Introduction: The Kenotic Subject and the Ego

Rowan Williams’s theology can be understood as an ever-deepening meditation on a set of recurring themes. In reading his work, there is the sense of an early-intuited and fertile complex of ideas that are broached again and again throughout his career. If one navigates the sweep of his scholarship, one sees how certain authors and styles of arguments are reworked continuously – non-identically to be sure, but with a remarkable continuity of perception nonetheless. His reflections on human subjectivity appear no different on this score, and in fact can be traced to some of his earliest work.Footnote ² Sufficient attention on the outlines of his thought surrounding selfhood have been given elsewhere,Footnote ³ but it seems useful here to focus on one nexus of concepts that might clarify his project more generally, and thereby ameliorate the overreaches in his prose which here and there might be found. I am referring here especially to the commentary of a few sympathetic readers who think that Williams’s critique of egocentricism, occasionally, has the unintended inference that a lacerating hyper-vigilance (within the context of apophatic prayer) is the only remedy, or prophylaxis, against an idolatrous capturing of the divine. There is the consideration of Mike Higton that Williams’s ‘writing is too unrelentingly agonized – too aware of the possibilities of self-deceit, too aware of the dangers of cheap consolation’.Footnote ⁴ Benjamin Myers is not far from this when he says that Williams expresses the ‘deep conviction that life must always remain unconsoled, that the best we can hope for is to be stripped bare, exposed, and forgiven under the stark relentless light of reality’.Footnote ⁵ Because of this, he asks whether Williams’s ‘deep preoccupation with the problem of fantasy’ is not ‘in danger of becoming myopic’.Footnote ⁶ John Milbank also has qualms that Williams’s preference for ‘a naked stripping of all self-imaging’ sometimes hints towards the option that all self-representations are, by default, ‘almost necessarily delusory’.Footnote ⁷ Now one might query whether this is really the cumulative effect of Williams’s prose, which in its totality does not leave me with such an impression. But be that as it may, the appearance of similar commentary between differing readers should give us pause at least.

It will not be the task of this essay to investigate all of these claims, and judge whether they are completely accurate as regards the broad tenor of his work. It would be hard to deny, for instance, that Williams (already in his early work) expressed tendencies that open him to some of these critiques. One could examine his lectures on T.S. Eliot,Footnote ⁸ as well as some sermons,Footnote ⁹ and see how they already are strongly geared towards counter-acting the Freudian/Feuerbachian idea that religion is an anthropocentric projection onto a godless void.Footnote ¹⁰ On these occasions, his language can appear rather strident, and possibly uneven. And while certainly not an exhaustive causality, it is safe to assert that it is against the background of these atheist critiques that his preference for negative theology gains some of its legibility – here specifically in the way that the experience of ‘the night of sense’ militates against the notion that all self-transcendence implies a drift into consolatory phantasy. However, my purpose here is not to enter the details of this debate directly, but rather to focus on how this sensibility might enter into his reflections on selfhood, and whether he himself provides a contrapuntal voice to his sometimes less-than-judicious rhetoric.

Donald MacKinnon

George Steiner, in an encomium to the late Donald MacKinnon, once remarked how MacKinnon was a man ‘deeply fascinated by pain’.Footnote ¹¹ One wagers the same could be said for MacKinnon’s one-time student Rowan Williams, who in many ways is the contemporary heir to his proclivities, and specifically as regards ‘the tragic’.Footnote ¹² It is well known that MacKinnon, more generally, is a central persona within the renewed dialogue between Christianity and the theme of tragedy, and that it repeatedly enters his reflections like a stubborn leitmotif.Footnote ¹³ Much like his student, MacKinnon also considered the phenomenology of tragedy as rebarbative to any cosy metaphysics or instrumentalist reason which asserted that reality can be finally managed or contained. For him, the non-negotiability of tragic suffering within a finite world meant that there could be no harmless blending of relations between all the actors involved. To acknowledge this, was simply to have a clear-eyed vision of the way things are. This sentiment had a deep congeniality with MacKinnon’s wider preference for realist philosophies (over-against the British idealism of F.H. BradleyFootnote ¹⁴), and was of a piece with his wider focus on the question of temporality and its connection to moral development.Footnote ¹⁵ For MacKinnon, our time-bound natures are implicated and formed through ‘growth’ and ‘estrangement’,Footnote ¹⁶ experiences that are fundamental for our advancement in virtue. The temporality of human personhood does not, he stressed, necessitate a ‘facile determinism’Footnote ¹⁷ but rather provokes an awareness that we are able ‘to fashion or refashion’Footnote ¹⁸ ourselves in accordance with the givens of memory and circumstance. It is through this narration that we achieve adulthood and coherency, in which we are able to let go of past identities (or fixations) in our journey towards ethical maturity.Footnote ¹⁹ Dwelling within the constraints of time necessitates a kind of loss (which might be tragic), but it also grants the possibility of learning. It implies, to quote Williams’s summary, a ‘ceasing to feel and think in certain ways’,Footnote ²⁰ and thereby points towards an augmenting movement from moral childhood to adulthood, a journey from personal narratives that are self-serving towards a greater truthfulness about oneself and the world.Footnote ²¹ It is within this context that MacKinnon’s (and Williams’s) polarization on time and its tragic entanglements serves as a path whereby the ego and its fixations are once again reminded of their marginality.

