1st Hegelian Society of Spirit Conference - Schedule and Abstracts

Thank you to everyone who joined us for our first conference. If you missed it, fear not. We have a YouTube video of the sessions here:

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Abstracts

KEYNOTE PRESENTATION: Hegel’s Critique of Hegel’s Position on War

Todd McGowan

Hegel’s philosophy constantly reveals how oppositions between external positions express internal contradictions within the positions. Nowhere is this more true than during warfare, which uses the figure of the enemy to obscure a nation’s self-division. And yet, Hegel sees war as formally necessary to lift subject’s out of their particular concerns and force them to confront the universal. This talk contends that, instead of facilitating an encounter with the universal, war actually ensconces people in their particularity by transforming contradiction into an opposition against the enemy.

The Being of Spirit is Ein Einziger Zug

Eric Jobe

In a major turning point in his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel discusses the conclusions of phrenology as an example of “observing reason” whereupon he comes to the inevitable conclusion of phrenology that “the being of spirit is a bone” (§343). Through this contradiction, Hegel exposes two important ideas, (1) that spirit must be thought of as material even as much as the material body must be thought of as spiritual, and (2) spirit is determined by something external and alien to it. Regarding the former, observing reason finds that its being is a Thing, which sets up an infinite judgment between spirit and thinghood, i.e. materiality. Regarding the latter, that something external to spirit, i.e. thinghood, could determine the being of spirit, consciousness recoils from this conclusion that the highest (spirit) and the lowest (bone) meet. But this is only representational thinking that must be superceded through the notion that arguably guides the whole of the Phenomenology, namely that “substance is also subject”, or to take from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, “What is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational”. Thus spirit seeks to actualize itself externally in thinghood through action. We might say that a reciprocal movement follows observing reason’s shocking discovery that the being of spirit is a bone whereby the external things are subjectified, i.e. one could then say that the being of bone is spirit, and this is how reason actualizes itself through external action or by spilling over itself as the individual self-consciousness into the collective.

In this paper, Hegel’s procedure outlined above will be shown to prefigure the psychoanalytic intervention of Sigmund Freud and more particularly of Jacques Lacan. Drawing upon the notion of “bone” as a heuristic device linking both Hegel and Lacan, focus will be drawn to Lacan’s notion of the Einziger Zug, “unary trait”, borrowed from Freud, but given its own unique valence in Lacan’s seminars. At the crux of this concept is the notion of the unary trait as a tally mark on a bone that marks each kill of a hunter. The signifier “marks” the subject as a one one, whereby the subject gains a mark of identification with the big Other, the source of this master signifier. This is the action of what Lacan refers to as “the One”, which ties together his teaching from Seminars VIII and IX all the way to Seminar XIX. In the function of the signifier, the subject gains an identification, i.e. the subject qua spirit is determined by something external and alien to it, namely the signifier that comes from the big Other. The observing reason, i.e. the analysand undergoing analysis, discovers this contradiction much as Hegel himself narrated, and discovers that the only way out of this deadlock is to see how this external Thing, i.e. the big Other, is itself subject or a desiring, lacking being the same as the subject. This is the way whereby the analysand is able to leave the analyst’s couch and transfer that knowledge to ethical action in the world.

Hegelian Negation in Lacanian Dialectics

Kristian Schäferling

The contemporary readings of Hegel through Lacanian concepts entail terminological changes in our understanding of the dialectic. Absolute self-consciousness, or, in other words, the dialectic between actualisation (Verwirklichung) and realisation (Realisierung), has been re-interpreted here as the dialectical (non-)relation between the symbolic and the real. The Lacanian post-Hegelian readings are thus attempts to radically subvert idealist thought by means of referring to each other precarious points of contact between Lacan and Hegel — such as: self-consciousness, desire, anxiety, death, will, political subjectivity etc.

