Making Things International 2: Catalysts and Reactions, 2013
This entry explores the dialectic between the global and the international. It specifically focus... more This entry explores the dialectic between the global and the international. It specifically focuses on the stakes involved in making global politics into an ideal, and does this by appealing to a specific methodology: thinking from a position of shit. Engaging a thick description of the shit-disposal practice at NASA’s International Space Station (ISS) will foreground the political presuppositions, not to say impetus, of its meta-state, following from the fact that its shit is the only ‘thing’ that this new International – rallied under the flag of humanity – cannot contain. This will lead to a more theoretical meditation about the dream of unifying the inter-national, and proceed by analogizing the assumptions conditioning the physical existence and position of this international-cum-station, and those conditioning the conceptual ones of an international-cum-globe.
When ‘History’ is called to represent silence, its metaphysical position is symptomatically felt.... more When ‘History’ is called to represent silence, its metaphysical position is symptomatically felt. Tracing what Fasolt calls “the historian’s revolt”, this paper identifies the political impetus behind it as the symptom dictating Foucault’s own silences/silencings (regarding Derrida’s intervention in his History of Madness). In naming such a symptom/silence – in taking “Derrida’s position” – this paper performs its own violence/decision by, both “justifying,” and betraying, this position; by installing itself in, instead of “above,” this curious “debate”. ‘The last refuge of the scoundrel’ appears then as the reflective exteriority of a political antagonism that’s based on a metaphysical difference with regards to the legitimate “seat” of authority (in Fasolt, an antagonism between the historian and the Catholic Church). Finally, this trajectory is installed within a wider – metaphysical and historical – context, where Hegel’s famous saying, that the University is the Protestant’s Church, might yet echo that distant metaphysical decision – still looming, like a “genealogical specter,” over Academia and its Social Sciences.
The basic idea is to connect the philosophical "this is" to a political discourse. Thus I try to ... more The basic idea is to connect the philosophical "this is" to a political discourse. Thus I try to embody this gesture of identification by using the figure of the finger (that, among many other things, points), which has a context and a history, a "weight" and a threat of contamination, and also a volume that always compromises its pointing/aim (hence refusing the dimensionless "point" as a "point of departure"). The finger touches, is touched, contaminates and is contaminated, thus implicating it in its objects in an inescapable ethico-political way. It carries with it a blindness, a stupidity, that still calls for responsibility (rather than mere "reduction-to-minimum," systematic ignoring, or persecution). The finger, like stupidity, involves powers of contagion and abjection, and these are the materials with which I suggest to encounter "experience." This is an initial, not very good, attempt at what Gilles Deleuze called for when he coined the phrase "transcendental stupidity."
[modified from thesis' version - Sept 5th, 2010]
This thesis explores the notion of betrayal thro... more [modified from thesis' version - Sept 5th, 2010] This thesis explores the notion of betrayal through a sustained examination of two politically abject types – ‘the corpse/body’ and ‘the dilettante’. By expounding on what is here termed an ‘antipathology’, it performs a phenomenology of these types, not so much enclosing them as totalities - consistent concepts/essences - as taking them in their discursive-affective import, “at their word”. The argument unfolds via readings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Emmanuel Lévinas – both serving as each other’s readers and interpreters – taken to share the project of critiquing (a prdominantly Christian-Thomistic) morality. This "antipathology of treason" aims its epokhe at evoking the mechanisms of (political) ‘abjection’ – a concept borrowed from Julia Kristeva – employed in the automatic expulsion of the 'traitor' from the political as such, and the unique and specific forms that this expulsion takes. I will aim toward the ethical implications of this expulsion, insofar as this expulsion is taken here to be inscribed deep within prevalent ethico-political discourses and hermeneutic structures, part-and-parcel of their sustaining inertia. This is how the author of this thesis understands and works the Lévinasian term of 'ethical responsibility.'
Homo Perfidus: An Antipathology of the Coward’s Betrayal identifies and speaks to an ethical and ... more Homo Perfidus: An Antipathology of the Coward’s Betrayal identifies and speaks to an ethical and methodological lacuna in western metaphysics with regards to betrayal. Following Levinas’ call for an ‘Ethics as first philosophy,’ my research question is: ‘How can I think of betrayal responsibly?’ I offer to approach betrayal as an accusation, one that comports an excessive hatred towards the identified ‘traitor.’ Suspending its moral vilification, I construct a broadly phenomenological method – which I call ‘antipathology’ – that proposes to take this hatred seriously; not as the sign of a lack to be filled or purloined with shame, but of a communication to respond-to. Tracking western thought’s metaphysical engagements – mainly via Kant, Hegel and Heidegger – my antipathology witnesses an exceedingly systematic muting of this hatred. Such a principled effacement of hatred’s signs is the very mechanism by which western thought “de-problematizes” betrayal, appropriating its otherness for its own metaphysical ends. To those ends, betrayal ceases to be an event and becomes its ‘prefiguration,’ a twist on an assumed temporal and causal progression.
I focus here on the coward’s betrayal, broadly defined as secession from a principle – seen to give cohesion and legitimacy to a ‘Whole’ – of which this traitor was nevertheless an integral part until the event of her betrayal. Antipathology follows young Hegel’s ‘antisemitic’ association of the “Jewish spirit” with a principle of alienation and secession, a vain and hateful self-assertion that only “Christian spirit” can successfully negate, turning this drive for hateful dissociation to one of loving association (with progressively diminishing “remainders”). Reading modern philosophy’s treatment of the skeptic I show how her doubt can be appropriated and turned to ‘Truth’ in the same way that the Jews’ hateful and cowardly betrayal can be turned to absolute faith/love; what Hegel calls “negating the negation.” Both ‘Jew’ and ‘Skeptic’ here become antibodies in a process through which a ‘Whole’ slowly becomes immune, or insensitive to, the threat of future interruptions: outside of this process – offering no ‘Whole’ of their own – their respective interruptions are seen as expressions of vanity, of a ‘self’ that breaks-away from the bonds of belonging and love in a fit of gratuitous hatred and doubt; all in the name of a “who knows what” that for Hegel, as well as for Kant and Heidegger, amounts to precisely ‘Nothing.’
I conclude by a performative ‘antipathological’ reading of Dante’s Inferno alongside Kafka’s In the Penal Colony: while Dante, as a faithful ‘Christian’ witness to Divine Justice (Hell), desires to internalize the Truth of God, progressively renouncing the vain resistances of a ‘self’ not yet fully reconciled to God’s Being (the theological ‘Pleroma’ of the ‘Whole’), Kafka’s nameless traveler, as a skeptical ‘coward-witness,’ not only remains “unconverted” but also causes the violence that is implicit in the Dante-esque ‘progression’ to show itself. ‘Faith’ is here shown as progression from one betrayal-event to another, all of which require the believer to sacrifice another part of their resistance to the demands of the ‘Whole’ until no such resistance remains (or, at least, felt/expressed). Similarly, the Dante that begins his journey weeping for the suffering of Hell’s sinners, ends up kicking one of them in the face; deliberately, yet without hatred, as if it were a mere rock on the road.
The coward’s betrayal consists in her ‘vain witness’ to time as rupture, as event, as the opening that puts her previous beliefs and attachments in radical question. The hatred towards the coward and the accusation of ‘traitor’ mark this question as a threat to the ‘Whole;’ a mark that, approached antipathologically, can open a discourse concerning the violence (and self-violence) that was and is necessary to keep the ‘Whole,’ through a narrated causal-historical time, from breaking apart. Painful and dangerous, this approach is, nonetheless, the only way to keep a system that abolished all ‘positions to complain’ from being equated with a ‘wholly just’ system; or to keep a knowledge-machine that successfully tames all doubts from being absolved.
Nutshell:
I engage in supplying a remainder of Hegel's appropriation of Greek tragedy, as part o... more Nutshell: I engage in supplying a remainder of Hegel's appropriation of Greek tragedy, as part of a larger project that seeks to carve "a position to complain" to victims of what Lyotard called 'wrong' (tort); a crime that specifically effaces the victims legitimacy to complain about it. Cassandra's true but empty speech provides, in this sense, a glimpse into this problematic as a sovereign problem of justice and justification. The vain (Eitel) difference that Hegel loved to hate so much, the difference that remains by definition unworkable/unreal (unwirkliche), is owed an ethical responsibility, one that Hegel's Sittlichkeit and its conception(s) of 'Right' is arguably centered around its system(at)ic denial.
