Abstract
This chapter retraces the ways in which Hegel’s writing cannot set forth without “reading” the language that will have come in its advance. “Readings of Hegel” are probed, then, in both senses of the genitive, exposing the interval of reading that both opens speculative thinking and solicits its “deconstruction.”
My sincere thanks go to the participants of the workshop, “German Idealism and Post-Structuralism” (March 2021), for their helpful comments, questions, and suggestions on an earlier version of this chapter.
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Notes
- 1.
G. W. F. Hegel, Die Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Meiner, 1952), 9; my translation. Cf. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Terry Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 3: “In the preface to a philosophical work, it is customary for the author to give an explanation – namely, an explanation of his purpose in writing the book, his motivations behind it, and the relations it bears to other previous or contemporary treatments of the same topics – but for a philosophical work, this seems not only superfluous, but in light of the nature of the subject matter, even inappropriate and counterproductive.” In passages such as this one, I have offered my own translations of quotations from the Phänomenologie des Geistes, so as to replicate more closely the syntactic movement of Hegel’s German phrasing, as well as the lexical transformations that the terms of his propositions undergo. The translation offered above should, for example, underscore that Hegel does not construct two independent clauses to describe, first, the habitual clarification of a “purpose” (Zweck) in a foreword, and, second, the “counter-purposive” (zweckwidrig) appearance that such a habit forms. Instead, the habit and its (self-destructive) appearance are spanned together in one main clause, which discloses itself in the end to be the clarification of the unsuitability of such clarifications, and thus the reduction of habitual clarifications to a semblance. When I offer my own translations, the corresponding page numbers from Pinkard’s translation will be cited after the abbreviation “cf.,” in order to provide readers with a convenient point of reference.
- 2.
Hegel, Phänomenologie, 11; cf. Hegel, Phenomenology, 5.
- 3.
See Hegel, Phänomenologie, 10; cf. Hegel, Phenomenology, 4. It is in keeping with the thought of universal thinking that the exemplary concept of vegetal life which Hegel offers in the Phenomenology and elsewhere recycles the example that Giordano Bruno gives for the universal intellect cum artist in his treatise on the one, the cause, and the principle. In the excerpt and translation that F. H. Jacobi offers in the 1789 edition of Über die Lehre des Spinoza, the passage reads: “Aus dem Inneren der Wurzel oder des Samkorns sendet er die Sprosse hervor; aus der Sprosse treibt er die Äste, aus den Ästen die Zweige, aus dem Inneren der Zweige die Knospen” (Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn ed. Klaus Hammacher et al. [Hamburg: Meiner, 2000], 197)
- 4.
G. W. F. Hegel, Early Theological Writings, trans. T. M. Knox (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), 251; trans. modified; cf. G. W. F. Hegel, “(Jesus trat nicht lange...) [Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal],” in “Der Geist des Christentums”: Schriften 1796–1800, ed. Werner Hamacher (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1978), 466.
- 5.
Hegel, Phenomenology, 389.
- 6.
Werner Hamacher, Pleroma—Reading in Hegel, trans. Nicholas Walker and Simon Jarvis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 65.
- 7.
G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse 1830: Erster Teil: Die Wissenschaft der Logik mit mündlichen Zusätzen, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), § 213, 368; G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline: Part 1: Logic, trans. and ed. Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), §§213, 283; trans. modified. In the following, references to this volume of the German edition of Hegel's Encyclopedia will be abbreviated: Enzyklopädie I, followed by paragraph and page number. References to the English translation will be abbreviated: Encyclopedia Logic.
- 8.
Hegel, Phänomenologie, 51; cf. Hegel, Phenomenologyt, 39. This formulation is the example Hegel cites for a “proposition” which solicits a speculative reading in his foreword, on which see below.
- 9.
G. W. F. Hegel, “(Zur Zeit, da Jesus...) [Das Grundkonzept zum Geist des Christentums],” in Hegel, “Der Geist des Christentums,” 390; my translation. This text comprises an outline of Hegel's most complete study from this early period, The Spirit of Christianity (Der Geist des Christentums).
- 10.
