A wrong life cannot be lived rightly.
—Adorno (Reference Adorno and Jephcott2006: 39)Footnote 1Recent discussions of Hegel's conception of second nature, specifically focused on Hegel's notion of habit (Gewohnheit), have greatly advanced our understanding of Hegel's views on embodied normativity.Footnote 2 Cross-referencing Hegel's account in the ‘Anthropology’ section of his Philosophy of Subjective Spirit and in the Philosophy of Right, commentators have clarified habit as the site of becoming human. Its repetitions account for ‘uprightness’, walking, seeing, holding and other basic activities that comprise our metabolic relation to ‘nature’ (see esp. Žižek Reference Žižek, Gabriel and Žižek2009). As Catherine Malabou puts it, ‘human “nature” is, for Hegel, always and already “second nature”’ (Reference Malabou2005: 117). Andreja Novakovic, for instance, stresses that Hegel glosses freedom as actualized second nature in order to explore how the structure of reflection is ‘already present in what looks to be unreflective, such as habitual and customary participation’ (Reference Novakovic2017: 6). Simon Lumsden, for example, shows that the ‘appropriative’ relation to the body distinctive of habit does not signal entry into a ‘denaturalized spiritual sphere’. He adds that habit is a ‘way in which human beings can be at home with nature’ (Reference Lumsden2012: 228).
To say that habit is central to Hegel's account of becoming human, however, is to say that it is central to becoming a ‘person’ (Person). Hegelian personhood is tied to albeit transforms Kant's understanding of freedom as rooted in the activity of Selbstgesetzgebung—giving oneself the (moral, in Kant) law (see Zambrana Reference Zambrana2015 and, e.g., Menke Reference Menke2013). From an anthropological point of view, habit is the possibility of freedom, since, as we will see, it is a dead because unconscious repetition that makes this authorizing and deauthorizing possible (see Zambrana Reference Zambrana2015). As such, it is a transcendental structure, one might say. Its achievement is the possibility of acquiring more than a routine metabolic relation to nature, though as mere repetition it can just as much stand in the way of the actualization of freedom. Given its role in education indeed discipline, its achievement is the acquisition of specific normative commitments that become orienting features of experience, but which must be self-consciously ‘taken up’ if they are to be, as Kant would put it, ‘mine’. Habit is therefore the condition for the self-conscious taking up of norms and hence owning or rejecting orienting norms. Beyond being the condition for the mere activity of authorizing, then, habit sustains specific ideas of being human by nurturing some practices and penalizing others. Habit, for this reason, is central to Hegel's account of ethical life.
Hegel's account of embodied normativity (SS: §411) should thus raise what I take to be the most Hegelian question of all: What is the cultural formation that is being reproduced and sustained institutionally, materially, bodily through habit?Footnote 3 Throughout his intellectual life, Hegel examined modern Western culture with preoccupation, describing its effectivity, its work, as a form of diremption (Entzweiung), alienation (Entfremdung), even despair (Verzweiflung). We know well that some if not most readers of Hegel understand his critique of modernity as the source of undeniable reconciliationist commitments, however (see Hardimon Reference Hardimon1994). The ‘right’ modern, European institutions are able to overcome (aufgeheben) abstract legalism, mere moralism, dehumanizing poverty, and other negative effects of the modern, European understanding of freedom as self-determination. ‘Good’ habits, then, reconcile our bodies, not merely our minds, to the right institutions when they make possible self-consciously taking up, authorizing, mere ethical (sittlich) comportment. Habit is thus not merely Geist embodied, as it were, top-down. It bears a crucial relation to the universal, bottom-up. In being the particularization of the universal, of the norms that compose what Hegel calls Geist, it is central to the reproduction and not merely the productivity of Geist. A reconciliationist reading of Hegel thereby preserves the moment of negation that actualization entails. Normative commitments are, on this view, revisable through the negation of conditions that undermine freedom (see Pippin Reference Pippin2008). Individuality is hereby imagined within the stable institutions sketched in the Philosophy of Right (see Comay Reference Comay2010, also Comay and Zantvoort Reference Coma and Zantvoort2017).
