Arkady Plotnitsky

Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities
Vanderbilt University

 

Hegel’s philosophy and its impact can be mapped in a variety of ways, and they resist any unique or definitive mapping. One could argue, however, that the jucture of three concepts–consciousness, history, and economy–persists across, if not defines, Hegel’s work. Adam Smith’s political economy was a major influence on Hegel during his work on The Phenomenology of Spirit. No less significant was the very political economy surrounding the emergence or production (in either sense) of the book, which is both one of the greatest documents of and one of the greatest reflections on the rise of industrial and politico-economic modernity. From the Phenomenology on, economic thematics never left the horizon of Hegel’s thought, the emergence of which also coincides with the rise of economics as a science, which conjunction is, of course, hardly a coincidence. “Hegel’s standpoint,” Marx once said, “is that of modern political economy [Hegel steht auf dem Standpunkt der modernen Nationalökonomie].”¹ This is a profound insight into Hegel’s thought and work–his labor–and the conditions of their emergence. Both in terms of the historical conditions of these thoughts and work–their political economy (broadly conceived)–and in terms of the resulting philosophical system, one can speak of the fundamental, and fundamentally interactive, juncture of history, consciousness, and (political) economy in Hegel.² Economic thematics have had central significance in a number of key developments in modern and postmodern, in a word post-Hegelian, intellectual history–in Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Bataille, Lacan, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida, Irigaray, and others. From this perspective, one could even suggest that all post-Hegelian criticism and theory is fundamentally “economic”–post-Smithian. They are profoundly related to economic models, metaphors, and modes of inquiry; or conversely, and often interactively, to dislocations or deconstructions (here understood as constructive dislocations) of such “economies” as traditionally or classically conceived.

 

This essay explores the implications of the conjunction of consciousness, memory, history, and economy in Hegel, strategically centering this conjunction around the concept of economy and linking it to the economy and the economics of collecting. Taking advantage of the double meaning of both the German word “Sammlung” and the English word “collection” as signifying both accumulation and selection, and of the English signifier “recollection” as a translation of German Erinnerung, I consider the conjunction of selecting, accumulating (or conserving), and expending principles operative in Hegel’s work and the processes at stake there.³

 

Although most of Hegel’s texts may be invoked here, I shall refer most specifically to The Phenomenology of Spirit, particularly the last chapter, “Absolute Knowledge,” and the long closing paragraph of the book. This paragraph begins with the image of a gallery–“the gallery of images, endowed with all the riches of Spirit”–and ends with Hegel’s concept of history in one of its most condensed but also most powerful articulations. The concept of history as a collection emerges as a culmination of, interactively (and sometimes conflictually), both the closure or enclosure (which may here be distinguished from the “end”) of history and of Hegel’s book itself, and perhaps, as Derrida says, the (en)closure of the book as a structure, and, one might add, as an economy and a form of collecting. Hegel, Derrida says in Of Grammatology, “is the last philosopher of the book and the first thinker of writing“–two very different forms of economy and of collecting.⁴

 

I consider this economic configuration and the transformation of the key concepts involved in it via Bataille’s concept of general economy, which may be seen both, and often simultaneously, as the most radical extension and the most radical dislocation of the Hegelian economy. The relationships between Hegel’s and Bataille’s economic frameworks reflect a more general situation or a possibility of reading Hegel, which has played a significant role on the modern intellectual scene, from Nietzsche and Heidegger to Deleuze, Derrida and Irigaray, and which I consider here in terms of economies of collecting. This situation may be described as follows.

 

First, the Hegelian economy offers a paradigmatic classical economy of collecting or of “economy.” It does so by introducing both the metaphorical relationships between different forms of collecting (or other forms of organization) and the metonymic extensions and causalities that a given collection or organization necessarily entails. Such extensions and their economies–historical, cultural, and political–can in turn be configured in terms of collecting, but are not reducible to these terms, or indeed to any given terms.⁵ It follows, to a degree against Hegel, that no collection, or any other form of organization, can be fully self-contained. Second, the Hegelian economy (in this reading) carries within itself the seeds of the dislocation of the classical understanding of collecting or economy, including political economy, and entails a radical reinterpretation of both.

 

Accordingly, I shall argue that one can map the classical understanding and practice of collecting (and other classical theoretical and political “economies”) on the model or a class of models introduced by Hegel; and also that one can critically reorganize the classical field(s) of theory and practice by reorganizing the Hegelian program (in either sense), or, more precisely, by understanding how the latter can be reorganized.⁶ As a number of key recent approaches argue, this reorganization can in part be accomplished from “within” Hegel’s “own” text, to the degree that either denomination–“within” or “own”–or indeed the phrase “from within Hegel’s own text”–can apply in view of the reorganization at issue, which refigures (reorganizes) all these terms and the terms of their conjunction. One of the fundamental consequences of this reorganization is that the Hegelian field (or any other classical field), and even less so the reorganized critical (non-classical) field emerging in the process, cannot be fully contained within itself, or perhaps within anything, which would also imply a radical reorganization of (the field of) the concept of “ownerships” and “property”–textual, intellectual, and politico-economic.⁷ The “within-ness” (a certain “within-ness”) of Hegel’s program or text does not disappear. A certain “within” is an always possible and, at certain points, necessary articulation produced by a given reading. Such an inscription can be either classical or critical, or both, in part because classical inscriptions do not disappear or lose their value altogether, but must instead be resituated and redelimited in a refigured critical field. All such inscriptions, however, classical or critical, and their very possibility and necessity, become refigured in an irreducibly complex interplay of many an “inside” and many an “outside” (or “classical” and “critical,” or any other opposition of that type) that can exchange their roles at any point and, in certain cases, interminably pass into each other. Indeed any “inside” or “outside” becomes rigorously possible only under these conditions.⁸ The economy of stratification of Hegel’s text must be reorganized accordingly, and–which is my point here–it offers an extraordinarily rich (although, of course, not unique) model of the general economy (including in Bataille’s sense) of such a reorganization.

