THE SITUATION OF ERINNERUNG IN
HEGEL’S SYSTEM

The whole of remembrance, imagination, and memory is memorialized in the Encyclopedia’s third part, “The Philosophy of Spirit,” first division, “Subjective Spirit,” third section, “Psychology,” first subdivision, “Theoretical Spirit,” §§445—68. Memory, and especially interiorizing remembrance, are obviously matters of firsts and thirds for Hegel, beginnings and ends, precisely because their function is to rescue seconds, that is, midpoints, mediations, and differences. For this reason Erinnerung in particular everywhere surpasses its situation in the “Psychology,” appearing throughout Hegel’s account of the philosophical sciences at decisive junctures. Only a small selection of those junctures is recollected in what follows, one for each of the Encyclopedia’s three major parts: (1) logic, (2) philosophy of nature, and (3) philosophy of spirit.

(1) A number of items in the “Introduction” to the Encyclopedia and in the “Preliminary Conception” of its first part, “The Science of Logic,” might be remembered here, but I shall pass over them in silence and proceed to the third part of the logic. Whereas the first part of the logic presents the doctrine of being (or thought in its unmediated state) and the second part the doctrine of essence (or thought in its reflected and mediated state), the third part unfolds the doctrine of the concept as the actual grasp of the idea (or thought “in its having returned to itself” and in its fully developed being-with-itself). Here the idea expresses itself in the moments of life, cognition, and absolute idea.

In spite of what I said a moment ago about firsts and thirds, the movement of interiorizing remembrance proceeds most noticeably in the second moment: cognition (Erkennen) constitutes the process and progress of the idea and of reason itself in the mediation of difference. In its coming to know itself the idea cancels and surpasses the onesidedness of both subjectivity and objectivity in their limited and limiting senses: it surpasses vacuous subjectivity by taking up into itself, as its own content, the world that is in being; it overcomes alien objectivity—the existent world viewed as a mere aggregate of contingencies and insignificant details—by means of the interiority of the subjective (§225: das Innre des Subjektiven). Yet cognition appears under two guises. Hegel employs the title Erkennen twice in his schema, the narrowly epistemological sense being subordinate to cognition broadly conceived, that is, conceived in such a way that willing pertains to it. Surprisingly, interiorizing remembrance plays a vital role in the latter. Willing achieves for subjectivity the return to self of a spirit that is simultaneously “the interiorizing remembrance of the content into itself” (§234). Hegel also describes this return as Erinnerung of “the presupposition of theoretical comportment,” namely, the presupposition that the object is the proper truth and substance of theoretical inquiry. If it were not for such remembrance, subjectivity would be ceaseless contradiction and dispersion, the sheer frustration that results when what should be (Sollen) is separated from what is (Sein). The speculative or absolute idea (the third division in which the concept and logic as a whole culminate) thus depends on an interiorizing remembrance that is not purely theoretical but also practical. If the dialectical method in logic is not to be mere extrinsic form, it must be interiorized as “the soul and the very grasp [Begriff] of the content” (§243). Thought thinking itself dare not forget. It must freely remember its own life, its first moment and inception. Logic yields gracefullybut then, all at once, there came a most deadly nausea over my spiritto the philosophy of nature. Hence it is odd that when philosophy of spirit rises from the ashes of nature and retrieves the notion of Erkennen, remembrance is reduced to the theoretical sphere. Its importance for practical spirit—for the will—appears to be forgotten.

(2) Philosophy of nature traces the biography of interiorizing remembrance. It is a life-story told from the outside, from a position of alienation, seeking interiorities everywhere. Remembrance plays a particularly striking role in this grandest of “seconds,” the realm of exteriority and difference par excellence. Here again but a few reminders, from two domains of Hegel’s “Organic Physics,” to wit, the pre-organic stage of geological nature, and vegetable life.

Geological nature is the “processless immediacy” that life presupposes as its condition (§338). Nevertheless, however much geological nature may now appear to be without process, it is in fact full of gaps and openings, passages across boundless reaches of time from outside to inside and back again, rifts and shifts caused by ruptures and eruptions of all sorts. All these have to do with Erinnerung. “The interiorizing remembrance of the idea of nature into itself, on the way toward subjective and even more toward intellectual vitality, is the Urteil in itself,” that is to say, not merely “judgment” but, literally, a primordial sundering, Ur-teilung, the “ordeal” of the idea in its self. The initial outcome of this primeval sundering, which all life in its immediate totality presupposes, is the globe of planet Earth, the very figure of organism. (Perhaps the very figure engraved by Matthaus Merian for the “second emblem” of Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens, 1618, “Nutrix ejus terra est [His nurse is Earth],” the figure reproduced here as Plate 7.) Yet the formation of this global presupposition, Hegel reminds us, is ineluctably past (§339). Its process is lost in the mists of geological time—which during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries receded steadily beyond the reaches of both knowledge and faith. In his epochal Theory of the Earth, first published in 1788, then expanded in 1795, James Hutton proclaimed of geological nature that “. . . we find no vestige of a beginning,—no prospect of an end.”³ As though analysis of geological nature, the infinite presupposition of life, were identical to the analysis of mind itself as Wordsworth described it in “The Prelude” (Book II, lines 228—33):

PLATE 7

The irretrievable geological past of Earth’s radically exterior sidereal nexus implies certain dramatic consequences for terrestrial life: subsequent physical organization does not evolve from a unified seed or kernal poised in its husk; on the contrary, its point of departure is already an outcome. Hegel (§340) uses the word Ausgang when referring to that organization, Ausgang meaning both outcome and point of departure. In this way the proto-stage of geological nature serves as a paradigm of vegetable life, in which reproduction is so much the essence that it becomes impossible to say where one individual stops (outcome) and another begins (point of departure). M. J. Petry translates Ausgang as “egression.”⁴ Yet such originary egression implies that physical organization is nothing less than primal difference (spelled with a pyramidal “A”), a nonorigin, a foregone conclusion, as it were, that nevertheless will not yield up its secrets to philosophical science.⁵ Sidereal Earth remains a presupposition.

The outcome and point of departure of geological nature involves the mediation of two (or three) principles, namely, granite and limestone. (Threewhen one considers that limestone or chalk is the neutral base of an already reduced binary distinction.) Such stony principles are not utterly without process, however, and they continue their lapidary, titanic labor of aeons. The granite principle develops partly as massive chunks of solid rock and partly as more highly determined differentiations in myriad mineral moments, “the metals and the oryctognostic objects in general.” (Oryctognostic: from oryktos, related to digging or mining, and gnōsis, knowledge, hence having to do with the science of minerals and fossils.) Granitic development eventually “loses itself in mechanical stratifications and in alluviums devoid of immanent configuration,” its power to form exhausted, and proceeds, as it were, by rote. The neutral principle—expressed in all forms of calcium carbonate—now intervenes. Its first productions are “the less imposing formations on the flank,”⁶ that is to say, those lower ranges identified by Johann Gottlob Lehmann in 1756 as Flöz-Gebirge, fletz formations or stratified mountains extending laterally (zur Seite: as though the chalky ranges were the lateral cathexis of spirit) from the massive granitic ranges. The still later productions of alkali earth, containing the remains of ancient sea creatures and yielding coal, marble, and limestone, are what the leading Neptunist of his time, Abraham Gottlob Werner, describes in 1787 as “alluvial mountains.” Hegel denigrates these last as jumbled forms, concrescences yielded by an “extrinsic mixture” of the two principles. It is of course in these less sublime chalky mountains, the stratified and the alluvial, and not in the granitic ranges, that caverns and their monstrous crystallizations appear. Lehmann’s Investigation into the History of Stratified Mountains (1756) cites the changes wrought in such fletz mountains by cataclysms and contingencies of all kinds—earthquakes, deluges, tidal waves, and so on—in the following words: “Changes even took place in the interior of the earth. For, wherever the waters acted upon soluble earths and minerals, such as limestone mountains, they were able with little difficulty to dissolve these and to carry away the dissolved parts, thus creating caverns, sink holes, canyons, etc.”⁷

What is the upshot of Hegel’s “organic physics” of “geological nature” for an account of interiorizing remembrance? The mediating process of the granitic and neutral principles remains vergangen, bygone, altogether out of reach, as a kind of absolute past. Especially the second and third sets of mountains, the stratified alluvials—mineralogically the most heterogeneous and paleontologically the richest, veritably embedded with monuments of crustaceous life, the delight of all spelunkers—Hegel derides and abandons. He quits geology, which in his Philosophical Propaedeutics he equates with “extinguished process,” for biology and anthropology.⁸ Because it is the outcome of a merely “presupposed past,” and because it has its sidereal nexus outside itself, the terrestrial globe proves to be the ultimate oxymoron—Hegel calls it the “crystal of life” and the “organism of the prostrate Earth.” Precisely as outcome, Earth serves as a point of departure; it is fructified and vivified in its seas. The caverns and pits of the calcareous, alluvial past, themselves the immemorial wash of time, the vast burial vaults of an absolute past, are abandoned for the amniotic environment of myriad single-celled animals. Sidereal Earth, its rock and chalk, hills and hollows, pits and lodes, is left behind in the ebbtide of spirit. As if forgotten. On the verge of remembrance.

Of interiorizing remembrance in vegetable and animal life there would be at least as much to relate. Yet vegetable life—with its roots, branches, leaves, buds, and seeds—fails to produce truly individualized plants. Its avatars assimilate nourishment in a relatively simple, nonmediated way; they cannot budge from their place; and they reproduce in a fashion that bars our knowing where the process itself begins and ends—

The sole interiority of plants is expressed in the channeling of some of its cells into the tender inner parts designed for plant circulation, as opposed to the durable woody fibers of the exterior. Yet the incipient “return into itself,” the phloem and xylum of vegetable life, achieve no real measure of “self-feeling” (§347). Such life too is left behind and forgotten, presuming that spirit leaves anything behind other than its lifeless sidereal presupposition.

The interiority of animal life in all its variegated forms and their general modes of assimilation, reproduction, and generation is of course far more complex and profound. Yet it would lead us too far afield to recall these matters in any detail here. Of greater moment is Hegel’s “Anthropology,” even if by referring to it I invade “Philosophy of Spirit” ahead of schedule. The very notion of “psyche” or “soul” results from an essential interiorizing (§401: innerlich machen; erinnert werden) of what is simply “found” in “sensation,” a faculty that humans share with animals. Throughout his “Anthropology,” Hegel plays on the relationship of the words das Gefundene, “what is found,” and die Empfindung, “sensation,” both of them formed on the verb finden, “to find.” The embodiment of spirit in man is expressed in man’s interiorizing remembrance of what (in sensation) seems to have been merely found outside him. Hegel’s “Psychology” focuses on this interior way of spirit, and I shall turn to it after one final example of Erinnerung at crucial junctures in the Encyclopedia—this time at the very end of the book (§§572-77), where Hegel defines “Philosophy” as such.

