We will never be finished with the reading or rereading of Hegel, and, in a certain way, I do nothing other than attempt to explain myself on this point.
     --Jacques Derrida

 

     There will, apparently, be no end to Hegel.  It is ironic and fitting that the philosopher who thought through so carefully the problems of historical culmination, transformation, and closure should himself become the primary index of an epoch in thinking that refuses to come to closure.  Whether one argues for modernity as an uncompleted project or against modernity as having already collapsed into postmodernism, Hegel seems to be an implicit and explicit battlefield on which the possibility of the closure of modernity is fought out.  Indeed, those who would argue that postmodernism is the final renunciation of all that is Hegelian, do agree nonetheless that Hegel defines that modernity which is to be overcome.  Accordingly, Hegel is seen as the architect of the dream of an absolute metanarrative of the historical unfolding of an always unitary reason.  In all the clamor to proclaim postmodernity, however, one cannot avoid the suspicion that the simplification of Hegel it entails is a necessary and enabling misreading.  It is a misreading necessitated, moreover, by the fact that all that postmodernism proclaims has been carefully mapped out by Hegel.   For Hegel is not only the philosopher of the unity of reason.  He is also the thinker of difference, pluralism, relativism, and contingency.  Thus to simply embrace these topics as if they in themselves would guarantee the closure of modernity and the end of Hegel is a gesture of naive optimism.   One cannot help recalling the often-cited yet seldom-heeded suspicion Michel Foucault voiced in a speech he delivered, interestingly enough, when he assumed Jean Hyppolite's chair at the Collège de France:

But to truly escape Hegel involves an exact appreciation of the price we have to pay to detach ourselves from him.  It assumes that we are aware of the extent to which Hegel, insidiously perhaps, is close to us; it implies a knowledge, in that which permits us to think against Hegel, of that which remains Hegelian.  We have to determine the extent to which our anti-Hegelianism is possibly one of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us.1

The "metanarratives" I was concerned with in The Postmodern Condition are those that have marked modernity: the progressive emancipation of reason and freedom, the progressive or catastrophic emancipation of labor (source of alienated value in capitalism), the enrichment of all humanity through the progress of capitalist technoscience, and even--if we include Christianity itself in modernity (in opposition to the classicism of antiquity)--the salvation of creatures through the conversion of souls to the Christian narrative of martyred love.  Hegel's philosophy totalizes all of these narratives and, in this sense, is itself a distillation of speculative modernity.2

Philosophy must restore unity to learning, which has been scattered into separate sciences in laboratories and in pre-university education; it can only achieve this in a language game that links the sciences together as moments in the becoming of spirit, in other words, which link them in a rational narration, or rather meta-narrative.  Hegel's Encyclopedia (1817-27) attempts to realize this project of totalization . . . ."3

It [the speculative apparatus] shows that knowledge is only worthy of that name to the extent that it reduplicates itself ("lifts itself up," hebt sich auf; is sublated) by citing its own statements in a second-level discourse (autonomy) that functions to legitimate them.  This is as much to say that, in its immediacy, denotative discourse bearing on a certain referent . . . does not really know what it thinks it knows.4

     To fully appreciate the significance of Derrida's work on Hegel it is necessary to indulge in some intellectual history.  This is because a volume such as this one is necessarily an undertaking in mediation.  Given that the relation of Derrida and deconstruction to the work of Hegel is being presented here to an Anglo-American audience, it is not too amiss to suggest that what is being broached here borders on a mise en abîme of theory.  Several languages, several histories, and several traditions are being traversed here.  To begin with, it must be admitted that the status of Hegel in Anglo-American philosophy remains tenuous.  The attention granted Hegel often assumes what Russell proclaimed about Hegel: "Even if (as I myself believe) almost all Hegel's doctrine's are false, he still retains an importance which is not merely historical, as the best representative of a certain kind of philosophy which, in others, is less coherent and less comprehensive."6   The assumption clearly is that, much as in pathological studies, extreme cases are required to understand a disease.   Prominent philosophers such as Karl Popper added to this blame for both fascism and communism.7   Thus, while it can admittedly boast of producing some of the finest Hegel scholars in the world, Anglo-American philosophy as a whole remains suspicious of Hegel.8   Indeed, it would probably be fair to suggest that the conceptual tools, if not the very vocabulary, necessary to understand and grapple with Hegel are simply not present within analytic philosophy.9   Hegel, in fact, seems more like the very embodiment of everything that ordinary language philosophy--a school whose influence within the analytic tradition is perhaps greater than suspected--sought to dispel and dismantle.10
     Joseph Findlay, one of the important philosophers to work towards an acceptance of Hegel in the Anglo-American tradition, underscores his precarious status in a speech of 1959:

I wish this evening to defend the proposition that Hegel is an extremely important philosopher, well deserving the closest of contemporary study, and not at all belonging to what some have called the "paleontology" of philosophical thought. To defend this proposition in the present climate of opinion still requires a certain expenditure of energy and personal authority, though much less than it did a little while ago . . . .  In Anglo-Saxon countries a Hegel-renaissance has been made more difficult by the comparative  recency of a period in which Hegel's prestige was immense, though his doctrine and method were very imperfectly understood.11

My knowledge of the table as a physical object . . .  is not direct knowledge.  Such as it is, it is obtained through acquaintance with the sense-data that make up the appearance of the table.  We have seen that it is possible, without absurdity, to doubt whether there is a table at all, whereas it is not possible to doubt the sense data.  My knowledge of the table is of the kind which we call "knowledge by description."  The table is "the physical object which causes such-and-such sense-data."  This describes the table by means of sense-data.  In order to know anything at all about the table, we must know truth connecting it with things with which we have acquaintance: we must know that "such-and-such sense data are caused by a physical object."  There is no state of mind in which we are directly aware of the table; all our knowledge of the table is really knowledge of truths, and the actual thing which is the table is not, strictly speaking, known to us at all.  We know a description, and we know that there is just one object to which this description applies, though the object itself is not directly known to us.  In such a case, we say that our knowledge of the object is knowledge by description.17

Hegel left Kant's ideal of philosophy-as-science in shambles, but he did, as I have said, create a new literary genre, a genre which exhibited the relativity of significance to choice of vocabulary, the bewildering variety of vocabularies from which we can choose, and the intrinsic instability of each.  Hegel made unforgettably clear the deep self-certainty given by each achievement of a vocabulary, each new genre, each new style, each new dialectical synthesis--the sense that now, at last, for the first time, we have grasped things as they truly are.  He also made unforgettably clear why such certainty lasts but a moment.  He showed how the passion which sweeps through each generation serves the cunning of reason, providing the impulse which drives that generation to self-immolation and transformation.  He writes in that tone of belatedness and irony which is characteristic of the literary culture of the present day.26

