Repression, Speculation, Recognition
I. Repression and Speculation
Freud introduces his concept of repression by describing the psychic mechanism that makes a drive inoperative, or that by which the drive is made to pass into the unconscious state of repression (Verdrängung). Repression occurs under the condition that satisfying this drive—and the satisfaction of a drive is always pleasurable—would not only cause the pleasure intrinsic to its satisfaction but also a greater displeasure, given the irreconcilability of satisfying this drive and other drives, claims, or intentions.1 The repressed returns: a conscious idea (or representation), or group of ideas, invested by the repressed drive produces a vicissitude in the psyche, demanding either that the drive vanish from consciousness or be held back from it. The difference between these two demands is unimportant, since a host who orders an undesirable guest out of their drawing-room or denies them entry to the premises in the first place must in either case both recognize the guest and refuse to let them cross the threshold.2 In either case, moreover, I must both permanently guard the threshold to prevent the (re-)entry of the guest3 and permanently patrol the threshold to repel the guest, matching the continuous pressure with which they threaten to burst through the door they have been forbidden to enter with an unceasing counter-pressure.4 I must be immovable and mobile, for the undesirable guest is not alive to be killed off. Once turned away, this guest must be kept at a distance.5 Not even sleep relieves me from my post: watchman-become-nightwatchman, garrisoned in dreams.6 The drive cannot be escaped any more than the ego can escape itself; the drive is not outright judged because the judge is the condemned, the proprietor the intruder.7 A barrier can be known only to the one who has gone beyond it.8 The sentinel at the gate of the conscious psyche risks self-recognition with each marauder raid they repel.
Crucially, the mechanism of repression both creates substitutive formations and leaves behind symptoms, neither of which arise immediately through the repression itself but only mediately as indications of the return of the repressed.9 Freud distinguishes between primal repression and repression proper. Primal repression consists in the ideational representative of the drive being denied entrance into the conscious, which establishes a fixation of this representative in its attachment to the drive. Repression proper affects only derivatives of the repressed representative, or ideas and trains of thought that have become connected to the repressed representative by association. Freud explains that this makes repression proper—the unceasing counter-pressure of the unwitting host to repel the continuous pressure of the undesirable guest at the door—a matter of after-pressure (Nachdrängen). The repulsive force of repression proper that expels the derivatives of the repressed representative is shown to cooperate with the attractive force of the repressed representative that draws every idea, every train of thought, into association with itself. Freud surmises that repression would fail without such cooperation, “if there were not something previously repressed ready to receive what is repelled by the conscious.”10 The concept of repression itself derives from psychoanalytic practice11 and develops in application to it.12
Here, Freud describes the therapeutic intervention as the practice of requiring the patient to produce derivatives of the repressed representative—specifically, by requiring them to spin out threads of associations without influence from a conscious purposive idea, since that would decide the outcome in advance in favor of the repression being treated, or interference from (self-)criticism, since social or moral anxiety indicates the return of the repressed in an intolerable intensity and the self-reproach this anxiety provokes prolongs repression in a sterile and interminable struggle.13 It is only if the patient can unspool such associations beyond the influence of conscious goals or the reach of (self-)sanction that derivatives of the primally repressed can be produced that are distorted and/or remote enough to pass through the censorship of the unconscious. From these associations, therapist and patient reconstitute a conscious translation of the repressed representative. Once begin, this process can be interrupted, however, if, in the course of spinning out a thread, the patient encounters a thought so obviously related to the primally repressed that they are compelled to repeat the repression again. For Freud, the symptoms of neurotics result from such derivatives of the repressed that provoke redoubled efforts towards repression.14
To achieve a conscious translation of the repressed representative, the free association of the patient must produce derivatives of the repressed that, on the one hand, are derivative expressions of the repressed despite their degree of distortion or remoteness from it and, on the other hand, are not so obviously related to the repressed that they compel a repetition of the repression. Only this tender work can relieve the pressure exerted by the repressed, since the more successful the primary repression was, or the further withdrawn from conscious influence the repressed representative is, the more it develops and takes on increasingly extreme forms of expression that frighten the neurotic. The repressed representative “proliferates in the dark,” Freud says, presenting the neurotic with a deceptive image of the strength and danger of the repressed drive. Given both the “damming-up consequent on [the] frustrated satisfaction” of the repressed drive and the “uninhibited development in fantasy” of the diabolical image the neurotic has of the drive,15 it follows that only the derivatives that can express the repressed representative with delicate or diplomatic indirectness could ever enable the translation of the repressed into consciousness without sounding the tocsin for the forces of repulsion.16
II. Speculation and Recognition
The concept of repression is profoundly speculative. In the ordinary sense of the word, speculation is taken to be a merely subjective guess of the truth or objectivity of something beyond our immediate experience (or, perhaps, all possible experience), and, as a result, may or may not ‘agree’ with experience. In this ordinary sense, speculation is more like an opinion than a fact, or an anticipation of a fact.17 In the technical sense of the term, speculative thought—developed by Hegel but not unique to him by his own insistence18—is (1) what grasps the unity of thought-determinations (or categories) in their differential interrelations19 and (2) what grasps the affirmative in the negative movement of opposed thought-determinations as they pass away into one another.20 We find both features of the speculative moment of logic21 in the concept of repression: (1) the unity of pleasure and displeasure (in the satisfaction of the repressed drive), the conscious and unconscious psyche (in the censorship of the former of any idea that expresses the repressed drive), the forces of repulsion (of the derivatives) and attraction (to the repressed representative); (2) in the interpenetration of these opposite thought-determinations and their transition into one another, as in the return of the primally repressed to consciousness that compels the after-pressure of repression proper.
On the one hand, Freud follows the negative, or merely dialectical,22 movement of the opposed determinations as they pass into one another, as in the repulsion of the repressed representative that expresses the drive under censure by the conscious and the return of the repressed representative in derivatives that translate the repressed content into consciousness.23 On the other hand, Freud shows that this dialectical movement has an affirmative result. What results from the cooperative activity of the conscious and unconscious mind—in the after-pressure between the repulsion of derivatives of the repressed representative from consciousness and the attraction of certain conscious thoughts by the repressed representative that draws these thoughts into association with itself—is not the mutual annihilation of the opposed determinations. If this were the case, the opposed determinations could not have cooperated in their activity to make repression possible in the first place. Rather, the mutual interpenetration of these opposed determinations and their passage into one another is a productive process, one which generates a sequence of positive results.
