Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic

It is possible that in reality the future of the world, and thus the meaning of the present and that of the past, depend, in the last analysis, on the way in which the Hegelian writings are interpreted today.

—ALEXANDRE KOJÈVE

Hegel is at the origin of everything great in philosophy for the last century.

—MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY

This volume presents some of the most prominent readers of Hegel in contemporary philosophy and theology. We assert here that Hegel has become the litmus test of thought and possibility. How one interprets Hegel determines how one fundamentally understands the very force of thought, being, and truth. To be sure there are many different readings of Hegel, but among all the different readings, we suggest that one must finally come down on one of two sides: the Right, conservative side, or the Leftist, revolutionary side.

The conservative side reads Hegel’s ontology as finally remaining captive to both the Kantian split between form and content and the notion of rational autonomy. On this view Hegel’s doctrine of Being might first appear to be an infinite dialectical becoming that moves ever closer to Absolute Spirit but in truth looses it nerve and folds back into the security-domain of a self-enclosed methodology sundered from reality. A representative take on this conservative stance is Charles Taylor’s 1975 version of Hegel. Here Taylor argues that Hegel’s synthesis cannot command adherents today not only because it is built in part on the expressivist reaction to the modern identity which contemporary civilization has tended to entrench more and more, but because it is built on an earlier and outmoded form of this reaction. It belongs to the opposition while claiming to give us a vision of reason triumphant; and it belongs moreover to a stage of this opposition which no longer appears viable.¹

Here Taylor comes down by saying that basically Hegel’s “synthesis” is ultimately controlled by wedding a kind of nostalgic, romantic view of the world as essentially unified with a “rational autonomy.” But this is a problem because it relegates and confines Hegel’s ontology to a Kantian stance premised on the rational-core truth of the universe debarred from disruptive spirit. This conservative reading that reduces Hegel to Kant is true if you understand the former to be saying little more than he did in his very early essay on the “Life of Jesus.”² In this essay, as T. M. Knox states, “Jesus appears as a teacher of Kant’s purely moral religion.”³ Hegel’s infatuation with Kantian “Reason” is evident when in this essay he says, “Pure Reason completely free of any limit or restriction whatsoever is the deity itself.” Indeed Hegel’s Jesus tells humanity to switch “the eternal law of morality and Him whose holy will cannot be affected by anything but by the law.”⁴ Jesus says: “You were commanded to love your friends and your nation, but you were permitted to hate your enemies—I say however unto you: Respect mankind even in your enemy, if you cannot love him.”⁵ And again: “Act on that maxim which you can at the same time will to be a universal law among men. This is the fundamental law of morality—the content of all legislation and of the sacred books of all nations.”⁶ Taylor’s Hegel is thus confined to a liberal bourgeois subjectivity grounded in the Kantian idealized split between Reason and the external world. Autonomous reason ascends to the a priori of being which freezes the radicality of an ontology of irruptive becoming that overturns all static categories.

This conservative position further assumes that the heart of Hegel’s own structure enacts “the nothing” of Kant’s “thing-in-itself” precisely because the structure of Kant’s metaphysics collapses: and so spirit is left to tarry with form sundered from content. The Kantian metaphysical collapse takes place because Kant’s nerve gives out at the precise moment of truth. For instead of opting for risk, Kant circles the wagons and settles into what basically amounts to a defensive posture that has indelibly left its mark on philosophical structures ever since; indeed one could go even further here and show that it was this Kantian conservative move (which assumes a single version of transcendence, that is, Christian transcendence) which brings the radical nature of thinking under the control of systems which must assume no transcendence, such as the Nation-State, in order to exist.

Of course it remains a viable debate, but is this not the exact stance that Hegel in his mature thinking attempted to traverse? For if form (appearance) is detached from all things beyond itself, then is not the dialectic hijacked by the very idea of form as such? That is to say, form left to itself fails to relate to anything outside itself. And this brings us to a decisive difference between Hegel and Kant: namely, whereas Kant circles the wagons in a moment of panic, Hegel pushes form beyond its static definition and with it subverts orthodox Christian transcendence.⁷ This stance is what Hegel called Being-for-itself, which opposes the situation whereby Method always returns to itself as Method (self-referential and identical return) and so never goes beyond itself to touch the world (which resembles not just the One of Parmenides⁸ but also one of the problems that plagues phenomenology). The notion of Method is here merely an uninterested interpretation of the world, a position that Karl Marx roundly criticizes in his Thesis on Feuerbach XI: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” So, this stance assumes that Hegel’s philosophy, as brilliant as it is, remains sundered from changing the world.

