SOURCE: Desmond, William. “Hegel, Dialectic, and Deconstruction.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 18, no. 4 (1985): 244-63.

[In the following essay, Desmond contends that, despite their differences, Hegel's dialectic is an important precursor to the theory of deconstructionism.]

I

The topic of deconstruction is one of the most controversial, if not the most controversial issue, in recent literary theory. A measure of this controversy is the manner in which advocates of deconstruction and its antagonists tend to square off against one another, each confronting his opposite with highly combative rhetoric. The very term “deconstruction” itself carries something of this agonistic spirit. Traditionalists, non-deconstructionists, tend to respond with a matching animus. Yet what is at stake in the controversy is not always adequately spelled out. The deconstructionists do not always present a clear account of the character of their critical strategies. The traditionalists, themselves not always sure of the precise principles of deconstruction, grow uneasy with the practice of the deconstructors. Whatever else is obscure, one thing seems clear on both sides: theory has invaded the sphere of critical practice, in a manner which demarcates this forking of the ways: some exult in the new theoretical liberation; others groan under an excess of theory that they claim carries them from a balanced experience of the literary work itself. The controversy, however we refine further its character, is precipitated at the point of conjunction of philosophical theory and literary, critical practice.

What is further noticeable is that many of those uneasy with deconstruction often refuse to counter it on a full theoretical level.¹ Theory, the implication seems to be, is precisely what perennially risks violating the original integrity of the literary work of art. Better to put Satan behind one, than to sup with this devil, however long one's spoon. The command to Satan, however, does not seem to carry much efficacy. This Satan is not a docile boy. We have to sit down to dinner with Lucifer. For deconstruction is a critical strategy that grows out of a set of complex philosophical presuppositions, and only some clarification of these presuppositions will effect any fruitful encounter with it, and perhaps too the countering of some of its subtle deficiencies. This I propose to do here.

We might approach the issue in the following stages. First, we need to indicate some of the historical antecedents of deconstruction. Many critics are not sufficiently familiar with the philosophical influences on, say, Derrida, the high priest of deconstruction. I propose first to look at what I will call the Nietzschean-Heideggerian heritage. Many deconstructionists work in the shadow of Nietzsche and Heidegger, but we also need to notice a great, let us call it, “antishadow,” namely, Hegel. Hegel is the great ancestor and the great antagonist. Much of contemporary European philosophy has reacted to Hegel, but also lived off the supposedly disjecta membra of his system. The historical repudiation of Hegel will provide, I claim, a crucial focus for defining the character of deconstruction. Second, we need to indicate something of the precise character of deconstruction which links it to Hegel and separates it from him. Third, we need to present Hegel's own view, particularly his notion of dialectic as a fruitful foil to deconstruction. My purpose will be to argue that there are profound affinities between dialectic and deconstruction, though there is a decisive parting of perspectives on this central issue. This central issue, let us call it the problem of the wholeness of the art work, will occupy our final reflections. Here, I intend to argue that Hegel's dialectic not only helps to do justice to the complexity of the literary work, as rightly emphasized by deconstruction; it also preserves its character of wholeness. The suspicion that this essential wholeness dissolves at the hands of the deconstructionists is one of the chief sources of the sense of unease with deconstruction. The notion of dialectic, I will argue, points to the literary work as an inherently complex whole, a whole which entails no denial of its dynamic dimension. Dialectic, to anticipate, facilitates a joint or double affirmation of the wholeness and dynamism of the art work. Deconstruction, by contrast, tends to accentuate dynamism in a manner which risks dissolving wholeness. Let us now see in more detail what this might mean.

II

Thinkers who determine the discourse of the deconstructionists are many, ranging from Marx to Lacan, from Freud to Saussure. Since our focus here is on the conjunction of philosophy and literary theory, two important figures stand out: Nietzsche and Heidegger. Both of these in turn define an important attitude to Hegel and to the entire tradition of western metaphysics.

Let us first look at Nietzsche. As is well known, Nietzsche exploits the Dionysian and Apollonian principles to understand Greek tragedy, and indeed the whole of art and life. The Apollonian principle defines that dimension of harmonious beauty where form, perfection, and wholeness predominate. The Dionysian principle refers us to the promiscuous energy of life itself, the Bacchanalian formless intoxication which destroys the limits of form, surpassing every stabilized perfection or fixed unity. Initially, Nietzsche conceived of art as the balance of these two principles, roughly corresponding to Schiller's Formtrieb and Stofftrieb, or what above I called art's wholeness and art's dynamism. In time, however, the Dionysian, it seems, comes to predominance. Dynamism, Dionysus, or more abstractly, the Will to Power, is not just one principle alongside another equally fundamental principle. Dionysus, the Will to Power, becomes the basic character of all being, as Heidegger points out.² The Will to Power becomes the Whole.

Why should this be important? Its importance here lies in the implication for the notion of form generally, and artistic form particularly. How so? Artistic form can never be ultimate, and becomes a provisional stabilization of the basic energy of being, the Will to Power. Nevertheless, we are always tempted to treat provisional forms or structures as if they were ultimate and unsurpassable. We tend to fix the form. But this is to forget what cannot be completely encompassed or concretized in any form or structure, the Dionysian Will to Power. Form, therefore, may serve to hide as much as it discloses. Or stronger, it represses what it cannot directly, consciously embrace. Form, looked at this way, inevitably contains a drift towards a denial, towards a falsification. To counter this drift, we need to “break the form,” in Harold Bloom's phrase.³ We need to let the repressed return and reassert itself. (The connection with Freud is strong here.) We need to let the energy of Dionysus dissolve the excessively congealed structures of Apollo. Applying these philosophical ideas to the literary work, we need to engage in a deconstruction of its seemingly obvious meaning, and expose the lacunae, the repressed, unspoken elements that a more simple reading glosses over.

