Reading Hegel. Slavoj Žižek

Чтение книги онлайн.

Introduction

      According to Marx’s famous saying, “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”¹ Displacing this well-known quip, if only a bit, we might ask: Does this also hold for world-historic personages and facts in and of philosophy? Could one read Hegel’s philosophy itself as the first, the tragic event? Such a reading would in some respects not be entirely alien to a certain phase in the reception of Hegel’s thought in general. Many of his readers have asserted that he can and must be considered an essentially tragic thinker – one may here just in passing refer to the famous “tragedy in ethical life” which is often taken to provide a paradigmatic articulation not only of the constitution of the Greek, but also of modern political life and ethical communities, despite this view being repeatedly contested. However, if – for the sake of following this hypothesis – Hegel represents the tragic event, not only of ethical life, but also of modern philosophy in general, where and how do we locate its repetition in the form of the farce? Where are we to find Hegel’s inverted twin?

There is certainly a farcical dimension to the immediate aftermath of Hegel’s thought. This is already the case, because (some of) his pupils prepared and published an edition of his works that became highly influential to most of his subsequent readers, and which consequently led, to some degree, to profound confusion about the true kernel and thrust of Hegel’s philosophical system, and – by adding comments and annotations that were taken to be his very own wording – generated a peculiar struggle about Hegel’s ultimate achievements (and failures). Surprisingly material from this edition was nonetheless able to become, for long, the main reference for reading Hegel – a sort of manifestation of the Deckerinnerung, the screen memory that overshadows what one perceives to be Hegel’s ultimate philosophical system.² However, the immediate Hegelian aftermath also already inaugurated, among other things, the infamous split between the young and the old Hegelians, which seemed to practically and farcically enact Hegel’s own claim that any immediate unity (and thus also that of the Hegelianism and of Hegel himself) will need to undergo processes of alienation and division to, at least possibly, reinstate the original unity in a reflected form. Does Hegel’s ultimate tragedy, in both senses of the term, lie in the fact that immediately after his death his philosophy was not only dissected and rebutted, but there was also a farcical element in the defense of a Hegel that was articulated in words he never wrote against critics who got it all wrong? So, did the farce not simply prove the tragedy to be a real tragedy? One could also, in both enlarging the historical focus and in locating the ultimate embodiment of the repetition of Hegel’s tragedy as farce, identify the tragedy of Hegel’s oeuvre with the fact that the arguably most influential and important pupil of the thinker who was by many perceived to have been a Prussian state philosopher (Hegel), has been one of the most influential and famous contenders of revolution and of overthrowing the state, namely Marx. May then not Marx’s ultimate Hegelian heritage – again confirming the tragedy–farce sequence – be identified in the fact that he himself not only witnessed as many rebuttals as Hegel, but was actually often claimed to have been the one who put (revolutionary) dialectic into practice, and thereby refuted it even more harshly, due to the brutal and bloody outcomes of his thought when concretely realized?

The move from tragedy to farce then happens first as tragedy, then as farce that becomes again, a tragedy of its own, СКАЧАТЬ