Abstract
The aim of this chapter is to show how Ray Brassier portrays Hegel’s famous ‘in-itself’ of the ‘for us’ of consciousness as both a collective system of knowledge and as a process of ‘determinate negation’, which bypasses conventional accounts of both first-person phenomenological consciousness (subjectivist accounts), eliminative materialism and scientific realism. Brassier describes the process of Hegelian negation as an operation of effacement which bypasses the ‘content’ (of consciousness) that it produces (representational and conceptual content, for example) whilst simultaneously affirming a continual desubstantialisation of any scientific or ontologically positive form or ground of reality. The denotation of the word “negation” is a subtractive or revisionary one and does not denote a ‘given’ or deductive account of the reality of independently existing entities which science typically encourages. We will see how this appropriation of Hegelian determinate negation opens up a way to think the death of thought (qua extinction) which has “interests that do not coincide with those of living”, a thinking which bypasses the distinction made in Brassier’s thesis not only between the scientific and manifest images of thought (Sellars) but also between thought as organic extension and thought as a realisation indifferent to the whims of natural entropy and negentropy. In other words, Brassier’s Hegelian negation is a theory of the human as that which registers a “transcendental extinction” at odds with both the future-oriented practices of phenomenology (in Heidegger, for example) and the blind, repetitive processes of matter (or a scientific eliminativism). This space is conventionally one that is reconciled by Spirit in Hegelian philosophy (as the realisation of both life and death as co-implicated opposites, found in Becoming), yet Brassier ingeniously finds a way to show that thought fails to transcend and hence reconcile its opposites dialectically when it becomes terminated by an extinction which simultaneously objectifies thought into but another entity in the cosmos.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Hegel, G.W.F. The Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 18.
- 2.
As Willem deVries expertly exemplifies in his book Hegel’s Theory of Mental Activity, chapter 4: Sensation: Minds Material. Cornell University Press, 1988.
- 3.
Brassier stresses that Sellar’s account of thought is not ontological; it does not—unlike Kant and Hegel—lay claim to a specific ontological status but in fact leaves this open for further revision (if indeed revision is necessary).
- 4.
Brassier, Ray, Nihil Unbound, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, p. 4.
- 5.
DeVries, Willem, p. 68.
- 6.
In deVries’ words; “We have seen in what sense sensations have content: preserving within the mind a quality-space equally applicable to the outer objects causally responsible for the sensations. The sense in which higher cognitive states have a content is different, though not unrelated. The intentionality of sense is not the full intentionality of the higher cognitive processes” (p. 70).
- 7.
Brasier, N.U. p. 5.
- 8.
See Willem deVries, Hege’s Theory of Mental Activity, Cornell University Press, 1988. p. 16.
- 9.
Ibid.
- 10.
In Ray Brassier’s words, “reifying concepts as entities is a category mistake. Concepts have functional coordinates but not spatiotemporal ones”. Interview with Leon Niemoczynski (2017).
- 11.
Willem deVries, Hege’s Theory of Mental Activity, Cornell University Press, 1988. p. 26.
- 12.
Ibid.
- 13.
The Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford University Press, 1977, Introduction, p. 1.
- 14.
Findlay, J.N. The Phenomenology of Spirit, 1977. Foreword p. vi.
- 15.
Ibid., p. 56.
- 16.
Brassier, Ray, Nihil Unbound, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, p. 5.
- 17.
For example, could language be something so versatile that it could be ‘downloaded’ into machines which have no natural (or innate) relation to Newtonian physics.
- 18.
Hegel, G.W.F. The Phenomenology of The Spirit. Oxford University Press. 1977. p. 35. Preface.
- 19.
Hegel, G.W.F. The Phenomenology of The Spirit. p. 21. Oxford University Press. 1977.
- 20.
Ibid., p. 51.
- 21.
Rockmore, Tom, Hegel’s Circular Epistemology, Indiana University Press, 1986.
- 22.
Hegel G. W. F. 1807/2018. The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. T. Pinkard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 59.
- 23.
Ibid.
- 24.
P. 51. Introduction. Hegel, G.W.F. The Phenomenology of Spirit (1977).
- 25.
Ibid., p. 56.
- 26.
See video link, 16.00; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9Qy50X5Gs8&t=6s.
- 27.
Brassier, Ray, Nihil Unbound, p. 31.
- 28.
One could also say that this hidden discrepancy is found in the contingency of certain experiences of objects in the subject, and the necessity of the manifest forms produced out of such contingent experience. This would seem to relate to Hegel’s points on the necessary logical unfolding of the conceptual in distinction to the actual contingent events which present such possible content. Historical events are contingent but the way in which they unfold are logical and necessary (the dialectic, sublation etc.).
- 29.