(3) It is the very existence and essence of “Philosophy,” as discussed in the closing sections of the Encyclopedia, to remember. The very movement that constitutes philosophy comes to grips with itself—although coming to grips with a movement might well threaten both the movement and the grip—by unceasing retrospection with regard to its knowledge. Hegel begs his hearers to remember (so mag noch dies dariiber erinnert werden) that philosophy respects concrete, determinate unity alone and does not countenance empty, abstract, thoughtless agglomeration (§573). Philosophy does not establish extrinsic connections and identities; it is the esoteric, not exoteric, study of God, identity, cognition, and the concept. The self-thinking idea is universality that is tried and tested, proved and preserved, a universality that recalls its own beginnings in the realm of logic and its proper odyssey through the realm of nature (§§574—75). Absolute spirit, as eternal progression and development of the idea, is as much activity as result, and the proper name of its activity is interiorization. Hegel remembers at the end to cite that moving paean to autonoesis—self-thinking thought—in Aristotle’s Metaphysics (XII, 7), autonoesis being the divine arkhe and apotheosis of interiorization.

So much for a very general and admittedly impressionistic determination of interiorizing remembrance in the vast circles of the Encyclopedia as a whole. Let me begin again, trying this time not to forgetLong suffering had nearly annihilated all my ordinary powers of mindso many details, so many differences.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ERINNERUNG AND
GEDÄCHTNIS

“Psychology” studies the various faculties of subjective spirit, such as intuition, representation, and memory, in order to liberate the concept from immediacy and extraneous (as opposed to interiorized) determination. It scrutinizes the dialectic that is at work in spirit as such. The content of that dialectic is both being-in-itself and spirit’s own being: Hegel establishes the two poles of the dialectic as das An-sich-seiende and das Seinige, just as earlier in the Encyclopedia (§20) and even in the Phenomenology he juxtaposed subjective “opinion” and the intended “universal” (die Meinung, das Meinige, das Meinen, and das Allgemeine).

Spirit’s way is theoretical inasmuch as it posits the determinations of reason as its own, making them subjective; practical inasmuch as it strives to liberate the determinations of will from their subjectivity, positing them as in-itself. We are now to consider the theoretical segment of spirit’s way, even though in the “logic,” as I have noted, remembrance is found to play a crucial role in spirit’s practical development. (Would we not have expected remembrance to play a predominately theoretical role in the logic, whereas the “philosophy of spirit,” which is both “objective” and “subjective,” would be the place for remembrance as will? The opposite is the case. It seems as though philosophy of spirit has forgotten what logic already attained, as though dialectical philosophy were not really perfect progress but a ceaseless slipping back, like a spider trying to make its way up a slippery limestone wall.) Be that as it may, for subjective spirit interiorizing remembrance is a matter of the theoretical life, a matter of intelligence. Die Intelligenz—by no means mere “intellect,” Verstand—finds itself initially determined from outside itself; specifically, in sensation. Its activities, functions, faculties, or powers are organized in a hierarchy of transition wherein all ostensibly alien determinations come to be grasped as its own. Such transition (Übergang) constitutes cognition (Erkennen). “The concept of cognition has proved to be intelligence itself, the certitude of reason; and the actuality of intelligence is cognition itself” (§445). (No distinction is made now between the broader and narrower senses of Erkennen.) Hegel anticipates the moments in the cognitive hierarchy of transition as “intuition, representation, interiorizing remembrance, and so on” (§445). Yet his structuring of the moments by no means places remembrance and memory on an equal footing with intuition and representation. The outline of the hierarchy looks like this:

α) Intuition [Anschauung, §§446-50]

β) Representation [Die Vorstellung, §§451-64]

1) Remembrance [Die Erinnerung, §§452-54]

2) Imagination [Die Einbildungskraft, §§455-60]

3) Memory [Gedächtnis, §§461-64]

ϒ) Thinking [Das Denken, §§465-68]

The apparent subordination of interiorizing remembrance, imagination, and memory to representation would hardly be worth noticing if we did not recollect the disparagement of Vorstellung throughout Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics, religion, history of philosophy, and philosophy of history—indeed farther back than the Phenomenology itself, in the “early writings.” Representation is a fallen form of thought, a merely extrinsic reflection ignorant of contexts; it is thought sullied by intuition and sensation. In the Phenomenology Hegel abjures Vorstellung as a “piddling” form of consciousness, as natural and vulgar as can be.⁹ Yet throughout the Encyclopedia, and in the Phenomenology as well, interiorizing remembrance plays a role that could never be reduced to piddling importance. Erinnerung occupies a special—if ambiguous and fugitive—place in Hegel’s thought as a whole. I shall try to locate that place. The difficulty is that remembrance seems to be more the movement of transition itself than any moment of the hierarchy. Hence it seems perpetually out of place; it is always as though spirit were on the very verge of it. But let me begin at the beginning of the hierarchy of transition, with intuition.

Spirit in the form of intuition remains caught up in a fabric of inarticulate feelings and sensations. Hegel calls it spirit’s “muffled weaving,” sein dumpfes Weben, a phrase he has already used in the “Anthropology” to characterize sensation (cf. §400).¹⁰ The German word for fabric, Stoff, reminds us of even earlier stages in spirit’s development, for example, of the stuff of vegetable nature (cf. §345). In intuition the determination of spirit remains extrinsic to it, as a determination of embodiment or abstract immediacy. Although feeling appears to be immediate and thus “the most present [präsenteste] form, as it were, in which the subject comports itself toward a given content” (§447), such presence proves to be limited to isolated particularity, to the stuff of embodied existence. Yet even in primitive sensation, muffled and inarticulate as it may be, spirit sets off in the interiorizing direction it will continue to follow until it finds itself weaving the forms. Hegel identifies that direction as attentiveness or alertness (die Aufmerksamkeit), the very category that will be so important for Freud’s attempt to portray the normal psychic processes, to which he (Hegel) immediately appends the phrase “active remembrance ” (§448: die tatige Erinnerung). The upshot is that interiorizing remembrance cannot be fixed as that specific moment of representation which is subsequent to intuition—indeed, we have not yet arrived at the moment of intuition proper, are only now arriving there, thanks to the unscheduled intervention of interiorizing remembrance. Erinnerung is functioning even before it has come to be, working its effects in the hierarchy of transition from sensation to thought even before its moment has come. Or have IBy long suffering my nerves bad been unstrung, until I trembled at the sound of my own voicesimply neglected to recall that Hegelian “moments” are never truly isolable, certainly not as points on a line-segment, one succeeding upon another? Perhaps the freedom of motion displayed by Erinnerung within cognition is to teach us something about dialectical thinking in general? It is almost as though the spider must slip back down that slippery slope in order to remember what she is about. However that may be, I note for now the prescience and ubiquity of active remembrance, which makes manifest to intelligence the fact that whatever it feels itself to be determined by is in fact its own, des Seinigen, and hence has the quality of being, des Sein-igen. The crucial role played by interiorizing remembrance after its debut in intuition is described in section 449 as follows: “Intelligence, as this concrete unity of the two moments [namely, both its attentiveness or inner alertness and its feeling of being outside itself], indeed, remembered immediately in itself within the fabric that is outside, and in its interiorizing remembrance in itself being plunged in being-outside-itself, is intuition.” In section 450 the dialectic swings back to the side of interiority, the favored side, the side of origins and eventual ends: “Intelligence directs its attention just as essentially toward and against its own being-outside-itself and is an awakening to itself in its very immediacy, its interiorizing remembrance into itself in such immediacy; in this way intuition is the concreteness of the fabric and of its self; intuition is its own, so that it no longer needs to find its content.—”

Under the heading representation, the second major stage in the hierarchy of transition, Hegel’s analysis continues to define the interiorizing remembrance that has not yet been thematized but is already at work “as remembered [or: internalized] intuition” (§451). Representation occupies the midpoint between the unmediated exteriority of a bemused intelligence that finds itself determined by some alien objectivity and the mediated interiority of an intelligence that is free and that thinks. As this midpoint, Vorstellung is still onesidedly subjective, inasmuch as what is its own remains conditioned by immediacy and is not yet its own proper way to be (das Sein). Intelligence proceeds to interiorize its intuitions, positing itself as intuiting, catching itself looking at things, as it were, and thus seeing itself through the magic of reflection. In this way it simultaneously cancels the sheer subjectivity of interiority, “in itself externalizing it from itself [in ihr selbst ihrer sich zu entaussern].” In its “own externality,” representation comes “to be in itself”.” Yet because representation “begins” with intuition and its fabric of sensations, its activity “is still burdened [ behaftet] with this difference.” Representation remains embroiled in synthesis, while pure thought of the concept will move freely in “concrete immanence.”

Precisely at this point Hegel’s explication of Erinnerung proper begins, as though interiorizing remembrance might be expected to liberate intelligence from its syntheses and foreign dependencies. Yet how could Erinnerung perform such liberation without forgetting what it had already done in and for intelligent intuition? The liberation has to do with icons or images in the interior space-time of intelligence. “Remembering-interiorizing at first as intuition, intelligence posits the content of the feeling in its interiority, in its [intelligence’s] own space and its own time ” (§452). Such positing of content and reduction of space-time result in an image, Bild. (Inserted into Hegel’s text immediately prior to the word Bild is a double-alpha, pointing forward to a double-beta and double-gamma in sections 453 and 454, respectively. Erinnerung, however much it encroaches on Einbildungskraft right from the start, occurs in and as three specific moments, which I want to trace with some care. All three moments have to do with the fate of the content of intuition in representation.) In the first moment of Erinnerung the image achieves a measure of freedom from the immediacy and particularity of the intuition; it is “arbitrary” or “contingent,” inasmuch as it has been isolated from the “external” space and time that shaped its unmediated context. Yet what are space and time, that they can be outside and inside? If “interior” space and time are arbitrary (willkurlich, subject to the freedom that spirit is ever seeking), how is the content of intuition to be remembered in its particularity and individuality? Or does Erinnerung require that some aspects of intuition be forgotten and fall into oblivion? Is there something like what Nietzsche calls active forgetfulness at work in it?

This would be the place for a detailed recollection of Hegel’s “Mechanics” of space and time. That mechanics rejects the Kantian interpretation of space and time as forms of intuitibn and substitutes for it a whole series of negations. The dialectic of space-time involves movement from the unmediated exteriority of space to the interiorities of point, line, plane, and of time itself as abstract subjectivity. Time therefore has everything to do with finite consciousnessLooking upward, I surveyed the ceiling of my prison. . . . In one of its panels a very singular figure riveted my whole attention. It was the painted figure of Time as he is commonly represented, save that, in lieu of a scythe, he held what, at a casual glance, I supposed to be the pictured image of a huge pendulum, such as we see on antique clocks. . . . I fancied that I saw it in motionand hence interiorizing remembrance, though not with the idea in and for itself, not with spirit as such, which isBut what mainly disturbed me was the idea that it had perceptiblydescended eternal. One would here be on the sliddery surface of the innermost vault of Hegel’s ontology—the relation of eternity to time, being to nothing, for-itself to in-itself. A veritable abyss of problems, swathed in darkness. I therefore return to the immediate context, advancing to Erinnerung in its second moment (§453), avoiding that breach from which there would be no escape.