Making Things International 2: Catalysts and Reactions, 2013
This entry explores the dialectic between the global and the international. It specifically focus... more This entry explores the dialectic between the global and the international. It specifically focuses on the stakes involved in making global politics into an ideal, and does this by appealing to a specific methodology: thinking from a position of shit. Engaging a thick description of the shit-disposal practice at NASA’s International Space Station (ISS) will foreground the political presuppositions, not to say impetus, of its meta-state, following from the fact that its shit is the only ‘thing’ that this new International – rallied under the flag of humanity – cannot contain. This will lead to a more theoretical meditation about the dream of unifying the inter-national, and proceed by analogizing the assumptions conditioning the physical existence and position of this international-cum-station, and those conditioning the conceptual ones of an international-cum-globe.
When ‘History’ is called to represent silence, its metaphysical position is symptomatically felt.... more When ‘History’ is called to represent silence, its metaphysical position is symptomatically felt. Tracing what Fasolt calls “the historian’s revolt”, this paper identifies the political impetus behind it as the symptom dictating Foucault’s own silences/silencings (regarding Derrida’s intervention in his History of Madness). In naming such a symptom/silence – in taking “Derrida’s position” – this paper performs its own violence/decision by, both “justifying,” and betraying, this position; by installing itself in, instead of “above,” this curious “debate”. ‘The last refuge of the scoundrel’ appears then as the reflective exteriority of a political antagonism that’s based on a metaphysical difference with regards to the legitimate “seat” of authority (in Fasolt, an antagonism between the historian and the Catholic Church). Finally, this trajectory is installed within a wider – metaphysical and historical – context, where Hegel’s famous saying, that the University is the Protestant’s Church, might yet echo that distant metaphysical decision – still looming, like a “genealogical specter,” over Academia and its Social Sciences.
The basic idea is to connect the philosophical "this is" to a political discourse. Thus I try to ... more The basic idea is to connect the philosophical "this is" to a political discourse. Thus I try to embody this gesture of identification by using the figure of the finger (that, among many other things, points), which has a context and a history, a "weight" and a threat of contamination, and also a volume that always compromises its pointing/aim (hence refusing the dimensionless "point" as a "point of departure"). The finger touches, is touched, contaminates and is contaminated, thus implicating it in its objects in an inescapable ethico-political way. It carries with it a blindness, a stupidity, that still calls for responsibility (rather than mere "reduction-to-minimum," systematic ignoring, or persecution). The finger, like stupidity, involves powers of contagion and abjection, and these are the materials with which I suggest to encounter "experience." This is an initial, not very good, attempt at what Gilles Deleuze called for when he coined the phrase "transcendental stupidity."
[modified from thesis' version - Sept 5th, 2010]
This thesis explores the notion of betrayal thro... more [modified from thesis' version - Sept 5th, 2010] This thesis explores the notion of betrayal through a sustained examination of two politically abject types – ‘the corpse/body’ and ‘the dilettante’. By expounding on what is here termed an ‘antipathology’, it performs a phenomenology of these types, not so much enclosing them as totalities - consistent concepts/essences - as taking them in their discursive-affective import, “at their word”. The argument unfolds via readings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Emmanuel Lévinas – both serving as each other’s readers and interpreters – taken to share the project of critiquing (a prdominantly Christian-Thomistic) morality. This "antipathology of treason" aims its epokhe at evoking the mechanisms of (political) ‘abjection’ – a concept borrowed from Julia Kristeva – employed in the automatic expulsion of the 'traitor' from the political as such, and the unique and specific forms that this expulsion takes. I will aim toward the ethical implications of this expulsion, insofar as this expulsion is taken here to be inscribed deep within prevalent ethico-political discourses and hermeneutic structures, part-and-parcel of their sustaining inertia. This is how the author of this thesis understands and works the Lévinasian term of 'ethical responsibility.'
Homo Perfidus: An Antipathology of the Coward’s Betrayal identifies and speaks to an ethical and ... more Homo Perfidus: An Antipathology of the Coward’s Betrayal identifies and speaks to an ethical and methodological lacuna in western metaphysics with regards to betrayal. Following Levinas’ call for an ‘Ethics as first philosophy,’ my research question is: ‘How can I think of betrayal responsibly?’ I offer to approach betrayal as an accusation, one that comports an excessive hatred towards the identified ‘traitor.’ Suspending its moral vilification, I construct a broadly phenomenological method – which I call ‘antipathology’ – that proposes to take this hatred seriously; not as the sign of a lack to be filled or purloined with shame, but of a communication to respond-to. Tracking western thought’s metaphysical engagements – mainly via Kant, Hegel and Heidegger – my antipathology witnesses an exceedingly systematic muting of this hatred. Such a principled effacement of hatred’s signs is the very mechanism by which western thought “de-problematizes” betrayal, appropriating its otherness for its own metaphysical ends. To those ends, betrayal ceases to be an event and becomes its ‘prefiguration,’ a twist on an assumed temporal and causal progression.
