The book is ostensibly about Heidegger, but it is really about Hegel, and even more importantly about envisioning Hegel as one who himself envisions thought in ways we are not used to, or even comfortable with, envisioning.ĭerrida’s later preoccupation with the religion of the “impossible” and the politics of the “undeconstructible” are obvious outcomes of his own, unspoken “Hegelian moment” when all of a sudden philosophy is no longer simply about signs and texts, reading and writing, but about the self-dissolution of finite intellectual calculations and the stilling of the rage for determinacy in a submission of the task of thinking to what he terms the “gift of death”. Read what Derrida in “Hegelian Semiology” (1971) calls “presence” as “father,” metaphysics as superego, etc.īut an anti-Oedipal Hegel can also be discerned transparently in the formation as well as the itinerary of post-structuralism.įor example, a revival of Derrida’s youthful efforts during the Sixties to reposition French structuralism – and hence the unshakable legacy in French thought of Cartesian formalism and deductive rationalism – as a semiotics of force, which derived directly from the opening chapters of The Phenomenology of Spirit, can be found in his book from the late Eighties entitled Of Spirit. One could also argue that Derrida’s project of deconstruction, born of his early wrestling with the quest for Husserlian “certainty” and Hegel’s theory of truth throughout the 1960s and early 1970, belongs to the very same genre. Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, first published in 1972, can also be read as a kind of anti-Hegelian screed, aiming to short-circuit the dialectic and drive the subject back from the demand of Absolute Spirit that it “go over into its opposite” (i.e., the Freudian renunciation of infantile desire) into the (maternal) orgiastics of pure becoming. Hegel was, and in a certain sense still is, the enduring Oedipal figure for the French post-structuralists. Increasingly historical research and genealogical perspectives on the rise of French “poststructuralism” – rebaptized as “postmodernism” by Jean-Francois Lyotard in the 1980s – demonstrate the the likes of Derrida, Deleuze, and even the young Badiou were merely offsc ourings of the kind of French Hegelianism fomented through the seminars of Alexandre Kojeve and the translations of Jean Hypolite. Very few philosophers, let alone theologians, who still after all these years of abuse continue to sport the name tag “pomo”, understand that if it were not for Hegel, they would never have had a calling. He embodies the historical inexorability of what the latter termed “creative destruction.” Hegel is to philosophy what the economist Joseph Schumpeter was to the concept of capitalism.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |