Hegel & the Infinite

INSURRECTIONS: CRITICAL STUDIES IN RELIGION,POLITICS, AND CULTURE

INSURRECTIONS: CRITICAL STUDIES INRELIGION, POLITICS, AND CULTURE

Slavoj Žižek, Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis,

Jeffrey W. Robbins, editors

The intersection of religion, politics, and culture isone of the most discussed areas in theory today. Italso has the deepest and most wide-ranging impacton the world. Insurrections: Critical Studies inReligion, Politics, and Culture will bring the tools ofphilosophy and critical theory to the politicalimplications of the religious turn. The series willaddress a range of religious traditions and politicalviewpoints in the United States, Europe, and otherparts of the world. Without advocating any specificreligious or theological stance, the series aimsnonetheless to be faithful to the radical emancipatorypotential of religion.

After the Death of God, John D. Caputoand Gianni Vattimo, edited by Jeffrey W.Robbins

The Politics of Postsecular Religion:Mourning Secular Futures, AnandaAbeysekara

Nietzsche and Levinas: “After the Death ofa Certain God,” edited by Jill Staufferand Bettina Bergo

Strange Wonder: The Closure ofMetaphysics and the Opening of Awe,Mary-Jane Rubenstein

Religion and the Specter of the West:Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality, and thePolitics of Translation, Arvind Mandair

Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic,Destruction, Deconstruction, CatherineMalabou

Anatheism: Returning to God After God,Richard Kearney

Rage and Time, Peter Sloterdijk

Radical Political Theology: Religion andPolitics After Liberalism, ClaytonCrockett

Radical Democracy and PoliticalTheology, Jeffrey W. Robbins

EDITED BY

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK | CLAYTON CROCKETT| CRESTON DAVIS

Hegel & the InfiniteRELIGION, POLITICS, AND

DIALECTIC

Columbia University PressPublishers Since 1893New York Chichester, West Sussexcup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2011 Columbia University PressAll rights reservedE-ISBN 978-0-231-51287-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataHegel and the infinite : religion, politics, and dialectic / edited

by SlavojZizek, Clayton Crockett, and Creston Davis.

p. cm. --— (Insurrections) Includes index. ISBN 978-0-231-14334-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-14335-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-51287-9 (e-book)1. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770–1831. I. Žižek,

Slavoj.

II. Crockett, Clayton, 1969– III. Davis, Creston. IV. Title.

B2948.H31787 2011 193—dc22

2010045029

A Columbia University Press E-book.CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience

with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at thetime of writing. Neither the editors nor Columbia University Pressis responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed sincethe manuscript was prepared.

To KXMM (the King College Mountain Men)and James C. Livingston, and to the futurereaders of Hegel

CONTENTS

Preface: Hegel’s Century

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Risking Hegel: A New Reading forthe Twenty-first Century

CLAYTON CROCKETT AND CRESTON DAVIS

1 Is Confession the Accomplishment of

Recognition? Rousseau and the Unthought ofReligion in the Phenomenology of Spirit