Mention of the “obvious meaning” brings us to a second element in the Nietzschean legacy, namely, its antagonism to traditional metaphysics, said to be epitomized in the person of Plato.⁴ Plato versus Homer: this is life's basic antagonism, Nietzsche exclaimed, and sides with Homer.⁵ The viewpoint here is that the artist is closer to the Dionysian truth of things, while the metaphysician, Plato, exaggerates the Apollonian to the point of poisoning it. How so? Nietzsche holds that Plato's resort to the ideal entails a flight from, an evasion of the real. The eide, the ideas, the forms, then become an attempt to substitute an eternal world of pure Being for the visible world of Becoming. What characterizes eternal Being is pure stasis: the Forms are dead. Consequently, the Platonic transcendence devalues Becoming, the very ground out of which grows art, for Nietzsche the chief affirmer of life's will to power. Platonism is nihilism,⁶ for in substituting the fixed unity of eternal form for the pulsing multiplicity of the here and now, it reduces, negates the wealth of this given world. Once again, the forms must be dismantled, deformed, deconstructed, or in Nietzsche's phrase, the “Innocence of Becoming” must be restored once again. Becoming is without structure, a diversification without any absolute unity, a play of energies that never finally rests in any one definitive form. The dualisms of Platonic metaphysics, the oppositions it creates between body and soul, matter and form, time and eternity, art and philosophy, must be unmasked for their cowardice before purposeless becoming. The forms are not just there eternally; man, as will to power, puts the structure, the purpose into sheer becoming.⁷ Acknowledging this his own authorship of fixed structure, he must also be courageous enough to undo his work, to deconstruct what he has constructed and so undermine the illusion of an eternal permanence. As Nietzsche repeatedly asserts: creating and destroying are always found together. We have it in an immortal phrase in which dynamism is exalted over definite form, and its explosive, that is, destructive power disclosed, when Nietzsche proclaims in Ecce Homo: I am not a man; I am dynamite!

The obsession with fixed form, or the “obvious meaning” leads to this further consequence. Put succinctly, in the hands of the Platonists, it replaces art with logic. Discursive logos comes to predominance over poeisis and mythos. Logic particularly, Nietzsche implies, lends itself to a certain kind of illusion of unity, or unitary meaning.⁸ That is, the ideal of logic tends to be that of a univocal language. Logic insists on either the repudiation or resolution of contradictions. Opposed meanings either must be reduced to one single univocal sense, or else the opposition in question rejected as a transgression of meaning. In insisting on the ideal of univocal meaning, logic seems to seek to reduce language to a manipulable system, a lawful and rulebound system, a total, ordered structure within which everything has one definite place. Since the language of poetry is conspicuous by its lack of univocal language, it becomes logically suspect, indeed suspect to the point of being exiled from Plato's ideal city. The non-univocal language of poetry is now held secondary, parasitical on the ideal logical language of univocity. For Nietzsche this is another reversal of the true situation. It is poetry that is the more primordial. Univocal language is an impoverished version of this more primordial utterance. If I can adapt the title of one of Nietzsche's works, we need a Genealogy of Logic which will restore language from its deformation by the logic of univocity. What is concealed in the univocal ideal must be brought out. The concealed equivocations and contradictions must be coaxed into the open. To make clear a new space for the play of poetry, we need a critique, a taking apart, a deconstruction of this logical ideal.

Heidegger carries forward into the twentieth century and develops further some of these themes.⁹ The tradition of the west, he puts it, is essential logocentric, but this logocentrism tends to forget the source of truth. Primordial truth is not the simple, referential correspondence between definite propositions and a fixed external reality, but an event of disclosure, an unconcealing in aletheia. The Presocratic philosophers were closer to primordial truth, but with Socrates and Plato, and borne on by Aristotle and other great metaphysicians, a narrowing of the notion of truth occurs under the aegis of the logical ideal. The result is a forgetfulness of Being. The Platonic eidos or form secretly contains a will to power which determines the subsequent history of occidental metaphysics, which now devalues its grand heritage and ends in nihilism. But this end, nihilism, is implicit in the logocentric beginning itself, for both logocentrism and nihilism define different but joined extremes along the spectrum of the forgetfulness of Being. To recover, uncover again what is thus covered in this forgetting, we require a “destruction” (Destruktion) of metaphysics, and its overcoming (Überwindung). The Heideggerian “destruction,” of course, has been the focus of intense debate, and its defenders have denied that it is an essentially negative enterprise. The tradition of metaphysics, they insist, must be dismantled, to allow what is “unsaid,” “unthought,” and “unspoken” in it to show itself.¹⁰ The tradition of metaphysics thus becomes a vast text for deconstruction, as is made plain in Heidegger's own dialogue with so many thinkers from that tradition. The hidden tensions in the tradition must be brought to light, and particularly the dualisms and complementary oppositions of soul and body and so on that mark the western tradition since Plato. In the tension of these oppositions, a forgetfulness of Being may be detected. Hence the interrogation of these metaphysical oppositions may help us to renew the question of Being, and so alleviate and perhaps surpass the result of this forgetfulness, namely, nihilism.