The thesis underlying my paper is that through these recent approaches it becomes possible to reconsider the systematic intention of Hegel’s Phenomenology, which can be understood as the early Hegel’s unruly idea of an onto-logic. This possibility is 1 particularly intriguing insofar as it allows for reevaluating what seemed to be a dead end: As pointed out by Heidegger in several critical readings of Hegel, the absolute negativity unfolded in the Phenomenology cannot be adequately understood in a phenomenological frame alone, but rather has to be conceived of as an ontology. At the same time, Heidegger’s prominent critique and rejection of Hegelian negativity has proved to be a considerable obstacle to a better understanding of the ontological complex of natural consciousness and absolute knowing.

In my paper I therefore want to take up this point and ask how the ontological element of Hegel’s Phenomenology can help to better understand the philosophical significance of the recent approaches by the Ljubljana School or Alain Badiou, where Hegel is read through Lacan. Clearly these approaches are by no means affirmative reprisals of Hegelian thought, but neither is their point a critique of Hegel. Instead, the question posed by these contemporary political philosophers is whether it is possible to think a reversal of the movement of absolute spirit, as a critical form of political subjectivation. I will thus argue that it is through Lacanian psychoanalysis, especially Lacan’s work of the late 1960s and early 1970s (roughly seminars 16-20), that it becomes possible to reinterpret and reformulate the ontological problem of the dialectics of absolute consciousness in such way as to give critical answers both to Hegel and to Heidegger. In doing so, I will try to explain in which sense one can consider Hegelian negation to play a decisive role after Lacan.

The paper will proceed in two steps: 1) The first step will consider how negation in Hegel can be re-interpreted as dialectical mode of subjectivation. For negation to become an ontological category, it is necessary for logics and actuality to permeate each other. I will therefore ask how the dialectical movement of consciousness can be redefined as logical process setting out from the subject of anxiety. Here, then, it is no longer the (Hegelian) question of how to refer actualization and realization to each other, but rather how the realm of the logical and the realm of actuality can be referred to each other. It is at the crossing of the two that the Lacanian concept of the real is situated. Thinking Hegelian negation through Lacan as ontological category makes it possible to separate the internal differences of determinateness (Bestimmtheit) from negation. 2) The second step of the paper will consist in a sketch of how the Lacanian Post-Hegelian perspective might thereby allow for reinterpreting and dissolving Hegel’s critique of formalism into ontological thought and political thought, as presented for example in the works of Badiou. It will be discussed how the relation between negation and affirmation should not be understood as two opposing logical forms, but rather can be understood as inscribed into the sequence and process of subjective renewal which are prescribed to empirical consciousness by the real.

The Sociality of Madness: Spirit, Pathology, and the Sanity of Ethicality

Will Gregson

Despite a profound concern for the epistemological, ontological, and ethical conditions for being-at-home-in-the-world, G.W.F. Hegel published very little on a particularly serious threat to being-at-home: mental illness and disorder. The chief exception is found in Hegel’s Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830). In this work, Hegel briefly provides an ontology of madness (Verrücktheit), wherein madness consists in the inward collapsing of subjectivity and objectivity into the individual’s unconscious and primordial feeling soul. While a small number of studies of Hegel’s conception of madness exist, they focus on this small section of the Encyclopaedia. In contrast to this individual conception of madness, I argue in this article that Hegel also offers a compelling social account of madness in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), which arises at the elevated, self-reflective, and community level of spirit. This sociality of madness, as I call it, occurs when spirit is unable to reconcile two contradictory yet equally essential aspects of its reality, resulting in spirit’s structural homelessness. I argue that by examining this overlooked sociality of madness, we may read Hegel’s political-philosophical project in a new light: on the one hand, the ethical life (Sittlichkeit) presented in the Philosophy of Right (1821) becomes understood as a political therapeutic. On the other hand, if the ethical life fails to live up to the demand of being an adequate spiritual therapeutic, then the traditional reading of the Philosophy of Right as a reconciliatory hermeneutic becomes problematized, opening up new avenues for the proliferation of social pathology.

