The complexity, depth, and historical position of Hegel’s work all make him a likely and recurring target for rereadings in the light of later thought. Thus today there are many Hegels: a Freudian and a Marxian Hegel, an existential and an phenomenological Hegel, even an analytic philosophy Hegel. There is a Hegel for those with a synthesizing bent, but also for those who challenge totalities or absolute beginnings. Efforts to avoid formalism or to accommodate historical change likewise can find much that is useful in the Hegelian effort to think with the oppositions that still maintain their hold on philosophical debate: certainty and truth, individual and society, form and content, experience and thought, and so on and on. While this openness to rereading depends on the richness -- not to mention the ambiguities and contradictions -- of Hegel’s thought, it also illustrates hermeneutic insights about the inherent creativity of reading itself. Often engagements with Hegel show how novel and fruitful readings can result from bringing new questions and experiences to long familiar texts. Such a productive interaction may lie in the nature of reading in general; at any rate, it need not make such new readings arbitrary or subjective.
None of these perhaps platitudinous comments about Hegel and rereading seem to be quite what the editor of the present volume proposes when he offers us the prospect of a "Hegel after Derrida". For Stuart Barnett, these authors are not simply important figures whose works stand in informative relations to each other. Derrida’s achievement, combined with Hegel’s unique relation to modern thought, should, Barnett suggests, make possible from this rereading new directions in thought that step beyond the limitations of the modern tradition. Underlying this anthology, then, is a thesis about the possibility of a distinctively postmodern thought. Perhaps this thesis gives us a standard by which we can measure the volume’s success.
The Hegel who comes "after Derrida" should be a different Hegel in the precise sense of a Hegel who illuminates the postmodern terrain even while being -- or just because he is -- an emblematic thinker of modernity. None of this will be possible, of course, if Derrida is not the thinker Barnett takes him to be, namely an initiator of new postmodern possibilities. Derrida’s contribution in this regard is usually associated with deconstruction, a critical rethinking of conceptions or arguments that play logically crucial or otherwise revealing roles in the organization of epistemological and metaphysical thought. Derrida’s early discussions of Husserl provide good examples of his close reading of texts in which claims about thought, evidence, reasoning, and the thinking subject are shown to depend on assumptions that undercut the project of a presuppositionless philosophical science that is grounded in purely descriptive or intuitive procedures.1 Particularly important for Derrida is the interplay of thought and language. He argues that, time and again, Husserl must presuppose aspects of the linguistic web that transcends immediate subjectivity even as he tries to ground linguistically dependent claims on subjective acts. In association with this, Derrida develops his signature term of "differance," whose idiosyncratic spelling marks out the inescapable dependence of consciousness on a linguistic "other" it is supposed to precede.
The arguments against Husserl are meant to have a wider significance, since Derrida takes Husserl’s philosophy at its word as an attempt to recuperate the philosophical tradition in the face of positivism and historicism. Derrida’s thinking thus figures within a number of linguistically minded challenges to this tradition, but one that sees Husserl’s opponents themselves as enmeshed in modern epistemological and metaphysical assumptions. In this respect Derrida resembles the thinker to whom he owes his greatest debt, namely Heidegger, who earlier undertook a "destruction" of metaphysics as an attempt to challenge modernity’s "forgetfulness" of the question of being.2
If Derrida opens us to new possibilities of thought, these are not obviously matters of the fundamental ontology which in Heidegger’s hands takes an increasingly mystical turn. Rather than a hermeneutics of being, Derrida offers a rather dialectical phenomenology of texts, in which philosophical projects repeatedly turn out to depend on assumptions that undercut their aims. In his early work this argument works within more or less conventional philosophical discourse, but, though the pattern persists, the language and focus of deconstruction becomes more metaphorical, playful, and, to many readers, more obscure. So far as there is something specifically postmodern at work here, it is more evident in its negative claims about the instability and self-defeating character of modern thought than in claims about what comes next. In fact, the challenge to thought makes theoretical claims in the conventional sense a doubtful undertaking since the standards of argumentation have themselves been put in question.