I will turn to Hegel's dialectic later, but here we must note that Hegel functions as a kind of antipodes to some of the Nietzschean and Heideggerian emphases. What is the received picture of Hegel relevant here? Hegel develops, it is said, to the highest degree possible, the themes of western metaphysics, and by so developing them rounds off this tradition in an unsurpassable way.¹¹ Hegel himself seems to concur with this assessment. First, Hegel seems to be the logocentric philosopher par excellence. The real is the rational, the rational is the real, he asserts. Is not this to carry western logos further than Plato or any other? Indeed, Hegel's link with and transformation of the rationalist-idealist tradition is revealed in its extremity in that the highest category in his Logic, or Being in its richest determination, is the Absolute Idea. Moreover, Hegel holds to the necessity of grasping truth in the highest form, that is, in the form of system. Between system and Dionysus stands an absolutization of the Apollonian imperative, it would seem. Again, the Hegelian system seems to throw its order over things in a totalizing manner. No region of being seems to be exempt from its imperious sway. The ambition of the system seems only exhausted before the totality. Does not Hegel attempt to encompass the entirety of history as essential stages of a dialectical progress? More pointedly for present purposes, does he not subordinate art to philosophy? All these points are interpreted as showing forth the will to power in its most exalted and extremist form. The suspicion seems to be confirmed when Hegel implies that with him philosophy comes to a completion or an unsurpassable closure. I will indicate later that a more “open” reading of Hegel is possible. Nevertheless, the above account is perhaps the received, I almost said, frozen picture of Hegel. Given this, and given Hegel's purported propensity to snare himself in every trap that the Nietzschean heritage claims to expose, what great thinker seems more ripe for deconstruction?

III

Before touching further on this question, we need to state as succinctly as possible what is involved in deconstruction itself, given the guidelines of our historical remarks. We can summarize what is at stake here by confining ourselves to four main points: first, concerning the nature of language; second, concerning the character of critical analysis; third, concerning the limitations of the univocal ideal; fourth, concerning the inescapability of the equivocal.

First, deconstruction is a critical strategy consonant with a particular interpretation of language. On this interpretation language functions as an autonomous power. Thus, following Heidegger, deconstructionists are often fond of saying that man does not think with language, rather language thinks with and through man. Through this autonomous power more is meant than any particular speaker intends. Likewise, more is contained in language than any particular interpretation can comprehend. Every effort to pin down the strict meaning of language runs against a limit of failure. As Derrida puts it: the field of language lacks a center; rather language is defined by a free play of substitutions.¹² Language is an endless “dissemination” of itself, a diversification without absolute integration, a plurality of elusive signs that cannot be encapsulated within an encompassing totality. Consequently, in the interpretation of literary texts, there is no one definitive meaning which one definitive interpretation can exhaustively articulate. Indeed the inexhaustibility of language, should we be attentive to it, invariably presents us with a recalcitrance, an impasse, an aporia, a breakdown we cannot transcend. Any reading of a text which intends to be an absolute reading is not only a misinterpretation of language in its free play. Any absolute reading is an impossibility.

This is related to our second point: deconstruction as a strategy of critical analysis. For the naive temptation of the reader is precisely to think that his reading of language has, in fact, genuinely succeeded in its grasp of meaning. Deconstruction, by contrast, is a technique for disillusioning the reader with regard to this naive faith. The “naive” reader, trusting the surface of language, erects his partial interpretation into a total interpretation. Deconstruction exposes or attempted to expose the partiality of the partial, not by itself giving an absolute reading, but by attempting to show that no absolute reading at all is possible. On the positive side, the intention is to return the interpreting reader to the text, open to it, as it were, more humbly in his disillusion. It is important to reiterate that deconstruction is a strategy of analysis, albeit a form of subversive analysis. What “analysis” does is to confront an initially complex phenomenon which we tend to think we have mastered. In setting out more explicitly the elements of its complexity, this faith in our mastery is questioned and undermined. By “taking apart,” “breaking down,” the spontaneous and naive response, we open up this complexity in its inherent richness. The poetic work especially lends itself to the revelation of this inherent richness of language.

This inherent richness might be granted by many who do not practise deconstructive strategies, and so might seem innocuous. However, it is in relation to the limits of the univocal ideal, our third point, that the deconstructionist attempts to specify the peculiarities of this richness. For it the univocal ideal of language, said to be intimately lodged in the logocentrism of western metaphysics, is what primarily bars the interpreting consciousness from freely entering the Aladdin's cave of language. Logocentrism, univocity is ingrained so deeply in the texture of western consciousness, that it is all but impossible to acknowledge its presence. The univocal sense, logocentrism, works through us, ferments in the western mind, like a Heideggerian destiny. Our interpreting powers are determined in that direction, and only by a kind of hermeneutical wrench—the violent interpretation of deconstruction itself—can we free ourselves, or if not free ourselves at least become self-conscious, of this pervasive orientation. Even the deconstructionist himself does not claim complete liberty from this determination of the mind. As himself a product of the history of a western metaphysics, the logocentric ideal nests also in his own involvements with language.