 

At one level, the Hegelian economy–the economy of the Hegelian Spirit, Geist–may and perhaps (at one level) must be read as that of the most discriminating spirit, the very spirit (in either sense) of discrimination–of collection as selection and selectivity. It is only through this (economy of) selectivity and selection that a fully containable organization becomes possible in Hegel–at the level of Spirit. The latter, it is worth stressing, must be distinguished from any human economy, individual or collective, even though Spirit, as understood by Hegel, enacts and accomplishes its labor only through participating collective humanity–the collectivity of actual human history [wirckliche Geschichte], conceived by Hegel as World History [Weltgeschichte]. The latter is governed by the same principle of selectivity and discrimination; or rather it is governed by the economy of Spirit which is governed by this principle. Spirit becomes an assembly–a collection (in process)–of ideas and figures for history, including those of history itself. These ideas and figures are, then, enacted in actual human history as the objective form of Spirit’s existence in the world.⁹ As Hegel writes: “The movement of carrying forward the form of its [Spirit’s] self-knowledge is the labor which it accomplishes as actual History.”¹⁰

 

The dynamics of the historical process (which Hegel’s term for history “Geschichte” primarily designates) as conceived by Hegel is, thus, reciprocal and interactive. Without this reciprocity, and without the joint labor of Spirit and humanity–and Nature–Spirit’s production, collection, and re-collection would not be possible. The economy of Spirit’s reciprocal interaction with Nature emerges with extraordinary power and brilliance in Hegel’s concluding elaborations on sacrifice in the Phenomenology (493). This economy is, however, laboriously configured and analyzed throughout the Phenomenology and other of Hegel’s major works, most extensively, of course, in “Philosophy of Nature” in the Encyclopedia. In view of this reciprocal or interactive economy the very question of Hegelian idealism may need to be reconsidered, and in some measure it has been in recent approaches to Hegel. A much more “materialist” Hegelian philosophy may emerge as a result. This new Hegelian “materialism,” however, would–and this may be the most significant point here–be quite different from the classical (and some more recent) Marxist materialism, which has wanted to appropriate Hegel (as a kind of early “Marx”) for quite some time, perhaps indeed since (and before) early Marx and Ludwig Feuerbach. This classical Marxist materialism, of which Fredric Jameson’s work can be offered here as a recent example, is, ironically, dialectical or (classically) Hegelian, in contrast to what may be called general-economic materialism of Nietzsche, Bataille, and Derrida, which is counter-dialectical.¹¹ Some contours of (a possibility of) such a counter-dialectical “Hegel” will be suggested later in this essay. To return for the moment to a more classical–or more classically Hegelian or Hegelianist–Hegel, however, the overall historico-political and politico-economic process is governed by Spirit’s selective productivity, organization, and Spirit’s memory and recollection [Erinnerung] and their unerring discrimination. “The goal [Ziel]” of this process, “Absolute Knowledge, or Spirit that knows itself as Spirit, has for its path the recollection [Erinnerung] of the Spirits as they are in themselves and as they accomplish the organization of their realm.”¹²

 

Coupled with consciousness and self-consciousness–finally as the absolute self-consciousness of Absolute Knowledge–this ideal memory, or this ideal of memory, becomes the model of history. The economy of Spirit is the ideal realization of the historical model developed by Hegel. History itself–Geschichte–as conceived of by Hegel is this, finally (in Absolute Knowledge), fully conscious and fully selfconscious, absolute memory of Spirit.¹³ As Hegel writes in the final sentence closing, but again not quite finishing, the book (or history):

 

Their preservation [i.e., the preservation of preceding historical Spirits], regarded from the side of their free existence appearing in the form of contingency, is History; but regarded from the side of their philosophically comprehended organization, it is the Science of Knowing in the sphere of appearance; the two together, as conceptually comprehended History, form alike the interiorization and the Calvary of absolute Spirit, the actuality, truth, and certainty of his throne, without which Spirit would be lifeless and alone.¹⁴

 

What Hegel calls here conceptually comprehended history [die begriffene Geschichte] is not a collection of historical “facts” (a concept that is profoundly ambiguous, if not altogether problematic, already for Hegel) but the collection–history and encyclopedia–of ideas and, crucially, of the relations between ideas. The same economy defines the later Encyclopedia, as encyclopedia or collection of ideas and, again, the relations between them, rather than facts or contents–the first and, it appears, the last project of that type. Both the Phenomenology and the Encyclopedia also, reciprocally, inscribe the history of these ideas and relations, as do all of Hegel’s major works. What Hegel calls “the Notion” or “the Concept” [das Begriff] or, in later works, the Idea [die Idee] designates this historico-theoretical collection and re-collection as a dynamic–Heraclitean–and multi-linear or manifold process. The Notion is a concept in the process of temporal and historical transformation that both unifies and differentiates along many lines, rather than a single abstract, static or dogmatic configuration conceived as a finished structure or conglomerate–collection–of ideas. The Hegelian collection–the history and (political) economy of Spirit–may be read as enacting an (en)closure, an (en)closure of itself and all other things within itself. But it has perhaps no end, is never finished. In this sense, contrary to a common (mis)reading, there may be no end of history for Hegel.¹⁵ One can think of this (en)closing economy on the model of some major museums, such as the Louvre and the British Museum, at a certain “late” point in their history, when a certain completion–a closure and enclosure–may be ascertained without presupposing a termination, either in terms of internal organization or in terms of external connections.

 

Such collections may also need to be seen as collections of collections, libraries of libraries, or economies of economies (with various organizing and dislocating economies operating at and between different levels). This double, or further iterated, structure is equally at work in the economy of the Hegelian Spirit and, at a certain level, in that of any collection or library–for example, those consisting of a single object, which concept becomes in turn provisional as a result. Collection, or collectivity, always comes “before” (meant here logically rather than ontologically) “single objects” of which it is composed.¹⁶ Every single object must be seen as a complex intersection of many “collections.” Some such “collections” are separate from and sometimes historically precede a given collection–a collection to which such an object may (be claimed to) belong in one way or another–and others are indissociable from, although not always identical to, this collection. It again follows that no object and no collection can ever be identical to itself, even at any given moment, let alone, as Hegel realized, in its historical becoming. The very concept of a single moment itself becomes provisional on both grounds, in the end, more radically provisional than any classical economies of temporality–classical “collections” of moments, such as the line or the continuum–would allow for. More generally, it follows that the complex comes (logically) before the simple, and all three concepts and the relationships among them must be refigured as the result. This refiguration is one of the key junctures of Derrida’s analysis, which may be seen (and has been seen by Derrida himself) as the analysis–a general economy–of the complex always coming before the simple, whereby the before is replaced by what Derrida calls “the strange structure of the supplement . . . by delayed reaction, a possibility produces that to which it is said to be added on.”¹⁷

 

