The Architecture of Freedom: Hegel, Subjectivity, and the Postcolonial State

331 Pages·2019·2.972 MB·English

by  Hassanaly Ladha

For Ayla
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“Philosophy is its time grasped in thought”
– G. F. W. Hegel
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1 The Colossi of Memnon. Etching by Baltard. Based on a drawing by
Dutertre. Description de l’Egypte (Paris: Imprimerie impériale, 1809),
Vol. II, Plate 20, 1809 47
2 Memnon. Engraving by Bernard Picart. The Temple of the Muses, 1731 68
3 The Departure of Memnon for Troy, Greek, 6th century BC. Courtesy of
Royal Museums of Art and History, Brussels 69
4 Memnon and His Ethiopian Warriors, Greek, c. 530 BC. Courtesy of
British Museum, London 70
5 Eos Tearing Her Hair in Grief over the Body of Memnon, 6th century BC.
Courtesy of Gregorian Etruscan Museum, Vatican City 71
6 Achilles Battles Memnon as Thetis and Eos Watch Attic red figure volute
krater, 500–480 BC. Courtesy of British Museum, London 72
7 Goethe as “Mohammedan Poet.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
West-östlicher Divan (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1819), Frontispiece.
Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University 101
8 The Pyramids at Meroe, View from the Northeast. Engraving by Fédéric
Cailliaud. Voyage à Méroé : au fleuve Blanc, au-delà de Fâzoql dans
le midi du royaume de Sennâr, à Syouah et dans cinq autres oasis; fait dans
les années 1819, 1820, 1821 et 1822 (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1826),
Plate XXXVI 125
9 Kunta Kinte and the Overseer. From Roots [miniseries], dir. Chomsky,
Erman, Moses et al. USA: Wolper Productions, 1977. Still from episode 2 212
10 The Last Supper. Barthélémy Toguo, Dak’Art Vert, 2014. Rendering by
Boaz Balachsan 289
PREFACE
Hegel has plausibly been called the “inaugural thinker of the contemporary world.”1 And
yet foundational elements of his thought have escaped attention—not only those buried
in neglected manuscripts, marginal notes, and obscure literary and political allusions,
but also those hiding in plain sight. This book attends to a constellation of such moments
across Hegel’s work. Ranging from Egyptian “architectonics” to the logic of borders, from
Persian poetry to the sublimity of representation, from “beautiful” democracy to forced
labor, and from African history to international “right,” the book offers a new reading of
Hegel’s related theories of architecture and language, aesthetics and history, mastery and
slavery, and subjectivity and the state.
I wrote this book for scholars in philosophy as well as those in other fields impacted
by Hegel’s thought, including architecture, postcolonial studies, political theory, and
the history of slavery. I would recommend that readers resist the urge to pass directly
to chapters most relevant to their area of study. The argument of the book proceeds
methodically from beginning to end; the later sections will make little sense if read out of
sequence. My hope is that the payoff will have been worth the effort of a patient reading.
This book has had a long gestation, and I have accrued more debts along the way
than I could possibly acknowledge. I wrote and completed Part One of this book in
2004; this section appears here in essentially the same form. I am deeply grateful to
Claudia Brodsky and Michael Wood for reading the manuscript at that time, just as
I was going on academic leave for personal reasons. I am indebted to both for their
early encouragement and insistence that I continue with my work. Since then, I have
had the privilege of tapping the prodigious intelligence and friendship of both Claudia
and Michael on numerous occasions. Barbara Johnson served as a mentor during my
years at Harvard. I will never forget her steadfast passion, generosity, and commitment
to excellence, even as writing and speaking became difficult for her: I continue to feel
her loss keenly. Walter Johnson shared his encyclopedic knowledge of the history and
theory of slavery; to him I also owe the book’s title. Tom Conley, Ann Smock, Sebastian
Wogenstein, Sarah Johnson, and Peter Constantine provided invaluable feedback on
various aspects of the manuscript. While I have benefitted from the generosity and
erudition of these and other scholars, all shortcomings and errors in this book, including
those of fact, interpretation, and translation, are mine alone.
