Hegel: The Restlessness Of The Negative

by Jean-Luc Nancy

At once an introduction to Hegel and a radically new vision of his thought, this remarkable work penetrates the entirety of the Hegelian field with brevity and precision, while compromising neither rigor nor depth. One of the most original interpreters of Hegel, Jean-Luc Nancy offers a portrait as startlingly unconventional as it is persuasive, and at the same time demonstrates its relevance to a very contemporary understanding of the political. Here Hegel appears not as the quintessential dispassionate synthesizer and totalizer, but as the inaugural thinker of the contemporary world-one whose thought is inseparable from anxiety and desire, as well as the concrete, the inconclusive, the singular. Under Nancy's scrutiny, no facet of Hegel's work remains untouched or problems of aesthetics, affect, and history, as well as the implications of freedom, politics, and being-in-common. Engaging eleven judiciously chosen points essential to Hegel's sprawling system of thought-restlessness, becoming, penetration, logic, present, manifestation, trembling, sense, desire, freedom, and "we"-Nancy develops precise arguments for their philosophical importance for us today. Nancy's Hegel is the thinker who foregrounds the original, irrepressible, and joyous embrace of the inevitable will to philosophize; he is the philosophical guide who negotiates between the two extremes of stupidity and madness along the path to meaning. In the face of the horror of history and despite the temptation of past-based solutions, this Hegel's uncompromising foothold in the real makes him our contemporary, a thinker for our time. Jean-Luc Nancy is professor of philosophy at the University of Strasbourg. Among his many books are The Inoperative Community (1991), and The Sense of the World (1998), both published by the University of Minnesota Press. Jason Smith and Steven Miller are doctoral candidates in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine.

Genres: Philosophy, Theory

124 pages, Textbook Binding

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Jean-Luc Nancy is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Strasbourg. Stanford has published English translations of a number of his works, including The Muses (1996), The Experience of Freedom (1993), The Birth to Presence (1993), Being Singular Plural (2000), The Speculative Remark (2001), and A Finite Thinking (2003).

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Books like this usually serve to clarify or provide exposition on another writer's work. Judith Butler's review of the book says Nancy has made Hegel "accessible." I would disagree. I found Nancy's Hegel to be just as difficult to follow as Hegel himself. What good the book does is focus directly on Hegel's concept of negation; a good, concise analysis for those who don't want to uncover it from Hegel's much longer, denser writings, but unless one is already familiar with Hegelese speak this is not a place to begin.

[G · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decía el matemático John von Neumann que a las matemáticas nunca logramos comprenderlas realmente, sólo nos acostumbramos a ellas. Creo que pasa algo similar con la filosofía de Hegel. Este libro de Jean-Luc Nancy fluye de manera escurridiza, no se deja atrapar. Sin embargo, creo que éste es un buen indicador del hegelianismo de Nancy. Más aún, la necesidad de un lenguaje diferente para expresar una visión diferente está claramente explicitada por Nancy. Opino que se trata de una lectura honesta y profunda de Hegel que invita al lector a intentar la misma experiencia. El fracaso de una lectura que intente descifrar a Hegel utilizando los parámetros habituales de lectura está claramente asegurado. Hegel habla en otro idioma, no en alemán, sino en un lenguaje diferente, propio, fetichista. La sintáctica, la semántica y la pragmática exigidas para aproximarse a Hegel con la guía de Nancy surgen de la lectura misma. Es el texto mismo quien va explicitando sus propias reglas que, a la vez, se anulan a sí mismas y luego vuelven a surgir. Nancy lo expresa claramente, en la filosofía de Hegel se tiene que yo soy yo, pero su dialéctica hace que en otro momento yo sea igual a no yo. Si bien parece absurdo, una lectura abierta, una entrega humilde del lector al texto, va generando una intuición de verdad, una tenue luz en las tinieblas. Luego de la perplejidad inicial que resulta irritante aún para las lecturas mejor intencionadas, comienza a percibirse un idiolecto descifrable en lugar de un discurso psicótico. Por ejemplo, decir que yo soy yo pero también soy no yo no es tan absurdo como pareciera en una primera inspección. Si se acepta que yo soy en gran medida un devenir otro, ese yo que no soy yo resulta más razonable. Pareciera que todo lo que hay está asediado por una negatividad que lo limita, lo constituye, lo hace devenir, lo destruye y lo construye. Opino que este libro de Nancy es muy bueno porque aproxima al lector a un Hegel que pareciera ser inteligible.

[Siddharth Shankaran · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nancy brilliantly manifests the Hegel we have difficulty accepting today, especially in a "post-ideological" world. The Hegel here is concise, speaks through Nancy and in turns Nancy thus speaks for-himself , via the mediation of Hegel. This is the central lesson of Hegel, and if some of us have difficulty in digesting the Hegel in these pages, we must remember that in Hegelese, a writer is not just his work, but exactly includes all the re-works as part of itself, as its essential part. Nancy here is "thinking" what Hegel himself must have thought, as per his system, and to my mind, that is the only way of any learning, that is by engaging (in Heideggerian terms) with the author and perhaps even transcending him , through his own formal methods.

And lastly, what this book beautifully displays is how negation is part and essence of the subjectivity, no matter how reduced it may appear in our (post ?)modern world. A must read for all ...

[Levi · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is Nancy, not Hegel we encounter in these pages, but that's not altogether a bad thing. In fact, I rather feel I should like to read more in the works of Nancy.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Everywhere equal to itself, the abstract subject contemplates the exploitation, hunger, distress, and anguish of concrete subjects. Not only is it powerless, but it is the powerlessness of its abstract and empty equality that it opposes, as a paltry infinity, to the misfortune of the world. This name itself, "the subject," has become the name of its own passing out and away, or the name of an empty aspiration and a vain agitation in which "spirit" exhales what might still be left of its last gasp. In place of spirit, but as its final truth, the world knows itself to be the actuality of (and responsible for) extermination, and to be the potential to destroy itself. Hegel's most famous passage is this: 'But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself.'"pg 29.

"Philosophical decision is the decision not to settle for the manifest, and this in the name of manifestation itself. This decision is the decision not to entrust the manifest to something else: to something occult, hidden, or secret. It is the decision of a world without secret, or a world whole whole secret lies in its logos or its revelation. It is difficult to hold to this decision, because it is so unsettling."pg 38.

"Negativity makes all determinateness tremble." pg 45.

"The mediation and sublation of sense, or in sense, is what we have to do--that is our most proper concern, our every instant's responsibility, and the effectivity of our history." pg. 53.

"No authoritative agency can retain or contain infinite movement--neither a particular agency, nor a general one. This is also why thought that is only thought, and that, as such, only knows agencies--subjects, predicates, copulas, forms of judgement and of reasoning--remains distanced from the truth of passage. This thought must become thought that passes itself. In penetrating the thing, it suppresses the "merely thought pure concept," and it enters into that recognition of the other which Hegel names "love." pg 59.

"On the contrary, the awakening of the I is its awakening to the world and by the world--the world of alterity in general. Waking up is precisely the experience of the other that arrives and that, thus, uncovers me to myself as that to which or the one to whom the other arrives." pg. 60-61.

"But what the struggle manifests is that each one has consciousness of being desire of the other because the other, being itself desire of its other, is the desire of me. I desire the desire of the other: I desire that the other recognize me--and I desire that the other recognize me as the desire that I am, as the infinite becoming-self that I am. Struggle is also the phenomenon of the very thing whose reality is love. But make no mistake. Hegel does not give us a pacifying and conciliatory vision the of hardness of human relations. The phenomenon is nothing secondary: it forms the necessity of manifestation. Love must manifest itself as struggle. But the struggle does not thereby lose any of the hardness in which relations of power and exploitation are engendered. Knowing that "love" is the truth of struggle does not lead to preaching some stale fraternity. On the contrary, the injustice and cowardice of power must be denounced and, in their turn, negated." pg. 62.

"Freedom is indeed independence, but independence from the "despotic ego" as much as from any political and domestic despot whatsoever. It is indeed autonomy, but the law it gives itself is precisely itself: it therefore gives itself the law to have no law, if it is itself, for itself, the law." pg. 68.

"The Hegelian thought of freedom is the most difficult because it gathers and knots together all the aporias that intersect at the term "freedom"--and because it expends much effort showing the way to freedom from these same aporias. Freedom is par excellence the concept that consciousness or the understanding expects to be a given--whereas it must be the concept of nothing given, the very concept of the nongiven and the ungiveable. Here, thought forcefully states: you ask to have a freedom, whereas you have to become it."pg. 69.

[Alexandru Jr. · Rating 5 out of 5]

tipul asta de carte care e asa de cursiv / fluid scrisa, incat, chiar daca nu intelegi, vrei sa mergi mai departe, si plutesti prin ea, si incepi sa curgi si tu.
e despre hegel, scrisa in felul in care vroiam eu o vreme sa scriu despre spinoza :)
tare frumos scrisa.
si Absolutul e - in cartulia asta a lui nancy - intersubiectivitatea. faptul de a fi impreuna, unul cu altul, in dorinta si in tremuratul provocat de aceasta dorinta.
si sinele e ceea ce se raporteaza la sine, diferentiindu-se mereu de sine - adica negativitate.
si dorinta e cea care - generata de prezenta celuilalt - te scoate din eventuala fixitate in care te blochezi, te face sa pornesti aceasta miscare a negativului, miscare de diferentiere continua de sine - care te si face sine, de fapt - si diferentierea continua de sine inseamna deschidere spre celalalt, deschidere spre relatie, relatie care te transforma.

[Aeisele · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite readings of Hegel. Unorthodox, but great.

[Boaz Frissen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Als het geen oude man was zou ik hem doen