When Error Becomes Madness: Skepticism as Malady of the Soul in Hegel

Miles Hentrup

Skepticism has long been considered an important element of healthy human reasoning and sound common sense. Indeed, since at least the time of Sextus Empiricus, it has even been prescribed as an effective treatment for a variety of mental and spiritual afflictions. According to Sextus, those “who hold the opinion that things are good or bad by nature are perpetually troubled” – troubled, for instance, by an excessive pride and arrogance in the possession of good things or an unsettling awareness that they may soon be lost. The modes of skepticism, however, purport to offer a remedy for such a troubled mind, promising both “mental tranquility” [ataraxia] and “moderation of feeling” [metriopatheia] through the suspension of judgment and cessation of belief. But if skepticism can be generally counted on as an effective tool for critical thinking, there is surely also a point at which it becomes genuinely pathological. Obsessive indecision, crippling self-doubt, and the paranoiac mistrust of authority all present cases in which the skeptical inclination to question has grown into something pernicious. Philosophical discussions of skepticism tend, as a general rule, to ignore such cases, presenting skepticism rather as a method for avoiding dogmatic beliefs. While this focus has given rise to crucial developments in the theory of knowledge, it has also contributed to the overall impression that skepticism is a narrowly epistemological problem warranting a narrowly epistemological solution. Such solutions are in ready supply in the history of philosophy, but they seem to offer little relief from the maladies just described.

In this paper, I argue that Hegel provides us a way of understanding skepticism as a psychical condition. I will suggest that this contribution only comes into view, however, when we read two dimensions of his philosophical project in connection with one another: his treatment of skepticism in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit and his discussion of the varieties of mental derangement [Verrücktheit] in the Anthropology, specifically the condition that he refers to as “folly” or “madness proper” [die eigentliche Narrheit]. While it has been shown that Hegel’s writings are helpful for recognizing the epistemological and conceptual dimensions of skepticism, less obvious is the value of Hegel’s writings for recognizing skepticism as a psychical and affective phenomenon. This is at least in part due to the fact that his discussion of skepticism and his account of the maladies of the soul are confined to two different parts of Hegel’s philosophical system and that he never explicitly connects or draws together these two discussions. Indeed, it would seem that skepticism ceases to play an important role in his system of philosophical science, insofar as all subsequent versions of the Phenomenology of Spirit after 1807 omit any explicit reference to stoicism, skepticism, and unhappy consciousness. I will argue, however, that there are striking similarities between Hegel’s account of skepticism and his discussion of folly. One finds, for instance, a parallel dialectical development between, on the one hand, Hegel’s account of stoicism, skepticism, and unhappy consciousness and, on the other hand, his account of weak-spiritedness, folly, and insanity. Moreover, Hegel presents both skepticism and folly as a condition in which one oscillates between two competing sources of representation – one subjective and one objective. In the case of skepticism, the subject oscillates back and forth from “one extreme of self-equal self-consciousness to the other extreme of contingent, disordered, and disordering consciousness." Similarly, in the case of folly or madness proper, one oscillates between a fixed idea or a particular representation and the objective consciousness from which the former has been dislocated. Finally, Hegel describes each of these as problems of vanity [Eitelkeit]. By drawing out these parallels, I hope to show the fruitfulness of Hegel’s thought for understanding skepticism not just as an abstract epistemological challenge but as an affliction involving the soul’s very development.

Žižek’s Dialectics of History in the Eyes of Hegel

Joseph Carew

This paper has a two-fold function: to demonstrate that Žižek gets something fundamentally right and something fundamentally wrong about Hegel. The purpose of doing so, however, is not to simply fight over “bookish” matters of textual exegesis but instead to sketch a new, alternative Hegelianism that might better captivate us today.