     The story of the French reception of Hegel has been told often, yet in this context it warrants some consideration.27   French  interest in Hegel was a sudden and relatively recent event.  Up until the 1930s little serious work on Hegel had been done in France.  This was due to some extent to the lack of translations of Hegelian texts.  Yet, as many critics have noted, there was a whole complex of reasons why Hegel was simply not up for discussion.  At the most simple level was the antipathy for all things German.  As Alexandre Koyré noted: "The war, among other disastrous results, led to a violent reaction against German thought, German art, and German civilization in general."   Georges Canguilhem pointed out, moreover, that this antipathy also focused explicitly on Hegel: "Almost everyone saw in Hegel the spiritual father of Germanism and Pangermanism.  All of the German thinkers, from Hegel onwards, were victims of a nationalist prejudice, born of circumstances--which one could hold Hegel responsible for--such as the war of 1870 and the victory of Prussia."   In addition to these reasons, academic French philosophy was dominated by a Cartesian rationalism whose concerns focused on Kant and the philosophy of mathematics.  It thus could not find much use for a philosopher who was perceived to equate logic with temporal existence.
     What little work that was done on Hegel was done at the fringes of the academy.  Jean Wahl published in 1929 what was later to be seen as an important study--Le malheur de la conscience dans le philosophie de Hegel.  Yet at the time its was an isolated work seemingly unrelated to the philosophical concerns of the times.  Academic philosophy in France seemed to be pursuing what Mikel Dufrenne termed a "conspiracy of silence" with regard to Hegel.   The other significant critic working on Hegel at this time was Alexandre Koyré.   While Koyré did not produce an extended study of Hegel,  he prepared the way for a reception of Hegel through careful articles that contained generous translated excerpts of Hegel.  Yet the status of Hegelian studies in France remained such that Koyré could report with some evident embarrassment in 1930 at the first Hegel Congress: "I am somewhat afraid that, after the reports of my German, English, and Italian colleagues, which are so rich in facts and names, my report on the state of Hegelian studies in France will seem very meager and poor to you by comparison."   Very soon after this--as Koyré himself admits in a postscript to the published version of this lecture--the status of Hegel changed dramatically.  The first immediate sign was the flurry of translations that began to appear.  Gibelin's Leçons sur la Philosophie de l'Histoire appeared in 1937; Lefèbvre's Morceaux choisis appeared in 1939; Hyppolite's Phénoménologie appeared in 1939 and 1941; Kann's Principes de la Philosophie du droit appeared in 1940; and Jankélévitch's Esthétique appeared in 1944.  Many more translations followed after the war.  What is remarkable (and this is substantiated by the critical commentary that soon follows the translations) is that Hegel was no longer associated with the reactionary and militaristic political developments in Germany.   On the contrary, Hegel was seen to speak directly to the political situation of France.  Work on Hegel flourished despite--or, perhaps more accurately, precisely because of--the war.  As Mikel Dufrenne suggested, "by means of a phenomenon that was quite Hegelian, Hegel has been acknowledged by us under the instigation of concrete history and in the context of political events . . . .  [H]istory presses upon us from all sides and we interrogate Hegel."   Hyppolite phrased it even more pointedly: "after the last war (during which we experienced invasion, defeat, resistance) French thought, and, of course, philosophical thought, has not ceased refining its position on the historical situation of man."   By the end of the war, then, the stage was set for a full-fledged Hegel renaissance.  Indeed, by 1948 already Georges Canguilhem could report: "Contemporary philosophical thought is dominated by Hegelianism."   The transformation of the status of Hegel in French thought--and thus by extension French thought itself--was all in all relatively sudden and sweeping.
     While Wahl and Koyré laid the groundwork for a reassessment, the remarkable turn around in the fortunes of Hegel was due above all else to the work of Alexandre Kojève and Jean Hyppolite.   Before their intervention, interest in Hegel was sporadic and remained at the fringes of intellectual debate.  Hyppolite produced the first French translation of Hegel's Phenomenology.  And in 1947 he published his magisterial exegesis of the Phenomenology, Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology.  Eschewing slogans, Hyppolite brought scholarly patience to the study of Hegel.  He resisted the seemingly universal temptation to produce a strong reading of Hegel that would bring him into line with another philosophical tradition.  Hyppolite sought instead to carefully outline and explicate the intricacies of this notoriously torturous book.  Indeed, he was so faithful to the text that one early reviewer, Henri Niel, complained that it was impossible to determine what Hyppolite's own ideas were.   The mere fact that Hyppolite was focusing on the Phenomenology, however, played into the reading of Hegel offered by Kojève.  For this reason, one suspects, Hyppolite turned later to Hegel's Logic and the question of the Absolute in Logique et existence.  He turned, in other words, to an aspect of Hegel pointedly ignored by Kojève.  The effect of this was to position man and the issue of self-consciousness as a moment in the unfolding of the Absolute.  The merit of Hyppolite's work, and the source of its subtle and long-lasting impact, was the insistence on understanding the interconnectedness of Hegel's work.  He made it more difficult to arbitrarily pick and choose elements in Hegel that seemed appealing.  Thus while Kojève clearly had a greater immediate impact, Hyppolite taught French scholars to read Hegel with patience and to seek to understand Hegel in his full complexity.  One can see this patience and rigor in two scholars he did in fact teach, Foucault and Derrida.
     All in all, however, it was undeniably Kojève who defined the French reception of Hegel.   At the invitation of Koyré, Kojève delivered lectures on Hegel from 1933 to 1939 at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes.  Since Koyré had focused for the most part on the early Hegel, particularly the recently published writings on Christianity, Kojève, logically enough, picked up the story by addressing the Phenomenology.  Kojève's lectures soon attracted attention because they were not only patient and brilliant explications of a central philosophical text that had remained inaccessible to the French but also an ongoing meditation on the philosophical and political situation of the early twentieth century.  As a result, Kojève soon attracted a remarkable audience that included Bataille, Lacan, Aron, Queneau, Merleau-Ponty, Weil, and Levinas.   In an appropriately Hegelian fashion the notes from these lectures were eventually published by Queneau in 1947 as Introduction à la lecture de Hegel.
     In these lectures Kojève presented a willfully strong reading of Hegel.  Perhaps the most controversial aspect to Kojève's interpretation was his insistence on an anthropological foundation to Hegel's thought.  Dismissing issues of theology, indeed, of ontology itself, Kojève focused on the notions of self-consciousness and history.  Kojéve paid little heed to what was clearly a central tenet of the Phenomenology--that it is the Absolute that articulates itself, as subject, through nature and human history.  For Kojève, Hegel's philosophy is fundamentally a theory of the historical evolution of consciousness.
     The center piece of Kojève's reading is the master/slave dialectic.  Given the impact this aspect in particular had, it is necessary to consider it briefly.  Indeed, far more people associate the mere notion of the master/slave dialectic with Kojève (if not simply Hegel) than actually understand its significance for Kojève's reading.  As stated, the constant assumption of Kojève is that Hegel's philosophy is an anthropology.  Accordingly, Kojève seeks to establish how Hegel defines humans as beings that develop through time.  Kojève argues that, for Hegel, the essential characteristic that guides the development of humans is desire: "The very being of man, the self-conscious being, therefore, implies and presupposes Desire" (4).
     The difficulty with desire is that it does not strictly define man per se.  For desire does not distinguish humans from other living beings.  This is most evident in the desire for food.  This desire is negating and leads to the destruction and ingestion of the object.  This desire and action remains primitive according to Kojève because it will never lead to self-consciousness:

The I created by the active satisfaction of such a Desire will have the same nature as the things toward which that Desire is directed: it will be a "thingish" I, a merely living I, an animal I.  (4)

Such a Desire can only be a human Desire, and human reality, as distinguished from animal reality, is created only by action that satisfies such Desires: human history is the history of desired Desires. (6)

He must give up his desire and satisfy the desire of the other: he must "recognize" the other without being "recognized" by him.  Now, to "recognize" him thus is "to recognize" him as his Master and to recognize himself and to be recognized as the Master's Slave.  (8)

this power that thought has to separate and recombine things is in effect "absolute," because no real force of connection or repulsion is sufficiently powerful to oppose it.  And that power is not at all fictitious or "ideal."  For it is in separating and in recombining things in and through his discursive thought that man forms his technical projects, which, once realized through work, really transform the aspect of the natural [and] given World by creating therein a World of culture.  (126)