In the case of obsessional neurosis,24 a subject represses a sadistic drive, which is expressed in the ideational content of a loved one toward whom they are nonetheless hostile, by generating a substitutive formation in the ego in the shape of increased conscientiousness. Freud calls this process of substitutive formation reaction-formation, in which the subject reacts to an intolerable drive and the idea that expresses it by intensifying an opposite psychic determination. But this repression is only successful at first and cannot hold, as the failure becomes marked in the return of the repressed representative (in this case, the sadistic drive and the idea of a loved one that expresses it), which in turn provokes social anxiety, moral anxiety, and unlimited self-reproaches for the anti-social and immoral thought. At this stage, Freud tells us that the rejected idea is replaced by a second substitutive formation, a substitute by displacement, and the drive is redirected towards the idea of an object that is small, and so incapable of explaining either the intensity of the drive or the anxiety the drive provokes, and/or indifferent, and so considered capable of receiving the hostility or sadism of the subject. For Freud, obsessional neurosis is defined by an unmistakable tendency to a complete re-establishment of the repressed idea, a perpetual restoration to consciousness that provokes further displacements, further aggression toward the displaced substitute, avoidance of it, or self-reproach for feeling aggression towards it. Though the repression characteristic of obsessional neurosis is “prolonged in a sterile and interminable struggle,” this sterility has produced a first substitutive formation (in increased conscientiousness) through reaction-formation, the symptoms of (social, moral, self-critical) anxiety, and a second substitutive formation (in the idea/object onto which the sadistic drive is displaced) through substitution by displacement. From the dialectic of obsessional neurosis, Freud says we learn something new about the mechanism of repression–specifically, the difference between the formation of substitutes (reaction-formation; substitution by displacement) and the formation of symptoms (the return of the repressed in social, moral, self-critical anxiety). Obsessional neurosis is unique in that the primary repression does coincide with the formation of a substitute (reaction-formation), despite the fact that the mechanism of repression (as in primary repression) is distinct from the mechanism of substitutive formation.25 But it is also unique in that the formation of this substitute (reaction-formation) does not coincide with the formation of a symptom (social, moral, self-critical anxiety).26
Consequently, Freud’s concept of repression is speculative in the sense of grasping the unity of opposed determinations through their opposition as it traces the real development of its object, the psyche. The concept of repression grasps both the negative self-overcoming (or -sublation)27 of opposed determinations in the dialectic of conscious and unconscious psychic activity and the positive results of this process in an internally differentiated sequence of formations (substitutive; symptomatic)—results which, in turn, transform the forces of (conscious) repulsion and (unconscious) attraction that generated them. However, Freud’s concept of repression is also speculative in the sense that the concept of repression itself develops by tracing this process of the development of its object. The concept of repression, derived from psychoanalytic practice, is developed by its immersion in or surrender to the different cases of psychoneurosis that arise in practice.
By tracing the development of the concept of repression in Freud’s own effort to trace the development of the mechanism of repression, it becomes clearer why speculation in the technical sense cannot be regarded as a subjective opinion or anticipation about a possible fact outside of our immediate (or ultimate) experience. Speculative thought grasps the unity not only of the opposed determinations of the objects of our concepts as these objects develop, but also the unity of our concepts and their objects through their difference from or opposition to one another. To condense what we have established:
Speculation involves both speculative concepts, each of which is a unity of opposed and different determinations (e.g., the concept of repression as a unity of pleasure and displeasure, conscious and unconscious activity, forces of repulsion and attraction), and the development of speculative concepts, in which the development of the object of the concept of repression (e.g., tracing the cooperation of conscious repulsion and unconscious attraction in the obsessional neurosis) compels a development of the concept of repression itself (e.g., the discovery of a coincidence of primary repression and substitutive formation; the discovery of the non-coincidence of substitutive formation and symptom formation).
In the instructions of CLR James: “examine, and see that you do it, both the things that you test and the instruments by which you test them.”28 This is why Hegel says speculative philosophical thought is neither merely analytic nor synthetic: the analytic method proceeds from the individual (object) to the universal (concept); the synthetic method proceeds from the universal (concept) to the individual (object).29 Speculative thought is neither a juxtaposition of these two methods nor an oscillation between them, but advances “in each of its moments both analytically and synthetically at the same time”: analytically, so far as it surrenders itself to the object and gives it “full play” to develop; synthetically, so far as the pure passivity of the surrender to the object is shown to be the activity of the concept itself.30 It is what Fredric Jameson calls the genuinely dialectical moment, in which the concept of the developing object develops in its frustrated efforts to grasp the object’s development by grasping its own frustration as a revelation of the relation between concept and object–thereby “converting (...) problems into their own solutions on a higher level.”31 The difference between concept and object simultaneously relates them to one another, and by marking this difference we have already installed ourselves in the gap between them. Jameson’s slogan is ever appropriate: “difference relates, radical difference is itself a form of identity.”32
Taken in its difference from the object, the concept is merely subjective. But by taking a concept to be merely subjective, thought has already begun to develop the concept. This is what Gillian Rose, in her critique of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, calls undoing the spell binding thought to frozen oppositions, such as the pet antinomies of so much critical theory spinning in place between universal and particular, subject and object.33 It is only in the critique of the merely subjective concept, and in the critique of the critique of the merely subjective concept that pretends to a- or non-conceptual contact with the object, that “speculative beginnings may be released and coaxed to take up the labour of the concept (...) the labour—which is equally repose—[that] may refresh us.”34 But this requires the “strenuous effort” of surrendering thought to the relation of difference and identity between concept and object.35
In Hegel Contra Sociology, Rose distinguishes between reading Hegel’s infamous propositions—for example, ‘religion and the foundation of the state are the same’ or ‘the real is the rational; the rational is the real’—as ordinary propositions and reading them as speculative propositions. She defines the basic form of the proposition as a division of a sentence into a grammatical subject and its predicate, joined by the copula ‘is.’ When such a sentence is read as an ordinary proposition, the subject is considered to be a fixed bearer of accidental predicates and the identity of this subject and its contingent predicate is supposed to be affirmed.36 But Hegel was at great pains to distinguish ordinary propositions from what he called speculative propositions in which “the identity which is affirmed between subject and predicate is seen equally to affirm a lack of identity between subject and predicate.”37 Rose explains this simultaneous affirmation of identity and lack of identity between subject and predicate by referring to the experience of this lack of identity, or the non-correspondence between (subjective) concept and object.
