Note on Hegel, and radical and identity politics

Much of philosophy since Kant turns on the relationships of identity and difference between something like a “subject,” an “I,” and statements made by or attributed to such subjects, with a determinate content. Political life itself is possible because people identify, and even stake, their sense of who they are upon what they are concerned about.

One way of handling this is a politics of recognition. You should validate what I say (unless you prove me wrong in the matter); otherwise, I will think you do not respect me. And people hate those who scorn them or don’t return their attentions, sometimes.

A number of social forces no doubt only fully intelligible when enough of the dust has settled in both social and intellectual history, led societies like ours to he point of a shift, which may be marked as a shift in the reading of Hegel’s dialectic of the master and the slave. First, many people clamored for recognition, or even for the chance of appearing in a public space of visibility or representation, and this became the main part of justice. But at the same time, notions of narcissism (Lacan, object relations psychoanalytic theory, cinematic postmodernism critiquing spectacular identities)* and of the inevitability or universality of trauma, as seen in a post-World War II understanding (more than anything, it may have been Hitchcock, taking up themes in Freud and twentieth century historical experience, who persuaded us that there is really no limit to the depravity and horror of what people can do or suffer, the victim like everyone else is very likely also guilty, and partly even of his own oppression or trauma (or guilty of dealing with it badly), and so strong and common are the experiences of the unbearability of much that can or does happen (and so, again, trauma, for traumatic experience is by definition unbearable, so much that it distorts and blocks representation, and our memories are always selective in terms of the projects or faults of the present). All this means that today we can suspect of mere narcissism or some other corrigible psychical malaise, what in another time might have been food for claims of injustice (and with them, claims to the legitimacy of the violence that alone might end it, or the false attribution of “violence” to all resistance and opposition to the smooth wielding of social power). So someone who in some sense participates in a collective victimhood (which, though it may be dealt with badly or displaced, is usually all too real—and we should resist, even with those victims who become, as many do, executioners, supposing that their oppression is only subjectively felt by them because it is caused by an illness in the mind (Hitler, the story goes, was an angry psychotic whose hatreds came from bad bringing-up….).

So much depends on the fact that we stand fully in the image of a creator God absent from the world of his creation, as beings who say the in itself empty “I” of “I think,” or have, or am, or want, this, a this. Idolatry and iconicity part here from a common source: does the object reveal the divine as overflowing it, or does the thing substitute for it, reducing creation’s fecundity to piles of excreted waste matter? But even more, we have practices of reason because we need and want to justify what we believe to be true or right, and this is ultimately because of something like the fact that the subject’s objects, what appears which ultimately is indistinguishable from what is thought (at least in German idealism and Hegel; in Kant these are separate and sensibility differs from, even if it is subject to, subsumption, in thoughts, under concepts).