Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic

The expression “Hegel in America” should resound with something of the comic incongruence associated with titles such as Tintin in America, not to mention Tintin in the Congo, which allowed their author Hergé, at the time of Belgium’s infamous enterprise in Africa, to give vent to his colonial unconscious. The element of incongruence ought to be even more striking if we take “America” to mean “Latin America,” which we should not forget includes a large portion of “North America,” that is, modern-day Mexico. Lighting up his words across an empty outline of the United States on a giant computerized billboard, Chilean-born artist Alfredo Jaar still felt the need not so long ago to remind passersby in Times Square in New York City, in a geopolitical diversion or détournement of that verbal-visual pun of another Belgian pipe smoker, the surrealist René Magritte: “This is not America.” The real question, however, is whether such comic effects still have the power to jolt us out of the new dogmatic slumber that, with the themes of finitude, restlessness, and plasticity, now seems to have overcome many of the most illustrious heads in the family of Hegel scholars—a family still prone to perceiving itself as based exclusively in Western Europe and the United States of America.

In fact, a nearly identical formulation, “Hegel and America,” already exists as the title of an essay by José Ortega y Gasset, no doubt the foremost philosopher to have emerged from the “generation of ’98,” named after the so-called disaster of Spain’s loss of its last colonies, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, upon defeat in the Spanish-American War of 1898.¹ Ortega y Gasset carefully crafts his text so as to tease his reader for several pages until the grand finale in which he quotes the now well-known passage at the start of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History where the German philosopher excludes America from the purview of both history and philosophy, all the while designating the continent as “the land of the future” in what can only be called a giddy overcompensation for the guilt incurred in this very exclusion. Ortega y Gasset laconically quotes the following words from Hegel, without further comment, as the final lines of his own essay:

America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World’s History shall reveal itself—perhaps in a contest between North and South America. It is a land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical lumber-room of old Europe. Napoleon is reported to have said: “Cette vieille Europe m’ennuie.” It is for America to abandon the ground on which hitherto the History of the World has developed itself. What has taken place in the New World up to the present time is only an echo of the Old World—the expression of a foreign Life; and as a Land of the Future, it has no interest for us here, for, as regards History, our concern must be with that which has been and that which is. In regard to Philosophy, on the other hand, we have to do with that which (strictly speaking) is neither past nor future, but with that which is, which has an eternal existence—with Reason; and this is quite sufficient to occupy us.²

Actually, as Enrique Dussel among others was to insist many years after Ortega y Gasset, Hegel does not so much dismiss as conceal the determining role of the discovery and conquest of the New World for the historical emergence of that Old Europe which today seems to bore the likes of Donald Rumsfeld almost as much as yesteryear it did the otherwise incomparable Napoleon. America, then, is not the land of the future so much as it is the necessary past of a geopolitical present, the one ciphered in the shorthand notation of “1492,” whose subsequent erasure from historical memory is ultimately what allows for the self-affirmation of Europe, henceforth endowed with “an eternal existence” that alone would be worthy of philosophical speculation.

Ortega y Gasset argues that this treatment of America reveals a fundamental paradox in Hegel’s entire philosophy of history. In the latter, there simply is no place to put America—except, precisely, in and as a place: in geography. Without wishing to enter into the sour discussion over whether such treatment is actually better or worse than the one given to Asia, as part of “unhistorical History,” we should not forget that Hegel relegates America together with Africa to a prior section in his Philosophy of History, “Geographical Basis of History.”³ More importantly, the ambiguity of the very expression of “the land of the future” to designate America sums up a pivotal vacillation on Hegel’s part, as though he were not altogether certain that the continent in question could not also open up a vista onto the spirit’s future, including a future that would lie in wait for Old Europe itself. This last dimension of futurity, which would anticipate the possibility of an end to the end of history as envisaged in Hegel’s apology for the Prussian State, for this same reason cannot find its way into the main body of The Philosophy of History. When Hegel says about the United States, for example, that they are insufficiently advanced to feel the need for a monarchy, he is unable to envision for them any future other than a repetition of the trajectory already followed in Europe: “The idea that Prussia might, over time, come to shake its monarchy as one shakes off a nightmare must not have crossed Hegel’s mind.”⁴ Were such an idea actually allowed to cross his mind, America would cancel out, perhaps even without sublation, the eternal present of Hegel’s Europe.

America may well contain a vast expanse of land, but it must remain just that: a continent whose content cannot be allowed to leak back onto the Old World. This is the paradox that lies revealed in Hegel’s treatment of America:

Here we touch in a concrete point upon the enormous limitation of Hegelian thought: its blindness for the future. The future to come upsets him because it is what is truly irrational and, thus, what a philosopher esteems the most when he puts the frenetic appetite for truth before the imperialistic drive of a system. Hegel makes himself hermetic to the tomorrow, he becomes agitated and restless when he comes upon some dawn, he loses his serenity and dogmatically closes the windows so that no objections come flying in with new and luminous possibilities.⁵

By pushing back the future into a section on geography prior to history, Hegel in one fell swoop limits the scope of his entire endeavor to the past (history) and the present (philosophy)—without a future relevant enough to speak of in the main body of the text. “The case of Hegel clearly reveals the error that consists in equating what is historical with the past,” writes Ortega y Gasset: “Thus it happens that this philosophy of history has no future, no escape. Therein lies the peculiar interest of studying how Hegel deals with America, which, if anything, is certainly something future.”⁶

By anticipating such skepticism, Ortega y Gasset can be read as having set the tone for subsequent interrogations of the limits and blind spots in Hegel’s philosophy of history, particularly as seen from the global South—including, in this case, from the privileged vantage point of post-1898 Spain. Indeed, what is ciphered in the so-called disaster of 1898 gives us a retrospective glimpse into the truth of 1492 that hits home with a vengeance as Spain definitively loses its status as a colonial world power.⁷ “Hegel and America,” in this sense, is nothing if not premonitory of the kinds of reading that would be produced in the latter half of the twentieth century, once the providential history of the world-spirit qua theodicy is set against the backdrop of the dilemmas of colonialism, dependency, and underdevelopment that since then have become unavoidable even for some of Hegel’s most admiring readers in the global South.