In this experience, we mark the difference between concept and object because we have already begun to realize their identity. The difference can only be registered if we have already begun to grasp the identity of subject and predicate in their relation to one another. Each side of the proposition is transformed by the experience of the lack of identity: the subject, no longer fixed but problematic (“initially, an empty name”); the predicates, no longer contingent accidents arbitrarily appended.38 If read as an ordinary proposition, subject and predicate must be formally identical (i.e., ‘X is Y’ a tautology), considered as reducible to one another in their meaning, and formally different (i.e., ‘X’ and ‘Y’ must be different from each other to be related by the ‘is’), considered as irreducible to one another in their function (fixed subject; accidental predicate). If read as ordinary propositions, Hegel’s sentences appear to consist only in empty equivalences that fail to register the difference between subject and predicate for the sake of inserting the philosophical subject into the role of the grammatical subject. As Rose notes, this is what Marx accuses Hegel of in the former’s critique of the Philosophy of Right: surreptitiously lending the philosophical subject the ontological fixity and priority the reader assumes for the grammatical subject and, by extension, assigning ontological contingency or dependency to the predicates attached to the subject.39
For the young Marx, Hegel is guilty of a subject-predicate inversion: supposedly reducing the terms that do have ontological priority in reality and should be considered as the subject—the historical subject of the ensemble of social relations, real individuals, forces and relations of production, political struggle, the division of labor, and so on—to the level of mere predicates or accidents appended to what, in reality, is derivative—the philosophical subject of consciousness, self-consciousness, concept, spirit, Idea, and so on. Since Marx, critical theorists40 have overwhelmingly (and underwhelmingly) read Hegel’s speculative propositions as ordinary propositions, propositions supposed to reduce the real priors to mere derivatives of a philosophical subject that unilaterally creates them.41 If Rose is right, and I argue that she is, “then the original project of critical theory, following Marx, to reassess the stance towards the Hegelian dialectic for its age, may take on a different complexion.”42 The outcome implied by the experience of the lack of identity between Hegel’s speculative philosophy and Hegel’s reception in critical theory cannot be pre-judged. Whatever conceptual unity might result from the re-negotiation of Hegelian philosophy and critical theory “can only become known as a result of the process of the contradictory experiences (…) which gradually comes to realize it.”43 In Hegel’s own idiom, a true conceptual unity can only be achieved when justice is done to the difference between the two sides in their relation and within each side in itself.44 This is the labor of the concept. Only once this difference has received its due will the sides yield their one-sidedness, or self-sublate—sublate in the dual sense of ‘clearing X out of the way’ and ‘taking care of X / taking X out of harm’s way / putting X in a safe place.’45 What we could call the free power of the concept in its universality—reaching out to its other and embracing it without violence—we could also call free love—relating to that which is distinct from it as to itself.46
Only a specular reading can save us from finding only our own reflections, right-side-up or up-side-down, in Hegel’s thought.47 If Hegel has anything to show us, it’s that “what is familiar is for that reason not known.”48 The measure of a scientific demonstration is the degree to which we have cleared away and taken care of ourselves and others in the development of the concept implicit in even the most unreasonable context. Speculative thought is recognitive, not reflective. Recognition is the hard-won repose into power without domination and love without resentment in the interval between past and potential misrecognitions.49 The Concept is not in your head, you aren’t even up there. Speculation is self-surrender that neither demands nor promises self-annihilation, but returns you to yourself as someone else. Rose has the last word: “Whether disturbing or joyful, reason is full of surprises.”50
Freud, “Repression.” (1915). cf. pp. 2977-2878
Ibid.: “[I]t amounts to much the same thing as the difference between my ordering an undesirable guest out of my drawing-room (or out of my front hall), and my refusing, after recognizing him, to let him cross my threshold at all.” (p. 2983)
Ibid.: “I must set a permanent guard over the door which I have forbidden this guest to enter, since he would otherwise burst it open.” (p. 2983)
Ibid.: “The process of repression is not to be regarded as an event which takes place once, the results of which are permanent, as when some living thing has been killed and from that time onward is dead; repression demands a persistent expenditure of force, and if this were to cease the success of the repression would be jeopardized, so that a fresh act of repression would be necessary. We may suppose that the repressed exercises a continuous pressure in the direction of the conscious, so that this pressure must be balanced by an unceasing counter-pressure.” (p. 2982)
Ibid.: “[T]he essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious” (p. 2978)
Ibid.: “The mobility of repression, incidentally, also finds expression in the psychical characteristics of the state of sleep, which alone renders possible the formation of dreams.” (p. 2982)
Ibid.: “If what was in question was the operation of an external stimulus, the appropriate method to adopt would obviously be flight; with an instinct, flight is of no avail, for the ego cannot escape from itself. At some later period, rejection based on judgement (condemnation) will be found to be a good method to adopt against an instinctual impulse. Repression is a preliminary stage of condemnation, something between flight and condemnation; it is a concept which could not have been formulated before the time of psycho-analytic studies.” (p. 2977)
Hegel, Encyclopedia Of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline, Part 1: Logic. Translated and Edited by Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom. Cambridge University Press. (2010), §60: “It is therefore the greatest inconsistency to admit, on the one hand, that the understanding acquires knowledge of appearances only, while maintaining, on the other, that this kind of knowledge is something absolute by saying that knowing cannot go further, that this is the natural, absolute barrier [Schranke] for human knowledge [Wissen]. Natural things are limited [beschränkt], and they are merely natural things, insofar as they know [wissen] nothing of their universal barrier, insofar as their determinacy is a barrier only for us, not for them. Something can be known [gewußt], even felt to be a barrier, a lack only insofar as one has at the same time gone beyond it. Living things have the prerogative over lifeless things of feeling pain. For the former, an individual determinateness becomes the sensation of something negative, because, qua alive, they carry within themselves the universality of the living nature that is beyond the individual, they maintain themselves even in the negative of merely themselves, and feel this contradiction as it exists within themselves. This contradiction is in them only insofar as both exist in the one subject, namely the universality of its feeling for life [Lebensgefühl] and the negative individuality opposed to this. A barrier, a lack of knowing is determined precisely to be a barrier or lack only through a comparison with the existing idea of the universal, of what is whole and complete. Therefore, it is merely a lack of consciousness not to realize that the designation of something as finite or limited contains the proof of the actual presence of the infinite, the unlimited, that the knowledge [Wissen] of a boundary can exist only insofar as the unbounded exists on this side, in consciousness.” (pp. 106-107)
Freud (1915): “We must now try to obtain some insight into the mechanism of the process of repression. In particular we want to know whether there is a single mechanism only, or more than one, and whether perhaps each of the psychoneuroses is distinguished by a mechanism of repression peculiar to it. At the outset of this enquiry, however, we are met by complications. The mechanism of a repression becomes accessible to us only by our deducing that mechanism from the outcome of the repression. Confining our observations to the effect of repression on the ideational portion of the representative, we discover that as a rule it creates a substitutive formation. What is the mechanism by which such a substitute is formed? Or should we distinguish several mechanisms here as well? Further, we know that repression leaves symptoms behind it. May we then suppose that the forming of substitutes and the forming of symptoms coincide, and, if this is so on the whole, is the mechanism of forming symptoms the same as that of repression? The general probability would seem to be that the two are widely different, and that it is not the repression itself which produces substitutive formations and symptoms, but that these latter are indications of a return of the repressed and owe their existence to quite other processes. It would also seem advisable to examine the mechanisms by which substitutes and symptoms are formed before considering the mechanisms of repression.” (p. 2984)
