I. Introduction
One might simply label terrorism a threat to civilization that wells up from and threatens to drag the world back down into a barbarous past.Footnote 1 The need to exterminate terrorism may appear to be the lesson of Hegel’s identification of it with an incarnation of death motivated by a commitment to an empty notion either of God’s will or the universal will of the people. Obedience to an entirely negative, transcendent ideal seems to constitute a pre-modern threat to civilization, a dogmatism that denies the value of immanence itself. But Hegel’s account of terrorism forces us to abandon such simplistic notions and to recognize that the dialectic of history cannot simply be understood through interpersonal and social conflict over recognition. The interpretation of history as a struggle between oppression and revolutionary action progressing towards political freedom, moral status in the eyes of the other, and the End of History was the dominant interpretation in the reception of Hegel’s thought by phenomenologists and existentialists (Camus Reference Camus1956: 136). Yet an alternative interpretation was also clearly seen: his supposed pan-logicism was replaced with a pan-tragicism that doubted the End of History thesis and recognized that ‘violence […] is the victor’ and that ‘the repudiation of Terror […] only leads to an extension of the Terror’ (Camus Reference Camus1956: 136–37).Footnote 2 But between Enlightenment rationalism that brushes aside terrorism as pre-modern and post-Enlightenment pessimism that sees us as condemned to irrational violence, Hegel offers a middle path. His prescient analysis of terrorism and the response to it recognizes humanity’s perilous dependence on violence and empty ideals, but also holds that we can transform both ourselves and the community into a process of understanding the other and encountering difference. Such an actualization of the moral life, rooted in forgiveness, love and knowledge, eliminates the negative ideals that motivate terrorism but never fully escapes the possibility of the incarnation of death or the world-negating threat of terrorism and absolute freedom.Footnote 3
To grasp fully how sophisticated and prognostic Hegel’s treatment of terrorism is, I will analyse it through the theories of terror and violence offered, primarily, by Derrida and Baudrillard. Derrida’s central concept in his analysis of terrorism is autoimmunity, which is the paradoxical process in which ‘a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, “itself” works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its “own” immunity’ (Derrida Reference Derrida2003: 94).Footnote 4 He means, firstly, that terrorism takes place within a dynamic system (e.g., global capitalism) and that terrorism is an extension of that system. Secondly, he means that terrorism is suicidal in the sense of being both violently turned against itself and against the system of which it is part. This is said to be only quasi-suicidal, because, in fact, terrorism is not completely self- and world-annihilating. Through symbolic acts of terror, an atmosphere of violence is created, which both sustains and is sustained by a messianic opening towards an impossible, world-negating ideal. Thirdly, terrorism is autoimmune violence that makes explicit the hidden institutional violence of the ‘living system’—attacking by bringing to the foreground the background violence that acts as the immune system of hegemony. Although it is not surprising that Hegel influenced this postmodern account of terrorism, it is commonly believed that this interpretation only emerges through the deconstruction of Hegel’s thought. Yet Hegel’s thought is best explained through this autoimmune movement.
II. Interpreting terrorism through autoimmunity
The tendency to read Hegel’s theory of terror and violence in terms of mere conflict and struggle for recognition is seen when Merleau-Ponty describes Hegel as holding that ‘each self-consciousness aims at the destruction and death of the other’ (Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty1969: 102).Footnote 5 If we use such a model of force to understand Hegel, we will arrive at an account of revolutionary action against domination.
Domination is defined by what it is opposed to, by relations of force and internal contradictions. It is defined by a negativity, and, in order to exist, the master has as much need of the slave has of the master. …
Domination still had its strategy, which was to incorporate the negative as conflicts unfolded and in accordance with a dialectical perspective opened up by its adversaries themselves. …
We have to come to terms with the idea that negativity, as we have known it—that mainspring of history and human action—is disappearing, and that global antagonism works itself out now in a quite different way, far from the good old oppositions and the good old relations of force. (Baudrillard Reference Baudrillard2010: 35–38)
It is clear from these remarks that Baudrillard is modeling domination and negativity on the Hegelian dialectic, which he holds should give way to a postmodern model of power as hegemony, a power that ‘no longer has need of the opposite term; it does not need its contrary in order to exist’ (Baudrillard Reference Baudrillard2010: 36). Such an account is needed to understand terrorism and its contemporary prominence.
By contrast, the hegemonic form tends quite simply to liquidate its opponents, regarding them as worthless, eccentric and residual. A style not of oppression and alienation, but of excommunication of everything that doesn’t fall within this sphere of integral performance and exchange. (Baudrillard Reference Baudrillard2010: 38)
Yet the societies that give rise to terrorism in Hegel’s thought are hegemonic ones that render all value into a simulation, into a commodity that is ‘transparent’, mutable and ‘dispersed’. (Baudrillard Reference Baudrillard1993: 4)
Hegel, Derrida and Baudrillard hope to provide the underlying logic of terrorism itself. Uncovering that deeper logic must begin with the distinction between objective and subjective violence or between, respectively, institutional and agent-centered violence (Žižek Reference Žižek2008: 2). In a way, objective violence is a greater terror than terrorism, in so far as the latter is seen as subjective violence.
The only true fundamentalism, giving rise to the only true terror, is the fundamentalism of a fluid, mobile technocracy, the technocracy of flows and networks, of an inexorable dissemination and mental diaspora: a fundamentalism without foundations. All the other forms of reactional violence, all the other kinds of integrism—the totalitarianisms, the religious and ethnic fanaticisms—all this visible, spectacular violence that culminates in terrorism is less lethal than the invisible tentacular form of violence of the inexorable world process, of ‘world processing’. (Baudrillard Reference Baudrillard2010: 48)
The Derridean equivalent of this notion of a fundamental, institutional violence is what he calls a ‘preethical’ or ‘transcendental’ violence in his 1964 article on Levinas (Derrida Reference Derrida1978b: 125).Footnote 6 It is an idea that Derrida attributes to Hegel: war and violence are ‘congenital to phenomenality’ and to ‘the very emergence of speech and of appearing’, which then allows there to be ethical, reactional violence, such as the subjective violence of the struggle for recognition (Derrida Reference Derrida1978b: 129).