Then there is the other side, namely the “Leftist” reading of Hegel. Here one can read Hegel as positing an infinite truth that fundamentally revolts against the current and operating ideology incarnated as a social and political ontological-revolutionary act. On this view the very dynamic logic of being is always and already overturning any instantiation of itself in terms that are static and frozen. Moreover, this reading rests on the idea that the internal-core logic of the concept (Begriff) of Spirit always and perpetually traverses beyond (Vor-stellung) the instantiation (or fulfillment) of itself and into the future (as lack). In this regard, not only is Hegel’s ontology not a self-referential interpreted “Method” sundered from the world, it actually is the underlying logic of the world’s unfolding as such. But it is at this precise juncture that we end up confronting the deadlock hidden in both sides of this Hegelian divide: If the true meaning of Hegel’s ontology is a Method sundered from the world (as Marx charged), and if the opposite is true, namely that his ontology is inseparable from the world as such, then what we have here is nothing short of a tale of two totalizing logics. That is, the conservative, apolitical reading of method qua method converges with the Leftist reading of dynamic ontology insofar as Leftist revolutionaries become convulsed with questions of formal method and substitute the theorizing of the revolution for the revolution itself, and conservatives adopt a Hegelian dynamic social ontology to justify the ravages of capitalist repression. This split between Right and Left Hegel forms a perfect circle, just as Hegel’s philosophy itself is wrongly seen as totally circular and therefore totalizing in its logic. Nothing is to be done.

On this view, both Method and idealized ontology as world are guilty of totalizing and violence because each stance ultimately collapses all forms of otherness into a monolithic horizon of sameness and Identity. For the former the very existence of Method fails to offer up a space within which otherness exists in terms of itself as other and so finally folds into the logic of the same. There are three seminal twentieth-century philosophers who represent this stance: Emmanuel Levinas, as seen in his extraordinary book, Totality and Infinity; Jacques Derrida primarily in Glas; and Jean-Francois Lyotard in his brilliant analysis of The Postmodern Condition. The fundamental question that Levinas raises in Totality and Infinity is deceptively simple: is there an outside to the closure of thinking wrought by the history of Western philosophy from the Greeks to the twentieth century? Entertaining such a question as this, as simple as it may seem, really determines how thinkers within the history of Western philosophy fit into Levinas’s genealogy of metaphysics. Levinas’s assumption is that all metaphysics and ontology are by their very nature infused with violence. From this view of ontology it is all too easy for Levinas to place Hegel into his limited framework of Western philosophers.

For Levinas thinks of Hegel as a thinker who epitomizes the problem that plagues philosophy: he is a totalizing thinker who creates a world in which all things, all forms of otherness are absorbed within the horizon of a single History without an iota of deviation. So, as it turns out, the entire book Totality and Infinity is nothing short of a covert challenge to Hegel’s (and Heidegger’s) ontology.⁹ Levinas explicitly says that Hegel thinks that History is the transcendent determiner of all Identity: “Objectivity is absorbed in absolute knowledge, and the being of the thinker, the humanity of man, is therewith conformed to the perpetuity of the solid in itself, within a totality where the humanity of man and the exteriority of the object are at the same time conserved and absorbed.”¹⁰ The picture of Hegel that Levinas paints here is one of solidity, one that cleaves to the sign of the In-Itself. But this reading is highly problematic, as some of the contributors to this volume demonstrate. Furthermore, Levinas’s reading can be seen as violent because he fails to see how his own concept of totality is too quickly attached to Hegel’s thought. He is thus able to reduce Hegel to the figure of Sameness.

The other towering figure who pigeonholed Hegel (at least from the late 1960s to the late 1980s) into a totalizing shell is Jacques Derrida. Derrida’s principle text in which he engages Hegel is Glas (which is the word for the tones of a death knell).¹¹ Heinz Kimmerle tells us about the opening passages in Glas, which begins with the question “what remain(s) today, for us, here, now, of a Hegel?” from which alights another question, “what remain(s) for us to think after absolute knowledge?”¹² For, like Levinas, the Derrida of the late 1960s to the late 1980s thinks little more of Hegel than a complete totalizer devoid of the possibility of exteriority and difference. This can be seen most plainly in Positions, where Derrida attempts to distinguish différance from Hegelian difference. Derrida asserts that Hegel, “in the greater Logic determines difference as contradiction only in order to resolve it, to interiorize it, to lift it up (according to the syllogistic process of speculative dialectics) into the self-presence of an onto-theological or onto-theological synthesis.”¹³ The third and final thinker of this view that reduces Hegel to a totalizer without remainder is Jean-Francois Lyotard. Lyotard writes that the conditions of modernity requires that

Philosophy must restore unity to learning, which has been scattered into separate sciences into laboratories and in pre-university education; it can only achieve this in a language game that links the sciences together as moments in the becoming of spirit, in other words, which link them in a rational narration, or rather metanarration. Hegel’s Encyclopedia (1817–27) attempts to realize this project of totalization.¹⁴

Thus all three main figures of twentieth-century postmodern philosophical orientation interpret Hegel as the apex of modernity in which difference and exteriority are impossible from within Hegel’s structure.

