Hegel and Subjectivity

“The very fact that something is determined as a limitation implies that the limitation is already transcended.”—G.W.F. Hegel

The essence of Hegel’s notion of the subject is defined by a sense of reflexivity. This isn’t to be taken to mean that a subject simply ‘is’ what they are in any given process—such an attitude is more appropriate to Deleuzian ontology, where the endlessly differentiated series of becoming ensures some supposed transcendental status of the subject. Instead, what we have with Hegel is self-referentiality, a kind of relating back to premises which ground the agent through being deployed in all their determinations. While this may sound similar to the Deleuzian attitude, the key difference is that, in Hegel, the determinateness itself entails contingency. How can this be?

The above quote reveals two things, in this regard. The first is that the connection between the rational and irrational, determinate and contingent, is bound up with the way subjects establish their boundaries and thereby reshape them. It isn’t quite analogous to Einstein’s claim that accepting limitations is going past them, where the transcendent potential has more general spiritual connotations. Instead, what Hegel means to say is that the very act of positing a boundary/limitation/etc. implicates an entire process that inherently leads to its overcoming. And this is where the second key aspect comes in: transcending limitations isn’t literally getting past them. What the contingency at the heart of Hegel’s system teaches us, is that once a limitation is transcended, the process retroactively constitutes what was originally there, so that doing so is just a way of more meaningfully determining a subject whose potential isn’t endlessly infinite.

Of note here is the difference between Hegel’s notion of the bad or “spurious” infinite and true infinite. In a word, the former is basically where a process goes on ceaselessly with a kind of open-endedness that presumes to get past finitude through doing nothing but avoiding it. Whereas true infinite is a state where the limitations are integrated as part of the process of overcoming finitude. The paradox is that, while a subject can never purely see themselves as infinite through their finitude, they can, as Zizek loves to say, “posit their presuppositions”—they can access the infinite without abandoning the limitations which anchor them.

The implications of this are twofold. First, given that one can’t stand on their own shoulders and see themselves moving through history, positing presuppositions effectively means that the circle is closed not by merely accepting the general ways one is constituted as part of some greater pursuit, but instead realizing what these very limitations say about them in this context. A more accessible analogy would be the divide between one’s higher self or soul and the condition/fixations that delimit them. Contrary to conventional conceptions where one transcends to false enlightenment, the Hegelian lesson is that the higher self is embedded in these very constraints. Being infinite here means integrating this within one’s condition itself, so that they retain a sense of the true infinite that allows for determination.

And this brings me to the final point: negativity. As with Zizek, its status is ambiguous for many. But given that a subject has to be defined by limitations to get past them, and that the process of doing so entails a sense of contradiction, what’s left to a subject (in an almost Lacanian sense) is a referent that anchors their pursuits in a way that preserves the control necessary to work through ideas/projections/etc. without putting them in bondage to fate. The key point is that the referent itself isn’t fixed—say, “I am a smart, charismatic person” so xyz. Instead, the negativity is to be seen in the way a subject relates to the referent(s) they use to anchor their projections. Tying this back to the quote: if the determination of a limitation implies that it is already transcended, then the purpose of the referent is to let the negativity at the heart of subjectivity express itself in such a way that a subject can come to know themselves through it. In a word, a subject “already is” by virtue of getting past limitations which they posited for the sake of the process of doing so.