     What must be made clear is that the issues that have been raised here in the context of the French reception of Hegel are not confined to the realm of intellectual history.   The impact of Kojève was decisive and long-lasting.   It also was not merely restricted to the introduction of the work of Hegel into French intellectual life.  The impact of the Hegelianism fostered by Kojève also manifested itself in a preoccupation with certain issues, with a certain style and method of inquiry.  In this sense this impact was to have far-reaching consequences.  Indeed, we still live in the thrall of this brand of Hegelianism.  In fact, most of the work of Anglo-American literary and cultural criticism can be explained by relating it to this Hegelianism.  In order to substantiate such an apparently extravagant claim--which is, however, perhaps the ultimate motivation for this volume--it will be necessary to review the essential features of this French Hegelianism.  It will also be necessary to establish its relation to contemporary criticism.
     Early French Hegelianism found its origins in the need for a link between a philosophy of the subject and history.  A tradition so defined by Cartesian rationalism naturally found it difficult to broach the question of history, let alone that of the social being of man.  Thus, unlike the earlier British Hegelians who were drawn to the Logic and the Encyclopedia, the French were instinctively drawn to The Phenomenology of Spirit.  For what offered itself here was a careful exposition of the transition from consciousness to self-consciousness that made clear that the development of self-consciousness was dependent upon others, upon the social.  This is the reason for the fascination with the master/slave relation.  This relatively brief moment in the Phenomenology is the precise point where isolated self-consciousness must first acknowledge the existence of another consciousness.  This in itself would be enough to explain its fascination.  Hegel also describes how, because of the need for recognition, the encounter of self-consciousness with the other requires that one submit, that one render recognition in return for the right to live.  Hegel thereby links the unfolding of self-consciousness to the very origins and genesis of the social.  Hegel also made social and political struggle and evolution intrinsic to philosophy itself.  These issues spoke directly to a generation that was attempting to link a philosophy of the subject with a social theory.  For this reason Hegel became the primary means by which Marxism and phenomenology were to be brought into articulation with one another.  Hegel had made possible the advent of historicity within rationalism.
     In addition to phenomenology and Marxism, Hegel was adopted to a certain extent by existentialism.  In hindsight it is ironic that existentialism was equated--particularly in the American critical understanding--with French Hegelianism.  The Hegelian notion of the master/slave relation did indeed seem to sum up the necessarily conflictual relation of the existential subject with the other.  Yet Sartre's Being and Nothingness was more the attempt of Cartesian rationalism to defend itself in the face of the dissolution of the individual subject into historical and social being.  In short, the imagery of the master-slave relation was employed by Sartre to counter the argument of the Phenomenology.   Self-consciousness confronting another consciousness was not to lead to--as in Hegel--to the articulation of Sittlichkeit as the medium of spirit, but to the affirmation of the isolation and freedom of the individual subject.  Sartre did indeed appropriate much imagery from Hegel that involved the combatative confrontation with the other.  Thus it easily appeared that Sartre was arguing, as Hegel had done, that the transition from consciousness to self-consciousness was to found history itself when, in fact, he was arguing just the opposite.  Sartre was arguing against allowing the transition between consciousness and self-consciousness to function as a transition.  Self-consciousness could only be consciousness of the self; it could not form the bridge to the social being of man.  As a result, there could be no society and no history--only masters.  Indeed, as Hyppolite commented:

"One suspected that Sartre, despite granting an important place to the historical situation, is at bottom a moralist who does not believe in history (as a totality yet to be achieved)"

     How, then, does one relate this invisible yet rampant Hegelianism to the contemporary American critical scene?  To address this final issue one must turn to the work of Michel Foucault.  For if the contemporary American critical scene could be said to be under the spell of one philosopher it would be Foucault.  Under the guidance of Foucault, the human and the culture that it is a moment of--in all its discursive and non-discursive practices, no matter how seemingly mundane--become a signifying system in which the stakes are always power.  In particular, Foucault emphasized the Kojèvian notion of the master/slave dialectic.  Indeed, it would not be too much of an exaggeration to suggest that the crux of Foucault's thought is to be found in Kojève's reading of Hegel.  Running throughout Foucault's work is a fascination with the drama of self-consciousness.  From the story of Pinel's use of a mirror to treat mad inmates who believed they were the king of France, to the relentless controlling gaze of the Panopticon, to the ever-expanding discourse on the care and regulation of the self in all matters sexual, Foucault has spun an apparently historical narrative to present the philosophical drama of Kojève's master and slave.  As Kojève presented it, the struggle of the master and slave is the confrontation of two consciousnesses, only one of whom can achieve self-consciousness through the submission of the other.  This is a primordial power struggle that precedes any established structure of power.  The essence of this Kojèvian power struggle is that one consciousness recognize the other as master and--just as important--recognize itself as slave.  It is this moment of self-recognition--and thus auto-constitution--of the slave that forms the primary focus of Foucault's work.  Foucault sifts for different historical instances of the inauguration of consciousness as a vehicle of power.  Indeed, all of Foucault's work can be read as a history of the consciousness of the slave.  He presents narratives of historical moments in which consciousness was a means to enforce and maintain subjection.  Despite his own warning, then, Foucault would seem to be traveling down a road mapped out by Hegel (and paved by Kojève).
     Unlike many of his contemporaries, however, Foucault does not tout the notion of desire as the means for the slave to liberate itself.  Indeed, the very notion of liberation seems to be curiously absent in Foucault's thought.  Thus, despite the solution Foucault seems to offer out of the impasse between deconstruction and a humanist Neo-Marxism, many critics remain troubled by Foucault's refusal to offer any suggestions as to how one might effect political change.  As a result, Foucault has passed on an intractable dilemma to his followers: the price of fascinating and compelling analyses of power seems to be a commitment to a notion of power that is stripped ultimately of any historical or political specificity.  Despite curious attempts to crossbreed Foucault with someone like Habermas--which allows one to make vague claims about the bourgeois public sphere and the rise of the middle class--the decisive  political and discursive shifts that are pinpointed soon reveal themselves to be repeated in other political settings and other historical moments.  The reason is clear.  What Foucault was examining was what he believed to be a fundamental aspect of consciousness.  Power for Foucault was an inextricable part of consciousness itself.  History provided the material with which to present a philosophical--indeed, Hegelian--argument.
     The explanation for this paradox lies, once again, in the French reception of Hegel.  For, in addition to the notion of discourse as the disclosure and reworking of Being as well as the means of man's birth and death, Kojève also drew attention to the role of the wise man in the Phenomenology.  Kojève's reading of the wise man does much to explain Foucault's position.  For the wise man comes at the end of history when discourse has effectively transformed nature and reconstituted humanity as spirit.  The task that remains for the wise man is to make this transformation apparent in and as discourse.  "The wise man thinks all that is thinkable, and at the moment when the wise man lives, all that is thinkable is already effectively realized."   As a result, the wise man brings to an end the dialectic of the master and slave.  He does this by negating desire itself:

At the moment when the wise man and, consequently, science, appears,  the opposition in question is therefore already sublated.  In other words, Man no longer has Desire; he is perfectly and definitively satisfied by that which is; he therefore does not act, no longer transforms the world, and in consequence no longer changes himself.  In short, he has become . . . wise, very wise.