I focus here on the coward’s betrayal, broadly defined as secession from a principle – seen to give cohesion and legitimacy to a ‘Whole’ – of which this traitor was nevertheless an integral part until the event of her betrayal. Antipathology follows young Hegel’s ‘antisemitic’ association of the “Jewish spirit” with a principle of alienation and secession, a vain and hateful self-assertion that only “Christian spirit” can successfully negate, turning this drive for hateful dissociation to one of loving association (with progressively diminishing “remainders”). Reading modern philosophy’s treatment of the skeptic I show how her doubt can be appropriated and turned to ‘Truth’ in the same way that the Jews’ hateful and cowardly betrayal can be turned to absolute faith/love; what Hegel calls “negating the negation.” Both ‘Jew’ and ‘Skeptic’ here become antibodies in a process through which a ‘Whole’ slowly becomes immune, or insensitive to, the threat of future interruptions: outside of this process – offering no ‘Whole’ of their own – their respective interruptions are seen as expressions of vanity, of a ‘self’ that breaks-away from the bonds of belonging and love in a fit of gratuitous hatred and doubt; all in the name of a “who knows what” that for Hegel, as well as for Kant and Heidegger, amounts to precisely ‘Nothing.’
I conclude by a performative ‘antipathological’ reading of Dante’s Inferno alongside Kafka’s In the Penal Colony: while Dante, as a faithful ‘Christian’ witness to Divine Justice (Hell), desires to internalize the Truth of God, progressively renouncing the vain resistances of a ‘self’ not yet fully reconciled to God’s Being (the theological ‘Pleroma’ of the ‘Whole’), Kafka’s nameless traveler, as a skeptical ‘coward-witness,’ not only remains “unconverted” but also causes the violence that is implicit in the Dante-esque ‘progression’ to show itself. ‘Faith’ is here shown as progression from one betrayal-event to another, all of which require the believer to sacrifice another part of their resistance to the demands of the ‘Whole’ until no such resistance remains (or, at least, felt/expressed). Similarly, the Dante that begins his journey weeping for the suffering of Hell’s sinners, ends up kicking one of them in the face; deliberately, yet without hatred, as if it were a mere rock on the road.
The coward’s betrayal consists in her ‘vain witness’ to time as rupture, as event, as the opening that puts her previous beliefs and attachments in radical question. The hatred towards the coward and the accusation of ‘traitor’ mark this question as a threat to the ‘Whole;’ a mark that, approached antipathologically, can open a discourse concerning the violence (and self-violence) that was and is necessary to keep the ‘Whole,’ through a narrated causal-historical time, from breaking apart. Painful and dangerous, this approach is, nonetheless, the only way to keep a system that abolished all ‘positions to complain’ from being equated with a ‘wholly just’ system; or to keep a knowledge-machine that successfully tames all doubts from being absolved.
Nutshell:
I engage in supplying a remainder of Hegel's appropriation of Greek tragedy, as part o... more Nutshell: I engage in supplying a remainder of Hegel's appropriation of Greek tragedy, as part of a larger project that seeks to carve "a position to complain" to victims of what Lyotard called 'wrong' (tort); a crime that specifically effaces the victims legitimacy to complain about it. Cassandra's true but empty speech provides, in this sense, a glimpse into this problematic as a sovereign problem of justice and justification. The vain (Eitel) difference that Hegel loved to hate so much, the difference that remains by definition unworkable/unreal (unwirkliche), is owed an ethical responsibility, one that Hegel's Sittlichkeit and its conception(s) of 'Right' is arguably centered around its system(at)ic denial.