While history [Geschichte] is, thus, irreducible, Science [Wissenschaft] or philosophy–in short, theory–is the fundamental principle and calculus of historical accounting and collecting in Hegel.¹⁸ Science or philosophy determines what counts, what must be selected, collected, or conserved and what, conversely, is to be discounted, discarded, or abandoned. One also can–and at certain points must–reverse the perspective and make history the calculus and accounting of theory or science. Both perspectives are clearly entailed by Hegel’s elaborations cited earlier. One can consider most museums and collections through this double economy–on the one hand, that of more or less causal or more or less arbitrary historical (for example, chronological) contingency, and, on the other, that of conceptual organization broadly conceived (via aesthetic, ideological, political, or other economies, and their interactions). Most museums and collections have always been and, for the most part, still are arranged according to this double economy. The classical ideal pursued by both philosophical (or, conversely, historical) projects and museums or collections is the unity–and, ideally, an unambiguous and unproblematic unity–of both. This unity, furthermore, is understood as a reflection of an organized, structured historical and cultural process–that is, precisely what Hegel calls History [Geschichte] as the history of spirit or spirituality. Hegel’s philosophy and writing may, thus, be seen as a paradigmatic program (in either sense)–a universal software–for configuring such interactions and historical mediation [Vermittlung] that is necessary in order to accommodate them. Such an economy and the synthesis of history and science (or ideology) it entails may be–and in Hegel’s case, certainly are–extraordinarily complex, especially in view of the historical or historico-political mediation they may entail, as they do in Hegel. For, while history and science are irreducibly intertwined and should, ideally, be united in Hegel, the play of symmetries and asymmetries (and hierarchies) between them are fluid, and often indeterminate or undecidable, allowing for either position and often necessitating continuous, if not interminable, oscillations between them.

 

This interplay may be conceived more classically within a Hegelian economy. Its more radical aspects, however, emerge once it becomes apparent that Hegel’s “software” entails another–by now, in the wake of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bataille, Lacan, Deleuze, Derrida, and others, equally paradigmatic–“machine” or “counter-machine”–unperceived or at least insufficiently perceived by the first. This second “machine” makes the conception and the operation of the first Hegelian machine both possible within certain limits and impossible within the global limits envisioned by Hegel. The understanding of this second (hidden) “machine” requires what Bataille calls a general economy. I shall consider this “hidden”–counter-Hegelian or counter-Hegelian/Hegelian machine–presently. First, a few more (or more or less) Hegelian points should be stressed.

 

The Hegelian economy just described is defined by and defines the Hegelian dialectic and economy of the Aufhebung, which is based on the triple meaning of the German word itself–(selective) negation, conservation, and supersession. This economy becomes a collection, a museum of history, governed by the laws of dialectic and the Aufhebung. In the final paragraph of the Phenomenology, defining History as “the other [than Nature’s] side of [Spirit’s] Becoming . . . a conscious, self-mediating process–Spirit emptied out into Time,” Hegel invokes, indeed begins with, the image of a gallery, which is also a gallery of historical images: “This Becoming presents a slow moving succession of spirits, a gallery of images, . . . endowed with all the riches of Spirit[Geist]” (emphasis added).¹⁹ Collection may, thus, be seen as an initiating grounding metaphor for the Hegelian economy. Conversely, as I have indicated, collections in various fields, from micro-economies of private collections (be they those of coins, stamps, books, or whatever) to major museums (whatever they collect–for example, coins, stamps, or books) form economies (in every sense conceivable) over which Hegelianism reigns–which is not surprising, given how great this realm is and how much it has collected by now. In addition to actual collections and museums, a great many theories of collecting, including some very recent ones, are governed by this type of economy–economy of selective accumulation and the forms of consumptions (or expenditure) based on it.²⁰ I must bypass here many specific economic forces–acquisition, chance, exchange, arrangement and rearrangement of elements, and so forth–involved in practices and economies, private and public, of collecting, and structuring them both from within and from without–via, to paraphrase Althusser, their multifarious apparatuses, economic, ideological, political, cultural, or still other. The borderlines between all such “insides” and “outsides”–for example, between private and public–are irreducibly indeterminate and undecidable. The principles of collectability as selectivity and discrimination at issue here, however, and related classical forms of consumption and expenditure, govern most historico-politico-economic frameworks, including most accounts of the practices of collecting, and these practices themselves. Hegel’s philosophy may be seen as a kind of generative calculus or program, an Ur-Program–a universal conceptual software–for all such theories, which is not to say that it can be reduced to them.

 

Hegel’s is, arguably, the most complex and comprehensive classical economy defined by these principles, and, conceivably, the most complex and comprehensive classical economy undermining these principles. How classical, then, can it finally be, or, more precisely, to what extent can one read it classically, or only classically? The history of contemporary readings of Hegel appears to suggest that there may be no decidable or determinate answer to this question. Arguably the main reason for this undecidability or indeterminacy (which are not the same) is that, even if (only) against its own grain, the Hegelian economy irreducibly implies indiscriminate accumulation, unaccountable losses, unreserved–unprofitable and sometimes destructive–expenditure and waste. “The riches of Spirit” can neither be contained–as in a gallery, for example–by this Spirit itself, nor can they, or any actual gallery, be managed without loss or waste; the very concept of richness, or conversely of poverty, must be refigured accordingly. Hegel, as both Bataille and Derrida argue, “saw it without seeing it, showed it while concealing it,” even if it is read within an economy which remains that of consumption without or by suspending–forgetting, repressing, and so forth, but thus also reserving–that which Bataille and Derrida see as expenditure without reserve.²¹ I shall, then, consider now, proceeding via both Bataille and Derrida, how this “hidden” Hegelian/counter-Hegelian machine emerges from “within” the “classical” Hegelian machine (though unperceived by it), and why it cannot be circumvented by the classical Hegelian machine and indeed makes the latter possible and, crucially, indeed necessary within certain limits.