The image or Bild is itself transitory, voriibergehend, inasmuch as intelligence comprises the time and space, the when? and where? of the image. For intelligence is not only the “consciousness” and “existence” of its determinations; it is also their “subject,” their “in-itself.” Interiorized and remembered in intelligence, the image no longer exists as such. It is, Hegel says, “unconsciously preserved,” bewusstlos aufbewahrt, in intelligence. Yet what can it mean that the image is transitory? The entire tradition of philosophy has devoted itself to demonstrating the durability of the eidetic icon. What sort of icon is it that is transitory? An imprint in oversoft wax, hygrotic typography, a failed iconography, a loss of presence. The image is no longer existent, nicht mehr existierend. It no longer “stands out,” its cutting edge has lost its contours, there is no relief. And yet. The icon is preserved. Like the soul incarcerate. And preserved unconsciously, unbeknownst, unbewusst. An engram as yet unread in a book as yet unopened.

Something very strange is happening here in the second moment (ββ) of the image. Whereas interiority has heretofore been identified with a kind of attentiveness or awareness, with the vigilance of a spirit that is present to itself, and contraposed to an exteriority that is ultimately impenetrable, muffling, and alienating, interiority itself is now said to be infected with darkness. Obscurity encroaches on the lucid self-presence of intelligence itself. There are things of which intelligence—itself the hallmark of consciousness—is not yet or no longer conscious. When Hegel says that intelligence is the “subject” and the “in-itself” of its determinations, this now means that it is subject to images in themselves. The emphatic words bewusstlos aufbewahrt reflect the paradox that Locke phrased so well—”that our Ideas are said to be in our Memories, when indeed, they are actually no where. . . .” These same words, “unconsciously preserved,” now release a series of “Remarks” (to §453) as cryptic as any Hegel ever penned:

To grasp intelligence as this shaft dark as night [diesen nächtlichen Schacht], in which a world of images and representations infinite in number is preserved, without their being in consciousness, is on the one hand the universal requirement in general of grasping the concept as concrete, as for example one grasps the seed in such a way that it contains affirmatively, in virtual possibility, all the determinations that come to existence only in the development of the tree. It is the inability to grasp this universal, which is concrete in itself and yet which remains simple, that has occasioned the preservation of particular representations in particular fibers and places; what is different is essentially to have but one individualized spatial existence.—But the seed emerges from the existing determinations only within an other, in the seed of the fruit; only in this way does it come to return to its simplicity and come once more to the existence of being-in-itself. However, intelligence as such is the free existence of being-in-itself internally remembering itself in itself in its development [die freie Existenz des in seiner Entwicklung sich in sich erinnernden Ansichseins]. Intelligence is thus to be grasped on the other hand as this unconscious shaft, that is, as the existing universal in which what is different is not yet posited as discrete. Indeed, this in-itself is the first form of universality that presents itself to representation.

A shaft or pit deep in the earth, and a tree with its seed, fibers, and shaft of trunk: it is pointless to complain about Hegel’s catachresis, since for him all nature is a mixed metaphor—he seeks the determinations of the concept wherever he can find them. Not that such finding could or should have anything to do with sensation, Empfindung. Yet the fact that philosophy of nature, and especially geology and biology, are remembered here in some detail has to do with the peculiar Ohnmacht der Natur which is not so much “impotence” as a swooning or sinking into the oblivion of unconsciousness. A swoon and oblivion that will pass. For such unconsciousness preserves images. The unconscious preservation of images in intelligence itself, acting as a kind of subliminal text, preserves the images of unconscious nature, its pits and its plants. Perhaps we ought not forget these images of intelligent nature too quickly. Perhaps these are the images of natural intelligence, images that are therefore indistinguishable from originals, icons that are paradigms, or at least presuppositions.

Hegel calls intelligence in its capacity to preserve images unconsciously “a shaft dark as night” or “nocturnalthe blackness of darkness supervened; all sensations appeared swallowed up in a mad rushing descent of the soul into Hades. Then silence, and stillness, and night were thepit,” diesen nachtlichen Schacht. The word Schacht is a mining term equivalent to the English shaft. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the latter as “a vertical or slightly inclined well-like excavation in mining, tunneling, etc., as a means of access to underground workings. . . .” Thus the cognate “shaft” is perhaps to be preferred to the word “pit,” which goes back to the Latin puteo, “to emit an offensive smell”—the Romans used the word puteus for a ditch, drain, cloaca, or cess-pool. However, pit does have two dubious advantages: first, it signifies a hole or cavity in the ground, “formed either by digging or by some natural process,” whereas a shaft is most likely to be manmade; second, a pit can also be “a deep hole or chamber in which prisoners are confined,” and the thought of images imprisonedI put forward my arm, shuddered to find that I had fallen at the very brink of a circular pitin a subterranean cell dark as night, while incorrigibly romantic, may not be altogether out of place. Hegel’s adjective nachtlich is foreboding: the dark of night is the absolute negation of light and hence of all manifestation, even of selfhood (see §§2.75—79).

We remember that planet Earth—herself an outcome, sidereal egression, and bifurcated point of departure—is not yet a self-contained seed; she is pitted with petrous differences, cavities that (presumably) contain no germ of life. It is significant therefore that Hegel immediately shifts the imagery of interiorizing remembrance away from the geological Ausgang toward vegetable life. The seed embraces in itself the concrete universal, contains all the determinations of the individual plant as virtual possibilities. We recall that the inadequacy of vegetable interiority lies in its failure to produce a genuine individual self as a simple unity. Instead, the plant is merely fixed in one particular place, changing and developing solely in the specialization of its fibers. Its ceaseless return to self in fertilization and reproduction remains bound to abstraction, exteriority, and otherness. Thus the glory of phototropic vegetable life is rooted in inglorious detritus and debris. Whereas Hegel’s contemporary, Schelling, counters every “womanly lament” with fervent affirmations—”All birth is birth from darkness into light; the kernel of seed must first be plunged deep in the earth and expire in gloom in order that the more beauteous figure of light [Lichtgestalt] loom and unfold along the beams of the sun”—Georges Bataille, in our own century, merely exposes the hinterside of romantic fervor when in “The Language of Flowers” he drags the figure of light back into the mire—

Flowers themselves, lost in this immense movement from earth to sky, are reduced to an episodic role; to a diversion, moreover, that is apparently misunderstood: they can only contribute, by breaking the monotony, to the inevitable seductiveness produced by the general thrust from low to high. And in order to destroy this favorable impression nothing less is necessary than the impossible and fantastic vision of roots swarming under the surface of the soil, nauseating and naked like vermin.¹¹

As opposed to all this, Hegelian intelligence exists, that is, develops and unfolds, standing out as a being on its own; intelligence is being-in-itself freely internalizing itself, remembering its self. Yet intelligence is in-itself only “on the one hand,” einerseits, and a onesided existence would be abstract, hence no real existence at all. “On the other hand,” andrerseits (and now Hegel returns to his own point of departure, abandoning the seed for the geological scission, the rift in which the seed will be planted), intelligence is “this unconscious shaft,” a pit existing or insisting as the universal whose other or difference is not yet individualized or discrete. The image of the pit or shaft, as an existent in-itself, is not yet sure of its imagic content. We arrive at the third moment (ϒϒ, §454) of the image in remembrance, which is also an image of remembrance—an iconographic reflexivity not to be forgotten.

The “abstractly preserved image” requires for its true existence an existent intuiting. What we actually call Erinnerung is the relation of the image to an intuiting whereby each individual intuition conforms to the universal and to representation as such. Intelligence is now interior to and intimate with itself (sich innerlich ist), recognizing the content of any sensation or intuition as “already its own” and therefore tried and true, preserved (bewährt/aufbewahrt). Hegel portrays such intimacy—and as readers of Theaetetus we will not be surprised by this—in terms of possession: “The image, which in the shaft of intelligence was only its property [Eigentum], is with the determination of exteriority now also in possession [im Besitze] of that exteriority. Hence the image is at the same time posited as distinguishable from the intuition and separable from the simple night in which it was at first plunged.” In this third moment the image or icon presumably escapes from the night in which all cows are black; it is scooped out of the pit and released to the exterior, which intelligence now not only owns but also occupies. Intelligence proves to be the power that dispenses, exteriorizes, expropriates (äussert) and, as we shall see, ex-presses (ausdrückt)what is its own, its property. The interiorizing movement of remembrance hence must retain and even culminate in a movement of exteriorization. The supposition that it now does not need an extrinsic intuition to do this would testify to its sovereignty (Gewalt). The synthesis of an interior image with its remembered existence is representation proper, das Vorstellen. And yet these closing words of Die Erinnerung are wholly mysterious: how understand the curious doubling by which the intimate, interior icon (des innerlichen Bildes) and interiorized existence (mit dem erinnerten Dasein) are synthesized? how identify the icon inside with some remembered existence? how recuperate the contingencies of the outside in necessitous interiority? To be sure, we have reached the threshold of Vorstellung proper, in which “the inner also has in itself the determination of being able to be posed before intelligence [vor die Intelligenz gestellt werden zu konnen ], to have its existence in intelligence”; yet whether such pre-position or posing before can be wholly interior in intelligence remains entirely questionable. Precisely when, where, and how does representation slough off those traits that always arouse Hegel’s scorn? And where Erinnerung is concerned, would not sloughing off amount to a kind of amnesia and primal repression?

The second major moment of representation, imagination, cannot detain us now. Yet we dare not forget that it is here that the procession of images from the shadowy shaft supplies intelligence with a stockpile (Vorrat) of images and representations over which it has free disposition. (And we ought to note in passing the similar structure and function of Vorrat in Freud’s 1895 “Project”: the lateral cathexis of ego-organization places a reserve of quantity—sometimes indistinguishable from mnemic images—at the disposal of the nervous system.) Intelligence now makes connections and associations among images as their proper content dictates, repatriating them, as it were. Those images drawn from the shaft of night and into the light of day are not the mere banalities of a life history, however, inasmuch as reason itself is here at work. Reason’s images, fabricated by the “sign-making fancy” of reproductive imagination, are signs, Zeichen, soon to become words and names. As always, no iconography without engrammatology. In the sign-making fancy, says Hegel, “intelligence is not the indeterminate shaft” (§457). For the kind of imagination that produces signs—for example, in the writing of a nonfictional text, such as a lecture course, and perhaps in the writing of a fictional text as well—the image of the pitMy cognizance of the pit had become known to the inquisitorial agents—the pit, whose horrors had been destined for so bold a recusant as myself—the pit, typical of hell and regarded by rumor as the Ultima Thule of all their punishments. The plunge into this pit I had avoided by the merest of accidentsis destined to be abandoned. Abandoned not for the pyramid (which it must nonetheless pass through) but for the workshop (Werkstatte) of spirit as reason. A workshop outfitted with machinesThere was something, however, in the appearance of this machine which caused me to regard it more attentivelywhich, as we shall see, are mnemonic word-machines.

