Up to this point we have seen that Hegel advances two fundamental arguments about Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew. First, the Nephew’s dis- course, insofar as it stands in for the Enlightenment world of culture, articulates the content of Spirit at one specific historical moment. And second, this discourse of culture effects a distortion of reality—an “ab- solute and universal perversion22 and alienation of the actual world and
of thought” (521, TM)—characteristic of the social milieu of the late French ancien régime, as well as, more generally, the constellation of Enlightenment thought in its characteristically French, though thoroughly Anglophilic, incarnation. For my purposes the most significant conse- quence of Hegel’s depiction of this helter-skelter world of culture is that in spite of its systematic inversion of acknowledged assumptions it manages to articulate what Hegel calls a hidden “truth.” The truth of
Bildung consists for Hegel in the recognition that in the new world the nobility of state power is contaminated by private capital, and the logic
of capital features an underlying synergy with the normative power of the state. In such a state of affairs the notions of wealth and state power— the means by which the noble and ignoble forms of self-consciousness attribute the judgments “good” and “bad” to their objects—lose their stability, their capacity to signify a stable signified. “All these moments become perverted,” Hegel concludes, “one changing into the other, and each is the opposite of itself” (521, TM).
Hegel’s argument here identifies a fundamental dialectical paradox we can articulate both in particular historical terms as well as in general theoretical ones. In the context of the ancien régime just prior to the revolution, the nobility found itself in the situation of witnessing a new bourgeois class increase its private wealth and usurp noble privilege while paying lip service to the state. Conversely, the private, liberal pursuit of economic self-interest produced dividends which accrued to the state and the general public it in principle represents. Of course, the outcome of this state of affairs was the destabilization, and eventual overthrow, of the monarchy, as well as a further blurring of the bound- ary between the state form and capital. But Hegel’s discussion also allows us to advance to the formulation of a general, nonhistorical law of subjectivity: The subject may only return to itself—constitute itself as an authentic subject—by means of an initial radical alienation it experi- ences as a traumatic expropriation. During this process what is most revered and idealized is shown to harbour a disgusting and base truth. It should come as no surprise, then, that in spite of Hegel’s obvious discomfort with what he terms the “nihilism” of the Nephew’s discourse, he shows nothing but disdain for the “uneducated thoughtlessness” (521) of the philosophe. If we compare the movement of Hegel’s dialectical interpretation to the progression of a proper psychoanalysis, we are forced to state that the Nephew, in Hegel’s view, is at a very late stage of the process, lacking only a final shift in perspective; the philosopher, in stark contrast, has not yet really begun.
Hegel will in fact suggest that the form of Spirit which Diderot’s dialogue finally uncovers—that is to say, not the naively virtuous Spirit of the philosophe, but rather the truly dialectical Spirit—gestures to- ward a conclusion which differs from both the Nephew’s relativist ni- hilism and the philosopher’s precritical faith. Reason, indeed, has its limits: The forms of knowledge and culture through which human civilizations intercourse with the world attempt in vain to fill a central void of nonknowledge, of nonsense—the pure, empty self-relating agency of self-consciousness itself. Nonetheless, precisely because of this inherent limitation to what it is possible to know, it is necessar y to underline that the ideas of difference and contingency toward which
cultural knowledge leads are also—in themselves—limited. It is there- fore of paramount importance for Hegel to refuse the absolute isolation of the self from reality and thereby to resist the temptation of the enjoy- ment I have been calling “cynical.”
Instead of asserting with certainty the impossibility of certain or nonrelative knowledge, Hegel’s reading of Diderot gestures toward an alternative conclusion: The subject must neither arrest its search for knowledge at a kind of affirmative, nonpropositional declaration of abso- lute contingency and difference (which at any rate, as the figure of the Nephew ably demonstrates, becomes in its most interesting form the hysterical protest that there should be a limit to the proliferation of differences), nor fall back onto the “nearly animal consciousness” which subsumes the world’s objects under the command of the erotic ego’s quest for pleasure. Rather, the subject must truly tarry with the scandal- ous void of nonsense which the limits of language and knowledge im- pose in order to identify the necessarily political zone of fracture which separates the sociosymbolic world of culture from the historical real. Hegel elucidates as follows the misleading implications of the sham ultimatum Diderot’s dialogue would seem, if only on the level of form, to impose: “If the demand for [the] removal [of this “whole world of perversion”] is directed to the universal individuality, it cannot mean that Reason should give up again the spiritually developed conscious- ness it has acquired, should submerge the widespread wealth of its moments again in the simplicity of the natural heart, and relapse into the wilderness of the nearly animal consciousness, which is also called Nature or innocence. On the contrary, the demand for this dissolution can only be directed to the Spirit of culture itself, in order that it return out of its confusion to itself as Spirit, and win for itself a still higher consciousness” (524).
Though, in other words, it would be a mistake to retreat from the disquieting instabilities of developed Spirit to firmer precritical ground, the cynical reason the Nephew’s discourse articulates cannot represent the terminal point of the dialectic as articulated through the world of culture. The musician’s absolute, nihilistic relativism must be traversed in order to accede to the “still higher” form of consciousness to which Hegel here—rather cryptically, to be sure—alludes. So what exactly is this higher form of consciousness for Hegel? And does he provide any indication of how the Nephew’s consciousness might move on toward a more desirable outcome?
