OSYĀN
In our historical moment, the life of Spirit appears as divided against itself, such that its unity is given only in the form of opposition.
Once there was a society that tried by innumerable and endlessly repeated means to annihilate the most lively of its children. Those children survived. They want the death of this society. They are free of hatred.
—Tiqqun
In our historical moment, the life of Spirit appears as divided against itself, such that its unity is given only in the form of opposition. This opposition first presents itself as the domination of universality in the form of exchange, wherein the relation between subject and object is mediated through an abstract equivalence that reduces concrete desire to its commensurable expression; yet this same movement also manifests as the compulsion toward a false unity, in which difference is suppressed and the negativity immanent to Spirit is foreclosed rather than comprehended.
Religion, in this configuration, expresses the attempt of finite consciousness to reconcile itself with its own limitation, but does so only in the form of representation. The Absolute is thus posited as an external power (God), before which consciousness remains subordinated, and in which its own activity appears as alien to itself. In this way, what is in truth the self-movement of Spirit is misconstrued as a fixed beyond, and the contradictions of the present are sustained rather than resolved. It is nevertheless through this very drive toward absolute closure that thought encounters its own limit, and in this encounter the attempt to abolish negation reveals itself as itself a moment of negation. For negation, when carried to its extreme, returns as determinate negation, the inner movement by which Spirit comes to itself; what appears at first as the exclusion of all difference thus proves to be the positing of difference within itself, and this doubling is not an external contradiction but the immanent life of the Concept. Accordingly, the abstract One, which traditional theology posits as the highest and most simple essence beyond all mediation, cannot remain in this immediacy. Precisely insofar as it is immediate, it is indeterminate, and as indeterminate it is indistinguishable from absolute nothing. Its truth therefore lies not in its supposed purity, but in its passage into negativity and its return from that negativity as mediated unity. In this way, the assertion of the One as fixed and self-identical gives way to its own dissolution, a sublation in which the One is necessarily both negated and preserved within the self-developing movement of Spirit. Theology, insofar as it holds fast to the representation of an abstract, unmoved essence, remains at the level of picture-thinking and thus fails to grasp the speculative truth: that the Absolute, rather than an inert beyond, is this very process of mediation in which thought and being are reconciled.
This same representational mode attains its most stubborn, historically developed, and fully actualized form in the lethal synthesis of globalized Capital and phallocratic power. Here it appears as the obscure subject of violent Islamism. Stripped bare of every fidelity to the truth of the event, it can confront the emancipatory rupture with nothing but the brute, undialectical immediacy of force and destruction, a sheer negativity that recoils in absolute terror from the labor of the negative and from every mediating movement through which Spirit would truly return to itself. At its innermost core Radical Islamism holds neither genuine polemic nor any self-conscious confrontation of opposites in which the Concept might recognize its own contradiction, tarry with it, and advance through its sublation. There is only terror raised to the dignity of sacred law, sacralized so as to annihilate in advance any universal address capable of traversing the sealed frontiers of communitarian particularity and thereby forcing the concrete universality of reason back into the abstract and rigid enclosure of the finite. A girl’s uncovered hair is thereby declared fitna; beauty and thought themselves must suffer absolute interdiction the instant they threaten to disturb the unmediated positivity in which alienated finite consciousness barricades itself against its own limit. In this way, the obscure subject attains to its most compact and determinate form, binding appearance itself immediately to the imminent law of interdiction, so that no figure of beauty or thought may circulate freely beyond the fixed boundary of sanctioned sense. The uncovered hair, the open gesture, and the living body in motion thereby become dangerous precisely because they bear witness to a possible declaration that remains indifferent to the debt which finitude ceaselessly demands.
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