The basic idea of the autoimmunity doctrine can already be found in this early essay of Derrida’s. Starting from the idea that phenomenality itself, i.e. the appearing of meaning and language, is objective violence or the institution of hegemony (preethical violence), Derrida then recognizes that ‘discourse, therefore, if it is originally violence, can only do itself violence, can only negate itself in order to affirm itself, make war upon the war which institutes it without ever being able to reappropriate this negative, to the extent that it is discourse’ (Derrida Reference Derrida1978b: 130). In so far as discourse rebels against this objective, transcendental violence itself and aims to expose the conceptual flaws and illusions within it, it is effectively acting as suicidal terrorism. Deconstructive discourse exposes the institutional violence of discourse itself. It makes war against the war that constitutes it, but does so without appropriating that original war and becoming its own hegemonic, objective order of violence. If these acts of violent discourse were to eliminate that transcendental violence, the result would be nothingness: a ‘peace’ that is the complete disappearance of reason and discourse and a sinking into ‘the worst violence, the violence of primitive and prelogical silence, of an unimaginable night’ (Derrida Reference Derrida1978b: 130). These ideas are at the very foundation of Derrida’s philosophy, stated as early as his 1963 paper on Foucault, that one must adhere to the ‘Hegelian law’ that ‘the revolution against reason can be made only within it’—articulation of that revolt ‘can only operate within reason’ and so must take place as a ‘disturbance’ (Derrida Reference Derrida1978a: 36).Footnote 7 This leads Derrida to proclaim, ‘I philosophize only in terror’ (Derrida Reference Derrida1978a: 62).
It is important to clarify whether terrorism is objective or subjective violence. While the tendency is to see it as the latter, the autoimmunity model suggests that terrorism is an extension of objective, hegemonic violence directed against itself. Terrorism tends to be read either as the subjective violence of oppression or as Fraternity-Terror, to use Sartre’s terminology. The latter is the revolutionary use of violence against oppression and with the aim of keeping the revolutionary group bound to a pledge and from relapsing into ‘seriality’ or alienated, mechanical existence outside of affective groups (Sartre Reference Sartre2004: 736–37). Counter-revolutionary violence is violence that disrupts pledges and recommits individuals to statutes that serialize them and keep them from forming revolutionary action groups. Such violence is oppression: ‘it is used against one or more individuals, imposing an untranscendable statute on them as a function of scarcity’ (Sartre Reference Sartre2004: 737). While terrorism seems directed at oppression, it does not work to bind together a community or pledged-group due to its suicidal nature. Lacking any positive revolutionary goals, terrorism seems merely aimed at destruction, in spite of its pronouncements. While terrorism also seems like oppression and the assertion of an ‘untranscendable statute’, it is not plausibly interpreted as such. Its violence is self-directed, and its weakness against the power of the hegemonic force that it battles makes it an implausible war of mere force. So the challenge of understanding terrorism is that it promotes what Sartre calls seriality as does oppression, but it is also directed against global hegemonic structures and their serialization of humanity.
Terrorism looks more like Sartre’s description of an extremist group that embodies ‘violence incarnate’—such a group can serve to ‘perpetuate the climate of violence’ and may ‘allow more effective groupings … to constitute themselves despite competitive antagonisms’ (Sartre Reference Sartre2004: 727). What that group does is not best understood in terms of subjective violence against individuals or groups. Sartre says its essence is not its actualization of ‘real violence’ (Sartre Reference Sartre2004: 727). Instead, it is a part of the instantiation of objective violence as a pervasive climate. It attempts to make violence into something permanent through symbolic acts rather than simply enacting subjective violence.Footnote 8 Terrorism makes present the invisible violence of the normal state of things, but it is a double-edged sword. Its symbolic significance is ambiguous and may equally serve revolutionary or counter-revolutionary aims. By sowing fear it may lead people (both oppressed and oppressors) to rally behind oppressive statutes, serializing ideals, and violent institutions or it may awaken people (either oppressor or oppressed) to the reality of objective violence. Thus, this incarnate violence may allow for ‘more effective groupings’ even across antagonisms and serialization, in so far as people come to recognize how objective violence serializes. But by embodying nothing but violence in symbolic form, terrorism itself does not have the power to actually overcome serialization and may in fact reinforce it.
According to Baudrillard, modern terrorism attempts a ‘situational transfer’ or, we might say, a fundamental structural challenge to hegemonic globalization (Baudrillard Reference Baudrillard2002: 9). He claims that ‘the tactic of the terrorist model’ is to ‘bring about an excess of reality, and have the system collapse beneath that excess of reality’ (Baudrillard Reference Baudrillard2002: 18). All hegemonic power operates by total liquidation of events that can disrupt the order that constrains human possibility. Thus, all hegemonic orders, with their institutional violence, give rise to a violent alternative that exposes the reality of violence with a symbol of that which cannot be absorbed into the global system of exchange. According to Baudrillard, terrorism is a ‘symbolic violence’ that generates a ‘singularity’, which confronts hegemony and is both a void (nihilism) and an excess (violence incarnate); it has no positive aim such as ‘to transform the world’ and, instead, aims ‘to radicalize the world by sacrifice’ (Baudrillard Reference Baudrillard2002: 10).Footnote 9 This is what he calls the ‘spirit of terrorism’ (Baudrillard Reference Baudrillard2002: 22).