Yet I am moving far too quickly: although we do not want to be detained I must recall the order of steps or stages in the hierarchy of transition—here the transition of the content from pictorial images to significant words. I shall follow the path indicated in the Encyclopedia, not that of the Propaedeutics (§§150—53)? which, with its treatment of sleep and dreams, premonitions and hallucinations, natural sympathy and spiritism, delirium and insanityand then all is madness—the madness of a memory which busies itself among forbidden thingsis far more complex. The role of imagination in the account of representation in the Encyclopedia may be reduced to the following five stages, the first three involving the play of association, the last two requiring the labor of reason.

First, an association or relation of images occurs, “the play of a thoughtless representing” (§455).

Second, the gradual formation of general or universal representations by virtue of the contiguity of similar images begins. The attractive power or affinity of such icons for one another derives from intelligent subjectivity, as interiorizing-remembering, which examines their content and asserts itself as the source of universality (§455).

Third, intelligent association is recognized as subsumption under a universal, a (relatively) free connecting of images according to their proper content or sense. Such subsumption is the work of fancy, or the symbolizing, allegorizing, and creatively poetic imagination—still bound to what it has found in sensation, however, and thus still synthetic (§456).

Fourth, play becomes labor, as we encounter the sudden assertion of reason. Vernunft does not merely synthesize but appropriates (aneignen) what is found; it simultaneously determines its own concrete intuition of self as “in being.” In such assertion reason is active and expressive, productive of its intuitions. It makes signs (§457). Fancy is thus the true midpoint between what is found and what is reason’s own, of being and universality, not by way of extrinsic synthesis but as concrete individuality. In sign-making fancy intelligence is no longer “the indeterminate shaft” but “concrete subjectivity” (§457). We might express the matter fittingly by gracing Hegel’s geology with a phrase of Nietzsche’s: with intelligence as fancy forming signs, we exit from the calcareous shaft onto “the granite of spiritual fate.”

Fifth, for intelligent reason the word is “properly the worthiest kind of externalization of its representations” (§459). Precisely in the way Augustine appeals to verba concepta as both related to sensuous vestiges and yet radically distinct from them, Hegel puts all his faith in names . The dignity of the word, as a name, consists in the simplicity or univocity of its significance, its syllables, its letters, and its resonance.

These five steps within Einbildungskraft take usDown—certainly, relentlessly down!to the core of Derrida’s “Le puits etDown—still unceasingly—still inevitably down!la pyramide.” I cannot reproduce Derrida’s analysis in any detail here, although Hegel’s semiology is crucial for the matters of interiorizing remembrance and memory. Before proceeding to Hegel’s account of memory proper, it would be well to recall hastily some of Derrida’s principal findings.

(1) If metaphysics—Hegel’s metaphysics included—determines being as presence, the sign can only be passage to a lost presence; the sign must be provisional and subsequent, even when it takes the form of a spoken word or name. The sign is a supplement subservient to the process of an Aneignung that is more re-appropriation than appropriation pure and simple, more an infinite return than a return to or by the infinite.

(2) Such reappropriation by grace of signs therefore remains mysterious, if not entirely futile, inasmuch as the status of the sign is determined as much by loss and absence as by appropriation and presence. The pyramid, Hegel’s symbol for the sign (§458), contains its own obscure shafts, multiple shaftsDeep, deep, and still deep and deeper we must go, if we would find out the heart of a man; descending into which is as descending a spiral stair in a shaft, without any end, and where that endlessness is only concealed by the spiralness of the stair, and the blackness of the shaftin which intelligence inevitably finds and loses itself. Early in “The Pit and the Pyramid” Derrida writes:

A path—we shall follow it—leads from this pit of night, silent as death and resonant with all the powers of voice that it holds in reserve, to that pyramid removed from the Egyptian desert and looming suddenly out of the sober and abstract fabric of the Hegelian text, constituting there the stature and the status of the sign. The natural source [i.e., the pit] and the historical construction [the pyramid], each in its own way, remain silent. The enigma is that, in accordance with the trajectory of onto-theology, this path remains circular: the pyramid again becomes the pit it will have been all along. (M, 88/77)

The nocturnal pit can never be abandoned, all hierarchies of transition notwithstanding. To desire to ascend out of it is to surrender dialectic and to lapse into something approximating absolute oblivion.

(3) In Hegel’s semiology the sign proves to be both production and intuition. In fact, it conjoins in itself all the binary oppositions of metaphysics: interiority/exteriority, spontaneity/receptivity, intelligibility/sensibility, sameness/otherness, and so on. The pyramid itself proves to be an eminently ambiguous sign/symbol: a monument built for the living as well as for the dead, testifying to mortality and immortality alike, representing the containment of the foreign soul of significanceand breathing with greater freedom, I turned my glances to the pallid and rigid figure upon the bed. Then rushed upon me a thousand memoriesbut yielding up no more than an embalmed corpse orBy vast pains we mine into the pyramid; by horrible gropings we come to the central room; with joy we espy the sarcophagus; but we lift the lid—and no body is there!—appallingly vacant as vast is the soul of a man!opening onto an empty vault.

(4) The standard Hegel applies to the phonetic sign, by which he gauges its superiority over all other types of signs, is the degree of arbitrariness (Willkur—actually a more perfect freedom of the will, as envisaged in practical philosophy) and the mastery or domination (Herrschaft) it permits. The demands of freedom and dominion require a kind of hidden maneuver: the sign succeeds by effacing its own spacing in the text, obliterating its espacement, obscuring its own exteriority; and by obfuscating the temporisation of its own sound and voice. Such obfuscation occurs in the privileging of the name, the concept, that is to say, in the preference for the mineral deposits of logic over the detritus of nature.¹²

Derrida himself reminds us of the importance of Hegel’s theory of signs for the determination of both Erinnerung and Gedächtnis: he notes that in the “Philosophical Encyclopedia” of the Propaedeutics (to which we shall soon turn) it is not productive imagination but productive memory, das produktive Gedächtnis (§156), that serves as the medium of interiorization and the source of language (M, 101/87). It is for this reason that in the Grammatologie (G, 41/ 26) Derrida exalts Hegel for his “rehabilitation” of thought as the “productive memory of signs,” acclaiming him “the last philosopher of the book and the first thinker of writing.” Yet Hegel’s semiology is also constricted by its commitment to the nominative character of language, its naming function, which Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations describes as the most primitive and childlike function of language. In Hegel’s privileging of the name, and in that hidden maneuver by which the sign conceals its embodiment, the formalism that Hegel criticizes in Leibniz and in all mandarin mathematical thinking reasserts its privilege. The commitment to the name is essential to what Hegel will now assert of memory proper, Gedächtnis (§461-64), namely, that it is the transition to conceptual thought itself. Section 459 closes by weaving a tapestry of intelligence, speech, memory, and thought: “The mediation of representations by means of the less sensuous element of tones is further manifested in its peculiar essentiality for the following transition from representation to thought—the memory.” And the final section on imagination (§460) insists on the importance of the name in such mediation:

The name, as a connection of the intuition that is produced by intelligence with its significance [ Bedeutung], is at first a single transitory production; and the connection of the representation as something interior with the intuition as something exterior is itself extrinsic. Internalizing remembrance of this exteriority is memory.

Thus Gedächtnis too is thoroughly subordinated to Erinnerung: memory is the interiorizing remembrance of names (as significations). Interiorizing remembrance clearly remains at work after its moment has been fully explicated, just as it entered on the scene prior to its proper moment. Dialectical negotiation of outside and inside can itself find no fixed abode in the system. Intelligence as thinking memory (Gedächtnis) “runs through the same activities of interiorizing remembrance” which Hegel has discussed earlier, except that now its intuition is of a word, not a sensation. In fact, Hegel directs us back to sections 451 and following, in order that we may recapitulate the steps of Erinnerung, making the proper substitutions and bringing the parallel to its full stature and status. Again three moments are identified, double-alpha through double-gamma. Because such repetitions are in fact microcosms of the grand repetition, the macrocosm that finds its end only in a reinstatement of the beginning, we should follow Hegel’s counsel. Let us banish the fear that when we arrive the second time at section 461 we will once again have to shuttle back to sections 451 and following, returning in infinitum, unable to read the musical sign for repetition ||: 451-461 :|| just once and then get on with it, outside of it, beyond it. It would be necessary to distinguish, between two repetitions. . . .

When double-alpha first appeared, it was as a symbol inserted immediately before the italicized word Bild. One step removed from the sensuous stuff of intuition, the image or icon was said to occupy its own space and time, the space-time of intelligence. Yet that occupation was itself transitory, voruber-gehend; it slipped out of existence and into the noctural shaft, bewusstlos aufbewahrt. Now, in the first section of Gedächtnis (§461), we find a repetition of that removal and slippage, a repetition with a difference.

—αα) By means of this interiorizing remembrance, intelligence now elevates the single connection—that connection which the sign is, which makes the sign belong to intelligence—to a universal, that is, to a perdurant connection. The latter is a connection in which name and meaning [ Bedeutung] are tied to one another objectively for intelligence; it makes the intuition which the name is at first into a representation, so that the content, the meaning, and the sign are identified, are one representation, and the representing is concrete in its interiority, with the content as its [the representing’s] existence.—The memory that retains names.

Rather than removal, elevation; rather than slippage, connection and binding. In this repetition of double-alpha it is identity that prevails, as singularity passes to universality, to the tie that b(l)inds.