It is against this background, I will argue, that we should read Williams’s reception of the Augustinian distentio animi (to be discussed shortly). However, we will also need to read this essentially kenotic account of selfhood against the background of certain ‘postmodern’ accounts of pain, from which it needs to be distinguished. In this regard, it is advisable to heed Graham Ward’s argument that the preference among a number of continental theorists for the perpetual suspension of surplus desire (jouissance), and its consequent fetishizing of nothingness, ultimately valorizes abjection itself as the telos of human longing.Footnote ²² He argues that without any speculative or eschatological ideal of completion – however asymptotic that ideal might be – we remained locked within an account of suffering that is finally ‘sadomasochistic’,Footnote ²³ one where a directionless incompletion as such asserts the truth of our nature. On this account, which has strong affinities to a Lacanian imaging of desire,Footnote ²⁴ there is no transcendent supplementation which we can expect, but rather the bad infinity of the post-Kantian sublime.Footnote ²⁵ Ward polemicizes that this postmodern vision is a bastardization of the Christian narrative of suffering, which, in contrast to an unending and hopeless abjection, is encompassed within a christological incorporation.Footnote ²⁶ Here suffering is conceived within a kenotic obedience and self-donation (Phil. 2.1-11), one that participates in an eternal economy of plerosis that, ever so incrementally, comes to manifest the plenitude of the Incarnate Son in the particularity of all beings (Col. 1.15-20; 1.24–2.5).

Our need to mention this crucial distinction is, as we will see, related to the fact that Williams’s account of desire is somewhat influenced by poststructuralist accounts of signification (à la Derrida), and that he, more generally, is not completely immune to its subterranean influences (despite his often critical reception of its excesses). Moreover, it also has connections to the worries, mentioned previously, regarding Williams’s partiality towards a stark conceptuality of the self-emptying of the ego. It is for this reason that I would like here to correlate Williams’s reading of Augustine, as mediated through the ‘tragic’ sensibilities of Donald MacKinnon, with his reception of Hegel, particularly as this has been given through another of his great influencers, namely Gillian Rose. What I hope to show is that Williams’s juxtaposition of Augustine and Hegel on the question of selfhood allows him to harmonize an Augustinian theory of distentio and self-displacing desire with a Hegelian ‘comic’ reading of the self, one in which the dissolution of non-substantial aims is not finally destructive of selfhood. On the contrary, such loss is traversed through laughter, a mirth that operates in the trust that we may receive ourselves back again through the mediation of another. In this way, it coheres with the Christian logic of death and resurrection, of kenotic unhanding and pleromatic re-collection, and thereby refuses the melancholic suspension of postmodern sublimity.

Augustine, Temporal Distension and the Tragic

Before we begin with his take on Augustine, it seems prudent to lay out Williams’s theological account of the goodness of embodiedness and created finitude, since they have a deep connection to his understanding of the self, its desires and its tragic upshots. We should underline then that Williams’s dilations on the self, overall, place an emphasis on ‘the inescapable significance of time as a correlate of bodiliness’.Footnote ²⁷ Personhood cannot be prized from its materiality and relational connectedness, especially as its physicality and temporal placement contribute to meaning. For Williams, there is no matter without mattering,Footnote ²⁸ no objectivity apart from an intelligent investment: ‘the body is never helpfully described as an object like other material objects’, since it is through ‘that curious material transaction called language’ that ‘we continue to recognize that the oddity of this material reality that is my body is an oddity shared by other materially recognizable bodies’.Footnote ²⁹ As becomes clear, Williams’s phenomenology is resourced by Aquinas and Merleau-Ponty: the body is the form of the soul and therefore is ‘a meaning portion of matter’.Footnote ³⁰ The en-mattered body is inseparable from the limits of communicative and relational exchange; it is temporal and therefore cannot exceed its material circumscription, since ‘what we are are our limits’.Footnote ³¹ Our embeddedness means that we are finite, but it is precisely through these strictures (here adapting Heideggerian terms) that we are opened to ‘the being-at-hand of love’.Footnote ³² This is radically incarnational because what we are concerned with here is not ‘some mysterious inner core, but my body’. He thinks that if we do not come to love ‘our mortal vulnerability’, then our care of others will be stripped of its pedagogical basis, namely in the love of God and the love of self.Footnote ³³ This is because ‘we encounter God truly only when we accept our mortal fragility for what it is, do not seek to escape it, but put our trust in a God who speaks and relates to us through flesh’.Footnote ³⁴