Ibid.: “We have reason to assume that there is a primal repression, a first phase of repression, which consists in the psychical (ideational) representative of the instinct being denied entrance into the conscious. With this fixation is established; the representative in question persists unaltered from then onwards and the instinct remains attached to it. This is due to the properties of unconscious processes of which we shall speak later. The second stage of repression, repression proper, affects mental derivatives of the repressed representative, or such trains of thought as, originating elsewhere, have come into associative connection with it. On account of this association, these ideas experience the same fate as what was primally repressed. Repression proper, therefore, is actually an after-pressure [Nachdrängen]. Moreover, it is a mistake to emphasize only the repulsion which operates from the direction of the conscious upon what is to be repressed; quite as important is the attraction exercised by what was primally repressed upon everything with which it can establish a connection. Probably the trend towards repression would fail in its purpose if these two forces did not co-operate, if there were not something previously repressed ready to receive what is repelled by the conscious.” (p. 2979)
Ibid.: “[I]t is a concept which could not have been formulated before the time of psycho-analytic studies.” (p. 2977); “Let us rather confine ourselves to clinical experience, as we meet with it in psycho-analytic practice.” (p. 2978)
Ibid.: “Further, restricting myself to the three best-known forms of psychoneurosis, I will show by means of some examples how the concepts here introduced find application to the study of repression.” (p. 2985)
Cf. Freud’s example of obsessional neurosis: (i) reaction-formation, or intensifying the opposite (e.g., substituting a hostile/sadistic trend with increased conscientiousness) without the substitute being a symptom, (ii) substitute by displacement, or responding to the inevitable return of the vanished affect (e.g., the sadistic trend) by both moral self-reproach and displacing the affect onto something taken to be unnoticeable or capable of receiving the affect indifferently, (iii) flight from the substitute by avoidance and prohibition, (iv) the persistent rejection of the idea from the conscious (a fettering of the drive in a prolonged, sterile, interminable struggle). (p. 2987)
Ibid.: “Reverting once more, however, to the opposite aspect of repression, let us make it clear that it is not even correct to suppose that repression withholds from the conscious all the derivatives of what was primally repressed. If these derivatives have become sufficiently far removed from the repressed representative, whether owing to the adoption of distortions or by reason of the number of intermediate links inserted, they have free access to the conscious. It is as though the resistance of the conscious against them was a function of their distance from what was originally repressed. In carrying out the technique of psycho-analysis, we continually require the patient to produce such derivatives of the repressed as, in consequence either of their remoteness or of their distortion, can pass the censorship of the conscious. Indeed, the associations which we require him to give without being influenced by any conscious purposive idea and without any criticism, and from which we reconstitute a conscious translation of the repressed representative - these associations are nothing else than remote and distorted derivatives of this kind. During this process we observe that the patient can go on spinning a thread of such associations, till he is brought up against some thought, the relation of which to what is repressed becomes so obvious that he is compelled to repeat his attempt at repression. Neurotic symptoms, too, must have fulfilled this same condition, for they are derivatives of the repressed, which has, by their means, finally won the access to consciousness which was previously denied to it.” (p. 2980)
“Psycho-analysis is able to show us other things as well which are important for understanding the effects of repression in the psychoneuroses. It shows us, for instance, that the instinctual representation develops with less interference and more profusely if it is withdrawn by repression from conscious influence. It proliferates in the dark, as it were, and takes on extreme forms of expression, which when they are translated and presented to the neurotic are not only bound to seem alien to him, but frighten him by giving him the picture of an extraordinary and dangerous strength of instinct. This deceptive strength of instinct is the result of an uninhibited development in phantasy and of the damming-up consequent on frustrated satisfaction. The fact that this last result is bound up with repression points the direction in which the true significance of repression has to be looked for.” (p. 2980)
For more on the psychoneuroses and repression, especially where the creation of substitutive formations is concerned, see Freud’s examples of:
Anxiety hysteria: (i) displacement (e.g., fear of a wolf instead of a demand for love from the father), (ii) phobia (e.g., an attempt at flight or avoidance) (p. 2985)
Hysterical conversion: the successful formation of a substitute that condenses the investment, typically in an area of the body related to the repressed representative, that shows signs of over-excitation or otherwise inexplicable inhibition (p. 2986)
Hegel EL (2010): “In ordinary life, the expression speculation tends to be used in a very vague and at the same time subordinate sense, as, for instance, when one speaks of speculations concerning marriage or commerce. What is understood by such ‘speculation’, then, is merely the fact that, on the one hand, one should go beyond what is immediately on hand and, on the other, what forms the content of such speculations is initially merely something subjective but should not remain so but instead be realized or translated into objectivity. What was remarked earlier about the idea holds likewise for this ordinary use of language concerning speculation, to which may be added the further remark that those who count themselves among the more educated also often speak of speculation as something merely subjective. They say, namely, that a certain construal of natural or spiritual conditions and circumstances may be very well and good when taken in a merely speculative manner, but that experience does not agree with it and nothing like it can be countenanced in actuality.” (§82)
Ibid.: “In terms of content, the rational [jc: positively rational, or speculative] is so far from being the possession merely of philosophy that it must be said instead that it is available to all human beings at whichever level of education and mental development they may find themselves. In this sense, human beings have, since ancient times, rightly been designated as rational beings [Wesen]. The general empirical manner in which the rational is known [wissen] is at first that of prejudice and presupposition and, according to our previous discussion (§ 45), the nature of the rational is generally to be something unconditioned which for that reason contains its determinateness within itself.” (§82)
See Jameson in Marxism & Form (1971), in Ch. 5 “Towards Dialectical Criticism,” on the strategic role of thinking in terms of determinations, or categories, for developmental thought: “[S]uch analysis clearly presupposes the initial isolation of a limited group of factors from the historical totality or the historical continuum: such factors here were missile development and atomic research as such. In the literary realm, however, it will become apparent that the initial choice of such key factors, or dominant categories of the work, as we shall call them there, is a strategic moment in any dialectical criticism. Such categories are then seen as entertaining relationships with each other such that an alteration in the one involves a corresponding shift in the proportions of the other as well; this is, of course, the most basic sense in which we speak of a dialectical interrelationship of phenomena, or, to reverse the terms, of a dialectical understanding of such relationships.”
Hegel EL (2010): “(γ) The speculative or the positively rational grasps the unity of the determinations in their opposition, the affirmative that is contained in their dissolution and their passing over into something else.” (§81)
Ibid.: “These three sides do not constitute three parts of logic, but are moments of every properly logical content [Momente jedes Logisch-Reellen], that is to say, of every concept or everything true in general. They can all be brought under the first moment, i.e. that of the understanding, and thus separated and kept apart, but in this way they are not considered in their truth. – Like the division, the statement made here about the determinations of the logical is at this point only anticipatory and historical.” (§79)
Ibid.: “(β) The dialectical moment is the self-sublation of such finite determinations by themselves and their transition into their opposites. (…) In its distinctive determinateness, the dialectic is far more the proper, true nature of the determinations of the understanding, of things, and of the finite in general. Reflexion is at first a process of going beyond the isolated determinacy, i.e. a relating of it, whereby it is brought into a relationship, despite its being maintained in its isolated validity. The dialectic is, by contrast, this immanent process of going beyond [such determinacy] wherein the one-sided and limited character of the determinations of the understanding presents itself as what it is, namely as their negation. Everything finite is this, the sublating of itself. Thus, the dialectical moment constitutes the moving soul of the scientific progression and is the principle through which alone an immanent connection and necessity enters into the content of science, just as in general the true, as opposed to an external, elevation above the finite resides in this principle. (…) It is (…) a matter of showing how each abstract determination of the understanding, taken merely in the way it presents itself, immediately turns over into its opposite.” (§81)
Crucially, Freud (1915) himself distinguishes between, on the one hand, primary repression and the return of the repressed that leads to repression proper and, on the other hand, the immediate reversal of a drive into its opposite or the redirection of the drive to the subject’s own self. This is because repression–both primary and proper–is only a possible defense for a psychic organization that has developed a sharp cleavage between conscious and unconscious mental activity, which cleavage makes repression possible in the first place: “Let us rather confine ourselves to clinical experience, as we meet with it in psycho-analytic practice. We then learn that the satisfaction of an instinct which is under repression would be quite possible, and further, that in every instance such a satisfaction would be pleasurable in itself; but it would be irreconcilable with other claims and intentions. It would, therefore, cause pleasure in one place and unpleasure in another. It has consequently become a condition for repression that the motive force of unpleasure shall have acquired more strength than the pleasure obtained from satisfaction. Psychoanalytic observation of the transference neuroses, moreover, leads us to conclude that repression is not a defensive mechanism which is present from the very beginning, and that it cannot arise until a sharp cleavage has occurred between conscious and unconscious mental activity - that the essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious. This view of repression would be made more complete by assuming that, before the mental organization reaches this stage, the task of fending off instinctual impulses is dealt with by the other vicissitudes which instincts may undergo - e.g. reversal into the opposite or turning round upon the subject’s own self.” (p. 2978)
Freud (1915): “A totally different picture of repression is shown, once more, in the third disorder which we shall consider for the purposes of our illustration - in obsessional neurosis. Here we are at first in doubt what it is that we have to regard as the instinctual representative that is subjected to repression - whether it is a libidinal or a hostile trend. This uncertainty arises because obsessional neurosis has as its basis a regression owing to which a sadistic trend has been substituted for an affectionate one. It is this hostile impulsion against someone who is loved which is subjected to repression. The effect at an early stage of the work of repression is quite different from what it is at a later one. At first the repression is completely successful; the ideational content is rejected and the affect made to disappear. As a substitutive formation there arises an alteration in the ego in the shape of an increased conscientiousness, and this can hardly be called a symptom. Here, substitute and symptom do not coincide. From this we learn something, too, about the mechanism of repression. In this instance, as in all others, repression has brought about a withdrawal of libido; but here it has made use of reaction-formation for this purpose, by intensifying an opposite. Thus in this case the formation of a substitute has the same mechanism as repression and at bottom coincides with it, while chronologically, as well as conceptually, it is distinct from the formation of a symptom. It is very probable that the whole process is made possible by the ambivalent relationship into which the sadistic impulsion that has to be repressed has been introduced. But the repression, which was at first successful, does not hold firm; in the further course of things its failure becomes increasingly marked. The ambivalence which has enabled repression through reaction-formation to take place is also the point at which the repressed succeeds in returning. The vanished affect comes back in its transformed shape as social anxiety, moral anxiety and unlimited self-reproaches; the rejected idea is replaced by a substitute by displacement, often a displacement on to something very small or indifferent. A tendency to a complete re-establishment of the repressed idea is as a rule unmistakably present. The failure in the repression of the quantitative, affective factor brings into play the same mechanism of flight, by means of avoidance and prohibitions, as we have seen at work in the formation of hysterical phobias. The rejection of the idea from the conscious is, however, obstinately maintained, because it entails abstention from action, a motor fettering of the impulsion. Thus in obsessional neurosis the work of repression is prolonged in a sterile and interminable struggle.” (p. 2987)
Ibid.: “Obviously this is no subject for further speculation. The place of speculation must be taken by a careful analysis of the results of repression observable in the different neuroses. I must, however, suggest that we should postpone this task, too, until we have formed reliable conceptions of the relation of the conscious to the unconscious. But, in order that the present discussion may not be entirely unfruitful, I will say in advance that (1) the mechanism of repression does not in fact coincide with the mechanism or mechanisms of forming substitutes, (2) there are a great many different mechanisms of forming substitutes and (3) the mechanisms of repression have at least this one thing in common: a withdrawal of the cathexis of energy (or of libido, where we are dealing with sexual instincts).” (p. 2984)
