The Dash: A discussion with Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda
Discussion · zizekpodcast.com ·
2018-10-23 · 1:26:41 · 12,802 words
with Chris Simmons
hegel-dialecticsphilosophy-generalideologypsychoanalysislanguagecommunism-socialismcinema-art-culture
Žižek introduces Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda at a book event for their study of Hegel focused on two dashes, one ending the Phenomenology of Spirit, one beginning the Science of Logic. He praises the book's deconstructive immanent reading and argues that recent good Hegel scholarship has been written by women. The discussion ranges over the Phenomenology/Logic duality, Hegel's 'liberal' reception, the relationship between Marxism and Leninism mediated by Hegel, and the speculativity of language and punctuation. Žižek contributes dialectical remarks on the parallax between the two books, Hegel's formalism, and the comedy of Ninotchka's 'coffee without cream' as a model of negative determination.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 14
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Žižek cites Hegel's canonical sublation/preservation-negation term while arguing that in the Phenomenology's treatment of Absolute Freedom and Terror, Aufhebung cannot properly recuperate from that point.
Žižek cites Hegel's famous metaphor that philosophy grasps an epoch only at dusk, when its time is already passing, to support a reading of the Philosophy of Right as description of a lost moment rather than an ideal.
The rabble as those who are produced by society but have no proper place in it, thereby representing the universality of the social totality by their very exclusion.
as “rabble (Pöbel)”
Žižek highlights Ruda's reading of Hegel's rabble as the 'part of no part', those necessarily produced by society yet assigned no proper place within it, and argues this notion stands for the universality of society.
Invoked (by discussion participants) as the methodological hinge of the book: reading a highly concrete and seemingly trivial detail (a punctuation mark) as if it were totally necessary, yielding insight into the universal system.
The mode of presentation of the absolute in Hegel in which a proposition resists the standard subject–predicate reading and produces a reflexive reversal of perspective.
The resolve with which the Science of Logic begins, not a sovereign choice among options but a constitutive decision that precedes the agent who makes it, analogous to the 'choice of neurosis' in psychoanalysis.
Žižek's critical label for the dominant contemporary reception that deflates Hegel's logic into a general epistemology and reduces his politics to recognition theory, stripping out both radical negativity and speculative excess.
Žižek applies his own signature term to the Phenomenology/Logic relationship: the two books are not simply convertible but define a gap that cannot be stabilised from either side.
Žižek maps Lacan's four discourses onto Hegel's own works: the Phenomenology and Logic enact hysteria (permanent self-questioning) while the Encyclopedia and Philosophy of Right enact the university discourse (bureaucratic paragraphs).
Žižek uses the Lacanian term to characterise Hegel's Encyclopedia and Philosophy of Right as bureaucratic report-giving on notional breakthroughs that took place elsewhere, contrasted with the hysteria of the Phenomenology and Logic.
Žižek treats it not as omniscience but as the interstitial transitional moment between the Phenomenology and the Logic, the systematic place where questions of transformation and new beginning are posed.
as “negative determination”
Via the Ninotchka/coffee joke, Žižek illustrates that a thing is speculatively constituted by what it is deprived of: 'coffee without cream' differs from 'coffee without milk' even when materially identical.
Werner Hamacher's term (cited by Ruda) for a creation of form in the act of formation itself, modifying 'performative' to avoid implying a pre-existing transcendental form being activated.
Stories he reaches for 2
A customer asks for coffee without milk; the waiter says they have no milk, only cream, so he can only serve coffee without cream. The coffee is materially identical in both cases, but speculatively 'coffee without cream' differs from 'coffee without milk', the negative determination changes the thing's virtual identity.
“coffee without milk which is not the same as coffee without cream although they are materially the same the difference is purely virtual”
At the outbreak of World War One, with the whole classic Marxist concept of evolution towards revolution collapsed, Lenin went to Switzerland and began reading Hegel's Logic, illustrating that the dash between Marxism and Leninism is a contingent gap, not a development.
Works invoked 11
Central text throughout. Žižek maps it as enacting hysteria (permanent self-questioning) and argues it ends by staging a political challenge rather than achieving closure.
Philosophy of Right book
Žižek re-reads it as a retroactive description of a passing moment rather than an ideal rational state, using the owl of Minerva metaphor to support this.
Science of Logic book
Žižek presents it as the revolutionary text: thinking what God thinks before creation, the Logic is what radicals (Lenin, Marx) return to in crisis rather than concrete historical analysis.
The German Ideology book
Žižek dismisses early Marx's German Ideology as 'pretty bad vulgar evolutionism' compared to the sophistication Marx develops by returning to Hegel's Logic.
Named as the first in the lineage of excellent women Hegel scholars.
Žižek classifies it as university discourse: a bureaucratic report on notional breakthroughs achieved elsewhere, contrasted with the living thought of the Logic and Phenomenology.
The Future of Hegel book
Cited as one of the really good recent books on Hegel written by a woman.
Cited as one of the really good recent books on Hegel written by a woman.
Mourning Sickness book
Žižek calls it path-breaking: an immanent deconstructive reading arguing Hegel cannot recuperate from the Absolute Freedom and Terror moment in the Phenomenology.
Žižek calls it 'absolute fascism at its most elementary', warning against the aestheticisation of politics that Schiller represents at the end of the Phenomenology.
Žižek calls it beautiful for its immanent Hegelian critique of Hegel: showing where Hegel is not Hegelian enough via the concept of the rabble, and finding that concept more adequate today than the Marxist proletariat.
People invoked 23
Gillian Rose positive
Cited as the starting point of the lineage of excellent women Hegel scholars, for her book Hegel Contra Sociology.
Robert Pippin positive
Žižek is always in polemics with Pippin but credits him with an observation of 'total common sense which is nonetheless so intelligent' about the owl of Minerva passage.
Rebecca Comay positive
Žižek praises her book Mourning Sickness as path-breaking, an immanent deconstructive reading with a precise thesis: Hegel cannot recuperate from the Absolute Freedom and Terror moment in the Phenomenology.
Vladimir Lenin positive
Žižek highlights Lenin's return to Hegel's Logic in crisis as the non-developmental gap between Marxism and Leninism; Lenin is presented as externally intervening from a totally different theoretical position.
Georg Lukács negative
Cited as the exemplar of the Marxist view that the proletariat can be a historical agent with relatively perfect knowledge of what it is doing, a position Žižek implicitly distances himself from via Hegel.
Jacques Lacan positive
Žižek invokes Lacan's four discourses (hysteria/university discourse) to map Hegel's own works, and uses Lacan's reading of Achilles and the turtle for the Phenomenology/Logic parallax.
Gilles Deleuze positive
Žižek appreciates Deleuze, mentioning his concept of theatricalisation of concepts and noting the strange claim that all philosophers theatricalise except Hegel, which Žižek disputes, arguing Hegel does nothing but theatricalise.
Francis Fukuyama negative
Mentioned as an instance of the 'liberal Hegel', even the Pentagon and State Department now like Hegel, with Fukuyama as the poster case.
Frank Ruda positive
Žižek praises Ruda's book on the rabble in Hegel as a beautiful immanent critique showing where Hegel is not Hegelian enough, and finds the notion of the rabble more adequate today than the Marxist proletariat.
Invoked via the ending of the Phenomenology where Hegel quotes him; Žižek (and others) note that Schiller is the figure of an aesthetic politics that Hegel keeps at bay; Žižek briefly calls Schiller's poem 'The Bell' 'absolute fascism at its most elementary'.
Žižek quotes Wilde's 'I can resist anything but temptation' as a comic self-description of his own inability to resist making an obscene remark.
Cited for the phrase 'Habermasian Hegelians' used to describe the dominant liberal-recognitive Hegel reception.
Bertolt Brecht positive
Noted (by Comay) as the one person who recognised that the Science of Logic itself operates in a performative/theatrical mode, calling it 'a big comedy'.
Catherine Malabou positive
Listed among the excellent women Hegel scholars, for The Future of Hegel.
Briefly mentioned as a potential danger in the discussion: a 'Rancièrean' aestheticisation of the dialectic, finding an aesthetic ground layer beneath dialectical movement.
Martin Heidegger negative
Contrasted unfavourably with Hegel: Heidegger sought authentic depth in the German language, while Hegel was absolutely indifferent to linguistic nationalism.
Béatrice Longuenesse positive
Listed among the women who have written the best recent books on Hegel, for Hegel and the Critique of Metaphysics.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
Cited as the first to notice the strange beginning of the Science of Logic and as criticising Hegel's Entschluss as a way out of infinite regress; also linked to indirect communication and irony in relation to the dash.
Werner Hamacher positive
His concept 'afformative' is cited (by Ruda) as more precise than 'performative' for capturing Hegel's formation of form in the act of formation itself.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Cited (via Fredric Jameson's coinage 'Habermasian Hegelians') as representative of the Kantianising / liberal-recognitive reading of Hegel that Žižek opposes.
Karl Marx positive
Žižek credits Marx's best work to his formalism but argues he remained too idealist and theological compared to Hegel; early Marx (German Ideology) is dismissed as vulgar evolutionism.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Central reference throughout. Žižek reads Hegel as more materialist than Marx, as a radical formalist, and as a thinker whose speculative use of double meanings is philosophically superior to analytic clarification.
Discussed as Hegel's main interlocutor on the limits of experience and the bounds of knowledge; Hegel is read as 'hyper-Kantian' in his formalism rather than simply anti-Kantian.
What it argues
Phenomenology/Logic duality and parallaxHegel's absolute knowing and the question of beginningliberal vs. radical readings of Hegeltwofoldness and non-binary differencespeculative language, punctuation, and double meaningMarxism-Leninism as a mediated ruptureHegel's formalism as hyper-Kantianism
Dialectical moves 8
“The true reversal is that being a social revolutionary requires thinking what God thinks before creation (the Logic), while being a reactionary means sticking to concrete historical analysis.”
The politically radical move in Hegel is paradoxically the most abstract one; concrete historical analysis is the conservative temptation.
“Hegel is more materialist than Marx — Marx is still too idealist, too theological.”
The standard hierarchy is inverted: the 'idealist' Hegel is more rigorously materialist than the materialist Marx.
“Where Hegel is not Hegelian enough — that is the only way to overcome Hegel.”
The critique of Hegel must proceed through Hegel's own logic rather than from a Marxist or external standpoint.
“Far from being an ideal, Hegel's Philosophy of Right describes something whose time is already passing — he describes a lost moment.”
The 'owl of Minerva' passage shows Hegel was not prescribing an ideal society but performing a retroactive description of a disappearing world.
“Coffee without cream is not the same as coffee without milk, although they are materially the same — the difference is purely virtual.”
Speculatively, a thing is constituted by what it is deprived of; negative determination creates a real difference at the level of the virtual even when the material object is identical.
“Reconciliation is not that you overcome duality but that you realise duality was always already overcome — it is strictly retroactive.”
Hegelian reconciliation is not a forward achievement but a retroactive recognition that the split was never ultimately real.
“The strong move is not to stay in existential authenticity but to pass into university bureaucracy — that is the real strength of thinking.”
The passage from living philosophical engagement to bureaucratic encyclopedic form is not a degradation but itself a dialectical moment of thinking.
“Hegel goes in the same obscene direction as the Argentine coger joke — the highest and the lowest meet in the same word (cf. phrenology: urination and the skull).”
Hegel's speculative use of double meanings is structurally identical to obscene jokes: the highest speculation and the lowest vulgarity converge.