On the “thetic propositions” (thetische Sätze) that Hegel finds to persist in even the apostle John’s “more proper language on God and godly matters” (eigentlicherer Sprache über Gott und Göttliches), Hegel remarks that they should “find” their “sense and weight” in “the spirit of the reader,” whose interpretation may vary as greatly as the various “relations of life,” precisely because the speculative spirit is not (yet) sufficiently spelled out in writing. Instead, the words of the gospel maintain the “deceptive semblance of judgments” (ibid., 473–74). Upon these premises, the written presentation of speculative sense should prescribe its proper reading by minimizing all semblance of independence on the parts of its terms.
- 11.
Ibid., 474; my translation.
- 12.
Although apposition yields the destruction of propositional forms that Hegel calls for, it also entails troubling implications for the logical and conceptual syntheses of Hegel’s thought and writing, which are elaborated at greater length in Andrzej Warminski’s analysis of the role of examples in Hegel’s oeuvre (see Andrzej Warminski, Readings in Interpretation: Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987], 95–111).
- 13.
Hegel, Phänomenologie, 51; cf. Hegel, Phenomenology, 39.
- 14.
Hegel mentions such sheer passing only in passing, in the section from the Encyclopedia that addresses memory (Erinnerung). There, Hegel insists upon the contingency of all present, past, factual, and fictive occurrences upon mental representation, without which they would not only not be known to have occurred, but would also attain to no being at all, insofar as the condition of possibility for the being of temporal matters is their sublation from restless transience. The structure of temporality entails, he writes, “that all that happens first receives its duration for us from its uptake in representational intelligence—that, on the contrary, happenstances which are not valued for this uptake by the intelligence become something completely past” (G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse 1830: Dritter Teil: Die Philosophie des Geistes, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), § 452, 259). Cf. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, trans. W. Wallace and A.V. Miller, rev. Michael Inwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), § 452, 186. In the following, references to this volume of the German edition of the Encyclopedia will be abbreviated: Enzykopädie III, followed by paragraph and page number; the English translation will be abbreviated as Philosophy of Mind.
- 15.
Hegel, Phänomenologie, 21; Hegel, Phenomenology, 13.
- 16.
Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda, The Dash—The Other Side of Absolute Knowing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 5. Later, Comay and Ruda similarly insist upon the premise that “the absolute is nothing but its own exposition” (ibid., 22).
- 17.
G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik III, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 325; my translation. See also G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art: Volume II, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 1040.
- 18.
Hamacher, Pleroma, 65. Precisely by repeating Hegel’s circular logic of reading in the first person, as one would have to do—and nevertheless in a manner that Hegel had not done himself —Hamacher shows through his rhetorical performance that repeating (or: reading) makes a difference.
- 19.
Hegel, Phänomenologie, 50–51; cf. Hegel, Phenomenology, 38–39.
- 20.
Hegel, Phänomenologie, 48–51; cf. Hegel, Phenomenology, 36–39.
- 21.
Giorgio Agamben, Idea of Prose, trans. Michael Sullivan and Sam Whitsitt (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 41. For Agamben, however, the turns of enjambment that constitute the “core of verse” are also at the core of discourse as such. In his Idea of Prose, Agamben insists upon the “mismatch” or “disconnection between the metrical and syntactic elements, between sounding rhythm and meaning” in poetic verse as that which “brings to light the original gait, neither poetic nor prosaic, but boustrophedonic, as it were, of poetry, the essential prose-metrics of every human discourse” (ibid., 40). My thanks to Tilottama Rajan for drawing my attention to this passage.
- 22.
Theodor W. Adorno, “Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel,” Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 122. Departing from different passages than those which are analyzed in this chapter, Comay and Ruda pursue the similar thought that, namely, “thought moves episodically and retrogressively, constantly revisiting and reformulating its premises” (Comay and Ruda, The Dash, 23). Whereas their remarks follow from a reading of the notions of “form” and “the absolute,” however, the reading of Hegel’s “Foreword” that is offered here retraces and draws the consequences of the singular ways in which the very first words of his Phenomenology call for an oscillating movement of reading-writing, while at the same time deferring to speak.
- 23.
Hegel, Phänomenologie, 376; cf. Hegel, Phenomenology, 306.
- 24.
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Speculative Remark (One of Hegel's Bon Mots), trans. Céline Surprenant (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 42.
- 25.