Ibid.: “Here, substitute and symptom do not coincide. From this we learn something, too, about the mechanism of repression. In this instance, as in all others, repression has brought about a withdrawal of libido; but here it has made use of reaction-formation for this purpose, by intensifying an opposite. Thus in this case the formation of a substitute has the same mechanism as repression and at bottom coincides with it, while chronologically, as well as conceptually, it is distinct from the formation of a symptom.” (p. 2987)
Hegel EL (2010): “In its distinctive determinateness, the dialectic is far more the proper, true nature of the determinations of the understanding, of things, and of the finite in general. Reflexion is at first a process of going beyond the isolated determinacy, i.e. a relating of it, whereby it is brought into a relationship, despite its being maintained in its isolated validity. The dialectic is, by contrast, this immanent process of going beyond [such determinacy] wherein the one-sided and limited character of the determinations of the understanding presents itself as what it is, namely as their negation. Everything finite is this, the sublating of itself. Thus, the dialectical moment constitutes the moving soul of the scientific progression and is the principle through which alone an immanent connection and necessity enters into the content of science, just as in general the true, as opposed to an external, elevation above the finite resides in this principle.” (§81)
CLR James, Notes on Dialectics (1969). (p. 57)
Hegel: “The movement of the synthetic method is the inversion of the analytic method. While the latter advances by going from the individual as its starting point to the universal, in the former case the universal (as definition) forms the point of departure instead, and there is a progression from it through the particularization (in the division) to the individual (the theorem). With this, the synthetic method demonstrates itself to be the development of the moments of the concept in the object [Gegenstand].” (§228)
Hegel EL (2010): “The philosophical method is as much analytic as it is synthetic, yet not in the sense of a mere juxtaposition or a mere oscillation of these two methods of finite knowing. It is instead such that it contains them as sublated in itself and accordingly behaves in each of its movements both analytically and synthetically at the same time. Philosophical thinking proceeds analytically insofar as it merely takes up its object [Gegenstand], the idea, giving the latter full play, and as it were merely looking upon its movement and development. To this extent, philosophizing is completely passive. But philosophical thinking is then equally synthetic and demonstrates itself to be the activity of the concept itself.” (§238)
Jameson, Marxism & Form (1971): “It is, of course, thought to the second power: an intensification of the normal thought processes such that a renewal of light washes over the object of their exasperation, as though in the midst of its immediate perplexities the mind had attempted, by willpower, by fiat, to lift itself mightily up by its own bootstraps. Faced with the operative procedures of the nonreflective thinking mind (whether grappling with philosophical or artistic, political or scientific problems and objects), dialectical thought tries not so much to complete and perfect the application of such procedures as to widen its own attention to include them in its awareness as well: it aims, in other words, not so much at solving the particular dilemmas in question, as at converting those problems into their own solutions on a higher level, and making the fact and the existence of the problem itself the starting point for new research. This is indeed the most sensitive moment in the dialectical process: that in which an entire complex of thought is hoisted through a kind of inner leverage one floor higher, in which the mind, in a kind of shifting of gears, now finds itself willing to take what had been a question for an answer, standing outside its previous exertions in such a way that it reckons itself into the problem, understanding the dilemma not as a resistance of the object alone, but also as the result of a subject-pole deployed and disposed against it in a strategic fashion—in short, as the function of a determinate subject-object relationship. There is a breathlessness about this shift from the normal object-oriented activity of the mind to such dialectical self-consciousness—something of the sickening shudder we feel in an elevator’s fall or in the sudden dip in an airliner. That recalls us to our bodies much as this recalls us to our mental positions as thinkers and observers. The shock indeed is basic, and constitutive of the dialectic as such: without this transformational moment, without this initial conscious transcendence of an older, more naïve position, there can be no question of any genuinely dialectical coming to consciousness.”
Cf. “The Valences of History: Part I” in Valences of the Dialectic (2009) (p. 540)
See Gillian Rose, Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays (2017), Chapter 6 “From Speculative to Dialectical Thinking–Hegel and Adorno,” for a more detailed discussion of what she calls “the larger issue: that ‘dialectical’ thinking is not ‘speculative’ thinking.” (Her reference point for the difference between (merely) dialectical and speculative thinking is Hegel’s letter to Niethammer (10/23/1812) in which the three logical moments of reason–understanding, (negative) dialectic, (positive) speculation–are introduced well before the publication of the “Preliminary Conception” of the science of logic in the second edition of the Encyclopedia Logic (1827).) In this essay, Rose explains Adorno’s decision to confine himself to the dialectic, the second and negative stage of reason, against the speculative, the third and positive stage of reason, given his misunderstanding of Hegel’s speculative thought as a false ‘reconciliation,’ or power grab, for subject/concept over object/intuition. By way of conclusion, Rose begins two gestures any speculative reading of Adorno today must complete: (1) Rose criticizes Adorno’s judgment that Hegel ‘sides with the universal’ against the dynamism of the opposition between particular and universal given Adorno’s tendency towards static thought in multiplying dialectical antinomies–of subject and object, particular and universal, individual and state–that are supposed to have no history because history itself is supposed to have stalled out in them; (2) Rose criticizes Adorno’s merely judgmental writing for condemning what appears to him as the ‘repose’ of Hegel’s philosophy, which is in truth the dynamic unity or speculative identity of universality and particularity, given Adorno’s (and his readers’) unwillingness to recognize either the positive result of the negative dialectic in the historical development of a unity of opposites (“the universal in the aporia”) or the historical specificity of our distinctively contemporary experience of the lack of identity (“the lack of identity in its specificity”). Adorno’s problem is what Rose, in Hegel Contra Sociology (2009), identifies as his “morality of method,” which inherits all the aporias which accompany method and moralism: “For, although ‘method’ in (...) Adorno does not mean a general logic with its attendant objectifications, it did result in a preoccupation with itself, with the mode of intervention. It thus remains in a realm of infinite striving or task, a morality (Moralität), in the limited sense in which Hegel criticized: a general prescription not located in the social relations which underlie it, and hence incapable of providing any sustained and rigorous analysis of those relations.” (pp. 35-36) In other words, the mind-dulling restlessness of Adorno’s negative dialectic can’t just be excused by his pseudo-historical defense that history, too, is spinning in place.