     It is Derrida who has sought to confront this silent Hegelianism of our age.  From the early essays such as "The Pit and the Pyramid" and "A Hegelianism Without Reserve" to the extended study Glas  and the recent writings on the political, Hegel has provided a constant point of reference for the articulation of deconstruction.  It is clear, moreover, that Hegel is not just one more philosopher in the range of philosophical and literary figures that Derrida treats in his work.  Rather, one could argue that it is the task of deconstruction to come to terms with Hegel.  For Hegel's work, Derrida argues, occupies a unique and strangely ambivalent position in the history of Western philosophy.  It is both the culmination of the Western philosophical tradition and the beginning of its dissolution.  As such, Hegel's work forms both the horizon and limit of deconstruction as well as its very condition of possibility.
     This productive ambivalence is in evidence throughout Derrida's treatment of Hegel's philosophy.  On the one hand, for instance, Derrida portrays Hegel as the very consummation of the Western philosophical tradition that begins with the Greeks.  As Derrida writes of Hegel in Of Grammatology: "he undoubtedly summed up the entire philosophy of the logos.  He determined ontology as absolute logic; he assembled all the delimitations of philosophy as presence; he assigned to presence the eschatology of parousia, of the self-proximity of infinite subjectivity."   Hegel, in other words, announces the advent of the closure of metaphysics itself.  For in Hegel onto-theology finally achieves systematicity in the unfolding of an absolute subjectivity.  As such, Hegel defines what forms the ultimate task of deconstruction: the imperative to disrupt the virtual self-realization of onto-theology in speculative idealism.  The means of this self-realization--the Aufhebung--comprises the decisive site of investigation for deconstruction.  For this reason, Derrida underscores in the interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Sarpetta in Positions that the key "concept" of différance was deployed in order to make a strategic intervention in Hegelian thought.  "If there were a definition of différance," Derrida states, "it would be precisely the limit, the interruption, the destruction of the Hegelian relève wherever  it operates.  What is at stake here is enormous."   This is an essential point to bear in mind given the confused designation of Derrida as a "post-structuralist."  The Aufhebung--as the elision of the material means of signification--reasserts itself in the claim of structuralism to be the unfolding of the cultural logic of an absolute subjectivity.  Thus Derrida's early work does not position itself vis-a-vis structuralism per se, but addresses that which enables the persistence of the Hegelian dialectic in our century.
     On the other hand, it is clear that Hegel also announces for Derrida the possibility of deconstruction.  As Derrida phrases it in Of Grammatology, Hegel is the last philosopher of the book and the first philosopher of writing.  Hegel is not only the most complete manifestation of that which deconstruction seeks to undo.  Hegel also opens up the possibility of the task of thinking difference.  It is for this reason that Derrida argues that Hegel occupies such a unique position in the history of Western metaphysics.  As Derrida argues: "all that Hegel thought within this horizon, all, that is, except eschatology, may be reread as a meditation on writing.  Hegel is also the thinker of irreducible differance."   This aspect of Hegel is no doubt most fully addressed in Glas.  Here Derrida focuses on Hegel's early writings on Christianity and ethics.  Hegel's consideration of the finitization of the divine are of particular interest because he had not yet articulated his mature system.  Hence this unique period in Hegel's development is one in which he perhaps most carefully confronted the problem of finitude.  Glas in turn examines what in Hegel resists the Hegelian dialectic.  Derrida thereby expands upon what he had announced in Positions: "[i]n effect I believe that Hegel's text is necessarily fissured: that it is something more and other than the circular closure of its representation."   This fissuring of the Hegelian text--which Glas performs--is what truly opens up the possibility of deconstruction.  Paradoxically, then, Hegel's text, in its performance of the thinking of difference, comprises the enabling condition of the strategies of deconstruction.
     Despite the clear centrality of Hegel to the work of Derrida, this issue has remained relatively unexplored.  The relative critical silence that Glas has met is symptomatic of this.  While many would no doubt agree with Geoffrey Hartman that Glas is a masterpiece of criticism, few have actually ventured to broach this text.   All too often, the attention that has been granted Glas has focused on the seemingly arbitrary nature of its typography.  The fact that such an extended study of Hegel could meet with a pronounced critical silence is both significant and telling.  It reveals a persisting inability to grasp the full philosophical complexity of Derrida's work.   The urge to put Derrida "to use" in such critical discourses as New Historicism and Cultural Studies only underscores the resistance to the truly philosophical nature of deconstruction.  Nonetheless, it is only when we begin to come to terms with the true philosophical dimensions of deconstruction--and thus with its engagement with Hegel--that we will begin to confront the Hegelianism of our thought.