Nancy, The Speculative Remark, 59; trans. modified; cf. Jean-Luc Nancy, La remarque spéculative (Un bon mot de Hegel) (Paris: Galilée, 1973), 77.
- 26.
In his “Foreword” to the Phenomenology, the living contradiction of conceptual identity is exemplified with the life cycle of a tree, but the structure does not cease to circulate throughout Hegel’s written oeuvre. In, for example, the section of the Encyclopedia that explicates the “nature of the concept,” Hegel derives the copula of predicative judgments or Ur-teile from the “original division” that the conceptual subject is: “The judgment is the concept in its particularization, as the differentiating relation of its moments, which are posited as being for themselves and at the same time as identical with themselves, not with one another,” Hegel writes, before clarifying further: “The copula ‘is’ comes from the nature of the concept to be identical with itself in its exteriorization” (Hegel, Enzyklopädie I, §166, 316–17; my translation; cf. Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, 240–41).
- 27.
Nancy, The Speculative Remark, 142; trans. modified; cf. Nancy, La remarque spéculative, 176.
- 28.
Hegel, Phänomenologie, 88–89; cf. Hegel, Phenomenology, 67.
- 29.
Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 98. As de Man puts it, this is “a disturbing proposition in Hegel's own terms since the very possibility of thought depends on the possibility of saying ‘I’” (ibid., 98).
- 30.
See Hegel's chapter on “sense certitude” or “sinnliche Gewißheit” in Hegel, Phänomenologie, 79–89; cf. Hegel, Phenomenology, 60–68.
- 31.
Hegel, Phänomenologie, 89; cf. Hegel, Phenomenology, 68.
- 32.
Hegel, Phänomenologie, 59; cf. Hegel, Phenomenology, 45–46.
- 33.
In his written and pedagogical “oeuvre,” Hegel repeatedly reiterates and varies Parmenides’ proposition: “for the same is thinking and being” (τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἐστίν τε καὶ εἶναι). See Parmenides, Fr. 5 (DK), in Parmenides: Übersetzung, Einführung und Interpretation, 4th ed., ed. and trans. Kurt Riezler (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2017), 26. In his lecture course on the history of philosophy, Hegel asserts that the identification of thinking and being was Parmenides’ “chief thought” (Hauptgedanke) in the context of other fragments, which he interprets to indicate that thinking produces (its) being through autopoiesis: “Thinking produces itself; what is produced is a thought; thinking is thus identical with its being, for there is nothing outside of being, this great affirmation” (Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie: Erster Teil, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986], 289–90; my translation; cf. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 1, trans. E.S. Haldane [London: Kegan Paul, 1892], 253). Yet since Hegel also finds the truth of this identity to accrue further determinations over the course of spirit’s history—and since the universal character of true thoughts would be falsified if they were associated exclusively with any single proper name—Hegel rediscovers the same thought in René Descartes’s oeuvre as well, calling it the “concept of Cartesian metaphysics” (Hegel, Phänomenologie, 410; cf. Hegel, Phenomenology, 336). In the Phenomenology, it is thus in his explication of the Cartesian concept that Hegel writes “that, in itself, being and thinking is the same” (ibid.).
- 34.
Hegel, Enzyklopädie III § 462, 280; my translation; cf. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 200.
- 35.
Ibid.
- 36.
Shortly before these remarks, Hegel characterizes interiority as a “nocturnal pit” (nächtlichen Schacht), whose contents lie dormant and thus remain unconscious in all senses of the phrase (Hegel, Enzyklopädie III § 453, 260; cf. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 187). “Thus,” Hegel adds, “I initially do not yet have full power over the images sleeping in the pit of my interiority; [I] am not yet capable of calling them up at will. No one knows what an infinite crowd of images of the past slumber in him; now and again, they may very well awaken by chance, but one cannot, as we say, call them to mind” (Hegel, Enzyklopädie III § 453, 260–61; cf. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 187).
- 37.
Jacques Derrida, “The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel’s Semiology,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 107.
- 38.
Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, 240; my translation; cf. Hegel, Aesthetics, 973. Shortly thereafter, he reiterates the priority of poetry over speech as we “know” it: “the first [way of seeing] is unintentionally poetic in its representing and speaking” (Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, 242; my translation; cf. Hegel, Aesthetics, 974). According to Hegel’s reading, this original poetry, as suggested above, is found(ed) in epic. Hence, in the Phänomenologie, Hegel will also write of the “epos” as “the first language,” which contains “the universal content, at least as the completeness of the world,” which is in turn “begotten and borne” (erzeugt und getragen) by the bard (Hegel, Phänomenologie, 507; cf. Hegel, Phenomenology, 418).
- 39.
Hegel, Enzyklopädie III, § 457, 269; cf. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 194.
- 40.
Hegel, Phänomenologie, 251; Hegel, Phenomenology, 200. “Thoughtlessness” (Gedankenlosigkeit) is also Hegel’s word for the void thinking of phrenology, and if this modifier should seem to contradict the Hegelian premise that what is “said” (das Gesagte) is what is “thought” (das Gedachte), the systematic demands of Hegel’s thinking require that it include its limit-cases: in this case, the thoughtless language of the caput mortuum. Nor is the characterization of skull-“language” a “mere” figure of speech, as if there were a proper or authentic alternative: for the skull, as it is treated and understood in phrenology, not only fulfills the criterion for language that Hegel names, consisting in an exteriorization of interiority, but also exemplifies the arbitrary structure of the sign: “This outer, although it is a language of the individual which he has on his own, is, as a sign, at the same time something indifferent to the content which it is supposed to designate just as that which, to itself, posits the sign is indifferent to the sign itself” (Hegel, Phänomenologie, 251; cf. Hegel, Phenomenology, 200).
- 41.
This thought would be verbalized in precisely these terms in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s lyrical drama, Der Tor und der Tod, where it is suggested that mortal, dying consciousness distinguishes itself in interpreting what is “not interpretable” (nicht deutbar) and in reading “what was never written” (Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Der Tor und der Tod, in Lyrische Dramen [Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1999], 74; my translation).
- 42.
Among the articulations of life in the Phänomenologie, for example, variations upon this phrase can be found at the pivotal moment where the absolute relation of life “to itself” (auf sich selbst) is said already to “speak” of its diremption and alterity—“thus … the other is at the same time already spoken out with it” (so ist darin schon das Andere mit ihm zugleich ausgesprochen)—; as well as at the moment where the designation of “sensibility” and “irritability” as “factors” in animate life is said to “speak out” the fact that these are sublated moments of its concept—“with that, it is precisely spoken out that they are moments of the concept” (Hegel, Phänomenologie. 125, 202; cf. Hegel, Phenomenology, 98, 159). Later, “speaking out” occurs again, when the observing consciousness of phrenology is said to know “no other way to grasp and to speak itself out, than by openly proposing the bone … for the reality of self-consciousness, as it finds itself as a sensual thing” (Hegel, Phänomenologie, 253; cf. Hegel, Phenomenology, 202). The further development of self-conscious and objective life will then be traced back to the living, ethical substance of antiquity, where both speaking and consciousness assume a more articulate form: “the individual finds its determination / destiny, that is, its universal and singular essence, not only spoken out and at hand as thinghood, but is itself this essence and has reached its determination / destiny. The wisest men of antiquity therefore made the outspoken claim: that wisdom and virtue consist in living according to the ethics of one’s people” (Hegel, Phänomenologie, 256; cf. Hegel, Phenomenology, 206). If this scenario still involves the reification of spirit, then its “thinghood” is no longer skeletal, and its speech is no longer mute: things and speech are instead brought to life through the subjectivity that identifies with them, whose recognition of subjectivity as objectivity and objectivity as subjectivity universalizes both, in a fashion that is expressed in the universal organization and universal claims of ethical substance. Nor does it seem to be a mere coincidence that, after all of the speaking-out (Aussprechen) which was hitherto said to take place through the tacit assumptions and comportments of consciousness, an “outspoken claim” (Ausspruch)—that is, a substantivized form of speaking-out (aussprechen)—is verbalized when the mind recognizes itself explicitly in and as its object. For Hegel will characterize verbal language precisely as an objectivation through which the mind recognizes its thoughts in a universal form.
- 43.