Hegel mentions ‘bad’ habits as well, however (SS: §410). His discussion of the rabble (Pöbel) in the Philosophy of Right and other related texts is most relevant to expand on these instances. Hegel's discussion intimates the interruption of the effectivity of work and the sociality of belonging to an estate. It is an account of the ‘loss of the sense of right and wrong, of integrity and of honour in maintaining oneself by one's own activity and work’, as Hegel puts it in the Philosophy of Right (PR: §244). The rabble, famously, is not merely the poor.Footnote 4 It is the poor that has gained a very particular ‘disposition of mind, an inner indignation against the rich, against society, against the government, etc’ (PR: §244A). The rabble exhibits bad habits when it rejects activity, work, and when it nurtures indignation, a form of resentment, to the institutions that compose ethical life. The rabble represents an interruption of the productivity of embodied normativity essential to the reproduction of Sittlichkeit. It is not the site of critique and amelioration of modern ethical life as Hegel describes it. Rather, it is the site of ethical life's depotentiation given the deactualization (Entwirklichung) that the institutions of Sittlichkeit themselves produce. That is to say, poverty produces purportedly ‘bad’ habits because it generates modalities of rupture with the reproduction of ethical life. It is clear, then, why Hegel's treatment of the rabble is quick and dismissive. The rabble's bad habits call into question not only the proposed solutions to the problem of poverty offered in the Philosophy of Right. The rabble makes the very defence of modernity that the book offers untenable.
In Hegel's Rabble, Frank Ruda distils this figure in the Philosophy of Right, seeking a dialectical completion of its treatment (Ruda Reference Ruda2011). He aims to recover the insight that Hegel allows but cannot think without questioning the basic premises of his increasingly reconciliationist, conservative account of modern ethical life. Drawing from Ruda's work, I argue in what follows that the rabble is a figure of interruption, though it is not a figure of abstract negation. The rabble presses us to rethink Hegelian embodied normativity, bearing in mind Adorno's succinct suggestion in Minima Moralia that a ‘wrong life cannot be lived rightly’ (Reference Adorno and Jephcott2006: 39). The rabble has supposedly ‘bad’ habits because it affirms the loss of activity and, with it, the loss of the possibility of actualizing freedom within a sociality articulated by the political economy that produced its forms of material and social humiliation in the first place. I argue that the term ‘bad’ should not suggest, as it does for Hegel, that the rabble ought to reconcile itself to the structures and the strictures of an institutionality that generates its forms of dehumanization. Rather, these habits index a bad life, that is, an institutional, hence material, and social formation that produces poverty, humiliation, dehumanization. This institutional formation cannot resolve its negative productivity, generating such excess as something to merely digest, or displace, or annihilate. It is an institutional formation, as we will see, that through notions of propriety, through notions of the human it ongoingly shores up (‘revises’) disciplines and polices, produces precarity and ‘killability’, as Ruda notes. That bad habits index a wrong life, then, means that the wrong life stands in need of dismantling instead of revising. Indeed, the rabble disallows the progressive revision of the project of modernity.
This article is composed of two sections. First, I provide an overview of Hegel's notion of habit as key to his views on embodied normativity. My aim here is to examine habit as the site of the productivity of the human and the reproduction of Geist. It is an account of binding as central to understanding the coming-to-be of the human, according to Hegel. I build on previous work I have done on Hegel on race in this context. There I show that the claims of the ‘Anthropology’ section and the Lectures on the Philosophy of History disallow views of Hegel's discussion of race as detachable from his conception of history and modernity. The notion of the human developed in the ‘Anthropology’ section relevant to the discussion of Sittlichkeit in the Philosophy of Right cannot be detached from Hegel's views on race either. Second, I turn to Hegel's discussion of the rabble, engaging Ruda's work. The rabble's bad habits are a site of interruption rather than critique of the institutions of modern ethical life. Unproductivity or idleness is a site of deactualization, since it undermines the effectivity of work for the development of personhood and hence freedom. I argue that it is a site of depotentiation, since it is an interruption of the productivity and reproduction of Sittlichkeit. As refusal, it interrupts modes of discipline and policing that install the racial norm that subtends Hegel's view of the human. The rabble, as Ruda (Reference Ruda2011) puts it, is a figure of ‘unbinding’ in two senses. It is unbound from the institutions and modes of sociality of ethical life through the modes of expulsion that poverty and indignation express. However, the rabble unbinds itself from the institutions of ethical life in becoming a figure of refusal in its resentment and affirmation of idleness.