Rose, Ibid.: “Adorno’s œuvre has broadcast the judgement that Hegel justifies totalitarian politics and that Nietzsche’s will to power amounts to omnipotencies but no potentiality. Adorno does not use the dialectic, but he does judge it; he cannot ‘give himself up to it’ – for then his thinking would become speculative. For reasons he gives himself, he is ‘under the spell’, which accounts for the remorselessly judgemental tone and style of his writing. Adorno kept the dialectic spellbound so that when later, post-modern generations insist again on revel without repose, their inevitable judgements may arrest their own inconsistency. If, even only abstractly and dialectically, this paper has begun to undo the spell – speculative beginnings may be released and coaxed to take up the labour of the concept. After the debilitations of the dance, the labour – which is equally repose – may refresh us.”
Hegel EL (2010): “This requires, however, the strenuous effort of holding off on one's own notions [Einfälle] and particular opinions which are always trying to assert themselves.” (§238)
Rose HCS: “They [JC: those who read Hegel’s sentences as ordinary propositions] divide the sentence into a grammatical subject and predicate joined by the copula ‘is.’ The grammatical subject is considered a fixed bearer of variable accidents, the grammatical predicates, which yield the content of the proposition. Hegel knew that his thought would be misunderstood if it were read as a series of ordinary propositions, which affirm an identity between a fixed subject and contingent accidents, but he also knew that, like any thinker, he had to present his thought in propositional form.” (pp. 51-52)
Rose HCS: “He thus proposed, in an unfortunately schematic statement, that the propositional form must be read as a ‘speculative proposition.’ This use of ‘speculative’ is not the same as Kant’s use of it. It does not refer to the illegitimate use of correct principles, but embraces the impossibility of Kantian justification. To read a proposition ‘speculatively’ means that the identity which is affirmed between subject and predicate is seen equally to affirm a lack of identity between subject and predicate.” (p. 52)
Rose HCS: “This reading implies an identity different from the merely formal one of the ordinary proposition. This different kind of identity cannot be pre-judged, that is, it cannot be justified in a transcendental sense, and it cannot be stated in a proposition of the kind to be eschewed. This different kind of identity must be understood as a result to be achieved. From this perspective the ‘subject’ is not fixed, nor the predicates accidental: they acquire meaning in a series of relations to each other. Only when the lack of identity between subject and predicate has been experienced, can their identity be grasped. ‘Lack of identity’ does not have the formal meaning that subject and predicate must be different from each other in order to be related. It means that the proposition which we have affirmed, or the concept we have devised of the nature of an object, fails to correspond to the state of affairs or object which we have also defined as the state of affairs or object to which it should correspond. This experience of lack of identity which natural consciousness undergoes is the basis for reading propositions as speculative identities. The subject of the proposition is no longer fixed and abstract with external, contingent accidents, but, initially, an empty name, uncertain and problematic, gradually acquiring meaning as the result of a series of contradictory experiences.” (p. 52)
Rose HCS: “Thus it cannot be said, as Marx, for example, said, that the speculative proposition turns the predicate into the subject and therefore hypostatizes predicates, just like the ordinary proposition hypostatizes the subject. ‘The important thing is that Hegel at all times makes the Idea the subject and makes the proper and actual subject, like “political sentiment,” the predicate. But the development proceeds at all times on the side of the predicate.’ But the speculative proposition is fundamentally opposed to the kind of formal identity which would still be affirmed by such a reversal of subject and predicate.” (pp. 52-53)
Adorno, in Hegel: Three Studies, reads Hegel as not only Fichtean, but hyper-Fichtean in advancing a subjective idealism: “Like Fichte, Hegel attempted to outdo Kant in idealism by dissolving anything not proper to consciousness—in other words, the given moment of reality—into a positing by the infinite subject. Hegel praised the greater consistency of Kant's successors in comparison with the abysmal discontinuities of the Kantian system, and he even outdid them in this regard. It did not occur to him that the Kantian discontinuities register the very moment of nonidentity that is an indispensable part of his own conception of the philosophy of identity. (…) In his decision to tolerate no limits, .to eliminate every particle of a determination of difference, Hegel literally outdid Fichtean idealism. The individual Fichtean principles thereby lose their conclusive significance. Hegel recognized the inadequacy of an abstract principle beyond the dialectic; a principle from which all else is to follow. Something that was implicit in Fichte but not yet developed now becomes the driving force of Hegel's philosophical activity. The consequence of the principle negates the principle itself and destroys its absolute primacy.” (pp. 11-12)
Adorno, in Negative Dialectics (2007) trans. Ashton: “The fundament and result of Hegel’s substantive philosophizing was the primacy of the subject, or–in the famous phrase from the Introduction to his Logic–the “identity of identity and non-identity.” He held the definite particular to be definable by the mind because its immanent definition was nothing but the mind. Without this supposition, according to Hegel, philosophy would be incapable of knowing anything substantive or essential.” (p. 7)
Rose (HCS) argues that Marx’s reading of Hegel reads Hegel as Fichte while Marx himself reproduces Fichte’s dualism: “Marx produces a Fichtean reading of Hegel’s system as the unconditioned absolute idea which pours forth nature, which does not recognize but creates determination, but presents in his turn a dichotomous Fichtean actuality which is divided into activity and nature, which is either created by the act or external to the act.” (p. 229)
Rose J&M (2017), pp. 56-57
Rose (HCS), using the case of the implicit conceptual whole beyond the distinction between finite and infinite: “Once it is shown that the criterion of what is to count as finite and infinite has been created by consciousness itself, then a notion is implied which does not divide consciousness or reality into finite and infinite. This notion is implied by the very distinction between finite and infinite which has become uncertain. But it is not pre-judged as to what this notion, beyond the distinction between finite and infinite, might be. It is not pre-judged in two senses: no autonomous justification is given of a new object, and no statement is made before it is achieved. The infinite or absolute is present, but not yet known, neither treated methodologically from the outside as an unknowable, nor ‘shot from a pistol’ as an immediate certainty. This ‘whole’ can only become known as a result of the process of the contradictory experiences of consciousness which gradually comes to realize it.” (p. 49)
Hegel EL: “In the second sphere, the concept at first being in itself came to shine forth [zum Scheinen gekommen] and is thus in itself already the idea. – The development of this sphere becomes the return to the first, just as the development of the first sphere is a transition into the second. Only by means of this double movement is justice done to the difference, since each of the two differentiated factors, each considered in itself, completes itself so as to form the totality and, in that totality, puts itself into unity with the other. Only the fact that both sublate [das Sichaufheben] the one-sidedness in themselves prevents the unity from becoming one-sided.” (§241)