For those who critique the radical side of Hegel, if the world really does unfold inextricably with and as Spirit, then this logic (at first glance) seems to be inherently wedded to a teleological trajectory of all History into which all things (all otherness and difference from otherness) must ultimately fold. And this is precisely where Gilles Deleuze’s critique fails to see the radically contingent, fissured ontology located within the heart of Hegel. Deleuze understands Hegel’s notion of difference as emerging from the latter’s notion of contradiction. Moreover, he explicitly says this when he compares Hegel to Aristotle: “Hegel determines difference by the opposition of extremes or of contraries that is articulated by the difference between Identity (self) and difference (other).”¹⁵ Thus for Deleuze difference for Hegel is premised on a thing’s negation from “all that it is not.” So for a thing to be, it must first be subtracted from everything else that it is not. That is to say that a thing only is (as possessing the ontological status of existing), as Deleuze understands Hegel, when it is in absolute nonrelation with everything else, and so ultimately everything (all History and so forth) must fold into a total system whose telos comes to itself necessarily through a pretend difference, that is, a difference that contains within it a secret singularity which is already part of the telos of History as absolute knowledge coming to terms with itself. So for Deleuze (following Levinas, Derrida, and Lyotard), difference for Hegel is really not difference but sameness. Additionally, it is clear that Deleuze understands Hegel as being too conservative, stopping short of pushing the idea of difference beyond the limits encompassed in the idea of contradiction seen in the Science of Logic. Deleuze follows Bergson here in the belief that all things don’t begin with Identity via negation (as with Hegel) but with the axiom that a “thing differs with itself, first immediately” (and not secondarily). But Slavoj Žižek challenges Deleuze’s misreading of Hegel based on Bergson: “If ever there was a straw-man, it is Deleuze’s Hegel: is not Hegel’s basic insight precisely that every external opposition is grounded in the thing’s immanent self-opposition, i.e., that ever external difference implies self-difference? A finite being differs from other (finite) things because it is already not identical with itself.”¹⁶ Deleuze is much closer to Hegel than he wants to think.

Thus we can see that these two different twentieth-century takes on Hegel, working together, basically spell out the completion and exhaustion of his thought and by extension the death of metaphysics and finally, according to Badiou, the end of philosophy for our time.¹⁷ On the other hand, suppose that this double threat (which culminates in the work of Levinas, Derrida, Lyotard, and Deleuze) entirely misses the point precisely because each critical side does not believe in the very idea of risk itself? To put it differently, suppose that the force of the critique leveled at Hegel (that he is a totalizer and wedded to a historical teleology that neutralizes all difference) is actually presupposed within these very structures themselves? Thus, each side simply (if unconsciously) projects the assumption that there is no risk within history itself onto Hegel and so dismisses him cleanly out of hand, as if Hegel were a sacrifice to the gods of philosophy.

The impetus of this book revolts against this double-empty threat, for it is our belief that the principle reason why Hegel was dismissed is because it is his thought above all that gives us true risk, it gives us hope. Here we merely repeat Slavoj Žižek’s thesis originally submitted in Le plus sublime des hysteriques: Hegel passé, namely, that Hegelian “dialectics is for Hegel a systematic notation of the failure of all such attempts—‘absolute knowledge’ denotes a subjective position which finally accepts ‘contradiction’ as an internal condition of every identity.”¹⁸ In other words, Hegelian “reconciliation” is not a pan-logicist sublation of all reality in the Concept but an affirmation of the fact that the Concept itself is “not-all” (to use this Lacanian term). Such an understanding of Hegel inevitably runs counter to the accepted notion of absolute knowledge as a monster of conceptual totality devouring every contingency.

simply shoots too fast, like the patrolling soldier of the well-known joke from Jaruzelski’s Poland immediately after the military coup. At this time, military patrols had the right to shoot without warning at people walking on the street after curfew (ten-o’clock); one of the two soldiers on patrol sees somebody in a hurry at ten minutes to ten and shoots him immediately. When his colleague asks him why he shot when it was only ten to ten, he answers: “I knew the fellow—he lived far from here and in any case would not be able to reach his home in ten minutes, so to simplify matters, I shot him now….” This is exactly how the critics of Hegel’s presumed “panlogicism” proceed: they condemn absolute knowledge “before it is ten o’clock,” or high noon, without reaching it—that is, they refute nothing with their criticism but their own prejudices about it.¹⁹

In short, Hegel needs to be reclaimed to overcome the death of thought that resulted from philosophy’s linguistic turn in the twentieth century which ended up subverting the very core of philosophy’s desire, namely, the pursuit of truth.²⁰

As such this volume represents thinkers from both sides of this debate with the goal of not just presenting Hegel in a neutral fashion (for this stance never truly exists) but rather to continue to open up the debate about which Hegel is most viable for our time. The editors here side with Hegel’s more radical side, which escapes the generic and misplaced boxes into which Hegel’s thought simply doesn’t fit, especially in light of the need to embody an ontology that resists being arrested by the death of metaphysics, neoliberalism, and capitalism, which together form a front that forecloses the possibility of truth alighting in the world.

