Zizek’s Preface to our Hegel Book (with Columbia University Press)

This preface will appear in Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic, edited by Zizek/Crockett/Davis…  To be published in 2011. Copyright (c) 2010 Columbia University Press.

HEGEL’S CENTURY

Hegel--The Scapegoat of 20th Century Philosophy

Slavoj Zizek

The ultimate anti-Hegelian argument is the very fact of the post-Hegelian break: what even the most fanatical partisan of Hegel cannot deny is that something changed after Hegel, that a new era of thought began which can no longer be accounted for in Hegelian terms of absolute conceptual mediation; this rupture occurs in different guises, from Schelling’s assertion of the abyss of pre-logical Will (vulgarized later by Schopenhauer) and  Kierkegaard’s insistence on the uniqueness of faith and subjectivity, through Marx’s assertion of actual socio-economic life-process, and the full autonomization of mathematicized natural sciences, up to Freud’s motif of “death-drive” as a repetition that insists beyond all dialectical mediation. Something happened here, there is a clear break between before and after, and while one can argue that Hegel already announces this break, that he is the last of idealist metaphysicians and the first of post-metaphysical historicists, one cannot really be a Hegelian after this break, Hegelianism has lost its innocence forever. To act like a full Hegelian today is the same as to write tonal music after the Schoenberg revolution.

Habermas-"The Fake Materialist"

The predominant Hegelian strategy that is emerging as a reaction to this scare-crow image of Hegel the Absolute Idealist, is the “deflated” image of Hegel freed of ontological-metaphysical commitments, reduced to a general theory of discourse, of possibilities of argumentation. This approach is best exemplified by so-called Pittsburgh Hegelians (Brandom, McDowell): no wonder Habermas praises Brandom, since Habermas also avoids directly approaching the “big” ontological question (“are humans REALLY a subspecies of animals, is Darwinism true?”), the question of God or Nature, of idealism or materialism. It would be easy to prove that Habermas’s neo-Kantian avoiding of ontological commitment is in itself necessarily ambiguous: while they treat naturalism as the obscene secret not to be publicly admitted (“of course man developed from nature, of course Darwin was right…”), this obscure secret is a lie, it covers up the idealist FORM of thought (the a priori transcendentals of communication which cannot be deduced from natural being). The truth is here in the form: the same as with Marx’s old example of royalists in the republican form, while Habermasians secretly think they are really materialists, the truth is in the idealist form of their thinking.

Such a “deflated” image of Hegel is not enough, one should approach the post-Hegelian break in more direct terms. True, there is a break, but in this break, Hegel is the “vanishing mediator” between its “before” and its “after,” between traditional metaphysics and post-metaphysical 19^th and 20^th century thought. That is to say, something happens in Hegel, a break-through into a unique dimension of thought, which is obliterated, rendered invisible in its true dimension, by the post-metaphysical thought. This obliteration leaves an empty space which has to be filled in so that the continuity of the development of philosophy can be re-established – filled in with what? The index of this obliteration is the ridiculous image of Hegel as the absurd “absolute idealist” who “pretended to know everything,” to possess absolute Knowledge, to read the mind of God, to deduce entire reality out of the self-movement of (his) Mind – the image which is an exemplary case of what Freud called Deck-Erinnerung (screen-memory), a fantasy-formation destined to cover up a traumatic truth. In this sense, the post-Hegelian turn to “concrete reality, irreducible to notional mediation,” should rather be read as a desperate posthumous revenge of metaphysics, as an attempt to reinstall metaphysics, although in the inverted form of the primacy of concrete reality.

In what, then, resides Hegel’s uniqueness? Hegel’s thought stands for the moment of passage between philosophy as Master’s discourse, the philosophy of the One that totalizes the multiplicity, and anti-philosophy which asserts the Real that escapes the grasp of the One. On the one hand, he clearly breaks with the metaphysical logic of counting-for-One; on the other hand, he does not allow for any excess external to the field of notional representations. For Hegel, totalization-in-One always fails, the One is always-already in excess with regard to itself, it is itself the subversion of what it purports to achieve, and it is this tension internal to the One, this Two-ness which makes the One One and simultaneously dislocates it, it is this tension which is the movens of the “dialectical process.” In other words, Hegel effectively denies that there is no Real external to the network of notional representations (which is why he is regularly misread as “absolute idealist” in the sense of the self-enclosed circle of the totality of the Notion). However, the Real does not disappear here in the global self-relating play of symbolic representations; it returns with a vengeance as the immanent gap, obstacle, on account of which representations cannot ever totalize themselves, on account of which they are “non-all.”

Is there nonetheless not a grain of truth in the most elementary reproach to Hegel – does Hegel effectively not presuppose that, contingent and open as the history may be, a consistent story can be told afterwards? Or, to put it in Lacan’s terms, is the entire edifice of the Hegelian historiography not based on the premise that, no matter how confused the events, a subject supposed to know will emerge at the end, magically converting nonsense into sense, chaos into new order? Recall just his philosophy of history with its narrative of world history as the story of the progress of freedom? And is it not true that, if there is a lesson of the XXth century, it is that all the extreme phenomena that took place there cannot ever be unified in a single encompassing philosophical narrative? One simply cannot write a “phenomenology of the XXth century Spirit,” uniting technological progress, the rise of democracy, the failed Communist attempt with its Stalinist catastrophe, the horrors of Fascism, the gradual end of colonialism…

But why not? Is it REALLY so? What if, precisely, one can and should write a Hegelian history of the XXth century, this “age of extremes”(Eric Hobsbawm), as a global narrative delimited by two epochal constellation: the (relatively) long peaceful period of capitalist expansion from 1848 till 1914 as its substantial starting point whose subterranean antagonisms then exploded with the First World War, and the ongoing global-capitalist “New World Order” emerging after 1990 as its conclusion, the return to a new all-encompassing system signalling to some a Hegelian “end of history,” but whose antagonisms already announce new explosions? Are the great reversals and unexpected explosions of the topsy-turvy XXth century, its numerous “coincidences of the opposites” – the reversal of liberal capitalism into Fascism, the even more weird reversal of the October Revolution into the Stalinist nightmare – not the very privileged stuff which seems to call for a Hegelian reading? What would Hegel have made of today’s struggle of Liberalism against fundamentalist Faith? One thing is sure: he would not simply take side of liberalism, but would insisted on the “mediation” of the opposites. (And, let us not forget that, for Hegel himself, his philosophical reconstruction of history in no way pretends to “cover everything,” but consciously leaves blanks: the medieval time, for example, is for Hegel one big regression – no wonder that, in his lectures on the history of philosophy, he dismisses the entire medieval thought in a couple of pages, flatly denying any historical greatness to figures like Thomas Acquinas. Not even to mention the destructions of great civilizations like the Mongols’ wiping out so much of the Muslim world (the destruction of Baghdad, etc.) in the 13^th century – there is no “meaning” in this destruction, the negativity unleashed here did not create the space for a new shape of historical life.)

This is why the time of Hegel still lies ahead – Hegel’s century will be the XXIst.

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