Section 1 considers Žižek’s reading of Hegelian historical dialectics as radically contingent, not governed by some God-like mega-Subject, and open-ended. That Žižek is fundamentally right here will be shown by analyzing the moments of immediacy, negation, and negation of negation that characterize the transitions of shapes of spirit in Hegel’s Phenomenology. First, we have the immediate lifeworld of a historical community mediated by its conceptual universe (or, in Lacanese, “the Imaginary” supported by “the Symbolic”). Second, without fail this conceptual

universe eventually and unpredictably generates an internal contradiction (what Lacan calls “the Real”) that effectively negates it from within. Third, this negation then gives rise to the possibility of its own negation via the creation ex nihilo of a new conceptual universe that aims to overcome the old one’s antagonism by integrating it, but the success and coordinates of which are unknowable a priori. Any “logical” necessity displayed by Hegelian historical dialectics is therefore, as Žižek succinctly puts it, the product of the retroactive rewriting of its past that suppresses its initial radical contingency. The structure of historical-dialectical movement thus entails (1) that there is no cosmic world spirit pulling its strings: being impelled forward by its own negativity, the whole process is immanent to human spirit qua an irreducible set of social practices (politics, art, religion, and philosophy); and (2) that, since there is “no Other of the Other” directing it towards some pre-given eschatological end, it is open-ended.

Section 2 evaluates Žižek’s reading of the Hegelian subject. To explain why spirit creates a conceptual universe in the first place, Žižek marshals Hegel to postulate that our biological nature must be broken. Because our instincts have been derailed, they no longer provide us with innate patterns of behaviour by which we seek out pre-set objects to satisfy biological needs. This unsettling state wherein natural instincts become the denaturalized, unruly drives described by psychoanalysis, is best captured by Hegel’s concept of “the night of the world” as the ground zero for history and its dialectics: it opens up space for the violent imposition of an alien, non-natural

symbolic order upon the drives, thereby domesticating them by creating an autonomous conceptual universe. That Žižek is fundamentally wrong on this point is proven by Hegel’s insistent remarks that rationality is a distinctively human and naturally occurring instinct. As such, the subject matter of Hegel’s Logic—the formal structure of categories, judgments, and inferences—must be conceived as innate patterns of behaviour that we perform to satisfy a species-specific biological need: the need to create a conceptual universe that explains the world around us and what we should do in it. This entails that the conceptual universe is not some non natural “big Other” that colonizes the short-circuited life-substance of drives. For Hegel, it is just as natural for spirit to create a conceptual universe as it is for a spider to create a web; there is no prior “night of the world” required to explain why we create a conceptual universe.

The Conclusion demonstrates how this more textually faithful “naturalist” Hegelianism provides a framework better suited for today. We will see that Žižek’s “anti-naturalist” Hegelianism has an unfortunate effect. To ensure the open-endedness of historical-dialectical movement, Žižek must appeal to “the night of the world.” But since the conceptual universe is thereby made into a reaction formation against it, there is always an “indivisible remainder” in any conceptual universe: something of the excessive life-substance of drives is left over, fails to be domesticated, and eventually destabilizesits regime. Consequently, the transition from one conceptual universe to another is, as Žižek says, by its very nature the “mad” gesture of creating an entirely new and arbitrary conceptual universe and imposing it on said life-substance. This transforms historical dialectical movement into a bad infinity of repeated failures. Worse still, while Žižek does capture the radical contingency and immanence of his historical dialectics, what he misses is how its open-endedness nevertheless makes room for truly rational progress. In its movement, we witness the journey of spirit’s rational satisfaction and its vicissitudes, not drives and their vicissitudes: each transition is not “mad” but the logical process by which spirit reflectively revises its conceptual universe by creatively qualifying and building upon it (the meaning of “sublation”), learning along the way. Thus, there is an unbridgeable gap between Hegel and psychoanalysis— the Hegelian unconscious is our rational instinct and has no relation to unruly drives responsible in psychoanalysis for civilization and its discontents.

The Beginning and the End of Philosophy: Hegel's Philosophical Pedagogy

Simone A. Medina Polo

From as early writings such as the Tübingen essay, we find that Hegel is considerably invested in the project of education, culture, and cultivation—notably sharing a etymological root in German between the term Bildung, which is specially notable when Hegel deploys Bildung instead of Kultur with respect to his approach to culture as the domain of spirit. In his earliest work, Hegel adopted the late Katian project of pure religious faith and universal religion in conceiving of a ground for the ethical formation and inclination towards philosophy by the members of a given society.

