Slavoj Žižek
Hegel on
Marriage
αποσπάσματα από άρθρο
Author: Slavoj
Žižek
The
limitation of Hegel’s notion of sexuality is clearly discernible in his theory
of marriage (from his Philosophy of Right), which nonetheless deserves a
close reading: beneath the surface of the standard bourgeois notion of marriage
lurk many unsettling implications. While a subject enters marriage
voluntarily, surrendering his/her autonomy by immersing him/herself into its
immediate/substantial unity of family that functions with regard to its outside
as one person, the function of family is the exact opposite of such a
substantial unity: to educate those born in it to abandon (their parental)
family and pursue their path alone. The first lesson of marriage is that that
the ultimate goal of every substantial ethical unity is to dissolve itself by
way of giving rise to individuals who will assert their full autonomy against
the substantial unity that gave birth to them.
This
surrender of autonomous individuality is the reason Hegel opposes those (Kant,
among others) who insist on the contractual nature of marriage: “Though
marriage begins in contract, it is precisely a contract to transcend the
standpoint of contract, the standpoint from which persons are regarded in their
individuality as self-subsistent units. The identification of personalities,
whereby the family becomes one person and its members become its accidents
(though substance is in essence the relation of accidents to itself), is the
ethical mind.” It is clear in what sense, for Hegel, marriage is “a contract to
transcend the standpoint of contract”: contract is a deal between two or more
autonomous individuals, each of whom retains their abstract freedom (as is the
case in exchange of commodities), while marriage is a weird contract by means
of which the two concerned parties oblige themselves precisely to
abandon/surrender their abstract freedom and autonomy and to subordinate it to
a higher organic ethical unity.
Hegel’s
theory of marriage is formulated against two opponents. His rejection of the
contract theory of marriage is linked to his critique of the Romantic notion of
marriage, which conceives as its core the passionate love attachment of the
couple, so that the form of marriage is at its best merely the external
registration of this attachment and at its worst an obstacle to true love. We
can see how these two notions supplement each other: if the true core of
marriage is the passionate inner love, then, of course, marriage itself is
nothing but an external contract. For Hegel, on the contrary, the external
ceremony is precisely not merely external. In it resides the very ethical core
of marriage:
“ It is in the actual conclusion of a
marriage, i.e. in the wedding, that the essence of the tie is expressed and
established beyond dispute as something ethical, raised above the contingency
of feeling and private inclination. If this ceremony is taken as an external
formality, a mere so-called “civil requirement,” it is thereby stripped of all
significance except perhaps that of serving the purpose of edification and
attesting the civil relation of the parties …
As such it appears as something not merely indifferent to the true
nature of marriage, but actually alien to it. The heart is constrained by the
law to attach a value to the formal ceremony and the latter is looked upon
merely as a condition which must precede the complete mutual surrender of the
parties to one another. As such it appears to bring disunion into their loving
disposition and, like an alien intruder, to thwart the inwardness of their
union. Such a doctrine pretentiously claims to afford the highest conception of
the freedom, inwardness, and perfection of love; but in fact it is a travesty
of the ethical aspect of love, the higher aspect which restrains purely sensual
impulse and puts it in the background … In particular, the view just criticized
casts aside marriage’s specifically ethical character, which consists in this,
that the consciousness of the parties is crystallized out of its physical and
subjective mode and lifted to the thought of what is substantive; instead of
continually reserving to itself the contingency and caprice of bodily desire,
it removes the marriage bond from
the province of this caprice, surrenders to the substantive. ”
Along these
lines, Hegel rejects the Romantic view of Schlegel and his friends that “the
wedding ceremony is superfluous and a formality which might be discarded. Their
reason is that love is, so they say, the substance of marriage and that the
celebration therefore detracts from its worth. Surrender to sensual impulse is
here represented as necessary to prove the freedom and inwardness of love—an
argument not unknown to seducers.” What the Romantic view misses is thus that
marriage is “ethico-legal (rechtlich sittliche) love, and this eliminates from
marriage the transient, fickle, and purely subjective aspects of love.” The
paradox here is that, in marriage, “the natural sexual union—a union purely
inward or implicit and for that very reason existent as purely external—is
changed into a union on the level of mind, into self-conscious love.” The
spiritualization of the natural link is thus not simply its internalization; it
rather occurs in the guise of its opposite, of the externalization in a
symbolic ceremony:
“ The solemn declaration by the
parties of their consent to enter the ethical bond of marriage, and its
corresponding recognition and confirmation by their family and community,
constitutes the formal completion and actuality of marriage. The knot is tied
and made ethical only after this ceremony, whereby through the use of signs,
i.e. of language (the most mental embodiment of mind), the substantial thing in
the marriage is brought completely into being. ”
What Hegel
does here is bring forward the “performative” function of the marriage
ceremony. Even if this ceremony appears to the love partners as a mere
bureaucratic formalism, it enacts the inscription of the sexual link into the
big Other, the inscription which radically changes the subjective position of
the concerned parties. This explains the well-known fact that married people
are more attached to their spouses than it may appear (to themselves also). A
man may have secret affairs, may be dreaming about leaving his wife, but
anxiety prevents him from doing this when a chance presents itself—in short, we
are ready to cheat on our spouses on condition that the big Other doesn’t know
it (register it). The last quoted sentence is very precise here: “The knot is
tied and made ethical only after this ceremony, whereby through the use of
signs, i.e. of language (the most mental embodiment of mind), the substantial
thing in the marriage is brought completely into being.” The passage from a
natural link to spiritual self-consciousness has nothing to do with “inner
awareness” and all with the external “bureaucratic” registration, a ritual
whose true scope can be unknown to its participants, who may think they are
just performing an external formality.
The key
feature of marriage is not sexual attachment, but “the free consent of the
persons … to make themselves one person, to renounce their natural and
individual personality to this unity of one with the other. From this point of
view, their union is a self-restriction, but in fact it is their liberation,
because in it they attain their substantive self-consciousness.” In short, true
freedom is liberation from pathological attachments to particular objects
determined by caprice and contingency. But Hegel goes all the way to the end
here, i.e., to the dialectical reversal of necessity into contingency. To
overcome contingency does not mean to arrange marriage based on careful
examination of the future partner’s mental and physical qualities (like in Plato);
it is rather that, in marriage, the partner is contingent,
and this contingency should be assumed as necessary. So when Hegel deals with
the two extremes of prearranged marriages and marriages out of attraction and
love, he ethically prefers the first one. At one extreme,
“ the marriage is arranged by the
contrivance of benevolent parents; the appointed end of the parties is a union
of mutual love, their inclination to marry arises from the fact that each grows
acquainted with the other from the first as a destined partner. At the other
extreme, it is the inclination of the parties which comes first, appearing in
them as these two infinitely particularized individuals.
The more ethical way to matrimony may be taken to be the former extreme or any
way at all whereby the decision to marry comes first and the inclination to do
so follows, so that in the actual wedding both decision and inclination
coalesce. ”
The beginning
of the last sentence is worth rereading: “The more ethical way to matrimony may
be taken to be the former extreme or any way at all whereby the decision to
marry comes first and the inclination to do so follows”—in other words, the
pre-arranged marriage is more ethical not because the benevolent elder
relatives see further than the young and are in a better position than the
young, blinded by their passions, to judge if the young couple has the
qualities needed to make their shared life happy; what makes it more ethical is
that, in this case, the contingency of the partner is directly and openly
assumed. I am simply informed that it is expected from me to freely choose as a
life-long partner an unknown person imposed on me by others. This freedom to
choose what is necessary is more spiritual because the physical love and
emotional tie come as secondary. They follow the abyssal decision to marry. Two
consequences follow from this paradox: not only is the surrender of abstract
freedom in marriage a double surrender (I not only surrender my abstract
freedom by accepting to immerse myself in the family unity; this surrender of
abstract freedom itself is only formally free, since the partner to whom I
surrender my abstract freedom is de facto chosen by others); furthermore, the
surrender of my abstract freedom is not the only surrender implied by the act
of marriage—let us read carefully the following passage:
“ The distinction between marriage
and concubinage is that the latter is chiefly a matter of satisfying natural
desire, while this satisfaction is made secondary in the former …
The ethical aspect of marriage consists in
the parties’ consciousness of this unity as their substantive aim, and so in
their love, trust, and common sharing of their entire existence as individuals.
When the parties are in this frame of mind and their union is actual, their
physical passion sinks to the level of a physical moment, destined to vanish in
its very satisfaction. On the other hand, the spiritual bond of union secures
its rights as the substance of marriage and thus rises, inherently indissoluble,
to a plane above the contingency of passion and the transience of particular
caprice. ”
So what do we
surrender in marriage? Insofar as, in marriage, the pathological
attraction and lust are sublated into a symbolic link and thus subordinated to
spirit, the consequence is a kind of de-sublimation of the partner: the implicit
presupposition (or, rather, injunction) of the standard ideology of marriage is
that, precisely, there should be no love in it. The true Pascalean formula of
marriage is therefore not: “You don’t love your partner? Then marry him or her,
go through the ritual of shared life, and love will emerge by itself!” On the
contrary, it is: “Are you too much in love with somebody? Then get married,
ritualize your love relationship in order to cure yourself of the excessive
passionate attachment, to replace it with the boring daily custom—and if you
cannot resist the passion’s temptation, there are extramarital affairs …” In
other words, what is sacrificed in marriage is the object.
[ εδώ: μερική αναπαραγωγή του άρθρου του Slavoj Zizek “Hegel on Marriage”
πηγή: ιστότοπος e-flux journal ]
πηγή:
Hegel on Marriage - Journal #34
Λόγος Έμφρων
[ ανάρτηση 1 Δεκεμβρίου 2023 :
Slavoj Zizek
“
Hegel on Marriage
”
αποσπάσματα από άρθρο
δημοσίευση: e-flux journal ]