     The essays contained in this volume present a beginning attempt to read our repressed Hegelian genealogy.  They can be grouped according to three basic and necessary responses.  The first is a return to the texts of Hegel to pursue a path Derrida has opened up.  The second is a consideration of the impact this already transformed Hegel has and will have upon our culture.  The third is a meditation on Glas, Derrida's most extensive treatment of Hegel.  These three responses, accordingly, divide the volume into three distinct parts.
     Part One of this volume, "Hegel After Derrida," responds to the implications of Derrida's work for the study of Hegel.   The essays in this section reread Hegel in light of the strategies and issues suggested by Derrida.  Two distinct insights emerge from these investigations.  One is that we remain implicated in an Hegelianism to a greater extent than might be anticipated.  The other is that there is nonetheless a Hegel yet to be examined by us.  The task these essays set for us--which has barely begun to be undertaken--is the interrogation of a Hegel that remains very much with us and yet unknown to us.  Each in its own way testifies to the fact that we are far from done with Hegel.
     In "Hegel at the Court of the Ashanti," Robert Bernasconi pursues a course suggested by Derrida in Glas and such political writings as The Other Heading.  He examines Hegel's use and appropriation of Africa, particularly in the Lectures on the Philosophy of History.  While seemingly marginal to the project of speculative idealism, the presence of Africa in Hegel is, in fact, an index of the relation between the West and its colonial other.  Hegel is thereby implicated--and, as Bernasconi reminds us, we too are implicated here--in a history (and a future) of exploitation.  For Hegel Africans supposedly exist at the most primitive level of consciousness--immediate sensuousness, which is why Africa lies outside of history and outside of the very concept of justice.  Indeed, it is only by encountering the West and, specifically, enduring slavery to the West, that Africa enters into the dialectical process of consciousness and thus world history.  According to the logic of the unfolding of world spirit, it is both necessary and just that Africa be subject to slavery and colonization.  In his assessment of this complex issue, Bernasconi does not permit us to enjoy a simplistic and self-congratulatory dismissal of such politically incorrect views.  Rather, Bernasconi seeks to document, with an eye to the question of justice, how Hegel used and abused a certain "knowledge" of Africa.  Accordingly, Africa--as a textual entity--is drawn into the realm of justice.  Hegel is very much on trial in this essay.  And, as prosecutor, Bernasconi shows us how reading, coupled with a philological scrupulousness, can be a form of ethics, a way of unraveling a history whose future we might not be condemned to.
     In "Of Spirit(s) and Will(s)," John H. Smith argues that the concept of the will serves to indicate the unthought remains of Hegel within Derrida's work.  Will remains unthought within deconstruction because it has been mistakenly conflated with spirit.  Far from being considered a distinct concept, will is collapsed into the metaphysics of subjectivity.  The result, Smith argues, is a disavowal of a concept necessary for political thought.  This issue is of particular importance because it lies at the root of deconstruction's problematic relation to politics.  To addresss this issue, Smith undertakes an exercise in hermeneutics to uncover the nuanced reading Hegel, in fact, gave to the concept of the will.  For this reason Smith investigates the family in Hegel, which is the originary constellation of will in Hegel's system.  Of particular interest to Smith are the transitions from the family to civil society to the state--the transition, in other words, from individual will to polity.  Smith argues that this transition is most concretely thought out in the exploration of wills and testaments in the family.  For it is in the will of the patriarch of the family that order (of spirit) and arbitrariness (of individual will) are fused together.  This impossible fusion extends beyond spirit or any of its deconstructions.  Will is thereby not drawn into the purity of absolute interiority, but is instead laid out in all its intricacy, in all its finite plurality.  Within Hegel is a thinking of will(s) that is not yet subject to spirit or a metaphysics of subjectivity.  As Smith demonstrates, not only is there much to examine in Hegel after Derrida, but there is also much to examine in Derrida after Hegel.  The cross-interrogation Smith stages between Hegel and Derrida that unsettles Hegelian thought and deconstruction.  Smith suggests that this unsettling may yet make a politics  for deconstruction possible.
     In both a direct and an oblique way, Jean-Luc Nancy has for sometime been considering the relation between Hegel and Derrida.  Indeed, one of his earliest publications, La rémarque speculative, emerged out of a seminar conducted by Derrida.  What has interested Nancy from the outset is the bifurcated nature of both Hegel's texts and his status in the history of philosophy.  Nancy has argued for the necessity of simultaneously thinking with and against Hegel.  Perhaps more than in his other writings, "The Surprise of the Event"--written in the challenging, evocative, and intensely literary style of his more recent essays--shows us the extent to which we can think against Hegel within Hegel. Nancy focuses on Hegel's Science of Logic in order to undertake a thinking of the event, for it is, in fact, in Hegel that the event is first thought.  What interests Nancy is the distinction Hegel makes between the cognition of truth and the "mere event" of the truth--its narrative presentation.  It is this distinction that opens up the possibility of a thinking of the event--of the happening of truth.  Hegel thus sets philosophy the task of comprehending not simply the truth, but the taking-place of the truth, the event of the truth.  We must follow Hegel--pitting a canonical Hegel against the thought of Hegel--in thinking the event as not distinct, but as the primordial arrival of truth, of the coming-to-presence of the present.  Yet Hegel--and this, Nancy argues, is what defines philosophical modernity--mainly seeks to overcome the event.  As such, he does not think the surprise of the event.  Beyond just event, one must think the surprise of the event, the leap of nothingness into Being.  What must be thought, Nancy argues, is not the fact of Being, but that Being happens, that there is Being at all--indeed, simply that there is.  Thought then is this surprise, which is nothing.  Nancy thus presents a reading of Hegel--which perhaps is itself an event--that discloses not only the role of the event in Hegel, but also the role of Hegel in a thinking of the event.
     In "Eating My God," I examine Hegel's "The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate," an essay that forms a major focus of Glas.  At issue in this essay--if one can in fact call it that--is the very idea of reading: for how does one read an essay that actually consists of fragments?  The tension between part and whole, fragment and corpus, is addressed within this text(s)'s consideration of the problem of representing the divine.  For Jesus is a representation, an embodiment of the divine.  Yet to draw the infinite into the realm of finitude is to subject it to limitation.  For this reason, Hegel argues that the spirit of Christianity necessitates the annihilation of the material sign of the divine, which is what the death of Jesus accomplishes.  The most perfect example of this resolution for Hegel is provided by the Last Supper, for it is here that Jesus represents himself as the bread and wine of the meal, which the disciples are then invited to consume.  The sign of the divine thus achieves signification without leaving any material trace of itself.  This is in nuce the mechanism of the Aufhebung.  Yet in the context of "The Spirit of Christianity" it is made clear that the Aufhebung is dependent upon the ongoing destruction of the very materiality of the sign.  The bread and wine of the Last Supper thus present a solution to the representation of the divine, to the becoming-subject of the Absolute, that is itself impossible--and yet which becomes the very foundation for Hegelian thought.
     Part Two of this volume, "After Hegel After Derrida," continues the discussion begun in Part One.  Given the enormous role Hegel plays in our philosophy and culture, it is only logical that the emergence of a different Hegel as a result of the work of Derrida will require extensive realignments in our culture.  Thus the essays in this section explore the implications for our understanding of Freud and Marx.  It is clear that this is only the beginning of a complex and enormous undertaking.  Nonetheless, this undertaking is absolutely necessary, for Derrida's work presents not merely a rereading of Hegel, but an indication of the ultimate impact an as of yet unexamined Hegel might have on our own decidedly Hegelian culture.
     In "The Remnants of Philosophy: Psychoanalysis After Glas" Suzanne Gearhart intertwines Derrida's reading of Hegel with his reading of Freud to explore the implications of deconstruction for the psychoanalytic understanding of gender.  Following up reflections by Sarah Kofman on this topic, Gearhart undertakes an examination of Derrida's critique of phallocentrism.  Gearhart begins with an intriguing question: why does Hegel have a place at all in Glas?  For if the target is phallocentrism, why should Hegel feature so prominently?  The answer, Gearhart suggests, is that Hegel, in his analysis of the family and the concept of the Aufhebung, offers us a reworking of the concept of repression.  For repression--which is linked with penile envy, castration fear, and the very origins of the constitution of gender in psychoanalysis--is tantamount to the Aufhebung itself.  Derrida's Hegel makes clear, moreover, that repression is not linked to some precise event or activity in time, but is instead a process that has always already begun.  Rigorously thought, then, Derrida's Hegel presents an interpretation of repression that transforms it into a post-Freudian concept.  Drawing from this insight, Gearhart proceeds to present a rereading of the role of Antigone in Hegel and Derrida.  At first glance, Hegel's Antigone would seem to be far removed from Freud and Derrida since she supposedly stands outside of desire.  Yet what Antigone demonstrates, Gearhart argues, is that the overcoming of desire is bound up with desire.  For Antigone ultimately serves the larger articulation of Sittlichkeit.  She is therefore a figure of the process of repression/idealization.  Thus Gearhart warns us that privileging Antigone entails accepting fetishism as a model of desire.  This acceptance, in turn, entails acknowledging castration as the foundation of psychic experience.  As a result, the opposition between Antigone and Oedipus never confronts "that there is" at all a primal scene, but simply accepts it as "given."  The investigations of gender and sexuality must take into account repression, the fact that the process of repression/idealization has always already begun.  Thus, the task of post-Freudian and post-Hegelian thought is to rethink the feminine in terms of a repression that knows no discrete origin or final closure.