 

It is not only the many often magnificent images of expenditure, waste, and destruction (including those enacted by Spirit itself) permeating the Phenomenology and most of Hegel’s works that are important. (Some of this imagery is associated more often with Nietzsche and Bataille than with Hegel, who is, however, partly responsible for the genealogy of these images in Nietzsche and, along with Nietzsche himself, in Bataille.) More significantly, the Hegelian economy (including, by definition, that of the Aufhebung, in view of its negating aspects) depends, indeed is predicated, on loss and expenditure. This dependence, and the irreducibility of the unproductive expenditure, are a fundamental general consequence of Bataille’s general-economic analysis, and no system–Hegel’s, Hegelian, or other–can circumvent the unproductive expenditure within the processes it considers and remain a rigorous description and analysis of these processes. Conversely, a rigor of an analysis, such as Hegel’s, would introduce the possibilities and indeed necessities of general-economic efficacities (in Bataille’s sense), even sometimes by virtue of trying to circumvent them or to rethink them in classical terms, which is, as will be seen, rigorously impossible. Obviously (post-)Nietzschean, (post-)Freudian, (post-)Lacanian, (post-)Derridean economies of theoretical “repression” are often operative in such situations. The theoretical process at issue, whether in Hegel or elsewhere, is, however, not reducible to repression–whether to any one of these different economies of repression or to their combination.²²

 

As both Derrida and Bataille stress–as do most major readers of Hegel, such as Heidegger, Kojève, Hyppolite, Lacan, Blanchot, de Man, and others–the power of the negative may be the most crucial aspect of Hegel’s thought and writing. The conservative and productive aspects of the Hegelian economy remain crucial, and Hegel’s understanding of the economies of time and of history as constructive rather than as only destructive is central to his philosophy. The point here is not to suspend this economy but instead, to the degree that it becomes problematic, reinscribe it within a different economy of both consumption (or conservation) and expenditure, and conceivably also produce a different reading of Hegel or a different form of Hegelianism, or conversely a different form of departure from Hegel or Hegelianism.

 

The role of economies of expenditure, destruction, and death–of negativity–is crucial in Hegel. The economy of the history of Spirit is predicated on the economy of the negative–death and sacrifice–inscribed as a certain double negative which can no longer be read as the return to a positive. Certainly it cannot be read–for nothing in Hegel can ever be–as a return to the original positive of such a double negative.²³ “The self-knowing Spirit knows not only itself but also the negative of itself, or its limit [Grenze]: to know one’s limit is to know how to sacrifice oneself. . . .”²⁴ The Hegelian economy may be seen not even so much as an economy of conservation, consumption and gain, but as an economy defined by the ability to sustain and to survive enormous losses and turn them into gains, if “gain” is a word that can be used to describe this–in the deep, including Nietzschean, sense, tragic–economy. This tragic economy defines the experience (also in Hegel’s sense of experience [Erfahrung]) of Spirit, as at once the artist [Künstler], the collector, the curator, and the viewer of his gallery, slowly moving through a collection, whose immense material and spiritual wealth he must digest–and, perhaps imperceptibly to Hegel himself, he is also, and again simultaneously, a buyer and an auctioneer. At a certain level one must, in fact, always function in all these capacities simultaneously, whatever one does. At the end of the Phenomenology and its interminable last paragraph (perhaps deliberately suggesting the process it describes), this process is inscribed in the famous double economy–both spiral and Phoenix–the economy of death and rebirth. Hegel writes:

 

This Becoming presents a slow moving succession of Spirits, the gallery of images, each of which, endowed with all the riches of Spirit, moves thus slowly just because the Self has to penetrate and digest this entire wealth of its substance. As its fulfillment consists in perfectly knowing what it is, in knowing its substance, this knowing is its withdrawal into itself in which it abandons its outer existence and gives its existential shape over to recollection. Thus absorbed in itself, it is sunk in the night of self-consciousness; but in that night its vanished outer existence is preserved, and this transformed existence–the former one, but now reborn of the Spirit’s knowledge–is the new existence, a new world and a new shape of Spirit. In the immediacy of this new existence the Spirit has to start afresh to bring itself to maturity as if, for it, all that preceded were lost and it had learned nothing from the experience of the earlier Spirits. But recollection, the interiorization, of that experience, has preserved it and is the inner being, and in fact the higher form of the substance. So although this Spirit starts afresh and apparently from its own resources to bring itself to maturity, it is none the less on a higher level that it starts.²⁵

 

At stake here is obviously much more than an economy of collecting–or creative process or historical dynamics in general–even though the latter is, as we have seen, irreducible in Hegel, and even though this and related elaborations show how much is at stake and how high such stakes are in collecting. It may be suggested that what is at stake in this “economy” or “non-economy” is, by definition, more than anything–“infinitely” more, one could say, were the very concept of infinity not radically problematized as a result. The question, as will be seen presently, is how this excess of everything, including “everything-ness” itself, is configured. This economy is reiterated perhaps even more dramatically–or again tragically–in an even more famous passage in Hegel’s “Preface” on “tarrying with the negative.” That passage continuously attracts consideration, and continues to remain at the center of critical and philosophical attention on the contemporary intellectual scene.²⁶ Arguably the main reasons for its significance is that, of all Hegel’s passages, it appears to demonstrate most dramatically–or tragically–the power of negativity and, by implication, of expenditure in Hegel. Thus this passage again makes the Hegelian economy one primarily of sustaining and, however tragically, elevating and benefiting from immense, even (with qualifications just indicated) infinite losses. The resulting economy of expenditure-consumption and accumulation-collecting may be much closer to Nietzsche, Bataille, and Derrida than it may appear. Hegel writes:

 

this is the tremendous power of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of the pure “I”. Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength. Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say something that is nothing or is false, and then, having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject, which by giving determinateness as existence in its own element supersedes abstract immediacy, i.e. the immediacy which barely is, and thus [this Subject] is authentic substance: that being or immediacy whose mediation is not outside of it but which is this mediation itself.²⁷

 

Hegelian mediation (and nothing for Hegel, not even immediacy, is, as is clear in this passage, interesting or even possible without mediation) is, thus, above all a mediation through the negative and an ability to convert the negative into a tragic affirmation. Nietzsche’s great phrase may well be most fitting here, although one can also (or simultaneously) read it as the positive power of Spirit.²⁸ This is, of course, a crucial and complex nuance, which, in the end, may define the difference or proximity between Hegel, on the one hand, and Nietzsche, Derrida, and Bataille on the other, or, in Bataille’s terms, the difference between the perspectives of restricted and general economy. The question, that is, becomes whether the negative, expenditure, death are still in the service of the positive, consumption/conservation, meaning, and truth, as they perhaps are in Hegel; or whether they are tragically affirmed and even celebrated as expenditure without reserve and unredeemable loss and waste of meaning, truth, and so forth. The difference, in short, is between meaningful and meaningless expenditure–and yet a meaningless expenditure without nihilism, that is, as Nietzsche puts it, affirming and celebrating rather than denying life under these tragic conditions. For one can still assign meaning–either positive or negative–to loss of meaning, either positively, as Hegel perhaps does, or negatively, nihilistically, by denying life, either of which would be short of the (general economic) perspective of Nietzsche, Bataille, and Derrida. Bataille’s whole meditation on general economy may be seen as that on this passage, leading him, however, to realization that “the energy of thought” at stake there, or that (excessive) energy which should be at stake there–cannot be meaningfully utilized. As will be seen presently, “[this] excessive energy can only be lost without the slightest aim, consequently without any meaning.”

 

Under all conditions, however, here as elsewhere, the point would be not to dismiss any of the possibilities just indicated or still other possibilities that may emerge in the processes at issue, for, at the very least, such positions or ideologies do have powerful practical effects. Instead, one the point is the necessity to refigure them within a richer and more interactive matrix or matrices. Both the productive and destructive aspects of the Hegelian economy may, in fact or in effect, well be more symmetrical than implied by the economy of Aufhebung as (or if read as) an ultimately conserving and productive economy. Or both aspects may be (re)configured as more, or more or less, symmetrical effects of another economy (which Bataille approaches in terms of general economy, understood as theory or “science”). This symmetry does not eliminate the possibility of overcoming the negative at certain points, including and especially via “tarrying with the negative,” or other local asymmetries. This symmetry would prohibit an economy that would be always–or finally–able to do so, as the Hegelian Spirit is claimed to be able to do. It may well be that “material” or “corporeal” (mortal) negativity finally always defeats us (although all such concepts as “material” and “corporeal” may in turn need to be radically refigured as a result). That is, although we may never know when or how, all collections are going be destroyed at some points–I mean now, radically destroyed, so that even memory of them would finally be erased, as George Herbert profoundly grasped it in his “Church Monuments”:

 

                    . . . What shall point out them, 
     When they shall bow, and kneel, and fall down flat
     To kiss those heaps, which know they have in trust?
                                   (14-16).29

 

This dissipation–this dis-collection and dis-recollection–may well include, as both Herbert and Hegel perhaps knew, that ultimate, and ultimately Hegelian, collection, which is our civilization. Or, as we know now and as Hegel perhaps did not know, it may also include that ultimately ultimate, and ultimately counter-Hegelian, collection, the collection of elementary particles, that is, our universe–if it is a collection in any sense, which is far from clear. In both Nietzschean and Heideggerian vein, Jean-François Lyotard responds to the possibility of this “absolute” (can one still use this term here?) in his discussion of “the death of the sun” in his “Can Thought Go on without a Body.”³⁰ The death of the sun, however, is a (very) small event on the scale of the universe, as Nietzsche pointedly and poignantly observes at the opening of his great, and now seemingly uncircumventable, early lecture “Über Wahreit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinne” (On Truth and Falsity in their Extra-Moral Sense).

 

General economy is opposed by Bataille to classical or “restricted” economies, like that of Hegel’s philosophy or Marx’s political economy, which would aim or claim to contain irreducible indeterminacy, loss, and non-selective–excessive–accumulation within the systems they describe. General economy entails the fundamental difference between the classical (restricted-economic) and the counter-classical or postclassical (general-economic) understandings of the relationships between the economies of collecting and broader cultural economies, to which a given collection is metonymically connected. Restricted economies (theories) would make economies of collecting either fully conform to a given classical economy (process or theory) or place them fully outside such an economy. General economy would see these relationships as multiply and heterogeneously interactive–or interactively heterogeneous–sometimes as metaphorically mirroring each other, sometimes as metonymically connected, sometimes as disconnected (and connected to alternative systems), without ever allowing for a full Hegelian synthesis, assuming that Hegel himself in fact or in effect allows for it.³¹ As Bataille writes:

 

The science of relating the object of thought to sovereign moments in fact is only a general economy which envisages the meaning of these objects in relation to each other and finally in relation to the loss of meaning. The question of this general economy is situated on the level of political economy, but the science designated by this name is only a restricted economy–restricted to commercial values. In question is the essential problem for the science dealing with the use of wealth. The general economy, in the first place, makes apparent that excesses of energy are produced, which by definition cannot be utilized. The excessive energy can only be lost without the slightest aim, consequently without any meaning. This useless, senseless loss is sovereignty [emphasis added].³²

 

The connections between Bataille’s concept–or his economy–of general economy and Hegel are multileveled and complex. Some–such as its relation to Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave or those proceeding via Marx, as here–are more immediately apparent (what Bataille calls “sovereignity” here is expressly juxtaposed by him to, or is an ambivalent displacement of, the Hegelian mastery [Herrschaft], as well as a corresponding economy in Marx); others–such as those related to other dimensions of sovereignty and sacrifice–would require a more complex tracing. Given my limits here, I shall take a shortcut, via Derrida, which will also allow me to introduce Derrida’s own (general) economy through this context. As Derrida writes in Différance:

 

Here we are touching upon the point of greatest obscurity, on the very enigma of différance, on precisely that which divides its very concept by means of a strange cleavage. We must not hasten to decide. How are we to think simultaneously, on the one hand, différance as the economic detour which, in the element of the same, always aims at coming back to the pleasure or the presence that have been deferred by (conscious or unconscious) calculation, and, on the other hand, différance as the relation to an impossible presence, as expenditure without reserve, as the irreparable loss of presence, the irreversible usage of energy, that is, as the death instinct, and as the entirely other relationship that apparently interrupts every economy? It is evident–and this is the evident itself–that the economical and the noneconomical, the same and the entirely other, etc., cannot be thought together. If différance is unthinkable in this way, perhaps we should not hasten to make it evident, in the philosophical element of evidentiality which would make short works of dissipating the mirage and illogicalness of différance and would do so with the infallibility of calculations that we are well acquainted with, having precisely recognized their place, necessity, and function in the structure of différance. Elsewhere, in a reading of Bataille, I have attempted to indicate what might come of a rigorous and, in a new sense, “scientific” relating of the “restricted economy” that takes no part in expenditure without reserve, death, opening itself to nonmeaning, etc., to a general economy that takes into account the nonreserve, that keeps in reserve the nonreserve, if it can be put thus. I am speaking of a relationship between a différance that can make a profit on its investment and a différance that misses its profit, the investiture of presence that is pure and without loss here being confused with absolute loss, with death. Through such a relating of a restricted and a general economy the very project of philosophy, under the privileged heading of Hegelianism, is displaced and reinscribed. The Aufhebung—la relève–is constrained into writing itself otherwise. Or perhaps simply into writing itself. Or, better, into taking account of its consumption of writing.³³