Claims 15
asserts
In the last twenty-five years, practically all really good books on Hegel have been written by women.gender and Hegel scholarship
asserts
Hegel in the Philosophy of Right is not prescribing an ideal rational state but describing something whose time is already passing — a retroactive portrait of a lost moment.reading of Hegel's Philosophy of Right
asserts
Hegel is more materialist than Marx; Marx remains too idealist and too theological by comparison.Hegel vs. Marx
asserts
Ruda's notion of the rabble today has more actuality than Marx's concept of the proletariat.Hegel's rabble vs. Marxist proletariat
asserts
Where Hegel failed, he was not Hegelian enough: the rabble stands for universality, a conclusion Hegel described but feared to draw.Hegel's treatment of the rabble and universality
asserts
The Phenomenology/Logic relationship is a parallax, not a simple developmental passage: the problem is to define the difference as such, not to cross from one to the other.structure of Hegel's two main books
asserts
Conservative readers of Hegel focus on historical topics while radical revolutionaries (Lenin, Marx in crisis) preferred the Logic — a beautiful paradox.political reception of Hegel
rejects
The dominant liberal Hegel reception is dangerous precisely because it deflates the Logic into epistemology and reduces politics to recognition theory.liberal/recognitive Hegel reception
asserts
The Phenomenology and Logic are Hegel at his best (hysteria: permanent self-questioning), while the Encyclopedia and Philosophy of Right enact university discourse.Hegel's own works distinguished by discourse type
reframes
One should not simply valorise Hegel's 'good' existential thinking against the 'bad' bureaucratic Hegel; the strength of thinking is precisely the capacity to pass into university bureaucracy.good vs. bad Hegel distinction
asserts
Hegel, unlike Heidegger, was not a linguistic nationalist; for him no deeper authenticity resided in the German language, and double meanings are purely contingent resources for speculative thought.Hegel and language / contrast with Heidegger
asserts
The transition from Marxism to Leninism is not a development but is mediated by total failure and Lenin's contingent external intervention — analogously to the Lacan/Freud transition.Marxism-Leninism as non-linear rupture
asserts
There is a movement of self-referentiality and retroactivity in Hegelian dialectics that he doubts can be translated into formalised logic or what computers do.limits of formalisation / computation vs. dialectics
asserts
Hegel's reconciliation is strictly retroactive: one realises that duality was always already overcome, not that one has actively overcome it.Hegelian reconciliation and retroactivity
asserts
Hegel's extended struggle with differential calculus in the Logic is a symptom: mathematics does there something that, according to Hegel's own principles, it should not be able to do.Hegel's treatment of mathematics / differential calculus
Quotes 10
“either Hegel was a total idiot who didn't know what he is doing or he was not providing an ideal society in his Philosophy of Right — he is describing something whose time is already passing”Slavoj Žižek · Philosophy of Right as retroactive portrait of a disappearing world
“Hegel is more materialist than Marx — Marx is still too idealist, too theological”Slavoj Žižek · inversion of standard Hegel/Marx hierarchy
“the only way to overcome Hegel — not Hegelian enough”Slavoj Žižek · immanent critique as the only valid overcoming
“the way to be a reactionary: take a concrete historical analysis. The way to be a social revolutionary: let's think what God is thinking before the creation of the world”Slavoj Žižek · paradox of abstract Logic as revolutionary, concrete history as conservative
“coffee without cream is not the same as coffee without milk although they are materially the same — the difference is purely virtual”Slavoj Žižek · negative determination / virtual difference
“reconciliation is not that you overcome duality but that you realise that duality was always already overcome — it is strictly retroactive”Slavoj Žižek · retroactive structure of Hegelian reconciliation
“Hegel is not Heidegger — for him there is no deeper authenticity in German language”Slavoj Žižek · Hegel's non-nationalist use of language vs. Heidegger
“the problem is not can I go from here to there when I'm in logic to phenomenology or back — the problem is to define the difference as such”Slavoj Žižek · parallax structure of Phenomenology/Logic
“phenomenology and logic are hysteria at its best — permanent self-questioning — while Encyclopaedia and Philosophy of Right are pure university discourse”Slavoj Žižek · Lacanian discourse theory applied to Hegel's own works
“they are simply doing it better than us men — so I'm really even getting a little bit angry at them”Slavoj Žižek · admiration for women Hegel scholars, self-deprecating humour
Transcript 58 turns
Slavoj Žižek
We arranged it because it's their event so that I will briefly further introduce them then they the two of them will engage in a dialogue about the book not endless they know what they will talk about about the book then I will add some finishing thoughts which will culminate in a question to both of them and then when we finish this cycle there should be some time for for Q and A so let me begin Rebecca and Frank I think it’s something breathtaking to have both of them here I’m quite serious here first Rebecca you know people often accuse me of being ironic me too making fun not being a pessimist but as a Hegelian not being a feminist but as a Hegelian there is no choice but not being a pessimist in this pathetic sense oh look even women can write a book on Hegel but it's very simple in the last twenty twenty-five years practically all really good books on Hegel I don't know what this means were written by women it started was it thirty more years ago with with Gillian Rose Hegel Contra Sociology then it was Béatrice Longuenesse Hegel and the Critique of Metaphysics then it was Catherine Malabou The Future of Hegel then it is her Rebecca’s incredible path-breaking book Mourning Sickness so which this one is of course also about Hegel but what I’m saying is that I cannot even say what unites those books but what I’m proud to say again it’s that you don’t have to do in this pseudo-feminist male chauvinist way oh yeah look even women can do it no they are simply doing it better than us men so I’m really even getting a little bit angry at them I mean how can they now much more seriously what is so incredible about her book is that it’s beyond these cheap dilemmas criticism of Hegel yes or no and so on it's simply a wonderful deconstructive immanent reading with a very precise thesis that Mourning Sickness I’m talking now that if I if I resume it correctly that when he deals in Phenomenology with in a coded way French Revolution Absolute Freedom and Terror that Hegel cannot really recuperate from that point it doesn't work all the Aufhebung then later and so on and I think we should elevate this into a general principle let me give you to conclude with her another example I’m sorry this time from a man I am always involved in a polemics with Robert Pippin but he made one remark of such a total common sense which is nonetheless so intelligent I think he said you know this usual accusation Hegel is describing a society of a certain type it’s a half proto-fascist half liberal whatever you want ideal of a rational state but uh does this still hold and so on isn’t it dated but wait a minute in his the most famous passage maybe of Philosophy of Right Hegel says you know that famous metaphor that philosophy can grasp an epoch when the owl of Minerva takes flight in the evening only when its time is over now isn’t there a clear conclusion from this either Hegel was a total idiot who didn’t know what he is doing or he was not providing an ideal society in his Philosophy of Right he is describing something whose time is already passing he is describing a lost moment which is already disappearing and this is now my reading which is why I will stop here Hegel is more materialist than than Marx Marx is still too idealist too theological for Hegel Hegel would have never allowed for a position conceptualized by Marx that as a proletarian agent the way Lukács describes it that you can be a historical agent who at the same time from a relatively perfect knowledge of history you do something and you know what you are doing enough of this briefly Frank he did among other things publishing a lot already his first book it is in English about rabble rebel the notion of rabble in Hegel this is for me such a beautiful book why because it is critical towards Hegel but not in the standard that’s the beauty Marxian sense Hegel just saw rabble rebel he was not able to conceptualize it in the Marxian sense of proletariat no it’s a wonderful very precise point of criticizing Hegel through Hegel himself he shows first how to analyze our society today the notion of rabble in all its forms gained new actuality it's again maybe more appropriate than Marx’s the Marxist notion of proletariat and where Hegel is and that’s the beauty that’s the only way to overcome Hegel not Hegelian enough Hegel describes as you know rabble as the part of no part to use more contemporary those who are necessarily produced by society but for whom a strata there is no proper place within the social edifice the conclusion I simplify that Hegel was afraid to draw but should have is that as such rabble stands for universality that precisely as this outside element which does not have a particular place within social body it is the it stands for universality of a society I’ve already spoken too much just to tell you how happy I am and I should also thank you all it’s breathtaking what went wrong why there are more people here than on my classes but I should be the big one like what is happening that so I’m really glad about this I think this shows that although everybody wants now to fight about Me Too criticize Trump and so on that’s not the real thing to put it in shamelessly idealist way the spirit is happening here we don’t all get become new John Stewarts or whatever and get involved in that cheap comedy please it’s up to you thanks thanks Slavoj for for so generously introducing us and being here and engaging with our book tonight and I just wanted also to thank Lindsay and Juliane and Jasmine and the Deutsches Haus and the German Department for their wonderful organizing Frank and I thought we would say a few words back and forth about um what what this book is about and what started it and some of the some of the implications of this book and really we started quite accidentally before we knew each other it was kind of a random coincidence that both of us when we first met discovered that we had both been kind of obsessing about a punctuation mark in Hegel two different ones I had been kind of fretting about the concluding sentence in in the Phenomenology of Spirit where Hegel um in a very grammatically ambiguous way sort of stops writing at the at the very end of the Phenomenology and interpolates a dash and then adds this strange epigram by Schiller which doesn’t entirely make sense and the tempting think has always been to say oh he’s lapsing into literature philosophy’s not finishing or something like that but but um there seemed to be a lot going on there and at the same time Frank was had been thinking about the first sentence of the Science of Logic the kind of companion text and sequel to the Phenomenology in some very enigmatic sense a first sentence which doesn’t begin till about page fifty-eight or something like that but it it it also is actually ungrammatical you have the two sentences on the on the book cover here being pure being with with this interruption and with this and that was really our
We arranged it because it's their event so that I will briefly further introduce them then they the two of them will engage in a dialogue about the book not endless they know what they will talk about about the book then I will add some finishing thoughts which will culminate in a question to both of them and then when we finish this cycle there should be some time for for Q and A so let me begin Rebecca and Frank I think it’s something breathtaking to have both of them here I’m quite serious here first Rebecca you know people often accuse me of being ironic me too making fun not being a pessimist but as a Hegelian not being a feminist but as a Hegelian there is no choice but not being a pessimist in this pathetic sense oh look even women can write a book on Hegel but it's very simple in the last twenty twenty-five years practically all really good books on Hegel I don't know what this means were written by women it started was it thirty more years ago with with Gillian Rose Hegel Contra Sociology then it was Béatrice Longuenesse Hegel and the Critique of Metaphysics then it was Catherine Malabou The Future of Hegel then it is her Rebecca’s incredible path-breaking book Mourning Sickness so which this one is of course also about Hegel but what I’m saying is that I cannot even say what unites those books but what I’m proud to say again it’s that you don’t have to do in this pseudo-feminist male chauvinist way oh yeah look even women can do it no they are simply doing it better than us men so I’m really even getting a little bit angry at them I mean how can they now much more seriously what is so incredible about her book is that it’s beyond these cheap dilemmas criticism of Hegel yes or no and so on it's simply a wonderful deconstructive immanent reading with a very precise thesis that Mourning Sickness I’m talking now that if I if I resume it correctly that when he deals in Phenomenology with in a coded way French Revolution Absolute Freedom and Terror that Hegel cannot really recuperate from that point it doesn't work all the Aufhebung then later and so on and I think we should elevate this into a general principle let me give you to conclude with her another example I’m sorry this time from a man I am always involved in a polemics with Robert Pippin but he made one remark of such a total common sense which is nonetheless so intelligent I think he said you know this usual accusation Hegel is describing a society of a certain type it’s a half proto-fascist half liberal whatever you want ideal of a rational state but uh does this still hold and so on isn’t it dated but wait a minute in his the most famous passage maybe of Philosophy of Right Hegel says you know that famous metaphor that philosophy can grasp an epoch when the owl of Minerva takes flight in the evening only when its time is over now isn’t there a clear conclusion from this either Hegel was a total idiot who didn’t know what he is doing or he was not providing an ideal society in his Philosophy of Right he is describing something whose time is already passing he is describing a lost moment which is already disappearing and this is now my reading which is why I will stop here Hegel is more materialist than than Marx Marx is still too idealist too theological for Hegel Hegel would have never allowed for a position conceptualized by Marx that as a proletarian agent the way Lukács describes it that you can be a historical agent who at the same time from a relatively perfect knowledge of history you do something and you know what you are doing enough of this briefly Frank he did among other things publishing a lot already his first book it is in English about rabble rebel the notion of rabble in Hegel this is for me such a beautiful book why because it is critical towards Hegel but not in the standard that’s the beauty Marxian sense Hegel just saw rabble rebel he was not able to conceptualize it in the Marxian sense of proletariat no it’s a wonderful very precise point of criticizing Hegel through Hegel himself he shows first how to analyze our society today the notion of rabble in all its forms gained new actuality it's again maybe more appropriate than Marx’s the Marxist notion of proletariat and where Hegel is and that’s the beauty that’s the only way to overcome Hegel not Hegelian enough Hegel describes as you know rabble as the part of no part to use more contemporary those who are necessarily produced by society but for whom a strata there is no proper place within the social edifice the conclusion I simplify that Hegel was afraid to draw but should have is that as such rabble stands for universality that precisely as this outside element which does not have a particular place within social body it is the it stands for universality of a society I’ve already spoken too much just to tell you how happy I am and I should also thank you all it’s breathtaking what went wrong why there are more people here than on my classes but I should be the big one like what is happening that so I’m really glad about this I think this shows that although everybody wants now to fight about Me Too criticize Trump and so on that’s not the real thing to put it in shamelessly idealist way the spirit is happening here we don’t all get become new John Stewarts or whatever and get involved in that cheap comedy please it’s up to you thanks thanks Slavoj for for so generously introducing us and being here and engaging with our book tonight and I just wanted also to thank Lindsay and Juliane and Jasmine and the Deutsches Haus and the German Department for their wonderful organizing Frank and I thought we would say a few words back and forth about um what what this book is about and what started it and some of the some of the implications of this book and really we started quite accidentally before we knew each other it was kind of a random coincidence that both of us when we first met discovered that we had both been kind of obsessing about a punctuation mark in Hegel two different ones I had been kind of fretting about the concluding sentence in in the Phenomenology of Spirit where Hegel um in a very grammatically ambiguous way sort of stops writing at the at the very end of the Phenomenology and interpolates a dash and then adds this strange epigram by Schiller which doesn’t entirely make sense and the tempting think has always been to say oh he’s lapsing into literature philosophy’s not finishing or something like that but but um there seemed to be a lot going on there and at the same time Frank was had been thinking about the first sentence of the Science of Logic the kind of companion text and sequel to the Phenomenology in some very enigmatic sense a first sentence which doesn’t begin till about page fifty-eight or something like that but it it it also is actually ungrammatical you have the two sentences on the on the book cover here being pure being with with this interruption and with this and that was really our
unknown
starting point what if you actually put these two sentences together which as the end of one book and the beginning of another book end and beginning which are which are adjoined not immediately but by after this kind of thicket of paratextual material that somehow stands in between what if we put them together and use this as a kind of prism for thinking about really the most fundamental and notorious questions of of Hegel the question of closure the question of ending the question of beginning and what the
starting point what if you actually put these two sentences together which as the end of one book and the beginning of another book end and beginning which are which are adjoined not immediately but by after this kind of thicket of paratextual material that somehow stands in between what if we put them together and use this as a kind of prism for thinking about really the most fundamental and notorious questions of of Hegel the question of closure the question of ending the question of beginning and what the
unknown