     Andrzej Warminski reads the relation between Hegel and Marx as the attempt to read the relation between consciousness and life.  Contrary to what has often been assumed about this relation, Warminski argues in "Hegel/Marx: Consciousness and Life" that Marx does not simply perform an inversion of the relation between these two terms.  Materialism, in other words, cannot simply be the chiasmic inversion of idealism.  For this would result in merely a more naive, pre-critical idealism.  Instead, materialism understands life to overdetermine consciousness in a way that consciousness cannot master.  Accordingly, consciousness is not the other of life; it is not the determinate negation of life.  Consciousness transforms life into a figure for consciousness.  The only authoritative ground for this transformation, however, is the system of consciousness itself.  At the same time, consciousness can only come to be because of this trope that turns life into a phenomenal figure for consciousness.  The relation between consciousness and life is thereby rewritten in the materialist reading to be the arbitrary act of a linguistic imposition of meaning.   As a result, self-consciousness as such is impossible.  Thus Hegel, as Warminski suggests, is closer to Marx than most Marxists.  What emerges then is a completely unfamiliar Hegel, a Hegel who would be divided against himself.  Indeed, the Hegelian text becomes thereby heterogeneous to itself.  Marx's reading discloses this heterogeneity; it also makes apparent that materialism--if the term is to mean anything--must be founded on the scrupulous labor of reading.  As Warminski suggests, it is only in this manner that the texts of Hegel, Marx, and Derrida can be put to work, can be made to happen for an uncertain future.
     The ultimate ambition of Part Three, "Reading Glas," is, simply, to make further readings of Glas possible.  Despite the range of scholarship on Derrida, Glas remains a shockingly unexamined text, better known as an example of concrete poetry than as a philosophical text. Yet, given the suspicions of Hegel scholars and the lack of a thorough familiarity with Hegel on the part of literary critics, this situation is perhaps not surprising.  To a great extent, the essays collected in Part Three present the "argument" of Glas.  As Simon Critchley has argued, it is necessary to explicate Glas in order to open it up as a text for others.  The essays of Critchley and Heinz Kimmerle, accordingly, clarify Glas's relation to Hegel and Derrida's other work.  This is, in a sense, the conditio sine qua non of any meditation of "Hegel after Derrida."  Kevin Thompson's essay complements those of Critchley and Kimmerle in that it focuses on the issue of the quasi-transcendental in Glas--a key "concept" that indicates the almost absolute proximity of deconstruction and speculative thought.  Finally, Henry Sussman positions Glas in the larger context of Western modernity,  reminding us that part of the task of reading Glas is unraveling the larger cultural implications of this complex text.  Taken together, then, these four essays offer a good casebook for understanding Glas.
     In "A Commentary of Derrida's Reading of Hegel in Glas," Simon Critchley offers us a sustained analysis of the Hegel column of Glas as well as a meditation on the relation between ethics and deconstruction.  Glas, Critchley argues, is not a self-indulgent exercise in textual free play; it is a rigorous and detailed examination of Hegel, a "devotional labor of reading."  Critchley undertakes a similarly systematic reading of Derrida, one that traces Derrida's own systematic reading of Hegel.  Accordingly, Critchley focuses on one of the major "threads" in Glas, the role of the family in Hegel.  For the family is a crucial transitional hinge in the Philosophy of Right and the Hegelian system as a whole.  In addition to being the first moment in the articulation of Sittlichkeit, the family regulates the transition from religion to philosophy in the elaboration of absolute spirit, while rendering the system problematic.   The family constitutes, in short, a rupture in and of the system.  The figure in the family that embodies this enabling rupture is the sister; more specifically, it is Antigone who embodies this impossible hinge.  Antigone is thus a quasi-transcendental condition of possibility and impossibility for speculative thought, marking a place within Hegel where an ethics is discernible that can not be reduced to dialectics or cognition.  She gestures towards an ethics of singularity that would not be based on the dialectical recognition of the other, which, in fact, is nothing less than self-recognition.  Indeed, Critchley argues that an ethics of the singular is the perpetual horizon of Derrida's reading of Hegel.  He follows this issue into Derrida's discussion of the gift and holocaust.  For the non-metaphysical donation of the gift exceeds Hegelian dialectics and opens it to the ethical.  Critchley thereby demonstrates that the question of ethics--which is increasingly brought to bear on deconstruction--must confront Hegel and, more precisely, must confront Derrida's reading of Hegel.
     Heinz Kimmerle addresses Derrida's reading of Bataille and Hegel in his essay "On Derrida's Hegel Interpretation."  After outlining some preliminary issues in Derrida's reading of Bataille, Kimmerle turns to examine the remains of absolute knowledge which resist internalization into the holocaust of speculative thought in which everything must be consumed.  Derrida's merit, Kimmerle argues, is to demonstrate that everything is not consumed in this holocaust--there is always a remainder that is extrinsic to and yet utterly necessary for the system.  The remains that interest Kimmerle are those that have resisted the attempt of absolute knowledge to incorporate nature, its own other.  Hegel thinks this relation to nature in terms of labor, in terms of reworking and appropriating objectivity.  It is in the realm of the family, Kimmerle argues that this relation comes to a point of crisis. As the family is to serve as the conduit for the full articulation of Sittlichkeit into the community, femininity--which constitutes nature in the realm of the family--becomes the enemy of the community.  Femininity is nature, the otherness of exteriority, that must be aufgehoben in order for  Sittlichkeit--and hence the social--to come into being.  This, then, accounts for the tragic role of the sister in Hegel's description of the family.  Once the resistance of the feminine is overcome, the true work of the speculative can continue in the relation between the father and son: a relation that comprises the foundation of the Hegelian community.  Kimmerle argues, however, that there will always be a remainder to the work of spirit upon nature.  The figure of the feminine--which in Hegel is represented by Antigone--comprises an exemplary instance of what remains in the wake of the holocaust of absolute knowledge.
     In "Hegelian Dialectic and the Quasi-Transcendental in Glas," Kevin Thompson's examination of the role of Hegel in Derrida makes clear that Hegel is not simply a topic within deconstruction, but that which makes deconstruction possible.  Derrida's work, Thompson argues, does not inhabit a privileged space beyond speculative thought.  Indeed, Derrida's work is perhaps not thinkable outside of speculative thought.  At the same time, speculative thought can perhaps not be truly understood without deconstruction.  For deconstruction, as Thompson suggests, is intrinsic to the dialectic.  This is because Hegel presents us with a rigorous thinking a negativity that is neither abstract nor determinate.   This constitutes, in turn, the quasi-transcendental structure of the remains within which the Hegelian dialectic is both inscribed and displaced.  Following Derrida's example in Glas, Thompson focuses on the family in Hegel--which is both a finite moment in Hegel's system and a figure of its totality.  In his essay, the relation between the brother and sister is taken as a key instance of this quasi-transcendental structure.  For it is in this relation that singularity remains distinct.  Nonetheless, this thinking of singularity undergoes the teleological constriction that dialectics enforces.  Hence what is natural difference in the theater of the family becomes an ethical opposition.  As such, speculative thought recovers itself--recovers itself from the thought of difference and hence the suspension of the dialectic itself--and moves on to the articulation of spirit.  Thompson succeeds in mapping out the space of the point of almost absolute proximity between deconstruction and speculative thought.  As Thompson also shows us, it is in that "almost" that the difference between Hegel and Derrida--if not difference itself--lies.
     Henry Sussman, in "Hegel, Glas, and the Broader Modernity," undertakes to situate Glas within the context of what he terms the larger Modernity--that is, Modernity considered not simply as an early twentieth-century cultural movement, but as a project the West has pursued since at least the eighteenth century.  Derrida's intervention in the texts of Hegel, Sussman argues, is far from an exercise in esoterica of interest only to specialists.  Rather, Glas speaks both to the larger Modernity and the cultural moment we presently occupy.  Under the guidance of postmodernism and multiculturalism, critical thought claims to have prepared the West to confront and pass over into its own conceptual and political other.  Glas, however, does not relate itself to a supposed externality.  Instead, it burrows into the heart of the West itself in order to bring the West in relation to its own internalized and repressed other.  Glas thereby intuits a plane of cultural articulation--a purely linguistic articulation--that is autonomous from the metaphysics of the subject.  At the same time, Derrida makes clear that this derangement is not imposed upon this philosophical system; rather, it is already installed within it.  Thus the search for the other does not need to posit an exteriority to the West--which is, in fact, always a positing of the West--because the other inhabits its innermost structures.  Sussman suggests then that the larger Modernity is precisely this search for an other too easily forgotten, an other that the West has repressed and yet is utterly dependent upon.  Glas, accordingly, is the making-concrete of an architecture of derangement between the institutionalization of Modernity and its own ongoing deconstruction.  Sussman's essay is a valuable complement to the essays of Critchley, Kimmerle, and Thompson in that it reminds us of the larger role Glas does, can, and should play in our culture.
 