It is then perhaps ironic that Catherine Malabou, in her otherwise stunning book on The Future of Hegel, does not consider for one moment that which for Hegel himself constitutes the land of the future, that is, America. Then again, Malabou pays only scant attention to The Philosophy of History. Aside from briefly mentioning the possibility that there might be something “clumsy” about Hegel’s approach, which “cuts abruptly across centuries and speculative moments,” she is quick to add that “history and philosophy intersect, an intersection that immediately justifies this approach.”⁸ In fact, she seems to feel no need to distance herself from the overarching structure of Hegel’s study of the history of the world-spirit as centered on the advent of Christianity and raised up from abstract “personality” or “ego” among the Greeks to the higher principle of “freedom” in Hegel’s own philosophy: “Given its form by Descartes, radicalized in its significance by Kant, the subject will henceforth appear as an independent principle and as the absolute autonomy of thought.”⁹ Similarly, in discussing the striking possibility of a “history of the future,” Malabou reduces the available options to two fundamental moments, the Greek and the modern, without for a moment pausing to consider the role of Asia, Africa, or America—not to mention the enormous lapse of the Middle Ages—in the movement from one to the other: “Subjectivity comes itself (advient) in two fundamental moments: the Greek moment and the modern moment, which prove to be, both in their logical unity and in their chronological succession, “subject as substance” and “substance as subject.”¹⁰ Thus, even if Malabou argues that the dimension of futurity is actually a crucial component of Hegel’s philosophy, this insight does not significantly alter the latter’s view of world history and of the place of America in it or, as the case may be, outside of it.

As for the element of comedy, it comes into play when what at first sight may seem merely clumsy or odd turns out to be an essential part of the most abstract speculative movement of the concept itself. Ortega y Gasset understands this when he quotes the following description from The Philosophy of History in which Hegel highlights the inferiority not only of the human inhabitants but also of the fauna of the New World:

In the very animals one notes an inferiority equal to that of the people. Animal life includes lions, tigers, crocodiles, etc., but these wild creatures, although they are notably similar to types of the old world, are, nonetheless, in all senses smaller, weaker, more impotent. They swear that edible animals in the New World are not as nutritious as those of the old. In America there are huge herds of cattle; but European beef is considered to be an exquisite mouthful there.¹¹

From this observation Ortega y Gasset goes on to infer a general interpretive principle for the reading of Hegel. Indeed, immediately after explaining how “we see that the great errors in his work do not stem from his speculative method but rather from the limitations from which all empirical knowledge suffers,” he continues as if to rescue the element of error as the principal charm of Hegel’s philosophy of history:

The gaucheries of old photographs are, at the same time, their greatest charm. These, and not the elements that appear correct and contemporary, tear us away from the present and transfer us with voluptuous historical magic to that time now past. It seems we now similarly regard Hegel, in his great Muscovite cap, reading in his office a story of travels through America where it is noted that European beefsteak is preferred in America to the indigenous beef.¹²

Hegel’s truth would lie in the clumsy and incongruent details of his untruth. “His philosophy is imperial, Caesarean, Genghis-Khanesque. And so it happened that, finally, he dominated politically the Prussian state, dictatorially, from his university professorship,” but this does not mean that there is not also a moment of truth in the failures of this imperial ambition: “And yet, and yet … Hegel never comes off completely empty. In his mistakes, like the lion with his bites of flesh, he always carries between his teeth a good chunk of palpitating truth.”¹³

When looked at from the vantage point of Latin America, the commonplace or downright hackneyed objections against Hegel—against his panlogicism, against his view of history as theodicy, against his apology for the inherent ethical order of the State—are further compounded and given their proper world-historical stage, so to speak, where they seem to have to represent the same play over and over again, now as tragedy and then as farce. The most frequently rehearsed criticism of Hegel’s thought in Latin American circles indeed does not apply in the first place to his dialectical method or to his inveterate idealism but rather and inseparably to his philosophy of history with its pivotal concept of the world-spirit driving home the identity of the real and the rational. Even commentaries on Hegel’s Logic or his Phenomenology of Spirit always must undergo the retroactive effects of a gaze that is unable to stop staring at those remarkable opening pages from The Philosophy of History.

José Pablo Feinmann, writing in the wake of dependency theory and anti-imperial struggles throughout the continent, devotes several pages of his Philosophy and Nation to a “Brief (Very Brief) Social and Political History of European Philosophy: From Descartes to Hegel.”¹⁴ Feinmann boldly moves through this particular part in the history of modern European philosophy by reading it as the expression, in thinking, of the history of Western imperialism. Thus, whereas with Descartes the res cogitans necessarily still confronts the inertia of the res extensa, for Kant reason begins to dictate its own laws to nature, following the insights of his Copernican revolution. Even for this thinker of the Enlightenment, however, the thing-in-itself continues to confront the powers of reason as an unknowable. It is not until Hegel that the in-itself will become sublated and pass over into the for-itself of reason: “There is no more in-itself, nor are there any regions of being forbidden to reason. Reason now possesses being and has engraved its own teleology on it: being, thus, has transformed itself into reason,” Feinmann writes: “In Hegel, indeed, the process of the overpowering of the in-itself by the subject reaches its culmination.”¹⁵

Feinmann claims that there is nothing mechanical or reductive about reading the history of European expansionism into the history of philosophy and vice versa. “The transformation of substance into subject expresses, philosophically, the appropriation of history on behalf of European humanity. There is no reductionism in affirming that, in Hegelian philosophy, the development of the spirit is identified with that of European history,” insofar as Europe names this very process of appropriation or overpowerment itself: “Now the magnificent scaffolding of Hegelian logic can unfold itself: the laws of thinking are the laws of being, there is a profound unity between logic and ontology, the method is not exterior to the object, for if knowledge is conceived of as different from its object, then neither can knowledge know of the absolute nor can the absolute come to know itself.”¹⁶ It will not do, therefore, merely to separate Hegel’s method from his system or his politics, as though one—the dialectical method—could emerge unscathed from its separation from the other, from the reactionary political premises behind the system identified, in Hegel’s day, with the Prussian State. Seen from Latin America, Hegel’s dialectical method and his world-historical system would appear for what they are, namely, provincial self-legitimations of Europe’s colonial ambitions.

