Abstract
This chapter discusses the criticism of Hegel by poststructuralist authors like Louis Althusser and Gilles Deleuze in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the Hegel revival in the early years of the Ljubljana-based Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis in the 1980s with thinkers like Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar. The vantage point of the contribution is a 1962 article “Contradiction and Overdetermination,” where Louis Althusser disentangles Marx’s political historical analysis from Hegelian dialectic. The central focus of this chapter thus falls on the concepts of contingency and anachronism as the points where Althusser and Deleuze criticized Hegel’s take on social contradiction as the driving force of history. The chapter then analyzes Hegel’s notions of the “ruse of reason” and the “end of history” and discusses whether these patently Hegelian concepts indeed permit no such thing as contingency or anachronism.
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Notes
- 1.
This chapter is a result of work conducted within my research project “History and Legacy of Yugoslavian Social Philosophy (1960–1990)” (J6-4624) and the research program “Philosophical Investigations” (P6-0252), financed by ARRS, the Slovenian Research Agency.
- 2.
Originally published in the journal La pensée, the first English version appeared in For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Review, 1969).
- 3.
Karl Marx, “Afterword to the Second German Edition,” Capital, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, text available at www.marxists.org.
- 4.
An example of this type of social phenomena is the curious case of toilet paper shortage in the early months of the Covid pandemic. Seeing pictures of individuals irrationally stockpiling toilet paper, even though there was no shortage of it, caused many people to start making the rational decision to stockpile on toilet paper, since they did not want to be left without it. In this manner, the actual shortage of toilet paper which ensued was ‘caused by its own effect,’ by people stockpiling on it. The so-called snowball phenomenon, which we can describe simply as the tendency of people to ‘buy precisely those shoes that others have already bought,’ differs from the toilet paper phenomenon in that, in our example, the others do not serve as our peers or models, but precisely as irrational others who compete with us for the same resource in a zero-sum game. Nonetheless, both social phenomena are examples of a co-dependent causality, where the cause is supported, and in some sense even preceded by the effect.
- 5.
Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm (last accessed 8/1/2021).
- 6.
Louis Althusser, “Contradiction and Overdetermination,” For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 2005), 97.
- 7.
Ibid., 101.
- 8.
Ibid., 113.
- 9.
Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right,’ trans. Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 134.
- 10.
Althusser, “Contradiction and Overdetermination,” 101.
- 11.
Ibid., 102.
- 12.
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 53.
- 13.
Althusser, “On the Young Marx,” in For Marx, 82.
- 14.
Kojève’s lectures were assembled and published in 1947 by Raymond Queneau; an abridged English version appeared as Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980).
- 15.
Originally published in 1946 by Aubier, Jean Hyppolite’s massive work appeared in English translation as Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974).
- 16.
Althusser and his students at the École normale supérieure ran a seminar on Marx’s Capital. The collection of their contributions, originally published in two volumes with Maspero in 1965, continues the general thrust of Althusser’s project of scientific, anti-humanist Marxism, with a special emphasis on rejecting Hegelianism. The complete English edition of Reading Capital was published by Verso in 2016. Pierre Macherey’s study Hegel and Spinoza appeared in English translation with University of Minnesota Press in 2011. For further reading on the complexity of the relationship between Hegel and Spinoza as quintessential modern thinkers, see my own work Hegel and Spinoza: Substance and Negativity (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017).
- 17.
G. W. F. Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 15.
- 18.
Ibid.
- 19.
Althusser, “Contradiction and Overdetermination,” 116.
- 20.
Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, 16.
- 21.
Probably a reference to Goethe’s Faust, where Mephistopheles distinguishes between the colors of life and theory: “All theories, dear friend, are gray; the golden tree of life is green.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust I & II, trans. Stuart Atkins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), ll. 2038-9.
- 22.
G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 18-19.
- 23.