 

     This volume must necessarily go against the grain of contemporary critical thought.  As has already been suggested, the contemporary critical scene is utterly inimical to what is seen to be hopelessly abstract--"sauve qui peut," as Hegel said--philosophical thought.   Unless, of course, that thought can be shown to be disguising an oppressive ideological agenda.  Most, moreover, seem eager to toll the death knell of deconstruction.  Perhaps this is just as well.  For, as Andrzej Warminski suggests in his essay, deconstruction in a sense never took place.  Yet in the project of deconstruction--particularly in the confrontation between Derrida and Hegel--there is (still) being articulated what our contemporary situation silently presupposes.  For, despite the effort to be a culture that comes after Hegel, ours is still an Hegelian culture.  If anything, Hegel will still come after us.  For we have yet to begin reading Derrida's reading of Hegel.  This task, which has just begun to be undertaken, may be the only means of eventually dismantling the Hegelian edifice.
     It is not the place of an introduction to set forth what only the volume as a whole can articulate.  It is impossible not to recall here that both Hegel and Derrida have meditated on the impossibility of the very idea of an introduction.  For the introduction belies the incompleteness the system (as text) denies.   This introduction in particular--with its thoroughly Hegelian evolutionary history of thought--negates its own supposed objective.  It cannot be the introduction it claims to be.  At best it is an Hegelian prelude to the introduction that will follow.  This volume as a whole, then, will have been an introduction to an engagement that is yet to be enacted.  Not just an Einleitung, this volume is also a Vorrede.  It is prefatory, but it is also vor der Rede in the sense of Kafka's "Vor dem Gesetz."  It awaits, perhaps in vain, but nonetheless with infinite patience, for a reading of the speculative.
 