The bewitching spell of univocal logocentrism, nevertheless, can be partly dispelled through deconstructive analysis. Univocal language, if subjected to close scrutiny, will invariably show its limitations, and moreover let this limitation emerge from within language itself. This brings me to my fourth point: the inescapability of the equivocal.¹³ For, if treated with deconstructive analysis, univocal language shows itself to contain an entire world of ambiguities and ambivalences. The univocal word seems to have one meaning and one only. But it often hides a plurality of meanings, some of which are antagonistic and contradictory. The univocal word, the deconstructionist indicates, is a word divided against itself, and against other words. The Apollonian surface of calm, unitary significance yields to a Dionysian tumult of warring words. Again, also reminiscent of the Nietzschean-Heideggerian critique of metaphysics, the deconstructive critic is a virtuoso of discovering in language hidden polarities and oppositions, inversions and reversals, doublings and mirrorings. Indeed, the impression is often created that the poem, say, becomes a disconcerting hall of distorting mirrors: we have nothing but a plurality of images without a fixed or stable original. There is no original—no author, or fixed subject that can be solidly represented, no final, finalizing representation that will restore all to stability. We have the scattering of images, related and unrelated, one image developing into another image, another distorting and subverting the first, an incessant flux of metaphors in ceaseless transformation and reversal.¹⁴ Difference, sheer difference, or multiplicity without an enjoining unity, is the keynote of this world. In this case sheer difference means the reduction of univocity to the equivocal. Univocity reduces the differences of multiple meanings to one central, determinate sense. Equivocity scatters again this one central meaning into a multiplicity without center or unity. Since, as Derrida says, the field of discourse lacks any center, deconstruction must aim to bring home to us this lack. It does so, one is tempted to say, by satiating us with an excess of equivocations. This may seem perverse to those supped on the more sparse economy of univocity. But this is the deconstructionists' whole point: it is the inherent intricacy of language itself that throws up this equivocal fare.

IV

We now turn to Hegel's dialectic, again confining ourselves to those points relevant to the issue of deconstruction. The suggestion here is that many of the themes implicit in the strategy of deconstruction are articulated in Hegel's view of dialectic. Indeed they display close affinities, even if, in the final analysis, as we shall see, they diverge in response to the crucial question of the wholeness of the art work. This divergence we will take up in the concluding section.

What then is dialectic? Dialectic is a major and wide-ranging concept, meaning a number of things to different thinkers. However, one theme seems fairly constant: namely, that dialectic has something to do with conflict. This we find, to name just some instances, in the conflict of opinions in Socratic dialectic, in the disputations of the medieval schools concerning controversial questions, in Kant's antinomies of Verstand, in Marx's class war. This theme of “conflict,” “antithesis,” “opposition” we also discover in deconstruction's emphasis on the equivocal. The theme is central also to Hegel, with the additional qualification that for Hegel dialectic has to do with the principle of articulation itself. In Hegel, the process of articulation involves reference both to the character of the real and man's own linguistic acts. Dialectic is something both in the order of thinking, or “logic,” and in the order of Being, or “ontological.”¹⁵ What flows from this? Immediately dialectic situates us in a world of process or Becoming. And, at least on this preliminary count, the Hegelian world is not unrelated to the universe of Nietzsche. We cannot fix the real into the frozen form, or congeal it into lifeless substance. We are greeted by a world in development in which dynamism, to recall previous terms, is a dominating dimension. The difference, however, with Nietzschean becoming is that this dynamism for Hegel cannot be characterized in terms of formless flux. It rather reveals itself essentially as an active process of forming, formation, rather than formless flux or frozen form. In Nietzsche becoming tends to be devoid of inherent structure, as when he speaks of the world as a monster of energy¹⁶; structure tends to be a comforting, necessary grid that we humans throw over chaos. With Hegel becoming is inherently a process of structuring, a self-structuring, again in a fully active sense. Dialectic is the principle of the articulation of this structuring. Hence dialectic from the outset implicates the notion of dynamic structuring, as if the energy of Dionysus were ultimately indistinguishable from the process of Apollonian formation, the first driving the process, the second giving this process shape, but the process itself being neither one nor the other but always both.

In addition, dialectic is related to the principle of articulation inherent in language itself. This is perhaps where Hegel's affinity with the deconstructionist most comes out. For Hegel, language at its richest is dialectical, but to hold this view entails some subordination of the normal logic of univocal propositions. In formal logic, a proposition ought to articulate a state of affairs in a manner which clearly separates it from its opposite state. A and not-A are mutually exclusive. As a linguistic unit, a proposition ought to have one definite meaning. And should we affirm this one meaning, we exclude the possible affirmation of the opposite. Hegel's dissatisfaction with this exclusionary logic follows from his view of the nature of being as Becoming. If the real is in process, its articulation cannot be fixed to one frozen form. What we find instead is a process in which a thing in time becomes other to its former shape, while yet in this process of differentiation remaining itself. Butler, canonizing the metaphysics of common sense, held: Everything is itself and not another. For Hegel, everything is itself and also other. Put somewhat differently: everything has some determinate identity—here Hegel would agree with Butler. But this identity is complex and defined by an inherent process of differentiation. This process of differentiation makes it to differ from itself as a simple identity, to become other than such (a similarity with Derrida's différance strikes one on this point). Reality in becoming is both itself and not fully itself, and the process of articulation moves towards the fullest determination of what the thing can become but is not yet. To do adequate justice in articulate language to these developments and transformation inherent in becoming, language must itself become more fluid.¹⁷ The notion of univocal propositions fixes language into an excessively rigid norm, fostering the exclusionary mentality of the “either/or” rather than the inclusionary perspective of “both/and.” To comprehend, to embrace the structuring process of becoming, the articulation of language must approach this latter possibility or itself become dialectical.