relationship between these might be so that was our that was our experiment and um we should say at the outset that in focusing um quite perversely on this little detail we’re not really trying to prove Hegel wrong because he used dashes rather rather quite the opposite Hegel in this in his strange method of writing actually shows us how to read and extract the really speculative resources of his of his thinking so so I'm gonna step in here and also hi from my side I’m not repeating the the gratitude but I am grateful for this to happen to all of you anyhow so two weird sentences right a longish one at the end of the Phenomenology and the shortish one which is very strange because it doesn't even there's no article in the sentence there is no verb it's not really a sentence and so in a sense what we try to figure out is what are we doing if we're focusing in on these two sentences and is there a kind of methodology if you wish that allows us to say something about these maybe merely accidental facts that he put two dashes into two important sentences right and we and in a sense we applied I mean and depending on the on the phrasing a psychoanalytical a Freudian insight that certain things I mean think of parapraxis right I mean my friend Aaron Schuster told me that joke parapraxis you want to say one thing and you say a mother right I mean I got that from you I think so in a sense right it is not accidental right I mean so there is if you wish reason in history or there is something to interpret or there I mean it doesn't happen totally arbitrarily in the sense and so we wondered what if from a Hegelian that would be the different second phrasing there's not only reason in history but there is reason in punctuation right there is reason in punctuation marks maybe there's a reason right there's a rationality it's not totally arbitrary but there is something to mine out of these weird details right that he uses these these two dashes and in a sense if you start thinking about that this is at least what we tried to do then um one one can immediately apply one of the most notorious maybe Hegelian concepts I mean the concept of the concrete universal to these very dashes because if you start reading something very concrete and treat it as if it is totally necessary right I mean as if there is reason in punctuation marks you may end up saying
relationship between these might be so that was our that was our experiment and um we should say at the outset that in focusing um quite perversely on this little detail we’re not really trying to prove Hegel wrong because he used dashes rather rather quite the opposite Hegel in this in his strange method of writing actually shows us how to read and extract the really speculative resources of his of his thinking so so I'm gonna step in here and also hi from my side I’m not repeating the the gratitude but I am grateful for this to happen to all of you anyhow so two weird sentences right a longish one at the end of the Phenomenology and the shortish one which is very strange because it doesn't even there's no article in the sentence there is no verb it's not really a sentence and so in a sense what we try to figure out is what are we doing if we're focusing in on these two sentences and is there a kind of methodology if you wish that allows us to say something about these maybe merely accidental facts that he put two dashes into two important sentences right and we and in a sense we applied I mean and depending on the on the phrasing a psychoanalytical a Freudian insight that certain things I mean think of parapraxis right I mean my friend Aaron Schuster told me that joke parapraxis you want to say one thing and you say a mother right I mean I got that from you I think so in a sense right it is not accidental right I mean so there is if you wish reason in history or there is something to interpret or there I mean it doesn't happen totally arbitrarily in the sense and so we wondered what if from a Hegelian that would be the different second phrasing there's not only reason in history but there is reason in punctuation right there is reason in punctuation marks maybe there's a reason right there's a rationality it's not totally arbitrary but there is something to mine out of these weird details right that he uses these these two dashes and in a sense if you start thinking about that this is at least what we tried to do then um one one can immediately apply one of the most notorious maybe Hegelian concepts I mean the concept of the concrete universal to these very dashes because if you start reading something very concrete and treat it as if it is totally necessary right I mean as if there is reason in punctuation marks you may end up saying
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something universal or general about the system as such right I mean it's not if that these these two like the ending and the beginning sentence if there is right the reason why he punctuated the way he did maybe that can give us a clue and that was our hunch if you wish or the gamble that that could say something about actually the status of the Hegelian system and that is again not totally arbitrary but Hegel himself accounts for a necessary form of presentation of what he’s trying to present whatever you want to call it the logic of the absolute or freedom or whatever you think he is doing because he talks about in the Phenomenology in the introduction to the Phenomenology about what he calls a speculative sentence or a speculative proposition which is precisely the mode of presentation of the absolute he believes and then weirdly in a in the Science of Logic so the sequel book whatever that’s supposed to say he talks not about speculative propositions or sentences but about speculative words right so words that somehow in one signifier entail a multiplicity of different even sometimes contradictory meanings and so we thought well he didn’t say that but maybe there’s speculative signs right too maybe the dash could be a speculative sign saying he’s it is doing many things at once and
something universal or general about the system as such right I mean it's not if that these these two like the ending and the beginning sentence if there is right the reason why he punctuated the way he did maybe that can give us a clue and that was our hunch if you wish or the gamble that that could say something about actually the status of the Hegelian system and that is again not totally arbitrary but Hegel himself accounts for a necessary form of presentation of what he’s trying to present whatever you want to call it the logic of the absolute or freedom or whatever you think he is doing because he talks about in the Phenomenology in the introduction to the Phenomenology about what he calls a speculative sentence or a speculative proposition which is precisely the mode of presentation of the absolute he believes and then weirdly in a in the Science of Logic so the sequel book whatever that’s supposed to say he talks not about speculative propositions or sentences but about speculative words right so words that somehow in one signifier entail a multiplicity of different even sometimes contradictory meanings and so we thought well he didn’t say that but maybe there’s speculative signs right too maybe the dash could be a speculative sign saying he’s it is doing many things at once and
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maybe that that’s the whole point of the dash right maybe there’s something a speculative insight to be mined out of it so that doesn’t lead us at all or didn’t lead us to basically assume that Hegel is using a kind of technical language as he always refused to do but just simply reading what is there right I mean you’re just and this kind of just just the English translations they omit the dash I mean the previously existing ones which is strange right because it’s not so hard to translate anyhow okay stop here maybe right just moving on here the idea of moving from um and this is this is Hegel's reading protocol that we're really taking literally um that um that to read speculatively is to um is to encounter and to to extrapolate from and to to think on the basis of some of of an ambiguity in language which seems to point in seemingly opposed directions and as he taught us to read his to read grammar or syntax a given sentence um can be read the regular way subject verb predicate um but also without changing the wording can be read um a very different way one which really transforms the metaphysical categories in which we think and likewise the kind of speculative words that Hegel um delights in finding in his native language German but the issue is not about German or any other national language it just happens to be the words that he stumbles upon um a word like famously Aufhebung and a number of other words um are doing multiple things at once um and our and our hunch um in looking at these ambiguous sentences and the way in which the punctuation actually works so ambiguously ambivalently um is to really um to move from the syntactic level um through the semantic level of words to the you know what which really what we could call a pragmatic level of of enunciation what what is punctuation itself doing um and part of this relates to the kind of um the fractal dimension of Hegel's thought that things get the units get smaller and smaller um and in this grain of you know this grain of sand um one one can perceive a kind of microcosmic um indication of the whole but also um it’s telling us you know it’s telling us what to do and the the speculative um ambiguities of this particular punctuation mark and it’s really important that not every um sometimes a dash is just a dash um so to speak um but these particular ones um really seem to be doing two things at once um that is to say that the temporal orientation um is is ambivalent a dash you know breaks up a sentence it in breaking it up it point it precipitates you to to an ending that you don’t know whether it’s stopping whether it’s going to be resumed whether it’s a parenthetical dash which is going to be followed by another dash and the main sentence is going to you don’t know you don’t know when you encounter it whether um it’s an interruption an end a kind of hesitation a momentary detour and so on and there’s a
maybe that that’s the whole point of the dash right maybe there’s something a speculative insight to be mined out of it so that doesn’t lead us at all or didn’t lead us to basically assume that Hegel is using a kind of technical language as he always refused to do but just simply reading what is there right I mean you’re just and this kind of just just the English translations they omit the dash I mean the previously existing ones which is strange right because it’s not so hard to translate anyhow okay stop here maybe right just moving on here the idea of moving from um and this is this is Hegel's reading protocol that we're really taking literally um that um that to read speculatively is to um is to encounter and to to extrapolate from and to to think on the basis of some of of an ambiguity in language which seems to point in seemingly opposed directions and as he taught us to read his to read grammar or syntax a given sentence um can be read the regular way subject verb predicate um but also without changing the wording can be read um a very different way one which really transforms the metaphysical categories in which we think and likewise the kind of speculative words that Hegel um delights in finding in his native language German but the issue is not about German or any other national language it just happens to be the words that he stumbles upon um a word like famously Aufhebung and a number of other words um are doing multiple things at once um and our and our hunch um in looking at these ambiguous sentences and the way in which the punctuation actually works so ambiguously ambivalently um is to really um to move from the syntactic level um through the semantic level of words to the you know what which really what we could call a pragmatic level of of enunciation what what is punctuation itself doing um and part of this relates to the kind of um the fractal dimension of Hegel's thought that things get the units get smaller and smaller um and in this grain of you know this grain of sand um one one can perceive a kind of microcosmic um indication of the whole but also um it’s telling us you know it’s telling us what to do and the the speculative um ambiguities of this particular punctuation mark and it’s really important that not every um sometimes a dash is just a dash um so to speak um but these particular ones um really seem to be doing two things at once um that is to say that the temporal orientation um is is ambivalent a dash you know breaks up a sentence it in breaking it up it point it precipitates you to to an ending that you don’t know whether it’s stopping whether it’s going to be resumed whether it’s a parenthetical dash which is going to be followed by another dash and the main sentence is going to you don’t know you don’t know when you encounter it whether um it’s an interruption an end a kind of hesitation a momentary detour and so on and there’s a
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kind of there’s a kind of delay and suspension which also produces this retroactive um effect of making us return to the beginning and read makes us read what precedes the dash in a very um in a new way so it’s a kind of it’s a kind of movement of incompletion um and and interruption and the the word English word dash is of course very suggestive because it’s doing so many things connected with with speed and destruction and ephemerality you know dashing off something and so on and so forth the German word Gedankenstrich it it has its own um you know its own beauty um in in so far as it it refers to a it seems to indicate a barring or cancellation of
kind of there’s a kind of delay and suspension which also produces this retroactive um effect of making us return to the beginning and read makes us read what precedes the dash in a very um in a new way so it’s a kind of it’s a kind of movement of incompletion um and and interruption and the the word English word dash is of course very suggestive because it’s doing so many things connected with with speed and destruction and ephemerality you know dashing off something and so on and so forth the German word Gedankenstrich it it has its own um you know its own beauty um in in so far as it it refers to a it seems to indicate a barring or cancellation of
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thought a pause of thought but also pause in thought but also a kind of striking out of thought a kind of a moment an elliptical moment where thought seems to suspend itself um and it's in this it’s in this really uncertainty of thinking um that that the repetitive um force of thought comes to the fore and our one of our one of our questions are the the the repetition that every dash um both entails in so far as it forces a return to the beginning but also invites and anticipates because a dash may or may not be followed by by its own sequel I mean in this virtual and real repetition that is staged by the dash um our our question was really is this is this a peculiar case of of Hegel’s favorite trope the negation of the negation is this actually a a performance of what that reflexive negativity might mean so yeah I mean because in a in a sense right I mean one dash can interrupt a sentence and the other one establishes continuity with creating like a weird intermediary zone between right I mean which even obeys its own grammatical syntactic rules and so we in addressing those two dashes at one at the beginning of the Logic one at the end of the Phenomenology we we ended up talking about the transition from one book to the other or about transition in general and about what in one way or the other is at stake at that point namely sort of clearing the slate that’s what um the Phenomenology kind of does it was once called the presupposition for a presuppositionless science you kind of need the Phenomenology to begin with the project that then whatever that project is the Science of Logic begins I mean Hegel describes it in most grandiose terms because what the Logic is actually doing it is depicting like exhibiting expounding the thoughts that God had before he created the world and finite beings he says right so it’s right we’re reading the mind of God before or in the act of creating creating the world so right there is no world he she it is kind of alone God I mean um is kind of alone so what is at stake immediately in this transition is what does it mean to begin right to begin anew to create a new world right with all the stuff that is implied and what does it mean that one has to do a lot of things I mean it’s not a very thin book the Phenomenology I mean right one has to go through it if it’s the presupposition for a presuppositionless science to get to the point where one can begin right so there is a lot of things to be done before one can start anew right it’s not that easy so in that transition somehow this very question what does it mean to begin what does it mean to dash off the old if you wish right is at stake so maybe yeah right and so um with this seemingly random um and ultra particular detail um we seem to be thrown right into the kind of the beast of the belly um that is to say into the heart of absolute knowing the most grandiose and enigmatic and ridiculous and reviled um and kind of incomprehensible part of Hegel’s system um which has always been a sore or has really become I shouldn’t it has become what was was an outrage for for a good century and has become a kind of embarrassment to to Hegel readers um so from the you know
thought a pause of thought but also pause in thought but also a kind of striking out of thought a kind of a moment an elliptical moment where thought seems to suspend itself um and it's in this it’s in this really uncertainty of thinking um that that the repetitive um force of thought comes to the fore and our one of our one of our questions are the the the repetition that every dash um both entails in so far as it forces a return to the beginning but also invites and anticipates because a dash may or may not be followed by by its own sequel I mean in this virtual and real repetition that is staged by the dash um our our question was really is this is this a peculiar case of of Hegel’s favorite trope the negation of the negation is this actually a a performance of what that reflexive negativity might mean so yeah I mean because in a in a sense right I mean one dash can interrupt a sentence and the other one establishes continuity with creating like a weird intermediary zone between right I mean which even obeys its own grammatical syntactic rules and so we in addressing those two dashes at one at the beginning of the Logic one at the end of the Phenomenology we we ended up talking about the transition from one book to the other or about transition in general and about what in one way or the other is at stake at that point namely sort of clearing the slate that’s what um the Phenomenology kind of does it was once called the presupposition for a presuppositionless science you kind of need the Phenomenology to begin with the project that then whatever that project is the Science of Logic begins I mean Hegel describes it in most grandiose terms because what the Logic is actually doing it is depicting like exhibiting expounding the thoughts that God had before he created the world and finite beings he says right so it’s right we’re reading the mind of God before or in the act of creating creating the world so right there is no world he she it is kind of alone God I mean um is kind of alone so what is at stake immediately in this transition is what does it mean to begin right to begin anew to create a new world right with all the stuff that is implied and what does it mean that one has to do a lot of things I mean it’s not a very thin book the Phenomenology I mean right one has to go through it if it’s the presupposition for a presuppositionless science to get to the point where one can begin right so there is a lot of things to be done before one can start anew right it’s not that easy so in that transition somehow this very question what does it mean to begin what does it mean to dash off the old if you wish right is at stake so maybe yeah right and so um with this seemingly random um and ultra particular detail um we seem to be thrown right into the kind of the beast of the belly um that is to say into the heart of absolute knowing the most grandiose and enigmatic and ridiculous and reviled um and kind of incomprehensible part of Hegel’s system um which has always been a sore or has really become I shouldn’t it has become what was was an outrage for for a good century and has become a kind of embarrassment to to Hegel readers um so from the you know
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from the first century and a half of um non-orthodox Hegel readers Hegel critics um absolute knowing is incarnating this this kind of monstrous um megalomaniac narcissistic effacement of of
from the first century and a half of um non-orthodox Hegel readers Hegel critics um absolute knowing is incarnating this this kind of monstrous um megalomaniac narcissistic effacement of of
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history of politics of individuation to the contemporary attempts to rehabilitate Hegel to by by making him more palatable um namely by by proposing deflationary readings which which kind of lop off that side of the system which is so which is so embarrassing um what if the you know what if the dash um our strategy is kind of the opposite of the deflationary readings of Hegel in a certain sense um in that these readings which which are the dominant readings today um tend to prune back the grandiosity of Hegel's system by by stopping reading at a point where he veers into kind of insanity um our reading is um kind of inflationary in that it takes um from these minor moments um it it shows how these minor moments actually precipitate this this plunge into um what um what is called absolute knowing and forces us to think about what that could possibly possibly mean and hence um we come to the most notorious moment but also the most notorious transition itself the end of the Phenomenology and its and the transition to something um as Frank said um sounds even more preposterous the thinking of God before the before the creation and it’s and it’s quite peculiar that if you just try to understand how these two books are related right I mean I we just said it was once coined to be the Phenomenology to be the presupposition for a presuppositionless science but also Hegel called it the first part and the introduction to the system of which weirdly the Science of Logic is the first part so we have two first parts um which odd right so we have a weird repetition so what is that what what is the relation between the two books and even more astoundingly or different from what one immediately would assume if you hear
history of politics of individuation to the contemporary attempts to rehabilitate Hegel to by by making him more palatable um namely by by proposing deflationary readings which which kind of lop off that side of the system which is so which is so embarrassing um what if the you know what if the dash um our strategy is kind of the opposite of the deflationary readings of Hegel in a certain sense um in that these readings which which are the dominant readings today um tend to prune back the grandiosity of Hegel's system by by stopping reading at a point where he veers into kind of insanity um our reading is um kind of inflationary in that it takes um from these minor moments um it it shows how these minor moments actually precipitate this this plunge into um what um what is called absolute knowing and forces us to think about what that could possibly possibly mean and hence um we come to the most notorious moment but also the most notorious transition itself the end of the Phenomenology and its and the transition to something um as Frank said um sounds even more preposterous the thinking of God before the before the creation and it’s and it’s quite peculiar that if you just try to understand how these two books are related right I mean I we just said it was once coined to be the Phenomenology to be the presupposition for a presuppositionless science but also Hegel called it the first part and the introduction to the system of which weirdly the Science of Logic is the first part so we have two first parts um which odd right so we have a weird repetition so what is that what what is the relation between the two books and even more astoundingly or different from what one immediately would assume if you hear
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I mean if you just hear the name Hegel you would assume system many books or something like that or all the books in a certain edition but he that’s kind of what we’re trying to argue at least he basically only wrote two books which is very odd and because I mean the rest of the things you get are kind of handbooks to use for his lectures so that guide you through the lectures right I mean you can study but but they need clarification by someone speaking right in in front and you need to listen because otherwise you don’t understand so these the only two books you could read in the sense right um and then there are lecture notes of course they’re amazing to read but they’re they have been compiled compiled afterwards right I mean so they’re not books in the sense so why two right I mean that was why why two books and what is the relation between the the two books I mean he could have written one book or five but he just wrote right two so twosomness or the question of the relation between the two became a problem maybe I stop here right so why why only two and why two at all so um for a for a philosopher whose intention was to to produce many more books and who has always been castigated for being a thinker of the one so two seems to be both too few and and too many for the you know for Hegel's own self-conception and for the the general perception of Hegel as a monistic metaphysician um so why why two um and it’s interesting so Hegel as Frank was saying wrote the introduction wrote the Phenomenology which was to be the introduction for a uh for the for a three-part work the the Science of Logic which was to be completed by the Philosophy of Nature and
I mean if you just hear the name Hegel you would assume system many books or something like that or all the books in a certain edition but he that’s kind of what we’re trying to argue at least he basically only wrote two books which is very odd and because I mean the rest of the things you get are kind of handbooks to use for his lectures so that guide you through the lectures right I mean you can study but but they need clarification by someone speaking right in in front and you need to listen because otherwise you don’t understand so these the only two books you could read in the sense right um and then there are lecture notes of course they’re amazing to read but they’re they have been compiled compiled afterwards right I mean so they’re not books in the sense so why two right I mean that was why why two books and what is the relation between the the two books I mean he could have written one book or five but he just wrote right two so twosomness or the question of the relation between the two became a problem maybe I stop here right so why why only two and why two at all so um for a for a philosopher whose intention was to to produce many more books and who has always been castigated for being a thinker of the one so two seems to be both too few and and too many for the you know for Hegel's own self-conception and for the the general perception of Hegel as a monistic metaphysician um so why why two um and it’s interesting so Hegel as Frank was saying wrote the introduction wrote the Phenomenology which was to be the introduction for a uh for the for a three-part work the the Science of Logic which was to be completed by the Philosophy of Nature and
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the Philosophy of Spirit and and and he kind of stopped um after writing the big Logic what he does is instead of giving us the book form of the Philosophy of Nature that should have followed it he gives us another logic a kind of recapitulation and miniaturized uh copy of the Logic um and so on um so what is this yeah what is this how in what sense does this um does this strange pair the Phenomenology and the Logic what work is it doing one of the one of the endless
the Philosophy of Spirit and and and he kind of stopped um after writing the big Logic what he does is instead of giving us the book form of the Philosophy of Nature that should have followed it he gives us another logic a kind of recapitulation and miniaturized uh copy of the Logic um and so on um so what is this yeah what is this how in what sense does this um does this strange pair the Phenomenology and the Logic what work is it doing one of the one of the endless
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questions that Hegel never stops asking and that Hegel's readers never stop asking is is Hegel's relationship to to Kant um Hegel’s notorious um gesture towards Kant’s careful demarcation and delimitation um of the bounds of of experience the the curtailing of the kinds of questions that could be posed without falling into um antinomies or contradictions Hegel’s Hegel’s rebuke to Kant um which was partly a formal one but had a had a huge you know the the stakes were huge was that every every posing of a of a limit de facto on formal grounds alone is the surpassing of that limit in order to mark the limit you've already thought the other side of it so so Kant's whole effort to think the bounds of experience by pro- by proscribing um which was essentially impossible the step beyond experience already already um extended the range of the scope of of thinking beyond what Kant was able to tolerate so the Phenomenology is um um as the name suggests it’s about experience it’s about the range about the realm of phenomena um um so what is the what is the logic which is no longer trafficking in appearances and is no longer um dwelling within the sphere of experience is it um is it we’re no longer talking about conscious or self-conscious subjectivity we’re talking about pure thinking is is Hegel venturing into some kind of upgraded version of a noumenal thinkability that cannot be experienced um or what is it in experience itself that that precipitates into the impossibility of experience and this is the point at which I think the uh Hegel really feeds into some some some anachronistic issues of the limits of consciousness of what is it in consciousness that tilts beyond itself are we talking about some kind of
questions that Hegel never stops asking and that Hegel's readers never stop asking is is Hegel's relationship to to Kant um Hegel’s notorious um gesture towards Kant’s careful demarcation and delimitation um of the bounds of of experience the the curtailing of the kinds of questions that could be posed without falling into um antinomies or contradictions Hegel’s Hegel’s rebuke to Kant um which was partly a formal one but had a had a huge you know the the stakes were huge was that every every posing of a of a limit de facto on formal grounds alone is the surpassing of that limit in order to mark the limit you've already thought the other side of it so so Kant's whole effort to think the bounds of experience by pro- by proscribing um which was essentially impossible the step beyond experience already already um extended the range of the scope of of thinking beyond what Kant was able to tolerate so the Phenomenology is um um as the name suggests it’s about experience it’s about the range about the realm of phenomena um um so what is the what is the logic which is no longer trafficking in appearances and is no longer um dwelling within the sphere of experience is it um is it we’re no longer talking about conscious or self-conscious subjectivity we’re talking about pure thinking is is Hegel venturing into some kind of upgraded version of a noumenal thinkability that cannot be experienced um or what is it in experience itself that that precipitates into the impossibility of experience and this is the point at which I think the uh Hegel really feeds into some some some anachronistic issues of the limits of consciousness of what is it in consciousness that tilts beyond itself are we talking about some kind of
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unconscious a strange way to think of a of a work whose scaffolding is seems to be so so perfect um and it's if if you raise that kind of question it is absolutely astonishing if you take a look at contemporary at the contemporary state of Hegel reception because Hegel is not at all anymore the bête noire because everybody seems to have become a Hegelian that's quite astounding but in a in a very specific kind of sense um almost in a as if there is something like a Kantian Hegelianism right I mean there is a certain kind of Hegelianism which emphasizes that there uh Fredric Jameson once called it Habermasian Hegelians uh which um basically describes a kind of approach which emphasizes a certain understanding of what it means that we’re rational and practical human beings right namely that we’re always already in a kind of that’s the the catchword or keyword normative space so we make normative moves and so forth but that is clearly I mean clearly but that is seems to be a Kantianizing of Hegel in the sense that there is a kind of transcendental form right I mean so there is space of reasons is the contemporary name that is often given to that to that to that very form so you might wonder is that all just a weird philological kind of super nerdy Hegel thingy right and it kind of is on the one hand side but not only because with the um or it has
unconscious a strange way to think of a of a work whose scaffolding is seems to be so so perfect um and it's if if you raise that kind of question it is absolutely astonishing if you take a look at contemporary at the contemporary state of Hegel reception because Hegel is not at all anymore the bête noire because everybody seems to have become a Hegelian that's quite astounding but in a in a very specific kind of sense um almost in a as if there is something like a Kantian Hegelianism right I mean there is a certain kind of Hegelianism which emphasizes that there uh Fredric Jameson once called it Habermasian Hegelians uh which um basically describes a kind of approach which emphasizes a certain understanding of what it means that we’re rational and practical human beings right namely that we’re always already in a kind of that’s the the catchword or keyword normative space so we make normative moves and so forth but that is clearly I mean clearly but that is seems to be a Kantianizing of Hegel in the sense that there is a kind of transcendental form right I mean so there is space of reasons is the contemporary name that is often given to that to that to that very form so you might wonder is that all just a weird philological kind of super nerdy Hegel thingy right and it kind of is on the one hand side but not only because with the um or it has
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implications for not only for Hegel or for an understanding of Hegel that is not limited to let's say philological debates because there is a lot of a lot of a lot at stake with the question of how to actually read and understand the transition from the Phenomenology into the Logic I already said um um that it's about the question of a new beginning clearing the slate and all these kinds of things right but it's also if you if you emphasize as we tried to do the let’s say twosomness of the books right there are two books and one has to just like emphasize their respective um projects and that they work kind of side-by-side one one one immediately shatters the cliché image of Hegel as not only philosopher of the one or totality but what would Hegel look like if he were a philosopher of the two if you wish just like formally right I mean he wrote two books and it’s quite difficult to account for the relation between between the two maybe that’s a systematic point right maybe there is reason in this twosomness to to emphasize that again and that resonates with certain clearly with certain tropes in think of Marxism or psychoanalysis right I mean a certain understanding of class struggle also emphasizes twosomness and the non-relationality of the classes in struggle and a certain understanding of psychoanalysis also emphasizes the non-relation between right what is constitutive um for sexed beings so yeah um so let me add one one one more thing so in a sense Hegel might prove if you want want a more trivial formula for that to offer an interesting account to what in the twentieth century was coined under the label of philosophy of difference right so maybe Hegel in this very setup of his system like in the two bookness gives an interesting um um account of what it means to think difference to conceive of difference right right sorry um yeah and speaking of speaking of class struggle and thinking of Marx and thinking about a form of class struggle being a you know having to be ultimately
implications for not only for Hegel or for an understanding of Hegel that is not limited to let's say philological debates because there is a lot of a lot of a lot at stake with the question of how to actually read and understand the transition from the Phenomenology into the Logic I already said um um that it's about the question of a new beginning clearing the slate and all these kinds of things right but it's also if you if you emphasize as we tried to do the let’s say twosomness of the books right there are two books and one has to just like emphasize their respective um projects and that they work kind of side-by-side one one one immediately shatters the cliché image of Hegel as not only philosopher of the one or totality but what would Hegel look like if he were a philosopher of the two if you wish just like formally right I mean he wrote two books and it’s quite difficult to account for the relation between between the two maybe that’s a systematic point right maybe there is reason in this twosomness to to emphasize that again and that resonates with certain clearly with certain tropes in think of Marxism or psychoanalysis right I mean a certain understanding of class struggle also emphasizes twosomness and the non-relationality of the classes in struggle and a certain understanding of psychoanalysis also emphasizes the non-relation between right what is constitutive um for sexed beings so yeah um so let me add one one one more thing so in a sense Hegel might prove if you want want a more trivial formula for that to offer an interesting account to what in the twentieth century was coined under the label of philosophy of difference right so maybe Hegel in this very setup of his system like in the two bookness gives an interesting um um account of what it means to think difference to conceive of difference right right sorry um yeah and speaking of speaking of class struggle and thinking of Marx and thinking about a form of class struggle being a you know having to be ultimately
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um if one is to be Marx taking binary form rather than a pluralistic form um what does it what does that twofold how can we think that twofold without um invoking notions of symmetry and polarity and and thus reconciliation what what what can how does one think of antagonism um in a differential way which is not going to just disperse into a kind of plurality of small differences um so just to get back to reality for a moment um Hegel is Hegel is um Hegel is writing the Phenomenology um in the pretty well the direct aftermath of the French Revolution as you as you all know um and one and and to conclude this work um and this is a work which as as we’ve been saying um is the clearing involved the clearing away of just about everything I mean by the end of the Phenomenology nothing um no appearance no givenness no no and concretely no institutional arrangements no no political formations that have yet um seen the light of day are still standing um so we're left with this kind of you know it’s complicated of course but we’re left with this kind of blank slate everything has been taken away and this is the really condition for the Logic um as this thought experiment setting aside the details of what's happening in the Logic and through the Logic um the Logic really begins um as the this God talk aside um but this is the extent of the grandeur of the project really
um if one is to be Marx taking binary form rather than a pluralistic form um what does it what does that twofold how can we think that twofold without um invoking notions of symmetry and polarity and and thus reconciliation what what what can how does one think of antagonism um in a differential way which is not going to just disperse into a kind of plurality of small differences um so just to get back to reality for a moment um Hegel is Hegel is um Hegel is writing the Phenomenology um in the pretty well the direct aftermath of the French Revolution as you as you all know um and one and and to conclude this work um and this is a work which as as we’ve been saying um is the clearing involved the clearing away of just about everything I mean by the end of the Phenomenology nothing um no appearance no givenness no no and concretely no institutional arrangements no no political formations that have yet um seen the light of day are still standing um so we're left with this kind of you know it’s complicated of course but we’re left with this kind of blank slate everything has been taken away and this is the really condition for the Logic um as this thought experiment setting aside the details of what's happening in the Logic and through the Logic um the Logic really begins um as the this God talk aside um but this is the extent of the grandeur of the project really
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begins is the project what it means to think anew what it means to build anew what it means to to construct a world um which has done away with all the givenness of of tradition this is one way of understanding the the transition at stake so um for Hegel and this this relates to the sort of the political stakes I think Hegel is writing the he’s kind of the the political possibilities have have kind of dried out by the time he’s finished the Phenomenology he doesn't actually know um there's nothing on the horizon there's no return there’s no return possible to a pre-revolutionary state he just does not know what the successor will be um and the the the the last part of the Phenomenology is running through all the kind of non-revolutionary cultural alternatives to political revolution all of which are are emphatically disproven or or re- contested by Hegel and it’s very interesting in this respect that the ending of the Phenomenology that the Hegel’s last gesture seems to be to give the word to Schiller or to invoke Schiller to put Schiller on stage in such a way um it’s not just an empty res- invocation of literature or poetry or a sort of attestation to the limits of discursive thinking um Schiller is kind of the bête noire of this whole project in so far as Schiller um is the figure um who never makes a real appearance in the Phenomenology proper I mean the the the very possibility of an aesthetic politics this is kind of pushed out to the end as a um as an unsolved problem and it’s in this respect um that the that the Phenomenology we think um really ends by making a kind of political staging a political um demand is too strong a word for it but a political challenge to to the you know to the reader the reader being a you know much broader than someone sitting there poring over a text looking for punctuation marks the reader is is the is the collective um recipient of of Hegel and this is in a in a in a sense continued in the beginning of the of the Science of Logic because I mean I think Kierkegaard was the first who noticed that the Science of Logic of Hegel begins very strangely because Hegel himself raises the question
begins is the project what it means to think anew what it means to build anew what it means to to construct a world um which has done away with all the givenness of of tradition this is one way of understanding the the transition at stake so um for Hegel and this this relates to the sort of the political stakes I think Hegel is writing the he’s kind of the the political possibilities have have kind of dried out by the time he’s finished the Phenomenology he doesn't actually know um there's nothing on the horizon there's no return there’s no return possible to a pre-revolutionary state he just does not know what the successor will be um and the the the the last part of the Phenomenology is running through all the kind of non-revolutionary cultural alternatives to political revolution all of which are are emphatically disproven or or re- contested by Hegel and it’s very interesting in this respect that the ending of the Phenomenology that the Hegel’s last gesture seems to be to give the word to Schiller or to invoke Schiller to put Schiller on stage in such a way um it’s not just an empty res- invocation of literature or poetry or a sort of attestation to the limits of discursive thinking um Schiller is kind of the bête noire of this whole project in so far as Schiller um is the figure um who never makes a real appearance in the Phenomenology proper I mean the the the very possibility of an aesthetic politics this is kind of pushed out to the end as a um as an unsolved problem and it’s in this respect um that the that the Phenomenology we think um really ends by making a kind of political staging a political um demand is too strong a word for it but a political challenge to to the you know to the reader the reader being a you know much broader than someone sitting there poring over a text looking for punctuation marks the reader is is the is the collective um recipient of of Hegel and this is in a in a in a sense continued in the beginning of the of the Science of Logic because I mean I think Kierkegaard was the first who noticed that the Science of Logic of Hegel begins very strangely because Hegel himself raises the question
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can we begin by basically simply getting rid of all presuppositions and then of the presupposition that this is a presupposition and and then and then Kierkegaard basically said well that is just like infinite regress right and so how how right because you always want to get rid of something and you introduce just another presupposition by getting rid of that and you do that endlessly and then Hegel does something interesting in the beginning of of the of the Logic because he basically says well the only thing by which we can begin is a resolve an Entschluss in German a kind of decision um and Kierkegaard basically thinks well that is because Hegel couldn't get out of this shitty endless in- infinitely endless loop right he had to break it off and basically say well stop it just like I I want to start but we thought what if that Entschluss um indicates a different understanding of freedom somehow even people who today um assimilate Hegel into the more liberal camp and right I mean soften him and turn him into like a very a thinker of recognition or what what ever so very commode tropes if you wish um they emphasize that Hegel is a thinker of freedom and right I mean and one could say well if if Hegel is a thinker of freedom and
can we begin by basically simply getting rid of all presuppositions and then of the presupposition that this is a presupposition and and then and then Kierkegaard basically said well that is just like infinite regress right and so how how right because you always want to get rid of something and you introduce just another presupposition by getting rid of that and you do that endlessly and then Hegel does something interesting in the beginning of of the of the Logic because he basically says well the only thing by which we can begin is a resolve an Entschluss in German a kind of decision um and Kierkegaard basically thinks well that is because Hegel couldn't get out of this shitty endless in- infinitely endless loop right he had to break it off and basically say well stop it just like I I want to start but we thought what if that Entschluss um indicates a different understanding of freedom somehow even people who today um assimilate Hegel into the more liberal camp and right I mean soften him and turn him into like a very a thinker of recognition or what what ever so very commode tropes if you wish um they emphasize that Hegel is a thinker of freedom and right I mean and one could say well if if Hegel is a thinker of freedom and
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freedom is kind of at stake in this overall project with all its political implications what kind of freedom is the freedom of this resolve of that Entschluss I mean very trivially we wondered who the hell does even make that kind of decision because right I mean we just like cleared the slate so profoundly that we end up right with God before the creation of the world and finite history right so um it’s a a very peculiar kind of kind of resolve or decision taken which sort of I mean in our reading resonates with what for example like in psychoanalysis is called choice of neurosis right I mean it’s a kind of very very strange choice which precedes all choices is not what what the French theorist of catastrophes Jean-Pierre Dupuy once called supermarket freedom right where you basically have a lot on display and basically like that Coke more than that or whatever burger or a car whatever right I mean it is a choice which kind kind of precedes the agent of that very choice because it's constitutive of that very agent right so I mean in different terms what when and how and why did God decide to create just because he could maybe because he wouldn't be God if he didn’t or I mean right I mean that these questions are are at stake so and what what we try to emphasize that in a sense this resolve or decision is not a sovereign decision anymore it cannot be a sovereign decision right if you choose the way I mean choice of neurosis you want to translate in something like how do you choose the way in which you dream right I mean what kind of choice is that kind of choice it’s clearly somehow in you but it's not that you're totally able to do that right on a Friday nights because you just want different kind of dreams over the weekend or whatever right I mean so it is a freedom that cannot simply be a capacity inside outside so all these strange kind of things happen at that point and bring back discussions that that have to do with the again right maybe history of philosophy-wise or systema- systematics-wise Kant-Hegel debate about right what is the status of freedom noumenal experiential or whatsoever but did you I will now ironically be pathetic did you express what you wanted to or do you need some more time who expresses what they want to okay then just some brief remarks most first just to elaborate the background to be clear to you did you
freedom is kind of at stake in this overall project with all its political implications what kind of freedom is the freedom of this resolve of that Entschluss I mean very trivially we wondered who the hell does even make that kind of decision because right I mean we just like cleared the slate so profoundly that we end up right with God before the creation of the world and finite history right so um it’s a a very peculiar kind of kind of resolve or decision taken which sort of I mean in our reading resonates with what for example like in psychoanalysis is called choice of neurosis right I mean it’s a kind of very very strange choice which precedes all choices is not what what the French theorist of catastrophes Jean-Pierre Dupuy once called supermarket freedom right where you basically have a lot on display and basically like that Coke more than that or whatever burger or a car whatever right I mean it is a choice which kind kind of precedes the agent of that very choice because it's constitutive of that very agent right so I mean in different terms what when and how and why did God decide to create just because he could maybe because he wouldn't be God if he didn’t or I mean right I mean that these questions are are at stake so and what what we try to emphasize that in a sense this resolve or decision is not a sovereign decision anymore it cannot be a sovereign decision right if you choose the way I mean choice of neurosis you want to translate in something like how do you choose the way in which you dream right I mean what kind of choice is that kind of choice it’s clearly somehow in you but it's not that you're totally able to do that right on a Friday nights because you just want different kind of dreams over the weekend or whatever right I mean so it is a freedom that cannot simply be a capacity inside outside so all these strange kind of things happen at that point and bring back discussions that that have to do with the again right maybe history of philosophy-wise or systema- systematics-wise Kant-Hegel debate about right what is the status of freedom noumenal experiential or whatsoever but did you I will now ironically be pathetic did you express what you wanted to or do you need some more time who expresses what they want to okay then just some brief remarks most first just to elaborate the background to be clear to you did you
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notice how till twenty-thirty years maybe forty there were two main perceptions of Hegel conservative and revolutionary either Hegel was almost the neo-conservative like no not abstract liberal democracy we need some organic order or it was negativity destroy it all and so on what defines our time and that’s why this Hegel is the most dangerous I agree with both of you this liberal Hegel now all of a sudden we have a liberal Hegel a middle of the road Hegel and you can immediately recognize it with two features which exactly mirror your duality on logic and phenomenology the logic is deflated as you mentioned in the sense that it’s no longer about in whatever way I put it the basic structure of the world whatever it's simply a kind of epistemological reflection on all possible ways of reasoning it’s the general theory of discourse if you want and politically you recognize it by the term recognition which is I think totally one-sided are people even aware how rarely Hegel mentions the term recognition and that’s I think the importance of what you are doing you are the true
notice how till twenty-thirty years maybe forty there were two main perceptions of Hegel conservative and revolutionary either Hegel was almost the neo-conservative like no not abstract liberal democracy we need some organic order or it was negativity destroy it all and so on what defines our time and that’s why this Hegel is the most dangerous I agree with both of you this liberal Hegel now all of a sudden we have a liberal Hegel a middle of the road Hegel and you can immediately recognize it with two features which exactly mirror your duality on logic and phenomenology the logic is deflated as you mentioned in the sense that it’s no longer about in whatever way I put it the basic structure of the world whatever it's simply a kind of epistemological reflection on all possible ways of reasoning it’s the general theory of discourse if you want and politically you recognize it by the term recognition which is I think totally one-sided are people even aware how rarely Hegel mentions the term recognition and that’s I think the importance of what you are doing you are the true
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alternative
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to this new predominant
to this new predominant
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everybody likes him now even in Pentagon in State Department Fukuyama and so on this liberal Hegel second thing uh it’s so important what you said about binary the no precisely about this duality in this case logic phenomenology I think today it’s very fashionable to be against binary logic you know like two sexes no there are multiple sexes and then the two enters as a kind of oppressive gesture you know the two totalizes castrates whatever you want the multiplicity but what Hegel allows us to think is precisely a kind of duality twofoldness which is not binary the the most stupid thing to do would be for example to try to in this mythic pre-modern way sexualize logic phenomenology and say I don't know logic is masculine pure thinking phenomenology is feminine it’s not this it’s a it allows us to think a non-binary twofoldness and third point when you this dash you know that you mentioned I found another use of the dash in theory often for example I’m sorry for the stupidity of this example Marxism-Leninism what does this mean it’s not simply a continuation like Lenin just developed Marxism no it’s mediated by a by a utter failure despair for Lenin although one must be very careful here Lenin never talked about Leninism Leninism is a Stalin’s retroactive dream but nonetheless remember Lenin even here Hegel’s logic immediately intervenes I mean Lenin was totally desperate at the beginning of World War One everything collapsed basically the whole classic Marxist concept of evolution towards revolution slow and so on collapsed and what did Lenin do as you know literally he went to Switzerland and started to read Hegel’s logic no and what I like tremendous so again Marxism-Leninism is not just Lenin developed Marxism tuned it no there is a fiasco total loss and then Lenin intervenes from outside from a totally external position and there is always a a contingent gap here you cannot really develop Marxism Leninism out of Marxism and so on and so on and I don't have time to go into it now but exactly the same goes I think for Freud and Lacan Lacan intervenes brutally from the outside his theoretical reference from the point from which Lacan intervenes into Hegel is is precisely a different one it is of structural linguistics and so on and so on so a couple of brief remarks first I think as an old Stalinist it's so important what you say I don't know which of you I’m old senile like confused this act- this emphasis on Hegel as doing uh cleaning chimney sweeping and so on I think without even great irony that Hegel is engaged in a purge which oh my God where is poor Stalin with his small purges you know
everybody likes him now even in Pentagon in State Department Fukuyama and so on this liberal Hegel second thing uh it’s so important what you said about binary the no precisely about this duality in this case logic phenomenology I think today it’s very fashionable to be against binary logic you know like two sexes no there are multiple sexes and then the two enters as a kind of oppressive gesture you know the two totalizes castrates whatever you want the multiplicity but what Hegel allows us to think is precisely a kind of duality twofoldness which is not binary the the most stupid thing to do would be for example to try to in this mythic pre-modern way sexualize logic phenomenology and say I don't know logic is masculine pure thinking phenomenology is feminine it’s not this it’s a it allows us to think a non-binary twofoldness and third point when you this dash you know that you mentioned I found another use of the dash in theory often for example I’m sorry for the stupidity of this example Marxism-Leninism what does this mean it’s not simply a continuation like Lenin just developed Marxism no it’s mediated by a by a utter failure despair for Lenin although one must be very careful here Lenin never talked about Leninism Leninism is a Stalin’s retroactive dream but nonetheless remember Lenin even here Hegel’s logic immediately intervenes I mean Lenin was totally desperate at the beginning of World War One everything collapsed basically the whole classic Marxist concept of evolution towards revolution slow and so on collapsed and what did Lenin do as you know literally he went to Switzerland and started to read Hegel’s logic no and what I like tremendous so again Marxism-Leninism is not just Lenin developed Marxism tuned it no there is a fiasco total loss and then Lenin intervenes from outside from a totally external position and there is always a a contingent gap here you cannot really develop Marxism Leninism out of Marxism and so on and so on and I don't have time to go into it now but exactly the same goes I think for Freud and Lacan Lacan intervenes brutally from the outside his theoretical reference from the point from which Lacan intervenes into Hegel is is precisely a different one it is of structural linguistics and so on and so on so a couple of brief remarks first I think as an old Stalinist it's so important what you say I don't know which of you I’m old senile like confused this act- this emphasis on Hegel as doing uh cleaning chimney sweeping and so on I think without even great irony that Hegel is engaged in a purge which oh my God where is poor Stalin with his small purges you know
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like Hegel does an incredibly more radical more radical purge and in both books as you emphasize
like Hegel does an incredibly more radical more radical purge and in both books as you emphasize
Slavoj Žižek
so again I will not go into this properly parallax relationship between phenomenology logic because it’s a much more delicate
so again I will not go into this properly parallax relationship between phenomenology logic because it’s a much more delicate
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relationship the problem is not to pass from
relationship the problem is not to pass from
Slavoj Žižek