I am grateful to the journal October for generously granting permission to reprint
material that appeared in my essay entitled, “Hegel’s Werkmeister: Architecture,
1Jean-Luc Nancy, Hegel: L’inquiétude du négatif (Paris: Hachette, 1997), 5.
Preface
Architectonics, and the Theory of History.”2 I am particularly thankful to the Humanities
Institute at the University of Connecticut for support as I completed research for the
final chapter of this book. Michael Lynch, Brendan Kane, and other fellows at the
Institute created a collegial and fertile intellectual environment. I am deeply appreciative
of my other colleagues at the University of Connecticut, especially Roger Célestin, Anne
Berthelot, Eliane DalMolin, Valérie Saugera, Jennifer Terni, and Gustavo Nanclares.
Their support has meant more to me than they could know. A number of scholars have
played a formative role in my intellectual development, including Suzanne Nash, Gerhard
Böwering, Alan Trachtenberg, and Langdon Hammer, as well as David Underdown and
Wolfhart Heinrichs, whose memories I honor here. I am humbled to have benefitted
from these scholars’ instruction and example. Mary Gaylord, James Irby, John Hamilton,
Karen Feldman, Luis Girón-Negrón, Fernando Rivera-Díaz, Fermin Rodriguez, Paola
Cortes-Rocca, Pablo Ruiz, Ana Yáñez Rodriguez, Amr Shalakany, Katherine Stevens,
and Yamila Hussein have each had a hand in this book in ways large and small. Susan
Holman proved a most generous and valuable proofreader. No one deserves more
appreciation than my beloved wife, Emily. To my parents, siblings, and children, I owe
simply everything. This book is dedicated to Ayla, who as an infant slept on my shoulder
while I labored over Hegel, who taught me the meaning of unconditional love, and who
made me a Daddy.
2Hassanaly Ladha, “Hegel’s Werkmeister: Architecture, Architectonics, and the Theory of History,” October, 139
(Winter, 2012), pp. 15–38. © 2012 by October Magazine, Ltd. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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INTRODUCTION
In the 1820 preface to the Philosophy of Right, Hegel argues that freedom through
“ethical life,” shaping a polity into a “well-formed building” [gebildeten Bau], constitutes
“the architectonic [Architektonik]” of the state’s “rationality.”1 In 1824 he likewise
characterizes the state as “a great architectonic building or hieroglyph of reason that
presents itself in reality.”2 Hegel here echoes the Lectures on Aesthetics, where the
“architectonic” emerges from the interpenetration of built and linguistic form or, in
their respective aesthetic modes, architecture and poetry. As I will show, for Hegel the
opposition of these two “arts”—one principally material, the other verbal—defines the
dialectic of the aesthetic and propels what he calls, engaging Kant, the “architectonic”
unfolding of history. For Hegel the “architectonic” manifests in particular as the
Egyptian “hieroglyph,” a term he applies not only to written signifiers engraved in stone,
but also to pyramids and obelisks arranged in rows over the desert, like inscriptions
on a page. Most quintessentially, the architectonic and hieroglyphic converge in the
colossus of Memnon, an African warrior appearing in ancient Egyptian architecture
and in Greek myth and art from Homer to the Hellenistic period. As non-referential,
built form voicing only the poetic signifier, the colossus marks the circulation of the
architectonic across dialectical limits, hence the coimbrication of concept and matter,
aesthetics and logic, and East and West. Moreover the Memnon, bearing the “African
element” into history, isolates the subject’s possible freedom from dialectical stasis. In
the Phenomenology of Spirit, the Memnon, as embryonic self-consciousness, appears
as the enslaved “work-master” [Werkmeister] laboring for freedom. This “statue in
1G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, 20 volumes, ed. E. Moldenhauer and K. M. Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1969–1971), 7: Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, 19. All translations of Hegel are mine, unless otherwise
noted. Following customary scholarly practice, I will designate “additions” and “remarks” in the various
versions of the Philosophy of Right or the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences with a simple “A” or “R”
after the paragraph citation from the text. For the sake of economy, in this book I will refer to Hegel’s Outlines
of the Philosophy of Right as simply the Philosophy of Right. I refer to Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical
Sciences by its full name or as simply the Encyclopedia, and to its constituent parts as the Encyclopedia Logic, the
Philosophy of Nature, and the Philosophy of Spirit. In the same vein, I also refer to the Phenomenology of Spirit
as simply the Phenomenology and to the Lectures on Aesthetics as simply the Aesthetics. I use the same method
of abbreviation for his other lecture courses.
