Reading Hegel. Slavoj Žižek

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СКАЧАТЬ and philosophical (or theoretical) apparatus, capable of truly understanding our own era. Its dawn appears to be, doubtlessly, a violent one, which thereby produces unsettling effects to established theories and destroys the already existing structures. It is our view that the present epoch can be best and fully grasped through the Hegelian system: “the whole mass of ideas and concepts” that are being proposed either as an anti-thesis of Hegel, or as a “subtle” replacement, are collapsing in front of the reality they try to understand and explain. In 1922 Lenin proposed the creation of a Society of the Materialist Friends of Hegelian Dialectics. The present book attempts in a different form to repeat this proposal. It is not only conceived as (yet another) exercise in affirming the unique dimension of Hegel’s philosophical system. We are also trying to emphasize in the following the necessity of drawing lines of demarcation within this very society, creating instructive liaisons and debating (between friends) what paths remain still open to explore and which might be the ones that are leading us astray. Our hope that the practice of such a Hegel-friendly society would not only prove to be farcical or tragic, but may bring to light a properly comic dimension of Hegel – a dimension that has been often neglected or at least downplayed in Hegelian scholarship but has been brought to the fore by some in recent years.⁴ The present book therefore presents three contributions from imagined members of this still fictitious society, three contributions within which becomes manifest the results of a continuous collective labor and discussions between three friends, who also happen to be friends of Hegelian dialectics.

Reading Hegel has been completed about three years after Reading Marx – the first book on which the three of us worked together. This move (from Marx to Hegel) is not accidental. It is our firm conviction that our contemporary predicament calls for a return from Marx to Hegel (that we also noted in our previous book). This return does not consist only of the “materialist reversal” of Marx (a thesis elaborated and developed in length by Žižek), but its implications and consequences are much deeper (for example the development and affirmation of an idealism of another kind, an idealism without idealism). So, why return (from Marx) to Hegel?

      Hegel was born about a quarter of a millennium ago. Then, as the famous Heideggerian adage goes, he thought and then he finally died. One hundred and twenty-five years after his death, Theodor W. Adorno remarked that historical anniversaries of births or deaths create a peculiar temptation for those who had “the dubious good fortune”⁵ to have been born and thus to live later. It is tempting to believe that they thereby are in the role of the sovereign judges of the past, capable of evaluating everything that and everyone who came before. But standing on a higher pile of dead predecessors and thinkers does not (automatically) generate the capacity to decide the fate of the past and certainly it is an insufficient ground to judge a past thinker. A historical anniversary seduces us into seeing ourselves as subjects supposed to know – what today still has contemporary significance and what does not. They are therefore occasions on which we can learn something about the spontaneous ideology that is inscribed into our immediate relationship to historical time, and especially to the past. Adorno makes a plea for resisting the gesture of arrogantly discriminating between What is Living and What is Dead – for example – of the Philosophy of Hegel.⁶ Adorno viciously remarked that “the converse question is not even raised,” namely “what the present means in the face of Hegel.”⁷ The distinction between what is alive and dead, especially in the realm of thinking, should never be blindly trusted to be administered only by those alive right now. Being alive does not make one automatically into a good judge of what is living and not even of what it is to be alive.

The dialectical intricacy to which Adorno is pointing does have a direct relation to a difficulty that Hegel himself pointed out at the beginning of the Phenomenology of Spirit: any “right now” comes with its inner dialectic that one can reformulate like this: as soon as we try to capture what we mean when we say “now,” now is not “now” any more. What seemed so evident and undoubtedly true and certain at first sight – now – proves to be essentially not what we expected it to be. That one therefore must question the assumption of stable distinctions (for example between life and death, as one assumes conceiving of them in natural and biological terms alone, or between the past as what happened before and the present as what is here right now) in general. This is one way of reformulating one fundamental law of the Hegelian dialectic, namely that “one divides into two,” as it was once rendered much later. Such formal(ized) and therefore abstract renderings of what we refer to as Hegel’s or the Hegelian “dialectic” then certainly and immediately also apply to their own product: “one divides into two” applies to each one produced by the first splitting of the one. The two sides that result from the originary division destabilize repeatedly, and everything that appears solid, from this perspective, melts into air. But this also means that things can revert from one to the other: there can be something undying in the thought of the dead – which can, but mustn’t be good – as well as something deadening in what seems most lively (including life itself or vitalism). As Brecht once remarked vis-à-vis Hegel’s dialectic (as presented in his Science of Logic): two concepts – very much as the two sides mentioned above – are separate, yet welded together: “they fight each other … and enter … into pairs, each is married to its opposite … They can live neither with nor without each other.”⁸ This is the “dialectic which” each side “possesses within itself” – it is what “moves the subject forward” [der Gang der Sache selbst], “the going or passing of the thing itself.”⁹

If in dialectical spirit, one inverts the spontaneous(ly tempting) perspective on Hegel and starts looking at our present, including at its past (thus even at Hegel) as well as our present’s (conception of the) future with Hegelian eyes – Hegel thereby becoming “die Sache selbst,” – one necessarily transforms one’s gaze. One looks in a circle (of circles) and might potentially end up forming a Borromean knot, or even a Klein bottle,¹⁰ both images that Hegel did not know, but could have liked. The latter always argued that philosophy deals not with “what is dead, buried and corrupt,” but with the “living present.”¹¹ To look at Hegel’s thought with eyes trained to see in this way, means to look at what his philosophy allows us to see in today’s world and proves Hegel’s dialectical contemporaneity. Hegel is with us – as the “absolute is with us … all along”¹² – in what his thought allows us to see in and of the present. What can it make us see? This is what we seek to find out in the following by reading Hegel. By reading Hegel as a reader of our contemporary situation; by reading Hegel as a reader of the readers of Hegel; and by reading Hegel as a thinker whose thought is equipped to intervene into the most burning questions not only of contemporary philosophy, but of contemporary socio-collective practice. Hegel assigned to art, for example, the capacity to make visible such invisible structures. In 1826 he remarks that the “semblance [Schein] of art is a much higher and truer form of the real than that which we are used to call reality.” This means that art allows us to see what makes reality tick, the dividing dialectical motors that determine it, “the powers at work in it.”¹³ Philosophy, for Hegel, has the same content as art has, but it presents it in a different form. It is this presentation that we will explore in the following.

      This will happen in three instalments: Slavoj Žižek will defend the thesis that Hegel is the philosopher most open to the future precisely because he explicitly prohibits any project of how our future should look. This becomes manifest in the Preface to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, with the Owl of Minerva, which takes off at dusk. Philosophy can only paint “gray on gray,” i.e., it only translates into a “gray” (lifeless) conceptual scheme, a form of life that has already reached its peak and entered its decline (is becoming “gray” itself). From this we can infer that we should reject all those readings of Hegel that see in his thought an implicit model of a future society reconciled with itself, leaving behind the alienations of modernity – Žižek calls them the “not-yet-Hegelians.” In this regard, the first chapter engages systematically with Robert Brandom’s masterpiece The Spirit of Trust, i.e. the position one of the most prominent “not-yet-there Hegelians.” And it demonstrates in what way Hegel has already moved beyond any such form of transcendental pragmatism.

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