To understand how this incarnation of total violence functions, we have to return to Derrida’s notion of autoimmunity. It appears as self-castration in his treatment of Hegel in Glas from 1974. There Derrida describes the ‘logical paradox of the apotropaic’:
Castrating oneself already, always already, in order to be able to castrate and repress the threat of castration, renouncing life and mastery in order to secure them; putting into play by ruse, simulacrum, and violence just what one wants to preserve; losing in advance what one wants to erect; suspending what one raises: aufheben. (Derrida Reference Derrida1986: 46)
The paradox of this magical warding-off of evil is not as obscure as it appears. One cannot be castrated if one has done it to oneself already; one cannot be threatened with death if one has renounced life. What is happening is a placing of value in the beyond. Exposing life, power and all value to death gives one an anarchic, nihilistic freedom to live and pursue power while claiming to do neither. In this way, the final value by which hegemony operates, i.e. violence, is also turned into a simulacrum.
Autoimmunity also appears in Derrida’s discussion of Hegel’s notion of natural religion as the religion of light. He describes the light (of God) as a ‘pure consuming destruction, pure effusion of light without shadow, noon without contrary, without resistance’ and, thus, which by being ‘all-burning’ should also consume itself and be nothing (Derrida Reference Derrida1986: 238). Because this infinite ‘pure play of difference is nothing’, something must ‘prime the dialectical process and open history’ (Derrida Reference Derrida1986: 240). To halt this complete self-extinguishment and actually to remain as the play of difference in the world, the all-consuming light must violate its all-burning nature in order to arrest itself and hold itself open infinitely towards both its completion and its death. This giving of ‘solid form’ is what Derrida calls pre-ethical or transcendental violence, and it is a sacrifice of the infinite but with a remainder, while the infinite itself, as self-consuming, is a sacrifice without remainder. Thus, we have the logic of autoimmunity: the light ‘sacrifices itself, but only to remain, to insure its guarding, to bind itself to itself’ (Derrida Reference Derrida1986: 241). It commits a suicide so that it might live, castrates itself so that it might not be castrated. Sacrifice as ‘absolute expenditure’ must itself be sacrificed into an ‘economy of exchange’ (Keenan Reference Keenan2005: 136). Derrida has given, following Hegel, the autoimmune description of the power of negation, whose suicidal act is the arresting of that negation and the constitution of some stable form of being. Yet the same autoimmune logic can work from the perspective of living beings, who can use the idea of negation to arrest life, to bring destruction rather than to halt it. These two forms of terrorism can be thought of, respectively, as either employing terror as the ordinary state of affairs—which requires some way to sustain existence and stave off self-annihilation—or as employing terror as an exceptional state that disrupts existence and increases the drive to self-annihilation.
The autoimmunity doctrine is essential to Derrida’s own account of religion. He argues that religion persists in the space between ‘the value of life’ and an ‘excess above and beyond the living’, which is what ‘opens the space of death’ (Derrida Reference Derrida1998: 51). This means that religion, as Girard has also argued, is tied to sacrifice—keeping itself open to ‘something other and more than itself: the other, the future, death, freedom, the coming or the love of the other’ and other messianic ideas (Derrida Reference Derrida1998: 51). Derrida’s conclusion is that there is a ‘universal structure of religiosity’—namely, autoimmunity—‘a principle of sacrificial self-destruction ruining the principle of self-protection (that of maintaining its self-integrity intact), and this in view of some sort of invisible and spectral sur-vival’ (Derrida Reference Derrida1998: 51). Insofar as Derrida’s deconstruction and terrorism share the same formal structure of autoimmunity, it is necessary to point out at least one structural difference. Religious terror on his account is directed towards ‘the existence of the world, the worldwide itself’ (Derrida Reference Derrida2003: 98). In particular, terrorism is rooted in onto-theological metaphysics and remains only open to the other as transcendent; its messianic structure envisions the achievement of absolute immunity.
It would seem that Derrida believes that Hegel’s Absolute Idealism does the same. But autoimmunity itself ‘is not an absolute ill or evil’; it ‘enables an exposure to the other’ and remains a part of utopian thought and hope (Derrida Reference Derrida2005: 152). What differentiates the structure of Derrida’s deconstructive political thought from terrorism is that the latter attacks a hegemonic order from the point of view of an opposing hegemonic order. It is a battle of fundamentalisms. It is clear that Derrida sees his own position as advancing beyond Hegel, whom he sees as tied to the same ontotheological foundations as terrorism. He reads the Hegelian Aufhebung as an idealization that believes it can overcome différance and progress towards total identity rather than recognize the horizon of continuous deferment (Derrida Reference Derrida1982: 88).Footnote 10 Derrida continually argues for ‘horizontal’ and open-ended responses to difference, rather than ‘vertical’ and closed responses. Although I think it possible to read Hegel’s dialectic and its culmination in Absolute Spirit as a logic of how difference is ceaselessly generated rather than how it is overcome, to argue that would take us beyond the topic of terrorism, which teaches us that difference can emerge even within the most totalizing and hegemonic of systems.
III. Hegel on religious terrorism
Early in the Phenomenology’s account of social development, a religious attitude appears based on the idea of a relation ‘in pure thought’ to ‘pure absolute Being’, which is conceived of as ‘utterly beyond the finite, beyond self-consciousness’, i.e., ‘Being in a negative sense’ (PhG: §576).Footnote 11 Hegel calls this ‘the religion of the underworld’, and this hellish form of religion gives rise to terrorism (§674).Footnote 12 What is lacking in this religion of the underworld, compared to the forms of legitimate religion discussed later in the Phenomenology, is the realization in life of ‘absolute being in and for itself’, which is manifest through ‘the self-consciousness of spirit’ (§672). In other words, true religion can only occur when self-conscious human beings understand themselves as essentially taking part in the positive, creative and social project of expressing and understanding the Absolute through art, philosophy and the formation of a loving, forgiving community committed to continual ‘self othering’ (§777). Self-consciousness takes its first step towards true religion when it finds that only in its particularity is it a nullity, whereas it is bound in life to the other, who ‘according to its own nature and disposition, [is] identical with himself’ (§666). This moral awakening will be supplemented with practices of love and forgiveness that can appreciate the other in their difference, finding stable community, rather than alienation, in alterity.
The religion of the underworld is merely an attempt by self-conscious beings to understand the world rather than to be a living process of self-knowing—the latter being the defining feature of positive religion (Lakeland Reference Lakeland1984: 72).Footnote 13 The Phenomenology’s division between types of religion argues that the first stage of ‘natural religion’ is followed by the ‘artistic’ stage or the ‘religions of spiritual individuality’, as stated in the later lectures on religion. Turning to one religion associated with terrorism for Hegel, Islam has been called a lacuna within his division of types of religion (Hodgson Reference Hodgson1987: 4). However, we know that Islam aligns closely with Judaism in Hegel’s mind and would be within the religions of spiritual individuality.Footnote 14 However, the place of Judaism is also ambiguous, appearing both as a natural religion of light that views God as ‘the pure, all-embracing and all-pervading essential light of sunrise, which preserves itself in its formless substantiality’ (PhG: §686), and as a religion of spiritual individuality. Hegel does identify the religion of light with the Persians and the Persian Empire generally, including Judea (PH: 188, 195). We also find Islam described as natural religion, which is focused on outer forms of nature that reveal nothing of the ‘inner being’, which remains ‘still simple darkness, the unmoved, the black, formless stone’ (PhG: §696). Here Hegel seems to be indicating the Hajar al-Aswad found in the Kaaba in Mecca. But this variation in the categorization of both Islam and Judaism is not philosophically significant, given that one could also use different sects of Christianity to illustrate the religion of nature and the religion of spiritual individuality.
Hegel holds that Islam’s ‘revolution’ in the seventh century is important, because it made ‘the abstract One, the absolute object of attention and devotion, and to the same extent, pure subjective consciousness—the Knowledge of this One alone—the only aim of reality’ (PH: 356). Unfortunately, ‘Allah’ or ‘the One’ is ‘deprived of every concrete predicate’ (356). In this way, Hegel holds that Islam retains something of the Oriental religions and Judaism, in which the Absolute is a pure negative (356). This emptiness is often found tied to the religions of nature, because the emptiness of the idea of the ‘One’ is logically filled in with the ‘One’ of nature itself. When humans devote themselves to an abstract totality, the result is a devaluation of the particular, material world as well as an inevitable reaction against the emptiness of that abstraction. This dialectic between empty universalism and materialism is at the heart of the Enlightenment notions of faith and pure insight out of which modern terrorism emerges.
Hegel’s discussion of the two lower forms of ‘determinate religion’ (the religions of nature and spiritual individuality) continually mentions the Cultus as the means by which the individual enters into a relation with the divine, has a feeling of divine love, and is unified with others in hostility towards the enemy (Hegel Reference Hegel1987: 110–20).Footnote 15 This discussion of religion as cult is essentially Schelling’s view: religion manifests itself in ‘a nation through its poetry and its art’, but, because of its ‘ideal character […] religion relinquishes the public and withdraws into the sacred darkness of secrecy’ (Schelling Reference Schelling2010: 51). Yet as cult, the negativity of God means that violence and a slide into the hellish religion of the underworld is a constant possibility.Footnote 16 If we regard this negative conception of God as the spur to mimetic cycles of violence, then we can say that Hegel agrees with Girard that ‘violence is in effect the motor of the religious system’ (Girard Reference Girard1978: 13).Footnote 17 There is a dual meaning to this: determinate religion and law stand as prohibitions to such violence, yet, in the religion of the underworld, God is an empty object, both Being and Nothingness, around which mimetic violence erupts as a response to the scarcity of this supposedly most real thing (ens realissimum) in the world (Girard Reference Girard1996: 10). To arise out of that primitive form of religion, Schelling claims that religion must take part in philosophical ‘cognition of the ideal-per-se’ and that, if it attempts to stand alone, it collapses into esoteric negativity (Schelling Reference Schelling2010: 41). Schelling believes that it is for the best that religion is kept from ‘mixing with the real, the sensate, or from laying claims to external dominion and violence’ (55). Obviously, Hegel is in complete disagreement with this suggestion: religion must become positive and real in a non-hegemonic community supported by philosophical insight (i.e., absolute knowing) into its purpose of instantiating God in the world by welcoming difference as such.Footnote 18
Hegel’s earliest treatment of religious terrorism concerns Judaism, in ‘The Spirit of Christianity’, written in 1798. In his analysis, Abraham appears as someone who sees the whole world as ‘his opposite’ and as a ‘nullity’ (ETW: 187). Having ‘contempt for the whole world’, Abraham dwelled in immediate relation to God, but as Judaism spread, it exercised its ‘dominion mercilessly with the most revolting and harshest tyranny, and utterly extirpated all life; for it is only over death that unity hovers’ (188). The world outside this unity with the Infinite is seen as ‘a stuff, loveless, with no rights, something accursed which, as soon as they have power enough, they treat as accursed and then assign to its proper place [i.e. death] if it attempts to stir’ (188). The Jewish people adopt a constructivism, which reappears in the Enlightenment notion of utility, and see the world as ‘not something which is, but something made which on its own account has no life, no rights, no love’ (191). Also, in Hegel’s early fragment on love, we see a state in which love is directed only to matter, to dead objects, and to the negative, which results in nihilism due to the externality and indifference of these dead objects (303). Such a distorting destruction of love, redirecting it from the living to the dead, is essential for Hegel’s conception of terrorism.Footnote 19 Both Hegel’s account and the model of autoimmunity draw our attention to the terrorist’s elevation of violence to the universal. Religious terrorism models itself on the terror of God as annihilating light. It is antithetical to life, including its own, and threatens to pass away into nothingness and darkness. The rupture that keeps this from happening is religious practice, praise and worshipful expectation of messianic notions, which keeps the descent into death from being total. Religious terrorism appears, at least in Hegel’s account of it, to have so totally identified itself with the negative conception of God that its autoimmune moment must arrest its nihilist collapse into transcendent nothingness. It must sacrifice total sacrifice and oneness with the negative in order to construct the relation of worship. Terrorist acts then maintain and promote the self-deceived myth of that identity with the transcendent by symbolizing the meaninglessness of the world and this life.