Although Hegel's work distances himself from Kant's critical philosophy and its conception of the ethico-theological ends of reason, this interest in philosophical cultivation remains throughout Hegel's mature work. This presentation will aim to introduce the major themes of Hegel's early work as well as their reflection in Hegel's mature work such as the Phenomenology of Spirit, the Science of Logic, the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, and the Philosophy of Right. Most crucially, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel hints at an implicit pedagogy through the ambiguous status of the preface to the Phenomenology—a text which was written after the first draft of the Phenomenology was produced and lost, thus acting both as a testament from Hegel's own commitment to undergo the process of the Phenomenology as well as a prop that seeks to mobilize our philosophical drive to commit to the process and the patience that it requires. In the Science of Logic, Hegel makes this implied element of his philosophy more explicit with the discussion concerning where we begin with philosophy. And in the Philosophy of Right, Hegel offers an image of philosophy coming of age into old age through the figure of the owl of Minerva.

In short, Hegel provides a sketch of a philosophical pedagogy as well as an intergenerational exchange between lovers of wisdom and those have actualized a wisdom concerning that love: we fall in love with wisdom, we exhaust all of its possible avenues into a bedrock of contradiction that constitutes the Absolute, we share communion among those who share in this Absolute Spirit, and we lower the ladder of wisdom for the philosophers to come while looking on to the passing of our own time.

Situating Phenomenology: Contemporary Applications of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit

Lucas Potts

A discursive tension exists among Hegel interpreters. To generalize, the tension highlights a distinction between historical and apodictic interpretations of Hegel’s system.

On the one hand, an historical interpretation of Hegel’s system would have us stay fast to the contingency and openness of the passage of time where, by-and-by, our grey-on-grey will be painted; and it is admitted that the capacity to decisively and explicitly formulate a philosophy, actually, marks that it’s time has passed – this point is thought to pertain to Hegel’s own thinking as well which, arguably, sets his system on similar or equal footing alongside the metaphysical systems that also served their own time.

On the other hand, the apodictic interpretation of Hegel would focus-in on the necessity and totality of the system as a “complete conceptual comprehension of all reality” which is always-and-everywhere true; and the Hegelian system thereby serves as the pinnacle of thought, having summed-up and synthesized the philosophical tradition as such. From this perspective it is supposed that Hegel’s system is eternally true, not ceasing its ongoing veracity as soon as its time has passed.

Several hundred years have passed since the inauguration of the Hegelian project and, meanwhile, several hundred years of what is called philosophy has continued to be produced. In the light of this passage of time, the continuing production of philosophy not only appears differently, but also plays different roles, to each side of this tension.

For the historical reading, one can contend that the new philosophies which have emerged since Hegel’s time move past Hegel’s system and capture genuinely new and essentially unforeseeable discursive configurations yet to be thought. A danger of an historical reading is that Hegel’s system, and the philosophies that he brought into his system, become something of historical artefacts – lost to their time as it passes – and the relevance of Hegel’s thought to our own thought, or to any time’s contemporary situation, becomes one of mere historical or literary venture, one which could be scaled for resources as one would, or could, with any discourse, insofar as they are considered to be on equal-footing, historically-speaking. Hegelianism risks losing it’s Philosophically-grounded discursive position of absolute veracity and becomes a mere theoretic or methodology characteristic particularly of the historical period of it’s inception, mentionable in passing primarily in anthologies.

Conversely, if one assumes the apodictic reading then any-and-all new philosophizing is assumed to always-already have been essentially comprehended in the system, offering nothing new to philosophize. A danger of an apodictic reading is that any-and-all new philosophizing is considered to already be possessed of an Hegelian dimension, to already have it’s place in the system. Apodictic Hegelianisms risk failing to tarry with what goes by the name of contemporary philosophy, in any age, if the task of demonstrating an Hegelian dimension of that contemporary thought is not undertaken – otherwise an eternally true discourse lapses into irrelevance with contemporary thought and becomes a bookish and reserved effort by itself.