 

This passage, too, may be seen as a translation–a translation-transformation–and is certainly a commentary or a general economic rereading of Hegel’s passage on “tarrying with the negative.” One should also point out the significance of the economic thematics and metaphorics in this passage, Derrida’s (general) economy–disassemblage and discollecting, or rather assemblage-disassemblage and collecting-discollecting–ofdifférance, and his theoretical matrix in general. As Derrida proceeds, his elaboration–his interminable (un)definition of différance–extends into (or by way of) an interesting political metaphor: “It [différance] differs from, and defers, itself: which doubtless means that it is woven of differences, and also that it sends out delegates, representatives, proxies; but without any chance that the giver or proxies might ‘exist,’ might be present, be ‘itself’ somewhere, and with even less chance that it might becomes consciousness.”³⁴ Without elaborating this point, it may be pointed out that this (general) economy would, at bottom, describe any political collectivity, which is, at bottom, always bottomless–abyssal–in this sense. Derrida’s metaphor, thus, is (perhaps uniquely) cogent here. The politics and economics, micro and macro, of collecting would, it follows, conform to the same economy; and it is this–by definition, general–economy that is my main concern at the moment. Though imperceptible to Hegel himself, this dislocating economy or co-economy is, thus, correlative to the Hegelian economy; or, more precisely, the (overtly posited) Hegelian economy is an effect of an efficacity, simultaneously economic and counter-economic (or, conceivably, neither) that produces both economies and their interactions. As I indicated earlier, this efficacity makes Hegel’s or Spirit’s collection and recollection–as memory and history without unaccountable and unprofitable losses–both possible and, finally, impossible. In Derrida’s words, such an efficacity, différance, “produces what it forbids, makes possible the very thing it makes impossible.”³⁵ It also makes possible different readings of Hegel, specifically from those which would read the Hegelian economy as that of absolute consumption or even a more qualified reading as suggested here; or, conversely, readings of, for example, Bataille’s economic theory or Derrida’s general economy as forms of Hegelianism, “Hegelianism without reserve.”

 

Whatever Hegel’s overt designs may have been, the Hegelian economy is closer to Andy Warhol’s collection of “junk,” consisting of indiscriminately accumulated products of modern or postmodern–“late”–capitalist consumption and unprofitable expenditure, although the latter aspect is somewhat less apparent in Warhol’s practice of collecting.³⁶ Warhol’s art has been linked to Hegel (by Arthur Danto, for example) along different lines–via the question of self-consciousness and Hegel’s notion of the death of art. The point is not discountable, and it can, I would argue, be made all the more interesting by relating to Warhol’s practices of collecting. The Warhol economy combines or interrelates his art and his collecting. It relates to the overall configuration or economy of artistic production in the industrial and postindustrial world, which, next to Duchamp, Warhol perhaps understood best, and which, next to Duchamp’s, his art indeed reflects with great selfconsciousness. This is why the question of selfconsciousness in Warhol’s art and his collecting are profoundly related, both metaphorically and metonymically. Their conjunction again profoundly reflects the metonymic or structural causality in Lacan and Althusser’s sense, which defines the capitalist economy and cultural system, and thus the cultural logic of all capitalism–early or late. Taking another shortcut here, one might say that, not unlike Warhol, Hegelian Geist is, again, simultaneously the artist, the viewer–the consumer (and the costumer)–the art collector and the junk or garbage collector, the buyer and the auctioneer. One of the profound ironies of Warhol’s collection is, of course, that it no longer exists, it was sold at an auction and thus, at least in part, returned to the junk economy. It is perhaps unavailable, unreconstitutable in spite of the obvious reproducibility of some of its objects–but not all and in the end, strictly speaking, none. One cannot authenticate them, however, even though the project of reconstituting the Warhol collection–and his spirit, his Ghost or Geist–by re-collecting all the items is conceivable. Such a project would be an interesting, if by now a bit tiresome, example of postmodernist cultural studies.

 

It is important, however, that Warhol’s collection can no more be seen as an absolutely indiscriminate accumulation or waste than can the Hegelian Spirit as fully avoiding or controlling waste, expenditure and excess. As I have stressed throughout this essay, arguable the most crucial point here is the fundamentally interactive character of all collecting, or of other economic processes which economies of collection metaphorically represent or to which they are metonymically connected. General economies and general economics (a possible alternative translation of Bataille’s”économie générale“) are always interactive in this sense. Such interactive economies and the economics of “collecting” that they imply would make a complete or completely definable collection impossible not only in practice (which would certainly be recognized by Hegel), but also in principle (a principle of which Hegel might not have been altogether unaware either). This impossibility applies not only globally–in the sense that it is in fact, in practice and in principle, impossible to complete a given collection–but also to any subset of a given collection, even to any single object, thus making the notion of a single item of a collection and, by implication, the notion of a single object of any kind impossible in full rigor. In this radical sense of both excessive–irreducible–accumulation and excessive–irreducible–loss, a complete collection is never possible, even if all given items, such as all paintings of a given painter, are assembled together. For one thing, such a completeness can never be assured: a new object can always be discovered and lead to rearrangements of the “whole,” or some items may prove to be forgeries. More significantly and more fundamentally, no given principle or set of principles can ever contain the intellectual, psychological, social,political, or monetary forces shaping a given collection or any given collectivity–theoretical, cultural, or political.

 

Let me return here, by way of conclusion, to my title. As it indicates, the overall economy just considered would apply at the level of language itself, fundamentally undermining the possibility of a purely philosophical (or otherwise fully containable) language. This ideal has governed the history of philosophy from Plato on, however complex such conceptions of philosophical language may be. Hegel’s text cannot contain–collect or re-collect–the field of its language and the possibilities indicated here by the grapheme “Re-,” in a contained plurality (or ambiguity, undecidability, indeterminacy, and so forth) exemplified by the (economy of the) Aufhebung–not even ideally, in principle, at any level, actual or ideal, let alone in practice. A variety of German graphemes must be used here, and in fact one needs other English graphemes as well. This multiplicity could not be contained even if one were to utilize every single “Re”-word available at the moment, let us say all those contained in all available dictionaries, German or English, although it also follows, of course, that this availability in turn cannot be taken for granted under these conditions, and is, in fact, never strictly determinable.³⁷

 

This iterability or dissemination is irreducible, and not only–and indeed not primarily–for practical reasons of potential magnitude of possibilities (or necessities) involved. “Iterability” and “dissemination,” as understood by Derrida, link indeterminacy and multiplicity in a complex interplay in which relative causalities or efficacities can be reversed: in some cases, potential multiplicities of determination reduce the power of determination at any given point; in other cases, the structural–built in–elements of chance increase the multiplicity of potential outcomes (and it may be shows that these two configurations, while overlapping or interactive in many cases, are not fully equivalent); in still other cases, more interactive and complex economies of efficacities and effects emerge.