Based in Mexico, Enrique Dussel seems to reiterate several of the points made by Feinmann. In his recent Politics of Liberation, he too refers to the way in which Hegel, in paragraphs 246–247 from The Philosophy of Right already quoted at length by Ortega y Gasset, legitimates the experience of colonialism by pointing at the need for European civil society to reach out and expand into peripheral territories:

As in no other philosopher, and this could not have happened before, the global hegemony of mature modernity, thanks to the impact of the industrial revolution, allowed Europe to experience for the first time that it was the “center” of planetary history. This it had never been! Hegel had an acute philosophical-historical instinct and he captured this recent experience—just a few decades old—of European supremacy. He is the first Eurocentric philosopher who celebrates with optimism the hypothesis that “the History of the World travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of History” and, again, “Europe is absolutely the center and end of universal history.” Moreover, the “Southern Europe” has ceased to be the “bearer” (Träger) of the Spirit, a function which in this final stage of history corresponds only to “the heart of Europe,” the Germano-Anglo-Saxon Europe of the North. These pseudoscientific “inventions” in history allow Hegel to reconstruct world history by projecting hegemonic Europe, after the industrial revolution (an event not quite fifty years old), onto the origin of Greek culture and Judeo-Christianity (both phenomena dislodged from their purely “oriental” context) with pretenses of world-historical explanation.¹⁷

This backward projection of European hegemony onto its supposed Greek and Judeo-Christian origins is precisely what leads to the occlusion of perhaps the most decisive fact for the history of that much-vaunted discourse of modernity, namely, the discovery of the New World.

In his famous Frankfurt Lectures, originally delivered in 1992, Dussel had made very much the same point by playing on the words descubrimiento (discovery) and encubrimiento (cover-up):

The possibility of modernity originated in the free cities of medieval Europe, which were centers of enormous creativity. But modernity as such was “born” when Europe was in a position to pose itself against an other, when, in other words, Europe could constitute itself as a unified ego exploring, conquering, colonizing an alterity that gave back its image of itself. This other, in other words, was not “dis-covered” (descubierto) or admitted, as such, but concealed, or “covered-up” (encubierto), as the same as what Europe assumed it had always been. So, if 1492 is the moment of the “birth” of modernity as a concept, the moment of origin of a very particular myth of sacrificial violence, it also marks the origin of a process of concealment or misrecognition of the non-European.¹⁸

From Hegel to Habermas, most European philosophers participate in this trend, which consists in defining modernity on the basis of the Enlightenment or the French Revolution. What remains hidden in all such accounts, with their customary leaps from ancient Greece to modern Christianity, is the violent process of primitive accumulation and imperial expansion without which the so-called movement of world history from East to West would never have reached its end point in Europe.

Both Dussel and Feinmann seem to want to give Hegel and his European followers a guilty or bad conscience. The question then becomes whether there are not also elements within Hegel’s method and system, no doubt starting with the very notion of bad conscience as unhappy consciousness, that would enable the recognition of the non-European. Even the project of a universal history might not be beyond salvage. “If the historical facts about freedom can be ripped out of the narratives told by the victors and salvaged for our own time, then the project of universal freedom does not need to be discarded but, rather, redeemed and reconstituted on a different basis,” as Susan Buck-Morss suggests in her groundbreaking essay “Hegel and Haiti.”¹⁹ If Hegel’s philosophy of history is ever to allow that its hidden and undisciplined stories be told, then the task cannot consist only in providing more empirical evidence of those revolts and uprisings whose rumble can be heard beneath the loud trumpets of theodicy, but the question is also one of principle, including at the level of philosophical logic proper.

Indeed, if the culmination of world history reveals the necessary backward projection of the identity of being and thinking, then should we not look for elements of truth in traces of nonidentity or in instances where there is a lack of adequation between the two? Would this not require that we raise the irreducibility of error, of failure, and of alienation into a new speculative principle—not least of all because its opposite, the unerring authenticity of a correct line, is inaccessible to us other than as a fiction? As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak observes in her own reading of Hegel in India: “Indeed, there can be no correct scholarly model for this type of reading. It is, strictly speaking, ‘mistaken,’ for it attempts to transform into a reading-position the site of the ‘native informant’ in anthropology, a site that can only be read, by definition, for the production of definitive descriptions. It is an (im)possible perspective.”²⁰ Whoever seeks to incorporate the non-European by way of a moralizing corrective into the Hegelian logic of history must come to terms with the fact that these figures not only do not ever appear as subjects but, even as objects for an anthropological gaze, are always originally lost. If ever the subaltern is going to be refigured into an alternative world history, the latter will have to start from the limit where it resists being retrofitted into logic. As Spivak writes elsewhere: “The historian must persist in his efforts in this awareness, that the subaltern is necessarily the absolute limit of the place where history is narrativized into logic. It is a hard lesson to learn, but not to learn it is merely to nominate elegant solutions to be correct theoretical practice.”²¹

Then again, is this not precisely the elegant lesson to be learned from the new consensus regarding Hegel’s legacy, namely, that far from confirming the identity of thinking and being in a supremely metaphysical panlogicism, he is actually already a thinker of nonidentity, or even of alterity, albeit in spite of himself; that instead of subsuming the particular under an empty universal, his is actually a thinking of pure singularity, of the event, and of the encounter; and that far from affirming the status quo of what is with the positivity of the infinite, his dialectic actually invites us to throw ourselves into the most extreme experience of self-divestiture?

In short, if we were to update Theodor W. Adorno’s The Jargon of Authenticity, which targeted mostly Heidegger and his lesser imitators, could we not capture the essence of the new consensus surrounding Hegel’s legacy today by referring to the jargon of finitude?²² Philosophically, this means going behind Hegel’s back and reading him against the grain so as to retrieve a principle that Heidegger was one of the first to attribute systematically to Kant but that others might associate already with Descartes: “Cartesian reason and Kantian reason offer plenty of differences and even stark oppositions between them, but they find one point of coincidence: the finitude of reason.”²³

Through the narrow gates of the finite, we could certainly glimpse the hollow presence of the problematic brought to the surface in our quest for Hegel in America. Even if this reemphasizing of all things finite is becoming a new dogma that actually might turn out to be more pernicious than advantageous from a political point of view, it is no exaggeration to state that from Kojève to Malabou there exists a consensus to place the concern with finitude squarely at the center of Hegel’s thought.

Adorno for a number of reasons constitutes somewhat of an exception in this regard. Not only does The Jargon of Authenticity put us on the right track toward a critique of the jargon of finitude, but even where Adorno draws attention to the truth that lies revealed in Hegel’s errors, blemishes, or weak spots, as he repeatedly does in Hegel: Three Studies, he never fails to add that this faltering dimension of mortality always appears as though in spite of Hegel himself: “For all his emphasis on negativity, division, and nonidentity, Hegel actually takes cognizance of that dimension only for the sake of identity, only as an instrument of identity. The nonidentities are heavily stressed, but not acknowledged, precisely because they are so charged with speculation.”²⁴ In other words, if Hegel indeed needs rescuing, it is precisely because he does not do the job of self-divestiture himself, at least not willingly.