CATHERINE MALABOU

2 Rereading Hegel: The Philosopher of Right

ANTONIO NEGRI

3 The Perversity of the Absolute, the Perverse Core

of Hegel, and the Possibility of RadicalTheology

JOHN D. CAPUTO

4 Hegel in America

BRUNO BOSTEELS

5 Infinite Restlessness

MARK C. TAYLOR

6 Between Finitude and Infinity: On Hegel’s

Sublationary Infinitism

WILLIAM DESMOND

7 The Way of Despair

KATRIN PAHL

8 The Weakness of Nature: Hegel, Freud, Lacan,

and Negativity Materialized

ADRIAN JOHNSTON

9 Disrupting Reason: Art and Madness in Hegel

and Van Gogh

EDITH WYSCHOGROD

10 Finite Representation, Spontaneous Thought,

and the Politics of an Open-EndedConsummation

THOMAS A. LEWIS

11 Hegel and Shitting: The Idea’s Constipation

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK

List of Contributors

Index of Names

PREFACE

Hegel’s Century

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK

The ultimate anti-Hegelian argument is the very factof the post-Hegelian break: what even the mostfanatical partisan of Hegel cannot deny is thatsomething changed after Hegel, that a new era ofthought began that can no longer be accounted for inthe Hegelian terms of absolute conceptualmediation. This rupture occurs in different guises,from Schelling’s assertion of the abyss of prelogicalWill (vulgarized later by Schopenhauer) andKierkegaard’s insistence on the uniqueness of faithand subjectivity, through Marx’s assertion of actualsocioeconomic life process and the fullautonomization of mathematicized natural sciences,up to Freud’s motif of the “death-drive” as arepetition that persists beyond all dialecticalmediation. Something happened here; there is aclear break between before and after. And while onecan argue that Hegel already announces this break,that he is the last of idealist metaphysicians and thefirst of postmetaphysical historicists, one cannotreally be a Hegelian after this break. Hegelianismhas lost its innocence forever. To act like a fullHegelian today is the same as to write tonal musicafter the Schönberg revolution.

The predominate Hegelian strategy that isemerging as a reaction to this scarecrow image ofHegel as the Absolute Idealist is the “deflated”image of Hegel freed of ontological-metaphysicalcommitments, reduced to a general theory ofdiscourse, of possibilities of argumentation. Thisapproach is best exemplified by so-called PittsburghHegelians (Brandom, McDowell): no wonderHabermas praises Brandom, since Habermas alsoavoids directly approaching the “big” ontologicalquestion (are humans really a subspecies ofanimals? is Darwinism true?), the question of God orNature, of idealism or materialism. It would be easy

to prove that Habermas’s neo-Kantian avoiding ofontological commitment is in itself necessarilyambiguous: while the neo-Kantians treat naturalismas the obscene secret not to be publicly admitted(“of course man developed from nature, of courseDarwin was right”), this obscure secret is a lie; itcovers up the idealist form of thought, the a prioritranscendentalism of communication that cannot bededuced from natural being. The truth is here in theform: as with Marx’s old example of royalists in therepublican form, Habermasians secretly think theyare really materialists, while the truth is in the idealistform of their thinking.

Such a deflated image of Hegel is not enough.One should approach the post-Hegelian break inmore direct terms. True, there is a break, but in thisbreak Hegel is the “vanishing mediator” between its“before” and its “after,” between traditionalmetaphysics and postmetaphysical nineteenth- andtwentieth-century thought. That is to say, somethinghappens in Hegel, a breakthrough into a uniquedimension of thought, which is obliterated, renderedinvisible in its true dimension, by thepostmetaphysical thought. This obliteration leavesan empty space, which has to be filled in so that thecontinuity of the development of philosophy can bereestablished. Filled in with what? The index of thisobliteration is the ridiculous image of Hegel as theabsurd “absolute idealist” who “pretended to knoweverything,” to possess Absolute Knowledge, toread the mind of God, to deduce all of reality out ofthe self-movement of (his) Mind—the image which isan exemplary case of what Freud called Deck-Erinnerung (screen memory), a fantasy formationdestined to cover up a traumatic truth. In this sense,the post-Hegelian turn to “concrete reality,irreducible to notional mediation” should rather beread as the desperate posthumous revenge ofmetaphysics, as an attempt to reinstall metaphysics,although in the inverted form of the primacy ofconcrete reality.

In what, then, resides Hegel’s uniqueness?Hegel’s thought stands for the moment of passagebetween philosophy and master’s discourse, thephilosophy of the One that totalizes the multiplicityand antiphilosophy, which asserts the Real thatescapes the grasp of the One. On the one hand, heclearly breaks with the metaphysical logic of

counting-for-One; on the other hand, he does notallow for any excess external to the field of notionalrepresentations. For Hegel, totalization-in-Onealways fails, the One is always already in excesswith regard to itself, it is itself the subversion of whatit purports to achieve; and it is this tension internal tothe One, this Twoness, which makes the One Oneand simultaneously dislocates it, it is this tensionwhich is the movement of the “dialectical process.” Inother words, Hegel effectively denies that there is noReal external to the network of notionalrepresentations (which is why he is regularly misreadas an “absolute idealist” in the sense of the self-enclosed circle of the totality of the Notion).However, the Real does not disappear here in theglobal self-relating play of symbolic representations;it returns with a vengeance as the immanent gap, theobstacle, on account of which representationscannot ever totalize themselves, on account of whichthey are “non-All.”