Hegel’s description of Islam explains its religious terrorism in terms of the emptiness of its world-negating concept of God, which has the consequence that ‘the worship of the One remains the only bond by which the whole is capable of uniting’ (PH: 357). Destruction and death remain the fundamental relations on such a model, both because anything that is opposed to the relation of worship must be exterminated so as not to expose the lie of the non-being of the world, but also because ‘the highest merit is to die for the Faith’ (357). The ‘enthusiasm’ for ‘something abstract’ results in ‘a negative position towards the established order of things’ that is called ‘Fanaticism’ (358). It is just this sort of pure liquidation of the world into a system of exchange that Baudrillard describes as hegemony. This fanatic ‘desolating destructive relation to the concrete’ results in a sort of ‘majesty of freedom’ or anarchism: the principle of the French Revolution, la liberté et la terreur, is presaged in Islam’s principle la religion et la terreur (358). In truth, obedience rather than freedom is the essence of religious terrorism: ‘In any religion, such as Judaism or Islam, where God is comprehended only under the category of the One, this human lack of freedom is the real basis’ (Hegel Reference Hegel1987: 156). However, there is neither true freedom in political terrorism, nor true obedience in religious terrorism. The only true law is enthusiasm or passion for the negative, which is governed by the autoimmune paradox of a nihilistic attitude towards all positive values that ordinarily sustain the self (PH: 359). This passion may appear as ‘love, the most fervid’, but it is a love of death, and thus not love at all, given that Hegel identifies love with life (PH: 359; ETW: 305). When passion and fanaticism cool, ‘no moral principle remained in men’s souls’, which is why positive religion only exists with a moral conscience that is capable of ‘standing directly in a relation of equality with every self-consciousness’ (PH: 360; PhG §647). Any religion lacking that will not resist the pull of the purely negative universal and the slide into violence and death.
Our tendency is to read Hegel’s account of religion and human history as a grand, Eurocentric narrative of the progress of humanity towards universal values.Footnote 20 Camus is not entirely wrong to see the Phenomenology as ‘a meditation on despair and death’ which are not fully escaped even in its final pages (Camus Reference Camus1956: 137). It is easy to see how the achievement of ‘absolute knowledge’ could be misread as definitively overcoming the pull of a transcendent, negative ideal, which would lead us to the quietism of ‘the Self contemplating itself in itself in its pure logic’ (Nancy Reference Nancy2002: 76).Footnote 21 But such a culmination of Geist would be a ‘life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation’, whereas Hegel envisions us achieving a selfhood and community that can ‘endure’ and ‘maintain’ in forms of incompleteness (openness to the other) and symbolic death (of the individual into a fully social being), because only in ‘utter dismemberment’ does spirit find itself (PhG: §32). What must take place is a radical transfiguration of the incarnate death found in terrorism into a form of self-consciousness in which the individual enacts ‘the universality of the Spirit who dwells in His community, dies in it every day, and is daily resurrected’ (§784). Rather than having religion wither away, Hegel believes that ‘revealed religion’ must enact a ‘reconciliation’ with the Absolute in the ‘heart’ and via a ‘love’ that permeates the community, is forgiving of all evil, and is accepting of the other (§787).Footnote 22 In both Derridean and Girardian terms, this life in death and dismemberment is the taking up of a position of a witness, an opposition to all victimization, and a radical sort of hospitality (Girard Reference Girard1978: 210).Footnote 23 Derrida thinks of this as the recognition that ‘a certain interruptive unraveling is the condition of the “social bond,” the very respiration of all “community”’ (Derrida Reference Derrida1998: 64). I maintain that it is possible to read Hegelian absolute knowledge (both philosophical and theological) as an absolute deterritorialization of the heart that resists all reterritorialization and exists within a loving openness to otherness as such.
IV. Hegel on political terrorism
Terrorism seems like such a nihilistic degradation of any form of spiritual life that one might legitimately ask whether it is simply the collapse of Spirit or whether it has some positive function to play in Hegel’s Phenomenology. Such a positive function seems essential to avoid the pessimistic conclusion of the earlier pan-tragicist reading, in which the dialectic of history inevitably collapses into (and never really emerges out of) the cycle of violence. For example, Rebecca Comay argues that terrorism turns the subject inward, into a will that merely wills, an ‘empty shell of subjectivity’, which is how she understands Kantian morality as asceticism (Comay Reference Comay2011: 90). Such asceticism falsely believes that it overcomes terror ‘through a sacrifice of particularity’, when, in fact, morality is just the ‘prolongation of terror by other means’ (93).Footnote 24 Comay justifies this claim by arguing that morality is just terrorism directed inwardly, which means that the dialectic ends up back at the nihilistic aestheticism of the completely disrupted individual found in culture (Bildung), prior to the escape into faith and pure insight (112). Such a reading is, I believe, not plausible. But to understand why, we should turn to the most complete account of terrorism that Hegel gives, which is found in a rationalism rooted in a transcendental, political notion of the universal will and in a constructivist metaphysics.