Each of the chapters in various ways push Hegel beyond the stereotypical postmodern critique where Hegel represents the totalizing philosopher par excellence, whose system proceeds with a relentless accumulation that swallows up all difference and prevents any genuine change or becoming. In other words, this volume’s thesis revolts against the process that returns back and only repeats the world’s happening in the same terms as before. In this way, our thesis breaks with the mechanical logic of the world, which can be found in the very heart of Hegel’s outlook—a virtue that twentieth-century philosophy has systematically overlooked. Each of the authors presents a genuine engagement with Hegel, whether as a serious Hegel scholar, a significant contemporary philosopher, or both, and these engagements are constructive and critical. Furthermore, the contributors consider various aspects of Hegel’s philosophy in its religious and political implications, providing readers an opportunity to reassess Hegel’s contemporary significance for considering important intersections of political and religious reflection.

In her essay “Is Confession the Accomplishment of Recognition,” Catherine Malabou, the contemporary French philosopher, student of Jacques Derrida, and author of The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, Dialectic, sets Hegel up with Rousseau and claims that Hegel’s perspective in the Phenomenology of Spirit allows us to integrate Rousseau’s political philosophy as expressed in The Social Contract with his autobiographical reflections in The Confessions. Hegel combines these two tendencies within Rousseau, but he also reverses Rousseau. For Hegel, the general will, understood as language, or a linguistic community, precedes the individual will and therefore the specific political community.

Malabou develops the motif of confession in relation to forgiveness, specifically in relation to Derrida’s thought. Confession haunts modern nation-states, according to Derrida, and forgiveness works (when it does work) to reconcile the self with the broader community. A Hegelian perspective views the state as a sublation and reconciliation of the subject and the community. According to Malabou, God occupies the structural role of the overarching forgiver, as the absolute witness, who allows forgiveness to occur by confession and recognition, by confession as recognition of the need for and possibility of forgiveness. Just as religion is the penultimate step before absolute knowing in Hegel’s Phenomenology, here religion subverts the essence and identity of the individual and the political community.

Malabou identifies three political languages: the language of contracts, the language of self-expression (confession), and finally a shadowy religious dimension of language as self-belief in oneself and one’s testimony. This religious essence is a third that is situated between the particular and the universal. According to Malabou, the contemporary challenge is the political and literary reorientation of the philosophical concept of the religious meaning of the nonreligious. This means that we are forced to stretch the possibilities of our language and our politics to account for our accountability itself, which is one way to understand and articulate the Hegelian dialectic. Confession accomplishes recognition with religious language, which is not a substantial, essentialist language but rather the form of language in its drive for recognition, which is also a drive for forgiveness. Who and how do we forgive, and how does this forgiveness exceed the attempts of the state and the media to control political confession?

In chapter 2, “Rereading Hegel, The Philosopher of Right,” the Italian philosopher Antonio Negri launches a profound critique of the Philosophy of Right, one that dialectically or antagonistically enables Negri to envision his own emancipatory political theory. According to Negri, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right represents the assimilation of Right to the State, where the aim of the State is the social control of living labor. Hegel is not only a historical relic but also a contemporary author, because his theoretical achievement allows the command of labor by the State precisely by being mediated, subordinated, and universalized by Right as the form or scheme of the modern state. Because labor is always labor of and for the State, labor is controlled and commanded in a bourgeois and capitalist manner. In the twentieth century, the Hegelian dialectic is continued by Western political science, and even the socialist State is a form of control over labor that is a more subtle version of Hegelianism.

Negri’s description of the Hegelian dialectic, “where it seems that everything is complete, everything is incomplete,” can function as a slogan for the book. The apparent completeness of the Hegelian absolute is on second glance rendered absolutely incomplete, and Negri expresses in a more negative and polemical way what other authors, including Malabou and Pahl, express more positively. For Negri, the key to liberation from the control of the State beyond recuperation by the Hegelian bourgeois dialectic lies in the refusal of labor, which encompasses a refusal of the State. In practical terms, the refusal of labor brings about a crisis of the State that can only function by the command or control of labor. This State is being shaken by an almost unimaginable credit crisis, which threatens to overwhelm the enormous victory that global capitalism has “won” over labor across the globe.

The hope of liberation from the dialectic by refusing labor in service of the State constitutes a rejection of Hegel and a valorization of the particular over the mediating prison of the universal. Although Negri does not spell this out, we could characterize his hope for liberation as a religious or quasi-religious hope. Negri ends on a bitter note, affirming his hatred for Hegel’s philosophy of right, but then he insists that this relation still contradictorily binds us to him. Negri’s chapter sets the stage for a rereading of Hegel precisely because he does not try to evade or avoid the dialectic, but rather sets up a direct, antagonistic encounter with his thought.

John D. Caputo, arguably the foremost American Continental philosopher, also has an ambivalent reading of Hegel, although less hostile than Negri’s. Caputo is able to value Hegel’s significance for contemporary religion and politics by following Slavoj Žižek’s lead and excising the perverse core of Hegelianism. In “The Perversity of the Absolute, the Perverse Core of Hegel, and the Possibility of Radical Theology,” Caputo elaborates a radical theology out of the context of Hegel by affirming that Hegel is the first thinker to think theology without the metaphysics of a two-worlds mentality. Hegel opens up the possibility for radical theology, a thinking of God and the world not as two disparate entities, but together, with God in the world as the radical implication of the Christian idea of the Incarnation.