Putting into practice his own principle of reading against the grain, starting from Hegel’s blind spots, Adorno is also one of the few to concentrate on the notion of world-spirit, most notably in “An Excursion to Hegel” in Negative Dialectics, though this was already a major stake in Hegel: Three Studies. Here, the history of the world-spirit in an immanent critique is shown to be true after all: “Satanically, the world as grasped by the Hegelian system has only now, a hundred and fifty years later, proved itself to be a system in the literal sense, namely that of a radically societalized society.”²⁵ The global integration of the world under capitalism thus verifies even the most outrageous claims about the identity of the real and the rational, whose nonidentity cannot fail to show through the cracks: “Hence the locus of Hegel’s truth is not outside the system; rather, it is as inherent in the system as his untruth. For this untruth is none other than the untruth of the system of the society that constitutes the substratum of his philosophy.”²⁶ In the end, perhaps not surprisingly, such an immanent critique in the same gesture enables an otherwise extremely rare acknowledgment of the importance of the conquest of America: “Even the Spanish conquests of old Mexico and Peru, which have been felt there like invasions from another planet—even those, irrationally for the Aztecs and Incas, rendered bloody assistance to the spread of bourgeois rational society, all the way to the conception of ‘one world’ that is teleologically inherent in that society’s principle.”²⁷ Little if anything from this reading of the world-spirit will survive once the dialectic, purged of its historical substratum, becomes equated with an analytic of finitude that is ultimately as antidialectical as it claims to be radically antitotalitarian.

Slavoj Žižek also cannot—or can no longer—be considered the epitome of the argument for a finitist reading of Hegel. True: for years Žižek has argued that Hegel’s logic is the very opposite of banal panlogicism but also and at the same time that it is identical to the logic of difference with which Jacques Derrida, among others, sought to outwit Hegel. More recently, however, both Žižek and his colleagues in Ljubljana, especially Alenka Zupancic, have been actively pursuing the infinite as part of a critique of the finitist argument. Both Žižek and Zupancic, finally, perform these criticisms of finitude—which may very well amount to self-criticisms—by way of a renewed appreciation of comedy. Thus, in The Odd One In: On Comedy, Zupancic argues in favor of the “physics of the infinite” over against the “metaphysics of the finite.”²⁸

Perhaps the most eloquent and didactic overview of Hegel as a thinker of finitude can be found in Jean-Luc Nancy’s Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative. Each subheading in this little gem of a book—from “Restlessness” through “Logic” and “Trembling” all the way to “We”—could serve as a separate entry in a dictionary of finitude. What emerges is a renewed appreciation of spirit, of subject, and of philosophy itself in terms of the pure effectuation of self-relating negativity. The Hegelian subject is far from being the absolute master of the process of going out of itself and coming home to itself. Instead, it is what undoes every determination and exposes every position. “In a word: the Hegelian subject is in no way the self all to itself. It is, to the contrary, and it is essentially, what (or the one who) dissolves all substance—every instance already given, supposed first or last, founding or final, capable of coming to rest in itself and taking undivided enjoyment in its mastery and property.”²⁹ The stage for the subject’s activity is still the stage of world history, but now the relation between subject and substance is not one of appropriation or overpowerment but rather of expropriation and passing: “The subject is what it does, it is its act, and its doing is the experience of the consciousness of the negativity of substance, as the concrete experience and consciousness of the modern history of the world—that is, also, of the passage of the world through its own negativity.”³⁰ Even the history of the world-spirit can appear as the manifestation of the absolute as self-liberation, now understood as the absolution from any given self.

Philosophy here does not come full circle by ending with a speculative return to the beginning, now raised to a higher level. Instead, it does nothing more, but also nothing less, than expose the restlessness of being itself in its pure immanence. If there is an infinite, it is only the infinite exposure of finitude to itself—without either a stable beginning or a transcendent end:

Hegel neither begins nor ends; he is the first philosopher for whom there is, explicitly, neither beginning nor end, but only the full and complete actuality of the infinite that traverses, works, and transforms the finite. Which means: negativity, hollow, gap, the difference of being that relates to itself through this very difference, and which is thus, in all its essence and all its energy, the infinite act of relating itself to itself, and thus the power of the negative.³¹

At the level of logic, this means that we find ourselves at the opposite extreme of any presupposition of identity. “Hegel is the first to take thought out of the realm of identity and subjectivity,” Nancy writes: “The Hegelian world is the world in which no generality subsists, only infinite singularities.”³² Thought does not at all operate according to the impoverished dialectic of particularity and generality. The notion of singularity, negating both of these poles, emerges as the epitome of the speculative “concept” or “grasp,” Hegel’s Begriff:

Grasp is thus the grasping of the singular in its singularity, that is, in what is unique and unexchangeable about it, and therefore at the point where this unicity is the unicity of a desire and a recognition of the other, in all the others. The ones and the others—the ones who are all others for each other—are among themselves equals in desire.³³

Nevertheless, the question immediately arises whether this view of the Hegelian logic is really any better equipped to acknowledge not just alterity in general but the concrete other that is the non-European. For all the stress on the labor of the concept as the power to delink the self from all given attachments, this perspective does not fail to corroborate the fundamental gesture that equates the movement of history with the manifestation of absolute liberty: “Hegel names this manifestation ‘the spirit of the world.’”³⁴ Is this truly liberty for all those others whose unexchangeable singularity the movement of spirit is supposed to expose? More importantly, is the renewed emphasis on alterity and finitude not bound to introduce a point of blockage in any contemporary attempt to put this philosopher to good political use for the Left? Should we not look for an alternative to this profoundly Kantian reading of Hegel? Finally, should we not acknowledge the historical circumstances that explain why there is such a strong desire today to rescue Hegel from the tainted image of him as a “dogmatic” and perhaps even “proto-totalitarian” thinker, presented by his Philosophy of Right or his Philosophy of History?

Not so long ago, for example in his polemic with Jacques Derrida and Rodolphe Gasché in For They Know Not What They Do, Slavoj Žižek could still convincingly take aim at the “typical deconstructivist” portrayal of Hegel as a thinker of an all-absorbing Absolute, to which he then opposes, with help from Lacan’s logic of the signifier, the “elementary” Hegelian dialectic of the not-All and the lack in the Other. Even the notion of an unavoidable excess or remainder would not be able to avoid the profound misunderstanding involved in the deconstructivist reading with its altogether commonsensical attempt to free heterogeneity from identity. For Žižek, the only true alternative is to experience how the difference supposed to be sublated never existed but was always already a lost cause: “The dialectical ‘sublation’ is thus always a kind of retroactive ‘unmaking’ [Ungeschehen-machen]; the point is not to overcome the obstacle to Unity but to experience how the obstacle never was one; how the appearance of an ‘obstacle’ was due only to our wrong, ‘finite’ perspective.”³⁵ Today, with Derrideans and Heideggerians such as Nancy or Malabou turning to Hegel for positive inspiration and not merely for a straw man argument, the same rebuttal is no longer possible. Hegel, who once stood for the textbook platitudes of absolute reason, now posits alterity and plasticity as such—and not even as a concession but as his first and last contribution to philosophizing proper.