In the realm of representation (as opposed to intuition) the sign is a name, and the name is the thing: Der Name ist so die Sache (§462). So saying, we arrive at double-beta. Above (§453), double-beta introduced the transitory character of the image and its unconscious preservation. Obscurity invaded intelligence itself. The image became virtual possibility, one among an infinite number, one in an entire world of representations. And intelligence became on the one hand unconscious, undeveloped, simple, not yet existent, and on the other hand an existent shaft, in-itself, a kind of proto-interiority opening up a space-time for representation. Now, in section 462, double-beta stands as a symbol and perhaps even a simulacrum of reproductive memory: “Das ββ) reproduzierende Gedächtnis .” Reproductive memory recognizes the matter in the name, the name in the matter, “without intuition and image,” obne Anscbauung und Bild. Rather than unconscious preservation of the image that announces itself as transitory, cancellation of the image, iconoclasm; rather than the shaft, a neutralization of the inside-outside distinction. “The name, as existence of the content in intelligence, is the exteriority of intelligence itself in itself [die Ausserlichkeit ihrer selbst in ibr]; the interiorizing remembrance of the name, as of the intuition produced by it, is at the same time the exteriorization in which intelligence within itself posits itself [in der sie innerbalb ibrer selbst sich setzt].” Intelligence may rattle off a string of names by sheer association, and yet if they are names it is no mere rattling: “It is in names that we think”

Just as the first double-beta introduced us to the “Remark,” one of the most cryptic, so does the repetition of double-beta bring us to an extended “Remark,” one that will bring us back to the very verge of the shaft. Here Hegel describes in detail—and criticizes as superficial and silly—the ancient art of mnemotechnic, which employs loci and imagines agentes, thus relying on extrinsic connections between its standardized tableaux and the variable contents to be remembered. The result of mnemotechnic is that things are not truly learned by heart. To recite auswendig, to churn out, requires that one learn inwendig, that is, that one turn inward, interiorize the material to be learned, and then draw it forth “out of the deep shaft of the ego.” The shaft, let it be noted, is no longer the pit of representational intelligence but the wellspring of concrete subjectivity or ego; no longer black as night but profound; no longer the obscure source of numberless pictorial images but the ancient thesaurus into which significant names are introduced and withdrawn again at will. The shaft no longer preserves something found in experience, no longer contains the Gefundenes of Empfindung, but produces spirit’s own word. Spirit gives itselfIn the deepest slumber—no! In delirium—no! In a swoon—no! In death—no! even in the grave all is not lost. Else there is no immortality for man. Arousing from the most profound of slumbers, we break the gossamer web of some dream. Yet in a second afterward (so frail may that web have been) we remember not that we have dreamed. . . . Amid frequent and thoughtful endeavors to remember, amid earnest struggles to regather some token of the state of seeming nothingness into which my soul had lapsed, there have been moments when I have dreamed of success; there have been brief, very brief periods when I have conjured up remembrance which the lucid reason of a later epoch assures me could have had reference only to that condition of seeming unconsciousness. These shadows of memory tell, indistinctlythe shaft.

Which brings us now to the final moment, the repetition of double-gamma. Earlier, double-gamma introduced section 454, the place where intelligence took full possession (Besitz) of the icon that heretofore was solely its property (Eigentum). Double-gamma thus entered on the scene in the first instance as a repetition, a replaying of the struggle in Theaetetus to differentiate hexis from ktesis. The shaft dark as night began to resemble more and more the aviary. The door of which, we remember, slammed shut. We ourselves introduced double-gamma some pages back by noting that this third moment of the image in remembrance—remember that αα, ββ, and yy are moments of Erinnerung first of all, that only by repetition do they become moments of Gedächtnis—was also an image of remembrance that we ought not allow to fade from memory. Double-gamma was therefore the moment in which intelligence took full possesion of its intuition, recognizing the content of every intuition as “already its own.” This recognition entailed a release of the image from the shaft of intelligence to the outside: double-gamma was a moment of externalization, and as such the culmination of interiorization. Now, in section 463, the double-gamma introduces the penultimate moment of memory, not the final moment (§464), the final moment being the accession to thinking. Perhaps because it is only the penultimate moment of Gedächtnis, we find in the repetition of double-gamma the most perfect of repetitions: here too the third moment is one of exteriorization, of release to the outside; here too that movement to the outside is held to be the culmination of interiorization—”this supreme Erinnerung,” Hegel says of Gedächtnis γγ. That movement has to do with the connection of names and their significations or meanings—an explicitly extrinsic connection that will secure the inner heartland of thought.

True memory preserves not images—these have all been set free—but the interiority of intelligence itself. Hence its superiority over intuitive imagination. It seems we will have no difficulty in leaving both intuition and representation behind as we repeat the three moments of Erinnerung. The question of course ||: ? :|| is whether we will be able to leave Gedächtnis behind as we repeat the moments of Erinnerung and so move toward memory, true memory, thinking memory itself. Oddly, the supreme interiority of memory, of Erinnerung in Gedächtnis, is manifested in the ability of intelligence to poll-parrot a merely existent, wholly extrinsic series of names at its discretion. For this shows that even extreme abstraction, even free-floating signs, can be interiorized and then externalized mechanically at will. What spirit has made its own, namely, words bereft of all significance, now simply flows forth as something in process of being found, as ein Gefunden-werdendes. Never mind the reemergence of sensation (Empfindung) here, never mind the continuous muffled weaving. Mechanical memory testifies to the profound objectivity and perdurant significance of intelligence.¹³

Intelligence is the active identity “for itself” of the exterior objectivity and significance of names; the identity “in itself ” of these things is nothing less than reason, Vernunft. “In this way, memory is the transition to the activity of the thought.” It is the transition, needless to relate, in which the hierarchy of transition itself comes to its end. The thought no longer has a meaning; it is the meaning. The thought exists as the interiority of subjectivity: this is the ultimate, not the penultimate, moment of memory: the arkhē kinēseōs. The German language itself, Hegel remarks, betrays the genuine affinity of memory and the thought, Gedächtnis and Gedanke. Yet it remains one of the most difficult tasks of a philosophy of spirit “to grasp the status and significance of the memory and to come to grips with its organic connection with thinking.” In spite of all the interiorizations at play in Hegel’s treatment of memory proper, Hegel concludes that Gedächtnis is “only the extrinsic way, the onesided moment, of the existence of thinking” (§464). In the activity of thinking itself, intelligence is recognitive, wiedererkennend; it recognizes all intuition as its own. Thoughtful intelligence knows “that what is thought, is; and that what is, inasmuch as it is a thought, only is for it; the thinking of intelligence is having thoughts; they are the content and object of intelligence” (§465). Thinking itself advances through sundry stages and culminates in the moment when intelligence “appropriates” whatever immediately determines it, taking “full possession” of “its property” (§468). The metaphorics of appropriation is confirmed in the Rechtsphilosophie (1820) when Hegel defines the essential moment of property, that is, taking possession (Besitzergreifung), in terms of interiorizing remembrance, erinnern (see §50 and especially the handwritten notes to §57; 7, 125). Thinking accomplishes the final negation of immediacy, whereby negation for itself recognizes its role in determining all content. Thinking, “as the free concept,” is now freeFor the moment, at least, I was freein terms of content. Such intelligence, Hegel concludes, bringing usFree!—and in the grasp of the Inquisition!finally to the realm of practical spirit, is the will. Thus ends Hegel’s account of theoretical spirit, seat of memory and witness to the infinitely repetitious interiorizing movement of remembrance.

ERINNERUNG AND GEDÄCHTNIS IN THE
PHILOSOPHICAL PROPAEDEUTICS OF 1808

Even though the “Philosophical Encyclopedia” of the so-called Propaedeutics (4, 9—69) is from an editorial point of view (606—9) a highly problematic text, it is tempting for a number of reasons to turn back to it at this point. First, a number of transitions and developments in the later Encyclopedia are much more clearly expressed here. Second, a number of significant variations emerge in the earlier text, especially with regard to imagination (Einbildungskraft) and memory (Gedächtnis). Third, and most generally, the character of Hegel’s doctrine of memory in terms of the threefold structure we have in Part One called typographic, iconographic, and engrammatological here appears in its clearest outlines.

Let me begin with the third point, the crucial one for my own enterprise. When we take a rather more distant, less sharply focused look at the Hegelian system as we find itI have said, that I minutely remember the details of the chamber—yet I am sadly forgetful on topics of deep moment; and here there was no system, no keeping, in the fantastic display, to take hold upon the memoryin the Propaedeutics, its contours stand out in bold relief. The discussions of feeling (das Gefühl: 4, 43: E, §§399—408) and intuition (die Anschauung: cited in the Propaedeutics as the first topic of Erinnerung, 4, 44; E, §§446-50), betray the fact that feeling, sensation, and intuition in the system are conceived typographically. All are forms of affection, affection by stuff, pure contingency, and hence violence and violation. The essential mediation oiantitypia is what Hegel calls representation, die Vorstellung (4, 43-53). In the Propaedeutics, as in the Encyclopedia, the essential powers of representation are interiorizing remembrance, imagination, and memory. Taken together, as representation, these powers prove to be ionographic. True, section 143 of the earlier work explicitly denies that the interiorized representation of Erinnerung is “a comparison of two individual intuitions” (46). “The self-sameness that I recognize is on the one hand the identity of the content of the representation; on the other hand I recognize in my current intuition my own identity with myself; or I remember myself in that representation (erinneremich in ihr].” Nevertheless, the discussion of “subsumption” in the very next section is classically iconographic: “In interiorizing remembrance the image of a past intuition or representation is summoned by a present one, an intuition or representation that was the same [die nämliche war] as the present one.” The long and difficult discussion of preservation and connection in the Encyclopedia will not have been in vain: Vorstellung is iconography. Finally, at some point (and the point shifts between imagination in the Encyclopedia and memory in the Propaedeutics) the iconography of representation is bound to become engrammatology, an explicit reflection on the semiotic character of memory and reminiscence. The first words of “C. Das Gedächtnis ” in the Propaedeutics are: “The sign in general” (51). Hegel recognizes that mnēmē and Mnemosyne are invariably hypomnemic, that they involve signs and signals that must be scanned, gleaned, or read. Thus the “situation” of Hegel’s principal treatise on language, speech, writing, and reading is a situation on the frontier of remembrance and memory, in the domain of productive memory, imagination, or reproductive memory; that situation is so far from being accidental that we must see it as the culmination of a tradition—the end of the book and the verge of writing.

In what ways does the Propaedeutics depart significantly from the later system, and what difficulties in our reading of the Encyclopedia does it help to resolve? The “Science of Spirit,” Part Three of the Propaedeutics, comprises and compresses what the Encyclopedia will distinguish as “Anthropology” and “Psychology.” The most immediate expression of this compression is the fact that in the earlier work (but compare Hegel’s 1820 Philosophy of Right, §4 [7, 48]) feeling, rather than intuition, constitutes the first moment in the hierarchy of transition that is “intelligence.” The function of representation is clearly marked: its three moments (interiorizing remembrance, imagination, and memory) are to grant Gefiihl an object, transforming fleeting feeling into the stable content of something felt (§134; 4, 43-44):

Only in representation does one have an object. The stages of representation are as follows: 1) intelligence remembers [or interiorizes itself: sich erinnert] by generally separating itself from the content of the feeling; 2) intelligence imagines [or informs in itself: sich einbildet] this content, retaining it without its object, summoning it forth and connecting it freely from out of itself; 3) intelligence takes from the content its immediate significance and gives it another significance and connection in memory.

Yet the distribution of tasks within these three moments of intelligence is not identical in the earlier and later systems. The most intriguing shift, one to which Derrida has already drawn our attention (M, 101 n. 6/87 n. 15), is the location in the Propaedeutics of much of the discussion concerning language and signs in memory rather than in imagination. Yet one can see why the “summoning” and “connecting” of contents (in imagination) will eventually involve language as much as the “taking” and “giving” of meaning and connection (in memory).