We can develop the point further if we remind ourselves that dialectic implies that an excessive reliance on univocity, if left to its own devices, tends to break down. We can put the point in terms of Hegel's understanding of Verstand. Verstand, the analytical understanding, tends to abstract from the flux of immediate sense experience, with the aim of stabilizing and differentiating this flux. Its aim is to differentiate, discriminate this flow, but it does so by asserting definite and fast distinctions. It abstracts but also separates, and so introduces some degree of structure, form, into the initial promiscuous tangle of experience. We might think that this analytical separation exhausts the work of reason, but this is not so for Hegel. The clarity and discrimination born of abstraction and analysis is a gain but it is also incomplete. In fact, what the analytical understanding fixes into hard and rigid separation, dialectic, or the continuing flow of articulation, tends to break down again. One of the chief advances of Kant's philosophy, Hegel thought, was to show just this: Verstand marches itself towards a series of fundamental antinomies or contradictions that it cannot resolve on its own resources. Put in the terms of the present discussion, fixed univocity deconstructs its own rigidity, and ends in a situation of antithesis and ambiguity which Verstand mistakenly believed it had completely overcome. The equivocal returns. For through univocity the analytical understanding tries to conquer a given equivocation; but its conquering categories are themselves conquered by equivocation on the other side of the established univocity. Dialectic, for Hegel, simply follows the flow of this development by which an initial unity, seemingly simple and hard set, breaks itself up into polarities, contradictions, antitheses, oppositions.¹⁸

The comparison with deconstruction is striking. Thinking makes war upon itself.¹⁹ It generates itself and drives itself forward by contradicting itself, creating itself anew out of the destruction of its own previous, partial forms. Indeed, Hegel insistently uses the language of “negativity” to bring forth this dismantling side of dialectic. In fact, it is for such reasons that Hegel incorporates the sceptical principle as an essential ingredient in all genuine philosophical thought. The sceptical principle, particularly as found in ancient, “noble” scepticism, we might say, confronts the experience of “nothingness.”²⁰ Everything we try to affirm with absolute fixity falls in time. Its fixity dissolves and comes to nothing. Thus Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit can be seen as an extraordinarily complex, all but epic working-out of this sceptical negativity of the dialectic. Here Hegel warns us that we must stare the negative in the face.²¹ And in the Phenomenology we discover consciousness trying to assert itself with complete certainty in a plurality of different forms, each of which it tries to fix as absolute. None proves absolute, each form breaks up out of its own inherent tension or strain. Each configuration (Gestalt) of consciousness disfigures itself, each form deforms itself, every construction deconstructs itself under the relentless power of the “negative.”

Opposition, antithesis, then, is unavoidable in every effort to posit or fix a unity. War is the father of all things, Heraclitus says. The negativity of dialectic, for Hegel, is generative of the process which constructs the forms of reality, or of consciousness, or of language, but it is also what deconstructs such forms in their partiality or limitation. For such reasons, perhaps, Hegel in his Logic²² explicitly praises the German language for containing words capable of directly contrary meanings. This is no index of the German language as a seat of confusion. It is rather a measure of its positive, embracing power. It articulates itself dialectically. As Hegel implies in his famous discussion of the Speculative Satz in the Phenomenology,²³ the normal propositional form is not completely adequate to articulate philosophical truth in the fullest measure. Richer language, language which contains a whole world within itself, a world inclusive of opposites, is required. The dialectical language of Hegel's own philosophical discourse is his effort to live up to this requirement.

Granting these comparisons with deconstruction, we now come to the further point with dialectic. Put most briefly, the power of negativity does not completely exhaust the process of articulation, but rather is itself completed by its balancing positive. At the heart of the “negative” we must affirm a positive. For Hegel reason in its negative dialectic flows into reason as speculative, or reason in its richest positive power.²⁴ The process of dissolving, of negating, is itself only possible on the condition of something that must be described in positive terms. The confrontation with the negative releases a positive power itself not capable of being characterized in negative terms alone. For Hegel, after deconstruction, dialectic opens up to a moment of reconstitution. This is perhaps most explicit in Hegel's notion of Aufhebung: something or some position is negated or cancelled; we transcend that something or position in this act of cancelling; but in that act of surpassing, what is cancelled is also preserved, contained as a necessary condition of the transcending move. Aufhebung entails the three dimensions of negation, transcendence and preservation. The limitation from which dialectic frees us, also binds us to it, as a necessary condition without which the fuller release would be impossible, and so as something which must newly affirm from the standpoint of the liberation. In more popular terms, terms which Hegel did not frequently employ, the breakdown of the thesis and its simplicity by its antithesis point further again to the synthesis of these two previous antagonists.