Given this distinction within Hegelian discourse, and given the proliferation of philosophical discourse since Hegel’s time, the question that I will pose in order to open-up my inquiry is: What would a Hegelianism need to be in order to demonstrably operate from the apodictic veracity of Hegel’s system while simultaneously and mutually situating contemporary philosophizing essentially within Hegel’s system?

My thesis pertains to Hegel’s Phenomenology Of Spirit, which is regarded as an/the systematic entry-point into Hegel’s system: once the text has been comprehended by the philosophical practitioner it provides the methodological means to engage contemporary philosophical claims to knowledge and situate them within the introduction to Hegel’s system essentially and systematically. In other words, as an attempt to dissolve the aforementioned discursive tension, my thesis contends that it is actually the introduction to Hegel’s system that serves as the touchstone with historical experience that permits the apodictic nature of the Hegelian system of knowledge to engage essentially with, mutually enrich, and remain relevant to, contemporary discourses. What focalizing the Phenomenology Of Spirit, in effect, achieves and demonstrates is how it is that Hegel’s thinking, in his time and ours, paradoxically, attests to a complete conceptual comprehension of all reality while also attesting-to and permitting a radical openness to any-and-all claims to experience. This achievement requires an ongoing demonstration. I will contest that this approach to Hegelianism thereby eases the tension by demonstrating the very apodictic veracity of the system of absolute knowledge in, as, and through comprehending, situating, historically contemporary knowledge discourses essentially in terms of the developmental role that they play in the advance toward Philosophical Science that is the Phenomenology Of Spirit.

Saturation of the Will? Passivity of the Intellect! The Influence of Hegelian Patience on Contemporary Theory

Laurent Shervington

This paper explores the importance of G.W.F. Hegel’s claim that philosophizing is a fundamentally passive and patient procedure, arguing that this concept plays a generative role in the theories of contemporary Hegelian (or neo-Hegelian) thinkers Slavoj Žižek, Robert Pfaller, Sylvain Lazarus and Alain Badiou. To begin, the anticipated response to the philosopher as passive – the charge of quietism – will be addressed. In considering this critique, one often made against Hegel apropos the statement “The rational is real, and the real is rational” from Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820), this paper will consider the fetishisation of practice over theory in today’s contemporary political landscape, calling for an adequate distinction between informed and immediate forms of action. Implicit in this critique is Slavoj Žižek’s reversal of Marx’s Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach, in which he proposes the formula: “Don’t Act. Just Think.” Building from this idea, the paper will turn to how other contemporary thinkers have, in different contexts, utilised the Hegelian idea of patience, starting with the theoretical work by Robert Pfaller on the concept of interpassivity. For Pfaller, interpassivity is the unique social phenomenon of delegation, whereby a subject outsources their enjoyment, belief or knowledge to an Other, thereby rendering themselves passive. While Pfaller’s own context for the concept is the debate within aesthetics around the primacy of interactivity over passivity, the work of Gabriel Tupinamba has mobilised the idea in explicitly political terms, highlighting the potentially positive role of interpassivity in the formation of social groups. Finally, the pairing of Sylvain Lazarus and Alain Badiou will be conceived. In particular, Lazarus’ notion of the saturation point, in which certain forms of political organisation become ineffective at particular historical conjunctures, and the axiom that politics is defined by its rarity, rather than its ubiquity, form as refined responses to a politics of immediate action, emphasising in their own way the virtue of patience.