Consequently, Christians should not aspire to an untrammelled existence separate from embodiment; ours is not a gnostic escape from the bodily but an incarnated discipline ‘to be perfected in grace’.Footnote ³⁵ It is within our temporal fragility that sanctity is received and discovered, where we come to ‘the recognition of the holy within the contingent order’, even though this progression is punctuated by the ‘disruptive’ and ‘discontinuous’ features of everyday life, by the continuing threat of ‘exile and alienation, loss and death’.Footnote ³⁶ Such means that our subjectivity remains exposed to the stochastic flux of ‘unstable circumstances’, and it is this that serves as the ontological foundation for the persistence of tragedy within the world. However, what is important to stress is that for the Christian an existence within time’s unfolding compass is about how these indeterminacies ‘bring to light who and what we actually are’, and so consequently requires a discipline without repression or a retreat from bodiliness, but a therapeutic transformation of physical desire: ‘what Christ delivers us from is not bodily circumstance, contingency, or instability’, but instead ‘the habits of mind and heart that make of this environment only a theatre for our private obsessions to be staged and our lust for control to be exercised’.Footnote ³⁷

Williams’s emphasis on our rapacious drive towards mastery, or the libido dominandi, transitions us to Augustine. A discussion of this figure is apt now since he is considered by some as being the foundational theorist of Western subjectivity, a proto-Cartesian thinker who anticipates the self-reflexivity of modernity.Footnote ³⁸ Williams takes a serious departure from this perspective: in his estimate, Augustine resists the suasions to ground self-knowledge within the ego. He does so by placing the soul within an epektasis of desire, in an active movement towards God in a continuing self-displacement and de-centering. In his estimate, the Augustinian self is at its profoundest recesses one formed through a ‘radical incompleteness and other-directedness’.Footnote ³⁹ Augustine’s understanding of the soul is relational, and is ontologically analogous to ‘the self-relatedness of the divine essence’,Footnote ⁴⁰ so that rather than being ‘proto-Cartesian or proto-Kantian’,Footnote ⁴¹ Augustine aims ‘to “demythologise” the solitary ego by establishing the life of the mind firmly in relation to God’, a God understood as ‘self-gift, as movement to otherness and distance in self-imparting love’.Footnote ⁴²

For Augustine, our identity is hidden within the relations of the Trinity, in the divine memoria, and therefore is not self-constituting. This differentiates Augustine from the Platonic account of anamnesis – or so Williams thinks – since Augustine is not talking about the soul as ‘a non-temporal thing’; the self is in ‘some sense made, by the infinitely painstaking attention to the contingent strangeness of remembered experience in conscious reference to God’.Footnote ⁴³ The soul grows within time, dilating out of a specific biography which comes to fruition ‘now in a new set of particular options, responses and determinations, providing a resource of given past-ness out of which the next decision and action can flow’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Augustine’s emphasis on memoria implies the inevitability of self-fabrication in time, and a denial of any notion of the soul’s timelessness.Footnote ⁴⁵ This sense of contingency and constructedness is linked to the imagery of the soul as a wandering pilgrim, existing without a final home in time. Its movement is continual, everlastingly drawn towards its final cause. However, the counterpart to this ascent is that the soul continues to be ‘wounded’ by divinity (here referencing the imagery of someone like Gregory of NyssaFootnote ⁴⁶ or John of the CrossFootnote ⁴⁷), and so is fragmented within its distentio, and in its inability to reach an achieved unity within time.Footnote ⁴⁸ This coheres with the Pauline concept of kenosis, and its cruciform pattern, which requires that we leave behind identities which hinder us from inhabiting Christ’s identity. Precisely because we are not God, and therefore limited, personal integrity cannot be achieved apart from self-dispossession, an acknowledgement that our true identity is ‘ungraspable’ (to reference the hymn preserved in Philippians 2). Of course, such an unhanding of self is always contextualized by resurrection, by the plenitude of the divine memoria, and therefore is not an emptying-without-reserve. The Bishop of Hippo suggests that despite the fragmentary nature of the soul, there is still the hope that God ‘can make a story, a continuous reality, out of the chaos of unhappiness, “homeless” wandering, hurt and sin’.Footnote ⁴⁹ So there is a double-sidedness to desire here: on the one hand, it is what continually draws us to our final beatitude in the life of God, but on the other, this attraction implies a perpetual non-satisfaction this side of the eschatological veil, a ‘questing’ that remains vigilant against becoming ‘glued to any object of satisfaction’.Footnote ⁵⁰

This dynamic is most clearly explicated in an essay on Augustine’s De doctrina. Here Williams unpacks Augustine’s distinction between frui and uti (‘enjoyment’ and ‘use’) in parallel to the pair of res and signum (‘thing’ and ‘sign’).Footnote ⁵¹ For Augustine, we can approach any particular res in two distinct ways: either we treat it as an end in itself, or as a sign towards something else. Since God for Augustine is supremely res – the one who forms the context in which all things are to be meaningfully positioned – he argues that created reality should be read as signum, since it does not have its existence within itself. Therefore ‘no worldly res is securely settled as a fixed object “meaning” itself, or tied in a fixed designation’. Such implies that ‘no worldly state of affairs can be allowed to terminate human desire … all that is present to us in and as language is potentially signum in respect of the unrepresentable God’.Footnote ⁵² Hereby the self is moved by dilectio towards God, who as the goal of human desire is the only one who can be enjoyed for his own sake, being the res itself. But since this is the case, and it is only within God’s life that res and signum – or essence and existence – coincide, it follows that created reality can only be ‘used’ towards ‘enjoyment’, since it is only God who is self-existing. Language of this sort is easily open to misinterpretation, since as post-Kantians we are suspicious of categorizing people as ‘means’ rather than ‘ends’. But in Williams’s opinion, Augustine’s language of uti avoids such a conclusion, since he orientates the final end of dilectio towards God. Precisely because God is the end of desiring, human beings should not be treated as an ‘end’ but rather as a signum towards our ultimate source: as he says ‘the language of uti is designed to warn against an attitude towards any finite person or object that terminates their meaning in their capacity to satisfy my desire, that treats them as the end of desire, conceiving my meaning in terms of them and theirs in terms of me’.Footnote ⁵³ Augustine’s deployment of the uti-frui distinction does not justify an instrumentalization of human persons for the sake of some transcendent goal – completion or self-satisfaction – at the expense of another’s given dignity. One could even suggest that it is precisely the opposite: it is to affirm that no human object can be reduced to a mere tool precisely because it remains a signum – an imago dei. Since desire is infinite, no worldly object can bring it to completion: only God can do that. Therefore, to speculatively project any person as the ‘end’ of my desire would be a form of destructive self-denial. It would idolatrously claim that a finite entity could act as ‘God’ for me. This would be the supreme instance of the libido dominandi, in which ‘the subject distorts its self-perception into fixity’, into a form of ontological closure whereby selfhood is reduced to ‘the meeting of needs in the determinate form in which they are mediated to [me] in the perception of the Other’.Footnote ⁵⁴ If we become stuck within this restriction, according to Williams, then we hinder spiritual growth, thinking that our good finds completion within time.

Moreover, Augustine’s account of desiring is linked to his idea that the self is ‘bound up with the desire for the Good’, for iustitia. Such means that ‘the self in construction is a self whose good is understood in terms of a universally shareable good’. For Williams, there is no true understanding of the self apart from a wider ordering of just relations between human subjects, and therefore necessitates ‘the dissolution of any fantasy that the good can be definitively possessed in history by any individual or any determinate group in isolation’.Footnote ⁵⁵ But this refusal implies that we accept a certain level of dispossessive negotiation, in which one must explain oneself and make oneself accessible to another.Footnote ⁵⁶ My own interiority is mediated: there is no immediate ‘access’ to the self, no bypassing of the deposits of language and history, and the various strategies we may adopt to make ourselves understood by another, and vice versa. In Williams’s mind, this negates any uncomplicated ‘transparency’ or ‘authenticity’ one might have,Footnote ⁵⁷ since ‘I do not cease to be vulnerable to other accounts of myself, to the pressure to revise what I say of myself’.Footnote ⁵⁸ To quote Jean-Luc Nancy, for Williams ‘The absoluteness…of [the body’s] sense, and the absoluteness of sense “in general”…is not kept “within” [the body], since it is itself nothing but the being-exposed, the being-touched of this “inside.” As body, the absolute is common, it is the community of bodies.’Footnote ⁵⁹ Similarly for Augustine and Williams, such vulnerability implies a kenosis, an imitation of the infirma divinitas as this paradoxically betokens an ‘emptiness of meaning and power’ which simultaneously makes him a signum of the divine.Footnote ⁶⁰ For Williams, the story of Christ’s resurrection and crucifixion – here in a quasi-Derridean fashionFootnote ⁶¹ – ‘represents the absence and deferral that is basic to signum as such, and is also the means ‘whereby God engages our desire so that it is freed from its own pull towards finishing, towards presence and possession’.Footnote ⁶² So rather than affirming a desire to control, Augustine’s theology implies that we surrender identities which place the ego at its magnetic centre, and come to find our deepest interiority in the exteriority of kenotic self-giving, thereby blurring any uncomplicated boundary between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’.