I will not recount the dialectic of wealth and state power that results in a hegemonic impasse and in the completely alienated individual found in Hegel’s appeal to Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew. The end result is precisely the sort of nihilism that we have just seen when love is directed to things, dead matter and empty ideals: social life as culture (Bildung) turns into a ‘nihilistic game’ (PhG: §521). The hegemony of wealth and state power results in the recognition of the ‘vanity of all reality and every definite Notion’ as well as a ‘vanity which knows itself to be such’ (PhG: §525). Comay’s argument is based on parallels between the despair and nihilism seen at this stage and the figure found at the end of the development of morality—the beautiful soul. That figure represents a form of Romanticism wherein morality collapses into melancholy, madness and consumption, but it must be recognized that Hegel’s dialectic does not pass through the beautiful soul (Comay Reference Comay2011: 116; PhG: §668). Instead, the beautiful soul clearly is a lapse in morality and not its culmination: it is someone with a ‘hard heart’ who cannot meet the confession of the other and admit to their own wickedness (PhG: §667). The dialectic only moves through the person who can see themselves in the other, can forgive in a way that is also ‘a renunciation of itself’ (§670). Although Hegel is critical of Kant’s moral formalism, there is absolutely no reason to think that Hegel cynically sees morality itself to be a perverse, tyrannical and ascetic force that breaks down into a sort of nihilism.
Hegelian political terrorism must be read through the hegemonic elimination of all values due to the self-undermining nature of wealth and power in the domain of culture.Footnote 25 Hegel describes this as a ‘bottomless depth, in which all stability and Substance have vanished and in this depth it [the subject] sees nothing but a common thing, a plaything of whims, an accident of caprice’ (PhG: §519). This emptiness of the world of culture reflects on the self itself, and the alienated person seems to themselves ‘to be completely devoid of essence, sees that its pure personality is absolutely not a personality’ and so its ‘gratitude’, for whatever share of wealth or power it achieves within the meaningless system of exchange, turns to ‘the feeling of the most profound dejection as well as of extreme rebellion’ (§517). In effect, the very preconditions for recognition and even for a conflict over recognition between agents do not exist.Footnote 26 The resulting dialectical progression—away from Bildung and eventually to Moralität via terrorism—is not a struggle for recognition, but is the story of people tossed about like ‘playthings of those raging elements’ of ideological systems and empty universals (§484). In other words, we cannot see political terror simply as political violence among competing factions for either economic or political values, which is how Pinkard reads the Terror (Pinkard Reference Pinkard1996: 185). Cameron and Goldstein recognize that terrorism cannot be understood as conflict between ‘ideational realms’ (Cameron and Goldstein Reference Cameron and Goldstein2010: 76). But their account cannot make sense of how total nihilism can issue in any action besides total annihilation except by preserving a notion of the dialectic between the individual will and community recognition, which is precisely the sort of revolutionary conflict between ideational realms that is inadequate to explain terrorism. Their ‘uniquely modern logic of identity, community, and the dynamic of terroristic violence’ lacks the paradoxical structure of autoimmunity (Cameron and Goldstein Reference Cameron and Goldstein2010: 61).
The paradox that enables the autoimmune reading is actually found in Hegel’s Logic: the identity of idealism and materialism.Footnote 27 The pure I and the non-I are empty, equivalent and incapable of sustaining meaning or life: ‘pure being is the pure abstraction, and hence it is the absolutely negative, which when taken immediately, is equally nothing’ (Hegel Reference Hegel1991: 139; PhG §574). Therefore, the two paths out of the nihilism that results from Bildung, i.e., mere faith and pure insight, remain flights into Nothingness. They misidentify their empty objects with Being: they arrive at an ‘Absolute without predicates, an Absolute unknown and unknowable’ (§573). The paradoxical logic of autoimmunity is required to make sense of a dialectical progression out of this state, for only then can we make sense of how spirit (Geist) is sustained rather than destroyed by a transcendent ideal that is both everything and nothing. Rather than total annihilation in nothingness (which is identical to reunification with Being), the terroristic mind becomes violence incarnate suicidally directed towards the I and the Non-I. Terror immunizes itself against the structural violence of the world order by taking its own destruction in hand, by refusing any positive value other than death. But this war against the war that is the immune system of hegemonic power is only quasi-suicidal. In the political realm, it sustains itself with rituals directed towards an empty ideal of a universal will of the people.
Religious terrorism emerges from the nihilistic path of mere faith, while political terrorism emerges via the path of pure insight. Through pure insight, self-consciousness turns the meaning of the world and its objects into their mere utility. Hegel believes that the attempt to reconstitute the world through this idea essentially hijacks the notion of true knowledge (i.e., insight into the essence of a thing) and ignores the contingency that infects all knowledge qua utility (PhG: §580). Utility fails actually to be objective: self-consciousness layers its meaning across objects according to its own needs and will. The useful is said to be ‘an empty show of objectivity separating self-consciousness from possession’ of the essence and truth of things (§583). Utility is ultimately a subjective, constructivist and idealistic metaphysics, in spite of its pretensions towards empiricism.Footnote 28 The particular self sees itself as the transcendental self, as an instantiation of the universal: constructivism enables it to see itself as the creator not only of meaning but also of things themselves in so far as they are entirely without essence. Hegel calls this an inner revolution and the emergence of Spirit as absolute freedom (§584). What this means is that self-consciousness no longer regards itself as having to attach itself to the existing metaphysical or even social-normative structures in order to find itself, because it holds that all ‘spiritual “masses”, or spheres’, all ‘essence and actuality’ are products of self-consciousness (§584). The result is that ‘the world is for [self-consciousness] simply its own will, and this is a general will’, although not in the sense of traditional social contract theory (§584). Instead, self-consciousness sees itself as ‘a real general will, the will of all individuals as such’ (§584). Although Pinkard and others read this shift towards the general will as a moment of traditional social contractarianism, it is in fact a moment of complete delusion. The notion of the general will has been made absolute, ontological and thus a fiction created by extreme subjectivism and narcissism, resulting in a completely unconstrained self-consciousness.