Derrida’s challenge to the coherence of discursive thought blurs the boundaries between philosophy and literature, since theory itself becomes a kind of fiction that is characterized by a play of unstable meanings. This blurring is reflected in Derrida’s practice of writing as well. In his hands philosophy can be studied and practiced like literature, just as literature can in turn be approached as philosophy. What results is a kind of writing that defies the conventions of philosophy by what can seem a willful focus on the obscure and the paradoxical, but also exercising a kind of playfulness and wit that can either amuse or dismay the reader with conventional philosophical expectations. It is quite in keeping with this that the present volume includes more contributions by members of departments of literature than of philosophy. This is not interdisciplinary collaboration as usually understood, since the basis of the coherence of the respective disciplines is in question. But what results is not so much a profound break with academic practices as the rise of an academic subculture that is intelligible to the initiate and at best tolerated suspiciously by those outside its discourse. This is an ironic result for a criticism that has been aimed in part at the illusions of modern philosophy to establish a self-sustaining discourse.
In this light it is not surprising that Barnett’s "Introduction" can both take Derrida’s breakthroughs for granted and wonder where they leave us intellectually. Accordingly, it makes sense to look to Hegel, who is both a key figure in modern thought and himself an important theorist of modernity. Along with Kant, Hegel figures as a pivot point in the history of modern thought. In attempting to reconstruct what can be preserved from an enlightenment in crisis, he fashions a new synthesis that goes on to provide terms in which succeeding debates have been fought out. And his dialectic -- features of which are so influential on the negative aspects of Derrida’s argumentation -- functioned precisely to capture the paradoxes and tensions that haunt modern thought and social being. Indeed, the irony that seems so often to characterize postmodern thought, Derridian or otherwise, is itself nicely captured in Hegel’s dialectic of moral subjectivism in the Philosophy of Right as well as in the discussion of alienated culture in the Phenomenology of Spirit. In both contexts, the language of culture loses its sense of objectivity and becomes a semblance that can be manipulated for particular ends or for no particular purpose at all.3 For Hegel, the disoriented agents of such activity are themselves the creatures of a world with inadequate social institutions. When ethical life is appropriately established, modern subjects can achieve their rightful coherence and their beliefs and norms can achieve appropriate forms of objectivity and universality. For Hegel, the promise of modernity is to overcome the prospect of an endless crisis of irony.
The postmodernity associated with Derrida challenges the assumptions behind confidence in such a resolution. Hegel relies crucially on notions of rational necessity, self-objectification and self-knowledge, and the overcoming of alienation which are key targets of deconstruction. Drawing on such ideas, Hegel constructs his idealist argument for a coordination between the evolution of thought and that of social being. Deconstruction challenges the metaphysical terms in which this coordination is conceived, but it is not always clear where it stands regarding Hegel’s claim that the fate of modern forms of thought is inseparable from the evolution of modern forms of social being. This is of course the insight Marx draws from when trying to put Hegel "on his feet." For Marx and other post-Hegelians like Sartre or Foucault, it becomes necessary to think about the role of thought within a wider social reality that provides both its limits and its preconditions. Challenging the autonomy of reason as conceived by the philosophical tradition means breaking with strictly immanent analyses of intellectual activity. Whether this is a lesson deconstruction has absorbed is by no means clear given its preoccupation with the internal criticism of texts. The lesson that modern texts generate paradoxes and contradictions poses a quandary: is the fact we seem compelled to use ideas we know to be problematic a fact about thought as such, about a particular tradition, about thinking bound up with particular conditions? May we even think that this consciousness of paradox is somehow tied to a transition between epochs, in which the deep seated nature of our conceptual commitments may blind us to important ways our world is changing?