Jean Hyppolite had similarly insisted: “To say that language is prior to thought means that thought is not a pure sense which could exist somewhere else, outside of its expression, like an essence beyond appearance. Thought is only by already being there, only by preceding itself, in this speech which refers to nature and to anthropology by means of its sonorous materials, in this speech which precedes the understanding by means of its grammatical structure, sketching in a way, at times prolifically, at other times insufficiently, the understanding’s forms” (Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence, trans. Leonard Lawlor and Amit Sen [Albany: SUNY Press, 1997], 43).
- 44.
Comay and Ruda, The Dash, 58.
- 45.
Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic, trans. Lisbeth During (London: Routledge, 2005), 166.
- 46.
Ibid., 8–9.
- 47.
Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik III, 325; cf. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1040.
- 48.
Tilottama Rajan, The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). In this monograph, Rajan elegantly describes Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as a “hermeneutics of intellectual history,” where “‘false’ or failed forms of awareness” are interpreted as “versions of truth” which “must be reread in a historical perspective” (Ibid., 50).
- 49.
Hamacher, Pleroma, 5; trans. modified; cf. Werner Hamacher, pleroma—zu Genesis und Struktur einer dialektischen Hermeneutik bei Hegel, in Hegel, “Der Geist des Christentums,” 15.
- 50.
Jacques Derrida, “Proverb: ‘He that would pun...,’” in Glassary, by John. P. Leavey (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 17.
- 51.
To name several of the further major studies which this reading may echo, no doubt in more ways than I know to say: Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992); Hyppolite, Logic and Existence; David Farrell Krell, Of Memory, Reminiscence, and Writing: On the Verge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 205–239.
- 52.
Derrida, “The Pit and the Pyramid,” 71.
- 53.
Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 204.
- 54.
Ibid., 204.
- 55.
Hamacher thus breaks down Hegel’s frequent similes of reading and eating and exposes the internal unsustainability of the onto-theo-logoical (digestive) system as Hegel imagines it: “This writing of the meal, which Hegel provides, would, once read and gathered [aufgelesen], disappear in the pure subjectivity of its sense, and would show itself in the sheer inwardness of its meaning as empty, cut off from the unity of the subject with its objective form. … Merely read, this writing would still, even after the reading, remain external to the understanding of its content, would remain a dead object, without any connection with the unity sedimented within it. Gathered [aufgelesen] or read [gelesen]—the writing of the speculative meal remains unread” (Hamacher, Pleroma,109; cf. Hamacher, pleroma, 127).
- 56.
Derrida, Glas, 43; cf. Jacques Derrida, Glas, (Paris: Galilée, 1974), 53.
- 57.
Geoffrey Hartman, Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 4.
- 58.
In his foreword or postscript to Glassary, Derrida thus remarks: “no one will be able to prove that Glas belongs, in its so-called original version, to the element of the French tongue. As for the English translation, despite all the diplomacy this invaluable glassary can deploy, the translation risks inflicting on your tongue a violence that renders your tongue unrecognizable in places, deprived of the very possibility of being spoken, in any case by its legitimate and usual guardians to which all at once it would appear suspect, foreign, without visa, outside the law” (Derrida, “Proverb,” 17). Similar commentaries are offered in John P. Leavey, “This (then) will not have been a book...,” in Glassary, 36–37.
- 59.
Derrida, Glas, 1; Derrida, Glas, 7.
- 60.
Hegel, Enzyklopädie III, 395; my translation. There, the quotation from Aristotle’s Metaphysics appears in Greek.
- 61.
Hegel, Phänomenologie, 552; Hegel, Phenomenology, 457; trans. modified.
- 62.
Hegel writes: “so that man could stand a chance against the outbreaks of the now hostile nature, it had to be dominated [...] Noah [...] made his ideal into an existence and counter-posed to it all things as thought, that is, as dominated (alles als Gedachtes, d.h. als Beherrschtes).” Hegel, “Der Geist des Christentums,” 373–74. As Derrida points out: “Noah is the concept. [...] one would say noesis” (Glas, 37–38).
- 63.
Jean Genet, Miracle of the Rose, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove Press, 1966), 141; trans. modified; cf. Jean Genet, Miracle de la rose, in Jean Genet, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 339.
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Mendicino, K. (2023). Reading Hegel I: Textuality and the Phenomenology. In: Rajan, T., Whistler, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Poststructuralism. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27345-2_6
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