A second, less noticeable shift involves elusive Erinnerung itself—the “motor” of the system in all its transitions, everywhere and nowhere at once. In the Propaedeutics the major rubrics are feeling, representation, and thinking. The moments of the second, as we have just seen, are remembrance, imagination, and memory. However, when Hegel comes to outline the contents of Erinnerung, placing the numbers 1, 2 and 3 before its essential moments (see §§135, 138, and 143), he identifies them as:

1. intuition

2. representation

3. interiorizing remembrance

The first two correspond to the two initial major rubrics in the Encyclopedia’s hierarchy of transition, the second rubric, “representation,” being the parent rubric of Erinnerung in the mature system; the third, remembrance, occupies the place that the Encyclopedia will reserve for thinking, Denken. In the Propaedeutics the moment of remembrance is both the first moment of representation and the third moment of itself. Erinnerung is thus the onset and the culmination of transition, the double-alpha and double-omega of the system.

The liberation of intuition from its space and time to a space-time interior in and intrinsic to intelligence is in the Propaedeutics (§§136—42) discussed in far greater detail. Hegel’s references to the Kantian forms of intuition make the stakes of that liberation far more perspicuous here than in the Encyclopedia. That it is a liberation from imprisonment becomes clear in a parenthetical remark to section 137: “Things are imprisoned by this determinateness in time and space; they are imprisoned by one another according to their determinations; they are in the universal dungeon.” Remembrance as representation will sever the cincture of their particularity (Bande ihrer Einzelheit: §142) and release them, not to the outside, but to a more profound interiority, the perfectly unobstructed vistaWith how vast a triumph—with how vivid a delight—with how much of all that is ethereal in hope did I feel, as she bent. . . that delicious vista by slow degrees expanding before me, down whose long gorgeous, and all untrodden path, I might at length pass onward to the goal of a wisdom too divinely precious not to be forbidden!of pure self-presence. Although the shaft dark as night does not gape in the Propaedeutics (the “universal dungeon” is a misnomer inasmuch as universality is precisely what things that are locked in space and time lack), there is one moment (§140) when we see it begin to yawn:

The intuition, transposed to the ego, is not merely image; it becomes representation in general. It is not simply that the intuition taken up into interiority perfectly corresponds with the immediate intuition; rather, the intuition is emancipated from its context in space and time, removed from it. It is an existence [Dasein] that is sublated [aufgehobenes], that is to say, as much nonexistent [nichtseiendes] as preserved [aufbewahrtes].

Of the major variation in the two treatments of Einbildungskraft I will say nothing here, except to note that when Hegel excises a large chunk of imagination it will have to be filled by material from Gedächtnis. What Hegel eliminates, and later transposes from “Psychology” to “Anthropology” (see E, §404ff.My memory flew back) oh, with what intensity of regret!)), are three astonishing paragraphs, equal to anything in Kant’s Anthropology, on dreamsI revelled in recollectionsand visions, somnambulism, madnessNow, then, did my spirit fully and freely burnand delusion. A tangle of profuse imagesSommer: Vergissmeinnichtwill be cleared from the text in order to make room for the discussion of language and signs. That it is Bilder that will have to be cleared away, “stripped off” and subtracted rather than sublated, is no accident. For memory sacrifices and assassinates images for the sake of words. Nowhere in the tradition is the move from iconography to engrammatology so stark in its violence: “The image is slayed [ertdtet], and the word stands in for [vertritt] the image” (§159; 4, 52). Predictably, it is the spoken word that performs the iconoclastic act(what marvel that I shudder while I write?)and dashes the disordered imagesI stirred not—but gazed upon the apparition. There was a mad disorder in my thoughts—a tumult unappeasableof the sensuous world of space and time (§159; 4, 52): “Speech is the slaying of the sensuous world in its immediate existence, the becoming sublated of that world to an existence that is a clarion callAnd now slowly opened the eyes of the figure which stood before mereverberating in all representational creatures.” Iconolastic speech is thus an aggravated typography, a kind of superlative hypertyposis, which one might contrast to Kantian hypotyposis.¹⁴

Can we now, if only as a moment of relief, remember sufficient of what has gone before to attempt something like an overview of both Hegelian systems of Erinnerung and Gedächtnis? And can we combine with such an overview an attempt at interrogation?

In Hegel’s distinction between Erinnerung and Gedächtnis we confront a memento of the traditional distinction between activity and passivity, even though Gedächtnis is always on the verge of active thought. Also in perfect conformity with the tradition is Hegel’s privileging of activity over passivity, interiority over exteriority, self-presence over alien objectivity, freedom over both accident and constraint, necessity over contingency. Yet passivity continues to mar Gedächtnis: all the purgings of an ever-active interiorization cannot wipe away the stain of sensuousness, the mark of dependence, the blows of typography that—however crucial they may be—offend the spirit. Erinnerung exceeds Gedächtnis as such. It is omnipresent in dialectic as the very movement in which all other functions, faculties, and activities of spirit are but particular gestures, including the gesture of egress. It is by virtue of the vagabondage of interiorizing remembrance in the hierarchy of transition that memory can be the transition to thought. Erinnerung as such however remains dark. Plato’s aviary and Augustine’s spacious fields, theater, and thesaurus of memory have become a pit where every trace testifies to loss and not recuperated presence; to an absolute past and not a present; to a granitic and cryptic presupposition and not a concrete proof; to a cavernous gap and not a spheric seed; to unannealed difference andThe fearful difference quickly increasednot to identity. In Hegel’s Erinnerung we find but the barest trace of the sensuous engram, the typos, as such. To scatter that trace Hegel posits the sign in reproductive memory or imagination—not in internalizing remembrance but in a faculty he would rescue from the pit and its pendulum and transfer to the perdurant pyramid. Mausoleum of meaning. Metronome of eternity. Yet the rescue and the transfer remain suspect inasmuch as memory reverts to Erinnerung, as indeed thought itself does. The sign, word, and name—the sources of universality and the resources of reason itself—are after all found, just as an image or a sensation are found, inscribed in stone or ululating in the throat. The inscribing instrument and the throat itself are verges of pyramidal signs. Does Hegel actually enter the shaft of such signs, the pit of the pyramid itself? Does he descend into its depth and risk losing himself in the receding origins of interiority and of language? Or does he not hesitate on the rim of the shaft of remembrance, on the brink of the pit of the sign, suffering there a kind of vertigo“Death,” I said, “any death but that of the pit!” Fool! Might I not have known that into the pit it was the object of the burning iron to urge me?that makes him “shrink back” (as Heidegger says of other thinkers in different yet not unrelated contexts) and grasp at a logic that seems firmly rooted, confident all the while that he has already made the descent, that he is now truly present to the deepest strata of experience? How very odd it would be if Hegel failed to remember the verge as such, the verge of remembrance, which is the permanent topic and typical tool of his thought. Yet how could Hegel lose himself, how could he let go, if the concept (Begriff/begreifen) has its grip onAn outstretched arm caught my own as I fell, fainting, into the abyssor is itself somehow gripped by the superficies of language and memory, so that dialectic can surrender everything but its determinate object, its grip? Hegel’s thought remains a matter of the grasp, of production and technique—mechanical dialectic mining the depths rather than freely exploring them without a thought to reserves. His is the philosophy of the granitic presupposition, all seed ensconced in the protective husk and hull of the absolute. It does not peer patiently down the shaft, much less overcome all prohibitions and inhibitions and descend into it. And what it does not condescend to see it cannot remember. “It does not see the foundationless play [le sans-fond de jeu] on which (the) history (of meaning) is erected.”¹⁵

Yet a cautionary word is called for. Hegel gives a name to thinking memory and a local habitation. To Erinnerung he gives an image, one over which he hardly has free disposition, an image he cannot slay with words. What in fact constrains Hegel to introduce into his system diesen nachtlichen Schachtf The only possible answer is that Hegel responds to the call of the blackness of darkness. True, he does not swoon; he equips himself with lights. He is wont to forget the image by transmogrifying it into an icon owned by the ego. Yet the simple, ineluctable happenstance of his having found the image, or of its having found him in the course of the writing or lecturing, preserves the element of Empfindung that Hegel would otherwise suppress. And why should we object that he merely preserves the element unconsciously, preserves it in his text, as long as the shaft comes to gape, as long as Hegel’s hearers and readers come to stumble onto the very verge of it? To interiorize something that remains obstinately outside and resists all incorporation—contingency, adversity, language, the past—is to remain subject to perpetual egress. Erinnerung requires, and is, Entausserung. It is—dare we say it?—dialectical. “Dialectical” in the sense indicated negatively by Merleau-Ponty when he says that dialectical truth, as truth “in act,” ceases to be such as soon as it “separates itself from its becoming, or forgets it, or relegates it to the past.”¹⁶

When we remember carefully enough we are displaced from all centers, removed from all interiors. When it is truly reminiscent and not merely recollective or appropriative, Hegelian dialectic is ecstatic, no matter what centripetal plans Hegel himself may have had for it. The eccentric, ecstatic dialectic of Erinnerung/Entäusserung comes into play more dramatically in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit than in either the Encyclopedia or the Propaedeutics, however, so that this chapter will come to a close only after it ushersin the deep and dark tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments ofa brief examination of the beginning and the end of Hegel’s Phenomenology.

ER-INNERUNG IN THE PHENOMENOLOGY
OF SPIRIT

It may seem preposterous to turn now to the last chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, as though all the preceding chapters posed no problems for me and I were prepared to finish reading the book before I began—with a flourish of absolute self-assurance. Das absolute Wissen, “Absolute Knowing,” is the title of the last chapter. Yet anyone who has taken pains to follow any of the earlier stages in the phenomenology of spirit knows that absolute knowing is never a matter of being cocksure. Hegel ends his book not with a flourish but with a sober, if not somber, reflection on interiorizing remembrance. He does not fail to remember the travail of the phenomenologist who tries to recollect the experience of consciousness and the protracted historical development of spirit. He does not fail to remember that each new phase of that experience and that history has as its herald negation and inversion—the insight that what we thought we knew is not true, or at least that it is not the whole story, an insight that each time we have it turns us upside down. It is as though one can only verge on the true, measuring absolute knowing against absolute commencement, presupposition, and ignorance.

Before turning to the final chapter I shall refer briefly to the Introduction, where the method and goal of phenomenology are treated. Here HegelA cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison. . . . The now ghastly pallor of the skin, and the now miraculous lustre of the eyedesignates the phenomenological science of the experience of consciousness as “self-accomplishing skepticism.” The theme of skepticism dominates the entire Introduction. Yet one must distinguish among at least three kinds of skepticism.