Caputo follows Hegel’s lead, but also claims that Hegel fails to go far enough, that he is still tied to metaphysics insofar as he posits absolute Spirit as governing and directing the process of self-knowing. Hegel thinks the death of God, of God without God as an essential aspect of the worlding of the world; but here, where everything seems complete, everything in Hegel is still incomplete, and he needs to be pushed beyond himself. The radicalization of Hegel’s radicalization of theology occurs by a perversion. Caputo thinks “perversatility,” that is, the perversion of the straight path of Christian orthodoxy and the straightforward Hegelian progression from art to religion to its consummation in philosophy. This perverse core of Hegel animates radical theology and prevents Hegelian philosophy from its attempt at closure.

Caputo calls for a perversion of strength into weakness by rereading and recognizing the event as the work of God in and as the world. The task of a radical politics informed by a theology of the event is one of responsibility—to transform ourselves and make ourselves and our relationships worthy of the event. Political theory cannot simply disavow or do away with theology: Caputo follows Derrida in claiming that there is an unavowed theologism at work in all political philosophy. Radical theology consists of acknowledging that theologism and using it to think better and anew philosophy and politics and that insofar as we identify with the spirit of radical theology we are heirs of Hegel.

In his chapter “Hegel in America,” Bruno Bosteels elaborates a critique of many of the en vogue finite readings of Hegel, some of which are represented in this volume, and insists on the irreducibility of the infinite character of the Hegelian dialectic. Bosteels, who has established himself as a brilliant interpreter of Badiou’s dialectical materialism, as well as an important guide for contemporary Latin American thought, connects the dogmatic and narrow interpretation of Hegel, which became established in the twentieth century (especially in Continental philosophy) to the European colonialism that grew into the present day imperialism that is “America” (i.e., the United States of America). Bosteels exposes Hegel’s lapse in thinking about America in his Philosophy of History, partly by reading him through the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset, but then recuperates an understanding of Hegel with the work of the Mexican novelist, playwright, and self-taught philosopher José Revueltas to show how reading Hegel as a thinker of infinite act makes his philosophy relevant for radical Leftist politics.

Against a reading that inserts alterity and finitude at the heart of Hegelian philosophy, Bosteels shows how Revueltas’s novel Los errores demonstrates that this interpretation cedes the ground of the political to a liberal philosophy and politics based on ethics. This liberal interpretation affirms human beings as erroneous beings, finite and erratic, whose every attempt to achieve the Good ends up accomplishing Evil. Against this understanding, Bosteels develops, in the context of a short story by Revueltas, “Hegel and I,” the idea of a profane illumination that occurs in an immemorial act. This immemorial act is a profane and secular rather than a religious illumination, and it has important political consequences. The character Hegel in the story is a bank robber who takes his name from the street on which the bank lies, Hegel Street. “From this character, in fact,” Bosteels asserts, “we obtain above all the outline for a provocative theory of the act—of what it means to reach consciousness in the act of theory.” A theory of the infinite in Hegel provides resources for thinking such a political act in and for America.

Mark C. Taylor is one of the founders of American postmodern theology, and as an heir to Kierkegaard, he has done more than any other scholar to bring French deconstruction to an American theological audience. At the same time, Taylor has also become more and more Hegelian over the last decade or so, wrestling with the theoretical, religious, and cultural implications of computer technology, money and finance, and complexity theory. In his essay “Infinite Restlessness,” Taylor argues that we need to think beyond the stereotypical image of Hegel as the representative of totality and totalitarianism, which was the major threat to political and intellectual life in the wake of World War II and during the Cold War. Today, the main threat to our global civilization is sectarianism, the impossibility of mediating and reconciling differences, and Hegel provides important tools for this urgent project. Rather than seeing Derrida’s work as diametrically opposed to Hegel’s and viewing Hegel as the culmination of the onto-theological tradition, we can engage in a productive double reading, reading Hegel through Derrida and also Derrida through Hegel. In doing so, we can come to view Hegel’s absolute as a process of infinite restlessness.

Taylor develops his reading of Hegel by situating Hegel in relation to Kant and a post-Kantian problematic in Germany in the 1790s and early 1800s. In certain ways, the situations and problems then resemble ours today, and so does the solution. Kant sets up and tries to overcome binary oppositions in his critical philosophy, and this finds echoes in structuralism and poststructuralism in the late twentieth century. Although Kant wants his solution, freedom, to be grounded in the moral law, it is really the third critique, the Critique of Judgment, that offers the solution that then becomes elaborated in Hegel’s philosophy. The third critique provides a figuring of the imagination in terms of a differential relationality, whereby the free play of imagination constitutes a groundless an-archy of freedom, which is an abyss that is called sublime by Kant. Taylor reads the figuring of imagination in terms of contemporary information theory, where imagination is an “information process” that is both constructive information and destabilizing noise.