The Persistence of Form: Hegel and Psychoanalysis. Slide 16. Presented at University of Brighton, College of Arts and Humanities on 20 February 2017.
- 30.
Foreword, Findlay, J.N. The Phenomenology of Spirit. 1977.
- 31.
Hegel, we know, did not desire to step out of his own time and his own thought-situation. To seek to transcend one’s time is only, he says, to venture into the ‘soft element’ of fancy and opinion. p. vii Phenomenology of Spirit, 1977.
- 32.
Ibid., p. vii.
- 33.
Introduction, p. 50, Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, 1977.
- 34.
Ibid., p. 51.
- 35.
Ibid., p. 51.
- 36.
The Persistence of Form: Hegel and Psychoanalysis. Slide 17. Presented at University of Brighton, College of Arts and Humanities on 20 February 2017.
- 37.
Rebecca Comay ‘Resistance and Repetition’. Brill. 2015 pp. 261–262.
- 38.
Instead of spending hours poring over Hegel’s Science of Logic in order to find references, I have decided to use Marxists.org to find certain passages that I thought would aid this section. See link here for Hegel’s passages on Being, Non-Being and Becoming; Section 135 https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hl/hl083.htm.
- 39.
Porter, Allen, The Syllogism in Hegel’s Logic, https://www.academia.edu/8931115/The_Syllogism_In_Hegels_Logic.
- 40.
- 41.
Ibid., section 140.
- 42.
Ibid., Section 135.
- 43.
Ibid., Section 135.
- 44.
Ibid., Section 138.
- 45.
- 46.
The more naturalist-speculative account may go something like this: Cognition putatively contains both the determination of reflection and “its opposite determination” (i.e. causal determination). But it also excludes the external causal dimension through virtue of this new, ‘sublated’ form of cognition that implies both modes; it can reflect upon causation and make its content interior or commensurate with consciousness. But also, it can conceptualise external causality as providing all the basic content it needs for consciousness. Moreover, when this new absolute consciousness is further analysed, as itself, it too must momentarily suspend itself or oppose itself as identity; it must negate itself as soon as it is posited, but this negative reflection is then aimed at itself ad infinitum (self-relating negativity).
- 47.
Hegel, G.W.F, The Science of Logic. See section Being, Becoming, Nothing.
- 48.
Zizek, Slavoj, Less Than Nothing, Verso, 2012. p. 484.
- 49.
Ibid., p. 485.
- 50.
The Persistence of Form: Hegel and Psychoanalysis. Slide 18. Presented at University of Brighton, College of Arts and Humanities on 20 February 2017.
- 51.
Ibid., slide 20.
- 52.
Zizek, Slavoj, Less Than Nothing, Verso, 2012. p. 487.
- 53.
The Persistence of Form: Hegel and Psychoanalysis. Presented at University of Brighton, College of Arts and Humanities on 20 February 2017 (my italics).
- 54.
Ibid., Slide 26.
- 55.
Ibid., slide 29.
- 56.
The Persistence of Form: Hegel and Psychoanalysis. Presented at University of Brighton, College of Arts and Humanities on 20 February 2017.
- 57.
Zizek, Slavoj, Less Than Nothing, Verso, 2012. p. 500.
- 58.
The Persistence of Form: Hegel and Psychoanalysis. Presented at University of Brighton, College of Arts and Humanities on 20 February 2017.
- 59.
Surely there can be individual moments of particularity as subsumption; subsumption is a subjective operation which equates universality to particularity without any remainder (without further negation) and instead abides by the law of fixation; self-identification with all that is qua the particular trauma. This reminds me of Nietzsche’s thesis that if one “says yes to one joy” then one is saying yes to all the moments that “are chained and entwined” with the existence of this one moment.
- 60.
The Persistence of Form: Hegel and Psychoanalysis. Presented at University of Brighton, College of Arts and Humanities on 20 February 2017. Slide 30.
- 61.
As Brassier himself admits, “Hegel believes that contradiction exerts a determining power; it can be conceptualised (determinately conceptualised).” Ibid.
- 62.
Ibid.
- 63.
Zizek, Slavoj, Less Than Nothing, Verso, 2012. p. 477.
- 64.
The Persistence of Form: Hegel and Psychoanalysis. Presented at University of Brighton, College of Arts and Humanities on 20 February 2017.
- 65.
See the following paragraph in this chapter.
- 66.
- 67.
Ibid., 193.
- 68.
This will have to be carefully qualified because although Hegel’s anti-Aristotelian successors wish to rid him of any positive theory of self-identical essences in Nature and wish to qualify his theory of negation as solely conceptual, the rise of the organism in Hegel—as the reconciliation of external purposelessness and internal, ideal teleology—is indispensable in his theory of the relation between Spirit and Nature.