I. Binding: habit
In the ‘Anthropology’ section, Hegel argues that habit is a ‘mechanism of self-feeling [Selbstgefühl]’ (SS: §403). Recall that habit solves the problem of the feeling soul that Hegel calls madness (Verrucktheit). Madness is the fixation and absolute identification with a particular feeling. It is a ‘lively feeling of contradiction’, Hegel says, ‘between his merely subjective presentation and objectivity’ (SS: §408). The individual is, crucially, ‘unable to rid himself of this presentation, and is fully intent on either actualizing it or demolishing what is actual’ (SS: §408). This is an individual that dwells, indeed, holds on to this particular content that cannot be reconciled with ‘objectivity’. This is an individual ‘incapable of adjusting to the present, feeling it to be both repulsive and restraining’ (SS: §408). This is an individual that clings onto the past. The psychic and physical manifestations of this state are various, but the point is that the ‘ethical or at least sensible person knows how to subdue’ the feelings of any such contradiction (SS: §408). Note, at the outset, that the rabble is not mad. Its indignation and hence resentment, its indolence and refusal to work, are responses to an objective contradiction in civil society.
Habit addresses the difficulties of madness because, on the one hand, it represents the ‘possess[ion] and preserv[ation]’ of ‘content’. Yet, on the other hand, the soul is not ‘sensitive [empfindend] in its determinations, not indistinguishable in its relation to them nor immersed in them, but has them in it in an insensitive [emfindungslos] and unconscious [bewusstlos] manner and moves within them’ (SS: §410).Footnote 5 Habit is a determinateness of feeling by which the soul ‘appropriates its body’, as Slavoj Žižek puts it (Reference Žižek, Gabriel and Žižek2009: 101). Or, as Chartier Alain puts it, ‘the body is no longer a foreign being, reacting belligerently against me; rather it is pervaded by soul and has become soul's instrument and means’ (cited in Žižek Reference Žižek, Gabriel and Žižek2009: 101). With habit, Alain continues, the body is ‘rendered something mobile and fluid, able to express directly the inner movements of thought without needing to involve thereby the role of consciousness or reflection’ (cited in Žižek Reference Žižek, Gabriel and Žižek2009: 101). Habit yields modalities of embodiment that become ‘second nature’. Routine metabolic activities make possible navigating life without reflection. In the same way that trust allows individuals to navigate modalities of sociality unreflectively, as we will see, habit allows individuals to navigate from the most basic to the most complex activities unreflectively, trustingly, and even with dexterity.
Habit is a form of embodied activity that, while mere repetition, hence lacking freedom, is the possibility of freedom.Footnote 6 It allows the soul to take up particular feelings at the expense of others.Footnote 7 Habit is the possibility of freedom when it ‘reduces the natural determinateness of sensation to its mere being’, Hegel writes, ‘and [the individual] is no longer in a state of differentiation in respect of it, i.e., interested in, occupied with, and dependent upon it’ (SS: §410). It is the proper mechanism of self-feeling, since in habit ‘man’ relates not to the sensation, presentation, or desire, but to himself, to a ‘general manner of acting which he himself has posited and which has become his own, and through which he therefore displays his freedom’ (SS: §410). When Hegel says that the soul is here liberated from sensation he means that it is not captured by it, despite habit being the practice of shaping sensation itself, self-feeling itself. The crucial point is that the sensible content is ‘mine’ rather than ‘me’, as Andreja Novakovic puts it (Reference Novakovic2017: 35). Habit makes possible that very distinction between me and mine. Good habits, Hegel thus states in the ‘Anthropology’ section, are those that involve ‘doing what is right and ethical’ (SS: §410). Such a habit has ‘freedom as its content’, he says (SS: §410). Bad habits, it follows, threaten liberation from sensation that habits that have freedom as its content make possible. Famously, one can also die of habit, when the individual is entirely at home in the world such that there is no ‘opposition between subjective consciousness and spiritual activity’.Footnote 8 Death by habit, to borrow Novakovic's nice quip, is especially prescient when the individual is habituated to spiritual activity that has lost actuality.Footnote 9