To view Kant’s conclusion in the Critique of Judgment from the standpoint of Kant’s successors, including Hegel, is to grasp the very essence of reason, how the “formal identity-within-difference and difference-within-identity of subject and object make knowledge possible.” This identity-within-difference and difference-within-identity is not a static situation, however, but a dynamic and unending process. Taylor claims that while the finite pervades and limits the infinite, the finite is infinitely disrupted by the infinite, which is an infinite restlessness. Taylor, like Edith Wyschogrod later in the book, focuses directly on art and indirectly on politics. This specific aesthetic primacy characterizes American postmodern theology as it emerged in the 1980s out of the encounter between French poststructuralism and deconstruction and American Death of God theologies. At the same time, the conclusion that art is the endless working of creative imagination and a productive process that achieves freedom, a productive freedom, is inherently political in its implications. Productive freedom is everywhere under siege in the onslaught of late capitalism, which is currently consuming the means of production itself—living human labor—in order to perpetuate itself. How can we preserve space for art and for thought and for freedom? Hegel again offers us crucial insights.

Just as Negri is driven to oppose Hegel in his drive for right, William Desmond is also highly critical of Hegel, but for different, more explicitly theological, reasons. In “Between Finitude and Infinity,” Desmond follows Taylor in analyzing the relationship between finitude and infinity, but he argues that Hegel’s dialectic domesticates the space between the infinite and the finite. The problem is the immanence of Hegel’s God, the fact that the infinite becomes finite in a predictable, overdeterminate, and absolute way. Desmond calls the dialectical process that makes the passage between finite and infinite too easy and renders finitude and infinity as equivalence a “sublationary infinitism.” Sublationary infinitism sees God as selving or self-othering in a process of infinitization of the finite that issues in a postreligious humanism. Sublationary infinitism completes the circle, closing the middle space between the finite and the infinite. Rather than surrender to this sublationary infinitism, on the one hand, or retreat to a Kantian dualism between finitude and infinity, on the other, Desmond wants to articulate a “metaxological agapeics.” Metaxological agapeics allows a passage between infinity and finitude; it does not equate them, but it sustains a fragile and asymmetrical (im)balance between the two.

Before developing his own view, Desmond considers and rejects two alternatives to Hegel’s sublationary infinitism, which he calls postulatory infinitism and postulatory finitism. Postulatory infinitism simply replaces Hegelian Spirit, Geist, with humanity as a whole. Feuerbach and Marx are seen as examples of this process, and this marks a “self-infinitization of finitude.” Basically, rather than an absolute sublating the difference between the finite and the infinite, this humanism postulates an infinite self-becoming of finite humanity in an ongoing process. The alternative, postulatory finitism, is better associated with figures such as Nietzsche and Heidegger and results in the “self-laceration of finitude as such.” Here is an attempt to think the infinite as finite and live as if there is nothing but the finite, which leads to a counterfeit infinitude, or a false infinity. Desmond is highly critical of the obsession with finitude that characterizes contemporary “Left-Nietzscheans,” and this anti-Hegelianism is no better than the Hegelianism it opposes. In a less explicitly religious vein, we could consider Quentin Meillassoux’s attempt to think the limits of finitude in his book After Finitude.

Desmond argues that there is a relation between finitude and infinity, but there is an important difference and heterogeneity as well. There exists a porosity between the two, but this connection cannot be captured in an immanent totality. Desmond invites us to think the God of the Between, as an overdetermined excess of divine infinity, a Between tilted toward infinity, but whose movement carries being beyond any and every whole. Signs of infinity include thematics such as the idiocy of being, an aesthetics of happening, an erotics of selving, and most significantly an agapeics of community. A religious community that stresses agapeic service maintains this distance between the finite and the infinite that Desmond values, and precisely such a vision of community is missing from Hegel. Furthermore, such an agapeic community founds a more vital politics, even if Desmond is very implicit on this point. In this sense, though, Hegel can still be viewed as the philosopher of totality and wholeness who cannot respect or value difference.

At the same time, using Negri’s mantra, here where it seems that everything is complete, everything is incomplete. Why? Because Desmond, like Negri, continues to think and write against Hegel, and specifically he suggests a kind of reverse sublation, a reworking of the necessary progression from religion to philosophy. At the same time, thinkers like Malabou and Caputo, not to mention Slavoj Žižek, give us tools to think Hegel’s philosophy itself as a kind of reverse sublation and push us to imagine alternative forms of social and political and religious community in light of this shift in perspective. Katrin Pahl’s essay, “The Way of Despair,” gives us further evidence that Hegel’s narrative is not simply one of cumulative and sublationary progress.