Is there nonetheless not a grain of truth in the mostelementary reproach to Hegel? Does Hegeleffectively not presuppose that, contingent and openas the history may be, a consistent story can be toldafterward? Or, to put it in Lacan’s terms: is the entireedifice of the Hegelian historiography not based onthe premise that, no matter how confused the events,a subject supposed to know will emerge at the end,magically converting nonsense into sense, chaosinto new order? Recall just his philosophy of historywith its narrative of world history as the story of theprogress of freedom. And is it not true that, if there isa lesson of the twentieth century, it is that all theextreme phenomena that took place over that timecannot ever be unified into a single encompassingphilosophical narrative? One simply cannot write aphenomenology of the Twentieth-Century Spirit,uniting technological progress, the rise ofdemocracy, the failed Communist attempt with itsStalinist catastrophe, the horrors of Fascism, andthe gradual end of colonialism.

But why not? Is it really so? What if, precisely, onecan and should write a Hegelian history of thetwentieth century, this “age of extremes” (as EricHobsbawm calls it), as a global narrative delimitedby two epochal constellations: the (relatively) long,peaceful period of capitalist expansion from 1848 to1914 as its substantial starting point whose

subterranean antagonisms then exploded with theFirst World War and the ongoing global-capitalist“New World Order” emerging after 1990 as itsconclusion, the return to a new all-encompassingsystem signaling to some a Hegelian “end ofhistory,” but whose antagonisms already announcenew explosions? Are the great reversals andunexpected explosions of the topsy-turvy twentiethcentury, its numerous “coincidences of theopposites”—for example, the reversal of the OctoberRevolution into the Stalinist nightmare—not the veryprivileged stuff that seems to call for a Hegelianreading? What would Hegel have made of today’sstruggle of liberalism against fundamentalist faith?One thing is sure: he would not simply take sideswith liberalism, but would have insisted on the“mediation” of the opposites.

(And, let us not forget that, for Hegel himself, hisphilosophical reconstruction of history in no waypretends to “cover everything” but consciously leavesblanks: the medieval time, for example, is for Hegelone big regression—no wonder that, in his lectureson the history of philosophy, he dismisses the entiremedieval thought in a couple of pages, flatly denyingany historical greatness to figures like ThomasAquinas. He does not even mention the destructionsof great civilizations like the Mongols’ wiping out somuch of the Muslim world (the destruction ofBaghdad, etc.) in the thirteenth century. There is no“meaning” in this destruction; the negativityunleashed here did not create the space for a newshape of historical life.)

This is why the time of Hegel still lies ahead—Hegel’s century will be the twenty-first.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Creston and Clayton would like to acknowledgethose who generously supported the efforts withoutwhich this work would have never materialized. Mostof all, we would like to thank the contributors for theirtime, work, and inspiration. In addition and inparticular, Slavoj Žižek, Mario D’Amato, JeffRobbins, and Catherine Malabou have encouragedus to pursue the original vision of Hegel seen in thiscollected volume, and Wendy Lochner and ChristineMortlock have constantly supported us at ColumbiaUniversity Press. We would like to acknowledge ourfamilies, Vicki Bryan Crockett and the ReverendMolly Bosscher Davis, as well as our children, Mariaand Bryan Crockett and Asher and Isak Davis,whose patience and love allowed us to labor with ourlove for risking Hegel in our time. To our respectivedepartments: At the University of Central Arkansas,Clayton wants to acknowledge his colleagues in theDepartment of Philosophy and Religion, includingCharles Harvey, Jesse Butler, Phillip Spivey, JakeHeld, Gary Thiher, Jeff Williams, Jim Shelton,Benjamin Rider, Jim Deitrick, Ron Novy, and TanyaJeffcoat. And at Rollins College, Creston’scolleagues Tom Cook, Margaret McLaren, L. RyanMusgrave, Eric Smaw, Scott Rubarth, Hoyt Edge,Yudit Greenberg, and Mario D’Amato; we thank youfor your intellectual and material support. Anespecial thanks is extended to the dean of the facultyat Rollins College, Dr. Laurie Joyner, for supportingthe research that made this book possible. Thanksto Melanie Davis for her amazing work in helpingprepare this manuscript for publication. Also thanksto Kelly Kozich and Kira Pack for their inspirationand encouragements. Finally, the Department ofInformation Technology at Rollins College needs tobe acknowledged for their care in providing thisproject with unwavering support, especially JosephF. Hughes and Caleb Jones.