 

Finally, this interplay would dissalow one to configure or determine such efficacities in any given form, however complex its articulation may be. No conceivable selection or even collection of terms, concepts, or even frameworks can absorb it. As such, it can be juxtaposed to or be seen as an ambivalent displacement of Hegelian controlled plurality, that of the Aufhebung or of the Phoenix economy discussed earlier–if once again they can be read strictly in this way, rather than closer to, if not quiteconverging with, the (general) economy suggested here. This dissemination cannot, thus, be seen as implying a full but hidden or unavailable plurality or plentitude. A very different conjunction of, jointly, insufficiency andexcess is at stake–an economy simultaneously collecting, un-collecting, and over-collecting (and, of course, under-collecting). The multiplicity, incompleteness, and randomness at stake here are structural, irreducible–that is, they cannot be seen as partial manifestations (due to some classically defined deficiency of knowledge) of completeness, unity, or causality which are not available–a collection whose full reserves are never seen or catalogued. This structural decataloging is not due to the fact that our resources of time, space, energy, or whatever might be necessary are inadequate for approaching an actual, but hidden, totality of plentitude. The insufficiency of that type does, of course, exist, too, and can be extremely powerful, often allowing one to make a similar theoretical point at this–classical–level. The unreserved economy at stake here, however, is more profound and fundamental than any classical economy of that type might suggest. For this unreserved economy disallows the existence of such a hidden totality or reserves unavailable to our account, just as (and indeed correlatively) it disallows the existence of any complete reserves, collections (or collectivities), or accounts, at any level, be they historical, theoretical, economic, or political. All relationships defining collecting (or history and economy), such as those between history and science as considered earlier, would have to be restructured accordingly.

 

The same economy would apply to reiterating, or re-etceterating, Hegel himself–his ultimately uncontainable, uncataloguable, uncollectible work, or works: while they do exist and must (it appears) have been written at some point, they cannot be fully located (present) either in a “text itself” (an expression no longer possible either) or in the conditions of their production (or/as reception), but must instead be seen as emerging in a complex interaction between both and, conceivably, within something that is neither. What would, from this perspective, constitute Hegel’s complete works or a collection of all his writings, even if one could be assured a possession of the extant manuscripts and editions, which is in fact impossible? There is a structural uncollectibility at stake here. Such a library of Hegel is closer to the library of Alexandria, always already burned, as it were. For the economy at stake here is, as I said, always–and indeed, in a deep sense, always already–tragic. One might even try to see it as a kind of Phoenix economy in reverse, something that, at the higher conceptual and material (including technological) levels, proceeds from resurrection to death, again in a kind of (post-) Hegelian double negative which does not return to the original positive. It may be something close to what Benjamin, conceivably also with Hegel in mind, envisions in his famous picture, via Klee’s work (in Benjamin’s collection), of the Angel of History, although the latter image has itself become by now just about as un-resurrectable intellectual cliche–not unlike a reproduction of a photograph of Klee’s painting, or of Benjamin himself (also quite ubiquitous, cliché-like, by now), painted over by an imitator of Warhol.

 

It also follows, however, that in this economy, destruction cannot be absolute either, and in turn is never assured, even if one tries to burn all the books, which has often been attempted, and not only in science fiction. To end with another of Benjamin’s titles–“unpacking my library”–we are always in transit, as Benjamin was on his way to America, without an assurance of arrival, even if one arrives geographically speaking. We are always unpacking, packing and repacking our libraries and galleries, individual and collective, of books and images, endowed with the riches and poverty of matter and spirit, or both or perhaps neither. One may need a very different un-nameable or un-writable, even if “writing” is taken in Derrida’s sense, to approach these “resources” and “reserves,” whose (un)economy may need as yet unheard of forms of philosophy and economics alike.

 

Notes

 

1. “Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuscripte (1944),” Marx/Engels Gesamtaufgabe, Erste Abteilung (Berlin: Marx-Engels Verlag, 1932), 3:157.

 

2.It may not be a unique defining juncture in Hegel, and it is no longer possible to speak in terms of unique or uniquely determining (or uniquely determined) junctures anywhere. It is difficult, however, to circumvent such terms in Hegel–which is about as much as one can say about anything called “fundamental.”

 

3.In addition to being a metaphor of market and management (from the Greek oikos and oikonomia, house and household), economy is, of course, also a metaphor from physics, a metaphor of energy, play of forces, and so forth, which cluster of metaphors also plays a significant role in Hegel’s work, for example, in “Force and the Understanding” [Kraft und Verstand] of the Phenomenology. Economy also designates science or other forms of account or the representation of a given economy as a process of the play of forces, as in “political economy” or “general economy” in Bataille, just as in the historical field, the word history may designate both–historical process and its representation–both of which may in turn be seen as economies (in the two senses just indicated). I have considered various aspects of the economy metaphor in Hegel and other figures to be discussed here, in Reconfigurations: Critical Theory and General Economy (Gainesville, Fl.: University Press of Florida, 1993).

 

4.Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri C. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 26.

 

5.One might also think this dynamics in terms of Althusser’s concepts of the metonymic or structural causality, introduced, via Lacan, in Reading Capital and, according to Althusser, constituting Marx’s “immense theoretical revolution” (Reading Capital, tr. Ben Brewster [London: Verso, 1979], 182-94). My analysis here would imply, however, that this “immense theoretical revolution” (which is perhaps no less Althusser than Marx) should be seen as a (materialist) extension–or again an extension-dislocation–of the economy offered by Hegel, rather than, as Althusser argues, only in juxtaposition to it.

 

6.The term “critical reorganization” may well be preferable to “deconstruction” here, although most deconstructions that could be invoked here are in fact or in effect also reorganizations in this sense, sometimes, certainly in Derrida, explicitly and pointedly so.