Although self-consciousness regards itself as ‘universal consciousness and will’ and in so doing finds absolute freedom, it must be said that this is a falsehood, the product of a misguided erasure of the difference between individual and universal consciousness (PhG: §586).Footnote 29 That false freedom results in terrorism, because it cannot allow anything to ‘become a free object standing over against it’, which means that it is anarchic: this will ‘cannot achieve anything positive, either universal works of language or of reality, either of laws and general institutions of conscious freedom, or of deeds and works of a freedom that wills them’ (§588). In order to avoid the arbitrariness of its ‘truth’, its separation from the universal, and its actual lack of true freedom, all that can be done is ‘negative action’ and ‘the fury of destruction’ (§589). Death is the effect and ‘characteristic work’ of absolute freedom: the ‘objectification’ of absolute freedom—its ‘negative nature’ made actual—is ‘the terror of death’ (§592). This requires an inner purification, an ascetic connection to a terroristic notion of virtue qua obedience to the universal and world-negating will, so that nothing personal can disrupt the illusion of universality (PH: 450). Consciousness exists for itself as ‘an object that no longer has any content, possession, existence, or outer extension’ (PhG: §590). It is not difficult to see how this nihilism, self-aggrandizement, and messianic relation to the universal turn into terrorism. In order to become death, the subject must see itself as the ‘inflexible cold universality’ and a ‘discrete, absolute hard rigidity’ of a ‘self-willed’ atom—paradoxically asserting itself to be nothing and yet everything (§590). In so doing, self-consciousness loses ‘the positive essence of personality’ (§592). Terrorism becomes suicidal to erase that conflict between its particularity and its universality. Absolute freedom as terror ‘puts an end to the thinking of oneself, or to self-consciousness’ (§592). We can clearly see here Baudrillard’s paradoxical conception of terroristic singularity and universal excess, as well as the autoimmune aporia of a self-directed violence that also attacks the valueless world in the name of equally valueless ideals.
Hegel’s solution to how the shift from terrorism to morality takes places again relies on the logical fact that the empty universal, the transcendent as Substance, is equally Nothingness and Being. When held in its sway, it is the most real. Upon witnessing its destructive nihilism, it can be abandoned as unreal and the actual world can be seen as something real. But that threatens to simply return us to the earlier stage of empty materialism (Bildung). Hegel worries that terrorism will simply fill us with ‘fear of the lord and master’ and cast us back down to ‘the ethical and real world of culture’ (PhG: §594).Footnote 30 But this does not happen, in part because the master-slave dialectic was not at all present in political terrorism: ‘there was no reciprocal action between a consciousness … and a valid external world’ (§594). Terrorism is not operating like domination or oppression, which had to repress the other and, in so doing, retained a tacit recognition of the other. Nor does terrorism act like reason or as critique to get the world to ‘behold its negation or alienation in this form of pure abstraction’ (§594). Terrorism does not defeat hegemony: it shows, against its own intentions, that we have defeated ourselves by failing positively to construct social selfhood. The sheer emptiness of the universal will, whether manifest as the will of God, the political will, the will to power or wealth, returns us to ‘absolute positivity’ or the task of establishing real, shared values (§594).
What this means is that we come to realize that our task is to find identity with the universal will only when we are engaged in ‘pure knowing qua essential being’ or in the task of discovering its actual content (PhG: §594). Terrorism deceives itself about having ‘removed the antithesis between the universal and the individual will’, which, when it shatters, forces self-consciousness into the challenge of discovering the universal will and finding real freedom in truth (§595).Footnote 31 This recognition is said to be the emergence of ‘the moral Spirit’ because we, as self-conscious beings, have ‘gained the mastery’ over the dialectical ‘antithesis of the certainty of self and of the object’ (§596). The self is no longer set in stone and is no longer simply receiving its content and will from external things, from Bildung, or from empty universals. Instead, consciousness comes to see that it is real only insofar as it achieves true knowledge of itself via moral knowledge of its duties. Thus, Kant’s categorical imperative underlies true self-knowledge and the recognition that we are more ‘the universal will’ than an ‘atomic point’ of consciousness (§594). But this is tempered with a recognition that one’s own ‘knowledge and conviction are imperfect and contingent’ and that pure duty is always ‘the content of another consciousness’ (§607–8). We must not lose ourselves to the universal will and must remain committed to the unfolding of social life through deliberation with alterity. Through a series of developments that I cannot detail here, we arrive at ‘conscience’, which ‘stands directly in a relation of equality with every self-consciousness; and the meaning of this relation is not an impersonal law, but the self’ (§647). I find no evidence that morality itself is viewed either as perversion, terror, asceticism, aestheticism or under any of the other profoundly sceptical descriptions that Comay gives in her argument that the moral outcome of the Enlightenment is simply another form of hegemony (Comay Reference Comay2011: 82, 17).
V. Conclusion
One of the more difficult moments of Hegel’s dialectic is the sublation of the nihilism and absolutely disrupted self at the end of the Bildung section of the Phenomenology. The paths of otherworldly faith and pure insight seem like solutions to nihilism, but in fact they remain, to use Hume’s phrase, sceptical solutions that do not establish a stable social self against the impersonal orders of wealth and power. Faith and pure insight culminate in a universal ideal of an external will that is posited as Being but, due to its complete negativity, is also Nothingness. It is only as a response to this annihilation of difference by the hegemonic forces of wealth and power that terrorism makes any sense. Cameron and Goldstein posit that modernity (and its extension in terrorism) is attempting to replace ‘the old particularist, differentiated world with a new one that instantiates its respect for the will as the source of all meaning by establishing the duty of universal membership in a universal community’, which makes the turn towards terrorism and absolute destruction extremely puzzling (2010: 82). Their answer is simply that all instantiation of positive values by individuals will be particular and, therefore, cannot embody the universal community. Acting ‘non-instrumentally’ and ‘outside prudential calculation’, terrorism destroys all that exceeds the limits of the community (Cameron and Goldstein Reference Cameron and Goldstein2010: 80–81, 85). The problem is that everything exceeds the limits of a community based on Nothingness. Reading terrorism as Fraternity-Terror merely trying to form and regulate the community makes such suicidal, non-prudential behaviour extremely puzzling. The account by Cameron and Goldstein not only fails to make sense of the paradoxical logic of terrorism, but it seems to contradict itself when it claims that terroristic action ‘does not leave the residuum of particularity behind it’, while also claiming that all action of individuals is particular (2010: 85, 82). What the logic of autoimmunity shows is that terrorism’s paradoxes are a function of the fact that it is responding to a hegemonic system that eliminates all value and particularity already. What terrorism does in response is make itself into the purely particular, that which resists all exchange, all universality, while also cloaking itself in the self-deception of being universal and, therefore, appearing as justified as is possible prior to the emergence of morality.