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Papers by Sagi Cohen
This thesis explores the notion of betrayal through a sustained examination of two politically abject types – ‘the corpse/body’ and ‘the dilettante’. By expounding on what is here termed an ‘antipathology’, it performs a phenomenology of these types, not so much enclosing them as totalities - consistent concepts/essences - as taking them in their discursive-affective import, “at their word”. The argument unfolds via readings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Emmanuel Lévinas – both serving as each other’s readers and interpreters – taken to share the project of critiquing (a prdominantly Christian-Thomistic) morality. This "antipathology of treason" aims its epokhe at evoking the mechanisms of (political) ‘abjection’ – a concept borrowed from Julia Kristeva – employed in the automatic expulsion of the 'traitor' from the political as such, and the unique and specific forms that this expulsion takes. I will aim toward the ethical implications of this expulsion, insofar as this expulsion is taken here to be inscribed deep within prevalent ethico-political discourses and hermeneutic structures, part-and-parcel of their sustaining inertia. This is how the author of this thesis understands and works the Lévinasian term of 'ethical responsibility.'
Drafts by Sagi Cohen
I focus here on the coward’s betrayal, broadly defined as secession from a principle – seen to give cohesion and legitimacy to a ‘Whole’ – of which this traitor was nevertheless an integral part until the event of her betrayal. Antipathology follows young Hegel’s ‘antisemitic’ association of the “Jewish spirit” with a principle of alienation and secession, a vain and hateful self-assertion that only “Christian spirit” can successfully negate, turning this drive for hateful dissociation to one of loving association (with progressively diminishing “remainders”). Reading modern philosophy’s treatment of the skeptic I show how her doubt can be appropriated and turned to ‘Truth’ in the same way that the Jews’ hateful and cowardly betrayal can be turned to absolute faith/love; what Hegel calls “negating the negation.” Both ‘Jew’ and ‘Skeptic’ here become antibodies in a process through which a ‘Whole’ slowly becomes immune, or insensitive to, the threat of future interruptions: outside of this process – offering no ‘Whole’ of their own – their respective interruptions are seen as expressions of vanity, of a ‘self’ that breaks-away from the bonds of belonging and love in a fit of gratuitous hatred and doubt; all in the name of a “who knows what” that for Hegel, as well as for Kant and Heidegger, amounts to precisely ‘Nothing.’
I conclude by a performative ‘antipathological’ reading of Dante’s Inferno alongside Kafka’s In the Penal Colony: while Dante, as a faithful ‘Christian’ witness to Divine Justice (Hell), desires to internalize the Truth of God, progressively renouncing the vain resistances of a ‘self’ not yet fully reconciled to God’s Being (the theological ‘Pleroma’ of the ‘Whole’), Kafka’s nameless traveler, as a skeptical ‘coward-witness,’ not only remains “unconverted” but also causes the violence that is implicit in the Dante-esque ‘progression’ to show itself. ‘Faith’ is here shown as progression from one betrayal-event to another, all of which require the believer to sacrifice another part of their resistance to the demands of the ‘Whole’ until no such resistance remains (or, at least, felt/expressed). Similarly, the Dante that begins his journey weeping for the suffering of Hell’s sinners, ends up kicking one of them in the face; deliberately, yet without hatred, as if it were a mere rock on the road.
The coward’s betrayal consists in her ‘vain witness’ to time as rupture, as event, as the opening that puts her previous beliefs and attachments in radical question. The hatred towards the coward and the accusation of ‘traitor’ mark this question as a threat to the ‘Whole;’ a mark that, approached antipathologically, can open a discourse concerning the violence (and self-violence) that was and is necessary to keep the ‘Whole,’ through a narrated causal-historical time, from breaking apart. Painful and dangerous, this approach is, nonetheless, the only way to keep a system that abolished all ‘positions to complain’ from being equated with a ‘wholly just’ system; or to keep a knowledge-machine that successfully tames all doubts from being absolved.
I engage in supplying a remainder of Hegel's appropriation of Greek tragedy, as part of a larger project that seeks to carve "a position to complain" to victims of what Lyotard called 'wrong' (tort); a crime that specifically effaces the victims legitimacy to complain about it. Cassandra's true but empty speech provides, in this sense, a glimpse into this problematic as a sovereign problem of justice and justification. The vain (Eitel) difference that Hegel loved to hate so much, the difference that remains by definition unworkable/unreal (unwirkliche), is owed an ethical responsibility, one that Hegel's Sittlichkeit and its conception(s) of 'Right' is arguably centered around its system(at)ic denial.