2Hegel, Werke 7: §279A, 449. The term “architectonic” in Hegel ultimately signifies the unstable entanglement
of conceptual and material form, hence language and phenomenality, that gives rise to apparently enduring
objects of experience. I examine Hegel’s relation of architecture to architectonics in Part One of this study.
The Architecture of Freedom
human form” hypostatizes the twin aesthetic operations through which the slave in
Hegel’s system struggles for emancipation: first, through the “formation” [Formierung]
of material form, or of the objectified “thought” through which he attempts to produce
and know himself as a subject; and second, through the poetic dissolution of inherited
form, which will ultimately enable the recognitive and thus discursive reconciliation of
the self-liberated slave and ousted master in the state.3
The aesthetic articulation of freedom underwrites the political theory advanced
through the critique of the “architectonic” state in the Philosophy of Right. In its most
immature conception, the state posits itself as a sealed “building,” a self-sufficient totality
predicated on the “ideality” of “right” only within its borders. By contrast the free state,
endlessly superseding its territorial or other material boundaries, attains to a coherence
of “internal” and “external” right. Polities at the telos of history—effecting the reciprocal
recognition of their concrete freedom—realize “universal right” everywhere and for
“everyone.”4
Astonishingly, scholars of Hegel have overlooked the architectonic and its implications
in his work, resulting in significant distortions in the interpretation of his corpus.5 Partly
to blame is the critical tendency to view Hegel’s works in isolation, neglecting their
dialectical place in the system set forth in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences,
3Hegel, Werke 3: Phänomenologie des Geistes, 510. As I will show in Part Two of this book, for Hegel the activity
of Formieren or Bilden underpins the relation between aesthetics and political economy.
4Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte, ed. G. Lasson (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1920), 761;
Hegel, Vorlesungen über Natturecht Staatswissenschaft, 247, 280. Since all dialectical oppositions are unstable,
they articulate the principle of their own undoing, hence the possibility of freedom from given signs and their
referents. I use the phrase “telos of history” as a heuristic to refer to this idea of freedom paradoxically internal
to the dialectic, not to a chronological “end of history” as the positive outcome of a temporal process. As we will
see, history for Hegel does not bend to chronology or the arbitrarily linear conjunction of purported causes
and effects, but rather emerges from the dialectical structure of logic: indeed, historical concepts emerging
after a “fact” can be shown to have constructed its always belatedly attributable “causes” and “effects.” (Cf.
Alexandre Kojève’s reading of “reason” [Vernunft] as a “teleological action” in Introduction à la lecture de Hegel
[Paris: Galimard, 1947], 531).
5An important exception is Claudia Brodsky Lacour, the only scholar who considers seriously the dialectic of
architecture and poetry in Hegel’s Aesthetics (see her “Architecture in the Discourse of Modern Philosophy:
Descartes to Nietzche,” in Nietzche and “An Architecture of Our Minds,” eds. Alexandre Kostka and Irving
Wohlfarth [Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999], 19–34 and “From the Pyramids to Romantic Poetry:
Housing the Spirit in Hegel,” in Rereading Romanticism, ed. Martha B. Helfer [Amsterdam: Rodolpi, 2000],
327–66, two studies to which this book must make continual reference). Informing my general approach to
the aesthetic in Hegel are Jacques Derrida’s “Architecture Where the Desire May Live,” in Domus, vol. 671,
1986, 17–25; “Point de folie—maintenant l’architecture,” in Psyché (Paris: Galilée, 1987); “From Restricted to
General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve,” in Writing and Difference, transl. Alan Bass (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1978); “The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel’s Semiology” and “White
Mythology,” in Margins of Philosophy, transl. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); and Glas,
transl. John Leavey Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986); the seminal essays on Kant and Hegel in
Paul de Man’s Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996),
including especially the discussion of the “architectonic” in Kant (ibid., 125ff.); de Man’s The Resistance to
Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); and Jean Hyppolite’s Logique et existence (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1961).