This emphasis upon a dialectical Aufhebung or more embracing synthesis distinguishes Hegel's dialectic from deconstruction. Both concede the breakdown of the simple unities of univocity; for univocity yields a simple identity without inherent differentiation or complexity. Both trace the process of antithesis emerging from such simple unities. But the deconstructionist interprets such antithesis as sheer difference or equivocation—opposition without unifying meaning. Difference dissolves identity. Hegel, by contrast, interprets the difference dialectically, not equivocally—this involves the claim that the many opposites are in fact capable of being held together, not indeed in any univocal unity, for that is impossible, but in a complex unity immanently differentiated, a dialectical unity. Equivocal difference dissolves univocal unity, but for this “dialectical identity” there is a reintegration of these differences beyond sheer equivocation. We are capable of thinking of the “togetherness” of these differences, of embracing a unity of opposites. Equivocal differences may dissolve univocal identity, but a dialectical unity seeks to embrace equivocation and go positively beyond its negating, dissolving power. Hence Hegel gives as a definition of the Absolute: the identity of identity and difference. That is, there is a complex unity, a dialectical identity which embraces both univocal unity and equivocal differences. This unity is absolute because it is absolving, freeing, not just dissolving. It absolves us, as it were, from the sense of difference as sheer hostile opposition, the animosity of the mutually negating dualisms said to beset the western tradition.

To summarize, then: the process of articulation for Hegel does not just form and deform, construct and deconstruct. It reforms and reconstructs. It reintegrates into its fuller developments the partial articulations it has previously surpassed. Indeed, it is this reintegration which gives discourse its inherent density, its immanent intricacy, its rich and compacted fullness. Like the deconstructionist, the dialectician may point to this “overdetermined” wealth of discourse, but to interpret this wealth in terms of the equivocal is to fall radically short. It must be interpreted in a manner transcending the univocal, but also on the other side of equivocalness. A dialectical interpretation is one such interpretation which tries to do justice to the rich ambiguity of language without allowing this ambiguity to fall away into the sheerly equivocal. Reverting to Nietzschean images, dynamism and form, Dionysus and Apollo, need not be mutually exclusive opposites, but rather form emerges dialectically from dynamism, harnessing its power but not necessarily stifling it, shaping its discordant strains into a new whole.²⁵ Form need not be superimposed by the violence of an extraneous force. It comes to articulation immanently out of the originally undeveloped dynamism; genuine form is the articulation of the original dynamism. Without this the original energy would be dissipated without outcome. Through the process of dialectical formation the original dynamism is shaped and set forth into its different stages and gathered together into a rich whole.

V

I now come to the upshot of the prior philosophical discussion in its bearing on the art work, and particularly the literary work of art. My suggestion is that the dialectical way represents an approach to the art work which preserves what I have called the principle of wholeness, while not necessitating the discard of the deep complexities and polarities disclosed by deconstruction. As should be clear, dialectic points further than its own negativity to a reconstitution within a whole of the separated and sometimes opposed parts. While deconstruction does awaken us often to the latter, thus disturbing our easy sense of the familiar simple unity of the art work, dialectic represents a fuller effort to do justice to a more complex sense of unity. Undoubtedly the deconstructionist repudiates such a unity, and so also repudiates what they claim is the Hegelian effort to bring the work to closure. The matter is not so simple, however. First we have to ask: does a great art work communicate to the reader something of the experience of complex wholeness? In answer it must be said that frequently what draws us to the work is the anticipation that this will be so. Experience of the art work does confirm this expectation, in opening consciousness to the experience of a dense and compacted fullness. Second, we need to ask: granted its occurrence, how are we to make intelligible the experience of this rich wholeness? The dialectical approach is one such way. The deconstructionist way, while feeding on the compacted fullness of the work, risks finishing with a plurality of equivocations without connections. The suspicion arises that the art work in its integrity has disintegrated or even vanished in the process. Instead of the full, compacted presence we are left with the trace of an absence.²⁶ One grows uneasy precisely because this outcome, while it wrenches us out of a too-dulled familiarity, is also at odds with our experience of encountering the art work.

Put differently, the deconstructionist begins with, say, a poem, having, it seems, a certain unity, presenting itself as something marked by a significant synthesis of experience. Deconstruction analyses this unity or synthesis, and discovers it riddled with contraries, oppositions, and so on. Dialectic does exactly the same. But where deconstruction seems to give us analysis without synthesis, dialectic insists that we return again to the original synthesis, now with the enrichment of having passed through the analysis. As a principle of criticism, deconstruction has difficulty in making intelligible the possibility of this original synthesis. As a critical practice, it rouses the suspicion that this original synthesis is simply dissolved. Dialectic, by contrast, allows the strain toward dissolution in every synthesis, but the given experience of the synthesis indicates that contraries are already contained within this original unity. The art work itself is already a dialectical whole, already a unity of opposites within itself,²⁷ regardless of how we subsequently analyze and take apart its constituent elements. Our subsequent interpretation of it must do justice to both the inherence of opposites within it and its wholeness. Having analyzed the original unity into its inherent oppositions, the deconstructionist then goes on in practice to deny the possibility of bringing together these oppositions. But such an analysis merely denies its own starting point. Opposition within the art work is not an absolute exclusion; the art work is already a significant relation of polarities in tension, a coupling of opposites which are now no longer merely dualized. The art work is original aesthetic testimony to the significant togetherness of these poles in tension. Deconstruction sounds extraordinarily like Verstand, or the analytical understanding, gone to equivocation: the polarities are frozen into hard and fixed opposites, and, of course, as such they cannot be brought together. But the dynamic fact of the art work already denies this fixation into irreconcilable opposition. The art work as an original unity is already such a movement towards reconciliation, however partial. The dialectical approach, granting the original synthesis and the inherent differentiation of the art work, simply traces the process of this movement.