On Spirit in Particular: Ethical Life and Death in Adorno’s Reading of Hegel

Daniel Pepe

Adorno’s Negative Dialectics offers a critical reading of Hegel’s concept of spirit that restores the particularity, or negativity, of ethical life, in an effort to redeem the ethical content and experience of spirit. Hegel initially recognizes that ethical life only emerges in and among particulars. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, he argues, “[i]n its simple truth, spirit is consciousness,” because spirit is nothing but the self-conscious development of ethical claims through their living embodiment, or division, among ethical actors. This definition already implies the necessary particularity of ethical life. To take up ethical life is to stand in opposition to some other doing the very same thing, that is, spiritually endeavoring to make ideal ethical claims “real” ones, i.e., existing and satisfied in action. As a result, the particular embodies ethical life in a specific, yet contradictory, manner: each is the spiritual activity that brings an ethical claim to life and, at the same time, each negates the spiritual content or substance of the other, especially insofar as each particular meets the inner moral demand to make itself more than particular (namely, to realize their ethical claims completely and universally). For Hegel, ethical life delimits this context of particularity, in which spirit experiences and, quite simply, is the embodiment of contradictory ethical claims—both at the level of externally related, competing particulars and also inside the spiritual particular itself, qua particular. Yet, while each embodiment of self-conscious spirit finds itself as a being-for-another—namely, dependent on some other outside itself in order to become itself, even if just to negate the other—there is no particular, no other, that is not already an embodiment of spirit. From this shared, if not universal, context of spirit’s particularity, Hegel infers the conclusion that spirit’s self negation—the sundering and sacrifice of its particularity—must entail the unity and perfection of ethical life, rather than, as Adorno sees it, its destruction.

Hegel’s conclusion to ethical life holds that spirit’s self-negation—the sacrifice of its own particularity—preserves only one, necessary ethical claim: the “absolute freedom” of spirit to posit itself. For Hegel, this means that spirit’s freedom is never lost amidst the divisions and contradictions of ethical life, but it is, rather, only multiplied and confirmed. Every particular embodiment of spirit really is the continuous realization of its whole, universal substance, namely, absolute freedom, which cannot be indexed to any one particular. This is, however, where Adorno argues that Hegel turns against the truth of spirit: “Hegel hypostasizes spirit […] he must inflate it into the whole, although spirit has, according to its concept, its differentia specifica in that it is a subject, and therefore not the whole.” All of Adorno’s criticisms of Hegel could, perhaps, be reduced to those lines. By arguing that Hegel hypostatizes spirit, Adorno means that he raises one aspect from the relational context of particularity into the sole condition for the possibility of particulars in general. Yet, if spirit only develops in and through its simple truth—the self-conscious division of ethical substance into particular subjects—then there is no spirit that is not some particular subject, and no particular subject that does not have negativity or contradiction in itself. Adorno thus intends to provoke the question whether spirit can be both “absolutely” free and also preserve anything of ethical life. Since absolute freedom exists in an exclusively universal subject position, a specifically abstract unity, no particular subject could ever embody it and, at the same time, remain a particular subject. Adorno, now, forces an ultimatum on Hegel. Spirit is absolute freedom, (a) because spirit preserves itself by negating and destroying all ethical claims as particular. Then, absolute freedom has no possible ethical content, since all ethical claims as such require a relationship to otherness and, thereby, particularity. Or, (b) spirit’s freedom is neither universal nor absolute, such that its negation and sacrifice of particulars never rises above the context of particularity. This, of course, also destroys the ethical content of spirit by indexing it to the false universality of some heteronomous particular. Both entail the absolute death of ethical life for spirit—the first is an eschatological logic and the second is the logic of genocide that Adorno names with the eponym, “Auschwitz.”4 The task of negative dialectics, as I argue, is to preserve the particularity and the negativity of ethical life against its false salvation in any hypostasis that would claim to be the truth of ethical life simply because it destroys spirit’s particularity. For Adorno, the truth of ethical life need not be its result. Indeed, I argue that the negativity of ethical life is much less a catastrophe than spirit’s hypostasization, and that alone, if nothing else, can become a resource for returning ethical meaning to the fragmented particularity and negativity of spirit in modernity.