The general trend of this take on Augustine is analogous to my earlier comments on Donald MacKinnon, who as we mentioned tends to conceptualize temporal categories in terms of loss, and particularly our tragic deficiencies. The reoccurring motifs of misdirection, fragmentation, sacrificial suffering, and a pervasive regard for ontological woundedness certainly invites these comparisons. Williams in other places has drawn explicit connections between the Augustinian vision and tragic limitation, as when he says that for Augustine ‘an authentically contingent world is one in which you cannot guarantee the compatibility of goods’,Footnote ⁶³ or when he deduces that for Augustine the ‘world is tragic, in the sense that our fallen perceptions of the world are so flawed that we are constantly, and inevitably (since the Fall), involved in mistaken and conflictual accounts of our true interests’, and therefore that ‘loss is always bound up with creaturely virtue, [and] even sanctity’.Footnote ⁶⁴ The connections on this score, therefore, are quite apparent, even though it should be added that this picture does not imply a fatalistic or pessimistic resignation: as Williams shows (in The Tragic Imagination), moral augmentation is indeed a potential outcome of tragic fiction and experience (something that MacKinnon, in his own way, also gestures towards). It is therefore to be distinguished from pure stoicism.

But in saying this, I am not implying that Williams is in complete unanimity with MacKinnon. As Brett Gray has argued that Williams’s Augustinianism privileges a metaphysics more congenial to the claims of orthodoxy. MacKinnon was dogmatically more unstable in this regard, and tended to leave open the question of an eschatological redress of the tragic, due to his aversion towards theodicy. However, Williams is somewhat more open to this option, since his fundamentally Augustinian position ‘transposes’ human finitude into ‘an almost eudaemonic register’. Hereby the distentio of the self is placed within an eschatology in which the finality of the goodness is paramount – here in accordance with Augustine’s Platonic equation of the good with the highest principle of being. Moreover, this vision is mediated through a specific ‘social manifold’, namely the church, which assists the believer’s own gradual and incremental approach ‘towards repair’.Footnote ⁶⁵ In Gray’s phrasing, this constitutes Williams’s own attempt to put forward ‘an amelioration of the tragic’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Even though this should be distinguished from a final cancellation or erasure of history, it does imply that tragedy as such ‘does not persist as an intractable fate’ since new futures and options may be opened by God’s providence.Footnote ⁶⁷ Williams does not at all deny that healing and reparation can take place within time,Footnote ⁶⁸ nor does he deny that the ‘work of grace’ and ‘victory’ is ‘never produced by history itself’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Williams does not oppose revelational history to history-as-such – as if there could a purely secular recounting of time – and yet he would still insist on an eschatological reserve insofar as there is ‘no temporal mending of the drama’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Redemption always comes as a supernatural augmentation of nature, and therefore is not resourced from within human agency. To assert otherwise would be to deny the gospel and our radical dependency as creatures. As such, the soteriological tension will continue to persist throughout the interregnum of the ages; there is neither a perfect balancing of relations nor a comprehensive healing this side of the eschaton. As Williams imagines Christ saying in one of his poems: ‘…here is / not innocence but absolution, for / your scars are true but I (always) / will bleed in them’.Footnote ⁷¹

But one could ask (as others have): if this MacKinnon-trajectory predisposes Williams to ‘tragic’ sensibilities more generally, and his reading of Augustine in particular, then could one not assert that this amounts to a one-sided presentation? One could raise this question with legitimacy. However, I have hopefully already shown that these affinities within Williams’s thought are not absolutized, and that there are qualifications that counter its over-emphasis. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile developing these themes a bit further, especially as they reveal that more explicit ‘comic’ register which remains active in his contribution. It is for this reason that we turn to the influence of Hegel and Gillian Rose, in the hope of recovering some of these other trajectories.