Nancy barely hints at the historical circumstances behind this strange anamorphosis within a broadly understood deconstructive tradition, preferring instead—almost as a simple matter of fact—to free Hegel of the charges of being a circular, foundational, or metaphysical thinker, since he neither begins nor ends nor grounds nor completes anything: “In these two ways—absence of beginning and absence of end, absence of foundation and absence of completion—Hegel is the opposite of a ‘totalitarian’ thinker.”³⁶ So what exactly has happened? How can the horizon of expectation have shifted so dramatically to begin with, to the point where even Hegel’s Aufhebung begins to read as a quasi synonym for a Heideggerian-inspired Ereignis as the event of appropriation without which there would be no historicity and, therefore, no history? In short, what are the political conditions that enable the reading of Hegel as the first full-fledged thinker of a finitist ontology to emerge as a crucial component in the recent history and theory of the Left? Only if we begin to formulate answers to these questions will we also know whether the language of finitude actually constitutes a jargon, or whether it is not perhaps, in the very manner of Hegel’s phenomenological attitude, the exposition of the real itself.

To answer some of these questions, I want to turn to the work of the Mexican novelist, playwright, and self-taught philosopher José Revueltas. In his 1964 novel Los errores, this author gives us important insights into the potential destiny of the whole jargon of finitude when combined with an antitotalitarian, Left-wing revisionist reading of Hegel. In fact, his novel can serve as a pivotal transition between Lenin’s orthodox view, in Left-Wing Communism as an Infantile Disease, and the view of the New Left, exemplified in Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit’s Leftism as the Remedy for the Senile Disease of Communism.³⁷

Aside from its melodramatic plot line that pits the lumpenproletariat of prostitutes and pimps against the fascistoid anticommunists, Los errores presents a narrativized judgment regarding the dogmatic excesses of Stalinism, including in the Mexican Communist Party. In this sense, the novel participates in a larger self-evaluation of the twentieth century in which we could also include Alain Badiou’s The Century or, closer to Revueltas’s home, Bolívar Echeverría’s Vuelta de siglo.³⁸ Revueltas is concerned above all with the interpretation that history has in store for the great events in the international expansion and perversion of communism. Its main problem is addressed in an odd parenthesis, in which the narrator’s voice seems indistinguishable from the author’s:

(One cannot escape the necessity of a free and heterodox reflection about the meaning of the “Moscow trials” and the place they occupy in the definition of our age, of our twentieth century, because we true communists—whether members of the party or not—are shouldering the terrible, overwhelming task of being the ones who bring history face to face with the disjunctive of having to decide whether this age, this perplexing century, will be designated as the century of the Moscow trials or as the century of the October revolution.)³⁹

Revueltas leaves us no clear verdict in this regard. Was the twentieth century criminal or revolutionary? The disjunctive remains open throughout Los errores, since there is also no single character capable of occupying the organizing center of consciousness that we might attribute to its author. Critics such as Christopher Domínguez Michael, after expressing their dismay at Revueltas’s “far-fetched and immoral” hypothesis regarding the trials, are quick to add how much they lament the fact that Revueltas could have suggested some kind of dialectical justification of sacrifice and terror: “Revueltas takes the liberties of a novelist with regard to history and, in his enthusiasm for the Hegelian triads, he converts Bukharin’s tortured mind into a precise and chilling dialectical synthesis.”⁴⁰ In reality, the text is far more ambiguous.

Thus, we find examples of an analysis of the corrupting nature of power with regard to historical truth. Other arguments leave open the possibility that it may be too early to judge the situation in the Soviet Union. That humanity, being still too alienated or else—metaphysically speaking—being merely mortal, cannot exclude the future vindication of sacrifice. Precisely to the extent in which truth must inscribe itself concretely in the time and space of a specific situation, there exists no absolute vantage point from where it could be judged once and for all. Finally, there is a moment for the justification of a heroic outlook in history:

Tomorrow history will vindicate these heroes, in spite of the errors, vacillations and weaknesses of their lives; these human beings who were able and knew how to accept the defamating stigma before the whole world, whose names are Bukharin, Piatakov, Rykov, Krestinski, Ter-Vaganyan, Smirnov, Sokolnikov, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Muralov and so many others.⁴¹

All these interpretations are not mutually exclusive nor do they present a clearcut picture of the ideological debate surrounding the Moscow trials. They sometimes invade the mind of a single character, dividing his inner sense with a terrifying uncertainty. This is the case of the communist intellectual Jacobo Ponce, who is on the verge of being expulsed from the PCM:

The other part of his self, the other part of his atrociously divided spirit, replied to him: no, these concrete truths are only small and isolate lies in the process of a general reality that will continue its course, despite and above everything. The miseries, dirty tricks, and crimes of Stalin and his cohorts will be seen by tomorrow’s communist society as an obscure and sinister disease of humanity from our time, from the tormented and delirious twentieth century that, all in all, will have been the century of the greatest and inconceivable historical premonitions of humanity.⁴²

From such ruminations, it is difficult to draw the simplistic conclusion that history, understood dialectically, would justify every possible means in the name of the communist end. Moreover, only a melodramatic imagination would define communism as a cause that is “pure and untouched by evil,” to speak the novel’s language, but this does not mean that we should move to the opposite extreme of the ideological spectrum so as to interpret evil as the profound truth of all militancy, a sure way if ever there was one to refute beforehand any future for the communist project.

In the final instance, as the novel’s title indicates, everything revolves around the status of errors: is there or not sublation of the errors committed by history, in the sense of a dialectical Aufhebung? For those who reproach Revueltas for his blind confidence in the Hegelian dialectic, it seems that the sheer idea of finding some sense or relevance in such errors only aggravates their criminal nature to the point of justifying terror and totalitarianism. But this view leads to a position outside or beyond the history of communism, by defending liberal democracy as the only remedy against the repetition of radical Evil—that is, against the threat of so-called totalitarianism with its twin faces of Hitler and Stalin.