- 69.
Deductive in the sense of deducing what non-relationality is not (in contra-distinction, for example).
- 70.
This is also connected to both Brassier’s and Harman’s emphasis on unilateral or asymmetrical relationality contra the reciprocity epitomised in “correlationism”, where thinking and being are interchangeable and co-implicated in many ways.
- 71.
This ‘in itself’ of the ‘for itself’ is usually characterised as an autonomous thinking activity generated through itself; its own determinations; the determinate becoming of the nothingness it initially starts with (nothingness as the impossibility of knowing anything in advance of the process of knowing).
- 72.
Nietzsche, F. (1968) The Will to Power, ed. and tr. W. Kaufman (New York: Vintage).
- 73.
See Ray Brassier’s presentation entitled The Persistence of Form: Hegel and Psychoanalysis. Slide 16. Presented at University of Brighton, College of Arts and Humanities on 20 February 2017. See video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyGji40HNQw.
- 74.
See Chap. 7: The Truth of Extinction in Nihil Unbound for Brassier’s analysis of the Nietzschean-affirmative metaphysics of becoming.
- 75.
“Nietzsche’s overcoming of nihilism amounts to an inverted Hegelianism, which pits the power of the positive against the labour of the negative only in order to convert difference-in-itself into difference-for-itself.” Brassier, N.U. p. 221.
- 76.
Brassier, Ray, Nihil Unbound, p. xi (Preface).
- 77.
Ibid., p. xi.
- 78.
Zizek, Slavoj, https://compactmag.com/article/the-stupidity-of-nature.
- 79.
In his presentation entitled ‘The Persistence of Form’, he states that more and more he is convinced that the Hegelian—Lacanian—Marxist trajectory is the right way to go considering philosophical and political questions at large.
- 80.
Evald Ilyenkov, The dialectics of the Abstract & the Concrete, in Marx’s Capital Chapter 3—Ascent from the Abstract to the Concrete Hegel’s Conception of the Concrete. See https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/abstract/abstra3b.htm#:~:text=According%20to%20Hegel%2C%20that%20means,to%20the%20concrete%20human%20spirit.
- 81.
See Ray Brassier’s presentation entitled The Persistence of Form: Hegel and Psychoanalysis. Slide 16. Presented at University of Brighton, College of Arts and Humanities on 20 February 2017.
- 82.
We have discussed this in full in our first section on Brassier via Willem DeVries research on Hegel.
- 83.
PART II of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. The Philosophy of Nature. See https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/na/nature.htm.
- 84.
See J.N. Findlay’s ‘Foreword’ to The Phenomenology of Spirit. p. xxix (1977 edition).
- 85.
As we have already argued, Hegel is very clever in retrospectively stating that all contingency is necessary as it brings about the realisation of the Idea. In other words, if necessity is disclosed at the end of the phenomenology of science of logic, then it has been a necessary route to get there.
- 86.
PART II of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. The Philosophy of Nature; Section 193. See link; https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/na/nature.htm.
- 87.
I think Hegel can be accused of the same prioritisation of Time over Space that Brassier applies to both Heidegger and Deleuze; all three philosophers “pit the ineradicable difference of creative time against the physical erasure of annihilating space, which is perceived as a threat to the life of the mind”. Brassier, Nihil Unbound, p. 222.
- 88.
Ibid., p. 222.
- 89.
See Iain Hamilton Grant’s presentation at ‘Speculations on Anonymous Materials’ in Berlin; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMoTh3HpO0E&t=608s (my italics).
- 90.
Implying that there may be a non-existence or non-being outside of this remit that nevertheless is not included in the being of nature or the cosmos.
- 91.
Ibid.
- 92.
P. 222. Nihil Unbound, 2007 (my italics).
- 93.
Ibid., p. 222.
- 94.
Brassier, Ray, Nihil Unbound, p. 222.
- 95.
Ibid., p. xi.
- 96.
Ibid., p. 223 (quoting Lyotard, Francois, The Inhuman, 1991, p. 9).
- 97.
Ibid., p. 228.
- 98.
Ibid., p. 228.
- 99.
Ibid., P. 228.
- 100.
Xi preface.
- 101.
“Lyotard invites us to ponder philosophy’s relationship to the terrestrial horizon which, in the wake of the collapse of the metaphysical horizon called ‘God’—whose dissolution spurred the Nietzschean injunction ‘remain true to the earth!’ (Nietzsche 1969: 42) has been endowed with a quasi-transcendental status, whether as the ‘originary ark’ (Husserl), the ‘self-secluding’ (Heidegger), or ‘the deterritorialized’ (Deleuze).35. But as Lyotard points out, this terrestrial horizon will also be wiped away, when, roughly 4.5 billion years from now, the sun is extinguished, incinerating the ‘originary ark’, obliterating the ‘self-secluding’, and vaporizing ‘the deterritorialized’” (Nihil Unbound, p. 223).
