity of matter and motion. Furthermore, this unity for Hegel appears not to be a static, peaceful one. Rather, light is constituted by a perpetual return of motion to matter and matter to motion:

Matter which has revealed itself as this unresting whirlpool of self-relating motion, and as the return to a being which is in and for itself, and this being- within-self which is there in contrast to outer existence: such matter is Light. It is the self-contained totality of matter, only as pure force, an intensive life which holds itself within itself, the celestial sphere which has withdrawn into itself, whose whirling is precisely this direct opposition of the directions of the self- relating motion, in whose flux and reflux every distinction is extinguished (ibid.; my emphases).

What one notices here is an ambiguity along the lines of what Kristeva outlines in her appropriations of Plato’s chora, and to a lesser extent Husserl’s hyle, both of which she unsurprisingly aligns with Hegel’s idea of force (Kristeva, 1984: 32). In the above quotation, Hegel’s understanding of light is predicated on the notion of force, which, as Kristeva notes, “supersedes itself as Force; conversely, its realization as Force is a loss of reality” (1984: 115). In other words, force, and therefore light (as “pure force” (Hegel, 1970: 87))—the material guarantor of identity and phenomenological certainty—does not and cannot itself posses a stable identity. Rather, light exists as a flickering, a departure and return in what Hegel calls an “absolute velocity” (ibid.): presumably the speed of light. This implicit instability requires Hegel to renounce the possibility of grounding the light that is the basis for the appearance of phainesthai in the first place, and therefore the basis of comprehending this appearance according to any discourse, or logos—which is to say phenomenologically. Hegel must take the position that light is “devoid of any determination within itself. Its determinateness is indeterminateness” (1970: 88); “In

thinking of light, one must renounce all conceptions of composition and the like” (Hegel, 1970: 93). In this way, he ends up with an aporia in which light cannot remain what it is.

Of course, any painter or optometrist will along with Hegel note that the apprehension of light requires a fundamental relation with what it is not. Pure light would function the same as pure darkness (Hegel, 1970: 89). It is therefore only in the interplay of these two extremes (which are effectively hyperbole) that light becomes effective: “light has a limit, a defect or lack; and it is only through this its limit that it manifests itself…it is in the limit that reality first begins” (ibid.). The limit to light is more determinate matter, the “heavy matter”(Hegel, 1970: 95) that it cannot permeate. As a result, light is reflected by its surface, and it is from this interplay that both light and what is illuminated derive significance. It is this reflection, and reflection in general, that makes the phenomenological project simultaneously possible and impossible in relation to vision. Light becomes caught in a perpetual reflection that removes it from any direct representational economy: the surface of an object “shines, but is not originally self- luminous, its shining is derived; [however] since the surface at each point behaves like the sun it is a being-for-another, hence outside itself and so in the other. That is the chief characteristic of reflection” (Hegel, 1970: 97). Reflection, on this account, is therefore not that of a single light that gives the condition of a single, self-same reflection of the world. Although for Hegel light does originate with the sun, or today with the fluorescent tube, and can by and large be trusted in everyday activity, it is nonetheless perpetually multiplied and fragmented by its objects of reflection. Light cuts across itself, splits itself in its reflectivity, dislocating itself in a displacement and deferral of origin. In other words, it is not that first light exists and then its reflection; rather, it is only in and as reflection, cutting across more reflections, that light comes to exist at all. Noting this ceaseless mirroring of light and its sources, Hegel gives the following analogy:

Any attempt to explain this mechanically results only in the wildest confusion. If we call the two mirrors A and B, and ask what is visible in A, the answer is B: but B is A’s visibility in B, so what is visible in A is A as visible in B. Now what is visible in B? A itself, and A as visible in B. What more is visible in A? B and that

which is visible in B; i.e. A itself and A as visible in B, and so on. Thus we have the continual repetition of the same thing, but so that each repeated image exists separately (1970: 98).

This amusing analogy shows that light and vision do not merely require an external opposition (i.e. darkness); rather, light is also caught up in a sort of general economy where in its very constitution it is already interpenetrated by its own impossibility of serving as a direct source of illumination. Expended and repeated ad infinitum in the very process of its shining, light reflects itself en abyme, monadically folding into itself and plying its objects of reflection along with it, so that any determinate understanding of one or the other is severed by their very relativity—which is not a relation of one identity to another, but rather the broken play of mirrors, which only show light back to itself as something different (its reflection via objects of reflection). This means that the

phainesthai, appearing “as such” in light, is fragmented rather than illuminated, because

light is always already engaged in an effectively originless reflectivity given by the very objects it is supposed to show. Thereby this “as such” can only appear to disappear, to move outside of itself into an economy of images (or signifiers) that functions as a suspension of communicability, cut across by other objects expended in light, which does not remain itself but which becomes the purveyor of these infinitely reflected positions, this “whirlpool” of non-identity. In light, phainesthai “is” phantasma. It is only upon a subsequent analytic separation of the object’s image from light, in vision (which implies a subject) that the phantasm takes on meaning and becomes a phenomenon, given by the

logos and its regime of signification: in Kristeva’s terms, the symbolic. This symbolic

emergence of the phenomenon from its ectoplasmic suspension, however, remains only temporarily, eventually returning as phantasma to the prolonged mirroring from which it came. At the basis of the appearance of phenomena (and therefore phenomenology), then, is no longer light per se—identical with itself and the condition of identity—but a lightlessness, which is nonetheless light, though a light that cannot shine because it is already reflected.