Readings that efface subjectivity to reach universality are actually particular and arbitrary

Evidence

However, don’t we always claim that, in principle, the validity of an interpretation relies on the effacement of all subjectivity? Hegel’s great originality is that he shows exactly how an interpretation that aims at nothing more than universality, that disallows any role for the singularity of the exegete, an interpretation, indeed, that refuses to be plastic, in the sense of both ‘universal and individual’, would be in reality particular and arbitrary. Isn’t the ‘knowing I’ fundamentally and paradoxically an ‘I’ that effaces itself? We have seen that, in order to understand the proposition, the reader must first put to work the attribution expressed in it: hence, the reader will be identified with the subject of the statement, and his or her own difference will be effaced. Nonetheless, such a reading, even though envisaged as a model of exemplary ‘fidelity to the text’, is absolutely nonphilosophical, and remains confined, as Hegel says, in ‘ratiocination’. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 1230

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The reversal that objectivity-as-effacement is secretly the most arbitrary stance — and the paradox of a knowing I that effaces itself as the very condition of its knowing — is a genuinely paradigm-shifting move about what fidelity to a text means.
• XREF: Resonates with Gadamer’s rehabilitation of prejudice in hermeneutics and with the critique of ‘view from nowhere’ objectivity in contemporary epistemology. — connects to: Abstract universalism fails because every human being is uniquely situated — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 51; Theoretical universalizations can recuperate difference into old Enlightenment universalist frameworks — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 409; Inclusive universal claims arise from within the particular (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Theoretical universalizations can recuperate difference into old Enlightenment universalist frameworks #corroborates (0.82) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 409
• Inclusive universal claims arise from within the particular #corroborates (0.80)
• Aphorisms dwell within the subject that systematic philosophy abandons #corroborates (0.78)