Most readers of the Phenomenology would surely agree that the distinction Hegel draws between pure nihilistic relativism and the am- biguous still higher consciousness is rather sketchily developed in the
passages which relate to Diderot. Nonetheless, Hegel’s argument ap- pears to be that the Nephew has in a sense already attained it, but that its perspective on this consciousness requires a subtle but crucial final adjustment. More specifically, Hegel avers that the Nephew’s conscious- ness, however developed, still lacks the double character of authenti- cally dialectical reflection. It is not merely a question of coming to terms with the vanity of every judgment featuring pretensions to certainty; one must additionally arrive at an analogous, negative and reflexive, perspec- tive with respect to the nominalist-relativist consciousness itself. Hegel thereby suggests in truly paradoxical fashion that the problem with the Nephew’s discourse is not that it is cynical, but rather that, if one may put it this way, it is not cynical enough. The world of culture’s cynicism lacks the gesture of negation proper to the relativist moment with re- spect to relativist consciousness itself.
In effect, it is not merely that any judgment pertaining to reality is necessarily contingent, context specific. Additionally, the consciousness of the contingent judgment is itself also limited: Contingency is in itself also contingent. Ultimately, for Hegel, reason does not allow thought to move from the observation that any particular truth claim one might come up with has limited validity to the conclusion that the category of truth as such is conceptually irrelevant, that it pertains to precisely nothing within Spirit’s dialectic. Enlightenment culture encounters a resistance within itself where it wants to transform its negative, critical work into a kind of program—a set of positive cultural values. In essence, Hegel thought that only brutish, absurdly solipsistic and antisocial forms of hedonistic utilitarianism can result from the systematization of En- lightenment-brand rationalisms and empiricisms. By resisting this final gesture of radical alienation—this alienation with respect to one’s own consciousness of the world of objects—the Enlightenment subject is condemned to the suffering demonstrated by the Nephew and to the slavish emulation of valued personages and ideas to which he dedicates his life. He is destined to pay the devastating price, in the form of his stubborn, dysfunctional nominalism, of his ambivalent subjection to the sociosymbolic order.
One particular detail of Hegel’s cryptic intimations of perversion’s beyond appears to refer to an anecdote recounted in Rameau’s Nephew; it also provides a more concrete depiction of what the Nephew’s dis- course lacks. The philosophe tells the story of the second son of the Calas family who goes off to Cartagena when his elder brother is handed the family fortune. Later, after the story’s protagonist learns that his brother spoiled the fortune, stripped the parents of their assets and abandoned them to their own devices, the second son immediately returns home,
whereupon he restores his family to its accustomed level of material comfort through dedication and hard work. “That man looked upon this period as the happiest in his life,” concludes the philosopher (67), his voice trailing off in a paroxysm of edified moral satisfaction. From the philosopher’s perspective this single example suffices to establish both that the performance of virtuous deeds secures happiness and that humanity can rise above its natural, self-involved psychology. Like the Nephew, however, Hegel clearly remains unconvinced. “To represent the existence of the good and noble as an isolated anecdote,” he main- tains, “is the most disparaging thing that can be said about it.” The singularity of the virtuous action stands as an “espèce, a mere ‘sort’ of thing” before “the universal actuality of the perverted action.”23 And if
the philosopher were to address himself merely to the concrete sensu- ous individual, Hegel continues, beseeching him to exit what he memo- rably calls “this whole world of perversion,” he would simply contradict himself, since this individual extraction remains impotent in the face of the corruption of the “real world,” and the individual, despite his best efforts, remains “conditioned” by it as is “even Diogenes in his tub” (all 524).
Hegel’s answer is therefore that it is not to the individual in the par- ticularity of its interests, but rather to what he calls the “universal indi- viduality,” that the demand for a decisive exit from the world of perversion is to be addressed. This change of address, according to Hegel, prevents the descent into the “animal consciousness” which is the admittedly counterintuitive endpoint of Bildung’s hegemony, but still allows for the preservation of the “spiritually developed consciousness” which reason acquires through acculturation. But the distinction drawn between the world of perversion and the still higher consciousness proves to be rather tricky, for Hegel asserts unequivocally that the Nephew is essen- tially already there.
By no means does Hegel wish to suggest, in other words, that the consciousness of the equivocal quality of the contents of the noble and ignoble judgments must be abandoned in favor of the outdated certain- ties of the virtuous moral philosopher. On the contrary, consciousness of the “vanity of all reality and every definite Notion” (525) constitutes, in a manner of speaking, the base from which the superstructure of the higher, supraindividual spiritual consciousness is achieved. Insofar as the subject remains imprisoned in its empirical specificity, Hegel im- plies, the ambivalence of value—its contingency, one might say—can only appear absurd and meaningless. The only available rational response to such an individualistic world is the combination of cynicism and base utilitarian pragmatism that the Nephew wants to embrace. If the world
is made up of species which devour one another, so the logic goes, you might as well go ahead and devour all you can before you become someone else’s supper. From this perspective, the phenomenal world is constituted by objects which are, so to speak, structurally hypocritical. The spirit of pure culture has refined into an art of the highest order the ability to pass judgment on a world which perverts all unequivocal judg- ments of value.
