February 5, 2003
This morning I started to re-read my very battered paperback copy of Hegel's well-known but little read Phenomenology of Spirit in the light of my recent exposure to some American neo-conservative material.
The reason for doing so is due to the writings of Anne Coulter, the author of Slander: Liberal Lies about the American Right and an upcoming book, Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War To The War On Terrorism. The texts I have read---some of the newspaper articles---have been preying on me. I cannot forget what I saw buried there. It has shaken me.
What struck me about the more extreme of Coulter's writings is the neo-con political unconscious. Coulter's writing open up the blind fury of the politics and the willingness to attack all opponents---whether they are nation-states like France or the US Democrats---in the name of freedom. Attack is given an extreme form since attack means fighting a campaign in a war.
What I discern in Coulter's writings---what these texts bring to the light of day---is a freedom that is hostile to any constraint or restriction on its action, and which celebrates its intolerance with an in-your-face style.
Such a freedom is what Hegel calls an absolute or universal freedom.
Here are some quotes taken from The Phenomenology of Spirit (Ch.6, para. 589ff) to indicate the character of absolute freedom. Hegel is referring to the absolute freedom of the French Revolution.
"Universal freedom, therefore, can produce neither a positive work nor a deed; there is left for it only negative action; it is merely the fury of destruction."
"And, moreover, by virtue of its own abstraction, it divides itelf into extremes equally abstract, into a simple, inflexible, cold universality and into the discrete, absloute hard rigidity and self-willed atomism of actual self-consciousness. Now that it has completed the destruction of the actual organization of the world and exists just for itself, this is its sole object, an object that no longer has any content, possession, existence or outer extension; but is merely this knowledge of itself as an absolutely pure and free individual self."
"The sole work and deed of universal freedom is therefore death, a death too which has no inner significance or filling, for what is negated is the empty point of of the abolutely free self. It is thus the coldest and meanest of all deaths, with no more significance than cutting of a head of a cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water."
"What is called government is merely the victorious faction and in the very fact of its being a faction lies the direct necessity of its overthrow..."
"....the terror of death is the vision of this negative nature of itself."
I have turned back to Hegel to begin to make sense of the neo-conservative conception of politics as blind fury that is willing to destroy what stands in its way. What it constructs as its opposite----that which has to be fought and destroyed ----is a negative, which is called terror. A war has to be unleashed on terror. Terror must be destroyed. What this gives birth to is a self-destroying reality.
So we have a dialectic of absolute freedom and terror.and this makes for dark times. That seems to me to capture what is happening with the war on Iraq.
That is the best I can do. Its not much help I know. But it is something, especially when there is little public evidence that Iraq poses a threat to the US; little public evidence that there is a direct link between the Iraqi government and the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, or little public evidence that there are links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. For the latter see Sunday's postings by Mark at pineappletown.
The irony is that this political unconscious of absolute freedom is surfacing in a nation-state whose ethical liberal culture is deeply structured around universal individual rights. These rights---a right to free speech, a right to a free trial, a right to freedom of assembly etc ---are almost venerated in the US nation, whilst the liberal state is deeply committed to these rights.
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Sounds like the biological metaphor for Hegel's absolute freedom might be cancer. Which would make Coulter a rhetorical/political cancer.