This thesis explores the notion of betrayal through a sustained examination of two politically abject types – ‘the corpse/body’ and ‘the dilettante’. By expounding on what is here termed an ‘antipathology’, it performs a phenomenology of these types, not so much enclosing them as totalities - consistent concepts/essences - as taking them in their discursive-affective import, “at their word”. The argument unfolds via readings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Emmanuel Lévinas – both serving as each other’s readers and interpreters – taken to share the project of critiquing (a prdominantly Christian-Thomistic) morality. This "antipathology of treason" aims its epokhe at evoking the mechanisms of (political) ‘abjection’ – a concept borrowed from Julia Kristeva – employed in the automatic expulsion of the 'traitor' from the political as such, and the unique and specific forms that this expulsion takes. I will aim toward the ethical implications of this expulsion, insofar as this expulsion is taken here to be inscribed deep within prevalent ethico-political discourses and hermeneutic structures, part-and-parcel of their sustaining inertia. This is how the author of this thesis understands and works the Lévinasian term of 'ethical responsibility.'
I focus here on the coward’s betrayal, broadly defined as secession from a principle – seen to give cohesion and legitimacy to a ‘Whole’ – of which this traitor was nevertheless an integral part until the event of her betrayal. Antipathology follows young Hegel’s ‘antisemitic’ association of the “Jewish spirit” with a principle of alienation and secession, a vain and hateful self-assertion that only “Christian spirit” can successfully negate, turning this drive for hateful dissociation to one of loving association (with progressively diminishing “remainders”). Reading modern philosophy’s treatment of the skeptic I show how her doubt can be appropriated and turned to ‘Truth’ in the same way that the Jews’ hateful and cowardly betrayal can be turned to absolute faith/love; what Hegel calls “negating the negation.” Both ‘Jew’ and ‘Skeptic’ here become antibodies in a process through which a ‘Whole’ slowly becomes immune, or insensitive to, the threat of future interruptions: outside of this process – offering no ‘Whole’ of their own – their respective interruptions are seen as expressions of vanity, of a ‘self’ that breaks-away from the bonds of belonging and love in a fit of gratuitous hatred and doubt; all in the name of a “who knows what” that for Hegel, as well as for Kant and Heidegger, amounts to precisely ‘Nothing.’
I conclude by a performative ‘antipathological’ reading of Dante’s Inferno alongside Kafka’s In the Penal Colony: while Dante, as a faithful ‘Christian’ witness to Divine Justice (Hell), desires to internalize the Truth of God, progressively renouncing the vain resistances of a ‘self’ not yet fully reconciled to God’s Being (the theological ‘Pleroma’ of the ‘Whole’), Kafka’s nameless traveler, as a skeptical ‘coward-witness,’ not only remains “unconverted” but also causes the violence that is implicit in the Dante-esque ‘progression’ to show itself. ‘Faith’ is here shown as progression from one betrayal-event to another, all of which require the believer to sacrifice another part of their resistance to the demands of the ‘Whole’ until no such resistance remains (or, at least, felt/expressed). Similarly, the Dante that begins his journey weeping for the suffering of Hell’s sinners, ends up kicking one of them in the face; deliberately, yet without hatred, as if it were a mere rock on the road.
The coward’s betrayal consists in her ‘vain witness’ to time as rupture, as event, as the opening that puts her previous beliefs and attachments in radical question. The hatred towards the coward and the accusation of ‘traitor’ mark this question as a threat to the ‘Whole;’ a mark that, approached antipathologically, can open a discourse concerning the violence (and self-violence) that was and is necessary to keep the ‘Whole,’ through a narrated causal-historical time, from breaking apart. Painful and dangerous, this approach is, nonetheless, the only way to keep a system that abolished all ‘positions to complain’ from being equated with a ‘wholly just’ system; or to keep a knowledge-machine that successfully tames all doubts from being absolved.
I engage in supplying a remainder of Hegel's appropriation of Greek tragedy, as part of a larger project that seeks to carve "a position to complain" to victims of what Lyotard called 'wrong' (tort); a crime that specifically effaces the victims legitimacy to complain about it. Cassandra's true but empty speech provides, in this sense, a glimpse into this problematic as a sovereign problem of justice and justification. The vain (Eitel) difference that Hegel loved to hate so much, the difference that remains by definition unworkable/unreal (unwirkliche), is owed an ethical responsibility, one that Hegel's Sittlichkeit and its conception(s) of 'Right' is arguably centered around its system(at)ic denial.