- 102.
Brassier, Ray, Nihil Unbound, P. 223.
- 103.
Ibid., p. 228.
- 104.
J-F. Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, tr. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991.
- 105.
See Iain Hamilton Grant’s talk, Speculations on Anonymous Materials, here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMoTh3HpO0E.
- 106.
We will look into this in more detail in our chapter on Iain Hamilton Grant.
- 107.
Using a term of Meillassoux’s to designate a time prior to consciousness itself.
- 108.
Nihil Unbound, p. 227, 2007.
- 109.
Nihil Unbound, p. 228.
- 110.
Ibid., p. 229.
- 111.
Ibid., p. 230.
- 112.
Ibid., p. 230. This immanent non-dialectical identity seems vague to me but Brassier suggests that much of its conceptual cogency and import can be found in his essay/s on Laruelle (see Chap. 5: Being Nothing) as “the non-dialectical identity of the distinction between relation and non-relation” (p. 230).
- 113.
Nihil Unbound, p. 232.
- 114.
Nihil Unbound, p. 239.
- 115.
Hegel, G.W.F, p. 55. Introduction. Section 87. 1977. Oxford University Press.
- 116.
This isn’t simply the epistemological problem of starting with thoughts’ content regarding a content-less origin (the becoming of the non-being/being dyad); it is also an ontological problem of acknowledging this indeterminate power of the negative beyond—or implicated by but not exhausted within—what emerges through the relation between being and non-being, that is, nature, biological life.
- 117.
Nihil Unbound, p. 231.
- 118.
See Laruelle Francois, From Decision to Heresy Experiments in Non-Standard Thought, Urbanomic, 2012.
- 119.
For example, although Harman’s philosophy of objects has been described as a ‘negative theology’ because of its attempt to formulate the ‘withdrawn’ as that which ‘resists’ cataloguing in terms of presence, relationality, access and the phenomenal, one could also suggest that Harman’s philosophy is a positive thesis about the irreducible reality of objects; there definitely is an existing ‘thing’ that withdraws and resists; as can be found in the failure of the sensual object and the sensual profile of the real object to fully exhaust the reality of the object beyond or in excess of such domains.
- 120.
Meillassoux, Quentin, After Finitude, p. 53.
- 121.
Brassier uses the term ‘anterior’ to distinguish it from purely ‘posterior’ unilateral difference found in Meillassoux’s ancestral statements of the earth before the advent of human consciousness. p. 236, Nihil Unbound.
- 122.
The Phenomenology of Mind Preface, On scientific knowledge. See; https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phprefac.htm.
- 123.
Ibid., p. 223.
- 124.
Ibid., p. 239.
- 125.
All phenomena are phenomena; their particularity does not stymie their mode of appearing. Science equally—in its tendency to undermine objects into a layer of fundamental (and usually arbitrary) reality—also does away with any ontological account of difference or particularity which Harman’s ontology does afford (the real differences between zebras and apples, for example, but also the difference between this apple and that apple).
Bibliography
Brassier, Ray, Nihil Unbound, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Churchland, P.M. A Neurocomputational Perspective: The Nature of Mind and The Structure of Science, London, M.I.T Press, 1989.
deVries, Willem, Hegel’s Theory of Mental Activity, Cornell University Press, 1988.
Grant, Iain Hamilton, Mining Conditions, The Speculative Turn, R.E Press, 2011 Pg 43.
Harman, Graham, The Quadruple Object, Zer0 Press, 2011.
Hegel, G.W.F. The Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford University Press, 1977.
Hegel, G.W.F. The Encyclopaedia Logic. Trans. Geraets, Harris, & Suchting. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. 1991.
Hegel G.W.F. The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. T. Pinkard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1807/2018.
Houlgate, Stephen, An Introduction to Hegel, Freedom, Truth and History. Blackwell, 2005.
Laruelle, Francois, From Decision to Heresy Experiments in Non-Standard Thought, Urbanomic, 2012.
Lyotard, F. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, tr. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991.
Meillassoux, Quentin, After Finitude, Bloomsbury, 2009 edition.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power, ed. and tr. W. Kaufman (New York: Vintage) 1968 edition.
Rockmore, Tom, Hegel’s Circular Epistemology, Indiana University Press, 1986.
Zizek, Slavoj, Less Than Nothing, Verso, 2012.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Johns, C.W. (2023). Ray Brassier: Eliminativism or Negation?. In: Hegel and Speculative Realism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32657-8_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32657-8_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-32656-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-32657-8
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)