For Revueltas, the task consists in thinking the crimes from within the politics of communism, not the other way around, not to ratify the facts with the stamp of historical inevitability but to formulate an immanent critique that at the same time would avoid the simple abandonment of communism as such. What seems to be happening today, however, is a tendency to interrupt in anticipation any radical emancipatory project in the name of a new moral imperative that obliges us above all to avoid the repetition of the crime. With Los errores Revueltas may have become the unwitting accomplice of contemporary nihilism, which consists precisely in defining the Good only negatively by way of the necessity to avoid Evil.⁴³ In particular, there are two aspects in the novel that run the risk of contributing to this complicity: the ethical role attributed to the party and the metaphysical speculation about “man” as an erroneous being. Both of these themes are presented with the hope of serving as possible correctives to the reining dogmatism, but they could easily invite an ideological conclusion that runs counter to its intended effect.

Revueltas, on one hand, lets Jacobo Ponce devote most of his energy to the task of an ethical reflection about the party’s authority. “The party [serves] as an ethical notion,” against the orthodoxy of the party vanguard of the proletariat: “The party [is] a superior moral notion, not only in its role as political instrument but also as human consciousness, as the reappropriation of consciousness.”⁴⁴ At the end of the novel, in the “Blind Knot” that serves as its epilogue, Ismael reaches the same conclusion as Jacobo: “The conclusion to be derived from this, if we introduce into our study of the problem the concepts of a humanist ethics, the concepts that stem from an ethical development of Marxism, can only be the most overwhelming and terrible conclusion, especially considering the parties that come into power.”⁴⁵ The exercise of dogmatism, with its “consoling tautology” that “the party is the party,” in reality involves “the most absolute ethical nihilism, the negation of all ethics, ciphered in the concept: to us everything is permitted.”⁴⁶

If, on the other hand, “thought and practice … are identified as twin brothers in metaphysics and in dogma,” then it is understandable that Jacobo would propose a philosophico-anthropological reflection about “man as erroneous being.”⁴⁷ This reflection is part of the “essay” in which Jacobo has inverted “close to three months of conscientious and patient labor,” no doubt similar to the labor it would take Revueltas to write his own essay, Dialectic of Consciousness, a few years later. Jacobo reads from this text:

Man is an erroneous being—he began to read with his eyes, in silence; a being that never finishes by establishing itself anywhere; therein lies precisely his revolutionary and tragic, unpacifiable condition. He does not aspire to realize himself to another degree, and this is to say, in this he finds his supreme realization, to another degree—he repeated to himself—beyond what can have the thickness of a hair, that is, this space that for eternal eternity, and without their being a power capable of remedying this, will leave uncovered the maximum coincidence of the concept with the conceived, of the idea with its object: to reduce the error to a hair’s breadth thus constitutes, at the most, the highest victory that he can obtain; nothing and nobody will be able to grant him exactitude.⁴⁸

What Jacobo proposes can be read as a new metaphysics—or antimetaphysics—of error and equivocity, over against dogma and exactitude. If the identity of being and thinking defines the basic premise of all metaphysical dogmatism, human conscience or consciousness (conciencia in Spanish means both) can avoid dogmatism only by accepting an infinitesimal distance between the concept and the thing conceived.

Revueltas accepts the need for a revision of the Hegelian dialectic in ways that are similar to what Adorno around the same time proposes with his negative dialectics, according to which no concept ever completely covers its content without leaving behind some leftover, or some remnant of nonidentity. Much of Revueltas’s intellectual work as a novelist and a theorist during the sixties and seventies is devoted to such a reformulation of the dialectic, as the conception of the nonconceptual. In the case of Los errores, though, it is not difficult to guess where the ethics of the party and the metaphysics of error will end up. Both arguments in fact could be invoked in order to stop, interrupt, or prohibit any attempt to organize politics as well as any project to approach the truth of consciousness. Not only would all organizational matters then be displaced onto moral issues, but this could even lead to a position for which the knowledge of our essential nature as “erroneous beings” would always be morally superior and theoretically more radical than any given action, which in comparison cannot but appear “dogmatic” and “totalitarian.” In full melodramatic mode, we would end up with the attitude of the “beautiful soul” from Hegel’s Phenomenology. The history of the 1970s and 1980s, with its peremptory declarations of the “end of ideology,” the “death” of Marxism, and the “ethical turn,” would end up confirming the extent to which the defense of liberal democracy against communism also adopted some of the features of this same “beautiful soul” who at least knows that its inactivity protects it from the Evil incurred by anyone intent upon imposing, here and now, some Good. “Politics is subordinated to ethics, to the single perspective that really matters in this conception of things: the sympathetic and indignant judgement of the spectator of the circumstances,” writes Badiou: “Such is the accusation so often repeated over the last fifteen years: every revolutionary project stigmatized as ‘utopian’ turns, we are told, into totalitarian nightmare. Every will to inscribe an idea of justice or equality turns bad. Every collective will to the Good creates Evil.”⁴⁹

Hegel’s finitude should be revisited from the point of view of this outcome. The premise of the irreducibility of error and of the necessary inadequacy between concept and being indeed runs through the entire finitist tradition of reading Hegel. Thus, central to the Kojève’s claim that Hegel is the first to attempt a complete atheist and finitist philosophy, we find the idea that this requires a view of “man” as an essentially erroneous being:

Being which is (in the Present) can be “conceived of” or revealed by the Concept. Or, more exactly, Being is conceived of at “each instant” of its being. Or else, again: Being is not only Being, but also Truth—that is, the adequation of the Concept and Being. This is simple. The whole question is to know where error comes from. In order that error be possible, the Concept must be detached from Being and opposed to it. It is Man who does this; and more exactly, Man is the Concept detached from Being; or better yet, he is the act of detaching the Concept from Being.⁵⁰

The ability of human errors to survive, in fact, is what distinguishes man from nature:

Only the errors committed by man endure indefinitely and are propagated at a distance, thanks to language. And man could be defined as an error that is preserved in existence, that endures within reality. Now, since error means disagreement with the real; since what is other than what is, is false, one can also say that the man who errs is a Nothingness that nihilates in Being, or an “ideal” that is present in the real.⁵¹

It is only thanks to our essentially human tendency to err that truth is possible as well. Otherwise, being would be mute facticity: “Therefore, there is really a truth only where there has been an error. But error exists really only in the form of human discourse.”⁵² To use Hegel’s own words in one of Adorno’s favorite formulations: “Only out of this error does the truth arise. In this fact lies the reconciliation with error and with finitude.”⁵³

For Kojève, true wisdom famously will bring about the perfect adequation of being and concept in the figure of the sage or wise man at the end of history. By contrast, in the absence of any ultimate reconciliation, philosophy survives only in and through error, through the gap between the concept and its object, a gap that is thus not merely temporary or accidental but constitutive. And yet, if finitude today constitutes a new dogma that blocks all action to avoid the trappings of radical evil, should we not also invert this conclusion regarding the irreducibility of error by reaffirming the identity of being and thinking with Parmenides? Revueltas explores this possibility through his own notion of the act in “Hegel and I.”