 

7.The question of “property” (traversing near the totality of the semantic field of the term) played an especially significant role in Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bataille, and Derrida, and their relationships with Hegel (and each other). As will be seen in more detail later, it follows that the very possibility of a totality of any semantic field and the very denomination “semantic field,” too, become problematic as result.

 

8.Cf. Derrida’s discussion in Of Grammatology (30-73).

 

9. The status of this “then” becomes complicated and, finally, problematic in view of the irreducible role of “actual human history” in this process, and, it has often been argued, is never quite resolved by Hegel (either in the Phenomenology or elsewhere). What Derrida calls “supplementarity” and, therefore, a general-economic form of theorizing (to which Derrida’s supplementarity conforms) become, at the very least, necessary here. Whether and to what degree Hegel’s framework itself approaches supplementarity is in turn a complex and, conceivably, finally undecidable question. Leaving a further discussion of these issues for the later part of this essay, one might say here that in Hegel Spirit is always “ahead” of humanity within a certain reciprocal economy–as, one might suggest with caution, some human beings may sometimes be seen as “ahead” of a given group or collectivity, while still depending on this group.

 

10.Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 488. All subsequent references are to this edition. The German edition used is Phänomenologie des Geistes, Werke im 20 Bänden (Frankfurt am Mein: Suhrkamp, 1986), vol. 3.

 

11.Cf. Fredric Jameson Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990), 241. I have considered Jameson’s work in Reconfigurations (245-96).

 

12.Phenomenology, 493.

 

13.This memory, again, should not be confused with any form of human memory, individual or collective.

 

14.Phenomenology, 493; translation modified.

 

15.The question of the end of history, in Hegel and in general, have resurfaced recently in the context of the historico– geopolitical reconfiguration (the emphasis is, I think, due here) in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the (so-called) Communist Eastern Europe. Derrida’s discussion in Specters of Marx (New York: Routledge, 1994) is especially pertinent here.

 

16.Of course, the very (classical) concept of ontology becomes problematic under the conditions of general economy; and, to the degree that one can apply classical language here, the proposition just offered may be given a certain ontological sense as well, even though one can, loosely speaking, start a collection with a single object or add a single new object to a given collection. This way of speaking is very loose (although in practice often functional) because the very concept of “a single object” becomes highly provisional here; and indeed one may well question in what sense, if at all, one can still speak of “collection” under these conditions. Rhetorically and strategically, however, the proposition that a “collection” precedes “a single object” would retain its effectiveness, especially within the (en)closure of classical concepts.

 

17.Speech and Phenomena and other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 89. For Derrida’s deconstruction of classical temporality see Speech and Phenomena and his “Ousia and Gramme” (in Margins), in the latter essay in the context of Hegel and Heidegger. The question itself, however, is central throughout Derrida’s work.

 

18. These metaphors have crucial significance for Hegel, in view of Newton’s or Leibniz’s calculus, on the one hand, and Adam Smith’s political economy, on the other.

 

19. Phenomenology, 492.

 

20.Thus, Susan Stuart’s discussion of collecting in On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984) still largely conforms to this Hegelian economy, in spite of its materialist and (in a certain sense) deconstructive aspiration.

 

21.Although the concept of general economy recurs throughout Derrida’s texts, I refer here most specifically to Derrida’s essay on Bataille and Hegel “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve,” Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). The sentence just cited is from this essay (260).

 

22.Nor is it, I think, reducible to de Manian economy of “blindness and insight” (to the degree that the latter can be described only in these terms), which is significant for understanding the processes at issue here, and which must be seen as different from other economies just mentioned. The concepts of “repression” in all of these texts would require a lengthy analysis.

 

23.Systems where the double negation of an object A is not, in general, equal to A do exist even in mathematical logic, for example, in the intuitionistic mathematics of L.E.J. Brouwer and A. Heyting. While the double negations at issue here are, obviously, more complex, they would not allow one simply to dispense with classical logic, mathematical or philosophical, which must instead be refigured within new theoretical economies.

 

24.Phenomenology, 492.

 

25.Phenomenology, 492.

 

26.Most recently, Hegel’s passage served as the conceptual center of Slavoj Zizek’s, post-Lacanian, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993).

 

27.Phenomenology, 19.

 

28.Thus, see Hegel’s elaborations on Reason [Vernunft], which concept may understood via a conversion of a negative relation to otherness into a positive one (Phenomenology, 139).

 

29.An assembly of “church monuments” can in turn be seen as a collection. In many ways it offer a paradigmatic case of collection as monumentalization with significant metaphoric (and metonymic) potential and implications for our understanding of all collecting. Herbert’s poem, of course, itself comes from a collection (in either sense) called The Temple, which, too, designate an economy of Spirit, and may be considered from the perspective developed here, as can many other poetry collections, especially those which themselves deal–as, for example, do Shakespeare’s Sonnets–with the economies (productive or dislocating, or both) at issue. Herbert’s poem clearly refers to his own writing as well and to the economy of writing and reading–and history–in general, as monumentalization. As such the poem and its “rhetoric of temporality” offers a powerful allegory (also in de Man’s sense) of all the processes just invoked and of their interaction.

 

30.See “Can Thought Go on without a Body,” The Inhuman, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press, 1991).

 

31.I have considered such relationships more generally under the heading of “complementarity,” conceived on the model of Niels Bohr’s interpretation of quantum mechanics, in In the Shadow of Hegel: Complementarity, History and the Unconscious (Gainesville, Fl.: University Press of Florida, 1993) and Complementarity: Anti-Epistemology after Bohr and Derrida (Durham: Duke University Press,1994).

 

32. “Méthode de Méditation,” Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1970–), 5:215-16.

 

33.Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 19.

 

34.Margins of Philosophy, 20-21.

 

35.Of Grammatology, 143.

 

36.There are other crucial “political economies” involved–such as those of sexuality and gender–which would require a separate analysis.

 

37.While a number of words available (at a given point) in any given language or in any combination of languages is finite (although again not necessarily determinate), and even if it were finite or determined, the number of possible combinations, any one of which may become necessary at some point in processes such as that described here, is potentially infinite. It is infinite because the number of sentences we may construct is potentially infinite, for example, in view of the fact that we can construct sentences with numerals ad infinitum–such as “one needs one word in order to approach the concept at issue,” “we need two words in order to approach the concept at issue,” etc. It is important to keep in mind that neither a presence nor an absence of any given word allows one to unequivocally determine a concept (such as that of “collection”) or reference. What Derrida calls “writing” is, in part, designed to approach this indeterminacy–this différance and this dissemination.