These are Hegelian questions, if we think of Hegel as a thinker of transitions, and, moreover, as a thinker who came to see philosophy as self-understanding of an epoch when it is coming to an end. Does a Hegel after Derrida illuminate a sense of historical change, within thought or society? Does it provide a sense of a world beyond the familiarly modern? While it may be unfair to expect the present volume to answer such sweeping questions, they may give us a sense of what we might hope to learn from a "Hegel after Derrida."
The book falls into three sections. The first bears the same title as the book as a whole, and offers the best test of the idea that Hegel read through Derridian spectacles opens up new possibilities for thought. We will turn to these arguments in a moment. The second section, "After Hegel After Derrida," contains two papers that discuss how a reconceived Hegel can then be used in reworking other authors, in this case Freud and Marx. The final section consists of four papers on Glas, the work in which Derrida gives his longest treatment of Hegel. Glas, another difficult text, has been largely neglected by commentators, so the contributions of Simon Critchley, Heinz Kimmerle, Kevin Thompson, and Henry Sussman are welcome aids to its reading. But as commentary on Derrida, these papers are not presented as developing the organizing thesis of the book.
In part one, Robert Bernasconi provides a valuable contribution to the discussion of Hegel’s thinking about Africa. This article confronts several texts by Hegel with the sources he drew upon as well as some he seems to have ignored. We learn that Hegel was not the exhaustive student of available materials he is often portrayed as being and, more importantly, that he fashioned an account of an unhistorical and undeveloped Africa that was not supported by materials available to him. Bernasconi abstains from judging whether Hegel’s work deserves to be described as "racist," but he suggests that Hegel did contribute to thinking that justified European colonialism. Perhaps the most informative contribution to this volume, this article casts important light on Hegel, but it is not clear in what way it has depended on Derrida in doing so. Neither is the theme one that Derrida has been crucial in raising, nor is the argument Bernasconi makes one that draws obviously from deconstruction. Bernasconi’s suggestion that Hegel may be contributing to a wider outlook proper to colonialism is important and may illuminate other features of Hegel’s work, but it is not clear that this has anything specific to do with Derrida’s program.
John H. Smith’s paper offers a better test of the thesis that Hegel approached through Derrida can open up post-Hegelian conceptual possibilities. The immediate aim of his argument is, however, to identify a blind spot in Derrida’s own thinking, namely regarding the concept of will, which Smith believes is fundamental for political thought. Without a recuperation of this idea, Smith argues, the charge that deconstruction cannot address political questions cannot be refuted. But the concept of will towards which Smith is working is not directly that which organizes the argument in The Philosophy of Right. Rather, Smith draws from Derrida’s own readings of Hegel to develop a notion of will which can advance the challenge to the metaphysical subject rather than being, as Hegel in effect argues, identical with it. Like Derrida, Smith develops his deconstruction of Hegel by focusing on the family, though he claims to go beyond Derrida by tracing the implications of Hegel’s account of the dissolution of the family in the will construed as the vehicle by which the family’s property is disbursed with the dissolution of the family subject itself. According to Smith, Derrida thus misses the crucial object of deconstructive analysis, since here the theme of will takes us into the ethical realm and so politics.
Smith, then, argues that a more rigorous use of Derrida’s own argumentation allows us to extract from Hegel the threads of a conception of will that is both post Hegelian and politically fruitful. His argument not only draws extensively from Derrida’s own work, but develops examples of the use of paradox and word play found in the master. Later he hints that the conception of will he finds is anticipated by Nietzsche, which leads one to wonder if the argument by way of Hegel was needed to evoke this notion of will. At any rate, Smith does nothing to justify the centrality he claims for the notion of will in politics, nor, is it clear whether he thinks this idea should help in thinking about specific political problems or if it is mainly of use in more general theoretical contexts. We are given no clear sense of the normative orientations that this idea might inform.