But what this self has not yet learned to do, Hegel continues, is to “comprehend” (526) this deeply unreliable world. The narcissistic, self- interested self which passes judgment on the world’s incoherence de- rives its own vanity precisely from the vanity that it has itself already attributed to the objects which comprise it. In the manner of a self- fulfilling prophecy, the cynical hopelessness and isolation of the subject of culture ensue directly from the despairing gesture through which it first characterizes its surrounding world as vain. To render his point more concrete, Hegel returns one final time to his historical example of the nouveau-riche bourgeoisie of the late French ancien régime who purchase their feudal titles—buy their way, in other words, into a social position which, through that very action, ceases to exist. “Through re- nunciation and sacrifice (526),” Hegel explains, this emergent class played the game of courtly deference to state power—flattery, in other words— as a means of acquiring not only wealth, but recognition and distinction, within the state structure; it disguised its particular interests under the cloak of its obedience to the universal form.
But Hegel argues that once the real goals of power and riches are achieved, they are shown to be not the form of mastery over state and subjects in which they originally appeared, but rather a means of subjec- tion to what Hegel, I wish to argue, characterizes as capital’s abstract, superhuman forces—forces which ultimately thwart the individual’s ambition to represent its particularity to itself and to the world. The subjective essence of the historical moment of pure culture proves to be not the wealth and power for which the sacrifice of flattery was origi- nally undertaken, but the form of this flattery itself—this pure, per- verse, duplicitous discourse in which appearance and truth are combined into a unique, self-subverting and self-contradictory whole. Accordingly, the endpoint of the dialectic of culture reveals itself to be not some normalized, reconciled version of the scandalous Nephew, but rather the Nephew on the very level of the awareness of his own self-antago- nism, as the hysterical “consciousness in revolt” which best approxi- mates, according to Hegel, the pure, empty point of Spirit’s—and every subject’s—self-relation; the point from which the contradictory contents of subjectivity are sublated into a fractured, imperfect whole.
Jean Hyppolite’s analysis of this aspect of Hegel’s dialectic under- scores how the Spirit of the world of culture “returns to self ” in both Rousseau’s evocation of the “new positivity” of a “return to nature” and the conflict between faith and “pure intellection,” which will of course make up the contents of the subsequent stage of the dialectic of Spirit.24
But Hyppolite’s accurate observations nonetheless underestimate the significance of the more formal quality of Hegel’s figuration of Spirit’s return to self in the form of the Nephew’s “self-consciousness in revolt.” The continuation of the dialectic under the guise of the new contents of faith and Enlightenment reason is a regression of Spirit, though an entirely necessary one, into a new manifestation of its alienation. In other words, because of the purely formal character of Spirit’s self- reconciliation, its occurrence is always on one level the same regardless of the nature of the specific historical contents whose conflict paves the way for this reconciliation. Insofar as it uncovers the roots of the second- degree or redoubled alienation of self-consciousness in revolt, the Nephew’s discourse may be said to convey the endpoint of every phase of the Hegelian dialectic, an endpoint which is nonetheless destined to attempt a new, imperfect realization in the substantial forms of the world. It is not the least merit of Diderot’s dialogue that it reveals how the Nephew is himself conscious of the manner in which power makes use of his madness as a temporary distraction which serves to domesticate the forces working against the political status quo. The function of the Nephew’s discourse from the perspective of power is to provide a sem- blance of resistance, to provide the general public with false evidence of the social immanence of subversion. In effect, the new bourgeoisie uses such figures as the Nephew to hide from itself its own self-enslavement to the cult of wealth. What it purposefully fails to recognize is thus the merely performative character of the Nephew’s speeches, in other words their playful, ludic, carnivalesque enunciation designed to subordinate its potential political effectiveness to the power relation in which it is inscribed. From a psychoanalytic perspective, the Nephew’s discourse becomes problematic by virtue of the fact that the ostensibly critical, subversive character of his indictments ally themselves, on the level of their enunciation, with either an implicit, hysterical call to a master ar- ticulating between the lines a demand for recognition, or a rather more insidious, and properly perverse, renunciation which posits an absolute Other whose cynical enjoyment comes to constitute a law whose very letter can be obeyed. Though it is possible for us—Diderot’s readers— to uncover in what the Nephew says to his patrons a critique of the entire sociopolitical system which grants them their newfound status, the Nephew’s professed concern to conform to the complex demands of
his audience betrays the true nature of his desire: To gain through the pantomime his audience’s love; to be recognized for the entertainment value, rather than the actual contents, of its articulations.
Power requires its clownish other to indicate to those subject to it that they need not take the law at its word because it contains within itself its own transgression. In the meantime, of course, power appeals to the law in its effort to undertake and enforce concrete social transfor- mation. The Nephew’s performances lack authentic political significance because they articulate their social criticisms in a feigned, ironical mode