Puppeteers and Ventriloquists: Hegel Scholarship, Žižek and the Johnston-

Pippin debate

Kobe Keymeulen

This paper is the culmination of my research into the contemporary debate between American philosophers Adrian Johnston and Robert Pippin, a debate which has roots going back at least a decade (if not 250 years) to the publication of Slavoj Žižek’s seminal Less Than Nothing (2012). Its most recent forms have been Pippin’s scathing review of Johnston’s A New German Idealism, followed by an extended back and forth in subsequent issues of Warwick’s journal Pli. Broadly speaking, Johnston slowly takes over the mantle from Žižek over the course of the decade as the latter becomes disinterested with the subject. Yet the first equally enters the conversation by “answering the question differently from Žižek." My goal here is threefold: (I) to give an accurate overview of the debate, (II) to identify and clarify its contemporary points of contention (versus those it has left behind) and (III) to explore the overall dynamic (relations, tensions) between Hegel scholarship and the Ljubljana School / Transcendental Materialism.2 However, as all three goals are innately linked, I will focus my presentation on the following major themes, where, in my view, they always are all present:

‘Deflationism.’ Undoubtably, the main crux of the debate is the contention that Pippin advocates for a “deflated Hegel”, taken to mean an “avoidance of full ontological commitment." Already contained in this starting shot are also three associated tensions which persist to this day. First, the idea of ‘true Hegelian’ reading versus a ‘weaker’, more cowardly one has since become a core argument for many, even outside the Ljubljana school. It must be acknowledged that Pippin explicitly challenges.

As well as perhaps an even more bizarre interview in a recent issue of arguably the Ljubljana School’s most popular journal (Crisis and Critique) in which Pippin quite literally refers to the issues of the debate (Realphilosophie etc.) without mentioning either Johnston or Žižek by name. Though of course, the differences (to what extent they exist) between these last two is intrinsically linked to the questions at hand.the fruitfulness of this distinction. Second, it is important to note that, despite Pippin being cited by Žižek, it is Robert Brandom and the Pittsburgh School who are first mentioned. To this day nearly always cited in the debate as another example of someone making the same ‘mistakes’ as Pippin. Brandom’s secondary response must here be taken into account. Lastly, Žižek claim that this “brings us close to Kantian transcendentalism” again sets up a domino effect of discussions regarding Pippin’s (supposed) ‘Kantianism’. I will highlight just highlight two dimensions here: the slow move from a ‘Kantianism’ charge to a disputed Kant/Fichte and Spinoza/Schelling dichotomy, and Pippin’s recent counterclaim that it is Johnston’s reading of Kant which is ‘deflated.'

Hegel’s Ontology. Any sense of ‘debate’ really begins with Pippin’s 2012 review, which in turn prompts a response, where bystanders would identify Žižek’s “gappy ontology” as the main focus of critique. This is not to say Pippin is the first to have noticed this aspect of Ljubljana philosophy, but rather the first scholar of his calibre to approach the Ljubljana School as an “interpretation of Hegel." In turn, Johnston’s first major contribution to the debate is also arguably framing it fully within Hegel scholarship, position the majority of major voices in some relation to it. However, he would later abandon this frame as the distinctions between his and Žižek’s views on Schellingian nature came into sharper focus.

System. Also striking in Pippin’s original review is its explicitly political points. Johnston identifies early on the potential necessity of these remarks, but the matter is mainly picked up later in the writings of another significant American Hegelian, Todd McGowan, who directly confronts the interplay between contemporary politics and one’s reading of Hegelian State and Sittlichkeit. So, echoing Žižek’s contentions with David Bordwell, the debate also provides insights into the entanglement of scholarly and political engagements. Johnston quickly puts this matter. Pippin does here cite an early paper of Johnston (then still mainly the first tendril of Žižek scholarship) here in an arguably positive light, but perhaps over-symbolically spells his name wrong to the side when it becomes but a fraction of a classic Hegelian question (to him at least), namely that of Anfang (‘With what must philosophy begin?’). The main crux of the later Johnston arguments resolves around Pippin’s (supposed) denial of Hegel’s Realphilosophie. This in turn would then be a consequence of an overemphasis of Pippin on Hegel’s Logik within the System. Pippin in turn disputes this.

To bring these three themes together, I conclude with a persistent fourth.4 As Johnston puts it, over the decade the debate has turned “to a reversal of Žižek’s question ‘Is it still possible to be a Hegelian today?’”5. What returns time and time again is the question of how one ought to be ‘reading’ and ‘interacting with’ not only Hegel, but the history of philosophy itself. In order add some potentially fruitful comments to this matter, I draw from sources both new and old.