In the decades around 1800, genealogical imaginaries, or the social, political, economic and cultural meanings of descent and kinship, underwent far-reaching change. Hegel was deeply concerned with these transformations in various respects and in different parts of his philosophy. By engaging with the issues of kinship and family, with the disputes over racial diversity as well as with the scientific debates about life, reproduction and the meaning of sexual difference, Hegel contributed to a philosophical re-articulation of genealogical relations, or to (...) the shaping of a new vocabulary through which the political, social, cultural and epistemic transformations of the period were rendered intelligible in distinctive ways. Although Hegel did not draw explicit connections between his reflections on kinship, race and reproduction, my aim is to explore the semantic interrelations among his reflections on these issues. (shrink)

To engage with Hegel's philosophy from a feminist perspective is necessarily to be confronted with questions about the politics of reading. Politics, that is, both in the obvious, traditional ideological sense and in the less obvious sense of the politics of the relation between reader and text. For some scholars this automatically places feminist readers in the category of a dubious scholarship which rests on a mistaken understanding of the meanings of both politics and truth.It seems to me a mistake (...) — and an inexcusable conceit — to say as some now do, that all scholarship is somehow ‘political’ or is itself politics practised by other means. That view demeans both politics and scholarship. Now this isnotto say that a scholar's motives must not be political, only that the methods and results of her researches must be judged according to scholarly standards and not political ones. The aim of scholarship is to seek and to tell the truth, as best one can discern it, and not to promote any particular partisan cause. Ball here confines the role of politics in the traditional sense to the Weberian category of ‘value’, which may motivate and orient scholarship but which cannot provide the criteria according to which scholarly work is carried out or its findings are judged. He dismisses the relevance of the category ‘politics’ to the understanding of the relation between reader and text as such and instead, argues that ‘truth’ is what that relation should be about. Yet, the work of interpretation and reflection in the reading of texts insofar as it involves a process of interaction between reader and text always problematises, I would argue, the distinction between politics and truth upon which Ball's analysis relies. There are various models on offer, both descriptive and prescriptive for what the process of textual interpretation does or should involve. One can contrast the notion of ‘scholarly standards’ as the route to the true meaning of a text with Skinner's new historicism, the virtuous circle of hermeneutics or the destabilising ambitions of deconstruction. These approaches elicit very different interpretive results but they also differ in their assumptions about what is or ought to be taken as authoritative for understanding and interpretation and in this sense they are characterised by a politics of the interplay between reader and text. This is a modest claim but one which disrupts the politics/truth distinction even if it doesn't necessarily imply the end of distinguishing between good and bad, valid and invalid understanding/interpretation. (shrink)

This paper explores the thought of Hegel, Saussure and Derrida regarding the nature of the linguistic sign. It argues that Derrida is right to maintain that Hegel is an influence on Saussure. However, Derrida misrepresents both Hegel and Saussure by interpreting them as falling within the Platonic rather than the Aristotelian philosophical tradition.

Although the concept of ‘true infinity’ is undoubtedly central to Hegel's philosophy, the Anglophone rehabilitation of Hegel as a post-Kantian critical philosopher has avoided any sustained interpretive confrontation with the concept. In this paper, I provide a revisionary reconstruction of Hegelian true infinity by engaging with Martin Hägglund's argument in This Life (2019) for the centrality of finitude to Hegel's philosophy. For Hägglund, Hegel's philosophy effects a ‘secular reconciliation’ with finitude by demonstrating that our mortality is not a negative condition (...) to be overcome; rather, mortality is constitutive of rational social agency or ‘spiritual life’. While Hägglund's interpretive emphasis on finitude prima facie occludes a consideration of the concept of true infinity, I show that Hägglund's understanding of spiritual life in terms of the dynamic of self-maintenance implicitly articulates a revisionary understanding of true infinity as instantiated in and through the activity of finite living rational beings. More specifically, I show that Hägglund's understanding of finitude as constitutive of spiritual life is grounded in three closely interrelated Hegelian meta-concepts, all of which Hegel derives in the second chapter of the Logic (‘Existence’): (a) the distinction between abstract and determinate negation; (b) the form of individuality as constituted through determinate negation; and (c) true infinity as the form of individuality understood in explicitly processual terms. I thus ground a deflationary interpretation of true infinity in Hegel's logical account of determinate individuality, and at the same time, contribute to This Life's ongoing critical reception by articulating its Hegelian logical infrastructure. (shrink)

Although both Heidegger and Derrida criticize Hegel as the archetype and historical culmination of the metaphysics of presence, Hegel’s dialectics also serves as a model for their critical destruct...

This review essay critically maps the Anglophone reception of Lyotard's Discourse, Figure onto the text's own two-part organization. Earlier deconstructive readings tended to focus on the critique of structuralism presented in Discourse, Figure’s first half, under-emphasizing the post-Freudian philosophy of desire developed by Lyotard in the text's latter stages. This essay instead presents Lyotard's first major work not as two separable or opposed parts, but as a coherent trajectory responding to a specific philosophical problem, namely, the Hegelian account of sense-perception (...) and signification as outlined in Hyppolite's Logic and Existence. In so doing, this review essay seeks to isolate key references and clarify the stakes for future readings of Lyotard's text. (shrink)

To be a teacher of literature at a university today is to occupy a problematic position in the production and codification of knowledge - a fact that has generated a great deal of critical comment in recent years. But this position in its problematic dimensions is not necessarily new. The teacher of literature has always been a propagator of an aberrant science - yet a science that in its aberrations has more to do with the methodological problems of the natural (...) sciences than is usually credited. In this article the author approaches an initial statement of what makes the study of literature aberrant in this way, and in the process, elaborates upon a central dynamic of teaching literature that draws its strength from such scientific aberrance. In the process he moves towards a statement of the role played by an aberrant science in negotiating cultural identity. (shrink)