one to the other Hegel himself is trespassing all the time the problem is not can I go from here to there when I’m in logic to phenomenology or back the problem is to define the difference as such it’s almost a little bit like Lacan's reading of that uh turtle and Achilles or what of course Achilles can always overcome the turtle but he cannot reach the turtle he can run after and bypass he cannot get there so uh I like very much what you emphasize I don't know which of you about these problems that how this duality is precisely not the historicist duality of horrible worst reading of Hegel which is Hegel is totally crazy in his logic God haha but Hegel is good in his concrete historical analysis ethics phenomenology that is the Hegel as I don't know which one of you indicates isn’t it a beautiful paradox that most conservative readers on Hegel of Hegel focus precisely on historical topics while all Lenin and others radical revolutionaries much preferred logic even Marx he was in a crisis how to reconceptualize all of it from his early I think pretty bad vulgar evolutionism of German ideology so what did he read to elaborate his critique of political economy Hegel’s logic not phenomenology and I find this a wonderful paradox the way to be a reactionary let’s take a concrete historical analysis the way to be a social revolutionary it’s let’s think what God is thinking before the creation of the world but now I wouldn’t be myself without finishing with two evil remarks one it’s not so much a criticism of you it's just a question okay you nicely develop this duality logic phenomenology as parallax you know you need both you trespass all the time but you cannot define the limit as such but then as you Frank indicated I love this thesis that Hegel basically wrote in this radical even a little bit existentialist sense of an engagement you can see to put it pathetically how Hegel suffered the active process of thinking when he was writing these two books and then he wrote basically two other books if you discount lectures and shorter texts Encyclopaedia and Phenomenology and Rechtsphilosophie Philosophy of Right which you describe them I think this is your part Frank which are okay we can put it maybe in this way in primitive psychoanalytic terms phenomenology and logic are hysteria at its best permanent self-questioning I’m saying this why I’m saying this am I really saying this while uh sorry while Encyclopaedia and Philosophy of Right are pure university discourse not only in the technical sense that they are notebooks and but already the form paragraphs and this as you Frank I think put it he is reporting giving a report on notional breakthroughs which are already supposed to take place elsewhere he doesn’t it’s not a living thought okay my I’m asking you maybe I read your book too primitively but what about admitting as immanent to Hegel this duality itself what if we shouldn’t say the good Hegel of creative existential thinking about this bad bureaucratic Hegel what if the true strength of thinking is say fuck it no I will not stick in my stupid existential authenticity I’m strong enough to make a pass into university bureaucracy that’s my question maybe I read you too different too easily but with my Stalinist mind I detected a little bit of this tendency you know of good Hegel passion existential thinking against the back bureaucratic Hegel and you know that I can resist anything but not temptation like Oscar Wilde but an obscenity when you mentioned not just dash but all this contradictory multiple meanings of a word I will tell you a dirty joke from Argentina which plays on a double meaning of a word and I think Hegel would have loved it because Hegel goes in the seen same similar obscene direction a couple of times for example you know about phrenology the same organ urination the highest and the lowest you know the verb coger in Spanish in Spain it just means to grab something to get hold of or whatever while in Argentina I don't know how it is I think also in some other Latino American countries I’m not sure it’s the f-word like coger a woman means f and so on so the eternal joke very Hegelian I claim is this one a stupid Spanish tourist comes to Argentina and says donde puedo coger un taxi and the answer is you can try in the exhaust fume but it will not be very pleasant with this Hegelian joke I finish and now you take over I think with Q and A ah sorry just maybe no no stay there one you know you were right when you emphasized it's not about German language Hegel was here extremely non-nationalist opportunist I read somewhere for some time when he was searching for a job he even played with the idea of getting a job in Amsterdam or somewhere in Netherlands and he was already writing there his friends there please tell me all possible words with many meanings and so on and so on no Hegel is not Heidegger for him there is no deeper authenticity in German language and so on and so on he was absolutely immediately and that's the beauty of Hegel that you know Hegel absolute idealist and so on but isn't this a beautiful reversal of how the pure speculative thought logic mind of God the only way to articulate it it’s not in some pure formalized logical language but it’s by using what is most contingent and irrational if you want in language double meanings and so on and so on that’s why Hegel would have been appalled by this analytic procedure of oh you are using a word in multiple meanings let's clarify the meanings and so on I stop I talk too much I’m sorry please hi I’m Emily Apter I’m comparative literature and um I’m just going to give a hand on moderating the discussion um I’m wondering if Rebecca and Frank would like to respond anything that Žižek raised first and maybe I’ll throw as a rider into that if you could come back because I think Žižek mentioned it already to giving us a little bit more of a hold on this question of the monster and the absolute and absolute knowledge which of course Slavoj's also been working on for a long time and if you can also then answer my reproach bureaucracy university right I want to answer that reproach first as a way of getting into this question of the the the absolute which are enunciated um seemingly from the position of absolute knowing but are not and this is not really meant as an insult they’re not engaged in the production of absolute knowing itself and this is part of this is part of the absolute and it’s inherent you talking about speculative words I mean it’s inherent in um the the most speculative word of all which is wissen absolute wissen is is both absolute knowing in the verbal active sense of what we’re calling for shorthand subjectification I mean it’s the production of a self-knowing knowledge and wissen as knowledge um the nominal form and that’s that’s contained in the word itself which is to say that the degradation um or bureaucratization which is at work in an encyclopedic university discourse which is about transmission which is about neutrality which is about all the things of which the university discourse is often reproached that is not in itself a um outside the absolute it’s actually part of the part of the diminution inherent in the absolute itself so it’s a yeah it's this deflationist itself part of in rather than being something to be feared away from now you can answer about the absolute well thank you no I also want just like very quickly um I mean this is why one could say if one if one goes through just like the systematic place of the book right books one could assume okay the Phenomenology of Spirit is the intro to the system then we get the Science of Logic and what happens then then comes the Encyclopaedia and what does the Encyclopaedia do it immediately repeats the Science of Logic right so we get we end the Science of Logic and Hegel does that with a very grandiose idea where the absolute idea releases that system itself into nature but we don't immediately get nature but we get a kind of as if naturalized version of the Logic in the Encyclopaedia before we approach the Philosophy of Nature and I mean just to make that more intelligible to everyone who has not even opened the book I mean we are basically wondering for example or making a even formal difference I mean the Encyclopaedia of Hegel is structured in paragraph right you start with paragraph one and very randomly you end at four hundred something right which doesn’t capture the structure of the Science of Logic or even though the English has right the paragraphs but the German doesn’t um and maybe it captures nonetheless some encyclopedic tendency of the Phenomenology but anyhow this doesn’t I mean this isn’t in the Phenomenology or the Logic so there is just just a formal difference right in the Encyclopaedia you get from one to two to three and sort of relying on numbers right just like you are must be able to count and then you know how to get from one to two and from I don’t know two hundred thirty-seven to two hundred thirty-eight which you this kind of security you don’t have in the Logic right and this is why I mean this is why what we’re saying about this difference could be read that the Science of Logic and the Phenomenology are cool books and the Encyclopaedia isn’t right I mean it’s the uncool book or whatever but Hegel himself talks in the Science of Logic about what he calls relapses Rückfälle right so some something and that is eternal to the unfolding of the absolute right so it is not only and that has to do also with a certain let’s say liberalist or liberal reading of Hegel it is not that Hegel is simply a progressist right it’s always continually getting better but there can be relapses right I mean one can relapse I mean he calls that even sublimation in vain right I mean so something can be subleated and not subleated at the same time and sometimes that can be productive and sometimes it cannot be but it's a systematic and integral part so about the absolute um why we emphasized so much the transition or non-relation between and the twosomness of the books because our hunch is that what is at stake at that very transition which sort of is the systematic place of absolute knowing right is and Rebecca already said that um a question of what does it mean to constitute or reconstitute subjectivity right what does it mean to begin anew not begin a new project but just like to really begin anew right and in a sense that means it is the systematic place where questions of transformation or revolution or whatever you want to call that are are placed that that is to say it is a very peculiar kind of knowing if it is an active kind of practice this is why we emphasize this this kind of weird decision right um I mean to use a cheesy example that I sometimes like to use what does it mean to decide to fall in love for example right I mean what kind of decision is that kind of decision it is I mean it is not a decision by objective criteria right I mean you're not basically saying well the salary seems okay height is okay and I like the hair color and the eyes or whatever I mean that would be weird to describe it that way right so it is a weird kind of decision for which one and that is then the catch is only oneself radically responsible nonetheless even though one has not and this is why we’re talking about Entschluss and so ever in whatsoever in the book um because um one did
one to the other Hegel himself is trespassing all the time the problem is not can I go from here to there when I’m in logic to phenomenology or back the problem is to define the difference as such it’s almost a little bit like Lacan's reading of that uh turtle and Achilles or what of course Achilles can always overcome the turtle but he cannot reach the turtle he can run after and bypass he cannot get there so uh I like very much what you emphasize I don't know which of you about these problems that how this duality is precisely not the historicist duality of horrible worst reading of Hegel which is Hegel is totally crazy in his logic God haha but Hegel is good in his concrete historical analysis ethics phenomenology that is the Hegel as I don't know which one of you indicates isn’t it a beautiful paradox that most conservative readers on Hegel of Hegel focus precisely on historical topics while all Lenin and others radical revolutionaries much preferred logic even Marx he was in a crisis how to reconceptualize all of it from his early I think pretty bad vulgar evolutionism of German ideology so what did he read to elaborate his critique of political economy Hegel’s logic not phenomenology and I find this a wonderful paradox the way to be a reactionary let’s take a concrete historical analysis the way to be a social revolutionary it’s let’s think what God is thinking before the creation of the world but now I wouldn’t be myself without finishing with two evil remarks one it’s not so much a criticism of you it's just a question okay you nicely develop this duality logic phenomenology as parallax you know you need both you trespass all the time but you cannot define the limit as such but then as you Frank indicated I love this thesis that Hegel basically wrote in this radical even a little bit existentialist sense of an engagement you can see to put it pathetically how Hegel suffered the active process of thinking when he was writing these two books and then he wrote basically two other books if you discount lectures and shorter texts Encyclopaedia and Phenomenology and Rechtsphilosophie Philosophy of Right which you describe them I think this is your part Frank which are okay we can put it maybe in this way in primitive psychoanalytic terms phenomenology and logic are hysteria at its best permanent self-questioning I’m saying this why I’m saying this am I really saying this while uh sorry while Encyclopaedia and Philosophy of Right are pure university discourse not only in the technical sense that they are notebooks and but already the form paragraphs and this as you Frank I think put it he is reporting giving a report on notional breakthroughs which are already supposed to take place elsewhere he doesn’t it’s not a living thought okay my I’m asking you maybe I read your book too primitively but what about admitting as immanent to Hegel this duality itself what if we shouldn’t say the good Hegel of creative existential thinking about this bad bureaucratic Hegel what if the true strength of thinking is say fuck it no I will not stick in my stupid existential authenticity I’m strong enough to make a pass into university bureaucracy that’s my question maybe I read you too different too easily but with my Stalinist mind I detected a little bit of this tendency you know of good Hegel passion existential thinking against the back bureaucratic Hegel and you know that I can resist anything but not temptation like Oscar Wilde but an obscenity when you mentioned not just dash but all this contradictory multiple meanings of a word I will tell you a dirty joke from Argentina which plays on a double meaning of a word and I think Hegel would have loved it because Hegel goes in the seen same similar obscene direction a couple of times for example you know about phrenology the same organ urination the highest and the lowest you know the verb coger in Spanish in Spain it just means to grab something to get hold of or whatever while in Argentina I don't know how it is I think also in some other Latino American countries I’m not sure it’s the f-word like coger a woman means f and so on so the eternal joke very Hegelian I claim is this one a stupid Spanish tourist comes to Argentina and says donde puedo coger un taxi and the answer is you can try in the exhaust fume but it will not be very pleasant with this Hegelian joke I finish and now you take over I think with Q and A ah sorry just maybe no no stay there one you know you were right when you emphasized it's not about German language Hegel was here extremely non-nationalist opportunist I read somewhere for some time when he was searching for a job he even played with the idea of getting a job in Amsterdam or somewhere in Netherlands and he was already writing there his friends there please tell me all possible words with many meanings and so on and so on no Hegel is not Heidegger for him there is no deeper authenticity in German language and so on and so on he was absolutely immediately and that's the beauty of Hegel that you know Hegel absolute idealist and so on but isn't this a beautiful reversal of how the pure speculative thought logic mind of God the only way to articulate it it’s not in some pure formalized logical language but it’s by using what is most contingent and irrational if you want in language double meanings and so on and so on that’s why Hegel would have been appalled by this analytic procedure of oh you are using a word in multiple meanings let's clarify the meanings and so on I stop I talk too much I’m sorry please hi I’m Emily Apter I’m comparative literature and um I’m just going to give a hand on moderating the discussion um I’m wondering if Rebecca and Frank would like to respond anything that Žižek raised first and maybe I’ll throw as a rider into that if you could come back because I think Žižek mentioned it already to giving us a little bit more of a hold on this question of the monster and the absolute and absolute knowledge which of course Slavoj's also been working on for a long time and if you can also then answer my reproach bureaucracy university right I want to answer that reproach first as a way of getting into this question of the the the absolute which are enunciated um seemingly from the position of absolute knowing but are not and this is not really meant as an insult they’re not engaged in the production of absolute knowing itself and this is part of this is part of the absolute and it’s inherent you talking about speculative words I mean it’s inherent in um the the most speculative word of all which is wissen absolute wissen is is both absolute knowing in the verbal active sense of what we’re calling for shorthand subjectification I mean it’s the production of a self-knowing knowledge and wissen as knowledge um the nominal form and that’s that’s contained in the word itself which is to say that the degradation um or bureaucratization which is at work in an encyclopedic university discourse which is about transmission which is about neutrality which is about all the things of which the university discourse is often reproached that is not in itself a um outside the absolute it’s actually part of the part of the diminution inherent in the absolute itself so it’s a yeah it's this deflationist itself part of in rather than being something to be feared away from now you can answer about the absolute well thank you no I also want just like very quickly um I mean this is why one could say if one if one goes through just like the systematic place of the book right books one could assume okay the Phenomenology of Spirit is the intro to the system then we get the Science of Logic and what happens then then comes the Encyclopaedia and what does the Encyclopaedia do it immediately repeats the Science of Logic right so we get we end the Science of Logic and Hegel does that with a very grandiose idea where the absolute idea releases that system itself into nature but we don't immediately get nature but we get a kind of as if naturalized version of the Logic in the Encyclopaedia before we approach the Philosophy of Nature and I mean just to make that more intelligible to everyone who has not even opened the book I mean we are basically wondering for example or making a even formal difference I mean the Encyclopaedia of Hegel is structured in paragraph right you start with paragraph one and very randomly you end at four hundred something right which doesn’t capture the structure of the Science of Logic or even though the English has right the paragraphs but the German doesn’t um and maybe it captures nonetheless some encyclopedic tendency of the Phenomenology but anyhow this doesn’t I mean this isn’t in the Phenomenology or the Logic so there is just just a formal difference right in the Encyclopaedia you get from one to two to three and sort of relying on numbers right just like you are must be able to count and then you know how to get from one to two and from I don’t know two hundred thirty-seven to two hundred thirty-eight which you this kind of security you don’t have in the Logic right and this is why I mean this is why what we’re saying about this difference could be read that the Science of Logic and the Phenomenology are cool books and the Encyclopaedia isn’t right I mean it’s the uncool book or whatever but Hegel himself talks in the Science of Logic about what he calls relapses Rückfälle right so some something and that is eternal to the unfolding of the absolute right so it is not only and that has to do also with a certain let’s say liberalist or liberal reading of Hegel it is not that Hegel is simply a progressist right it’s always continually getting better but there can be relapses right I mean one can relapse I mean he calls that even sublimation in vain right I mean so something can be subleated and not subleated at the same time and sometimes that can be productive and sometimes it cannot be but it's a systematic and integral part so about the absolute um why we emphasized so much the transition or non-relation between and the twosomness of the books because our hunch is that what is at stake at that very transition which sort of is the systematic place of absolute knowing right is and Rebecca already said that um a question of what does it mean to constitute or reconstitute subjectivity right what does it mean to begin anew not begin a new project but just like to really begin anew right and in a sense that means it is the systematic place where questions of transformation or revolution or whatever you want to call that are are placed that that is to say it is a very peculiar kind of knowing if it is an active kind of practice this is why we emphasize this this kind of weird decision right um I mean to use a cheesy example that I sometimes like to use what does it mean to decide to fall in love for example right I mean what kind of decision is that kind of decision it is I mean it is not a decision by objective criteria right I mean you're not basically saying well the salary seems okay height is okay and I like the hair color and the eyes or whatever I mean that would be weird to describe it that way right so it is a weird kind of decision for which one and that is then the catch is only oneself radically responsible nonetheless even though one has not and this is why we’re talking about Entschluss and so ever in whatsoever in the book um because um one did