Hegel, Gillian Rose and Comic Self-discovery

In this section, we hope to address the influence of Hegel and Gillian Rose on Williams’s thought. As we will see, Williams tends to bring out an emphasis in this ambit that is not always stated as strenuously in some of his other work. In these forays, Williams attempts to situate, in a more overt way, the truth of human personhood within the context of comic self-discovery. But before we get there, it seems worthwhile to unpack the contours of his reading of Hegel more generally, since this will provide background for his interventions.

Overall, Williams’s approach to Hegel is to be found in the primacy that he places on thinking, that is, how is it possible to conceptualize anything in particular. In ‘Hegel and the Gods of Postmodernity’,Footnote ⁷² Williams situates Hegel in opposition to a postmodern emphasis on sheer negativity (or différance) in which ‘the sacred’ is equated with pure ‘absence’ and ‘rupture’Footnote ⁷³ – a move that has strong affinities for the post-Kantian sublime of unknowable transcendence. Williams takes issue with the anti-representational strand of this tradition, which in its allergy to any invocation of ‘presence’ ends up privileging a realm always-already beyond the interpersonal field of human interaction and speaking. The practical upshot of this is a perpetual ironizing and relativizing of perspectives, with little resource for a social mediation of viewpoints in the here and now, because the staking of a particular representation means, on this view, that I am already compromised from the outset. For one thing, if I attempt to represent I have claimed an uncomplicated access to the representational object, and if I attempt to interpret and understand the presentation of another speaker, I risk reducing them to my own co-ordinates. It is for this reason that Hegel is often paraded within critical theory as the prime example of that ‘totalizing dialectic’ that reduces otherness to ‘my other’, to ‘a resolvable, confrontable difference’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Or to use the standard lingo, it implies a return to sameness. But Williams thinks that Hegel’s speculative philosophy, on the contrary, constitutes an attempt ‘to challenge the all-sufficiency of the polarity of simple identity and simple difference’. This is because what is ‘thinkable is so precisely because thinking is not content with the abstraction of mutual exclusiveness, but struggles to conceive a structured wholeness nuanced enough to contain what appeared to be contradictories’.Footnote ⁷⁵ In Hegel’s own language, thinking requires a transition from the immediacy of something like sense-certainty, with its particularities of the here, this and now, towards a more universal account of perception that will be able to accrue a multiplicity of properties to the object-in-question.Footnote ⁷⁶ In this way, it achieves a universality of concepts in an oscillating and unending concreteness of phenomenological description, whereby consciousness achieves an understanding of the object within ‘the totality of its determinations’.Footnote ⁷⁷ It is in this light that Williams argues that, for Hegel, metaphysical language in its general thrust is ‘bound up with the making of sense’, a move which distinguishes Hegelian thought from any ‘voluntarist play’.Footnote ⁷⁸ This kind of negativity does not emphasize the transcendent as an unspeakable rupture; rather, it requires a kind of ‘moral and spiritual dispossession and recreation’ on our part.Footnote ⁷⁹ This mediating dispossession here militates against a ‘depoliticized’ extraction from the human speaking-situation in which ‘there is a subtle suggestion that social and linguistic order (as opposed to this or that particular and questionable order) is what we need to be delivered from’.Footnote ⁸⁰

In ‘Logic and Spirit in Hegel’,Footnote ⁸¹ Williams argues that for Hegel thoughts and ideas cannot be engaged abstractly since they are always placed within the environment of their arrival, what he calls ‘their concrete, time-taking actuality’.Footnote ⁸² There is no thinking of any particularity without mediation, a term which he defines as something that is ‘realised and maintained by something other than itself alone’. For Hegel, otherness is always potentially thinkable, which means that any claim of ‘absolute otherness is fundamentally confused’.Footnote ⁸³ But because this context is never circumscribable, this means that thought takes place within a horizon of ‘an infinite relatedness, a comprehensive intelligibility’, a reality which we ultimately call God.Footnote ⁸⁴ Much like Augustine, Williams’s Hegel understands that there is no ‘timeless subjectivity’. Consciousness, since it is mediated, is tied to ‘the recognition of the self in the other’, in what is truly different to the ego.Footnote ⁸⁵ It should be registered that the language of ‘recognition’ has a deep resonance for Hegel, insofar as it plays a salient role in the continual rediscovery of rationality in the world. However, it is also the way in which we enter an awareness of selfhood: as he makes clear, ‘Self-consciousness is in and for itself while and as a result of its being in and for itself for an other’, which means that being-as-such, for Hegel, is perceived and understood ‘only as a recognized being’.Footnote ⁸⁶ This is not a conflictual model that supposes a necessary repression or reduction of one pole of the relation to another. Rather, we achieve a concretized freedom that is drawn out of ‘the otherness of what is given’,Footnote ⁸⁷ in which individuality is not conceived over-against or in competition with some kind of ‘passive externality’.Footnote ⁸⁸ To do so would make one guilty of the one-sidedness (Einseitigkeit) that Hegel’s speculative philosophy is at pains to oppose. For Williams, this means that the development of Spirit (or consciousness) is thus both ecstatic and kenotic, a self-augmenting and self-renouncing movement of ‘the self’s being-in-the-other’ – a move which (according to Williams) is simply a contemporization of the Christian notion of love.Footnote ⁸⁹

