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“Letter to X, Lecturer on Hegel

Paris, 6 December 1937

Dear X,

I am writing the following because it seems to me the only way to continue the conversation we have pursued in several forms. From the outset, I must say that your criticism of me helps me express myself more precisely.

I grant (as a likely supposition) that from now on history is ended (except for the denouement). However, I picture things differently (I don't attribute much importance to the difference between fascism and communism; on the other hand, it certainly doesn't seem impossible that, in some very distant time, everything will begin again).

If action (‘doing') is - as Hegel says - negativity, the question arises as to whether the negativity of one who has 'nothing more to do’ disappears or remains in a state of 'unemployed negativity'. Personally, I can only decide in one way, being myself precisely this 'unemployed negativity' (I would not be able to define myself more precisely). I don't mind Hegel's having foreseen this possibility; at least he didn't situate it at the conclusion of the processes he described. I imagine that my life - or, better yet, its aborting, the open wound that is my life - constitutes all by itself the refutation of Hegel's closed system.

The question you ask about me comes down to knowing whether I am negligible. I have often asked myself that question; the negative answer haunts me. Furthermore, as the representation I make of myself to myself varies, and as it often happens that I forget, in comparing my life to that of more remarkable men, that mine might be mediocre, I have often said to myself that perhaps there is nothing at the summit of existence except what can be neglected; in effect, no one could 'recognize' a height that is as dark as night. A few facts - such as the exceptional difficulty experienced in making myself be 'recognized' (on the simple level at which others are ‘recognized’) - have led me to assume the hypothesis of an irrevocable insignifcance, seriously though cheerfully.

That doesn't bother me and I see no reason to take any pride in it. But I would be no longer human if I put up with it without a fight (by accepting I would seriously chance becoming not just comically insignificant but bitter and vindictive: then I would have to find my negativity again).

What I am saying about it encourages you to think that all that takes place is just some misfortune, and that's all. Confronted with you, my self-justification is no different from that of a howling animal with its foot in a trap.

Really, the question is no longer one of misfortune, or of life, but only of what becomes of 'unemployed negativity', if it is true that it becomes something. I am following it in the forms it engenders, though not in myself right at first but rather in others. Most often, negativity, being impotent, makes itself into a work of art. This metamorphosis, which has real consequences, usually is not a good answer to the situation left by the completion of history (or by the thought of its completion). A work of art answers by evading or, to the extent that it gives a lasting answer, it answers no specific situation. It answers worst of all to the end situation, when evading is no longer possible (when the moment of truth arrives). As far as I am concerned, my own negativity gave up on being used only when it no longer had any use; it is the negativity of a man with nothing left to do, and not that of a man who prefers to talk.

But the fact - seemingly incontrovertible - that when negativity turns away from action it expresses itself in a work of art, is no less charged with meaning as far as the possibilities remaining for me are concerned. It is an indication that negativity can be objectified. This fact, moreover, does not just belong to art: religion, better than a tragedy, or than a painting, makes negativity an object of contemplation. But neither in the work of art, nor in the emotional elements of religion, is negativity 'recognized as such' at the moment when it enters the workings of existence as a stimulus to major vital reactions. To the contrary, it is introduced in a process of nullification (here the interpretation of facts by a sociologist such as Mauss is extremely important for me). There is, then, a fundamental difference between the objectification of negativity as the past has known it and that which remains possible at the end. In effect, the man of 'unemployed negativity', not finding in the work of art an answer to the question that he himself is, can only become the man of 'recognized negativity'. He has recognized that his need to act no longer has any use. But since this need cannot follow art's false leads indefinitely, sooner or later it is recognized for what it is: a negativity empty of content. The temptation to reject this negativity as a sin resurfaces - such a convenient solution that we did not wait for the final crisis to adopt it. But since this solution has already come up, its effectiveness has been previously exhausted. The man of 'unemployed negativity' can hardly ever use it any more: to the extent that he is the consequence of what has preceded him, the sentiment of sin no longer has any power for him. He is confronted by his own negativity as if by a wall. No matter how disquieted he is by it, he knows that henceforth nothing can be ruled out since negativity no longer has any prospect.

But the horror he feels looking at negativity within himself is no less likely to end in satisfaction than in the case of a work of art (not to mention religion). For it is precisely in needing to act that he has recognized negativity; and this recognition is bound up with a conception that has it be the condition of all human existence. Far from stopping in this investigation, he finds a total satisfaction in the fact of becoming the man of 'recognized negativity'. He will no longer rest as he begins the effort to pursue this recognition to its very end. In this way science, to the extent that its object is human negativity - especially the sacred left - becomes the middle term of what is only a process of awareness. Thus it brings into play representations extremely charged with emotive value (such as physical destruction or erotic obscenity, an object of laughter, of physical excitation, of fear and of tears). But at the same time these representations intoxicate him, he strips off the straitjacket that has kept them from contemplation and he sets them objectively within the eruption of time that nothing changes. He understands then that it is his good, not his bad, luck that brought him into a world where there was nothing left to do, and he offers what he has become now, despite himself, to be recognized by others. For he cannot be the man of 'recognized negativity' except to the extent that he makes himself be recognized as such. Thus, once again, he discovers something ‘to do' in a world where, from the point of view of actions, nothing is done any more. And what he has 'to do’ is to satisfy the portion of existence that is freed from doing: it is all about using free time.

For all that, moreover, he is not up against any less resistance than the men of action who have preceded him. Not that this resistance is able to manifest itself from the outset, but if he does not make a virtue of crime, he generally makes the virtue of the crime (even if he objectifies crime, making it thus neither more nor less destructive than it was before). It is true that the first phase of resistance must be pure elusion, for no one can know what he is after in confronting others as one who sees in a world of the blind. All around him he encounters people who shy away and who preter to escape immediately to the side of the blind. And only when a sufficient number achieve this recognition can it become the object of a positive resistance because the blind will be unable to see that something must be expelled until enough of it has been brought into play to make them conscious of its presence.

Moreover, for the man of 'recognized negativity', at the moment in which he recognizes negativity in himself, what will then take place does not count (at least regarding the precise form that things are to take). For what is important to him is precisely the fact that he is doomed to conquer or to compel recognition. He knows that his destruction is certain if he does not win in the two possible phases of the struggle. First of all, in the phase of elusive resistance, in his isolation he risks being dedicated to a moral disintegration against which, at the outset, he has no recourse. (He can be one of those for whom losing face in his own eyes does not seem preferable to death.) It is only in the second phase that there can be a question of physical destruction, but in both cases, insofar as an individual becomes the man of 'recognized negativity', he disappears if the force he brings into play is not greater, first of all, than the force of elusion and, later, than the force of opposition.

I have spoken here of the man of 'recognized negativity' as if it were not solely a question of myself. I have to add, in fact, that I do not feel that I am absolutely isolated except insofar as I have become completely aware of what is happening to me. But if I want to complete the story of the owl, I must also say that the man of 'unemployed negativity' is already represented by numerous dangers and that the recognition of negativity as a condition of existence has already been carried, in an uncoordinated state, very far. As for what is exclusively mine, I have only described my existence after it has reached a definite stance. When I speak of recognition of the ‘man of recognized negativity', I speak of the state of my requirements now: description only comes afterward. It seems to me that until then Minerva can hear the owl.

Only from this precise point does extrapolation take place and it consists of representing everything as a fact, what must follow being produced as the arrival at a position of equilibrium in a well-defined play of forces. Hegel even permitted himself an extrapolation of the same order: moreover, his elusion of a possible later negativity seems to me harder to accept than the description I give of forms of existence that have already been produced - in myself in a very precise manner and independent of a description that frankly came later and in a rather vague way. I add this last thought: in order for phenomenology to have a meaning, Hegel would have to be recognized as its author (which perhaps only genuinely happens with you), and it is obvious that Hegel, as a result of not accepting the role of man of ‘recognized negativity' to the end, risked nothing: he still belonged, therefore, to a certain extent, to the Tierreich.”

Staryu illustrated by Keiko Fukuyama