According to Pahl, most twentieth-century readers of the Phenomenology of Spirit assume that it is a narrative of progress; readers prefer and presume a happy ending. On the other hand, Hegel declares in the introduction that spirit proceeds by way of despair. Rather than an accumulation of truth and self-knowledge, the Phenomenology plots a path of despair that crushes and fragments the subject, rendering it into something akin to rubber due to the subject’s infinite elasticity. The conscious subject proceeds by way of despair, but proceeds ironically precisely by forgetting this despair and destruction and cheerfully starting anew. Pahl describes conscious spirit like a Weeble that keeps wobbling over but then always tipping up because it is unable to stay down.

Pahl develops her reading of Hegel by crossing the Phenomenology with the story The Passion According to G. H. by Clarice Lispector. Lispector describes an encounter of an upper-class Brazilian woman with a cockroach, and in crushing a cockroach and consuming its crushed whitish pulp, the woman experiences a kind of transformation—G. H. and the cockroach are each other, they eat each other and they give birth to each other. The cockroach represents an absolute nakedness and undivided divine being that then gets destroyed and consumed, whereas the woman G. H. possesses secrets, and she gives the gift of death to the cockroach. Paradoxically, ironically, this shared death becomes a mutual transformation: “I am the cockroach,” she declares. Returning to Hegel, Pahl shows how eating is a way of thinking, and how furthermore human despair is not so different from animal despair. When the conscious subject has to change, to alter, to become different by consuming and being consumed, it does not simply transform itself, it goes blank, which is a comical moment on the path to despair. The conscious spirit or subject cannot take account of its despair; rather, it can only respond to it by naively starting anew. Pahl reads Hegel’s stations of despair in the Phenomenology through the Christian Stations of the Cross and the Greek Eleusian mysteries or Dionysian initiation rites. In both cases spirit is born anew after being segmented and disjointed and having its body torn apart and reborn, and for Pahl this story possesses comic appeal. What is more, such lighthearted despair is sexy!

According to Adrian Johnston, a philosopher of psychoanalysis, Hegel read through Freud and Lacan gives resources for a more materialistic philosophy. In “The Weakness of Nature,” Johnston argues against the idealistic, and apparently Hegelian, Lacanian opposition of a “bad” biological naturalism in Freud and a “good” Freud of the signifier. Contemporary investigations in genetics and the neurosciences offer support to a psychoanalytic naturalism in which the brain and body are material in nature but open and underdetermined by established codes. This materialist psychoanalysis then allows a more nuanced appropriation of German idealist philosophies of nature such as Hegel and Schelling.

Johnston affirms a materialist reading of Hegel and Lacan, supported by Malabou and Žižek, whereby the opposition between nature and antinature is internal to nature itself, which is what distinguishes his philosophy as materialist rather than idealist. Johnston attends less to Lacan’s explicit use of Hegel, taken from Kojève, and more to what he calls the “unconscious Hegelianism” that appears in a session of Lacan’s Seminar IV on “The Signifier and the Holy Spirit.” According to Johnston, the natural Real is already denaturalized in Lacan, because the Real is riddled with negativity. The denaturalizing negativity of Geist, as the Other of nature, is immanent to disharmonious nature itself, and this reading of nature in Lacan mirrors the Hegelian reading of Christianity.

Johnston uses Hegel to think through Lacan and science more generally, while Edith Wyschogrod in one of her last essays offers us a meditation on art by juxtaposing Hegel and Vincent van Gogh on reason and madness. In “Disrupting Reason,” Wyschogrod echoes Taylor’s emphasis upon the liberating possibilities of aesthetics, while at the same time she complicates any simple progression from art to philosophy, or madness to rationality. She considers Hegel’s theoretical discourse on insanity in his Philosophy of Mind and compares it with his letters to his sister Christianne, who had a mental breakdown in 1820 and was briefly committed to an asylum. Although Hegel seems to be a prototypical bourgeois gentleman scholar, Wyschogrod reveals intriguing parallels with van Gogh, as shown in his accounts of his mental states in his letters to his brother Theo.

In his philosophy, Hegel understands madness as a stage on the way to higher rationality, while in personal terms he describes it in his letters as a reversion to animal nature. Wyschogrod also considers Hegel’s affair with an abandoned wife with whom Hegel had a son, Ludwig. Essentially, both Hegel and van Gogh strive for wholeness and rationality but both also succumb to erotic temptation and the risk of madness. Art and madness are linked in the conception of irrational or suprarational genius and both represent stages along the path of the development of Hegel’s dialectic. The goal is the Idea’s self-realization in freedom, but art, like religion, is a necessary stage but also a transitional step on the way to this destination. At the same time, van Gogh’s life and art and Hegel’s life suggest that we cannot neatly separate the penultimate from the ultimate, or the private life from the public sphere.

The passage from art to philosophy, like the passage from madness to reason, is contested and incomplete, especially where everything would need to appear perfectly rational and complete. Hegel wrestles with the conflicts between his inner life, which he characterizes as marked by Christian love (for his sister and his bastard son), his objective family life, and his ethical duty, which is also a responsibility of political life. This passage from the private to the public is also marked by resistance, subject to feelings that resist sublation and continue to erupt. This passage and transition, from art and religion and their attendant feelings that threaten madness to philosophical rationality and its serene acceptance of public duty, is a political passage and marks the very space of the political in modern life. Wyschogrod forces us back onto the irruption of irrational art as the disruption of the security of our public life by attending to Hegel’s irrationality.