INTRODUCTION

Risking Hegel: A New Reading for theTwenty-first Century

CLAYTON CROCKETT AND CRESTON DAVIS

It is possible that in reality the future of theworld, and thus the meaning of the presentand that of the past, depend, in the lastanalysis, on the way in which the Hegelianwritings are interpreted today.

—ALEXANDRE KOJÈVE

Hegel is at the origin of everything great inphilosophy for the last century.

—MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY

This volume presents some of the most prominentreaders of Hegel in contemporary philosophy andtheology. We assert here that Hegel has become thelitmus test of thought and possibility. How oneinterprets Hegel determines how one fundamentallyunderstands the very force of thought, being, andtruth. To be sure there are many different readings ofHegel, but among all the different readings, wesuggest that one must finally come down on one oftwo sides: the Right, conservative side, or the Leftist,revolutionary side.

The conservative side reads Hegel’s ontology asfinally remaining captive to both the Kantian splitbetween form and content and the notion of rationalautonomy. On this view Hegel’s doctrine of Beingmight first appear to be an infinite dialecticalbecoming that moves ever closer to Absolute Spiritbut in truth looses it nerve and folds back into thesecurity-domain of a self-enclosed methodologysundered from reality. A representative take on thisconservative stance is Charles Taylor’s 1975version of Hegel. Here Taylor argues that Hegel’ssynthesis cannot command adherents today not only

because it is built in part on the expressivist reactionto the modern identity which contemporarycivilization has tended to entrench more and more,but because it is built on an earlier and outmodedform of this reaction. It belongs to the oppositionwhile claiming to give us a vision of reasontriumphant; and it belongs moreover to a stage ofthis opposition which no longer appears viable.1

Here Taylor comes down by saying that basicallyHegel’s “synthesis” is ultimately controlled bywedding a kind of nostalgic, romantic view of theworld as essentially unified with a “rationalautonomy.” But this is a problem because itrelegates and confines Hegel’s ontology to aKantian stance premised on the rational-core truth ofthe universe debarred from disruptive spirit. Thisconservative reading that reduces Hegel to Kant istrue if you understand the former to be saying littlemore than he did in his very early essay on the “Lifeof Jesus.”2 In this essay, as T. M. Knox states,“Jesus appears as a teacher of Kant’s purely moralreligion.”3 Hegel’s infatuation with Kantian “Reason”is evident when in this essay he says, “Pure Reasoncompletely free of any limit or restriction whatsoeveris the deity itself.” Indeed Hegel’s Jesus tellshumanity to switch “the eternal law of morality andHim whose holy will cannot be affected by anythingbut by the law.”4 Jesus says: “You were commandedto love your friends and your nation, but you werepermitted to hate your enemies—I say however untoyou: Respect mankind even in your enemy, if youcannot love him.”5 And again: “Act on that maximwhich you can at the same time will to be a universallaw among men. This is the fundamental law ofmorality—the content of all legislation and of thesacred books of all nations.”6 Taylor’s Hegel is thusconfined to a liberal bourgeois subjectivity groundedin the Kantian idealized split between Reason andthe external world. Autonomous reason ascends tothe a priori of being which freezes the radicality of anontology of irruptive becoming that overturns allstatic categories.

This conservative position further assumes thatthe heart of Hegel’s own structure enacts “thenothing” of Kant’s “thing-in-itself” precisely becausethe structure of Kant’s metaphysics collapses: andso spirit is left to tarry with form sundered from

content. The Kantian metaphysical collapse takesplace because Kant’s nerve gives out at the precisemoment of truth. For instead of opting for risk, Kantcircles the wagons and settles into what basicallyamounts to a defensive posture that has indelibly leftits mark on philosophical structures ever since;indeed one could go even further here and show thatit was this Kantian conservative move (whichassumes a single version of transcendence, that is,Christian transcendence) which brings the radicalnature of thinking under the control of systems whichmust assume no transcendence, such as the Nation-State, in order to exist.