First, there is a thoroughly unschooled and timid sort of skepticism that despairs of ever bridging the gap between consciousness and the absolute, the latter understood as the things in themselves as they are essentially. Viewing knowledge as an implement or a medium that invariably distorts whatever it touches or mediates, such skepticism is unmanned by its fear of error—which, Hegel says, is actually fear of the truth. Such fear must be overcome if philosophy is to get underway at all. Sufficient to overcome such timorous skepticism is the fortitude Hegel invokes in his famous opening remarks in 1817 to his Berlin students, to wit, “courage in the truth, belief in the power of spirit.”

Second, there is a kind of skepticism, identified as a specific moment in the history of thought and in the experience of consciousness, that has a good deal of history and experience behind it and has already attained to the dimension of self-consciousness. Such skeptical self-consciousness entertains no illusions about knowledge as an “implement” or “medium” inadequate to the absolute. It comprehends the necessity of dialectic. Yet it is “absolute dialectical restlessness,” and its self-consciousness is but “a purely accidental confusion, the vertigo [Schwindel] of a perpetually self-generating disorder” (PG, 156-57). Consciousness of self here finds itself enmeshed in contradictions; it is at once its own master and its own slave. Such skepticism sees double, is itself a duplicate consciousness. And it is unhappy.

Historical skepticism is much more reminiscent of the self-accomplishing skepticism of phenomenology—the third kind—than is hesitant, pusillanimous skepticism, precisely because of the role interiorizing remembrance plays in both. Although Hegel’s account of Hume in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy (20, 275ff.) is perfunctory, the detailed and sympathetic treatment of Sextus Empiricus there (19, 367ff.) reflects Hegel’s own passion for self-accomplishing skepticism—and for remembrance—in the Phenomenology. He describes classical skepticism’s surrender of objectivity and truth, its sacrifice of all stable content, as “complete remembrance” (die vollkommene Erinnerung)and as “internalization” (die Innerlichmachung: 19, 404). Complete interiority is the abyss of self-consciousness, infinite subjectivity as infinite abstraction, crying for the concreteness of the Christian revolution. Yet the parallel is too close for comfort: the disappearance of all objective content, the resulting “confusion” when all meaning begins to move, stoic indifference or ataraxia poised on the brink of absolute listlessness, and even anorexiaThe writer spoke of acute bodily illness—of a mental disorder which oppressed him—and of an earnest desire to see me . . . with a view of attempting . . . some alleviation of his maladyall seem as much a part of phenomenological as of historical skepticism.

It is especially difficult for us to make the transition from historical to self-accomplishing skepticism, since skepticism in the form of suspicion is the hallmark of our own frazzled age—even if we should want to smile good-naturedly on Jean-Paul Sartre’s insistence that “human reality” is “by nature an unhappy consciousness with no possibility of surpassing its unhappy state.”¹⁷ Yet the fate of every effort to read Hegel’s Phenomenology depends on one’s trying to make the transition, or trying to remember one’s already having done so. Phenomenology of spirit, as science of the experience of consciousness, is the presentation (Darstellung) of knowledge that comes to appear (des erscheinenden Wissens). It retraces the way taken by “natural consciousness,” which advances toward “true knowledge” through various stations. These stations constitute the sequence of consciousness’ own configurations or shapes (Gestalten). Phenomenological presentation is a way of doubt, even desperation, inasmuch as the natural consciousness whose path it is retracing experiences again and again the untruth of appearing knowledge; yet the phenomenological observer knows that this is the route consciousness must take if it is to assume the form of science. Such phenomenological presentation, secure in the truth of the essential untruth of appearing knowledge, is “self-accomplishing skepticism.” Self-accomplishing means that skepticism, impelled by determinate negation, which is always a result and which always produces a new object for testing, progresses to a point where the necessity of its passage and of all the sundry stations is granted. At that point it is no longer necessary for knowledge to go out beyond itself. At that point, presumably, natural consciousness and phenomenological consciousness will have coalesced. Before it arrives at that point consciousness is torn out of itself and dies a death; indeed, many deaths. It remains unsatisfied with its progress to this or that station, is ill-at-ease with all constraint and restriction, impatient to surpass all limitation. “Hence, consciousness suffers from a violence that spoils its own limited satisfaction, and this violence stems from consciousness itself” (PG, 69). While consciousness is caught up in such violence or turbulence, anxiety in the face of truth may return, struggling to retain the object that is about to evanesce. Nothing quells such anxiety, not even the inertia of thoughtlessness—”the thought troubles thoughtlessness, and its restlessness disturbs the inertia.” The turmoil of dialectic proceeds unabated.

What has remembrance to do with such skepticism? The phenomenologist observes and records the stations of the experience of consciousness, then presents them, re-presents or recapitulates them, as it were. The very first stage of such observation and presentation, “Sensuous Certainty,” may serve as an example.

Sensations seem to be immediately certain to consciousness. Consciousness simply finds itself in Empfindungen and among the objects that press upon it here and now. (We know that this typographic starting point will not vanish altogether from Hegel’s mature system.) Yet when natural consciousness looks at this certainty more closely, putting it into words, it becomes intimate with the fact that such certainty is mediated: the sensations are certain through me, as I am (somewhat) certain through them. Consciousness now suffers its first inversion. A new object emerges as the embodiment of the true, one that requires us to take up the theme of perception and the “thing” as such. The movement of inversion, the commencement of dialectic, does not require philosophical lucubration or even a great deal of phenomenological scrutiny. Hegel insists that consciousness naturally experiences the thrust of negation as soon as it expresses itself about sensuous certainty. What then is the phenomenologist for? Hegel replies:

It becomes clear that the dialectic of sensuous certainty is nothing other than the simple history of its movement or of its experience. . . . Hence, natural consciousness itself always advances to this result, to what is true in sensuous certainty, and makes it a part of its experience. However, natural consciousness always forgets the result straightway and begins the movement all over again. (PG, 86-87)

As historian of the experience of consciousness, the phenomenologist possesses an essentially reminiscent and ruminative consciousness. He or she is possessed of a kind of double consciousness, one that sees itself seeing and remembers its having done so. It is this retentive consciousness that Hegel defines as self-accomplishing skepticism. Phenomenological consciousness remains mindful of the “for us” of things, of the movement of inversion that constitutes experience. Yet unlike the fainthearted, halting skeptic, the phenomenologist remains mindful also of the emergence of altered forms of the true, of new objects for consciousness. By virtue of his or her ability to retain and recapitulate in detail the dialectic of experience, the phenomenologist is a kind of therapist, curing the amnesias of natural consciousness. To undertake a cure of natural consciousness, the phenomenologist must let it undergo its inversions, accepting each exhibited result—the fruit of determinate negation—as relevant. Yet at every crucial point in the cure he or she must exercise the authority that is always vested in the one who sees and has seen, that is, the one who has reached the placeThe vault in which we placed it (and which had been so long unopened that our torches, half smothered in its oppressive atmosphere, gave us little opportunity for investigation) was small, damp, and entirely without means of admission for lightwhere semblance and exteriority fall away,

“where appearance is the same as essence” (PG, 75). The phenomenologist is the monster of memory who shows and presents. And the only thing that can prevent effortless ascent into absolute dogmatism is the readiness of the phenomenologist to remember. Relentlessly. Monumentally.

How are we to conceive of the point where skepticism is accomplished, where remembrance becomes absolute knowing, where appearance equals essence and itinerary becomes system, where all the stations will have been visited and all the configurations of consciousness contemplated? Is it a point of imperturbable calm and perfect sanity, untroubled by haunting recollections of pain and turmoil? The sweet contentment of oblivion—Stuttgart Heaven—would be, not self-accomplishing skepticism (note that the participle is present, not past) but perfect nihilism, as Nietzsche describes it in a note jotted down in the autumn of 1887 entitled “The complete nihilist”:

The nihilist’s eye . . . is unfaithful to its memories—it lets them drop, lose their leaves. It does not prevent their fading to that corpselike pallor which debility drapes over what is distant and past. And what the nihilist neglects to do for himself he neglects to do for mankind’s entire past—he lets it drop.¹⁸

Absolute knowing must therefore be something else, something more akin to remembrance than forgetfulness. What remains of reminiscent absolute knowing? What remains after absolute knowing remembers? Absolute?

Absolute. The dictionary says: loosened, absolved, free—that is, free from interference, connection, relation, comparison, and dependence. The Oxford English Dictionary cites James F. Ferrier’s Institutes of Metaphysic, published twenty-five years after Hegel’s death, as follows: “Whatever can be known (or conceived) out of relation, that is to say, without any correlative being necessarily known (or conceived) along with it, is the known Absolute.” Yet is the “known Absolute” what Hegel means by “absolute knowing”? Absolutely not. For absolute knowing is the nexus of all known or conceived relations, the never fully realized totality of dependencies, comparisons, connections, and interferences that make up the experience of consciousness and the history of spirit. The key words in Hegel’s final chapter all suggest such interference and mutual dependence: die Entausserung des Selbstbewusstseins, the need, on the one hand, for self-consciousness to go outside itself for its objects, the need that appears as the culmination of Erinnerung in the mature system; die Nichtigkeit des Gegenstandes _y the experience that, on the other hand, without a consciousness to apprehend and comprehend it, the object is nothing; and die Bewegung des Selbsts, the realization that it is neither boundless fascination with objects outside nor total captivation by my identity inside that defines spirit, but the ceaseless and no doubt violent movement between these two poles of experience.

In his final chapter, after discussing the identity of substance and subject, Hegel defines absolute knowing as “the final configuration [or shape: Gestalt] of spirit” (PG, 556). Absolute knowing is the configuration in which content and form coalesce and perdure as Begriff the actual grasp of the concept. The appearance of spirit, grasped conceptually, is accomplished science. Had Hegel wished to end his book with a lordly gesture, he would have stopped here. He did not. He could not. He had justIn the manner of my friend I was at once struck with an incoherence—an inconsistencydefined science as “spirit. . . appearing to consciousness.” Hegel himselfHis voice . . . that leaden, self-balanced, and perfectly modulated guttural utteranceemphasizes the present participle erscheinend and reintroduces a distinction where all had seemed firmly grasped identity. Spirit appearing to consciousness? Whose consciousness? Appearing? When? Where? And how is it with “spirit”?

