Re: AUT: Negri, Hegel, etc

[rainzed rainzed <rainzed@xxxxxxxxx>]

Chris, thanks for your reply. I find a lot of what you
say quite hard to grasp, so just a couple of questions
to clarify:

Did Hegel conceive of his philosophy as having a
telos?

Do you think Hegel would share your dismissal of the
identity of thought and being?

Does the shorter logic, in your view, help to answer
these questions?

cheers

Bananaman

--- cwright <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> This is really long, so I want to say something
> quick off the bat, based =
> on having read this carefully, along with Arianna's
> defense of Negri.  =
> What does all of this have to do with Marx's notion
> of 'the human'?  To =
> quote a friend from something he is working on:
>
> "Marx worked to demonstrate that living humanly, in
> a manner 'worthy of =
> and appropriate to our human nature' (Capital, Vol.
> 3), would mean a =
> free association of human individuals, an
> association in which 'the free =
> development of each individual is the condition for
> the free development =
> of all'. He showed that individuals were
> 'alienated', dominated by the =
> relations between them. A truly human way of life is
> incompatible with =
> private property, wage-labour, money and the state,
> but is actually in =
> accord with nature, and the way that humanity, at
> whose heart lies free, =
> creative, social activity, had emerged from what
> appears to be the blind =
> activity of nature."
>
> =20
>
> Whatever its worth, this debate seems to have lost
> that thread in =
> exchange for a debate over who has a correct theory
> of how capital =
> works.
>
> =20
>
> =20
>
> Bananaman:
>
> I've been following this discussion on a friends
> computer and thought I'd intervene.
>
> I think the missing link to make sense of some of
> these debates is the role of Spinoza. Althusser
> inaugurated (liscensed?) the rediscovery of Spinoza
> in
> 60's french philosophy, terming him the 'absent
> centre' of the philosophical tradition. His sketchy
> work on the philosopher claimed him as only direct
> ancestor of Marx, in the sense that Spinoza saw
> effects as interior to structure, i.e. structure as
> not existing outside of its objects. In the Self
> Criticism works, Althusser claimed Spinoza was the
> insipiraiton for the infamous 'theoretical
> anti-humanism' and we might add the critiques of the
> teleology of hegelian dialectics.
>
> =20
>
> Chris:
>
> "effects as interior to structure, i.e. structure as
> not existing =
> outside of its objects." =20
>
> First, one might ask in all fairness where you or
> Althusser get the idea =
> that Marx was interested in "structures." =20
>
> Second, to talk of "structure as not existing
> outside of its objects" =
> assumes that the structure is some kind of acting
> subject, which for =
> Marx was obviously never anything but human
> self-activity (practice), =
> and since that concept had to be historically
> grounded, in the case of =
> Marx he is talking about the self-activity of the
> proletariat.  Is the =
> proletariat a structure?  That would be a stretch
> unless you want to =
> return to very sociological notions of class as a
> structure, rather than =
> as a social relation mediated by things.  The two
> are simply not =
> compatible.
>
> Third, the "teleology of Hegelian dialectics" is a
> rather overrated =
> academic banality, since Hegel can only be accused
> of teleology if you =
> expect that Hegel had a definite end securely in
> mind as a guaranteed =
> outcome.  And yet, Hegel's own work in the smaller
> Logic (I believe), =
> where he talks of the movement from subjective
> idealism to Kant, ends =
> with the possible return to subjective idealism, not
> to Hegel's system.  =
> To claim that Hegel is at least contradictory on
> this is required, but =
> that his work had both a teleological and
> anti-teleological aspect makes =
> your argument unsustainable.
>
> Fourth, one could go even further and say that the
> teleological aspect =
> did not derive from dialectics, but from Hegel's
> mystified presentation =
> of dialectic.  Certainly, this was Marx's critique
> in his early works.
>
> Fifth, Negri, Althusser, et al conceive of Hegel as
> working from a =
> closed system when one might well accuse Negri of
> having the closed =
> system.  John Holloway in Historical Materialism
> 10.1 lays out a =
> critique of Negri along just those lines in so far
> as Negri succumbs to =
> functionalism.
>
>
> Bananaman:
> Negri thinks outside of these particular paradigms,
> but his philosophical leanings appear to be much
> influenced by the thought associated with
> Althusser's
> circle - Pierre Macherey (who argued for
> sturcturalist
> interpretation of literature, and went on to be
> perhaps number one reader of Spinoza in France),
> Alexandre Matheron, Balibar (spinoza and Politics)
> aswell as a slightly different tradition in the work
> of Deleuze. One can find healthy approvals of a
> number
> of these works in for instance Negri's recent essay,
> Spinoza's anti-modernity. One should also consult
> Montag's _bodies masses and power.
>
> In his essay, Negri argues that the fate of Hegel's
> modernity culminates in Heidegger, it results in a
> preoccupation with nothingness, whereas that
> dialectical tradition had at first seen itself as
> resulting in plentitude. Hence the quite inchoate
> Althusserian critique of the simple contradiction in
> Hegel, and the teleologies of subject centred
> reason,
> have in Negri and others been fleshed out and given
> a
> much fuller articulation in Spinozism. This has
> certain affinities with Althusser in the sense that
> in
> his interpetation of Hegel, totality is a result,
> the
> absolute is arrived at and can not be presupposed
> (see
> Althusser's book the Spectre of Hegel)without
> historical or logical movement of becoming. The
> de-temporalisation of presence, the termination of
> the
> philsophical conception of being in terms of
> duration,
> allowed for what Althusser could not have envisaged
> in
> his wildest dreams, the return of an ontology of
> production, of affective determinating behaviour in
> the form of singularities. This flys in the face of
> much contemporary scholarship, the crude and base
> criticsms by Thompson etc, that failed to see in so
> called 'structuralism' the basis of a new insistence
> on the power of production.
>
>
>
> Chris:
>
> The idea that Hegel is preoccupied with nothingness
> is hard to sustain.  =
> Recent scholarship on Hegel's relationship to the
> Hermetic tradition =
> shows quite clearly, although it is already
> contained in Hegel's work, =
> that he starts from the rejection of nothingness as
> a starting or ending =
> point.  Unlike Christianity, which saw creation ex
> nihilo, Hegel agreed =
> with the Hermetics that creation presumed creation
> as infinitely =
> always-already.
>
> As for "teleologies of subject centered reason",
> this seems like our =
> rather specious reading of Hegel again.
>
> Also, Negri and Hardt in practice do not at all
> de-temporalize anything. =
>  The notion of paradigm (and Negri's is certainly a
> paradigmatic
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