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not consciously make that kind of decision and this is where we believe that is what we believe is at stake with regard to that very concept does that that helps and listening to you that this would then be the kind of Kant-Hegel thing around debates around Willkür and freedom of choice and what’s the status of choice in this case that you’ve just raised but I’ll just let that dangle on the dash I think we should open it up to general questions and then yeah so anyone
not consciously make that kind of decision and this is where we believe that is what we believe is at stake with regard to that very concept does that that helps and listening to you that this would then be the kind of Kant-Hegel thing around debates around Willkür and freedom of choice and what’s the status of choice in this case that you’ve just raised but I’ll just let that dangle on the dash I think we should open it up to general questions and then yeah so anyone
Slavoj Žižek
want to jump
want to jump
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in hey thanks for that the response to this might have already been lost in the dash somewhere but I guess my only question is going back to absolute knowing and absolute knowledge are you saying that there’s a complete discontinuity between absolute knowing and the kind of knowing that’s deployed in the Science of Logic no um what I was um what we were suggesting was and I’m not I’m not sure that discontinuity is the right word but a certain a dissonance is registered between the absolute knowing um in which the Phenomenology culminates and from which um the Logic is born um and absolute knowing as a as a verb active sense of what we’re calling for shorthand subjectification I mean it’s the production of a self-knowing knowledge and wissen as knowledge um the nominal form which is the encyclopedic discourse which is the object of of knowing so that would be the the that would be the disjunction which is which is produced by the absolute itself which is why it’s not it’s not really an external disjunction it’s an internal one but may I very briefly I think it's important what the two of you indicated all
in hey thanks for that the response to this might have already been lost in the dash somewhere but I guess my only question is going back to absolute knowing and absolute knowledge are you saying that there’s a complete discontinuity between absolute knowing and the kind of knowing that’s deployed in the Science of Logic no um what I was um what we were suggesting was and I’m not I’m not sure that discontinuity is the right word but a certain a dissonance is registered between the absolute knowing um in which the Phenomenology culminates and from which um the Logic is born um and absolute knowing as a as a verb active sense of what we’re calling for shorthand subjectification I mean it’s the production of a self-knowing knowledge and wissen as knowledge um the nominal form which is the encyclopedic discourse which is the object of of knowing so that would be the the that would be the disjunction which is which is produced by the absolute itself which is why it’s not it’s not really an external disjunction it’s an internal one but may I very briefly I think it's important what the two of you indicated all
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the time that we don't have time now but we should really redefine in a closer sorry analysis what do we mean by absolute because we have a certain primitive idea absolute ooh some kind of a up there absolute untouchable unchangeable and so on Hegel’s you put it very precisely the even if there is a moment of absolute knowledge in Hegel it's more in these interspaces passages and so on for example but it has one has to emphasize this again and again Hegel does not mean that now even if it is in
the time that we don't have time now but we should really redefine in a closer sorry analysis what do we mean by absolute because we have a certain primitive idea absolute ooh some kind of a up there absolute untouchable unchangeable and so on Hegel’s you put it very precisely the even if there is a moment of absolute knowledge in Hegel it's more in these interspaces passages and so on for example but it has one has to emphasize this again and again Hegel does not mean that now even if it is in
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very vague sense we are at the end we know it all there are so many proofs of this for example last correct me if I’m wrong but the last text short that Hegel wrote is a critique of the English Reform Bill which made a step towards general I mean right how do you call it general elections and for Hegel it’s a it’s a very strange conservative text but very subversive Hegel is more or less horrified my God what is happening and so on second point look at introduction to philosophy of history where in two cases and this proves that empirical Hegel was not an idiot I claim two cases when he deals with Russia and with United States and be careful he wrote and though this in late teens twenties he says these two nations he speaks separately of them haven't yet reached their speculative form whatever it will be up the next century will be theirs we cannot say it now so again it’s not simply it’s not simply we know it all second point and this is an additional question to you then I shut up I’m sorry you know what in it’s on the one hand it’s true Encyclopaedia reports on acquired knowledge but the most wonderful moments in Encyclopaedia are those where although he acts behaves as if I’m just reporting on what I already went through a marvelous formulation happens here and there the one for example that I quote all the time this wonderful formulation against all historian optimist evolutionist that reconciliation is not that you overcome duality but that you realize that duality was always already overcome it’s strictly retroactive and another point where Hegel is for me at his best how honest he is you know he has this generally dismissive attitude towards mathematics you know oh it’s just quantitative formal thinking blah blah but if there ever was a symptom it’s look in the Logic the part on differential calculus it’s extraordinary it’s like fifty sixty seventy pages and why is he struggling with it because to simplify it with differential calculus mathematic does mathematics does something that according to Hegel shouldn’t be able to do no to move into qualitative conceptual qualitative conceptual thinking another proof at the very end and Slavoj can I just I’m just going to be a little interventionist here I’m sorry please and Frank did you have any response to that question about at we’re on the Encyclopaedia on Encyclopaedia question no I think that’s it okay all right sorry to interrupt you I shut up now question here I just have a few things the first thing Slavoj said that there’s the dash between Marxism-Leninism I’m wondering there’s another dash that happened later Marxism-Leninism-Maoism I’m wondering what you thought about that and I think these are all related you said the one and the two so what’s the difference between the one and the two is it two things is it one thing in two places is it one thing and a thing in a place and then another thing you mentioned is symmetry but what about asymmetry does anyone want to take that it was sort of a Žižek question but Frank did you want to jump in okay then I will say but one sentence I promise the best
very vague sense we are at the end we know it all there are so many proofs of this for example last correct me if I’m wrong but the last text short that Hegel wrote is a critique of the English Reform Bill which made a step towards general I mean right how do you call it general elections and for Hegel it’s a it’s a very strange conservative text but very subversive Hegel is more or less horrified my God what is happening and so on second point look at introduction to philosophy of history where in two cases and this proves that empirical Hegel was not an idiot I claim two cases when he deals with Russia and with United States and be careful he wrote and though this in late teens twenties he says these two nations he speaks separately of them haven't yet reached their speculative form whatever it will be up the next century will be theirs we cannot say it now so again it’s not simply it’s not simply we know it all second point and this is an additional question to you then I shut up I’m sorry you know what in it’s on the one hand it’s true Encyclopaedia reports on acquired knowledge but the most wonderful moments in Encyclopaedia are those where although he acts behaves as if I’m just reporting on what I already went through a marvelous formulation happens here and there the one for example that I quote all the time this wonderful formulation against all historian optimist evolutionist that reconciliation is not that you overcome duality but that you realize that duality was always already overcome it’s strictly retroactive and another point where Hegel is for me at his best how honest he is you know he has this generally dismissive attitude towards mathematics you know oh it’s just quantitative formal thinking blah blah but if there ever was a symptom it’s look in the Logic the part on differential calculus it’s extraordinary it’s like fifty sixty seventy pages and why is he struggling with it because to simplify it with differential calculus mathematic does mathematics does something that according to Hegel shouldn’t be able to do no to move into qualitative conceptual qualitative conceptual thinking another proof at the very end and Slavoj can I just I’m just going to be a little interventionist here I’m sorry please and Frank did you have any response to that question about at we’re on the Encyclopaedia on Encyclopaedia question no I think that’s it okay all right sorry to interrupt you I shut up now question here I just have a few things the first thing Slavoj said that there’s the dash between Marxism-Leninism I’m wondering there’s another dash that happened later Marxism-Leninism-Maoism I’m wondering what you thought about that and I think these are all related you said the one and the two so what’s the difference between the one and the two is it two things is it one thing in two places is it one thing and a thing in a place and then another thing you mentioned is symmetry but what about asymmetry does anyone want to take that it was sort of a Žižek question but Frank did you want to jump in okay then I will say but one sentence I promise the best
unknown
answer was given I hope we are all Beckettians Beckett no there is no duality here one is shit the other one is good
answer was given I hope we are all Beckettians Beckett no there is no duality here one is shit the other one is good
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Joyce is bad Beckett is good and Beckett wrote something so wonderful I don’t know where he said one divides into itself that’s the perfect Hegel is not two emerges when one wants to become one and that would
Joyce is bad Beckett is good and Beckett wrote something so wonderful I don’t know where he said one divides into itself that’s the perfect Hegel is not two emerges when one wants to become one and that would
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be the starting point of my answer but I promise I will not talk please just an addendum on this question of asymmetry um and whether the two whether that two whether can be conceived in a non-binary non-reciprocal non- which changes nature of mediation as being um I guess the question I
be the starting point of my answer but I promise I will not talk please just an addendum on this question of asymmetry um and whether the two whether that two whether can be conceived in a non-binary non-reciprocal non- which changes nature of mediation as being um I guess the question I
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would put back is is does asymmetry um is not incompatible with reversibility and reversibility therefore is is not about symmetry either not simply about reverse you know changing places or reversing master for slave or something like that but that the positions are doing doing work on each other maybe just very quickly I mean the whole this why we emphasize that whole two books thing right because one could say well isn't it just like the same project and he wrote about it twice and we’re kind of saying no because um it’s not two times the same thing but it’s totally unclear what the two things are I mean it’s just clear they’re two right and they’re not two of a kind and that I mean you
would put back is is does asymmetry um is not incompatible with reversibility and reversibility therefore is is not about symmetry either not simply about reverse you know changing places or reversing master for slave or something like that but that the positions are doing doing work on each other maybe just very quickly I mean the whole this why we emphasize that whole two books thing right because one could say well isn't it just like the same project and he wrote about it twice and we’re kind of saying no because um it’s not two times the same thing but it’s totally unclear what the two things are I mean it’s just clear they’re two right and they’re not two of a kind and that I mean you
Slavoj Žižek
you can see that in the history of Hegel reception the whole temptation was somehow to reduce it to just like one I mean it’s just one book like it’s the same movement as in a Phenomenology right I mean that would be one temptation and there are many others or basically saying well the Phenomenology is just like applied abstract structures that we get then in the Science of Logic for example right thereby you’re basically saying well there are no two and so we wondered what does it mean to account for the twosomness if you wish of the two books and we um and that must mean in one way or the other not to immediately identify a simple repetition of one and the same thing right I mean it’s not like two times one and this is where a difficult account of let’s say difference or asymmetry and so forth this is where precisely it takes right occurs right and becomes a systematic and conceptual question does that make sense there was a question um yeah hi uh yeah my question is kind of related it’s about dualism um and it’s also sort of to Slavoj about sort of if Hegel and Lacan come together and Lacan builds his theory from structuralism sort of Lévi-Strauss and Jakobson I’m wondering how we should think about like formalism in the sense of structuralism a system of discrete signs um and the way that what was being formulated there was uh part of was connected to the origins of computer science and sort of computational systems so Heidegger’s critique of Hegel in many ways is that Hegel is the ultimate metaphysician and also that metaphysics culminates in a kind of cybernetics or pure computation of deductive logic and so the Science of Logic is is supposed to be seen as kind of a deductive system a pure computational in some sense sequence um of concepts and propositions so I’m kind of wondering how how do you think Hegel how exactly does Hegel uh escape being sort of the culmination of perhaps a vision of pure computation and at the same time how is that related to the question of formalism in structuralism okay I can risk if you want very briefly I think first really briefly I think that first uh you know what do we mean by formalism if anything and I think you Frank proved it in detail that Hegel is a mega-formalist and what is best in Marx is exactly this formalism for Hegel Hegel so this pseudo-dialectics form follows content and so on no form precedes content but we don’t have time to go into this I this question about cybernetics and so on I think there is a certain movement of self-referentiality and retroactivity I’m a- in in dialectics in the Hegelian sense for which and I have had long debates with artificial intelligence people and they didn’t give me a clear answer which
you can see that in the history of Hegel reception the whole temptation was somehow to reduce it to just like one I mean it’s just one book like it’s the same movement as in a Phenomenology right I mean that would be one temptation and there are many others or basically saying well the Phenomenology is just like applied abstract structures that we get then in the Science of Logic for example right thereby you’re basically saying well there are no two and so we wondered what does it mean to account for the twosomness if you wish of the two books and we um and that must mean in one way or the other not to immediately identify a simple repetition of one and the same thing right I mean it’s not like two times one and this is where a difficult account of let’s say difference or asymmetry and so forth this is where precisely it takes right occurs right and becomes a systematic and conceptual question does that make sense there was a question um yeah hi uh yeah my question is kind of related it’s about dualism um and it’s also sort of to Slavoj about sort of if Hegel and Lacan come together and Lacan builds his theory from structuralism sort of Lévi-Strauss and Jakobson I’m wondering how we should think about like formalism in the sense of structuralism a system of discrete signs um and the way that what was being formulated there was uh part of was connected to the origins of computer science and sort of computational systems so Heidegger’s critique of Hegel in many ways is that Hegel is the ultimate metaphysician and also that metaphysics culminates in a kind of cybernetics or pure computation of deductive logic and so the Science of Logic is is supposed to be seen as kind of a deductive system a pure computational in some sense sequence um of concepts and propositions so I’m kind of wondering how how do you think Hegel how exactly does Hegel uh escape being sort of the culmination of perhaps a vision of pure computation and at the same time how is that related to the question of formalism in structuralism okay I can risk if you want very briefly I think first really briefly I think that first uh you know what do we mean by formalism if anything and I think you Frank proved it in detail that Hegel is a mega-formalist and what is best in Marx is exactly this formalism for Hegel Hegel so this pseudo-dialectics form follows content and so on no form precedes content but we don’t have time to go into this I this question about cybernetics and so on I think there is a certain movement of self-referentiality and retroactivity I’m a- in in dialectics in the Hegelian sense for which and I have had long debates with artificial intelligence people and they didn’t give me a clear answer which