The third moment of the final chapter (PG, 557) begins with the concession that absolute knowing does not exist until it appears “in time and actuality.” It comes to exist at the point where experience itself becomes the proper object of and for consciousness; that is, the point where experience is recognized as substance and substance is understood as spirit’s becoming what it is in itself. Substance, recognized as the experience of spirit’s coming to be, is “the circle that goes back into itself, presupposing its beginning and attaining it only in the end” ||: PG, 559 :||. At the point where Hegel contemplates the closure of the circle he introduces the word Erinnerung, inasmuch as end and beginning are joined in remembrance. He writes:

Because its [that is, spirit’s] perfection consists in knowing perfectly well what it is, knowing its substance, such knowing is its going into itself ]Insichgehen], in which spirit abandons its existence and commits its shape [Gestalt] to remembrance. With its going into itself, spirit sinks into the night of its self-consciousness, but its vanished existence is preserved in that night; and its surpassed existence—the prior one, but now born anew from knowledge—is the new existence, a new world and a new shape of spirit. (PG, 563—64)

The preserving night into which self-consciousness sinks will not be unfamiliar to us. The shape of consciousness is now a shade: the word Gestalt is redolent of ghostly shapes and shades (recall the apelike gespenstische Gestalt of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde). Vanished from existence, self-consciousness is nevertheless preserved. Where? Hegel describes the existence of spirit in space and time as passage through “a gallery of images” (PG, 563). These images—if we remember ahead to the Encyclopedia—will have been removed from the roughhewn pit and eventually set up in the exhibition hall; the pyramid in which self-consciousness is preserved will have been reconstructed in the workshop or apotheca of a museum. Such surpassed existence may therefore not be genuinely ecstatic or eccentric, in spite of our desire earlier to have it so, inasmuch as it remains within walls that are always familiar and reassuring. Spirit’s existence is said to be consummated—although it is destined for nothing else than a “new” existence—when spirit commits its shape to interiorizing remembrance, Erinnerung. It is high time we took a closer look at this word, the crucial sign/symbol of Hegelian philosophy.

Erinnerung possesses four structural parts, corresponding to its four syllables: Er-in (n)-er-ung. Er-: a verbal prefix meaning to initiate a process that will bring something about. In-: a preposition indicating that something inhabits or inheres or dwells inside or within an interior. This little preposition, which apparently cannot be defined without overt or covert reference to itself, as though in were itself the absolute presupposition of all preposition, is the heart of the word Erinnerung. It lies at the core of Hegel’s own etymological interpretation of remembrance. While discussing Platonic anamnesis in his lectures on the history of philosophy (19, 44), Hegel appeals to the pristine sense of Erinnerung as Sich-innerlich-machen, “to make oneself interior,” and as Insichgehen, the word that appears in the final pages of the Phenomenology, “to go into oneself.” He calls such active interiorization the “profoundly thoughtful sense of the word,” inasmuch as it locates the universality that cognition seeks within a conscious spiritual interior. Er-: now indicating the comparative form, or perhaps a pseudocomparative form, since the adjective innere has no simple form. By this reading, Er-inner(e)-ung has but three parts, and conforms to a quite general pattern, verbal-adjectival-nominal, as in Entschuldig-ung. In English too the words inner and interior are both comparative in form, meaning “more or further inward,” “situated more within.” A suggestion of ineluctable process, one that never quits the comparative for the superlative: interior, yet never utterly intimate, never innermost, so that what appears to be absolute—altogether “in”—never escapes comparison and relation with-“out.” Finally, -ung: the nominalization of the verb, naming (as one of the names of reproductive memory) the process of intensified interiorization.

The verb in question is sich erinnern an etwas: to make oneself (for the verb is reflexive) interior, more interior—

by going out to something else—

inasmuch as the preposition an takes the accusative and expresses motion toward. Although it is true that especially in the age of Goethe and Hegel the syntax of the verb is in flux, occasionally not reflexive and often taking the genitive or dative rather than the accusative, the reference to something with-“out” is constant.

On the last page of the Phenomenology (although not only there: see PG, 524), Hegel hyphenates the noun, writing it as Er-Innerung, in order to stress that all the icons in the gallery traversed by spirithis very ancient family had been noted, time out of mind, for a peculiar sensibility of temperament, displaying itself, through long ages, in many works of exalted artare now recognized as being spirit’s own productions. They portray what spirit in itself is eternally, but which it has come to know for itself only through its sojourn in time. In the project of remembrance, spirit must begin afresh and educate itself all over again, without prejudice or advantage, “as though all that had gone before were lost to it, and as though it had learned nothing from the experience of earlier spirits” (PG, 564). In the Preface (PG, 11), Hegel depicts the moment at which extraneous preoccupation with results, conclusions, and generalities ends and thinking begins not as remembrance but as a self-forgetting; like Lucinde giving herself over to Julius’ mouth and ardor, or Julius surrendering to the snowscape of Lucinde’s breasts and the tropics of Lucinde’s thighs, the phenomenologist remembers when to give, live and let live, forget: in ihr [der Sache] zu verweilen und sich in ihr zu vergessen, . . . sich ihr] hingeben].¹⁹ Yet any given avatar of spirit does possess an advantage over its predecessors: it now begins its education “at a higher level.” Remembrance preserves (aufbewahrt) as though in a mineshaft or cavern the experience of spirit’s forebears. Thus preserving, remembrance is ever the (more) interior, das Innre, “indeed the higher form of substance.” “Higher” of course means “ever deeper,” and depth is measured by the ever-expanding breadth of (exterior, though not extrinsic) experience. Spirit’s interiority perdures in the comparative form and does not beguile itself with superlatives. We would also have to write it as Erinn-Er-ung if we wanted to do justice to dialectic. Spirit never escapesHe was enchained by certain superstitious impressions in regard to the dwelling which he tenanted, and whence, for many years, he had never ventured forthfrom the gallery of images. If its existence in that gallery is not ecstatic, it is nonetheless uncanny.

The founding of that gallery is mysterious, and so is each image contained in it. Each remembered portrait, each family likeness, and each dawning recognition testify to spirit’s submersion in time, submission to what at least appears to be outside itself, and subjection to the task of remembrance. Erinn-Er-ung is itself an Entäuss-Er-ung: to go farther inside implies that spirit is farther outside; or, if the words “inside” and “outside” no longer make sense, we must at least say that spirit remains in the presence-absence of its unequal icons. It is no consolation if what spirit remembers proves to be its own handiwork, an icon from its own studio workshop. For it is precisely the newly established identity and ascription that make the quondam estrangement all the more terrifying. In the last lines of the Phenomenology of Spirit HegelHis countenance was, as usual, cadaverously wan—but, moreover, there was a species of mad hilarity in his eyes—an evidently restrained hysteria in his whole demeanor employs two words to describe the science of knowing that appears in history: Erinnerung, interiorizing remembrance, and Schädelstatte, the place, not of the workshop, but of the skull, Golgotha.

Viewed from the point of view of contingent existence, the organization of spirit’s realm is history; from the point of view of its conceptualized and actually grasped structure, such organization is the science of knowing-that-appears. History and science together constitute “the remembrance and the Golgotha of absolute spirit.” The conjunction and is crucial in both phrases. For if spirit comes to grasp itself as becoming, and if its comprehension is not abstract and bloodless, then it must remember that it has not always grasped; the goal exceeded its reach for aeons of time and for each well-preserved avatar of spirit; it was anxious and afraid and unhappy, its life was one of restlessness and turmoil; and all of this was necessary. Why?

As long as history and science remain two “sides” of the organization of spirit’s realm, dialectic is stillborn and spirit grasps nothing of its life. If in its history spirit did suffer, then as science it still does. If time and spatial extension revert to the self of spirit, then even after the translation to inner space and time spirit will be ever on the verge of remembering the when? and where? of its own experience, while the why? will continue to elude it as a kind of malady that began long ago (or even now) to seal its fateWe replaced and screwed down the lidintractably. Spirit not only is history (as science), but also has a history, and that is its destiny: in remembrance teleology and archeology coalesce.

Natural consciousness forgets straightway. Phenomenological consciousness, as absolute knowing, that is, knowing that must always begin again to compare, tries to remember. Is there some kind of exigency, breaching, resistance, primary repression, or trauma that would account for the tendency of natural consciousness to forget, a tendency that Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, as far as I can see, does not explain? If such resistance or repression be attributed to feelings of unpleasure, themselves emanating from an experience of profound anxiety, indeed, anxiety in the face of the truth, what is it in truth that has so traumatized consciousness? Perhaps Schelling seeks that primal injury when he speculates on the “will of the ground” in God’s personal nature, a ground that is in him yet different from him, the resulting bifurcation issuing in “a source of sadness,” a “veil of melancholy” that cloaks all nature and all life.²⁰ Perhaps Herman Melville is in chase of that vulnerability when in Moby-Dick he has Ahab say:

To trail the genealogies of these high mortal miseries, carries us at last among the sourceless primogenitures of the gods; so that, in the face of all the glad, haymaking suns, and soft-cymballing, round harvest-moons, we must needs give in to this: that the gods themselves are not for ever glad. The ineffaceable, sad birthmark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers. (Chap. 106)

Perhaps Heidegger—to whom we shall now turn—points to the still undisclosed trauma in spirit’s experience when he asks of Hegel near the conclusion of Being and Time (§82b): “How is spirit itself to be understood when we say that it is fitting for it to fall into . . . time?” Perhaps Jean Hyppolite points to it when he refers to Hegel’s Phenomenology as the “true Oedipus tragedy of the entire human mind.”²¹ Finally, another friend of Hegel’s student days, Holderlin, surely touches the wound when he meditates on spirit’s Golgotha, its having plunged into time, the matrix of memory and mortality:

And in the first draft of a poem called “Mnemosyne,” a name Hegel preserves in and for productive memory:

To accompany Hegelian thought to the verge itselfmy brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunderwould mean to experience the bipolar dialectic of interiority/exteriority as irreparably shattered. The in of Erinnerung would designate, not the centripetal presencing of spirit, but the series of displacements we call world. We would be forced to retreat from the gallery and its workshop to the pyramid and the pit, recognizing our situation on the verge as one of radical exposure and vulnerability. For we are never truly so much on the verge as to be in it: we do not occupy it as a vantage point. We experience it as a withdrawal and a decentering, a ceaseless slipping back, or at best as a transition without hierarchy, in that very realm where we thought dwelled the lord of the demesne, the Substance who would be Subject.

The in or innere of Erinnerung as interiorization can no longer be appropriated and “held in” by the system, can no longer be In-halt. Determinate “content” is the stepping-stone for the transition from dialectical to speculative thought, from negative to positive rationality and affirmative science in Hegel’s system (E, §82); yet precisely this Inhalt, as content or reserve, the property of thoughtful intelligence, is depleted by the incessant action of displacing Erinnerung-Entäusserung. Wherever the comparative form prevails, no capital accumulates, no stockpile looms. “Thus the dialectician is always one who ‘commences.’ “²⁴ Without appeal to the “higher level,” without the ruse of greater profundity. Even the ostensible progress from images to words, pictures to names, Erinnerung to Gedächtnis, and memory to thought, proves to be illusory: to think is to recall the images conjured by the words and tracings of the text in perpetual irruption and interruption; to think is to scan the icons and idols invoked by the language that found Hegel. Not in order to secure them in fixating recollection but to plumb—gingerly—their cavernous depths. Without lights.

Our response to the call of the blackness of darkness is not exhausted by anything we have read or written here. We are still on the verge of discovering what each of these strains of Hegel’s thought and strands of Hegel’s styleI shall ever bear about me a memory of the many solemn hours I thus spent alone with the master of the House ofdid not forget to remember.