As a practice, one pregnant with content, one that allows for freedom itself, habit is the becoming human of a self-feeling creature, indeed, ‘animal’. Uprightness and sight, for example, are corporeal mediations of the will and the intellect, according to Hegel (SS: §410). The acquisition of skills is a training of the body to serve Geist (SS: §410). ‘Mastery’ of the body, strength, and health through good habits, are necessary for such freedom (SS: §410). Habit is the genesis of the human as well as the person—that creature that can distinguish between me and mine in its most basic bodily comportment. These observations are further developed in the section on the ‘Actual Soul’, where Hegel stresses that:
requisite to the expression of humanity is, for example, the predominantly upright shape, the particular formation of the hand as the absolute instrumentality, of the mouth in laughter and weeping, etc., and the general tone of spirituality diffused throughout the whole, which is immediate evidence of a higher nature in the externality of the body. (SS: §411)
Human expressivity is consummated in language, he adds. More precisely, then, habit is the genesis of the human as well as the person—that creature with the capacity to will, think, speak, but also laugh, cry, build, but most importantly, the creature that can bind itself freely to norms.Footnote 10 This means that it is a creature that can authorize and reject norms, hence the culture these sustain and reproduce. Such a view of habit, then, provides an account of the condition for being a person, of the very possibility of authorization/rejection. Discipline as well as refusal address the content of norms, their bindingness in light of specific ideas of embodiment, propriety, and freedom.
We might find that these passages are crucial for troubling what was once a standard narrative of Hegel's idealism as denying materiality, embodiment, and related matters. But we should proceed with care, tracking the ableism of this account of embodied normativity and examining its relation to Hegel's Eurocentrism in general and views on race in particular. In my ‘Hegel, History, and Race’ (2017), I have detailed how Hegel's nature-spirit distinction subtends his distinction between the purported rationality of humankind and the purported natural difference of the races (see Zambrana Reference Zambrana and Zack2017, also de Laurentiis Reference de Laurentiis and Egger2014, Parekh Reference Parekh and Dudley2009 and Monahan Reference Monahan2017). I show how Hegel's claims about humankind's progressive freedom from nature through becoming conscious of the capacity to be a product of itself installs a racial hierarchy tied not only to the view that freedom is exhibited in the type of institutions distinctive of a ‘people’. It is tied to the supposed racial difference based on geological, geographical, and climatic diversity elaborated earlier in the ‘Anthropology’ section. In the passages examined above, Hegel is keen to distinguish between human animals and non-human animals as well as other ‘cultural’ formations in which human expressivity is marked as ‘other’.Footnote 11 The becoming of the feeling soul all the way to the actual soul is tightly bound to the view that the passage from nature to Geist is a leaving nature behind. To leave nature behind is also to leave behind an articulation of embodiment and expressivity not guided by the normative commitments of Western modernity. But notice that this is to posit as ‘behind’, under or not yet developed, modalities of embodiment and expressivity. Cultural norms are in fact racial norms in Hegel's text. Hegel's account of habit, as an account of embodied normativity, cannot be separated from this aspect of his view. Habits are assessed in light of norms with ontological weight, reproducing a specific view of humanity and personhood that is not only Western but more specifically white, bourgeois, with a dimorphic and heterosexual view of sex/gender.Footnote 12 Habit accounts for Geist's embodied actualization, then, already within the ‘Anthropology’ section.