More could be added but enough has been said to lay the groundwork for his reception of Gillian Rose (which lies heavily in the background of the Hegel essays). The most explicit indications of this influence are found in two texts in particular: in his earlier text, Williams attempts to outline a metaphysical register that takes historicity seriously, one that does not halt that ‘process of exchange’ as this discloses the world as difficult.Footnote ⁹⁰ The trope of ‘difficulty’ is a reoccurring theme in Williams’s corpus, and carries with it overtones of attending and waiting, to use the language of Simone Weil,Footnote ⁹¹ of being committed to a redescription of phenomena, without reducing them to an easily digestible index that simply serves wish-fulfilment. One part of this intractability is that our speech takes place within a historical and temporal continuum, a sense of having recognized that collective meaning is not limited to my selfhood. Since we are sign-making creatures, we are concerned with that which ‘sustains intelligibility in the exchanges and negotiations that constitute our actuality’, and not therefore with inexplicable and rhapsodic articulations of the ego. I can only work and communicate what I want to say within ‘a distinct accumulation of past negotiation’ in which all unique vantages are made ‘accessible’,Footnote ⁹² so that our attempts at meaning-making are able to be ‘followed’ by others.Footnote ⁹³ This is essential to the process of coming-to-understand, since apart from being able to follow and repeat argumentation, we are not yet in a position to grasp what is being represented, and so would be unable to chart ‘how error arises’,Footnote ⁹⁴ since without an intelligible basis for political arguments we would be unable to recognize our mistakes. Rose suggests that every claim for meaning is socially implicated, and is not created by me alone: it is, to use her staple terminology, ‘the taking of a position’, and yet such positioning cannot be abstracted from ‘the entirety of the path’ which is yet to be undertaken, and therefore should not be foreclosed.Footnote ⁹⁵

This emphasis on staking a position does not imply a hopelessly antagonistic model, because it is through our discovery of the-self-in-the-other – albeit within ‘scarcity’ – that we come to an awareness of shareable goods, a context of ‘potential abundance’,Footnote ⁹⁶ ‘a common life’ that exceeds exclusionary competition.Footnote ⁹⁷ On the speculative level, this wager on the shareability of goods – that my goods are bound up with yours, that our interests are connected – suggests an ‘intelligible structure’ that is not the product of ‘arbitrary willed options’,Footnote ⁹⁸ since for Williams (as for Aquinas) knowledge about ‘being’ is primarily about the deepening of intellection, and not the imposition of will.Footnote ⁹⁹ From this metaphysical perspective, the discovery of a non-conflictive account of the good implies, on the one hand, a universalizing abstraction from particular experiences towards concepts that are comprehensive and simple enough to grasp multiplicity, and on the other hand, it suggests an ethical posture of ‘dispossession’ (or ‘collaboration’), a coming to an awareness that my good exceeds ‘any individual decision or project’,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ since (once more) there is no personal good that is opposed to the good of others. On the contrary, our understanding of what is truly good is expanded through differing examples of goodness.

For Williams, our intellection of the good is achieved in an engagement with particular standpoints as they continue to unfold within time; but this does not mean that the Good itself, the transcendent Good in the Platonic sense, is produced through these contingencies. The Good can be represented in negotiation, and yet it cannot be reduced to any individual representation. On this reading, Hegel is distinguishable from what Williams calls ‘the pathos of perpetual negation’,Footnote ¹⁰¹ as exemplified in post-Kantian sublimities (e.g. Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida). Of course, Williams and Rose admit that there is both a surplus and entropy in cultural bids for meaning – since reconciliation does not dissolve otherness – but this does not imply that a ‘labour of analogy’ between ‘processes of production’ is unachievable.Footnote ¹⁰² Conflicting paradigms may be agonistic, and yet there remains a hope that through a commitment to negotiation, we can charter avenues of commonality.