Hegel EL: “We are to be reminded here of the dual meaning of our German expression ‘aufheben’ [to sublate]. By ‘aufheben’ we understand on the one hand something like clearing out of the way or negating, and we accordingly speak of a law, for instance, or an institution as having been ‘aufgehoben’. On the other hand, however, aufheben also means something like preserving, and in this sense we say that something is well taken care of [gut aufgehoben, taken out of harm’s way and put in a safe place]. This dual sense in linguistic usage according to which one and the same word has a negative as well as a positive meaning must not be regarded as a coincidence or even made the object of reproach to the language as causing confusion. Rather, in it we should recognize the speculative spirit of our language that transcends the either/or of mere understanding.” (§96)
Hegel, Science of Logic. Translated by George di Giovanni. Cambridge University Press. 2010. (p. 532)
Cf. Daniel Whistler’s excellent “Silvering, or the Role of Mysticism in German Idealism” (2013) for the distinction he develops between speculative and reflective thinking as both Schelling and Hegel understood it in the early 1800s: “The concepts of both reflection and speculation gain their sense from the workings of the mirror: its ontology of original and image (which both is and is not the original) and its evaluative criteria of fidelity (seeing face-to-face) and inaccuracy (seeing darkly). The description of thought as mirror (while traditional) takes on a new urgency from 1801 onwards in the task of differentiating between two types of mirror: a narcissistic, reflective mirror which is to be avoided and a magical, speculative mirror which all philosophers must strive to silver. What distinguishes these types of mirror—that is, the conditions of silvering that account for the transition from reflection to speculation—are Schelling and Hegel’s concerns.” (p. 151)
And: “Consideration of a passage repeated in both the Lectures on Philosophy of Art and the Lectures on Method (On University Studies) will help bring out further the key issues at play in this recourse to mysticism. Schelling writes, “Art contemplates the intimate essence of the science of the absolute (philosophy) as in a magical and symbolic mirror.” The artistic medium reflects—and so mediates—philosophical ideas. And there is, of course, also an art to philosophising itself: the philosopher too must hold up a mirror to her thinking through the written or spoken word. Articulation is necessarily mediation. So, one of the stakes in philosophising is the nature of the philosopher’s mirror—what it reflects and how it reflects it. That is, what is at stake is how the mirror is manufactured, the silvering process that goes into its creation. The art of the philosopher includes the art of making mirrors as well as looking into them—the production of “that dull surface without which no reflection and no specular and speculative activity would be possible.” The philosopher mediates reality through herself and her text—and it is not just the success of such mediation that distinguishes a good from a bad philosopher, it is also the type of mediation she forges in the first place.” (pp. 152-153)
(https://solutioperfecta.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/g7-whistler.pdf)
Hegel SoL p. 13
Rose HCS: “Re-cognizing’ emphasizes the lack of identity or difference which is seen. (…) Anerkennen [recognizing] thus implies an initial experience which is misunderstood, and which has to be re-experienced. It does not imply an immediate, successful vision, but that the immediate vision or experience is incomplete (…). The familiar or well-known, the immediate experience (das Bekannte), is a partial experience which has to be re-experienced or known again (anerkannt) in order to be fully known (erkannt). Hence ‘re-cognition’ implies initial mis(re)cognition, not an immediate ‘seeing into.’” (76)
Rose, J&M, p. 9
See also her speculative presentation of speculative reason itself through an analogy to friendship: “Reason – as the analogy with the deepened notion of friendship suggests – is relational, responsive and reconstructive. Only its restriction by specific institutions renders it exclusive, oppositional and closed – and even then it must precariously maintain itself as such. The exposition of friendship demonstrated that the most existential response to the crisis of friendship, that of negotiation, turns out to be the most logocentric: it involves recognizing our mutual implication in the dynamics of the relationship, and it leads to changed self-definition inseparable from the changed mutual definition. Boundaries are transgressed and redrawn and ever-vulnerable. The otherness of the Other could not be discovered without discovering the otherness of the self: friendship is relational, not differential, because it is always pervaded with meanings neither party intends, but which are recoverable by reflection when challenged. The concept of friendship which emerges from the pain and lessons of experience is dynamic: it connotes the unanticipated outcome of idea and act; and yields the actuality of the concept, not its alterity. To present experience, with its unwelcome and welcome surprises and with its structure, is the work of reason itself, its dynamic and its actuality. (…) To promise anything else, any new righteousness which will not be subject of and subject to the difficulty of actuality, which will never become unjust, is to disempower. Reason that is actual is ready for all kinds of surprises, for what cannot be anticipated, precisely because of the interference of meanings which are structured and reconstructable. (…) Negotiating the interference of meanings between idea and act, its isolation and implication, its self-identity and lack of self-identity and not hailing and sacralizing the plurality or irreducible singularity of itself and of ‘the Other’, reason, full of surprises, is adventurous and corrigible. (…) The discovery of the difficult, dangerous and irrational impulses and actualities of individual and social life can only be the work of faceted and facetious reason, which – like Socratic irony equally beyond irony – is at the same time beyond its facetiousness. Paul Klee’s Angélus Dubiosus provides an image and name for reason, full of surprises. (…) The dubious angel, bathetic angel, suits reason: for the angel continues to try to do good, to run the risk of idealization, of abstract intentions, to stake itself for ideas and for others. Experience will only accrue if the angel discovers the violence in its initial idea, when that idea comes up against the actuality of others and the unanticipated meanings between them. Now angels, of course, are not meant to gain experience – in the angelic hierarchies, idea and act at once define the angel, who is the unique instant of its species, without generation or gender. But here is the dubious angel – hybrid of hubris and humility – who makes mistakes, for whom things go wrong, who constantly discovers its own faults and failings, yet who still persists in the pain of staking itself, with the courage to initiate action and the commitment to go on and on, learning from those mistakes and risking new ventures. The dubious angel constantly changes its self-identity and its relation to others. Yet it appears commonplace, pedestrian, bulky and grounded – even though, mirabile dictu, there are no grounds and no ground.” (pp. 3-10)