In the Philosophy of Right, habit appears as a matter of education:
Education [Pädagogik] is the art of making people ethical. It considers them as natural beings and shows them the way to a second birth, the way to change their original nature into a second, spiritual, nature, and makes this spiritual level habitual to them. At this point the opposition between the natural and the subjective will disappears, the subject's internal struggle dies away. To this extent, habit is part of ethical life as it is of philosophical thought also, since such thought demands that mind be trained against capricious fancies, and that these be broken and overcome to leave the way clear for rational thinking. (PR: §151)
This passage, which echoes the discussion of the ‘Anthropology’ section, is the transition from morality to ethical life. The transition follows from Hegel's critique of conscience. True conscience is a matter of ethical right, rather than individual disposition and sheer affirmation (see PR: §§136–38). True conscience is key for the ‘validity’ (Gelten) of ‘ethical substantiality’ (PR: §152). The will is no longer one that would ‘like to exist for itself and opposed itself to the ethical substance’, Hegel says (PR: §152). Indeed, he adds, ‘the ethical character knows that the end which moves it is the universal which, though itself unmoved, has developed through its determinations into actual rationality’ (PR: §152). Habituation through education trains the individual. It is a form of discipline necessary even for philosophical thought, as it trains the mind away from capricious fancies. It makes possible the bodily appropriation of ethical substantiality. Habit makes possible feeling at home within the institutions of ethical life (see Novakovic Reference Novakovic2017: 53).
Relevant here is Hegel's discussion of patriotism in which habit also plays a role (see Moland Reference Moland2011 and Lumsden Reference Lumsden2012).Footnote 13 Patriotism is not a matter of sacrifice for the state or the ethical totality, according to Hegel. It is a disposition that expresses congruence between ordinary states of affairs or living conditions and the ‘habit of knowing’ that ethical substantiality, the institutions and its members, are the basis for such knowing. It is a matter of trust.Footnote 14 Trust here is a form of practical knowing in which the other ceases to be other for me. For Hegel, this stems from shared interests reflected not only in how one navigates the everyday but that one navigates the everyday unreflectively. Hegel writes:
Human beings have the trust that the state has to persist and that private interests can only be achieved within it, but habit makes that, upon which our entire existence rests, invisible. When someone goes at nighttime securely across the street, he doesn't notice that this could also be different, for this habit of security has become another nature and one does not even think about how this is just the effect of particular institutions. (PR: §268A)Footnote 15
Trust is based on habit. Such habits have been acquired through education and training, through which one becomes disciplined in the normative and material infrastructure of ethical life. The individual's second nature has had another rebirth. Habit is the key to acquiring not only humanity, not only personhood, but also identity, the feeling of community, and social status. It has not only acquired uprightness, but also the norms and expectations that orient ethical substantiality.
Here we have evidence of the old reading of the Philosophy of Right as a defence of social roles, yet new readings of Hegel have argued for the ‘cosmopolitan’ character of Hegel's account (see Moland Reference Moland2011). Pointing to appropriation of the universality of civil society eviscerates the traditionalist view of education, and hence habit, in ethical life. I will come back to this, as the appropriation of the universality of civil society by way of markets has to do precisely with the appropriation of the strictures of a capitalist economy and its demand of productivity, linking productivity with propriety. Hegel of course worries about the evisceration of concrete cultural habituation as well as poverty—a double worry he addresses in the discussion of the corporation. The point here is that feeling at home qua economic agents is a matter of appropriation of ethical substantiality, one that implies trust despite its distinctively atomistic structure (see PR: §310 and Novakovic Reference Novakovic2017: 100). Entry and exit from economic relations express the relation between markets and morals, as Axel Honneth would say.Footnote 16 More importantly, the discussion of trust is bound to the racial norm that unfolds through the development of the requisite expression of humanity, as seen above. That one navigates institutions unreflectively is tied to the racial norm. This is not merely a problem of alienation, whereby one might not feel at home in the institutions that compose ethical life. Rather, it is a problem of alterity, of the production of the other subject to suspicion for its inability to embody the racial norm. One way in which this is manifest, as I argue in the next section, is in the view that unproductivity is a feature of ‘barbarians’, Hegel will say.
Habit, in sum, is a crucial mechanism in the productivity as well as the reproduction of Sittlichkeit. It is a mode of binding, I want to suggest, on two counts. First, it binds individuals to the institutions of ethical life through education and thus habituation. Second, it expresses the validity of the institutions of ethical life hence their modes of sociality. Trust indexes validity. To be educated, according to Hegel, is to master the strictures of such institutions, of such modes of sociality. Yet habit reproduces, not only sustains, ethical life. It reinstalls rather than only expresses the productivity of ethical life in its institutional specificity. Habit is not merely necessary to any account of the stability of institutional life, then. It secures such stability. Habit, trust and stability, however, are inextricably bound to Hegel's Eurocentrism, its racial hierarchy, its racial norm. Figures of unbinding, accordingly, disturb not only the very productivity of ethical life but the very view that such productivity is the good life. The rabble represents such a threat. In disturbing the reproduction of modern ethical life, in threatening its normative commitments, however, the rabble is indexed as falling outside of the strictures of the human and the person, in the sense that it is subject to precarity, discipline, policing, and most of all, killability. The rabble's refusal, for this reason, can be seen as an interruption of the racial norm at work in its dehumanization.