Jean-Luc Nancy refers in a footnote to Derrida, but the thrust of his rereading of Hegel (on the concept of an event) seems far more reliant on Heidegger, so far as it stresses the specifics of happening (or being) and temporality, and locates in Hegel elements of a view that go beyond the usual logicist or idealist reading of The Science of Logic. This is one of the most straightforward of the arguments in this collection, and is helpful in showing what an ontological emphasis can bring to the reading of Hegel, but the bearing on a Hegel reconceived in the light of Derrida’s work is not clear.
Werner Hamacher’s challenge to the Hegelian thesis of the end of art explores some of what Hegel himself says about comedy and irony, and so develops a kind of internal criticism of Hegel pointing to a non-totalizing and open-ended sense of artistic practice. Though such a criticism risks adopting an ahistorical sense of art, it evokes the Derridian dialectic without referring to Derrida directly. Whether we have an alternative to Hegel that could not have been thought without deconstruction is not shown in the argument and seems doubtful.
The editor’s own contribution to this volume discusses Hegel’s early essay "The Spirit of Christianity" and works through deconstructive paradoxes regarding reading on the one hand and the materiality of the elements of the transubstantiation on the other. The main lines of the argument seem to illustrate classic deconstructive challenges to idealism as developed in Derrida’s early works. Though they can be used against Hegel, it does not follow that we are learning anything new from the deconstructed Hegel that results.
If, then, we turn to the articles in the first part of this collection as evidence that a Hegel "after Derrida" is not only an unfamiliar Hegel, but also a source for repositioning ourselves conceptually, we may be disappointed. Much of the rereading of Hegel is not uniquely Derridian, and that which is does not clearly put us on new philosophical terrain. In the second part we are given papers that are said to support the claim that "the emergence of a different Hegel as a result of the work of Derrida will require extensive realignments in our culture."4 This ambitious claim is documented by two articles, one on psychoanalysis, the other on Marx.
Suzanne Gearhart argues that Hegel read through Derridian lenses provides a useful guide for rethinking themes of desire, repression, and the feminine. Drawing on the work of Sarah Kofman and returning to Derrida’s discussion of Hegel on Antigone, Gearhart in effect offers the elements of a speculative framework that might be tested in psychoanalytic practice. What seems crucial here is not so much deconstructive thinking as the suggestions it elicits for thinking about the evolution of subjectivity when modeled as little as possible on metaphysical claims. Gearhart approaches a considerable literature on psychoanalysis and feminism as well as on the various critical approaches to received notions of subjectivity, but her argument is programmatic.
Andrzej Warminski turns to the section on "Self Certainty" in the Phenomenology of Spirit to offer a rethinking of Marx’s relation to Hegel. In this section, which establishes the terms with which the succeeding "Master/Slave" dialectic introduces self-consciousness through recognition struggles mediated by labor, Warminski finds the elements of a conception of consciousness that transcends idealism as usually understood. With this reading, he hopes to offer a different approach to the question of the respects in which Marx overcomes Hegel, and suggests that in certain respects Marx creates an alternative to Hegel by reworking ideas that look more Hegelian than Marxist. Though Warminski seems to draw on Derridian ideas of text and reading, his reliance on Derrida seems less in applying specifically deconstructive approaches than in trying to advance the discussion of a problem on which Derrida had commented several years before. Warminski doesn’t address the question how his proposal might affect our reading of Marx, much less how it would inform Marxian approaches to historical and political issues of consciousness.
Where are we left then with the idea of a "Hegel after Derrida"? Despite their occasional obscurity and differences of quality, many of these papers confirm the continuing interest of Hegel. And many of them confirm as well the relevance of Hegel to thinking that finds traditional ontological and epistemological concepts to be both problematic and impossible entirely to abandon. No doubt Derrida has contributed importantly to a sense of these difficulties of thought. But the arguments here do little to sustain the idea of Derrida’s uniqueness in this regard, or of the promise of specifically deconstructive work to opening up new possibilities for thought. That case remains to be made.
Richard T. Peterson
Michigan State University
Copyright ã 2000, Humboldt State University