A remarkably enigmatic short story, “Hegel y yo” was first published in 1973 as the planned onset for a future novel on the same subject that would never see the light. The text represents a culminating moment in the long trajectory of Revueltas as a narrator and a thinker. “Hegel and I,” in fact, seems to take up and to try to solve some of the deadlocks present in Revueltas’s strictly theoretical writings from the same period, most of which have been published posthumously in volumes such as Dialéctica de la conciencia and México 68: Juventud y revolución.

In Dialectic of Consciousness, Revueltas had proposed to himself various projects at once: a critique of the contemporary “compass madness” of the Left, symptomatically expressed in the proliferation of groupuscles of all kinds; a genealogical reconstruction to understand the true causes of the “crisis” of Marxism, by way of a return to the historical moment when Marx’s thought splits off from the double tradition of Kant and Hegel; and, finally, through a series of ingenious “cognitive anecdotes,” the elaboration of a subjective dialectic, or a dialectic of consciousness, as opposed to the excesses of the dialectic of nature. Though greeted by Henri Lefebvre in his preface as an effort comparable to that of contemporary figures such as Adorno, Revueltas’s project does not give us much more than a glimpse of what it would mean to rescue and reappropriate, through the act of consciousness, the gigantic memory of human rebellion and defeat against alienation.⁵⁴

Revueltas develops the notion of a “profane illumination” that takes place whenever an emergent consciousness is on the verge of breaking through the monumental obliteration of generic human labor. More specifically, he describes such moments in terms of “acts” that change the paradigms of existing knowledge in light of a truth that is historical yet part of an immemorial past that runs through, and sometimes interrupts, the continuum of human history.

History, seen in this light, is not an accumulation of cultural riches so much as the large-scale vanishing of misery into the unconscious of humanity’s constitutive prehistory. How, then, does humanity escape from the almost mystical slumber of its general intellect and unconscious memory? Here, like Walter Benjamin, Revueltas seems to have been inspired by a letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge. “Our election cry must be: Reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but through the analysis of mystical consciousness that is unclear to itself, whether it appears in a religious or a political form,” Marx had written to his friend: “Then people will see that the world has long possessed the dream of a thing—and that it only needs to possess the consciousness of this thing in order really to possess it.”⁵⁵ Benjamin turns this election cry into the cornerstone of his dialectical method. “The realization of dream elements in the course of waking up is the canon of dialectics,” he writes in The Arcades Project: “Is awakening perhaps the synthesis of dream consciousness (as thesis) and waking consciousness (as antithesis)? Then the moment of awakening would be identical with the ‘now of recognizability,’ in which things put on their true—surrealist—face.”⁵⁶ This view of awakening in as “a supremely dialectical point of rupture” or “flash” is reminiscent of the moment when consciousness suddenly is “on the verge” of forming itself and bursting into our field of visibility, according to Revueltas. The latter proposes to see the activity of thought as a secular, or profane, illumination: “Consciousness, freed and bared of all divinity—in virtue as much as in vice—puts things on their feet that were standing on their head, it illuminates them, and it profanes them.”⁵⁷ It is this kind of illumination that shines through “Hegel and I.”

Hegel, in the story, is the nickname for a prisoner, a paraplegic who from his wheelchair exchanges anecdotes and philosophical musings with his cellmate, a thinly disguised alter ego of Revueltas himself. “It is a questioning of Hegelian philosophy, referred to the prison,” the author explains in an interview: “A character who arrives in prison is a bank robber called Hegel because he robbed a bank on Hegel Street. Everyone calls him Hegel. From there the narrator takes up the positions of Hegel in order to demonstrate that the prison is the State.”⁵⁸ From this character, in fact, 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.

True acts have no witnesses in history. They belong to the silent reserve of an unconscious recollection. “The profound act lies within you, lurking and prepared to jump up from the bottom of your memory: from that memory of the nonevent [lo no-ocurrido],” Hegel says, and the narrator approves: “He’s right: our acts, our profound acts as he says, constitute that part of memory that does not accept remembering, for which it does not matter whether there are witnesses or not. Nobody is witness to nobody and nothing, each one carries his or her own recollection of the unseen, or the unheard-of, without testimonies.”⁵⁹ Without memory, without testimony, yet recorded in the blank pages of a collective unconscious, profound acts are those acts that define not only a subject’s emergent consciousness but this very subject as well. “You,” or “I,” in this version of “Hegel and I,” are but the result of the profound acts of history, whether in 1968 or in 1917, in 1905 or in 1871, acts that forever will have changed the conditions of politics in history. This is not a blind, voluntaristic account of the subject’s capacity for action and intervention, since it is not the subject but the act that is first:

Thus, insofar as you are here (I mean, here in prison or wherever you are, it doesn’t matter), insofar as you stand in and are a certain site, you have something to do with this act. It is inscribed in your ancient memory, in the strangest part of your memory, in your estranged memory, unsaid and unwritten, unthought, never felt, which is that which moves you in the direction of such an act. So strange that it is a memory without language, lacking all proper signs, a memory that has to find its own way by means of the most unexpected of all means. Thus, this memory repeats, without our being aware of it, all the frustrations prior to its occurrence, until it succeeds in lucking again upon the original profound act which, for this reason alone, is yours. But only for this reason, because it is yours without belonging to you. The opposite is the case: you are the one who belongs to the act, by which, in the end, you cease to belong to yourself.⁶⁰

The act not only constitutes the brief occurrence of an identity of thinking and being but also redeems past errors and failures. Through the notion of a repetition of the memory of lo no-ocurrido, that is, literally “the unhappened” or “the nonoccurred,” Revueltas is inverting the logic of Hegel’s sublation, which, as Žižek frequently reminds us, amounts to a kind of Ungeschehen-machen, incidentally the same German term that Freud uses in his understanding of denegation.⁶¹ For Revueltas, however, the aim of the profound acts of history is not symbolically to unmake what did happen but rather to allow that what did not happen be made to happen.