II. Unbinding: rabble
Overproduction, according to Hegel, is the source of poverty within an economic system that seeks to maximize production and exchange beyond its capacity for consumption. Production, Hegel argues, should seek to fulfil the needs of others within the ethical community. Because overproduction is a necessary rather than contingent feature of an economic system that has profit as its goal, poverty is also a necessary feature of such system. Overproduction leads to an expulsion of workers from the workforce, generating a surplus population that sinks to poverty (see PR: §245). Hegel will offer various solutions to the problem. They span from charity, to police control, exporting the poor to the colonies and, perhaps the least violent, the inclusion of the poor in a corporation. For Hegel, the very expulsion from the sociality of the estate is the central form of humiliation that poverty generates.Footnote 17 With the police, for example, Hegel imagines forms of surveillance and control that would ensure that the individual becomes a member of civil society, stepping in where the family seems to have failed.Footnote 18 With the corporation, for example, Hegel seeks to build on the sociality of a guild-like system that organizes labour, folding the expulsed individual back into ethical life.
Work is key, however. The significance of work is consistent throughout Hegel's corpus, indeed before the famous discussion of work in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit.Footnote 19 The role of work in practical education, hence its bearing on the discussion of habit, is here most relevant. Practical education, Hegel says, is acquired through work. Its ‘stages’ move from the ‘continuing need to do something’ and the ‘habit of simply being busy’, to the ‘adaptation’ of the activity to the ‘material worked on’ and the will of others, finally, ‘in a habit produced by this discipline, of objective activity and universally applicable skills’ (PR: §197). He adds that the ‘barbarian is lazy and is distinguished from the educated person by his dull brooding, because practical education is precisely education in the need and habit of being busy’. I will come back to this. Note that he also says that the clumsy person produces results he does not intend, hence he is not a master of his activity, unlike the skilled worker who produces the thing as it ‘ought to be’ and encounters ‘no resistance to the aim he is pursuing’ in his activity (PR: §197). Work, and indeed productivity, according to Hegel, are markers of a well-habituated individual who has been educated into an economy the sociality of which is based on atomistic interactions. Ideally, the goal of productivity is the satisfaction of other's needs, thereby centring the sociality of labour above sheer productivity. The point is, however, that productivity itself is underscored as a feature of education, propriety, being a member of civil society, and hence modern ethical life.
Faced with the material and social effects of poverty, the rabble refuses to affirm work and its productivity. The ‘rabble of paupers’, recall, is the result of the fall of the ‘standard of living […] necessary for a member of the society’ (PR: §244). This produces a ‘loss of the sense of right and wrong, of integrity and of honour in maintaining oneself by one's own activity and work’ (PR: §244). The rabble, however, is distinguished ‘only by the disposition associated with poverty, by inward rebellion against the rich, against society, the government, etc’ (PR: §244A). The rabble lacks honour because it cannot secure subsistence by its own labour, yet it claims the right to receive subsistence. Hegel recognizes that this is a wrong done to one class by another. He indeed recognizes that poverty and indignation are a possibility for all members of society, given the problem of overproduction central to capitalist modes of production and exchange. Nevertheless, Hegel is dismissive of the rabble for its refusal to work and for its resentment of the very institutions that generate its material and social humiliation.
