In defense of Hegel’s madness
pages: 785-812
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.2298/FID1504785ZAbstract
The article is a confrontation with Robert Brandom’s reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, his attempt to systematically “renormalize” Hegel, i.e., to reduce his extravagant formulations to the criteria of common sense. The article analyses a number of Brandom’s “domestications” of Hegel’s speculative concepts: self-relating, determinate negation, mediation, In-itself, action, knowledge, Spirit, reconciliation, history. On the basis of the examples from Marx, Freud, structuralism, Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, Lacan, Adorno, the text defends Hegel’s “madness”, the irreducible speculative, non-interpretable core of his philosophy. Hegel’s statements have to shock us, and this excess cannot be explained away through interpretation since the truth they deliver hinges on that. Keywords: Hegel, Brandom, in-itself, action, history
References
Doyle, Arthur Conan (1981), “Silver Blaze”, in: The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes, London: Penguin.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1991a), The Encyclopaedia Logic, Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1991b), Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1977), Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hegel, G. W. F. (2010), The Science of Logic, London and New York: Routledge.
Jameson, Fredric (2010), The Hegel Variations, London: Verso Books.
Lacan, Jacques (1971), Séminaire XVIII. D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, unpublished.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1987), Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, London: Routledge, Kegan & Paul.
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