Insofar as it repeats not the actual events of the past but the repetition of their halo of lack, the act proper has no beginning or end. “Where the devil did these things begin?” the narrator in “Hegel and I” asks himself: “It is not the things themselves that I recall but their halo, their periphery, that which lies beyond what circumscribes and defines them.”⁶² It is only afterward that historians—and perhaps philosophers of history as well—can name, date, and interpret the events that are repeated but not registered in such an immemorial act:

It is an act that accepts all forms: committing it, perpetrating it, consummating it, realizing it. It simply is beyond all moral qualification. Qualifying it is left to those who annotate it and date it, that is, to the journalists and the historians, who must then necessarily adjust it to a determinate critical norm that is in force, whereby they only erase its traces and falsify it, erecting it into a Myth that is more or less valid and acceptable during a certain period of time: Landru, Ghengis Khan, Galileo, Napoleon, the Marquis de Sade, or Jesus Christ or Lenin, it’s all the same.⁶³

Revueltas himself, thus, responds to the acts and events of 1968 in particular with the demand for a theory of the act that would be able to account for the process by which the frustrated acts of the past—acts of rebellion such as the railworkers’ strike of 1958 in Mexico—are woken up from their slumber and brought to realization. As prolonged theoretical acts in their own right, though, events cannot be seized without also sacrificing their nature, unless the interpretive framework is attuned to reflect this very event-like nature itself. To his fellow militants of May 1968 in France, for example, Revueltas sends a public letter with the following message: “Your massive action, which immediately turns into historical praxis, from the first moment on, possesses the peculiar nature of being at the same time a great theoretical leap, a radical subversion of the theory mediated, deformed, fetishized by the epigones of Stalin.”⁶⁴ This radical subversion in turn must be theorized without losing its subversiveness in the no man’s land of a theory without practice. Writing from his cell in the Lecumberri prison, Revueltas asks nothing less from his fellow Mexicans. “I believe,” he writes against all odds in 1976 in a collection of essays about the massacre in Tlatelolco, “that the experience of 1968 is a highly positive one, and one that will bring enormous benefits, provided that we know how to theorize the phenomenon.”⁶⁵ It is this attempt at theory that urges us to return to a certain shadowy presence of Hegel in America.

1. José Ortega y Gasset, “Hegel y América,” El Espectador 7–8 (1966): 11–27. There exists an English translation that I have consulted for this chapter: “Hegel and America,” trans. Luanne Buchanan and Michael H. Hoffheimer, Clio 25, no. 1 (1995): 69–81.

2. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1991), pp. 86–87.

3. Hegel, “Geographical Basis of History,” in Philosophy of History, pp. 79–102.

7. Roberto Fernández Retamar, “Modernismo, noventiocho, subdesarrollo,” in Para una teoría de la literatura hispanoamericana (Havana: Pueblo y Educación, 1984), p. 76.

8. Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic, trans. Lisabeth During (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 79.

12. Ibid. Since I began by mentioning René Magritte’s “This is not a pipe,” I might add the odd detail that according to Buffon there were no crocodiles but only caimans and alligators in Latin America. This has led the contemporary Colombian artist José Alejandro Restrepo to play off Hegel and Alexander von Humboldt in the installation titled “Humboldt’s Crocodile Is Not Hegel’s” (originally presented in 1994). See Erna von der Walde, “‘Ceci n’est pas un crocodile’: Variations on the Theme of American Nature and the Writing of History,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 15, no. 2 (2006): 231–249.

14. José Pablo Feinmann, Filosofía y nación: Estudios sobre el pensamiento argentino (Buenos Aires: Ariel, 1996), pp. 149–164.

17. Enrique Dussel, Política de la liberación: Historia mundial y crítica (Madrid: Trotta, 2007), p. 380.

18. Enrique Dussel, “Eurocentrism and Modernity (Introduction to the Frankfurt Lectures),” in The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America, ed. John Beverley, José Oviedo, and Michael Aronna (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 66.

19. Susan Buck-Morss, “Hegel and Haiti,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 4 (2000): 865.

20. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 49.

21. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 16.

22. Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973).

24. Theodor W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), pp. 13, 16.

27. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), p. 302.

28. Alenka Zupancic, The Odd One In: On Comedy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), pp. 43–60.

29. Jean-Luc Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, trans. Jason Smith and Steven Miller (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 5.

35. Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2002), pp. 62–63.

37. Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative, trans. Arnold Pomerans (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968).

38. Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2007); Bolívar Echeverría, Vuelta de siglo (Mexico City: Era, 2007).

39. José Revueltas, Los errores (Mexico City: Era, 1979), pp. 222–223. In the following two sections, I borrow and translate long segments from two previously published studies: Bruno Bosteels, “Una arqueología del porvenir: Acto, memoria, dialéctica,” La Palabra y el Hombre 134 (2005): 161–171; and “Marxismo y melodrama: Reflexiones sobre Los errores de José Revueltas,” in El terreno de los días: Homenaje a José Revueltas, ed. Francisco Ramírez Santacruz and Martín Oyata (Mexico City: Miguel Angel Porrúa/Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 2007).

40. Christopher Domínguez Michael, “Lepra y utopía,” in Nocturno en que todo se oye: José Revueltas ante la crítica, ed. Edith Negrín (Mexico City: Era, 1999), p. 65.

43. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), pp. 9, 30 (trans. modified).

50. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit Assembled by Raymond Queneau, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols Jr. (New York: Basic Books, 1969), p. 144n.34. I have also consulted the French edition in Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1947). I am much indebted to Evodio Escalante for first putting me on the track of Kojève’s Hegel in the context of my reading of Los errores.

52. Ibid., p. 188. We should note that there are actually two types of error in Hegel for Kojève: the inevitable erring that is part of our human condition and error as mistake or superable defect, as when Hegel’s posits the dialecticity not only of History but also of Nature.

54. José Revueltas, Dialéctica de la conciencia, ed. Andrea Revueltas and Philippe Cheron (Mexico City: Era, 1982).

55. Quoted in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 467.

57. José Revueltas, Las evocaciones requeridas, ed. Andrea Revueltas and Philippe Cheron (Mexico City: Era, 1987), vol. 1, p. 48.

58. Conversaciones con José Revueltas, compiled by Andrea Revueltas and Philippe Cheron (Mexico City: Era, 2001), p. 77.

59. José Revueltas, “Hegel y yo … ,” in Material de los sueños (Mexico City: Era, 1979), pp. 20, 13.

61. Slavoj Žižek, “Lacan—At What Point Is He Hegelian?” trans. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens, in Interrogating the Real (London: Continuum, 2007), p. 34. On Freud’s notion of das Ungeschehen-machen as neurotic compulsion, see also Elizabeth Rottenberg, Inheriting the Future: Legacies of Kant, Freud, and Flaubert (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 78–79.

64. José Revueltas, México 68: Juventud y revolución, ed. Andrea Revueltas and Philippe Cheron (Mexico City: Era, 1978), p. 26.