The rabble is a figure of unbinding, as Frank Ruda puts it. It does not submit to the structures and strictures of modern ethical life:
If existing right operates by the objectification and realization of an always particular freedom then this can only be done by action and labor. Against the right of reason, which organizes civil society and the state, the rabble claims a right that suspends the mediation by work and activity. (2011: 61)Footnote 20
The rabble is a figure of unbinding in two key ways. First, Hegel argues that it loses ‘the habit of laboring’, hence the ‘need for industriousness disappears’.Footnote 21 As Ruda puts it, ‘the rabble loses the habit of being active’; the rabble does not ‘endeavor to find work’ and ‘withdraws from its mediating relations’ (Reference Ruda2011: 75). The crucial point is that it does not merely renounce entry and exit into the economic and social relations distinctive of civil society. The rabble does much more. ‘If one keeps in mind’, as Ruda writes:
that the (rational) activity names the decisive feature of spirit that for Hegel enters the world and history with the reformation, then to lose the habit of working means not only to renounce social labor but moreover any form of activity and therefore to stand against the mediating movement of spirit itself. (Reference Ruda2011: 75)
The rabble does not lose the skills required to be part of an estate or corporation. It refuses the very disposition to be disciplined into such modes of sociality, which only serve as sites of deactualization for it.
The rabble's predicament can be understood as a ‘deactualization’—Entwirklichung.Footnote 22 The social and institutional conditions of the rabble's realization of freedom undermine, that is, not only that very freedom but also its dignity. Poverty, expulsion, precarization are not contingent. Rather, they are necessary features of a political economy based on profit. In refusing to be disciplined—educated, habituated—into the sociality distinctive of modern ethical life, the rabble denies its participation in the reproduction of this life. It thereby interrupts the continuation and indeed the reinstallation of the institutions that compose ethical life. In defiantly affirming the deactualization produced by civil society, the rabble depotentiates the movement of Geist. It not only resists the very undermining of the realization of its own freedom, to keep with Hegel's terms. It interrupts the effectivity of the specific institutions and modes of sociality that Hegel argues actualize freedom, specifically those that work in and through productivity and propriety. Laziness, attributed to ‘barbarians’, idleness, and refusal to work are the rabble's bad habits.Footnote 23 They are ‘bad’, then, according to Hegel, because they depotentiate the reproduction of the institutions that purportedly actualize freedom. Note the racial norm at work in the characterization of idleness. The rabble does not merely resist the reproduction of ethical life, then. In its refusal, it can short circuit the racial norm.
Second, the rabble unbinds by the manner of its affect. Hegel argues that what is distinctive of the rabble is its indignation. Ruda reads indignation as a form of resentment, despite the fact that Hegel does not use this term (see Ruda Reference Ruda2011, esp. Chapter 7). The rabble is a figure of unbinding, as we have seen, since its expulsion from the possibility of work motivates a turn away from the very habit of work central to the reproduction of ethical life. The rabble thereby also turns away from the sociality of those institutions. For Ruda, the rabble accuses the institutions of ethical life of being a state without right. On the basis of this, it refuses activity itself, the habit of productivity and its significance for the individual and collective actualization of freedom. It rejects right as the site of the realization of freedom, specifically bound to production and exchange, even if in view of the needs of another. The rabble is thereby unbound from the ‘respect of other's rights’, Hegel writes (quoted in Ruda Reference Ruda2011: 60). As Ruda puts it, the rabble ‘refuse[s] not only to give others their recognition but also to make themselves addressable in terms of rights and duties for the others’ (Reference Ruda2011: 60). For this reason, the rabble ‘corrodes the actual order’.
Key here is resentment, not merely indignation, Ruda argues. Resentment is not self-brooding. It is not an attachment to a past harm that denies any address. It is an interruption for the sake of something otherwise. It can be seen as an act of self-care or even self-love. To be sure, one must go beyond Hegel's own views on love, which are based on finding oneself in the other rather than through a refusal of the other. Resentment, as Grayson Hunt argues, can be seen in this context as a ‘restoration of respect’, perhaps better stated as a modality of care, by turning away from the source of harm and humiliation. The rabble turns away from mediation by notions of productivity and propriety that sustain a system of social labour and a racial norm that undermines its very conditions of possibility (see Hunt Reference Hunt2013 and Reference Hunt2015). It is not a mere abstract negation of the harm, which would merely reproduce forms of violence internal to the logic of the institutions of modern ethical life. It is an interruption of, and an unbinding from, the effectivity of Geist and its institutional expression, given that the latter have been specified as the source of the rabble's ‘humiliation’. Resentment, then, can be seen as interruptive indignation. It turns deactualization into depotentiation.