 

Central Connecticut State University
 
 
 

  1Michel Foucault, "The Discourse on Language," in The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972), p. 235.
  2Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained, trans. Don Barry, et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), pp. 17-18.
  3Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 33-34.
  4The Postmodern Condition, p. 38.
  5As Marc Froment-Meurice notes in Solitudes: From Rimbaud to Heidegger, trans. Peter Walsh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995): "Yesterday Marx-Nietzsche-Freud, today Kant, who is making his return like an old diva who can never make up his mind to 'bid the stage adieu' . . ." (xxiv).
  6Bertand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), p. 730.
  7See Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), pp. 223-273.  Popper discloses that it was the invasion of Austria in March of 1938 that galvanized him to write this study.  The constant subtext of the study is accounting for fascism.  And in this accounting Hegel surfaces as a prime suspect.  As Popper sums up his assessment: "Thus the formula of the fascist brew is in all countries the same: Hegel plus a dash of nineteenth-century materialism . . ." (p. 256).  He further describes Hegel in the following hyperbolic terms: "Thus, liberalism, freedom and reason are, as usual, objects of Hegel's attack.  The hysterical cries: We want our history! We want our destiny!  We want our fight!  We want our chains; resound through the edifice of Hegelianism, through this stronghold of the closed society and of the revolt against freedom" (p. 269).  Hegel and Hegelianism thus define the closed society; as such, they are perhaps the enemy of the open society.
  8The situation is thus admittedly changing, but it is a gradual improvement that perhaps stands out because of the overall context of antipathy.  As Rorty describes the fate of Hegel: "Before the appearance of M. H. Abrams' The Mirror and the Lamp, it often did not occur to students of English literature to read Hegel. During the same period, students of analytic philosophy were encouraged to keep their reading in literature well clear of their philosophical work and to avoid reading German philosophy between Kant and Frege.  It was widely believed that reading Hegel rotted the brain." Essays on Heidegger and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 87.  For an informative overview of the post-war reception of Hegel, see H. S. Harris, "The Hegel Renaissance in the Anglo-Saxon World Since 1945," The Owl of Minerva, vol. 15 (1983), pp. 77-106.
  9An indication of this lack of means to assess Hegel and the continental tradition is surely the willingness of Quine to add his name to a letter to the London Times denouncing Cambridge's move to award Derrida an honorary degree.  This insulting document, which claims that Derrida is an "embarrassment" capable only of "tricks" and "gimmicks," is yet another sad indication of the suspicion Anglo-American philosophers bear towards Derrida.  Interestingly, one of the major points of this letter is that Derrida is not a philosopher because he is read and taught "almost entirely in fields outside philosophy."  Jacques Derrida, Points (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 419-421.
  10Indicative of analytic philosophy's belief that it had dispelled the very errors that would lead to such metaphysical musings as Hegel's is Carnap's well-known essay "The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language" in Logical Positivism, A. J. Ayer, ed. (Glencoe, Ill: Free Press, 1959), pp. 60-81.  Finding their inspiration in the later Wittgenstein, many analytic philosophers felt that what they derisively termed metaphysics was the result of a muddled and confused use of language.
  11J. N. Findlay, "The Contemporary Relevance of Hegel," Hegel: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Alasdair MacIntyre (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976), pp.  1-2.
  12See the helpful essay by Peter Hylton, "Hegel and Analytic Philosophy" in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, ed. Frederick Beiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 445-486 as well as his authoritative Russell, Idealism and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
  13G. E. Moore, "The Refutation of Idealism," Philosophical Studies (London: Routledge, 1922), pp. 1-30.   See also A. J. Ayer's discussion of this essay in Russell and Moore (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 143-155.
  14As Russell stated in an earlier study: "The question of whether all propositions are reducible to the subject-predicate form is one of fundamental importance to all philosophy." Bertrand Russell, Philosophy of Leibniz (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1937), p. 12.
  15See G. E. Moore, "External and Internal Relations" in Philosophical Studies (London: Routledge, 1922), pp. 276-309.  As Russell phrased it at a much later date: "My reason for rejecting Hegel and monism in general is my belief that the dialectical argument against relations is wholly unsound.  I think such a statement as 'A is west of B' can be exactly true.  You will find that Bradley's arguments on the subject pre-suppose that every proposition must be of the subject-predicate form.  I think this is the fundamental error of monism."  The Autobiography of Bertand Russell (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969), pp. 252-253.
  16As D. F. Pears reflects of Russell: "His philosophical temperament combines in an unusual way the caution which is characteristic of British philosophy with the kind of speculation which, rather absurdly, we call 'Continental.'  It is, of course, questionable whether the doctrines to which these two tendencies naturally lead can be combined."  Bertrand Russell and the British Tradition in Philosophy (New York: Random, 1967), p. 269.
  17Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 47-8.  Russell offers a more circumspect analysis of that table in Our Knowledge of the External World (New York: Mentor Books, 1960), pp. 64-65.
  18Indeed, the unknowing attempt on the part of many analytic philosophers to reach a Kantian resolution between the demands of rationalist truth and empiricism are quite remarkable.  A sure indication of this strange state of affairs was the inability of the followers of Frege and Wittgenstein to understand or even perceive the Kantian background to these founders of the analytic tradition.
  19Amusingly, Russell took exception in a footnote to a similar suggestion by Alan Wood in the essay by Wood he included in My Philosophical Development (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959): "My final views are less Kantian than Alan Wood supposes.  I will mention two points.  First: though the external world is probably not quite like the world of perception, it is connected with the world of perception by correlations, which are impossible in a philosophy which regard time and space as subjective.  Second: the principles of non-deductive inference which I advocate are not put forward as certain or a priori, but as scientific hypothesis" (p. 262).  Note the qualifying "final" in the first sentence.
  20For further exploration of the proximity of idealism and analytic philosophy, see David Lamb, Language and Perception in Hegel and Wittgenstein (New York: St. Martin's, 1980).
  21As Sluga aptly notes: "Because of this lack of historical interest, analytic philosophers themselves have tended to overestimate the discontinuity of their own philosophizing from that of the past and to underestimate the historical evolution of their own tradition."  Gottlob Frege (London: Routledge, 1980), p. 5.  For further discussion of these issues, see pp. 1-7.
  22I am not claiming that Feyerabend is, by general consensus, the most representative figure of the philosophy of science.  He has few outright followers.  It is even hard to say that he had many students in the technical sense, given the paucity of dissertations he directed.  I am arguing, rather, that Feyerabend is of strategic significance in that he draws out much that was implicit in the tradition within which he was trained.
  23"Consolations for the Specialist," Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, eds. Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 224.
  24As his autobiography attests, unlike Popper, Feyerabend was uninterested in engaging in a debate with neo-Hegelianism.  In fact, he seems unconcerned about its existence.  See Killing Time: The Autobiography of Paul Feyerabend (Chicago: University of Chicago P, 1995).  My argument, however, is that the most vigorous forms of Hegelianism in the twentieth century have been thoroughly unconscious of the fact.
  25Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. 187.
  26Consequences, p. 148.
  27For a more detailed examination of this issue see Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), Mark Poster, Existential Marxism In Postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser  (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975) and Michael S. Roth, Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).  Also valuable is the well-documented introduction by John Heckman to Jean Hyppolite's Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), pp.  xv-xli.
  28Alexandre Koyré, "Rapport sur l'état des études hégéliennes en France," Études d'histoire de la pensée philosophique (Paris: Armand Colin, 1961) , pp. 214-215.  Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
   29Georges Canguilhem, "Hegel en France" Revue d'histoire et de philosophie religieuses, vol. 27 (1948), p. 284.
  30Mikel Dufrenne, "Actualité de Hegel" Esprit, vol. 16 (1948), p. 396.
  31See Jean Wahl, "Le rôle de A. Koyré dans le développement des études Hegeliennes en France," Hegel-Studien Beiheft 3 (1966), pp. 15-26.
  32Koyré, "Rapport," p. 205.
  33Dufrenne, p. 396.
  34Jean Hyppolite, Figures de la pensée philosophique, vol. 2 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971), p. 974.
  35Canguilhem, "Hegel en France," p. 282.
  36For an overview, see Michael Kelly, "The Post-war Hegel Revival in France: A Bibliographical Essay" Journal of European Studies, vol. 12 (1983), pp. 199-216.
  37Henri Niel, "L'intrepretation de Hegel" Critique, vol. 3 (1947), pp. 426-437.  "A cette massive étude, il n'y a pas de conclusion personnelle.  L'auteur se refuse à donner une vue d'ensemble de la pensée de Hegel.  Il n'abandonne jamais l'explication fidèlement attaché au texte" (428).
  38For a concise and insightful overview of Kojève's reading of Hegel, see Patrick Riley, "Introduction to the Reading of Alexandre Kojève," Political Theory, vol. 9 (1981), pp. 5-48 and Tom Rockmore, Heidegger and French Philosophy: Humanism, Antihumanism and Being (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 31-39.  For a more detailed examination, see Dominique Auffret, Alexandre Kojève: La philosophie, l'état, la fin de la histoire (Paris: Grasset, 1990).
  39As Aimé Patri notes of the impact of these lectures: "A partir de ce moment, on a respiré l'enseignement de Kojève avec l'air du temps."  "Dialectique du maitre et de l'esclave," Le contrat social, vol. 5 (1961), p. 234.
  40Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1947).  The English edition was edited by Allan Bloom.  (Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980]--hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text).  Bloom severely truncated the text, excising much of interest to the student of Hegel.  A substantial essay not included in Bloom's edition has been translated by Joseph J. Carpina--"The Idea of Death in the Philosophy of Hegel" Interpretation, vol. 3 (1973), pp. 114-156.  This is part two of the appendix, pp. 529-575.  This essay is of particular interest since it forms virtually the exclusive focus of Bataille's well-known essay, "Hegel, Death and Sacrifice," trans. Jonathan Strauss Yale French Studies, vol. 78 (1990), pp. 9-28.
  41Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, p. 54.
  42As Kojève argues, work is the ultimate realization of the dominion of the master: "it is this transformation of Nature in relation to a nonmaterial idea that is Work in the proper sense of the word: Work that creates a nonnatural, technical, humanized World adapted to the human Desire of a being that has demonized and realized its superiority to Nature by risking its life for the nonbiological end of Recognition"  (42).
  43For further discussion, see Dennis J. Goldford, "Kojève's Reading of Hegel" International Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 22 (1982), pp. 275-294.  As Goldford states: "It is with the concept of work that Kojève constructs the immediate bridge between anthropogenetic desire and history" (284).
  44Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, p. 53.
  45Alexandre Kojève, "The Idea of Death in the Philosophy of Hegel" Interpretation, trans. Joseph J. Carpina Interpretation, vol. 3 (1973), p. 123.
  46Alexandre Kojève, "The Idea of Death," p. 132.
  47Alexandre Kojève, "The Idea of Death," p. 129.
  48The intellectuals of the Communist Party in France knew quite well that the interest in Hegel was part of an attempt to challenge official Communist doctrine.  "Le commission de critique du cercle des philosophes communistes" close their analysis of this problem with the ringing words: "Ce Grand Retour à Hegel n'est qu'un recours désespéré contre Marx, dans la forme spécifique que prend le révisionisme dans le crise finale de l'impérialisme: un révisionisme de caractère fasciste."  "Le retour à Hegel: Dernier mot du révisionisme universitaire," La nouvelle critique 20(1950), p. 54.  This antipathy continued on through the work of Althusser, who struggled to demarcate a break in the work of Marx that would sanitize him of any influence from Hegel.  See For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Random House, 1970).
  49Kojève's impact was still acknowledged, in a positive sense, in 1968--a decisive year for the thinkers to be considered.  As Gilles Lapouge notes in the introduction to his 1968 interview with Kojève: "Nul aujourd'hui ne se mettrait en route vers Hegel sans emprunter le boussoles de Kojève.  Celui-ci occupe Hegel comme un territoire.  Il y règne."  "Entretien avec Kojève" Quinzaine Litteraire July 1, 1968, p. 18.
  50As Sartre states: "But if Hegel has forgotten himself, we can not forget Hegel.  This means that we are referred back to the cogito.  In fact, if, as we have established, the being of my consciousness is strictly irreducible to knowledge, then I can not transcend my being toward a reciprocal and universal relation in which I could see my being and that of others as equivalent.  On the contrary, I must establish myself in my being and posit the problem of the Other in terms of my being.  In a word the sole point of departure is the interiority of the cogito."  Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956), p.  329.
  51Hyppolite, Figures, vol. 2, 982.
  52Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 13.
  53Modern French Philosophy, p. 14.
  54See in particular "Shattered Love" in The Inoperative Community, Peter Connor, ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 82-109.
  55For a slightly different reading of Foucault--which elaborates on points only touched on here--see my "Resisting Subjects: Habermas on the Subject of Foucault" in Transitions in Continental Philosophy, Arleen B. Dallery and Stephen H. Watson, eds. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 43-56.
  56Kojève, Introduction à la lecture, p. 324
  57Kojève, Introduction à la lecture, p. 413.  Ellipses are Kojève's.
  58Kojève, Introduction à la lecture, p. 326.
  59Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1985), p. 9.
  60Paul de Man, "Sign and Symbol in Hegel's Aesthetics," Critical Inquiry,  vol. 8 (Summer 1982), p. 763.
  61Jacques Derrida. Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 24.
  62Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 40-41.
  63Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 26.
  64Jacques Derrida, Positions, p. 77.
  65See Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981).  This remarkable study of Hartman's is not so much an explication per se of Glas as an indication of what criticism might look like once we come to terms with Derrida's reading of Hegel.
  66The fact that this investigation of the philosophical dimensions of Derrida's work is now underway in the United States is due to a great extent to the work of Rodolphe Gasché.  See his The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986) as well as his Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).  The prominence of the "concept" of the quasi-transcendental in several of the essays in this volume testifies to his transformative effect upon the study of Derrida.
  67Indeed, what passes as theory in literary circles is often little more than a marketing ploy.  We may be witnessing the birth of the culture industry industry.  Yet, as Adorno reminded us, it was always the destiny of the culture industry to seek to become transparent, to expose to a jaded public the mechanism of it own power--and thereby guarantee the futherance of its power.  This reveals itself in the cheap cynicism of academics who write books exposing the political implications of aspects of popular culture (which will--because of this very fact--be widely discussed and reviewed in mainstream journalism) and the journalists, editors, and television reporters who present them to the public with feigned shock (and who would never bother reporting the teaching or research they keep urging academics to undertake).  One cannot help wondering whether that shock of discovery--like that of Claude Rains's Capt. Renault when he shuts down Rick's Café because of gambling--is itself responding to a more sinister directive.
  68See the "Preface" to the Phenomenology of Spirit and "Outwork, prefacing" in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).   See also Peter J. Burgard, "Preface, " Idioms of Uncertainty: Goethe and the Essay (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1992), pp. 1-23.
 
 
 

Copyright Routledge, 1998.