Jure Simoniti phrases the transition from Hegel’s understanding of social and historical processes to that of Marx precisely as the rearticulation and relocation of conceptual opacity. He argues that while Hegel established the idea of the ‘opaque core of sociality,’ the notion of the historical process remained, in Hegelian analysis, transparent—or simple, as Althusser put it. It is Marx who recognized and theorized the opaque core of history. Simoniti writes: “One way to bring post-Hegelian philosophy under the common denominator is to interpret it as a series of attempts to discern the non-transparent historical core. Karl Marx certainly provides the most beautiful example for this thesis. The innermost knot of his thought is precisely the identification of a still invisible subject of future historical change” (Jure Simoniti, “Hegel and the Opaque Core of History,” Problemi 53, no. 11-12: 227.) My understanding differs from Simoniti’s in that I argue that Hegel does leave an opening for a possible future historical change, despite the notorious proclamation of “the End of History” (see below).
- 24.
In the Suhrkamp TWA edition of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History, we can read: “The noblest men of Rome believed Caesar’s reign to be a matter of chance (etwas zufälliges). … That which only seemed contingent (zufällig) and possible (möglich) in the beginning, becomes something actual (Wirkliche) and confirmed (Bestätigte) through repetition.” See G. W. F. Hegel, Werke in 20 Bänden, Vol. 12 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), 380, my translation.
- 25.
Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic (London: Routledge, 2004).
- 26.
Louis Althusser, “From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy,” in Reading Capital: The Complete Edition, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 2016), 18.
- 27.
Mladen Dolar, Heglova fenomenologija duha I (Ljubljana: DTP, 1990). This book has not yet been published in English, but as a close reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, consistently arguing that “Hegel was a Lacanian,” it is extremely important for the general reception of Hegel in the Slovenian intellectual milieu.
- 28.
Slavoj Žižek, Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2014), 41.
- 29.
Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971), 176.
- 30.
Althusser, “Contradiction and Overdetermination,” 103.
- 31.
G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Volume 1: Manuscripts of the Introduction and The Lectures of 1822-3, trans. Robert F. Brown and Peter C. Hodgson, (Oxford: Clarendon, 2011), 96, note 44.
- 32.
Ibid., 387.
- 33.
Ibid., 165-6.
- 34.
Ibid., 166.
- 35.
Ibid., 168.
- 36.
Althusser, “From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy,” 16.
- 37.
Robert F. Brown and Peter C. Hodgson, “Editorial Introduction,” in Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 25.
- 38.
Slavoj Žižek, “O ‘točki prešitja’ in njenem izostanku,” Problemi 21/4-5 (1983): 11-24. Originally written in Slovenian, much of this text was translated and reworked, finding its way into the first English language book by Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989).
- 39.
In fact, many of Hegel’s ‘master concepts’ become much clearer and much more practicable when we consider them with the help of the structuralist concept of ‘master signifier.’ Consider the notorious ‘absolute knowledge,’ discussed above. As long as we focus on what this suspicious notion could actually mean, trying to decipher the content of this knowledge and reading and rereading Hegel’s vague allusions to the theological tradition, we remain in the dark. However, if we consider that absolute knowledge might simply be a kind of a formal capstone to conclude the progression of consciousness, the realization that the displacement between truth and knowledge is the structural predicament of any knowledge as such—basically what Mladen Dolar argued, see above—then it becomes perfectly clear why Hegel requires this concept: he requires it in order to seize knowledge as determined, as complete … as a ‘heap’ and not merely as an endless series of grains.
- 40.
Žižek, “O ‘točki prešitja’ in njenem izostanku,” 16, my translation. A reader knowledgeable in the history of Yugoslavia and the special place of Yugoslav National Army as the defender of the homeland in its political structure will immediately understand why this example was so important to Žižek in the 1980’s. Žižek’s account of the Dreyfuss Affair and especially of the perfidy of Maurass’s ‘explanation’ is—shall we say—overdetermined with the contingent historical circumstances of Žižek’s lecture, with how the Yugoslav National Army was consistently applying this kind of ‘spin’ in disqualifying any opposition, gradually moving closer and closer to, as well as co-determining the position of the nationalist leader Slobodan Milošević (this perfidious kind of argumentation was especially, although far from exclusively, directed against ethnic Albanians’ push for more autonomy within Yugoslavia).
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Moder, G. (2023). Reading Hegel II: Politics and History. In: Rajan, T., Whistler, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Poststructuralism. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27345-2_7
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