Williams’s recent essay on Rose could, however, be read as an attempt to provide a balance to the more austere vision given in his previous readings of Hegel. Here he emphasizes that Hegel’s dialectic can be described in comedic rather than tragic terms, a distinction which he takes from Rose.Footnote ¹⁰³ As far as definitions go, Williams follows Hegel, arguing that ‘Comedy arises from the gap between what we think we are and what in fact we are’, in which ‘the more developed the apparent mastery of the environment by the subject, the more developed are the comic possibilities’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ This is simply a reflection of the Hegelian idea that comedies at their height (e.g. Aristophanes, Cervantes) are dramatizations of the subject’s failure to recognize their projected aims and goals as being basically insubstantial, and therefore dissolvable before the claim of the Absolute.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ But unlike tragedies, which depict the dire consequences of one-sided passions, comedies do not lead to the destruction of the actor, but to the awareness that one has misrecognized the true workings of history. This opens us to the possibility of a ‘comic resolution’, where we ‘move decisively away from fear and bewilderment in the face of the other’. If we are to follow this Hegelian trajectory, as Rose and Williams argue, then it is ‘only recognition that liberates us, the recognition of the other as, like me, engaged, whether knowingly or not, in “comic” self-discovery’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Comic self-recognition thus occurs when we become conscious of the fissure between our various intentions and their actualizations, and it is this distinction or ‘gap’ which is amusing, thereby becoming a basis for a ‘holy’ laughter which is neither cynical nor despairing.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ This is why Williams has appreciation for a novel like Vodolazkin’s Laurus since it is able to imagine a repetitive displacement of personal identity without self-destruction.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ It does not exhibit the lacerating or harmful irony that Hegel dismissed.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Instead, the laughing of Hegelian comedy is emblematic of an ontological ‘humour’ that elevates ‘characters away above themselves and their crude, restricted, and false aims’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ For Hegel, that which is destroyed in comedy is ultimately non-substantial, while what survives are the characters themselves.Footnote ¹¹¹ Therefore to laugh-at-oneself does not necessitate postmodern melancholy or unremitting irony, but on the contrary a distancing from parochial visions that hinder human flourishing. It implies a relativization of the ego and an acknowledgement that what is active in history exceeds my own representations of ultimacy, and thereby opens me to a renewed discovery of self within the continuing dialectic of recognition and otherness.

This seeing of my own self within the other, as we have hinted at already, is intrinsically connected to the discovery of reason, a sense of coherency within ‘the risky activity of assuming recognizability’.Footnote ¹¹² Because every agent is comically distanced from aims incommensurate with the Absolute, this means they are able to recognize their own misdirected behaviour in the lives of others. And if their mutual discoveries are truly analogous, then there is an order that exceeds idiosyncrasies, and makes allowance for a comparison through a transcending medium of relation. For Williams and Rose, such mediation is the very essence of ‘reason’. This does not, however, abolish uncertainty, since reason according to Rose ‘has to act with a confidence not in its final justification but in the possibility of truthfulness’ – hence its riskiness.Footnote ¹¹³ But without an assumption of this basic truthfulness, so Williams argues, we end up baptizing the violence of exclusionary confrontation. He does admit, however, that a complete avoidance of violent confrontation is not always possible, since engagement occasionally requires coercion in order to move forward. But it is also critical to emphasize that such violence should not be equated with evil-as-such, or assumed to be always necessary.Footnote ¹¹⁴ It is rather a sign of tragic limitation or incapacity. The important distinction to be made here is that even though conflict may be unavoidable in some contexts, this does not mean it always has to be like this. If conflict arises, then reason unpacks how this conflict has arisen here, at this specific juncture. ‘Reason serves by exposing contradiction, showing the incomplete nature of this inhabiting and declaring that this need not be’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ It is about thinking why certain errors have occurred rather than declaring that they have developed from some necessary logic.Footnote ¹¹⁶ We should be wary of any position that underwrites prophecies of ‘foredoomed failure’ that assert ‘the impossibility of public virtue’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Both of these are fatal for a truly transformative politics. To avoid this gloomy picture, we need to rethink political progress not in ‘tragic’ terms, that is, in terms of inevitable defeat (to adopt Rose’s lexicon), but rather as a ‘comedy’ in which the self is able to recognize its mistakes, without self-laceration or what she calls ‘aberrated’ mourning.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Our diagnosis of error involves us in thinking more comprehensively about how structures have contributed to disorder, and also invites us ‘To know and think the complicity in and by which my agency is formed’.Footnote ¹¹⁹