Of course it remains a viable debate, but is thisnot the exact stance that Hegel in his mature thinkingattempted to traverse? For if form (appearance) isdetached from all things beyond itself, then is not thedialectic hijacked by the very idea of form as such?That is to say, form left to itself fails to relate toanything outside itself. And this brings us to adecisive difference between Hegel and Kant:namely, whereas Kant circles the wagons in amoment of panic, Hegel pushes form beyond itsstatic definition and with it subverts orthodoxChristian transcendence.7 This stance is what Hegelcalled Being-for-itself, which opposes the situationwhereby Method always returns to itself as Method(self-referential and identical return) and so nevergoes beyond itself to touch the world (whichresembles not just the One of Parmenides8 but alsoone of the problems that plagues phenomenology).The notion of Method is here merely an uninterestedinterpretation of the world, a position that Karl Marxroundly criticizes in his Thesis on Feuerbach XI:“Philosophers have only interpreted the world, invarious ways; the point is to change it.” So, thisstance assumes that Hegel’s philosophy, as brilliantas it is, remains sundered from changing the world.

Then there is the other side, namely the “Leftist”reading of Hegel. Here one can read Hegel aspositing an infinite truth that fundamentally revoltsagainst the current and operating ideologyincarnated as a social and political ontological-revolutionary act. On this view the very dynamic logicof being is always and already overturning anyinstantiation of itself in terms that are static andfrozen. Moreover, this reading rests on the idea thatthe internal-core logic of the concept (Begriff) of

Spirit always and perpetually traverses beyond (Vor-stellung) the instantiation (or fulfillment) of itself andinto the future (as lack). In this regard, not only isHegel’s ontology not a self-referential interpreted“Method” sundered from the world, it actually is theunderlying logic of the world’s unfolding as such. Butit is at this precise juncture that we end upconfronting the deadlock hidden in both sides of thisHegelian divide: If the true meaning of Hegel’sontology is a Method sundered from the world (asMarx charged), and if the opposite is true, namelythat his ontology is inseparable from the world assuch, then what we have here is nothing short of atale of two totalizing logics. That is, the conservative,apolitical reading of method qua method convergeswith the Leftist reading of dynamic ontology insofaras Leftist revolutionaries become convulsed withquestions of formal method and substitute thetheorizing of the revolution for the revolution itself,and conservatives adopt a Hegelian dynamic socialontology to justify the ravages of capitalistrepression. This split between Right and Left Hegelforms a perfect circle, just as Hegel’s philosophyitself is wrongly seen as totally circular and thereforetotalizing in its logic. Nothing is to be done.

On this view, both Method and idealized ontologyas world are guilty of totalizing and violence becauseeach stance ultimately collapses all forms ofotherness into a monolithic horizon of sameness andIdentity. For the former the very existence of Methodfails to offer up a space within which othernessexists in terms of itself as other and so finally foldsinto the logic of the same. There are three seminaltwentieth-century philosophers who represent thisstance: Emmanuel Levinas, as seen in hisextraordinary book, Totality and Infinity; JacquesDerrida primarily in Glas; and Jean-FrancoisLyotard in his brilliant analysis of The PostmodernCondition. The fundamental question that Levinasraises in Totality and Infinity is deceptively simple:is there an outside to the closure of thinking wroughtby the history of Western philosophy from the Greeksto the twentieth century? Entertaining such aquestion as this, as simple as it may seem, reallydetermines how thinkers within the history ofWestern philosophy fit into Levinas’s genealogy ofmetaphysics. Levinas’s assumption is that allmetaphysics and ontology are by their very nature

infused with violence. From this view of ontology it isall too easy for Levinas to place Hegel into hislimited framework of Western philosophers.

For Levinas thinks of Hegel as a thinker whoepitomizes the problem that plagues philosophy: heis a totalizing thinker who creates a world in which allthings, all forms of otherness are absorbed within thehorizon of a single History without an iota ofdeviation. So, as it turns out, the entire book Totalityand Infinity is nothing short of a covert challenge toHegel’s (and Heidegger’s) ontology.9 Levinasexplicitly says that Hegel thinks that History is thetranscendent determiner of all Identity: “Objectivity isabsorbed in absolute knowledge, and the being ofthe thinker, the humanity of man, is therewithconformed to the perpetuity of the solid in itself,within a totality where the humanity of man and theexteriority of the object are at the same timeconserved and absorbed.”10 The picture of Hegelthat Levinas paints here is one of solidity, one thatcleaves to the sign of the In-Itself. But this reading ishighly problematic, as some of the contributors tothis volume demonstrate. Furthermore, Levinas’sreading can be seen as violent because he fails tosee how his own concept of totality is too quicklyattached to Hegel’s thought. He is thus able toreduce Hegel to the figure of Sameness.