Thomas A. Lewis raises the issue of the consummation of Hegel’s philosophy of religion, and, like many of the other contributors, he resists the reading of Hegel’s system as a closed and totalizing one. Lewis argues that a shift from philosophy and the Concept back toward religion and Vorstellung helps to work against this suggestion of closure, while also raising the specter of Hegel’s declaration of Christianity as the consummate form of religion. Rather than endorse this turn to Vorstellung, Lewis follows Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard in emphasizing the spontaneous and social character of Hegel’s thought. Lewis argues that one cannot fix conceptual relations, and this is Hegel’s criticism of Kant, for these conceptual relations are themselves products and processes that spontaneously emerge out of the representations they represent. The idea of closure that Hegel evokes in the Notion or Concept is only a provisional or weak notion of closure.

Lewis considers Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion, and he shows how, on the one hand, Hegel does privilege the culmination of religion in Christianity as the consummate form of religion. On the other hand, Lewis stresses that even Christianity is a revealed, positive religion that is still a representation of spirit presented in representational form. This form is open-ended, however, and open to further development as philosophers interpret the conceptual and rational meanings implicit in Christianity and other religious forms. The only completion of Hegel’s system is the self-consciousness of the dynamism within all determinate concepts, religion and Christianity included. In conclusion, Lewis claims that Hegel’s thought possesses important political implications insofar as he directs us to consider the civil religion of our collective life in whatever forms it takes, and this is a continuous, open-ended transformation. Hegel is not a totalizing, proto-totalitarian thinker who suppresses alterity or difference, but neither is he a simple relativist who abandons any standards of political and philosophical comparison and truth.

In Hegelian fashion, these essays progress dialectically through politics, theology, art, literature, philosophy, and science, weaving in and out of diverse cutting-edge theoretical discourses to show how Hegel continues to inhabit them, offering unexploited insights for thinking about religion and politics. We end up at the rear, and Žižek in characteristically provocative fashion offers us a meditation on “Hegel and Shitting” as a work against constipation and the understanding of Hegel as a constipating thinker. Žižek works against the conventional reading of Hegel’s system as a voracious eater that swallows up everything and then keeps it all within itself, which would produce the most incredible constipation. Žižek reads Hegel’s dialectic as more genuinely evacuating, as being consumed by excrementation or release. Here Absolute knowing is a thoroughly empty subject, a subject reduced to the void or the empty form of self-relating negativity. The Idea lets itself go, just as God lets go of divinity, releasing itself into temporal existence. Žižek claims that this is a Hegelian form of Gelassenheit, the letting go of itself as the culmination of sublation. Shitting is part of the process of sublation itself.

According to Žižek, this releasing is at the same time absolute liberation or freedom. He explains that freedom is also radically materialist, in a way that echoes Malabou and Johnston: material reality is a sign of essential conceptual imperfection, such that necessity is nothing but a contingency (material form) elevated to the form of necessity (conceptual universality). This process, however, always leaves a mark or a stain, which testifies to the original status of necessity as radically contingent. Žižek says that universal form itself is marked by the irreducible stain of contingency. This means that the process of philosophical appropriation is always accompanied by excrementation. Eating later becomes shitting. The Idea is an abstract representation of this process, but Absolute knowing involves understanding the backward movement as well, the return to embodied existence, which has revolutionary political and religious implications. Here Žižek explains that this excrementation opens up a space for ecological awareness: Absolute knowing understands nature not as a threat to be controlled but a process that can be left to follow its inherent (albeit erratic) path. Hegelian dialectic is a radical version of a process without a controlling subject. Readers are invited to risk themselves in reading and open themselves up to a future beyond representational philosophy, trivialized religiosity, and representative liberal democratic capitalism in these essays.

1. Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 545–546.

2. Herman Nohl, Hegels theologische Jugendschriften (Tubingen: Mohr, 1907), pp. 73–136.

3. On Christianity: Early Theological Writings by Friedrich Hegel, trans. T. M. Knox (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1948), p. 5.

6. These citations were lifted from Knox’s gloss in his introduction to ibid., pp. 5–6.

7. See Alenka Zupancic’s brilliant rehearsal of Hegel’s move here in The Odd One In: On Comedy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008).

8. Alain Badiou, “Lacan and the Pre-Socratics,” in Lacan: The Silent Partners, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2006), pp. 7–16.

9. Thanks to Richard Kearney and Mary-Jane Rubenstein for conversations about Totality and Infinity.

10. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 296. Our emphasis.

11. Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).

12. Heinz Kimmerle, “On Derrida’s Hegel Interpretation” in Hegel After Derrida, ed. Stuart Barnett (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 232.

13. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 44.

14. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 33–34.

15. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 44.

17. Alain Badiou, “The Desire of Philosophy,” in Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2003).

18. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), p. xxix.