What is at issue here is the appropriate balance between analysis and synthesis. Without proper synthesis, analysis is unbalanced toward sheerly decomposing thought. The original whole dissolves into a deconstruction of the parts of the parts. But to analyze something so intricate and dense, we must first recognize or identify that something as a whole. Such an act of recognition or identification is not itself an instance of analysis. Something about the art work remains recalcitrant to deconstruction as critical analysis. It is an old platitude that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Analysis or deconstruction alone cannot tell us what this “more” is, though they can illumine the complexity of the parts for us. Inevitably the feeling surfaces that something essential has been missed, that deconstruction itself represses our experience of this “more,” our experience of concrete present wholeness. Obviously we need not entirely jettison deconstructive analysis. What we do require, however, is its balance with a synthetic thinking, not merely deconstructive. Dialectical thinking, I have claimed, represents an attempt to provide such a balance.

One of the fears of the deconstructionist, however, is that the Hegelian insistence on synthesis closes off our experience of the art work. Fear of closure is pervasive in their writings. My account of dialectic need not turn it into such a prison. Dialectic itself is perhaps capable of a double interpretation, one tending to closure, the other more openended. For dialectical thinking can be seen as either grasping or encapsulating the structure of a process of becoming, or creation. Or it might be seen as participating itself in the active structuring of such a process. The former side tends to lend itself to closure, the latter need not. And it is the latter, I believe, which reveals more about the links between dialectic and dynamism, as spoken of above. On this interpretation, dialectic moves with the dynamic process of structuring itself, in both its deconstructing and constructing moments. We might venture that Hegel, like dialectic itself, contains a “double” within his thought, reveals himself as open to a double reading. Indeed, the present essay might be seen as contributing to a positive “deconstruction” of a too closed and fixed view of Hegel. Hegel, on this double reading, turns out to reveal an inherent complexity more challenging than the picture of stock logician who tries to devour everything in the empty unity of abstract concepts. The “open” Hegel demands that even Hegel's absolute be not seen as this empty conceptual unity of totalitarian thought. As above implied, the Absolute might be seen as absolving, as releasing rather than dissolving or enclosing.

When Hegel places art in Absolute Spirit, it is to this ultimately releasing wholeness that I think he points. Wholeness need not be closure but may be “open.”²⁸ An “open” wholeness may seem like a contradiction in terms, a violent yoking together of absolutely heterogeneous categories: an impossibility in formal logic. But aesthetic experience brings home to us the possibility of such a seemingly absurd coincidence of opposites. The inexhaustibility of the art work reveals just one expression of such “open” wholeness. Hegel's dialectical thinking simply represents an effort to acknowledge this and render it intelligible. The deconstructionist sometimes strikes one as uneasily juxtaposing the sensitivity of the aesthete with the virtuosity of a kind of formal, logical analyst. We are reminded of Schlegel's characterization of Romantic Irony as mingling clear consciousness with a sense of infinitely rich chaos.²⁹ The deconstructionist plays with this infinite chaos in Nietzschean fashion with a clarity of consciousness almost Cartesian. Not surprisingly we sometimes find the deconstructionist speaking about oscillating between nihilism and logocentrism.³⁰ Hegel, however, is neither a Platonist or Cartesian (logocentrism) nor yet a Nietzschean (nihilism), neither freezing the form nor dissolving all form. Form is in motion, fluid and dynamic: not just static form, nor sheer process, but the formation process itself. There is, I believe, a world of a difference between an infinitely rich chaos and an infinite richness. This reference to romantic irony is not by the way, since Hegel derides the ultimate emptiness of its negativity, while relentlessly excoriating Schlegel.³¹ To return to the “open” wholeness of the art work, its inexhaustibility, its infinite richness rather than infinitely rich chaos, we must take a step beyond negativity, and in Hegel's phrase, reminiscent of the critic's effort to “deconstruct deconstruction,”³² we must “negate the negation.”

Notes

1. This is the impression created by some of the contributors to the symposium “Professing Literature” in The Times Literary Supplement, December 10, 1982: 1355-63. See also the remark of Geoffrey Hartman in Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), ix: “The separation of philosophy from literary study has not worked to the benefit of either.”

2. See Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume I: The Will to Power as Art, trans. David F. Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1979).

3. See Harold Bloom's article “The Breaking of Form” in Deconstruction and Criticism, ch. I.

4. Here there is a curious agreement with Whitehead when he says that all philosophy is but a footnote to Plato. Whitehead meant this as a compliment to Plato. When the Nietzscheans, Heideggerians, and deconstructionists see metaphysics as the historical working out of Platonism, they imply some rebuke. Lest some traditional literary critics be surprised at the introduction of metaphysics, see, for instance, J. Hillis Miller's “The Critic as Host” in Deconstruction and Criticism, where metaphysics and “obvious meaning” come under fire.

5. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), III, 25.

6. On Platonism and nihilism, see Heidegger's Nietzsche, vol. I. esp. 151-61.

7. On purposeless becoming, see, for example, The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 377-78; on form as fiction, ibid., 282. This emphasis on purposeless becoming, the innocence of becoming leads, of course, to a strong insistence on the importance of play. See my “The Child in Nietzsche's Menagerie,” Seminar V (1981): 40-44.

8. For just one representative statement, see The Will to Power, 277: “Logic is bound to the condition: assume there are identical cases.”

9. Thus Heidegger in Einführung in die Metaphysik (Tubingen: M. Niemeyer, 1953), 28, speaks of his own task as attempting to bring “Nietzsche's accomplishment to a full unfolding.” On Nietzsche's influence on Heidegger, see Krell's remarks in his analysis of the Nietzsche volume, 245ff.

10. This notion of the “unthought” is to be found, for instance, in Heidegger's discussion of Hegel in Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1974). In this volume we also have Heidegger's discussion of the principle of identity.

11. On this and its reverberations throughout the nineteenth century, see Karl Lowith, From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought, trans. D. E. Green (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1967).

12. Jacques Derrida, L'écriture et la différence (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1967), 426-28. Also Paul de Man's remarks on figuration in Deconstruction and Criticism, 61.

13. For a very clear statement of the issues of deconstruction in terms of the intertwining of the univocal and the equivocal, see Miller's contribution to Deconstruction and Criticism.

14. See de Man's reading of Shelley's The Triumph of Life in terms of a “chain of metaphorical transformations,” Deconstruction and Criticism, 58. If one were to judge by this volume, The Triumph of Life would appear to be the text, it gets so much attention. Miller speaks about the “prisonhouse of language” from which we can effect “no escape” by means of a “simple referential grammar” (229ff).

15. The question whether dialectic can be understood ontologically is controversial among Hegel's commentators. Hegel himself does speak of dialectic as a principle exemplified in the actual itself. See, for instance, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften in Werke (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1969-1971), Bd. 10, n48.

16. See Will to Power, 550. In this passage Nietzsche's description of the world as eternally moving between contradiction and concord has an extraordinarily Hegelian ring to it. The difference comes out elsewhere (e.g., 379) when Nietzsche says: “the world is not an organism at all, but chaos.”

17. Unlike Hegel, Nietzsche implies that language cannot do justice to Becoming (Will to Power, 380). Hegel implies that justice can be done if language itself becomes dialectical.

18. For some discussion of Verstand in relation to experience and Vernunft, see my “Hegel, Philosophy and Worship,” Cithara 19 (1979): 11-17.

19. On the “internal opposition of thought to itself,” see Enzyklopädie, n26; on dialectic generally see John Findlay, Hegel: A Reexamination (New York: Humanities Press, 1958), ch. III.

20. Enzyklopadie, n24, zus.

21. G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. J. Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1952), 29-30; Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 19.

22. Hegel's Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Humanities Press, 1969), 32.

23. See Phänonenologie, 48ff; Phenomenology, 35ff.

24. Enzyklopädie, n82.

25. In a very “Nietzschean” passage in the Phenomenology (27-28), Hegel speaks of truth as a peculiar Bacchanalian revel which combines drunken intoxication with complete calm, that is, as a kind of unity of Dionysus and Apollo.

26. “Trace of an absence” is the kind of language Derrida employs. See Bloom's remark about modern poetry and what he calls “an achieved dearth of meaning,” Deconstruction and Criticism, 12. I realize, of course, that the category of “presence” raises many hares for Heideggerians and post-Heideggerians. “Metaphysics of presence” tends to be a somewhat pejorative, tainted term. One is tempted to reply: “presence” is extraordinarily complex, indeed in some cases it may be inexhaustible. “Absence” falls prey to all the criticisms that Stillingfleet and Berkeley brought against Locke's material substrate as an “I know not what”; or to Hegel's criticisms of Kant's unknowable Ding an sich.

27. I have discussed some of these dialectical features elsewhere: “Hegel, Art and Imitation,” Clio 7 (1978): 303-13; also in “Hegel, Art and History,” paper read to the Hegel Society of America, Clemson University, October, 1982; to appear in the Proceedings.

28. On this possibility of an “open” wholeness, see “Hegel, Art and History,” cited above, n. 27.

29. See Eric Heller, The Artist's Journey into the Interior (New York: Random House, (1959), 82. Harold Bloom notes a connection between Paul de Man and romantic irony, indeed cites Schlegel as de Man's “truest precursor”; Deconstruction and Criticism, 16.

30. We have already noted the Nietzschean heritage, but one might also note Derrida's own concern with Husserl's project, and then in turn the connection between Husserl and Descartes. Miller (see n. 13, above) speaks about oscillating between logocentrism and nihilism. The dizziness of Miller's oscillation is enlivened by a cheerful nihilism à la Nietzsche. The nihilism of some deconstructionists, however, may veer from thoughtful cheerfulness to a kind of thoughtless complacency. See, for instance, the remark of the editors of The Question of Textuality: Strategies of Reading in Contemporary American Criticism, William V. Spanos, Paul A. Bove, and Daniel O'Hara (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 8: “We can connect nothing with nothing, one might say.” They speak of having to pass through Nietzsche, but such remarks make one wonder whether instead they are passing out into vacancy.

31. See G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, I, in Werke, Bd. 13, 92ff.

32. Denis Donoghue, “Deconstructing Deconstruction,” New York Review of Books, vol. 27, n. 10 (June 12, 1980): 37-41.