The nihilistic, hegemonic situation that Spirit (Geist) finds itself in calls for a response beyond fealty to or subjective violence in conflict with power or wealth; or else it collapses into pan-tragicism, where all that exists is the master-slave dialectic and struggles of interpersonal recognition. What the autoimmunity concept makes clear is that the only response against hegemony is to actualize difference as such. Terrorism creates death incarnate and, in so doing, performs acts of radical, excessive difference that resist hegemonic incorporation. It is also engaged in a symbolic warfare against this totalizing power, showing that even when it is most absolute, the particular remains, even if—paradoxically—it only remains to kill itself. Being left with only such a radical response, terrorism makes the objective or systemic violence of the current system evident. It is not a subjective act of revolutionary violence in a war against a competing force. It instead acts to create a pervasive atmosphere of violence, making visible the ‘invisible tentacular form of violence of the inexorable world process’ (Baudrillard Reference Baudrillard2010: 48). If that invisible form of violence is regarded as the protective immune system of an organism, then terrorism is not simply a dangerous force in the system that the immune system will attack. Instead, terrorism’s violence renders the violence of the immune system ineffective, immunizing itself to violence by enacting violence against itself, becoming death incarnate, and creating an instability that may give rise to counterrevolutionary oppression or galvanize a revolutionary response.
But there are at least two problems with terrorism’s assertion of difference against hegemony. Firstly, it is self-deceived about what it is doing. We have seen that it must justify its actions by attaching itself to a hegemonic concept of a higher order than the actual world. Rather than see itself as acting for the sake of the particular and for difference as such, terrorism attaches itself to an empty ideal, the will of God or the universal will of the people. Terrorism cannot accept the particularity and insignificance of its action. It is a self-deceived decisionism. Neither can it recognize the potential ground for human community in the suffering caused by the violence of hegemonic power. Instead, it hides behind a higher, negative power, a sovereignty that threatens the destruction of the world. Secondly, it obviously does not actually recognize difference, which only becomes possible with the emergence of morality. With morality, we come to see that the universal ‘pure duty’ is also ‘essentially this individual self-consciousness’, with its epistemic and sensuous imperfections, as the objectification and enactment of morality in the world (PhG: §602, 608). With the development of a moral self (‘the self of conscience’) we create a ‘third self’ that combines the legal person, which merely exists in terms of its status within the systems of wealth and state power, and the self as ‘absolute freedom’, i.e. the ‘perverted, and perverting and distracted, self of the world of culture’ that becomes the terroristic self (§633, 653). Those two notions (the social self and the absolute self) combine in moral conscience, where the ‘inner voice’ of morality is ‘a divine voice’, but to worship that voice is ‘at the same time essentially the divine worship of a community’, in the sense of a real moral community (§655–56). What ultimately takes place is that ‘consciousness has given up the hope of overcoming that alienation in an external, i.e. alien, manner’, and it is recognized that Spirit (Geist) is not the purity of self-relation but is ‘absolute difference’ or the unfolding of endless difference and variation in time (§803).
Religious and political terrorisms are ‘autoimmunitary movements … which produce, invent, and feed the very monstrosity they claim to overcome’: they fail to open out onto a future (Derrida Reference Derrida2003: 99). Derrida’s political alternative is no longer to be self-deceived about these aporias which issue in both trauma and decision, and to envision a future conceived of in terms of international law which overcomes the hegemonic power of capitalism and nation-states—which he recognizes is a vague, utopic hope that is ‘in the name of’ a democratic community (Derrida Reference Derrida2003: 114). Based upon a deconstruction of the notion of sovereignty and other ontotheological notions that we see at work in both terrorism and hegemony, Derrida expresses a ‘faith in the possibility of this impossible and, in truth, undecidable thing from the point of view of knowledge, science, and conscience that must govern all our decision’ (Derrida Reference Derrida2003: 115; Derrida Reference Derrida2005: 157). Undoubtedly he sees this aporetic response and his denial of the power of knowledge, science and moral conscience to achieve absolute knowing of that alternative to terror and hegemony to be something that puts him beyond Hegel, who calls the culmination of Spirit the establishment of Science (PhG: §798). But Hegel’s Science concerns the ‘method of movement’, and his phenomenology is the study of that movement in history (§48). Neither is knowledge of what that movement will beget in its ‘spontaneous becoming of itself’ (§20). In other words, Hegelian Science is the analysis of the purpose of the activity of subjects responding to and giving rise to ‘absolute otherness’ (§26). Therefore, I take there to be an ethical alternative to the hegemony of pan-logicism and the perpetuation of terror or pan-tragicism. That alternative is absolute knowing, as a community committed to understanding itself as the other, to working out the logic of the different forms of Spirit (Geist) even if those forms contain ‘an internal contradiction, an indecidability, that is, an internal-external, nondialectizable antinomy that risks paralyzing and thus calls for the event of the interruptive decision’ (Derrida Reference Derrida2005: 35).