The other towering figure who pigeonholed Hegel(at least from the late 1960s to the late 1980s) into atotalizing shell is Jacques Derrida. Derrida’sprinciple text in which he engages Hegel is Glas(which is the word for the tones of a death knell).11

Heinz Kimmerle tells us about the opening passagesi n Glas, which begins with the question “whatremain(s) today, for us, here, now, of a Hegel?” fromwhich alights another question, “what remain(s) forus to think after absolute knowledge?”12 For, likeLevinas, the Derrida of the late 1960s to the late1980s thinks little more of Hegel than a completetotalizer devoid of the possibility of exteriority anddifference. This can be seen most plainly inPositions, where Derrida attempts to distinguishdifférance from Hegelian difference. Derrida assertsthat Hegel, “in the greater Logic determinesdifference as contradiction only in order to resolve it,to interiorize it, to lift it up (according to the syllogisticprocess of speculative dialectics) into the self-presence of an onto-theological or onto-theological

presence of an onto-theological or onto-theologicalsynthesis.”13 The third and final thinker of this viewthat reduces Hegel to a totalizer without remainder isJean-Francois Lyotard. Lyotard writes that theconditions of modernity requires that

Philosophy must restore unity to learning,which has been scattered into separatesciences into laboratories and in pre-university education; it can only achieve thisin a language game that links the sciencestogether as moments in the becoming ofspirit, in other words, which link them in arational narration, or rather metanarration.Hegel’s Encyclopedia (1817–27) attemptsto realize this project of totalization.14

Thus all three main figures of twentieth-centurypostmodern philosophical orientation interpret Hegelas the apex of modernity in which difference andexteriority are impossible from within Hegel’sstructure.

For those who critique the radical side of Hegel, ifthe world really does unfold inextricably with and asSpirit, then this logic (at first glance) seems to beinherently wedded to a teleological trajectory of allHistory into which all things (all otherness anddifference from otherness) must ultimately fold. Andthis is precisely where Gilles Deleuze’s critique failsto see the radically contingent, fissured ontologylocated within the heart of Hegel. Deleuzeunderstands Hegel’s notion of difference asemerging from the latter’s notion of contradiction.Moreover, he explicitly says this when he comparesHegel to Aristotle: “Hegel determines difference bythe opposition of extremes or of contraries that isarticulated by the difference between Identity (self)and difference (other).”15 Thus for Deleuzedifference for Hegel is premised on a thing’snegation from “all that it is not.” So for a thing to be, itmust first be subtracted from everything else that it isnot. That is to say that a thing only is (as possessingthe ontological status of existing), as Deleuzeunderstands Hegel, when it is in absolute nonrelationwith everything else, and so ultimately everything (allHistory and so forth) must fold into a total systemwhose telos comes to itself necessarily through apretend difference, that is, a difference that containswithin it a secret singularity which is already part of

the telos of History as absolute knowledge comingto terms with itself. So for Deleuze (followingLevinas, Derrida, and Lyotard), difference for Hegelis really not difference but sameness. Additionally, itis clear that Deleuze understands Hegel as beingtoo conservative, stopping short of pushing the ideaof difference beyond the limits encompassed in theidea of contradiction seen in the Science of Logic.Deleuze follows Bergson here in the belief that allthings don’t begin with Identity via negation (as withHegel) but with the axiom that a “thing differs withitself, first immediately” (and not secondarily). ButSlavoj Žižek challenges Deleuze’s misreading ofHegel based on Bergson: “If ever there was a straw-man, it is Deleuze’s Hegel: is not Hegel’s basicinsight precisely that every external opposition isgrounded in the thing’s immanent self-opposition,i.e., that ever external difference implies self-difference? A finite being differs from other (finite)things because it is already not identical withitself.”16 Deleuze is much closer to Hegel than hewants to think.