Although he is interested in the form of humanism that such unbinding makes possible, one that draws from the young Marx's humanism, Ruda raises a crucial point in characterizing the rabble as a figure of unbinding. The rabble is unbound—expulsed—by the poverty generated by the political economy of civil society and it unbinds itself from the forms of sociality that pertain to the institutions of ethical life. The question at hand goes beyond Hegel's account of the rabble and quick lamentation that the problem of poverty remains to be resolved. In being a figure of unbinding, the rabble is also turned into surplus population, one that can be policed, incorporated, sent to the colonies, or simply become ‘killable life’, as Ruda says referring to Giorgio Agamben (Ruda Reference Ruda2011: 70).Footnote 24 Within the strictures of the institutions of right, the rabble appears as surplus population, a problem to solve, indeed ‘barbarian’. Ruda underscores that Hegel does not frame the problem of the rabble in merely individualist terms, as a matter of ‘erring conscience’ (Reference Ruda2011: 69). Otherwise, the rabble straightforwardly appears as ‘killable’. The risk remains despite Hegel's institutional account of the problem of poverty, however, given the ubiquitous subjection to conditions of precarity, policing and ‘killability’ of those who represent a threat to the normative order and its racial norm. Rather than Agamben's work, Achille Mbembe's writing on necropolitics, which centres on race, is more appropriate (Mbembe Reference Mbembe2003).
Bad habits are dangerous in two ways. Firstly, they are dangerous in challenging the normative structure of ethical life, in refusing to ameliorate it, in aiming to depotentiate it, to turn it inoperative. Secondly, they are dangerous because those who foment bad habits, who unbind from institutions that generate their precarity, index themselves as a problem to solve, something to remove, displace, reject, possibly even annihilate.Footnote 25 Against Hegel, the account of embodied normativity that follows is one that must account for discipline as well as refusal. It is an account of the reproduction of a normative order that subtends structures of trust, of unreflective activity, yet for those who embody the racial norm that structures the purported ‘good’ or ‘right’ life. Hence, it must also be an account of that order's generation of alterity, excess, dispensability. It must track the institutional ‘management’ of such excess and alterity, of those who are posited as suspicious, through degrees of violence. Furthermore, it must track the ways in which ethical life ongoingly shores itself up through more or less violent means. The rabble's refusal indexes the need to dismantle the ethical substance that produces dehumanization and its management, then. The rabble's interruptive indignation can turn inoperative the racial norm at work in the very conception of the human central to Sittlichkeit.
III. Concluding remarks
In this article, I have offered a critique of Hegel's views on embodied normativity. Centring on Hegel's discussion of the rabble in light of Ruda's reading helps to assess the link between habit and ethical life, calling attention to uncircumventable problems in Hegel's signature accounts of institutional rationality and the actualization of freedom. Habit, according to Hegel, is a key mechanism of becoming human, a person, a member of modern ethical life. Hegel's discussion of the rabble and the rabble's bad habits, however, is one way to specify the racial norm in his view of humanity. Habit indexes not only the normative commitments of modern, European culture, but more specifically the racial norm at work in his well-documented Eurocentrism. Despite important contributions to our understanding of Hegel's corpus, attempts to elucidate Hegel's views on embodied normativity must account for these problems and their dangers.
I have also provided a reading of the rabble that allows us to note that, on Hegel's account, poverty leads to deactualization. It undermines the material and social conditions for the actualization of freedom for those who have been expelled by a political economy based on profit. Moving away from Hegel, I have also suggested that the bad habits that the rabble displays—idleness, resentment—turn such deactualization into a depotentiation of modern ethical life and its racial norm. In refusing not only to be habituated but to adopt habits necessary for the reproduction of ethical life, the rabble is a figure of interruption. Its refusal does not seek revision of modern ethical life, presenting the problem of poverty as something to be ameliorated. It calls into question the very tenability of modern ethical life. As Ruda suggests, Hegel could not think through the radicality of the rabble. He would have had to abandon the very account of the actualization of freedom provided in the Philosophy of Right. It is precisely the figure of the rabble, then, that ought to orient our assessment of Hegel's views of freedom, ethicality, embodied normativity.