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Introduction
the purported armature for all of Hegel’s work, including his lectures.6 Failing to connect
the pyramidal sign in the Encyclopedia with the architectonic delineation of form in the
Aesthetics, scholars have misconstrued key elements of Hegel’s theory of language. In
turn, commentators on Hegel’s theory of art have failed to notice his definition of the
aesthetic as the dialectic of architecture and poetry—and, consequently, the foundational
place of their covalence in his system.7 They have thus not accounted adequately for the
impingement of the aesthetic on Hegel’s theories of logic, subjectivity, and history. Most
readers of the Phenomenology have ignored the slave’s aesthetic fashioning of “form”;
they have accordingly missed the relation between the dialectic of master and slave in the
section on “Self-Consciousness” and the necessarily aesthetic appearance of the servile
self-consciousness in the section on “Religion.” The latter section, uncoupled from its
complementary passages in the Aesthetics, has thus remained largely impenetrable.
Scholarship on the theory of recognition tends to focus on only the phenomenological
iteration of “self-consciousness,” abstracting it from the dialectic of subjective and
objective spirit. Scholars engaging Hegel’s critique of political economy and the state
in the Philosophy of Right and the Encyclopedia have accordingly not registered the
aesthetic mediation of person and property, the resulting centrality of slavery in political
economy, and the movement from the slave’s recognitive agency to the reconciliation of
states in universal right. Most damaging to Hegel’s reputation, readers of the Lectures
on the Philosophy of History, seduced by its deceptive accessibility, have missed its
governing principle—namely that there is no history, only the aesthetically mediated
“narration of history [Geschichtserzählung].”8 Embracing precisely the positivism Hegel
eschews, these readers have not fully grasped his conception of “world-history” as the
6This understandable tendency results from the critical rejection of any claim to systematicity binding the
works to each other. I am, of course, not suggesting that the Encyclopedia subsumes or converges neatly with
the Phenomenology, the Science of Logic, the Philosophy of Right, and the lecture courses—or that there is only
consistency or even complementarity across Hegel’s works. Even so, the reworked encyclopedic versions of the
Phenomenology, the Science of Logic, and the Philosophy of Right connect these texts to the Encyclopedia, to
each other, and to the lecture courses on world-history, art, religion, and philosophy in a manner that at least
merits consideration. The intertextualities to which we will attend across the “works” will indeed undermine
the notion that any of them stands apart as an independent totality. Ultimately Hegel’s system, subject to
endless revision and reiteration, will reveal its components as fragments of a paradoxically ungraspable
whole; accordingly I suggest they should be read alongside each other. On the relation of the Phenomenology
to the Encyclopedia, see Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann GmbH, 2009),
68: 69ff. Heidegger demonstrates that Hegel established the encyclopedia system between 1808 and 1811,
hence within a few years of the publication of the Phenomenology of Spirit (ibid.). In a salutary turn, scholars
like Robert Pippin, Slavoz Žižek, Catherine Malabou, Frederic Jameson, Rebecca Comay, and Frank Ruda—
to name a few—have taken more comprehensive approaches to Hegel’s oeuvre. On the relation between
the Phenomenology and the Science of Logic see, inter alia, Hyppolite, Logique et Existence; Robert Pippin,
Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 91ff.;
Frederic Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2009), 75ff., and Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda,
The Dash—The Other Side of Absolute Knowing (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018), 29ff.
7This oversight has unfortunately clouded views of Hegel among scholars of architecture. I present Hegel’s
theory of architecture in Part One of this book, in the hopes of supplementing such texts as Denis Hollier’s
seminal Against Architecture: The Writings of George Bataille, transl. Betsy Wing (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1992).
8Hegel, Werke 12: Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, 83.
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