Reading Hegel. Slavoj Žižek
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highpoint of his metaphysical regression, are still difficult to tackle for Hegel’s readers. To avoid those difficulties, the name “Hegel” seems to have become precisely the kind of toolbox that, as Michel Foucault once stated, one should take all kinds of theory to be and out of which one takes what one needs and what appears to be useful here and now. Is contemporary Hegelianism methodologically Foucauldian? Might this even be ultimately a good thing, or maybe the best one can do with Hegel today? This raises at least a number of questions: Firstly, what does it mean that one is witnessing today not only a Hegel revival but one that risks getting rid of all the elements that were considered crucial elements of the “substance” of Hegelian thought that made it once appear too dangerous, crazy, or just tragically metaphysical? And what is a Hegel without its “metaphysical,” “megalomaniac” kernel, wherever precisely we may locate it? Is this akin to the infamous beer without alcohol?
But the main question is the following one: what would Hegel – and not the name, “Hegel” – have said vis-à-vis this new wave of reception of his thought? What are we in the eyes of Hegel (and not the other way around)? Hegel always insisted that philosophy only must think what is (and not what should be). But what is, is (what constitutes) one’s “time.” And this is why philosophy has the difficult task of grasping its own time in thought (according to Hegel’s most famous definition of philosophy). But what does one do with a philosophy that asserts that the task of philosophy is to think its own time, after it exhausted and exceeded this very time? How does one think the present time with Hegel (a time after Hegel’s time that has also become the present of new Hegelianism)? Resulting from this, the thrust of the book you’re about to read can be best formulated in the following question: What does it mean to conceive of our time, “the today,” as a Hegelian? In the preface of his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel writes:
… it is not difficult to see that ours is a birth-time and a period of transition to a new era. Spirit has broken with the world it has hitherto inhabited and imagined, and is of a mind to submerge it in the past, and in the labour of its own transformation. Spirit is indeed never at rest but always engaged in moving forward. But just as the first breath drawn by a child after its long, quiet nourishment breaks the gradualness of merely quantitative growth – there is a qualitative leap, and the child is born – so likewise the Spirit in its formation matures slowly and quietly into its new shape, dissolving bit by bit the structure of its previous world, whose tottering state is only hinted at by isolated symptoms. The frivolity and boredom which unsettle the established order, the vague foreboding of something unknown, these are the heralds of approaching change. The gradual crumbling that left unaltered the face of the whole is cut short by a sunburst which, in one flash, illuminates the features of the new world.3
Hegel’s sunburst was the French Revolution, whose ardent supporter he was. In our predicament, we are still unable to fully grasp and comprehend the world in which we are, because inter alia we still were unable to solve the problems brought about by the French Revolution (how to properly bring together freedom and equality, for instance). We throw catchwords around, veiled as concepts, through which we try to understand the epoch into which we are entering globally. This grandiose rhetoric only comes to hide the lack of conceptual 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