Thus we can see that these two different twentieth-century takes on Hegel, working together, basicallyspell out the completion and exhaustion of histhought and by extension the death of metaphysicsand finally, according to Badiou, the end ofphilosophy for our time.17 On the other hand,suppose that this double threat (which culminates inthe work of Levinas, Derrida, Lyotard, and Deleuze)entirely misses the point precisely because eachcritical side does not believe in the very idea of riskitself? To put it differently, suppose that the force ofthe critique leveled at Hegel (that he is a totalizerand wedded to a historical teleology that neutralizesall difference) is actually presupposed within thesevery structures themselves? Thus, each side simply(if unconsciously) projects the assumption that thereis no risk within history itself onto Hegel and sodismisses him cleanly out of hand, as if Hegel werea sacrifice to the gods of philosophy.

The impetus of this book revolts against thisdouble-empty threat, for it is our belief that theprinciple reason why Hegel was dismissed isbecause it is his thought above all that gives us truerisk, it gives us hope. Here we merely repeat SlavojŽižek’s thesis originally submitted in Le plussublime des hysteriques: Hegel passé, namely, that

Hegelian “dialectics is for Hegel a systematicnotation of the failure of all such attempts—‘absoluteknowledge’ denotes a subjective position whichfinally accepts ‘contradiction’ as an internal conditionof every identity.”18 In other words, Hegelian“reconciliation” is not a pan-logicist sublation of allreality in the Concept but an affirmation of the factthat the Concept itself is “not-all” (to use thisLacanian term). Such an understanding of Hegelinevitably runs counter to the accepted notion ofabsolute knowledge as a monster of conceptualtotality devouring every contingency.

This still-too-prevalent interpretation of Hegel, tocontinue quoting Žižek,

simply shoots too fast, like the patrollingsoldier of the well-known joke fromJaruzelski’s Poland immediately after themilitary coup. At this time, military patrolshad the right to shoot without warning atpeople walking on the street after curfew(ten-o’clock); one of the two soldiers onpatrol sees somebody in a hurry at tenminutes to ten and shoots him immediately.When his colleague asks him why he shotwhen it was only ten to ten, he answers: “Iknew the fellow—he lived far from here andin any case would not be able to reach hishome in ten minutes, so to simplify matters,I shot him now….” This is exactly how thecritics of Hegel’s presumed “panlogicism”proceed: they condemn absoluteknowledge “before it is ten o’clock,” or highnoon, without reaching it—that is, theyrefute nothing with their criticism but theirown prejudices about it.19

In short, Hegel needs to be reclaimed to overcomethe death of thought that resulted from philosophy’slinguistic turn in the twentieth century which ended upsubverting the very core of philosophy’s desire,namely, the pursuit of truth.20

As such this volume represents thinkers from bothsides of this debate with the goal of not justpresenting Hegel in a neutral fashion (for this stancenever truly exists) but rather to continue to open upthe debate about which Hegel is most viable for ourtime. The editors here side with Hegel’s more

radical side, which escapes the generic andmisplaced boxes into which Hegel’s thought simplydoesn’t fit, especially in light of the need to embodyan ontology that resists being arrested by the deathof metaphysics, neoliberalism, and capitalism, whichtogether form a front that forecloses the possibility oftruth alighting in the world.

Each of the chapters in various ways push Hegelbeyond the stereotypical postmodern critique whereHegel represents the totalizing philosopher parexcellence, whose system proceeds with arelentless accumulation that swallows up alldifference and prevents any genuine change orbecoming. In other words, this volume’s thesisrevolts against the process that returns back andonly repeats the world’s happening in the sameterms as before. In this way, our thesis breaks withthe mechanical logic of the world, which can befound in the very heart of Hegel’s outlook—a virtuethat twentieth-century philosophy has systematicallyoverlooked. Each of the authors presents a genuineengagement with Hegel, whether as a serious Hegelscholar, a significant contemporary philosopher, orboth, and these engagements are constructive andcritical. Furthermore, the contributors considervarious aspects of Hegel’s philosophy in its religiousand political implications, providing readers anopportunity to reassess Hegel’s contemporarysignificance for considering important intersectionsof political and religious reflection.

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