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The Dash-The Other Side of Absolute Knowing
An argument that what is usually dismissed as the “mystical shell” of Hegel's thought—the concept of absolute knowledge—is actually its most “rational kernel.” This book sets out from a counterintuitive the “mystical shell” of Hegel's system proves to be its most “rational kernel.” Hegel's radicalism is located precisely at the point where his thought seems to regress most. Most current readings try to update Hegel's thought by pruning back his grandiose claims to “absolute knowing.” Comay and Ruda invert this deflationary gesture by inflating what seems to be most the absolute is grasped only in the minutiae of its most mundane appearances. Reading Hegel without presupposition, without eliminating anything in advance or making any decision about what is essential and what is inessential, what is living and what is dead, they explore his presentation of the absolute to the letter. The Dash is organized around a pair of seemingly innocuous details. Hegel punctuates strangely. He ends the Phenomenology of Spirit with a dash, and he begins the Science of Logic with a dash. This distinctive punctuation reveals an ambiguity at the heart of absolute knowing. The dash combines hesitation and acceleration. Its orientation is simultaneously retrospective and prospective. It both holds back and propels. It severs and connects. It demurs and insists. It interrupts and prolongs. It generates nonsequiturs and produces explanations. It leads in all continuation, deviation, meaningless termination. This challenges every cliché about the Hegelian dialectic as a machine of uninterrupted teleological progress. The dialectical movement is, rather, structured by intermittency, interruption, hesitation, blockage, abruption, and random, unpredictable change—a rhythm that displays all the vicissitudes of the Freudian drive.
- GenresPhilosophyTheory
192 pages, Paperback
Published May 4, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
September 23, 2026
I’m not going to waste your time mincing words: this was, without competition, the single most excruciating read of my semi-charmed philosophy-reading life to date. Given the subject matter and the reputation of its authors, it came as a massive shock just how much this disappointed me. It’s really so very rare for me to give a negative review—I genuinely cannot recall writing a single one—but The Dash got under my skin in ways I could never have foreseen.
Given that this was published under Zizek's Short Circuits series, we shouldn't be too surprised that the first essay is effectively an ode to both his style and substance, and by that I mean that they’re genuinely indistinguishable. Now I'm actually a fan of Zizek, so this isn't necessarily a bad thing—it facilitates some nice reflections on Kant as philosophy’s hangman and the reformist limits of pragmatist hegelianism—but it does rehearse, if proficiently, many of the same old beats we’re used to from the ol’ Z . Unfortunately, these cliches permeate the entire text, and the effect is nothing short of exasperating.
The text as advertised does not truly get started until the third chapter, where Hegel’s use of the dash is finally situated under the speculative microscope. This titular chapter, however, profoundly under-delivers. Whilst expending an entire essay upon a single punctuation mark is destined to necessitate a contrivance or two to keep things moving, that doesn’t mean it has to be so uninventive and thin! Almost immediately, the topic at hand is abandoned for some tangential musings on the nature of speculative propositions. Yes, there is surely a relation between the two, but such a connection is only worth elucidating if it offers us a new perspective on its constituent elements. It almost goes without saying that we learn almost nothing new about either speculative reading or the dash (at least not until much later), beyond the radical openness of Hegel’s system to which the latter points (which is certainly true!)
The following essay—on the closing words of The Phenomenology and its poetic invocation of Schiller—is certainly a better attempt at a similar microscopic analysis, but here the impressive erudition is undermined by an unflattering undercurrent of partisanship. I’m as much of a card-carrying Hegelian as the next guy (and I'm certainly not shy about it) but there’s simply far too much time here spent either taking every word he has ever uttered (or has been said to have uttered) much, much too seriously, or taking potshots at his critics. When the line between hagiography and philosophy starts to blur—to the point that it makes Kojeve's most fulsome appraisals of Hegel's eternal sage-like genius seem reserved—we really must take a step back.
