Who's Afraid of the Dialectic?

"Dialectic." It has been a dirty word for American academia, at least where he did his PhD, our professor said.

The problematic doxa of such an recollected announcement not withstanding, our class have barely started to be aware of it. Totality, self-consummating, identity in contradiction, etc, these words associated with the dialectic have been the symptomatic refusals of academic keywords these days, especially those that vulgarly prides itself on difference, diversity and ambivalence. I say symptomatic because they produce the very refusals of reading, which think itself possible to efface a stain without irreducibly marking it from the inside. Hence the dirty word.

For the present, our instructor deemded it sufficient to define dialects as a self-generative oppositional system. What is more pertinent in the context of our class on Animality is to see if the animal can be a negative that could not be aufgehoben. What might that be? Is it still a contradiction in the Hegelian system?

And which, in sum, as negative, but without appearing as such, without presenting itself, that is, without working in the service of meaning, would work? But would work then, as pure loss? Quite simply, perhaps, and one which would function. A machine defined in its pure functioning, and not in its finaly utility, its meaning, its loss, its work. [..] What Hegel, the relevant interpreter of the entire history of philosophy, could never think is a machine that would work. That would work without, to this extent, being governed by an order of reappropriation. Such a functioning would be unthinkable in that it inscrbes within itself an effect of pure loss. It would be unthinkable as a non-thought that no thought could relever [auheben], could constitute as its proper opposite, as its other. Doubtless philosophy would see in this a nonfunctioning, a non-work and thereby philosophy would miss that which, in such a machine, works. By itself, Outside (Derrida, "The Pit and the Pyramid" 107).

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The question, "what to do with the dialectic," hence masks this fear of questions in general, as such. Of a question that would be responsible enough to its subject, but most of all, to be responsible to the otherness of its subject. We must still machinate this presentation.