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I am not sure how you can translate them into formalized logic and what computers do if you allow me very briefly to tell you a joke which we use all the time I used it already some in this room I think about ten times you know that Ninotchka joke a guy comes
I am not sure how you can translate them into formalized logic and what computers do if you allow me very briefly to tell you a joke which we use all the time I used it already some in this room I think about ten times you know that Ninotchka joke a guy comes
Chris Simmons
to a cafeteria and says can I get a coffee please but without milk and the waiter says sorry we don’t have milk we just have cream so I can only give you coffee without cream you know this is the basic Hegelian point negative determination okay now the point is this one the coffee that you get is the same coffee but speculatively
to a cafeteria and says can I get a coffee please but without milk and the waiter says sorry we don’t have milk we just have cream so I can only give you coffee without cream you know this is the basic Hegelian point negative determination okay now the point is this one the coffee that you get is the same coffee but speculatively
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plain coffee is not the same as coffee without
plain coffee is not the same as coffee without
Slavoj Žižek
milk which is not the same as coffee without cream although they are materially the same the difference is purely virtual now I’m asking you a very naive question and with this I will stop can a computer reproduce this you know that something is but it differs with reference to what to its virtual shadow as it were I mean I didn’t get a clear answer to this one but since I have a word one sentence I promised I would like to ask the two of you an extremely evil
milk which is not the same as coffee without cream although they are materially the same the difference is purely virtual now I’m asking you a very naive question and with this I will stop can a computer reproduce this you know that something is but it differs with reference to what to its virtual shadow as it were I mean I didn’t get a clear answer to this one but since I have a word one sentence I promised I would like to ask the two of you an extremely evil
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question I warn you dash dash two which is not two what about the dash a book by Comay Ruda did you ever think about the dash of the two of you your book is a dash we are a slash actually ah this is such a dirty trick for this you will burn in Hegelian hell okay I stop sorry just a quick word about Hegel's formalism and formalization I I have to sidestep the question of cybernetics um except just to mention it as an extra-inner Hegelian thing
question I warn you dash dash two which is not two what about the dash a book by Comay Ruda did you ever think about the dash of the two of you your book is a dash we are a slash actually ah this is such a dirty trick for this you will burn in Hegelian hell okay I stop sorry just a quick word about Hegel's formalism and formalization I I have to sidestep the question of cybernetics um except just to mention it as an extra-inner Hegelian thing
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about mechanization and um being um a moment of thinking but but a moment um but but Hegel you know Hegel has this notion of absolute form um in the in which is thematized in the logic but I think is expressive of um not simply at a thematic level but expressive of of of of thinking and and particularly expressive of his strange relationship to Kant who’s usually reproached I mean usually in the name of Hegel Kant's empty formalism is criticized um and Kant is criticized for just being a formalist and having no you know no access to real stuff like Hegel you know um which Hegel seems to have that's that's kind of Kant's dualism um Hegel’s point is um in a sense hyper-Kantian because he um he he privileges form I mean in the in the antithesis you know the inherited antithesis of form and which is form and content or form and matter we can you know it has many different forms um what is unquestioned in that received dichotomy um is the is the binarity itself right and so form is in that sense reified um and deformalized in the in the way in which form and matter form and content have been traditionally received so in a certain sense
about mechanization and um being um a moment of thinking but but a moment um but but Hegel you know Hegel has this notion of absolute form um in the in which is thematized in the logic but I think is expressive of um not simply at a thematic level but expressive of of of of thinking and and particularly expressive of his strange relationship to Kant who’s usually reproached I mean usually in the name of Hegel Kant's empty formalism is criticized um and Kant is criticized for just being a formalist and having no you know no access to real stuff like Hegel you know um which Hegel seems to have that's that's kind of Kant's dualism um Hegel’s point is um in a sense hyper-Kantian because he um he he privileges form I mean in the in the antithesis you know the inherited antithesis of form and which is form and content or form and matter we can you know it has many different forms um what is unquestioned in that received dichotomy um is the is the binarity itself right and so form is in that sense reified um and deformalized in the in the way in which form and matter form and content have been traditionally received so in a certain sense
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the the idea of absolute form is the is a commitment to um to a form that’s so pure that it de- reifies itself it cannot it no longer occupies a a determinate position in the binary of form and content um and that’s why um one must opt for form in a certain sense um because only as such does one um cease to reproduce um what is what is um what becomes a substantivized notion of form including the form which takes itself as its own content so that’s just kind of a that's that's part of a long argument we make at some point in the in the book but that would be the point of the sort of surprising Hegel's surprising advocacy of a kind of formalism because it’s not what one thinks that he’s doing um in getting over Kant's approach to Kant is actually that he's not formalist enough yeah yeah it is crucial that's the formal yeah yeah Frank did you want to no I think that's the way you describe the dash and I my apologies I I haven't even opened your book right but I’m curious to do so only read the cover it’s I haven’t even read the cover right? So um so what you said
the the idea of absolute form is the is a commitment to um to a form that’s so pure that it de- reifies itself it cannot it no longer occupies a a determinate position in the binary of form and content um and that’s why um one must opt for form in a certain sense um because only as such does one um cease to reproduce um what is what is um what becomes a substantivized notion of form including the form which takes itself as its own content so that’s just kind of a that's that's part of a long argument we make at some point in the in the book but that would be the point of the sort of surprising Hegel's surprising advocacy of a kind of formalism because it’s not what one thinks that he’s doing um in getting over Kant's approach to Kant is actually that he's not formalist enough yeah yeah it is crucial that's the formal yeah yeah Frank did you want to no I think that's the way you describe the dash and I my apologies I I haven't even opened your book right but I’m curious to do so only read the cover it’s I haven’t even read the cover right? So um so what you said
Slavoj Žižek
about the the the ambiguity of the dash right very much reminded me of and and also what what you then elaborated on that regarding the temporality the suspension very much reminded me of of Kierkegaard right and and Kierkegaard who is and and you talked about the mode of representation of philosophizing so apparently with Kierkegaard we are entering very much into a literary mode of representation he’s very aware of of also punctuation marks and if I’m not mistaken so the punctua- as the dash plays a significant role in his work on irony so I was uh I was struck by that and and what what he would argue is basically he would make a case for the misunderstanding for the uh for the uh for the for the indirect communication right and that I guess one could see the dash in Kierkegaard as being part of this of being part of this indirect communication what one would further would call the performative dimension of his of his thinking right? Or what Deleuze would probably call the theatricalization of his philosophy and I was wondering whether you would go so far in Hegel as to argue okay your approach by taking the dashes seriously of the punctuation marks brings us towards a performative dimension in Hegel’s thought thank you um did you want to I think that could um just to start I mean just a quick word because um absolutely and and it brings out um not simply um the more obvious performative dimensions of the Phenomenology which is which is indirect you know free indirect style basically I mean it’s one position being occupied after another spoken from the position of that but with but with the dramaturge you know somewhere in the works who’s not quite that position um but it also brings out which you know to my knowledge
about the the the ambiguity of the dash right very much reminded me of and and also what what you then elaborated on that regarding the temporality the suspension very much reminded me of of Kierkegaard right and and Kierkegaard who is and and you talked about the mode of representation of philosophizing so apparently with Kierkegaard we are entering very much into a literary mode of representation he’s very aware of of also punctuation marks and if I’m not mistaken so the punctua- as the dash plays a significant role in his work on irony so I was uh I was struck by that and and what what he would argue is basically he would make a case for the misunderstanding for the uh for the uh for the for the indirect communication right and that I guess one could see the dash in Kierkegaard as being part of this of being part of this indirect communication what one would further would call the performative dimension of his of his thinking right? Or what Deleuze would probably call the theatricalization of his philosophy and I was wondering whether you would go so far in Hegel as to argue okay your approach by taking the dashes seriously of the punctuation marks brings us towards a performative dimension in Hegel’s thought thank you um did you want to I think that could um just to start I mean just a quick word because um absolutely and and it brings out um not simply um the more obvious performative dimensions of the Phenomenology which is which is indirect you know free indirect style basically I mean it’s one position being occupied after another spoken from the position of that but with but with the dramaturge you know somewhere in the works who’s not quite that position um but it also brings out which you know to my knowledge
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Brecht was the only person really to notice about the Science of Logic when he you know calls it this big comedy that you know these categories sit down and have you know sit down to you know and have this fight being and nothing have this argument and then they all sit down to dinner as if nothing had ever happened before I mean Brecht was the one person who actually noticed that the logic itself was um was behaving in a in a performative um uh mode but thank you yes please I mean I'm let Frank do the you can have a very quick in in a sense we’re using a term coined by Werner Hamacher like a German compatriot who recently died uh and he transformed the performative into an afformative right because the performative sounds too much as if there is it’s still obeying a transcendental logic in the sense that the form is already there and it’s just like activated or realized so perform so the afformative is the creation of the form in the process or practice of formation right? And this seems to be very much what actually is happening right I mean which totally if you
Brecht was the only person really to notice about the Science of Logic when he you know calls it this big comedy that you know these categories sit down and have you know sit down to you know and have this fight being and nothing have this argument and then they all sit down to dinner as if nothing had ever happened before I mean Brecht was the one person who actually noticed that the logic itself was um was behaving in a in a performative um uh mode but thank you yes please I mean I'm let Frank do the you can have a very quick in in a sense we’re using a term coined by Werner Hamacher like a German compatriot who recently died uh and he transformed the performative into an afformative right because the performative sounds too much as if there is it’s still obeying a transcendental logic in the sense that the form is already there and it’s just like activated or realized so perform so the afformative is the creation of the form in the process or practice of formation right? And this seems to be very much what actually is happening right I mean which totally if you
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if you take seriously that the Science of Logic for example as a science of absolute form what else could it mean right perform- it must mean a certain kind of practice in which one could say and that's why it’s why it's hyper-formal in which you're formalizing what you’re just doing right I mean you’re you don’t have a canon of forms right to which you or resources already to which you could refer back to on the other hand side I mean there is a certain danger and the the danger um and Rebecca does that in her her chapter discussing why Schiller pops up at the end of the Phenomenology
if you take seriously that the Science of Logic for example as a science of absolute form what else could it mean right perform- it must mean a certain kind of practice in which one could say and that's why it’s why it's hyper-formal in which you're formalizing what you’re just doing right I mean you’re you don’t have a canon of forms right to which you or resources already to which you could refer back to on the other hand side I mean there is a certain danger and the the danger um and Rebecca does that in her her chapter discussing why Schiller pops up at the end of the Phenomenology
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there is a certain let’s say danger of bête noire he’s gonna hate me for that but I'm gonna say it anyhow a Rancièrean danger um of aestheticizing uh basically saying like the the that the whole movement of the dialectics points to an aesthetic ground layer as it were and this is something which is kind of not the case I think or we we think but right I mean and that Schiller pops up at the end of the Phenomenology is a way of dealing with that very danger in a way does that make sense? Because we should not forget it’s always shocked me that when we speak about origins of fascism and so on I think if there is one poem which is it it’s Schiller’s The Bell Glocke or what it’s absolute fascism at its most elementary but what I just wanted to add to you very briefly I’m sorry is that I’m glad that you mentioned Deleuze and theatricality because Deleuze whom I appreciate very much makes at some point this very strange statement that all philosophers use
there is a certain let’s say danger of bête noire he’s gonna hate me for that but I'm gonna say it anyhow a Rancièrean danger um of aestheticizing uh basically saying like the the that the whole movement of the dialectics points to an aesthetic ground layer as it were and this is something which is kind of not the case I think or we we think but right I mean and that Schiller pops up at the end of the Phenomenology is a way of dealing with that very danger in a way does that make sense? Because we should not forget it’s always shocked me that when we speak about origins of fascism and so on I think if there is one poem which is it it’s Schiller’s The Bell Glocke or what it’s absolute fascism at its most elementary but what I just wanted to add to you very briefly I’m sorry is that I’m glad that you mentioned Deleuze and theatricality because Deleuze whom I appreciate very much makes at some point this very strange statement that all philosophers use
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theatricality theatricalize the concepts except Hegel but I think Hegel does nothing but this look in Phenomenology for example stupidly simple example when he talks about how do you pronounce it in English asceticism ascet- asceticism yes he does not criticize it by comparing it with how things really are but people like to enjoy they are not at- no he just theatricalizes or how should I put it he said okay let's imagine a scene what is an ascetic person doing he is torturing himself all the time
theatricality theatricalize the concepts except Hegel but I think Hegel does nothing but this look in Phenomenology for example stupidly simple example when he talks about how do you pronounce it in English asceticism ascet- asceticism yes he does not criticize it by comparing it with how things really are but people like to enjoy they are not at- no he just theatricalizes or how should I put it he said okay let's imagine a scene what is an ascetic person doing he is torturing himself all the time
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and
and
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so on so although
so on so although
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his official party line is I am nothing and so on he is dealing with himself all the
his official party line is I am nothing and so on he is dealing with himself all the
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time you know it’s an extremely simple example how the whole progress of and it at a different level it’s similar with Absolute Freedom Terror and so on he progresses through theatricalization of a concept if there ever was a philosopher who does this thing it is Hegel I think so I’m going to just oh so go ahead Rebecca one tiny point what one reason another reason why performative is perhaps not entirely the right word is because things don't perform I mean things things don't work so the performance breaks down so the performance not performing well one guy at the end
time you know it’s an extremely simple example how the whole progress of and it at a different level it’s similar with Absolute Freedom Terror and so on he progresses through theatricalization of a concept if there ever was a philosopher who does this thing it is Hegel I think so I’m going to just oh so go ahead Rebecca one tiny point what one reason another reason why performative is perhaps not entirely the right word is because things don't perform I mean things things don't work so the performance breaks down so the performance not performing well one guy at the end
Slavoj Žižek
who no we really do have to wrap up but um I I would like to take this opportunity to thank the audience for such fantastic questions for the panelists for this really deep discussion and for to Rebecca and Frank for giving us this book which we most of us haven't had a chance to read yet but I will point you to the opportunity to buy it right here and satisfy the urge to get closer to absolute knowledge and thanks for thanks everyone I just
who no we really do have to wrap up but um I I would like to take this opportunity to thank the audience for such fantastic questions for the panelists for this really deep discussion and for to Rebecca and Frank for giving us this book which we most of us haven't had a chance to read yet but I will point you to the opportunity to buy it right here and satisfy the urge to get closer to absolute knowledge and thanks for thanks everyone I just
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simplified here lovingly thank you one do the proper conclusion
simplified here lovingly thank you one do the proper conclusion
Slavoj Žižek
and
and
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say something like thanks God it’s over you were confused I was talking too much it's over that
say something like thanks God it’s over you were confused I was talking too much it's over that
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would be the true
would be the true
Slavoj Žižek
conclusion
conclusion