These fastidious hermeneutics can, at times, go so far as to border on the cabalistic. The good dialectician is a skilled animist of spirit, but even the magic of identity and difference has its limits. A universal determination is inextricably bound up with the vitality of the particular from which it might be coaxed. Is this not one of Hegel’s very first lessons? The speculative run amok becomes speculation: fun and playful in small doses but tiresome and empty after it has exhausted its (flimsy) tie to the legitimate.
Comay even goes so far as to psychoanalyse the syntax of a (likely paraphrased) passage from Hegel’s lectures on the Philosophy of Nature! It’s times like these that I wonder whether Hegel’s corpse has not been so thoroughly exhumed at this point that we’re not just picking through the bones. It sure doesn't bode well for someone like myself who wishes one day to write something of minor value on his thought...
I know I know: I’m the one who went out of his way to read a text on Hegel so niche that it takes two uses of a single punctuation mark as its theme. What did I expect?
It’s frustrating, because I fundamentally agree with the broader claims that are made—I would be lying if I denied Comay’s and Ruda’s virtuosic command of the material—even whilst I find the way the arguments are made no less exasperating. Is this what continental philosophy reads like to all those self-satisfied, refractory analytics?
Perhaps I’m being needlessly stubborn and unfair (by the end I was hardly poring over every word), but my previously rather high anticipation towards finally picking up Comay’s Mourning Sickness has, regrettably, tempered itself in light of this profoundly disappointing first impression; sometimes you expect to fall into instant friendship, as it were, but instead the hours tick by and you can do nothing more than trade awkward faux pas, speaking past each-other as you fail to find a rhythm.
If chapters 3-5 were distilled into a single, focused, and experimental attempt to elaborate a speculative poetics of syntax, indulging in the free play of signification and association, then this might be an easier pill to swallow. As it stands, however, Comay and Ruda take themselves far too seriously for this dimension—call it the other side of absolute lexical paranoia—to see the light of day. Skip to Zizek and do not pass go.
Given that this was published under Zizek's Short Circuits series, we shouldn't be too surprised that the first essay is effectively an ode to both his style and substance, and by that I mean that they’re genuinely indistinguishable. Now I'm actually a fan of Zizek, so this isn't necessarily a bad thing—it facilitates some nice reflections on Kant as philosophy’s hangman and the reformist limits of pragmatist hegelianism—but it does rehearse, if proficiently, many of the same old beats we’re used to from the ol’ Z . Unfortunately, these cliches permeate the entire text, and the effect is nothing short of exasperating.
The text as advertised does not truly get started until the third chapter, where Hegel’s use of the dash is finally situated under the speculative microscope. This titular chapter, however, profoundly under-delivers. Whilst expending an entire essay upon a single punctuation mark is destined to necessitate a contrivance or two to keep things moving, that doesn’t mean it has to be so uninventive and thin! Almost immediately, the topic at hand is abandoned for some tangential musings on the nature of speculative propositions. Yes, there is surely a relation between the two, but such a connection is only worth elucidating if it offers us a new perspective on its constituent elements. It almost goes without saying that we learn almost nothing new about either speculative reading or the dash (at least not until much later), beyond the radical openness of Hegel’s system to which the latter points (which is certainly true!)
The following essay—on the closing words of The Phenomenology and its poetic invocation of Schiller—is certainly a better attempt at a similar microscopic analysis, but here the impressive erudition is undermined by an unflattering undercurrent of partisanship. I’m as much of a card-carrying Hegelian as the next guy (and I'm certainly not shy about it) but there’s simply far too much time here spent either taking every word he has ever uttered (or has been said to have uttered) much, much too seriously, or taking potshots at his critics. When the line between hagiography and philosophy starts to blur—to the point that it makes Kojeve's most fulsome appraisals of Hegel's eternal sage-like genius seem reserved—we really must take a step back.
These fastidious hermeneutics can, at times, go so far as to border on the cabalistic. The good dialectician is a skilled animist of spirit, but even the magic of identity and difference has its limits. A universal determination is inextricably bound up with the vitality of the particular from which it might be coaxed. Is this not one of Hegel’s very first lessons? The speculative run amok becomes speculation: fun and playful in small doses but tiresome and empty after it has exhausted its (flimsy) tie to the legitimate.
Comay even goes so far as to psychoanalyse the syntax of a (likely paraphrased) passage from Hegel’s lectures on the Philosophy of Nature! It’s times like these that I wonder whether Hegel’s corpse has not been so thoroughly exhumed at this point that we’re not just picking through the bones. It sure doesn't bode well for someone like myself who wishes one day to write something of minor value on his thought...
I know I know: I’m the one who went out of his way to read a text on Hegel so niche that it takes two uses of a single punctuation mark as its theme. What did I expect?
It’s frustrating, because I fundamentally agree with the broader claims that are made—I would be lying if I denied Comay’s and Ruda’s virtuosic command of the material—even whilst I find the way the arguments are made no less exasperating. Is this what continental philosophy reads like to all those self-satisfied, refractory analytics?
Perhaps I’m being needlessly stubborn and unfair (by the end I was hardly poring over every word), but my previously rather high anticipation towards finally picking up Comay’s Mourning Sickness has, regrettably, tempered itself in light of this profoundly disappointing first impression; sometimes you expect to fall into instant friendship, as it were, but instead the hours tick by and you can do nothing more than trade awkward faux pas, speaking past each-other as you fail to find a rhythm.
If chapters 3-5 were distilled into a single, focused, and experimental attempt to elaborate a speculative poetics of syntax, indulging in the free play of signification and association, then this might be an easier pill to swallow. As it stands, however, Comay and Ruda take themselves far too seriously for this dimension—call it the other side of absolute lexical paranoia—to see the light of day. Skip to Zizek and do not pass go.
January 15, 2024
Comay’s Essay was an excellent account of a text that refuses to be digested fully, written by a man who always finds himself ‘chewing more than he bit off’. So its appropriate that this, like everything else Comay writes, is frustrating in the same way. Ive read “Hegel’s last words” like three times now and can’t seem to land on a final word!
And Frank Ruda’s essay is equally hard but in a different way. Here’s a highlight: “the beginning of the Logic demonstrates that retroactivity is itself a retroactive phenomenon. What will have been indeterminate immediacy will have been what it will have been when it will have become what it will have become (103). I wish I knew what Frank is talking about. But this is a great book for Hegel’s end! The last problems, what is truly at stake, what is left unsaid when all is said and done—its all here!
*The PERFECT book for anyone who’s already read and internalized every other book by and about Hegel.*
4.5/5
And Frank Ruda’s essay is equally hard but in a different way. Here’s a highlight: “the beginning of the Logic demonstrates that retroactivity is itself a retroactive phenomenon. What will have been indeterminate immediacy will have been what it will have been when it will have become what it will have become (103). I wish I knew what Frank is talking about. But this is a great book for Hegel’s end! The last problems, what is truly at stake, what is left unsaid when all is said and done—its all here!
*The PERFECT book for anyone who’s already read and internalized every other book by and about Hegel.*
4.5/5
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 5, 2021
Really a refreshing text on one of the most avoided areas of Hegel's thought: absolute knowing. Maybe a bit excessive in their rehashing of Ž's Hegel (i.e. the first couple chapters), but the last section of the book is where it really launches.
June 16, 2022
I liked this very much except the part where they attributed the Stalin (unacceptable) quote to Lenin (surprisingly acceptable now). It is fun seeing all these academics expositing Hegel referring to Lenin as he was a major Hegelian after 1914-15 and even after the revolution he was imploring the communist party members to read the Science of Logic - in an address to the congress he maintains that the “dialectical” part of dialectical materialism is just Hegelian dialectics and you can’t be a marxist without it.
August 10, 2018
Very well written and engaging, presents some great ideas and full of insight into the process that is sustaining a reading of Hegel. Incredibly useful to me as a Hegel nerd and at times quite funny. Recommended.
September 6, 2024
great idea, mediocre execution. the academic setting really killed this book, i was hoping for a roller coaster joyride through hegel once again but what i got was mrs henessey taking me to school in the back of a station wagon, very suburban reading. not recommended.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews